The Cambrian News’s man in Lampeter, Maurice Rotheroe, has died at the age of 71 following a long illness.

A former Fleet Street journalist who worked on Reveille magazine in London during the swinging sixties, Maurice was appointed assistant editor (South) when the newspaper’s Lampeter district office opened in 1989.

For the next eight years he co-ordinated news and background feature coverage, initially with reporter Jane Fisher and latterly with her successor Sue Goddard.

Born in Smethwick, near Birmingham, Maurice worked on various papers in the Midlands and the north-east before moving to London in the early 1960s where he worked primarily as a feature writer and theatre and film critic.

Maurice had acquired the skills to be a journalist after training as a shorthand typist during his National Service in the RAF.

In the mid 1970s he returned briefly to the Midlands to work for the Birmingham Evening Mail.

Maurice had developed a fascination for mycrology – the study of fungi – and he went on to become one of the foremost experts in the country who played his part in the selection of the National Botanical Gardens site at Middleton.

He took a BSc degree in botany at Aberystwyth university at the age of 50 before returning to journalism with the Cambrian News in 1987.