Leslie Jerman

Born: 21 August, 1921, in East Ham, London.

Died: 12 August, 2009, in Epping, Essex, aged 87.

STARTING as a teaboy at The Scotsman in 1938, Leslie Seth Jerman rose through the ranks to become air correspondent, then London news editor and deputy London editor. He retired in 1996.

The ninth child of 18, he was born in east London to a father described as a poetry-quoting, library-loving gambler and womaniser who sold papers at East Ham Station. Leslie's mother had been in service as a girl, working as a maid in south London.

Leslie read as many of his father's papers as he could and sold his first story at the age of eight to the East Ham Advertiser for 10/- (50p); at 16 he went on to beat 199 other hopefuls to become a copy boy on The Scotsman. "Once I saw my name in print (aged eight], I knew what I was going to do," he said.

He went on to report on a wide range of subjects, liking nothing more than getting a scoop, in his own specialism, aviation, or in the wider field, where he contributed a reported 12,000 entries in Londoner's Diary in the London Evening Standard, earning the title, the King of the Fleet Street Diarists.

Before that, during the first part of the Second World War, he lived at The Scotsman's Fleet Street office, easier than attempting to travel the seven miles to home. He was working as an office boy in Fleet Street from 3pm until 11pm. All the bound paper files had been sent for salvage from the basement and on the racks there were cheap mattresses. A teleprinter was installed so they could continue to send news to Edinburgh and The Scotsman's head office

The Scotsman gave him four days off a week, so he worked for only three. By then, in his spare time, he was driving a small Ford 8 mobile canteen from the YMCA Red Triangle Club at Plaistow, east London. Of the war, he said: "One good thing Hitler achieved – he drove all the bedbugs out of the East End because the humans on which they feed were no longer at home."

In 1941 he volunteered to train as a pilot with the RAF and he went to the United States to learn to fly. But he became ill and was sent home, whereupon the RAF wanted to train him as an air gunner. Declining that, he went on to control fighter aircraft from the ground. He was latterly with 484 Ground Control Centre, 2nd Tactical Air Force in France, operating from Normandy and worked in an operations room, at Kirkwall Orkney, for a year – guarding the fleet in Scapa Flow.

He was widely travelled, cycling to the south of France, meeting Gracie Fields at her home in Capri, and reporting on the Berlin air lift when he flew in on the aircraft bringing succour, or dining out with Jayne Mansfield in a Hollywood nightclub. He referred to The Scotsman as "a great breeding ground" and so it was, producing names such as Michael Leapman, Andrew Marr and James Naughtie, who later referred to Leslie as an eccentric Fleet Street scavenger.

Leslie worked hard at being an eccentric, as, doubtless, Lord King of BA, Sir Michael Bishop, chairman of BMI and Sir Adam Thomson, the founder and chairman of British Caledonian, could once testify. One of Leslie's bugbears was Concorde, of which he reported it was impossible to eat fresh oranges on board, as there was no extra cabin space to store them.

He married journalist Betty Jerman in 1954 and they had three children, Seth, Stacey and Toby. In 1969, the family bought a second home in Norfolk and the vagaries of second home-owning produced much good copy, as well as a large vegetable crop, as Leslie was a keen gardener.

At home in Epping Forest he was especially proud of his Suttons Summerday seed-sown lawn. TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh once came to see it, and the lawn was featured in a Sutton's seed catalogue. He would weed it with a knife from the kitchen, in the evenings after work.

Following a burglary at home in the mid 1980s, Leslie was given the opportunity to meet one of the trio of youths who had robbed his family and he decided to intervene, saying he did not want anyone to go to prison over material things, and that "people are more important". He managed to get the boy a conditional discharge. Leslie and the boy stayed in weekly touch over more than 30 years and the burglar has been out of trouble since they met.

From that, Leslie was prompted to become a prison visitor, over the next 15 years visiting and befriending some 60 prisoners in 24 jails.

In 1991 he was awarded the Howard League for Penal Reform's fourth Annual Media Award for his stories in the Independent and Guardian on the need for offender/victim mediation and reparation schemes, including highlighting the role of the prison visitor. The judges of the award were Katherine Whitehorn of the Observer, Zeinab Badawi from Channel 4 News and Andrew Rutherford of the Howard League. A letter he wrote to the Daily Telegraph, headed "Give burglars a chance" in May 2004, prompted the journalist Ginny Dougary to interview him, and report, in a double page spread in the Telegraph, of his philosophy and dealings with his erstwhile burglar, "Paul".

Later Leslie would admit to wanting to broadcast. In his words: "Initially, getting on the air was a problem. My first stint on radio involved rowing a boat across the lake behind the Mohne Dam in Germany, scene of that epic raid in 1943 when the RAF breached the dam with bouncing bombs.

"I was an office boy turned young reporter. We were visiting RAF stations in Germany, long after the 'dambusting', when a BBC correspondent asked if I would like to see the repaired dam. We were driven there by a young pilot and, once at the dam, we hired a rowing boat. I had to row while the BBC man interviewed the pilot on tape. Some weeks later I turned on the radio to hear a programme called Eye Witness. Suddenly, the Mohne interview began – punctuated by squeaks and splashes." He went on: "That was my bit."

After many setbacks he presented a weekly radio programme on BBC Radio Scotland, What The Papers Say, beginning with a piece about the patron saint of gardening, the little-known St Phocas.

In later years, he wrote articles for the Lady and his local paper, the Epping Forest Guardian and Independent and encouraged young journalists as they started out or advised members of his family on the path to becoming journalists.

He was a prodigious letter writer, to local and national papers and his family. In January 2006, he had a letter in the Daily Telegraph, suggesting, for the spare plinth in Trafalgar Square, a large sculptured telephone of the kind used by the Rev Chad Varah, who founded the Samaritans in 1953. To Leslie, the phone "would symbolise the power of love". He also spent much time on family history, linking up with fellow genealogists all over the world. He liked nothing better than to be in print, and if he was stirring things up, so much the better.

Lesley Jerman is survived by his wife, three children, and three grandchildren.