My friend and former colleague Patrick “Paddy” Roycroft, who has died aged 78, operated the Guardian switchboard for 32 years. During that time, he became the voice of the Guardian. And what a voice – honeyed, and whiskeyed, gravelly and mellifluous, he was part Terry Wogan, part Tom Waits. Paddy was a balm to reporters out in the field and readers trying to get queries answered. He knew everything there was to know about the Guardian – and where all the bodies were buried. Paddy was a story-teller extraordinaire, and boy did he enjoy telling them – almost as much as we enjoyed listening.
The second of four children, Paddy was born in Limerick,
Ireland, to Tom Roycroft, a chef, and Reavy (nee Sullivan). At the age of five he contracted TB and the following year spent nine months in Peamount, a hospital just outside
Dublin. He was discharged aged seven with the grave prognosis that nothing more could be done. But Paddy had other ideas. He attended the Christian Brothers school in Limerick, leaving at the age of 14, initially to train as a brother at Mount St Columb’s convalescent home in Warrenpoint, County Down, in
Northern Ireland. It didn’t take him long to realise this was not the life for him, and he returned to school in Limerick to complete his leaving certificate (equivalent to A-levels) and become a projectionist in the City Theatre cinema.