Bob Edwards
Bob Edwards, who has died aged 86, was a prominent if somewhat maverick journalist with the distinction of having been appointed a Fleet Street editor on four occasions (including twice at the Daily Express), a feat that earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records.
In 1963, during the second of his two spells at the Express, he bought up Christine Keeler, the woman at the centre of the Profumo affair, purchasing her memoirs for £2,000. It was a decision that shocked Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor, and Edwards conceded that this, the paper’s first venture into chequebook journalism, had been an act of bravado, purely to boost circulation.
Although a man of the left (at one time he edited Tribune) Edwards was devoted to Beaverbrook and found nothing uncongenial or illogical in editing the right-wing Express; in fact, it had been one of his earliest ambitions as a schoolboy to edit the newspaper that was then the undisputed leader of the popular press.
His career there was not without incident. He was sacked after a year in the job, only to be reinstated after a short spell editing the Evening Citizen in Glasgow. He then remained at the Express until 1965. Thereafter he worked for newspapers whose editorial lines were more in sympathy with his beliefs. From 1966 until 1972 he edited the Sunday People and then, for 13 years, the Sunday Mirror.
Robert John Edwards was born in Farnham, Surrey, on October 26, 1925. His middle-class upbringing in Reading, Berkshire, was, for those days, hardly conventional. His father, a director of United Dairies, never married his mother and kept two households going in tandem. Consequently the young Bob, who was ignorant of his father’s marital tangle until much later in life, saw little of him during the holidays and never at Christmas. At the age of five, Bob was sent away to boarding school. Shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939 his father died, and he was moved to a local school, Ranelagh in Bracknell, which cost his mother a modest £5 a term.
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Meanwhile, she had bought him a typewriter, on which he edited a scandal-packed school newspaper for his private amusement.
After leaving at the age of 15, he began his journalistic career on The Mercury in Reading, interrupted by war service in the ranks of RAF ground crew.
After the war he returned to The Mercury as a district reporter before joining Tribune on the recommendation of Ian Mikardo, a Labour MP. After a brief spell on the People, he returned to Tribune in 1952 as editor before joining the Beaverbrook empire as a leader writer on the Evening Standard in London at £50 a week.
— The Daily Telegraph
Hubert Dawkes
Hubert Dawkes, who has died aged 95, was a supremely skilful keyboard player, winning a slew of awards at the Royal College of Music and becoming harpsichordist of choice at the Bach Choir under Sir David Willcocks. He taught music to Lady Diana Spencer when she was a pupil at West Heath school in Kent and appears on a number of recordings by Joan Sutherland. Dawkes was an essential ingredient of the Bach Choir, a steadfast accompanist for almost 60 years. Whenever Diana attended the choir’s concerts she made a beeline for Dawkes, recalling her schooldays with him.
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— The Daily Telegraph