Camden New Journal - Obituary: Stewart Valdar

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Camden New Journal - OBITUARY
Published: 14 June 2007

Valdar of Hampstead – campaigning journalist

STEWART Valdar, who died last Tuesday aged 90, was a journalist to the end, producing his last weekly Newsround letter ten days before he died.
As editor of the Hampstead News and Marylebone Record in the 1960s he prided himself on providing a challenge to the then-dominant Hampstead and Highgate Express, while in his role as a stringer for the national press, ‘Valdar of Hampstead’ was paid by the line for his reports from the leafy but politically-active NW3.
From the Hampstead News he moved via a series of jobs at the Daily Herald and the Sunday Times to join his brother Colin in charge of the UK Press Gazette, where he remained until retirement in 1983.
Then aged 74, he launched the Vietnam Broadsheet, a newsletter aimed at highlighting the state of post-war Vietnam.
Born to a journalist father in Loughton, Essex, in January 1917, Stewart Valdar set down roots in Hampstead when he met his second wife at a meeting of the Young Communists League in South End Green in the late 1940s.
He lived within minutes of Hampstead Tube station for the next 30 years, with his main home in Willow Road, and was a mainstay of the Hampstead Local History Society.
He married three times, and leaves Jean Valdar, his widow, and four children.
His funeral will be held at Golders Green Crematorium at 11am tomorrow.
Paul Keilthy

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