Arnold Hadwin, who spent 60 years as a journalist in which he edited two regional newspapers, has died aged 82.
He was a man who proved his physical courage as a marine and his moral courage as an editor. One obituarist called him a man of vigorous action and uncompromising principle. And a recent profile of him observed: There is living life to the full, and then there is Arnold Hadwin.
As editor of the Bradford Telegraph & Argus in the 1970s he achieved national prominence by writing a scathing editorial about the National Front in which he proudly defended his paper's bias "against a political philosophy derived from the degenerate, diseased and disgusting minds of Hitler and his sycophants."
Hadwin, the son of a coke works fitter, was born in Spennymoor, County Durham, in 1929. He won a grammar school place but left school at 16 to become a cub reporter with the Northern Echo.
Two years later, he joined the royal marines, 40 Commando, and spent 15 months serving in Palestine. He carried a notebook as well as a sten gun and diligently chronicled his experiences.
He returned in 1948 to the Northern Echo to complete his training before winning a scholarship to Oxford University, reading PPE.
As an undergraduate, he wrote part-time for the Oxford Mail and, on graduation in 1953, he became the paper's industrial correspondent.
He rose through the ranks to be deputy editor before returning to the Northern Echo in Darlington in 1964 to edit its (now-defunct) sister title, the Northern Despatch. He spent nine years there until accepting the editorship of Bradford's Telegraph & Argus.
On 7 May 1976, he wrote the famous leading article about the National Front after the party had accused the paper of bias. Eight paragraphs of his editorial started with the phrase "We are biased".
Martin Wainwright, northern editor of The Guardian, worked under Hadwin at the T&A. He said: "Arnold enjoyed the excitement of the deadline and the scoop, but he was more interested in the underlying issues and their long-term implications."
Hadwin resigned in 1984, after 11 years in the chair, to take on the role of group editor of the Lincolnshire Standard Group, publisher of 14 titles weeklies.
He retired from that job on his 60th birthday, but later taught his skills to people across the world through a charity. So his love affair with newspapers went on for the following 22 years. He had little love however, for their modern owners.
In a Press Gazette interview to mark his 80th birthday,, Hadwin thought them "as greedy as bankers" and said memorably: "The people who run newspapers know nothing about newspapers."
He said: "They want 18% profit when they should settle for six - 18% and 20% is monstrous... I was always opposed to cutting down editorial posts.
"It's the easiest thing in the world to sack people - it's more difficult to become more efficient."
He passed on his love of journalism to his two daughters, Sara Hadwin launched the Beverley Independent, edited the North West Evening Mail in Barrow, and now teaches journalism at Cardiff University.
Julie Hadwin, his elder daughter, was a BBC producer who once said of her father: "He was never a revolutionary in the sense that he'd have people shot at the barricades, but he was an incredibly principled pragmatist."
Hadwin's funeral will be held at 1.30pm on Tuesday 1 February at St Hugh's church in Langworth, Lincolnshire.
Sources: Northern Echo/Bradford Telegraph & Argus/holdthefrontpage/Press Gazette/Peter Sands
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