IF THE term "Gentlemen of the Press" was ever justified, it was due to men such as Hugh Brown, former features editor of the Evening Times, who has died at the age of 91.

For here was one of nature's finest, not only a journalist of great ability but a man of old-world charm who fostered the young of his profession with a positive and practical encouragement they never forgot.

The quiet and modest demeanour would give little hint of Hugh Brown's dramatic career in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, which took him through the hell of the Russian convoys and onward to Malta and to the final battles against the Japanese in the Philippines.

He was one of the crew of the ill-fated battleship, HMS Prince of Wales.

For his brilliant shorthandwriting, he was called upon not only to make verbatim reports of courts-martial but to undertake secretarial work forWinston Churchill in connection with the Quebec Conferences of 1943 and 1944.

Born just before the outbreak of the First World War, Hugh attended Albert Road Academy in Pollokshields and left school determined to be a journalist.

Those shorthand skills, so valued in a bygone day, were his entree to the profession.

By the Second World War, he was a sub-editor on the Evening Times, earning the not inconsiderable sum of GBP4. 10s a week, augmented by an extra pound for working a shift at the Sunday Post on a Saturday night.

On the strength of that princely total he treated himself to a 14-day Mediterranean cruise in August, 1939, sailing on an Anchor line ship from Yorkhill at a cost of GBP1 per day.

He arrived back just at the outbreak of war.

It was on that cruise that he met Ellice, private secretary to Sir John Stirling Maxwell of Pollok, and when the couple married, Sir John provided them with their first home - a wing of the famous Pollok House in Glasgow.

Ellice, who went on to serve with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during the war, died after 45 years of marriage, her death coming on the funeral day of Hugh's father, who lived to be 100.

In 1986 he found romance again with the widowed Margo Marriott from Scarborough, who, like himself, had been married for 45 years. She became his second wife and presented him with a readymade family of daughters Jeannie and Vicki and their offspring. They are all his survivors.

Hugh and Margo also became partners in sequence dancing, bridge and golf - at Williamwood Golf Club, near their home in Netherlee, on the south side of Glasgow.

In retirement, he studied Spanish and Italian at Langside College, learned to play the keyboard from scratch in his eighties, making cassette recordings - and was a regular swimmer into his nineties.

Maintaining his newspaper connection, he wrote the gardening column at the Evening Times for 30 years and supplied the paper's daily quiz until his late eighties. He also maintained a life-long church connection, first at CamphillQueen's Park and then at Netherlee.

As a footnote to the character and personality of this delightful man, many a journalist on the Evening Times remembered how he would fill quiet moments on the editorial floor.

Giving way to his passion for "amateur" magic, he would entertain colleagues to some spectacular tricks, including a Houdini routine in which he would astound them with an apparently miraculous escape!

A memorable "Gentleman of the Press" if ever there was one.

Hugh Brown, journalist, born March 21, 1914, died September 3, 2005.