Among Philip Crosland’s few possessions when he died last Saturday, aged 94, was a sheet of paper on which was typed: “To Mr P.W.J. Crosland/ The cold and silent lake water/ under the bloomed peach tree/ is so deep,/ The depth is unmeasurable/ when a dear friend bids farewell.” The date is May 6, 1967, the day he retired from the Statesman after nearly 30 years. The signature is “Subal Ghosh Choudhury Asst. printer”. Philip had treasured the tribute for 45 years. He inspired loyalty. Forced to work on the Surrey Advertiser until he was 80 because he had neither pension nor savings, he would buy fish and chips for the printers on late shifts.

Philip was the last British journalist to make India his home. I don’t mean visiting firemen, freelancers and retirees who live here because, as George Orwell wrote, it’s “so easy (for whites) to play at being a gentleman” in India. I mean the last of generations of men who trod in William Hickey’s footsteps to work for papers like the Madras Mail or Civil and Military Gazette. Unlike most, Philip did not refer to England as “Home”. India was home and had circumstances on the paper been different, he might not have gone back at all. A 1947 diary entry read, “India’s freedom, I believe, benefited the British as much as it did Indians. It removed the last psychological impediment to uninhibited friendship between individuals of the two races and the Briton was enabled to relax and enjoy the country and the many good things it had to offer without the feeling that he was unwelcome. Overnight he ceased to be a ruler and became a friend. It is a tribute to Indians that this was so.”

Subal was not his only devotee. There was also perpetually smiling little Dulal in knee-length dhoti and teeth that chewing pan had ground to their roots. Dulal made up the Sunday magazine pages and wasn’t impressed by my innovations. No matter what I tried, headings without capitals, lines aligned on the right, reverse type, Dulal smiled benignly and murmured that Crosland sahib had done it. Their loyalty reflected the care and attention Philip devoted to the nitty-gritty of newspaper production — subbing, headlines, display, accuracy, style — which interests few journalists nowadays because it is anonymous.

He was a 17-year-old reporter in Essex when, incensed by Japan’s invasion of China, he offered to enlist in the Chinese Nationalist army. The embassy apologized that China didn’t take foreign volunteers. Little did Philip know that he, too, would one day be a victim of Japanese atrocities! Three years later he answered an advertisement in the London Times and joined the Statesman a year after Malcolm Muggeridge left it. Writing was in his blood. His grandfather, T.W.H. Crosland, the Victorian writer, might have been better known if Shaw and Wilde hadn’t been contemporaries. T.W.H. was a snob. “To the superior mind,” he wrote in a study titled The Suburbans (1905), “in fact, ‘suburban’ is a sort of label which may be properly applied to pretty well everything on earth that is ill-conditioned.” He was entitled to be scathing, being impoverished gentry whose fecklessness reduced the family to trade. But Philip went to good schools and counted among his teachers Monsignor Gilbey, a priest of the sherry family who lived and died in London’s Travellers Club.

He worked his way up on the Statesman to edit its Delhi edition before retiring as general manager of the entire outfit. He took a deep interest in many aspects of Indian life, and was as much at home in the company of arty Bengalis as bluff Punjabis. He rode with the Delhi Hunt (jackal instead of fox), went pigsticking with the Meerut Tent Club and played rugby in the Calcutta Football Club. The philistine image was softened by his interest in Mughal miniatures, Anglo-Indian engravings, Kashmir carpets and books on early British India. I must confess to being a little peeved when Modhu Bose assumed that if Philip hadn’t actually written my tribute to him and the incomparable Sadhona Bose (by-lines were rare then) he must have inspired it.

India’s obsession with politics left Philip cold. He was much happier writing as the Statesman’s Horse and Hounds Correspondent. He was equally happy with military matters. Like his father and grandfather, he had been a member of the Artists Rifles in Britain. In Calcutta, he joined the Light Horse whose exploits inspired James Leasor’s Boarding Party, which, in turn, led to the film The Sea Wolves, subtitled “The Last Charge of the Calcutta Light Horse”.

The real thing was altogether more brutal as Philip discovered when World War II broke out and the 2nd Battalion 15th Punjab Regiment he joined was sent to Borneo. Greatly outnumbered by the Japanese, they surrendered on March 9, 1942, as ordered by the Dutch commander-in-chief of the Netherlands East Indies who, to Philip’s outrage, treated Indian officers like servants. The Japanese were worse. They murdered six officers right away, and took the rest to Batavia and then Singapore. “We were shoved against a wall and threatened with a firing squad unless we promised not to escape,” Philip recalled. No one promised. A Sikh NCO was beheaded, and 1,445 British and Australian troops killed.

The PoWs were moved to Sarawak, where the Japanese regularly beat and tortured some 150 Indian soldiers in a separate camp because they refused to join the Indian National Army. That experience strengthened Philip’s affection and respect for Indians, and one day he and other British and Australian officers went to Col. Suga, the Japanese commander, to protest. They were told the Indians had been absorbed into the Imperial Japanese Army and were no concern of theirs. Philip took off his glasses (“the only ones I had”) and put them on Suga’s desk for safety during the roughhouse that inevitably followed. “You are not a gentleman!” Suga screamed. Bruised and battered, they were taken back to their camp and kept in close confinement. Yet, he refused to condemn Suga who had served with the Allies in World War I and several times avoided carrying out orders to eliminate all prisoners, including women and children.

Philip rarely spoke of his wartime sufferings but couldn’t repress a smile when his son, Michael, then aged five, was chasing him round the dining table in their Delhi bungalow. An exhausted Michael suddenly stopped running and declared “I don’t know how the Japanese ever caught you. You really run quite fast!”

His concern for Indian soldiers was again evident in 2000 when the Veterans Agency made a grant of £10,000 to every Far East PoW. It was a princely sum for impoverished Philip in his council flat. But he protested at the discrimination against the Gurkhas who had suffered the same, if not worse, hardships, until they, too, received a gratuity two years later. His Indian colleagues knew him as a kindly, hardworking, rather shy man who drove them – and himself – hard. His unorthodox food habits excited comment. In Calcutta he was the only sahib to send for singaras from the workers’ canteen. Delhi office lore had it that tired of the daily mulligatawny soup, roast chicken and baked custard, he demanded dum aloo. When it wasn’t forthcoming an exasperated Philip sent for the bawarchi. Angered by the man’s insistence he couldn’t cook dum aloo, Philip grabbed him by his lapels to demand, “And what the bloody hell do you eat at home? Roast beef and Yorkshire pudd?” Back came the unruffled reply, “I don’t cook at home. Bibi cooks.”

His passing marks the end of a chapter in the Anglo-Indian connection. Also, of a time when Indian journalism could boast a solid respectability because it flaunted fewer wheeler-dealer stars and more sound backroom workers. Philip was proud to be one of them.