Cy Fox - a man of wit and talent with a mischievous sense of humour

As former colleagues have rightly testified, Cy was a warm, talented and eccentric companion on the World Desk in Fleet Street. He had a mischievous sense of humour accompanied by a raucous laugh, which I remember particularly through one episode while we were both on the desk. 

At the time there was an overseas bureau chief whose tortured prose gave the desk constant problems.

I returned from a meal break one day to find Cy cutting something out of a newspaper with a pair of scissors. Giggling uncontrollably, he showed me an advertisement headed, "Would you like to be a journalist?", which appeared regularly in one of the broadsheets. He popped it in an envelope and sent it anonymously to the offending correspondent, whose reaction is not recorded, but whose copy sadly did not improve. ■