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.
Paddy was never going to be happy with just one career. He followed his father into cheffing for a while, retrained as a switchboard operator, then blagged his way into hairdressing in the late 1960s. He got a job by telling the owner of a London salon that he had trained at the reputable hairdressing college in Paris on the Rue du Luimneach (Gaelic for Limerick), but by the end of the first week, it was obvious he didn’t have a clue how to cut hair. The owner had fallen for the rogue crimper’s charm, and was more upset than Paddy when he told him that if he was going to stay in business he would have to let him go.
Paddy returned to cheffing, working the London to Glasgow train to save up money to go to hairdressing college. In 1967 he started training at the London College of Fashion, where he met Carol Bliss, whom he married in 1972. They opened up a salon in Limerick, where Carol also cut hair, and lived there until they moved to London in 1977, when Paddy joined the Guardian as a switchboard operator. He initially worked the night shift so he could look after his growing family in the day.
Paddy was warm, funny, gentle, mischievous and wise – and he made the greatest Irish coffee I’ve ever tasted. When somebody rang in asking about a job that had been advertised for MI5, Paddy told the caller “That’s classified” before putting the bewildered caller through to classified advertising.
He was a proud member of the trade union Unite, taught his children about the horrors of apartheid and why they shouldn’t eat South African apples, was a leading first-aider at work, a keen member of the Guardian Angels choir (and continued to be after he retired), a brilliant cook, a sports nut (who turned up at work in full Irish kit before heading off to the US for the 1994 World Cup, and volunteered as a Games Maker at the 2012 London Olympics), a goalkeeper for the Guardian football team and a wonderful father.
His son, Kieran, died of meningitis when he was three weeks old. Paddy is survived by Carol and their three daughters, Roisin, Aisling and Ursula.
