The boyhood dream of Frank Nicklin, who has died aged 80, was to open the bowling for his native Derbyshire and England. Instead, Nicklin became one of Fleet Street's greatest sports editors.
He was born and brought up in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, where his joiner father, a staunch trade union official, became mayor. He began his career on the Derby Evening Telegraph, but the outbreak of the second world war saw him join the Royal Air Force as an under-age volunteer. While flying Kittyhawk fighters, he was twice shot down and captured, and twice escaped.
The first time he spent a week in an Italian ditch before escaping. The second time he came down over Yugoslavia and spent several months with Tito's guerrilla partisans before his group was captured. He was being lined up to be shot with his comrades when one told the Germans that they could not execute Nicklin under the Geneva Convention as he was a British pilot. He escaped the firing squad. "Had they looked under a certain rock near Dubrovnik they'd have found the list of German anti-aircraft positions I'd compiled," Nicklin once told his son Sean. "They'd have shot me for spying then."
Demobilisation saw him back on the Derby Evening Telegraph, reporting the footballing exploits of his beloved 1946 FA Cup winners Derby County before moving to the Daily Telegraph and then the Manchester Evening News, where he is credited with dubbing the Manchester United team of the 1950s the Busby Babes. West Bromwich Albion tried to sign him after spotting him play in the local Wednesday football league. However, cricket continued to be his preferred sport, and he modelled himself on his favourite cricketer, fellow left-arm pace bowler Bill Voce, who opened for both Nottinghamshire and England in tandem with Harold Larwood.
Nicklin switched to the Daily Herald before coming to London in 1958 to become sports editor of the People. There he established himself as an imaginative, innovative operator. When the Mirror Group took over the Daily Herald to form the old Sun, Hugh Cudlipp brought Nicklin in to head sport and Rupert Murdoch knew he had the right man in Nicklin to help sell the paper on "sex, sport and contests" when he took on the ailing broadsheet in 1969. Sport under Nicklin played as big a part as page three girls in taking the tabloid Murdoch Sun into a circulation lead over the Mirror in seven years. Nicklin once said: "Larry Lamb, the Sun's first editor, called me a pie-and-pint man. He was right. I'd be down the pub talking sport like our readers. We never wrote down to our readers."
Nicklin turned the England fast bowler Freddie Trueman into a cricket columnist on the People, a formula he continued on the Sun with George Best and Jimmy Greaves on soccer, Harvey Smith on show jumping and even Mick McManus on wrestling. But he also built a team of thoroughly professional sports writers.
When Nicklin discovered he had stomach cancer, he was absent for over a year. He returned, fully recovered, but left shortly after Kelvin MacKenzie, with whom he had had a stormy relationship, became editor. Nicklin, however, was soon back in harness, running Hayter's Sports Agency until well into his 70s, mingling again with his Fleet Street chums, enjoying long, gossipy, liquid lunches.
He could be a tough, cantankerous man to work under, but he had a tender spot for birds. Once, at Hayter's, a feral London pigeon was trapped, injured, in the office. Nicklin boxed it up, called a cab, and paid its fare to a bird sanctuary. His funeral request was "No flowers. Donations to the RAF Association and the RSPB". He sometimes said he would like to be reincarnated as a sea gull. Strangely, as one of his former secretaries was being told of his death, a gull was squawking overhead. "Could that be Nick?" she wondered.
He is survived by his wife Margaret, daughter Jane, son Sean and five grandchildren, four of them cricket players.
· Frank Hallam Nicklin, sports editor, born April 15 1922; died June 25 2002