David Kerr Cameron

Born: 28 March, 1928, Doulis, by Tarves, Aberdeenshire. Died: 17 February, Luton, England

HE MAY have spent most of his life as a journalist in London, but David Kerr Cameron never forgot the rigours of farming life in his native Aberdeenshire, which he wrote about with un-sentimental vividness in his three best-loved and award-winning books.

The Ballad and the Plough (1978), Willie Gavin, Crofter Man (1980), and The Cornkister Days (1984), all of which won Scottish Arts Council Awards, gave the social history of the North-East a readability that drew comparisons with the work of the late John Prebble.

The books charted a harsh way of farmtoun life which, even in his childhood, was already being eclipsed through labour controls in the Second World War and by the spread of mechanisation.

One of three sons of a cottar, he remembered the twice-yearly hiring fairs at which his father and other farm labourers would be taken on, often only to find that the farmer’s fine promises turned out to be a leaky bothy and a horse fit for the slaughterhouse.

"It was a strange, gipsy-like existence," he later wrote. "On Term Days, we piled everything we possessed into farm carts for the move - bags, mattresses, even the coal scuttle. We were like a refugee army. It only needed one good downpour for the beds to be soaked through and start rusting away."

By the time he wrote these books, Cameron was a sub-editor on the Daily Telegraph, where he worked for 27 years until his retirement in 1993.

At the start of his working life, such a career looked distinctly unprobable. Indeed, when he was 14 and his headmaster suggested that he become a writer, the very idea came as a blow to his self-esteem.

"It seemed such a namby-pamby thing to be when I contemplated the hard men of the farmtouns in Scotland’s North-east lowlands," he wrote later.

He began his 45-year career as a journalist with a series of articles about rural life which he penned for local newspapers while doing his National Service in the Royal Air Force.

After marrying in 1950, he worked on the Kirriemuir Herald and the Press and Journal, before the lure of working on a Fleet Street paper drew him south to London and the Daily Telegraph.

It was only when he turned 50, however, that the books started appearing.

At first, he had only intended to write a 10,000-word text to accompany a series of photographs or pre-war farm labourers. However, the more he researched the lives behind those awkwardly posed pictures of men and women unused to the camera, the more he realis-ed that he had to write about them.

"If I had the money," he said, "I would have started a farming museum; instead, I had to do what I could by writing."

The Ballad and the Plough soon grew to 45,000 words, and instead of asking for it to be cut, his publisher (Gollancz) asked for more.

In the book, he showed how little had changed since the 1870s, when a farm labourers’ wages were only a third the cost of a Clydesdale horse, and they were treated just about as harshly.

Bothy ballads, and affairs with farmtoun servant girls offered them some respite from the relentless toil, but Cameron’s portrait of the vanished age - including his only novel, A Kist of Sorrows (1987) never confused nostalgia with romanticism.

The contrast all these books offered to today’s soulless, ultra-scientific agribusiness was not of itself, he realised, the reason for their popularity. However, for all the hardships of the life he described, it did offer a sense of belonging and identity.

"The old closeness with a landscape, and even with the figures who walked through it largely unrecorded, has gone and left a vacuum," he said in a Scotsman interview in 1978. "For all I know this is what I was looking for myself, down there in London."

The English Fair (1997) and London’s Pleasures (2001) took up the story of the transformation of country and town life south of the Border and were also well reviewed.

However, it for his portrait of the farmtouns of pre-war Scotland, the nuances of its social order, and the desperately hard lives of its itinerant workers that he will be most remembered for in his native land.

He is survived by his wife, Joyce, and by two brothers.