Charles Wilson, the former editor of the Times, who has died aged 87, was a newspaper man to his fingertips. He began as a teenager, as a copy runner in Fleet Street on the Sunday People, and his later career encompassed the editorship at various times of seven newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Universally known as Charlie or, to Private Eye magazine, “Gorbals” Wilson and occasionally, to the disgruntled, Jock MacThug, he made the most of his Glaswegian background to convey an image as a hard-nosed, ruthless and irascible tabloid news editor. Those who knew him, however, came to recognise a more genial and compassionate character, one who collected porcelain, lived in Holland Park, one of the most expensive parts of London, and was an enthusiastic racegoer and horse rider in his spare time. He was, said Peter Stothard, one of his successors at the Times, “one of the toughest, sharpest and most all-round newspaper men in London, maybe the world”.
