In his Fleet Street heyday in the 1970s, my husband, the journalist and author Tom Davies, who has died aged 82 from dementia and pneumonia, worked on several broadsheet papers, writing the diary columns Atticus for the Sunday Times and Pendennis for the Observer. Always unconventional, he was described by his fellow journalist Peter Deeley as an “idiosyncratic volcano”.
He had started out as a teacher, with Voluntary Service Overseas in Indonesia and Malaysia, after graduating in 1963, and then taught at a secondary school in Cardiff, before joining the Western Mail as a trainee in 1966. He moved to the Sunday Times in 1970. Over the next 15 years he wrote for the Sunday Times, the Observer and the Sunday Telegraph, as well as doing freelance work for several other publications and for radio.
