Tom Tickell

In loving memory of Tom who sadly passed away at Ashgrove House Nursing Home on 8th December 2025, aged 82. Tom will be forever loved and missed by all his family and friends.Tom had a long and successful career in journalism.From 1970 until 1982 he was the personal finance editor at the Guardian, offering excellent advice for readers, though he may not always have followed it himself. He went on to work for the Mail on Sunday (1982-84) and the Sunday Telegraph (1991-94), and then as a freelancer until 2004, with personal finance the main theme.His life outside work was lively and varied. One passion was Speakers’ Corner in London; he addressed the crowds there on politics, and such subjects as the suitability of llamas for London Transport. He was also proud to serve as a Mental Health Act Commissioner (1985-91), as a member of the Mental Health Review Tribunal on and off over many years, and as a prison visitor at Pentonville in north London, becoming, in retirement, a member of its independent monitoring board.Tom was born in Oxford during the second world war; he remarked that he was grateful to share a birthday with Queen Elizabeth II, rather than Adolf Hitler, born one day earlier. His father was Jerrard Tickell, the Irish novelist, and his mother, Renee (nee Haynes), was also a noted author and a researcher on paranormal phenomena. Tom had two much older brothers, Crispin and Patrick. As a child he survived a near-miss with meningitis, saved only when the new miracle drug of penicillin became available.By the time Tom reached his teenage years, he was already a gifted raconteur, mimic and avid collector of jokes and anecdotes; that was also when he began to collect nephews and nieces, the first arriving in 1957, with nine more to follow in fairly short order. We became his first devoted fanclub – he was always generous, entertaining and attentive with each one of us. The jokes and anecdotes later appeared in his many published works of quizzes, quotes and curiosities.After his education at Westminster school and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he graduated in history in 1966, Tom found a job at ITN . I remember him once confiding his ambition to become a Conservative prime minister, but he saw the error of his ways. After two years at the Economist, he moved on to his spiritual home of the Guardian.In 1979 he married Anne Tomlins, and they had three children, Lucy, Charlotte and Nicholas.Even after his diagnosis with dementia, he continued entertaining and joking with the carers and nurses around him.He is survived by Anne, his children, four grandchildren and 10 nephews and nieces.