Cresswell led a varied life. On leaving the Benedictine-run Belmont Abbey School in Hereford, aged 17, he had lied about his age and enlisted in the Palestine Police, where his responsibilities included acting as bodyguard for the future King Hussein of Jordan. On his return to the UK in 1948, he drifted through a variety of jobs including taxi-driver, private detective, travelling theatre owner, director of a news agency, teacher and broadcaster. After a time as a reporter with the BBC in Birmingham, and in industrial publishing, he launched his first religious paper The Weekly Pictorial, for the Church of England in the West Midlands. He subsequently launched the Birmingham Catholic Pictorial, and was then encouraged to launch another Catholic Pictorial in Liverpool by the city's then Archbishop John Carmel Heenan.

In his "auto-obituary" he wrote that his decision to move into religious journalism ensured... a life of poverty only alleviated by occasional bouts of simony. At the end of his life he frequently expressed surprise that he had managed to buy so much whisky with so little talent. In fact the Catholic Pictorial - still going strong - became an institution in Catholic Liverpool. He retired from "the Pie" in 1991 but was persuaded put of retirement in 1993 by Gabriel Communications, publishers of the national weekly tabloid newspaper The Universe. The company wanted him to launch a broadsheet paper aimed at Catholic traditionalists.
It was felt by the Gabriel board that the other weekly Catholic paper, The Catholic Herald, followed a liberal, post-Vatican II agenda. The new paper pledged obedience to the Pope; its masthead bore the "crossed keys" Vatican motif and the legend "Follow Peter".
The resources he had to launch me paper were minimal. He had only
one reporter and a few freelance contributors. His office - more of a cubby hole - just about had room for his battered old typewriter and the clouds of tobacco smoke from his pipe. It was tucked away in a comer of the advertising sales department to ensure that Cresswell kept his distance from the staff of The Universe, who considered the new paper a threat. Cresswell packed his paper with hard-hitting, right-wing commentators. The paper took an aggressively anti-abortion stance, and was more supportive of the Vatican than any of the other Catholic papers then on the market. It was even, one commentator suggested, more papist than the Pope. (If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery then Cresswell would have been flattered by the lurch towards the right in subsequent years of The Catholic Herald.)

Colleagues were never sure to what extent Cresswell himself  subscribed to the extreme and hard-line views which he published. While generally Supportive of Catholic teaching, he had, perhaps, a more generous understanding of the fallibility of human nature than some of the Vatican figures which his paper lauded. Certainly he understood, and occasionally pandered to, his readership. The letters page of the paper became the sounding-off board of choice for a host of reactionary Catholics, who bemoaned modern hymns, priests who failed to wear clerical dress, or the hundred and one other faults (as they saw them) of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. Although popular with its target audience, the paper was, in its early years, heartily disliked by many of the Catholic hierarchy, much to Cresswell's delight. After his retirement from the paper in 1996, he continued to contribute a column, "View from the Pew", in which he contemplated the mysteries of the Catholic Church from a lay standpoint - or maybe that should be kneelpoint. In one of his last columns in the Catholic Times he informed readers - almost apologetically - that he was terminally ill. "It seems to me the height of bad manners to just disappear one day without farewell or thanks for your patience with me over the years," he wrote. He wanted, he said,
" to say adieu whilst I still have some ability to think coherently. That said, I promise you I'll not have the bad manners, in however many columns are left me, to leave you with a recital of the woes inherent upon packing for a long journey."
He did, however, use his final columns to remind his readers of the strength, inspiration and courage he received from his faith. Catholicism, he said recently, was a "culture inbred in the bone". He was concerned, in the last weeks of his life, that no one would turn up at his funeral, and tried to ensure what he described as a "quorum" by promising that the wine would flow and that his wife, Mary, would not be doing the cooking. Cresswell need not have worried. His funeral Mass was packed. He was buried with his pipe, which in life he was rarely without,
and wearing the habit of the Franciscan order, to which he had always
felt a particular affinity. In a letter written shortly before his death, he
urged friends to "bombard with prayers the gates of Heaven where
a disreputable old hack will soon be trying to con his way in".

 
Norman William Cresswell, journalist: born Rock Ferry, Cheshire
2 September 1928; owner and editor, Industrial News Service, Birmingham 1955-60; owner) Catholic Pictorial .1961-88, Editor 1961 -91; owner, Mersey Mirror Ltd 1971-88; Editor, Catholic Times 1993-96; married 1965 Mary Rooney (two sons); died Little Crosby, Merseyside

PAULINUS BARNES
13 August 2001.