LORD DEEDES of Aldington - former Fleet Street editor and Government minister, Deputy Lieutenant of Kent, wartime hero, traveller, golfer, and much more - has died aged 94.

Always a master of words he remained a man of action, a fact recognised as he approached his 90th birthday when he was named a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to journalism and humanitarian causes, in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

As W.F. Deedes, he was a prolific contributor of columns ranging from nature notes and shrewd observation to leading articles and reports from hotspots around the world for the Daily Telegraph, of which he was editor for 11 years from 1974.

He took that demanding job after serving almost 25 years as Ashford MP Bill Deedes. During that time he was both a junior minister under Winston Churchill in the 1950s and later Minister without Portfolio, explaining government policy on major scandals like the Profumo affair.

But he was never as busy as when he "retired" in 1985 and became a globe-trotting scribe for the paper. He said his secret was to keep fit.

Each morning he hit 100 golf balls into his garden practice net, never drank at lunchtime but each evening liked a stiff whisky or two after 6.30pm.

Private Eye helped to make him a national figure, lampooning the way he pronouced the letter 's' with the catchphrase "shurely shome mishtake".

For half a century he was a close friends and golfing partner of Lady Thatcher's husband Denis and he was the character of the fictional Dear Bill letter in the magazine.

In 2001, reporting from the Indian earthquake disaster zone he suffered a minor stroke but still filed his story to meet deadlines from his hospital bed.

The following year he was reporting from the frontline of troubled regions of both Afghanistan and Africa. During the civil war in Angola, when the Government refused journalists entry, he got in by wearing his CARE international relief agency pass.

As the world's oldest roving reporter in 1999 he twice travelled to the Balkans, sending back moving accounts of the refugee crisis from the Kosova-Macedonia border after the bombings and from the civil war in Sudan.

He also worked closely with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, on her landmine campaign.

He was the only journalist to travel with her months before her death by private jet to Bosnia for a series of vivid reports from Sarajevo explaining the impact on victims.

Born into a once-wealthy Kent family, he was brought up in Saltwood Castle, near Hythe, which in those days had no running water or electricity.

His father lost his fortune in the 1929 Wall Street crash and young William had to leave Harrow School at 17 to earn a living.

An uncle introduced him to the ailing right-wing Morning Post newspaper, which took him on as a trainee reporter, to be paid by the word for anything published.

His first story was about an Indian rope trick being performed in London before he moved on to covering fashion shows, by-elections and crime.

It was in 1935 that he made his mark as a journalist when the paper sent him to cover Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia.

There he met novelist Evelyn Waugh, who was moonlighting as a Daily Mail reporter and was staggered by the amount of luggage Deedes had taken to the front.

When Waugh wrote Scoop, his satire on journalism, he based his hero William Boot on Deedes but young Bill did manage to produce scoops and was promoted to political correspondent when the Telegraph took over the Post.

At the outbreak of the Second World War he left to become an Army officer and went on to head an infantry company winning an MC for leading an attempt to take a bridge. The citation says that he displayed "a complete disregard for his personal safety".

By the end of the war he was married with a family.

He met his late wife Hilary, daughter of a Yorkshire industrialist and Land Army girl, in 1940 on the day France fell.

They married in 1942 and shortly after bought New Hayters, a large Victorian farmhouse overlooking Romney Marsh, which was home ever since.

They had two daughters and three sons, including Jeremy who became his boss as managing director of the Telegraph.

He returned to the paper after the war until elected Conservative MP for Ashford in 1950. In 1953 he was on the first party-political broadcast in the role of a television interviewer, questioning then Housing Minister Harold Macmillan, who went on to lead the country.