Last updated 20:56, Thursday, 20 November 2008

Alan Hankinson was one of that splendid band of men and women who, for more than two decades, used to send Britain happily to bed.

Joan Alexander next to a bust of her late partner Alan Hankinson

He worked as a reporter, sub-editor and scriptwriter for ITN right from the birth of News at Ten.

With its famous bongs, its team of newsreaders who were household names across the land, and the “and finally” last item of the evening, News at Ten reassured British television viewers whether the news was good or bad.

Hankinson, who moved to the Lake District in 1975 to concentrate on writing, always reckoned he got the TV job because he was the only journalist on ITN who wasn’t scared of mountains.

During his years working on the news programme, he knew the innermost secrets of newsreaders like his regular tennis partner Reginald Bosanquet, and hot tempered Anna Ford, who once threw a bottle of wine over someone in a fit of temper off camera.

Hankinson, the “amiable eccentric” as friends knew him, died in March, 2007, leaving behind an impressive collection of books, many of them about climbing, and essays.

But the man everyone knew as “Hank” had one last book he always intended to put together.

Sadly it was a task he never got round to, but now his partner Joan Alexander and a group of friends have got together to put that one omission right with the publication of Writers in the Lakes, a book containing several of Hankinson’s superbly researched and expertly written articles about a host of fascinating literary figures.

Joan said: “It was Hank’s last book and the one he never quite got round to. He spoke about it many times, but somehow it always got put off to another day. When he died, I thought that it was a project we needed to do.”

She said: “Throughout his life he had a passion for books and literature and this, combined with his love of the Lake District, led to a series of articles which were written for Cumbria Life magazine, and they appear in the book.”

Joan said: “Hank was an amiable eccentric with a dry sense of humour, slow to criticise and quick with praise. He was an intellectual who wore his learning lightly.”

Born at Gately in Cheshire in 1926, Alan Hankinson was educated at Bolton School and won a scholarship to read modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1949.

Although his university career was interrupted by war service, he subsequently got a job as a journalist with the Bolton Evening News and later became news editor at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.

In 1958 he got the call from a former reporting colleague in Lancashire, Bob Tyrrell, who had just joined ITN to present a programme called Roving Report, asking him if he would mind showing a young reporter the ropes. Hank took the cub reporter under his wing. His name? Robin Day.

Hankinson was instantly hired by ITN on his return from Nigeria. Because he loved fell walking and climbing, he was often sent to cover stories in the Alps and Himalayas and covered some of Sir Chris Bonington’s major expeditions.

Hank was also Reginald Bosanquet’s tennis partner twice a week and saw at close quarters the successful mix between the volatile Reggie, often barely able to sit up straight in his chair after consuming one or two over the eight, and the ever-reliable Andrew Gardner, who he always regarded as the best man he worked with.

People loved News at Ten, particularly the quirky final items. Hankinson said it was a wonderful, laid back place to work, and admitted: “Sometimes I had to pinch myself to believe that you could get paid for having so much fun.

“There were nights when we wondered whether Reggie Bosanquet was going to fall out of his chair, but he always managed to get his words out articulately and with style.”

Bosanquet once holed up in Hankinson’s Bassenthwaite home for several days while the national media pursued him over a drinking trip to Scotland when he had to be helped into his car, semi collapsed, during a student rag week event.

Hankinson also hosted Anna Ford, the cool beauty who went to school in Cumbria and who was the object of male desire across Britain when she read the nightly news.

Every red-blooded young farmer in the county seemed to get to know that Anna was staying with the Hankinsons. The phone was red hot with volunteers offering to take her out and Hank confessed: “The story spread like wildfire and I had to spend all day fighting them off.”

Hankinson’s books on climbing were highly regarded. He wrote on other topics as diverse as the American Civil War and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and made an acclaimed film on rock climbing, A Century on the Crags.

With his mellifluous speaking tones, his long locks and his involvement in local tennis and squash clubs, Hankinson became as much a character of Keswick as many of the people he wrote about.

The Lake District has traditionally been the home and inspiration to some of the nation’s finest writers and Hankinson’s final book celebrates the life and works of 30 authors, from Romantic opium eaters to Edwardian dandies.

Within the essays there is much of Alan Hankinson’s own personality. He writes about Enid Wilson of Keswick, whose nature notes for The Guardian were “full of love and sympathy” for Lake District life and lore, creatures and character. But he does not hold back from describing the impatient, impetuous nature of Hugh Walpole or comparing the talents with the less likeable traits of other writers..

Writers in the Lakes, a fitting tribute to one of the Lake District’s literary giants of the modern era, is published by Bookcase and costs £10.