Don Cameron

Posted: October 20, 2020

DON CAMERON, who was on the Mirror newsdesk from the early 1970s until 1990, died in London on October 13, 2020, aged 90.

Don Cameron was born in Sheffield in 1930, the son of a bank clerk. Following national service, during which he spent two years in Athens, he returned to Sheffield with little idea of what he wanted to do. His old headmaster suggested that as he wrote quite well he might see whether one of the Sheffield papers would take him on. He joined the Sheffield Star as an office boy in 1951.

In 1955 he followed his fiancée, Jane Ewing, then a reporter in the Mirror’s Manchester office, to a post as show business correspondent on the Manchester Evening News. Don and Jane married in 1956.

Don got his Fleet Street break in 1958 when he landed a job as a reporter on the Evening Star. He had not been there long when the paper went out of business but he was lucky to be head-hunted by the Daily Express. His time as a reporter on the Express included stints as foreign correspondent on the war in the Belgian Congo, and the Algerian war of independence in the early 1960s.

Once he had a family, Don was keen to get out of the erratic lifestyle required of a reporter, and sought a move to office-based journalism. In 1970 he got his chance when the Daily Mirror offered him a job as an assistant editor on the newsdesk. He stayed on the Mirror newsdesk until 1990 – when Robert Maxwell made him a pension offer he couldn’t refuse.

Don had 30 years of retirement as a Mirror pensioner, most of them spent very happily in his house in Putney near the river. He was a season-ticket holder at Fulham FC, and enjoyed drinking in the local pubs, doing the Times crossword, going fishing in Devon, and many holidays to Greece. He is survived by two children and five grandchildren.