Anderson died on 29 December at his home in North Yorkshire, two
days before his 74th birthday. He was an irrepressible freelance to the
end and had enjoyed late success as an author.
His life was as vivid as many of the stories he related in copy form.
Anderson
grew up on Teesside and first made his mark in the Army, serving in the
Green Howards before being selected for the SAS and seeing action in
Malaya during the early 1950s.
While recuperating from dysentery
he took a correspondence course in journalism, wrote for the hospital
newspaper and local press and soon earned the nickname “Scoop�?. He’d
been trying to unearth them ever since.
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He worked for a paper in Aldershot and had a spell on the Daily Sketch, but it was in Doncaster that he made his name.
When
he was there, the town epitomised the power of newspapers. It had two
evenings and three weeklies, but the epithet provided by his new
colleagues ‒“National Angle�? ‒summed up Anderson’s flair and
ambitions.
He and two partners founded East Mid News Service, one of the leading provincial agencies of the day.
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Anderson moved on to other projects, including scriptwriting for television.
He also produced the film Wolfshead, The Legend of Robin Hood.
After Doncaster he moved to York and then Malton but never lost his trackrecord for supplying headlines, mainly in the tabloids.
Latterly,
he had concentrated on creative writing. Ideas bubbled away and he
produced a tale for children, The Royal Mousehold, about a family of
mice in Buckingham Palace. When mainstream publishers turned it down,
he took it direct to supermarkets and shops, where it still sells
steadily.
His greatest triumph came in the final months of his
life with Sally, Face Like a Flower , the true story of a girl with
Down’s Syndrome, who became a gifted artist and whose work has raised
£250,000 for charity.
His self-published biography of her has
already sold more than 5,000 copies, with a Japanese company the latest
to acquire rights to it. For “Scoop�? and “National Angle�?, the byline
on the cover gave him the greatest satisfaction of all.
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