I’m amazed he made it to 94. Over the past five or six years I’ve come within inches of finishing him off. I would be coming out of the gents at the Telegraph and he, not so nimble on his feet as he used to be, coming in. Two or three times a very heavy door almost bowled him over. What a shameful footnote in journalistic history that would have been: the man who killed Bill Deedes.
He was Bill to everyone, even those whippersnappers whose names he didn’t know and, because of who he was, wouldn’t have to remember, because few of them would be sticking around as long as he did. But in print he was always W F Deedes.
When I joined the Telegraph 20 years ago, it was striking how many reporters were bylined with their initials. Among them were A J McIlroy, Air Cdre G S Cooper, T A Sandrock, and the wonderfully named R Barry O’ Brien. W F Deedes outlasted them all.
While I was working on the Weekend section in the early ‘90s, the then editor, Will Ellsworth-Jones, commissioned Bill to write a column on gardening and country matters. It was a slot in which Deedes would be rolling up his sleeves in more ways than one, so Will thought it would be fitting — as Bill had gained currency through the Dear Bill letters in Private Eye — for the column to be bylined Bill Deedes. “Bill,” said Will, tentatively, “we’ve been thinking about the column, and how it’s going to be you in more relaxed mode, and we’ve had an idea about the byline…”
“Oh, just W F Deedes, dear boy.” And that was as far as the conversation went.
It was a column that ranged in subject matter from his wife’s response to the nusiance of magpies (brutal) to his own prowess with power tools. The intro to a piece on the latter subject was particularly memorable: “The first rule of chainsaw use is never leave a widow.”