The journalistic career of the former Fleet Street editor Bill Hagerty, who has died aged 86, had an extraordinary span of 70 years and almost exactly mirrored the history of the newspaper industry from the glory days of its glamorous postwar heyday to the digital revolution of the first quarter of the current century.
His first published work included amateur football reports for the Walthamstow Post, where he was paid £3 5s a week, aged 16. His last regular column, contributed for many years until months before his death, was match reporting on Brentford FC for the Chiswick Calendar website, near his west London home. As he himself remarked of this circularity when given the award of Journalist Laureate by the London Press Club two years ago: “Funny old game, journalism.”
