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.
He enjoyed what he called “nutty” journalism, where he interviewed actresses while they rode on his handlebars around London, or went to pop concerts and met the groups. When he wrote about one actress whose play was doing badly in the West End the ticket sales soared and Tom became much in demand. But he also tackled serious subjects such as an investigation into the state of the London hospital in Whitechapel, and he went to Northern Ireland several times to report on the Troubles – assignments he found difficult.
Eventually he decided to withdraw from journalism and took the family to live in California, where he produced his first book, Merlyn the Magician and the Pacific Coast Highway (1982), writing about cities all over the world from the standpoint of his bicycle. He went on to make pilgrimages, some by bike, around Britain, Ireland, Europe, the far east and North America. He published 16 books, a mixture of novels, travel and religious titles, as well as a memoir, The Reporter’s Tale, in 2009.
Tom was born in Pontypridd and grew up in Cardiff, the eldest son of Phyllis (nee Ford) and Jack Davies, a steelworks brickie. While still at Canton high school, he worked for Campbell Steamers in the summer holidays in the Bristol Channel, serving meals to tourists. He won a scholarship to study philosophy at Cardiff University and served as a merchant seaman in his summer breaks, making a voyage to Australia in 1960 and to South Africa the following year. He spent the summer of 1962 in New York as a volunteer social worker.
I first met Tom at a student party in Cardiff in 1964. He told me I shouldn’t bother with him because he’d be dead by 30. I bothered, married him (in 1967) and proceeded to prove him wrong. We had three sons, Julian, Steffan and Nathan. In the early 2000s he and I moved to Bala, in Eryri (Snowdonia) national park, where we ran an art gallery, in a former butcher’s shop, for 17 years.
Tom and I travelled extensively in the last 20 years: in 2014, we went to Australia, bought a campervan and drove 22,000km round the country. He often said it was the best year of his life. He wrote a book about the trip, Bush Revelations, published in 2015.
He is survived by me, and by Julian, Steffan and Nathan, five grandchildren and a sister, Jackie.
