David Mathew

Apart from Dave Mathew’s admirable reporting and editing skills, so well detailed by Al Barker (above), another aspect of DM’s larger-than-life personality was his broad sense of humour and insatiable appetite for offbeat stories, tales of the bizarre, human quirkiness jokes (good and bad), groaners, word-play twisters, comic pictures and videos.

Over the last 15 years or so, since we both stopped working for Reuters, Dave had been the Betts family’s major wholesale supplier of comic e-mails, and I know he kept many other former colleagues and their families amused as well. He and I also exchanged a lot of grumpy messages about slopping writing, contorted sentences, errors in grammar or punctuation and so forth. It is hard to believe he will no longer be making deliveries to our inbox. We shall miss him badly. ■