Photo courtesy of Andrew Young
If I say a friend who has just died was a great reporter and an even greater human being, readers of Salut! who knew Syd Young will instantly recognise the description.
It would mean less to others, less again if I added that his great reporting was done for a tabloid newspaper.
Please put aside any such prejudice. Take it from me that Syd, who died last Friday (March 6 2020), was an outstanding journalist who happened to spend his career at the Daily Mirror but would have shone just as brightly in any other part of the media he had chosen to work.
More than that, he was a man of enormous charm, kindness and wit.
Syd was 82 when he succumbed to progressively poor health, after years of bearing up to fibrosis and pneumonia, with a blessedly peaceful ending, simply failing to awake from his night's sleep in hospital and passing away surrounded by his lovely family.
We first met in 1977, when I joined The Daily Telegraph from the Press Association to become its correspondent covering South Western England and South Wales from Bristol.
Syd covered part of the same patch - the Mirror was more generously staffed, so he had colleagues to the south and west - and was instantly welcoming.
This was a man who had reported from Belfast on the early stages of the Troubles before moving on to serve the Mirror in the USA, based in New York, as well as in Manchester and London.
He had no professional need to offer friendship to an upstart installed by a broadsheet newspaper, but knew no other way of living his life. Every reporter arriving in Bristol was given the same treatment: help, advice and camaraderie.
On July 8, 1978, Syd and his wife Jackie did what came naturally, insisting that our two-year-old daughter, Christelle, should spend the day with them - and their dog Poppa - at their beautiful home in Chelwood, north Somerset while my wife was giving birth to her sister, Nathalie. Christelle never forgot her day with them and "my first canine friend".
Syd and I worked together on countless stories, starting with a protracted series of trials in Bristol arising from the Operation Julie police operation that smashed a massive LSD ring and later including each phase of the Jeremy Thorpe affair, the GCHQ spy scandal and a colourful assortment of news, soft and hard.
There was lots of socialising, too; district reporting was competitive but there was always an element of reciprocal help. The urge to succeed never got in the way of opportunities for a spot of fun after work; Syd was unfailingly good company.
Memories of his fund of anecdotes keep penetrating the consciousness.
One of the Price sisters, later Old Bailey bombers, babysat for the Youngs when they lived in the republican Belfast district of Dunmurry (if I recall the story accurately so long after Syd told it). It was long before the Old Bailey bombing and she had a secretarial job at the Mirror's office. Her IRA activities were not then known but her broad sympathies were obvious enough for Mirror staff to sense it may be a good day to stay away from windows if she called in sick.
Alastair Campbell, a Mirror group trainee on local papers in the West Country and later, of course, Tony Blair's press secretary, was mentored by Syd and became a friend.
Years later, in a television documentary about the alcoholism that Campbell had conquered, Syd - talking about the drinking culture in journalism - remembered a ferocious old news editor who'd return from a three or four-hour lunch "without the least trace of food on his breath".
Syd, from, working class origins in the Ancoats area of Manchester, liked people and that helped to make him the reporter he was. I think of him, and the way he wrote, when I recall the Communist mineworkers' union official in South Wales who told me he regarded the Mirror as a great tool for adult literacy.
In other words, journalists like Syd could tell their stories with compelling brevity and force. His ability to communicate, face to face, at any level served him well in the difficult situations common to the reporter's trade. "Never forget that we rarely knock on someone's door with good news," he'd say. People, by and large, would talk to him anyway.
When I mentioned his death at Facebook, tributes quickly followed: "lovely man","fantastic human being", "laughs and happy memories", "brilliant in every post he held", "Mirror legend".
I imagine him hovering at my shoulder now as I write. "Not done yet? I finished my piece and sent it ages ago. See you in the bar."
Syd retired in 1999 after 37 years on the Mirror and we saw each other only rarely after my own departure from Bristol, mostly at press reunions in London.
But late in 2006, he and Jackie made an impressive effort and joined me in the faded magnificence of the Telegraph's Paris office-cum-flat on the rue de Rivoli as Joelle and I marked another farewell, the end of my 29 years with that paper.
I now bitterly regret that I had to pull out at the last minute from a carol service at St Bride's off Fleet Street just before Christmas.
Syd was having serious respiratory problems but I'm told he made a supreme effort to be there and was his usual cheerful self at drinks before and afterwards.
Syd is survived by Jackie, their sons Andrew and Jonathan and daughter Alison and seven grandchildren.
Alastair Campbell got it spot on when he said: "He was one of life’s givers. There in the good times, and the bad. I will miss him hugely.”
So will I.
* I have taken the liberty of adding comments posted elsewhere, eg my Facebook page, as well as directly here
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