Graham Ball, who has died at the age of 69, was one of Fleet Street’s old school. An investigative and campaigning journalist for more than 35 years, his newspaper life stretched from tabloid exposes on the Sunday People to investigations for TV’s The Cook Report, campaigns for The Independent, and leaders and literary reviews for the Express.
 
He was part of an era of excess but is remembered as much for his prodigious intellect and humour as for the drinking escapades that were inseparable from a newspaper career. A man who was interested in everything and made everything interesting, he followed up a passion for history with a BA in the subject at Birkbeck College in his fifties and was working towards an MA on press and propaganda in wartime in his retirement. Cricket was a lifelong passion. In 1978 he gathered together some journalist colleagues to form The Grub Street Casuals and for the next two decades he organised, captained and led the bowling attack with pin-point accuracy.
 
Graham was born In Rochford, Essex  and grew up in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex and after leaving Southend High School won a place on the prestigious Mirror Group Training Scheme based in Plymouth, a spawning ground for many national newspaper journalists. During training on the Devon newspapers Graham met his future wife, fellow trainee Tessa Hilton who went on the edit the Sunday Mirror.  Another trainee and Fleet Street journalist, Richard Holledge, remembers trying to set up a South Devon branch of the Young Liberals with Graham in a fit of youthful idealism. As Holledge recalls: “We ran a news item in the South Devon News. However, only two turned up for the inaugural meeting; Graham and me. And he was late”.
 
Bally, as he became known, loved a big car, but could only afford gas guzzling old wrecks in these early days and friends remember how, to nobody’s surprise except Graham’s, they would break down. He bid for and bought a much loved jag despite seeing it pushed into the auction. Hopelessly lost on the way to a story in another bargain buy and finally stuck down an increasingly boggy track, he was forced to ‘park’ and proceed on foot. Returning next day, the ‘track’ proved to be part of the River Tamar as the tide turned. Water now flowed through the radiator grill. The car had been stripped of its wheels.     
 
On finishing the course in 1972 he joined the Sunday People in Manchester transferring to London two years later. In 1977 during an expose of the notorious convicted paedophile Roger Gleaves, self-styled Bishop of Medway, Graham and two other reporters, David Alford and Frank Murphy, helped to organise the rescue of Tommy Wylie, a previous victim who had fallen back into Gleaves clutches and hid him away in a bolt hole in the country.
 
David Alford takes up the story: “That was our undoing because Gleaves was suing everyone connected to his past; the TV documentary makers, even the Wandsworth barber who cut his hair.  Wylie turned out to be an essential witness in one of his private prosecutions and he convinced a stipendiary magistrate that we were withholding his witness.
 
Frank, Graham and I were hauled before the magistrate by the police and our reluctance to say where Wylie was got us a night in Brixton Prison and a trip to court next day in the Paddy Wagon which went all over London delivering prisoners to courts. It started at the unholy hour of 5am and finished its run with us at Wells St Magistrates five hours later.
We were banged up in single cells in the wagon with no toilet facilities and we had to rely on the guards letting us use the toilets at the courts we visited en route to Wells Street. The wagon was awash with urine by the time we got to our destination. 
Not pleasant, and what really worried us was that it became apparent we were going back to Brixton for a second night. We weren’t relishing a second strip search, compulsory public bath and a night of screaming demented prisoners keeping us awake.
Fortunately the Mirror Group lawyers won our release minutes before the strip search line up began.” All the charges were later dismissed.
 
The fate of all top reporters is to be promoted away from their métier and so it was with Graham who was moved to the news desk and to edit the People’s showbusiness gossip column before being made head of investigations.
 
In 1989 he joined The Sun as Assistant Editor but on his first day discovered the previous incumbent of the post was still in position. Telling Kelvin Mackenzie, ‘You offered me one of the best jobs in Fleet Street, let me know when it’s free,’ Graham walked out on day two prompting Mackenzie to run a story on the ‘shortest-lived executive’ with a cartoon of Graham climbing over the wall at Wapping. The Mirror retaliated with a photofit of Kelvin illustrating a story about ‘the psychopath boss who drove an exec to quit his job in less than 48 hours’. Graham eventually won his employment case against The Sun.
 
Graham freelanced for The Oldie and The Independent and with Tim Minogue set up one of the first outsourcing operations producing a weekly supplement, Crime Buster, for the Sunday People and subsequently co-founded a news agency. In 1997 he was freelancing for The Cook Report researching a programme about the fugitive fraudster Asil Nadir, whose company, Polly Peck, collapsed in 1991 with debts of £1.3 billion.
 
Roger Cook remembers: “Nadir was an absolute charmer, and was adept at playing games with numbers, but Graham saw through him in short order. Terrier-like, he pursued the story through innumerable twists and turns until we had the ammunition we needed. Nothing was too much trouble. On one occasion in Cyprus we had to travel between the north and south of this divided island, across the so-called Green Line. To do this, you had to fly out to a neutral country and then back in again, and we simply didn’t have the time. The ever-resourceful Graham found us a man whose abandoned house straddled the border and for a small fee we left the north through his front door and arrived in the south through the back door. Job done!”
 
Soon afterwards he joined the Independent on Sunday, and as Campaigns Editor masterminded Rosie Boycott’s crusade to decriminalise cannabis, which included organising the rally in Trafalgar Square on 28th March 1998. He also travelled with Unicef, reporting on the plight of children in Cambodia and in the Philippines. 
 
He followed Boycott to The Express and for the rest of his newspaper years under the editorship of Martin Townsend was Campaigns Editor, Comment Editor and Literary Editor of the Express and then Sunday Express. He enjoyed mentoring younger writers, commissioning and writing reviews and comment and running the books page allowed him to indulge his appetite for biography, military and newspaper history, and philosophy.
 
As ‘Skipper’ of his Grub Street Casuals, Graham was known for his tenacious bowling. Wicketkeeper Roy Wright remembers: “Graham was the best. He was deceptively good with his short run up deceiving the batsmen into thinking he was a slow bowler but the ball usually came fizzing through. I always wanted to stand up to the stumps to his bowling but he was just too quick so I had to stand back. No disrespect to Grub St but Graham could have played at a much higher level of cricket.” 
 
Regular players included Tim Minogue, Garth Gibbs, Frank Thorne, David Alford, Roy Wright, Ric Papineau, his brother David, and Richard Holledge along with dozens of others making occasional appearances on Sundays and on the annual tours in England and Wales. When the papers moved from Fleet Street it became too difficult to keep the team going and Graham joined his local Buckhurst Hill Cricket Club where he was a player, secretary and then chairman. 
 
Bally had his demons but is remembered by many as the most big-hearted man in the room; a great conversationalist, raconteur, and humorist, still collecting stories wherever he happened to be.  After spending time at Kenward Trust rehab in Yalding, Kent he settled in the village. With his unfailing interest in everyone and everything, he made good friendships, enjoyed the Yalding Art Group and was welcomed by the community. He is survived by Tessa, his children Oscar, Thomas and Rebecca and four grandchildren.