Everyone who knew him (and a fair few who didn't) had a favourite anecdote about Edward Mace, travel editor of the Observer from 1973 to 1986, who has died aged 89. None were as funny or told more engagingly than his own. One recalled an after-office drinking session with colleagues at the Cockpit, the Observer local, during which the excitable leader-page editor assured him that he had always regarded Edward as one of the best second-rate brains on the paper. For someone who claimed he had never been to school, this was praise.
Edward's provenance, including his education, career and general movements before he joined the Observer as PA to the managing editor in 1959, was a subject that he preferred to leave vague. If he was aware of office rumours that he was in fact an illegitimate son of the ninth Duke of Devonshire (the Mace family home in Great Longstone, Derbyshire, was four miles from Chatsworth), he did nothing to discourage them. He certainly moved in grand circles and could be a dreadful snob. You forgave him because he was so stylish, and terrific company. He always made you laugh.
Edward's best stories were about the dotty, often dodgy, aristos he met at weekend house parties in stately homes. Correction – not weekend, Friday to Monday. He adhered rigorously to the Mitford language code. No cars or mirrors, please, only motors and looking-glasses, which may explain why he never managed to pass his driving test until he was 40. Dinner guests listened spellbound to his accounts of the ancient laird he met at breakfast in some ancestral pile who showed him the miniature pistol he had invented for shooting wasps and an even tinier pair of gold scissors for cutting first-class railway tickets (the small green cardboard kind they issued in the 50s) in half. Neatly.
Then there was the one about returning to London from Vaynol, home of Sir Michael Duff Bt, lord-lieutenant of Caernarvonshire. Edward got a lift on the royal train with the Queen Mother, who told jokes and drank large gins and tonic with her ladies-in-waiting throughout the journey. At Euston, she tottered on to the red carpet where an official receiving party was lined up, threw her arms round the station master's neck and burbled: "How perfectly sweet of you to come but you really shouldn't have bothered."
Not all his jokes featured toffs. My favourite was the one about him taking his aunt to buy a hat at the Marshall and Snelgrove department store. "How come this one smothered with flowers costs only 14 shillings and sixpence,"queried his aunt, "whereas the one with a single rose costs 19 shillings and sixpence?" "Modom is paying for the restraint," replied the assistant.
Edward's elegant, urbane style of writing was very different from his predecessor's. Eric Newby, author of the classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, had to be a hard act to follow. Edward did his share of Death Valley safaris and backpacking through the Amazon rainforest, but his ideal break was to motor through the Italian lake district, preferably in a chum's Rolls-Royce. "The Italian lakes," he wrote, "are the cornerstones of pleasure. They grow on you, trivial and frivolous, all beauty, a conspiracy to delight." He loved the extravagance of the Renaissance palaces overlooking Maggiore and the magnificent ornamental gardens of Villa Taranto at Pallanza. But a market stall displaying huge old-fashioned ladies' corsets, whose intricate mechanism of straps and pulleys to operate the suspenders might have given St Paul himself ideas, delighted him just as much.