An agricultural journalist and photographer whose career spanned 50 years has died at the age of 84.

David Edgar, left, wrote for a number of local and regional titles including the Newark Advertiser, Nottingham Guardian Journal, and Nottingham Evening Post as well as specialist publications such as Farmer and Stockbreeder and Farmers Weekly.

He also handled public relations for the Newark and Nottinghamshire show for more than half a century and continued to wrote his Danelaw column for the Newark Advertiser until he was well into his 80s.

He received the Guild of Agricultural Journalist’s Golden Jubilee Year Stewart Seaton Award in 1993 and was the first Regional Press Officer for the Country Landowners Association, covering a large part of Central and Northern England

David was born in 1925 in Tasmania and moved to the UK at the age of seven.

On the outbreak of war in 1939 he joined the British Boys for British Farming YMCA scheme and later started work at Eggington Hall, Derbyshire, where he work included hand milking and ploughing.

In 1946 he won a scholarship to Ruskin College Oxford, on the strength of an essay on British agricultural policy his first serious piece of writing.

His writing career began in earnest in 1955 with a part-time post composing the agricultural pages in the Newark Advertiser.

A father of four, David also wrote for the Nottingham Guardian Journal from 1962, transferring later to the Evening Post.

His funeral service will be held at Wilford Hill Crematorium on Thursday 3 June at 2.40pm and afterwards at Radcliffe-on-Trent Golf Club.

Comments

Jonathan Wheeler (27/05/2010 10:28:52)
So sad to hear about David’s death – one of those special colleagues who was both a great help and also a fierce competitor in my early days as an agricultural journalist in the 1980s.