Derek Ingram
Derek Thynne Ingram (20 June 1925 – 17 June 2018) was a distinguished journalist and passionate supporter of the Commonwealth. In the 1960s he gave up a successful career as a newspaper editor to start a news service that would reflect the views of people in newly independent African countries and elsewhere in the developing world. He was on first name terms with leaders such as Indira Gandhi and Kenneth Kaunda, and was known to many as “Mr Commonwealth”. Biography The only child of a middle-class family, brought up in North London, Ingram was successful immediately after leaving Highgate School at the age of 16 during WW2. He was earning six guineas a week as a sub-editor on the Daily Sketch at the age of 17. He served as a signalman in the Navy, stationed until 1946 in Rome. After being demobbed, he joined the Daily Express, but in 1949 jumped ship to the Daily Mail, where he rose to deputy editor. He might have become editor, but his liberal politics and ferocious opposition to apartheid and racism in any form put him at odds with the paper's proprietor, Viscount Rothermere. Ingram resigned in 1966, but not before making his