A charmer and a stickler: Jeremy Alexander was a Guardian sport mainstay for 57 years

I n journalism, there are people whose brilliance is known to every one of their departmental colleagues but not to the readers. There are people so idiosyncratic that it is hard to imagine them existing in a more conventional profession. And there are people who stay so long in the job that it becomes impossible to imagine the place without them.

Jeremy Alexander, who died of cancer aged 81 on Thursday, embodied all that in a single individual. For anyone who has ever worked on the Guardian sports desk there is not just sadness but disbelief. It is the end of an era that lasted 57 years. Repeat, 57. He worked for the department from 1966 until his final illness in March. It may even have been his first illness; he claimed never to have taken a day off sick, and his facts tended to be reliable.

He was not wholly anonymous. Longstanding Guardian readers may remember Jeremy’s elegant and lovingly crafted football reports, usually from the nether reaches of league football. But that was a fraction of his contribution. His original speciality was to act as the “stone sub”, spending his evenings in the bowels of the building, trying to ensure the hot metal type had the right words in the right order, which the old Grauniad was infamous for not doing.

When new technology arrived in the 1980s, simplifying the production process, this job mutated into the “revise sub”, still the last line of defence against libel, bad grammar, infelicity and simple mistakes. Calling him hawk-eyed does him scant justice. One is tempted to call him The Man Who Stopped a Million Errors, a phrase Jeremy would have amended on grounds of exaggeration. But there must have been hundreds of thousands.

And he did it all with immense charm. Even the