Peter Chapman has retired after an eventful career in regional and national newspapers. Vincent McDonagh, of the Grimsby Evening Telegraph where Peter worked for the last 17 years, wrote this appreciation to mark the end of an era.

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His friends have included Lord Lucan and the former chancellor Norman (now Lord) Lamont.

He once shared a barrack room with the late Willy Rushton, the celebrated satirist and broadcaster.

And he helped mastermind an electoral challenge against Jeffrey Archer.

But most local people know Peter Chapman better as Odd Man Out, the journalist who has penned a witty and absorbing weekly column in the Grimsby Evening Telegraph for the past 17 years.

Now, after a distinguished career in newspapers, he has finally put away his keyboard to embrace that compelling challenge we all know as retirement.

Born into a well-known Cleethorpes fishing family 62 years ago, Peter, the son of the late Frank and Nancy Chapman, was educated at St Martin’s Prep School, Grimsby, and Repton School in Derbyshire.

Resisting the temptation to join his father’s firm, the seiner owners and fish sales business of Sam Chapman & Sons, he chose journalism instead.

But not before completing his National Service with the 12th Lancers, patrolling the East German border against the threat of a Soviet invasion.

In fact if circumstances had taken a different course, he might well have pursued a military career.

To this day the Army remains one of the main loves of his life and he is a keen collector of military medals.

It was during National Service that he encountered a young Willy Rushton, little known at the time.

Few would have guessed that he would become a national celebrity within a few years.

Peter joined the Evening Telegraph in July 1958 as a trainee reporter under the formidable figure of the managing editor Jimmy Giles.

In the days when car ownership was still a relative luxury, Peter became renowned for the large open top Bentley which stood out from everything else in town.

He also frequented the Hacienda coffee bar, the haunt of a then unknown actor John Hurt and a young Norman Lamont, whose father was casualty surgeon to Grimsby General Hospital.

It was the nearest Grimsby ever got to a Left Bank Society.

In 1961 Peter left the Evening Telegraph and headed for Fleet Street, the Mecca for every aspiring young journalist in those days.

He had spells on the Daily Mirror, the magazine Reveille and others, but his refusal to join the National Union of Journalists, in a powerfully unionised industry, landed him in trouble.

So he headed for the quieter pastures of the Home Counties to become news editor of the Surrey and Hants News and later assistant editor of the Aldershot News and Military Gazette.

Peter, with his intense interest in all things military, was in his element and he frequently bumped into (quite literally in the case of Field Marshall Montgomery of El Alamein) many of his heroes.

Before moving to Aldershot he met and married his first wife Susan.

She had been a debutante and knew a number of leading socialites.

One of her flatmates married Lord Lucan while the other married the wallpaper magnate Bill Shand Kydd.

As Peter once put it: “Susan married the man from Reveille.”

Lucan, of course, became infamous for the murder of his children’s nanny whom he apparently mistook for his wife. He disappeared and has never been seen since.

Peter suffered his own personal tragedy two years into his marriage when Susan died suddenly following an asthma attack.

It was a shattering blow. Their son Giles was barely a toddler at the time.

Peter once said: “Everyone was tremendously kind and my job was left open for as long as I wanted.

“But Giles needed looking after and there was very little nursery care in those days.”

So he returned to his parents home in Grimsby, and eventually got back into journalism with the magazine Lincolnshire Life, under the ownership of another former Evening Telegraph reporter and now publishing millionaire Roy Faiers.

He later opened an antique shop in East St Mary’s Gate, Grimsby, where one of his greatest discoveries was a postcard written by General Gordon of Khartoum.

For Peter it was akin to finding the Holy Grail.

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