SINCLAIR Newton was inspirational to his reporting staff and generous in his encouragement, his influence generating a heady, competitive atmosphere.

Sometimes exasperating, but forever exuberant and never boring, he had a natural instinct for what made a news story and this was tempered with a liking for the absurd.

Each Saturday, his column Newton's Law would appear, an oblique look at life which sometimes featured his cats Matilda and Bilbo Baggins and caused one Evening News sub editor to remark: "I don't understand any of it. I just sub it!"

Never, ever, stuck for something to say, Newton had a treasure house of stories, some of them so seemingly far-fetched one wondered if they were true...

The morris men banned from the village green because they were wearing out the turf.

The farmer driving his tractor on the M5 whose defence was that it had been a country lane the last time he had driven along it.

The Sunday afternoon coachload of trippers who piled into the family home at Winchcombe, because they thought it was a teashop.

With his trademark liquorice paper roll-ups and his infectious giggle, he approached the job with a childlike wonderment and a belief that there was nothing so trivial that wouldn't make a story.

Sinclair Newton, who died at the weekend, was the youngest-ever news editor of the Evening News and one of the most talented journalists to be employed by the paper.

Under his enthusiastic guidance in the early 1970s, coupled with the editorship of Leon Hickman, the newsroom gloried in a seeming Golden Age of investigative journalism, the highlight of which was the reporting of the scandal surrounding Sunningdale.

The pair sent reporter John Ware - now frontman for BBC Panorama - undercover to the former sanatorium at Knightwick, where destitute families were forced to live in rented squalor.

Readers were appalled as the nightly diary exposed inadequacies in the county's social housing policy.

The story broke in the middle of a National Union of Journalists' dispute and Ware, typically, ran the gauntlet of pickets to pass his copy to the paper.

Newton's tenure of the newsroom - which he nicknamed Rose Cottage and sometimes Ward 13 - also coincided with the decade's two most gruesome stories, the Worcester Paraquat murder trial and the triple killings of three city children by their babysitter.

Sinclair Newton came to journalism after a series of unfulfilling office jobs.

It was in the late 1960s that he moved with his mother and stepfather from Manchester, to Winchcombe, and was offered the post of office junior at the Evesham Journal.

The job involved mostly making copious amounts of tea, but soon he was writing stories and taking delight in parish pump politics, amused that vegetable show competitors could argue so much over the size of the biggest turnip.

It was his natural inquisitiveness and enthusiasm for news that brought him to the Evening News as a reporter and at the age of 24, he became its news editor.

In March, 1973, he married Susan Weaver, a nurse from Stourport-on-Severn. Their best man was John Ware and for a time they lived at Brookside, Kempsey.

In 1974, they moved to Manchester, where Newton had a newsdesk job with the Daily Mail.

He remained there until the paper closed its Northern office and then ran his own news agency, most recently producing his own gourmet food magazine.

But during a sabbatical from the Daily Mail he chose to return to Worcestershire and spent time as a reporter with the Evesham Journal.

Sadly, his marriage to Sue failed and he married secondly and briefly, in the mid-80s, an American called Missy. There were no children from either marriage.

Sinclair had been ill for some time. He collapsed at his home in Ashton-under-Lyne on Sunday and died later in hospital, four days short of his 56th birthday.

The funeral is due to take place on Monday, March 17, 12 noon, at St Mary's Church, Horton Green, Manchester.