The popular image of journalistic life in days gone by may well be of the heaving newsroom, populated by harassed men with press passes stuck in the bands of their trilbies, but what of the life of the roving freelancer, scribing under his own steam?

Orphaned Reg Shay began working life in Fleet Street during the second world war as a messenger before moving up to the news desk and later becoming a South London court reporter. He subsequently moved to Rhodesia for family health reasons where he became a respected and sought-after international war and political correspondent writing for,...