Just plain 'Bill' to those who loved him

I see that Baron Deedes of Aldington has died. I was sorry to read that on the front-page of the overseas issue of the London Telegraph.

The man was a columnist, and former editor of the Telegraph, a war hero, and a reporter extraordinaire. He wrote under the byline of WF Deedes, but was known best to his friends as just plain ‘Bill’ Deedes.

Bill Deedes was 94.

He was kind of a hero of mine.

He died as he desperately tried to finish what would be his last column. Until relatively recently he was still well in the fray of news gathering and interpreting, and turning out some mighty fine prose while he was at it. I always read him when I got the chance. The concept of retirement was alien to him. As recently as 1994, at age 91, he made a tour of the horrors that were and are Darfur. Most people are long in their graves by that point. If not in their graves, then they are stuck in the ‘home’ along with Abe Simpson. Not Bill. When he wasn’t writing, he was still holding forth at his local pub, enjoying a jar, and even a smoke.

As I said, he was kind of a hero of mine. There are those heroes in the journalism business. I suppose there are heroes in any business. Maybe drycleaners have heroes in the trade. Why not? “Fred McNabb, yeah he could get spots out of gabardine like nobody else could.”

With journalists it’s a little different. There are those who have contempt for the ink-stained wretches of the trade, and movies and TV shows invariably relegate journalists to a sort of swinish category. Indeed, in opinion polls journalists rate lower than lawyers even. Go figure.

And, there are bad eggs in the business. There are rounders and bounders and knaves, and I’ve known a few of them and regard them with the same sort of contempt they deserve. And it is like lawyers. My grandfather was a lawyer and a more honorable and honest man you couldn’t meet. Of course, he wasn’t rich, either. And I know many other relatively poor, yet scrupulously honest lawyers, and some very fine journalists, so we must be wary of our biases.

My heroes in the business are, of course, the war correspondents, hundreds of whom have given their lives over the years to getting ‘the story.’ I admire them greatly. Ed Murrow wouldn’t go to a shelter when he reported front and centre from the London Blitz in World War Two. He felt it would give a bad impression. Later he told Senator Joe McCarthy to go and “have intercourse” with himself.

Ernie Pyle was a virtual journalistic god of mine, and for many other reporters. He slogged with the GIs through the mud and blood and guts and shit of the European campaign in the same war Murrow covered. He then went to the South Pacific and was blown away by a sniper on Iwo Jima. I once made a special personal pilgrimage to his grave at the Punchbowl Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. I had to pay my respects to Ernie.

And, Bill Deedes not only covered the war, but went on to do some soldiering of his own, and won the military cross along the way. He'd earned his rest.

Oh, and, he wrote real good, too.

If I still drank, I’d raise a pint to you, Bill.