Donald Trelford, who has died from cancer aged 85, edited the Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, for 18 years from 1975, while fighting for much of that time to preserve its existence, its editorial integrity and its separate identity under three successive owners in less than two decades.
The Observer, to which he first contributed sports reports as a freelance while still a student – three guineas for 300 words on a rugby match – was the focus of his career for nearly 30 years. Some editors are writers, some technicians, able to design and lay out pages: Trelford was both. He could write with facility and enthusiasm about a range of sports from cricket to snooker, but also tap out editorials and news reports, and each Saturday design the paper’s front page.
