My husband, Seán Day-Lewis, who has died aged 90, felt himself a journalist from an early age. As a small boy in Lyme Regis, Dorset, he turned his back on the sea and read the newspaper. He later wrote for several, including the Daily Telegraph for nearly three decades, and called himself “a hack”. After he retired to Devon, he wrote letters to newspapers instead.
Seán was the elder son of the Irish-born poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who later became poet laureate, and his first wife, Mary (nee King). He was born in Cheltenham, where Cecil taught at Cheltenham college. The family moved to Musbury in Devon when Seán was seven and there he created his own newspaper. One edition ran the headline “General has kittens”. Family cats were named after politicians they resembled – this one looked like De Gaulle.
He went to school at Allhallows, near Lyme Regis; his first day there in 1938 was later immortalised in his father’s poem Walking Away, published in 1962. In his biography of his father, C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980), Seán recalled poets of the 1930s visiting his home and relishing Mary’s cooking.
As a child, he could see the steam locomotives hauling trains from London through nearby Axminster. In later life, his research into Oliver Bulleid, designer of the locomotives he so admired, meant many breakfasts on the 9am from Waterloo and resulted in his book Bulleid: Last Giant of Steam (1964).
Seán cut his journalistic teeth on the Bridport News, in Dorset, followed by the Herts Advertiser and the Wolverhampton Express & Star, where we met in 1957. I was then Anna Mott, and we married in 1960. Looking to move to London, Seán applied to the Guardian but was turned away and instead, in 1960, took a post working on the Daily Telegraph’s London Day By Day column; he was later amused when Private Eye referred to it as “Sean-Day-Telegraph-Day-After-Day-After-Day”.
From our flat in Chancery Lane, he walked to work in Fleet Street. After the birth of our daughter, Keelin, we moved to Bow, east London (where Seán became an intense West Ham fan), and then west to Hammersmith, by which time we had had a son, Finian.
As a lifelong Labour voter, Seán was surprised to last 26 years on the Telegraph, but he used his time there to introduce an arts page, the first of its kind on Fleet Street. As the paper’s TV critic, and in his later book Talk of Drama (1998), Seán promoted television as an art form.
He retired from the Telegraph in 1986 and we moved to Colyton in Devon. We had looked forward to celebrating 62 years together when he died suddenly at home.
Seán is survived by me, our two children and seven grandsons.
