Eric Newby

Born: 6 December, 1919, in Barnes.

Died: 20 October, 2006, in Guildford, aged 86.

HIS career was a series of delightful and unconnected contrasts. Eric Newby had a distinguished war, worked in the rag trade and then as a buyer for John Lewis. He was, however, principally known for his witty and urbane travel books and articles. These reflected a rather "Boys Own" attitude to life that told of hair-brained escapades in remote areas of the world.

His time as the Observer's travel editor brought him acclaim and many of his books - written with a wry honesty - are now classics.

George Eric Newby attended St Paul's School in London and then started working in Dorland Advertising. Within two years, however, the wander-lust grabbed him and he signed on with a four master and sailed to Australia.

The return trip was the last of the Great Grain Races for four-masted ships and Newby's ship narrowly beat two German barques. It was later to be the subject of one of Newby's finest books, The Last Grain Race (1956).

War was declared within the year of his maritime adventure and Newby enlisted with the Black Watch, serving in India. In 1941, he was transferred to the Special Boat Section (SBS) and in August of the following year lead a hazardous mission to Sicily, with orders to blow up a German airfield there. However, "Operation Whynot" had to be aborted when, on arrival at the airfield, Newby and his team found it to be exceptionally well fortified. Wisely, he ordered a smart retreat back to the beach. They paddled their dinghies out to sea but were picked up by a Sicilian fishing boat and they were all interned.

Newby was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp near Parma from where, typically, he made a brief escape. However, he had a severely broken ankle and was transferred clandestinely to another hospital in the mountains by an Italian doctor. There he met and befriended Wanda who later arranged his passage to a hillside village in the Apennines. He was looked after by the villagers until betrayed to the authorities and transferred to a POW camp in Germany. Newby was awarded the Military Cross in 1945 when his bravery in the SBS was, belatedly, recognised.

For a few years after the war, Newby was connected with MI9, which made contact with the wartime underground workers. In this capacity, he returned to Parma and eventually found Wanda. They were married in the Bardi Chapel in the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence, in 1946.

He spent seven years in the rag trade, although from 1954 he was employed in the marketing department of the House of Worth Paquin. However, Newby had started writing and it was while with Worth Paquin he wrote The Last Grain Race.

With typical bravado and gusto he threw up his job and, in 1956, with a friend decided to climb to explore the Hindu Kush, the rugged wilderness straddling the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, just north-east of Kabul. Their preparation was rudimentary - a few weeks rock climbing in Wales and visits to a couple of London tailors. Nothing prepared them for the challenging climb up 18,000ft of one of the most desolate and forbidding mountain ranges; terrain that Newby described as being "like iron, with sharp rocks sticking up out of it".

In his best-known book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Newby underplayed their problems with typical bravura. They endured the most punishing conditions with remarkable stoicism - many of their escapades seem straight out of John Buchan. But Newby always invested his narrative with humour and had a keen sense of the dramatic. He related how he told the tribesmen that his watch was waterproof and they decided to test it by putting it into the bubbling pot of goat stew.

He returned to London and worked for the publisher Secker & Warburg before, in 1959, returning to the fashion business as chief buyer for John Lewis.

In 1963, Newby was offered the post of travel editor of the newly redesigned Observer. He arrived at travel writing when it was in its infancy - there was, for the general public, a travel restriction of 25 a year. Many of his exotic locations were impossible for the average reader.

But Newby was never going to write about the ordinary. Long before adventure holidays to far away islands were fashionable, he spent three months going down the Ganges and trekking in the Andes.

His books covered a variety of subjects and settings. He wrote of the decline of the rag trade (Something Wholesale, 1962), recaptured the atmosphere of India (Slowly Down the Ganges, 1966), retold of his war time experiences (Love and War in the Apennines, 1971) as well as a delightful account of a trip round Ireland (on a bicycle), with Wanda, in 1987 called Round Ireland in Low Gear.

Throughout his career, Newby took glorious photographs that illustrated his articles and books. He had as keen an eye for visual detail as he had as a wordsmith. His pictures, principally black and white, had an exacting and beguiling quality.

His books often had a sense of acerbic wit about them - never biting or malicious: just a delightful tongue placed firmly in the cheek. His style - like the man - was quintessentially English. He enjoyed wearing a trilby on many of his expeditions and his safari suit was always from the best tailor. Even in retirement, he was unstoppable. In his mid seventies, he cycled from John O'Groats to his home in Dorset.

He ceased working for the Observer in 1973, but his love of travel never deserted him. He kept a house in a remote valley of Tuscany for over 30 years (only selling it when the area became "in") and carried on writing prodigiously: Around the World in Eighty Years and A Book of Lands and Peoples were published in 2000 and 2003 respectively.

Newby was a popular and enthusiastic contributor to the BBC's Travel Programme and took a special pleasure in presenting an item on one of his favourite cities, Istanbul. Another was an emotional account of his return to Parma with Wanda. In 1994, Melvyn Bragg produced a South Bank Show entirely devoted to Newby's life and writings.

It is too easy to label Newby as an English eccentric. He certainly played up to that image but underneath the derring-do, Newby was a skilled writer who captured the very essence of a country and its people with a passionate accuracy. A Short Walk, for example, is now accepted as a classic and contemporary readers respond eagerly to Newby's stiff upper lip style and love of the understatement.

Newby, who was made a CBE in 1994, is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.