The writing of Byron Rogers, who died of a stroke on August 3 aged 83, sometimes appeared in the travel pages, even though, as he put it himself in a collection of his articles in 2001*, “just about all the travels I have ever undertaken have been in that narrow corridor of land between Northampton, where I live, and Carmarthen, where I was brought up. And why not? All human life is there.”

Though Rogers was a journalist, the biographer of the poet RS Thomas and the novelist JL Carr, and had been a part-time speechwriter for the Prince of Wales, he had little time for the celebrities shoved in front of newspapers by press agents and publicists. What he enjoyed most was telling the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, from an angler, fishing for salmon, who caught something the size of a basking shark, to an octogenarian who fell 45 feet from a church roof and survived. He did once, though, write about the most successful teenager in showbusiness, and the start of that piece is a reminder that he was a master of the drop intro…

*An Audience with an Elephant (Aurum Press), Rogers’s first book, was sold by his local butcher, the author throwing in a pound of sausages with each copy.

Updated September 3: In Last Word on Radio 4 on August 29, Bethan Rogers, a barrister, joined the presenter John Wilson to pay tribute to her father.