While focussing on the big stories, he kept an eye out for unusual stories, such as the ancient actor AE Matthews protesting a lamppost outside his Bushey Heath home in a dressing gown and deerstalker, or the Baltimore Sun music critic sent to cover the fighting in Katanga who was so roughed up that two rival correspondents had to write his copy for him.

There was also an interview with Saudi Arabia’s public executioner and a Mongolian herder who questioned if he knew William Shakespeare.

Arthur John Osman was born on July 3, 1929, in the West Sussex village of Durrington, as the son of an agricultural labourer. He was a paperboy who received a scholarship to Worthing High School before joining the Sussex Daily News as a reporter in 1945.

With an accurate shorthand note and a clear prose style, he received a Ford Madox Ford prize for junior journalists at the age of 17 and went on to become the Worthing Herald’s sports editor.

Moving to the Press Association, he surprised the American press corps with a doorstep interview with US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

He joined the Telegraph during the Suez Crisis. On the day Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister, Time magazine published a photograph of them outside No. 10 Downing Street. Osman claimed it should have been titled “a bookie and his runner”.

Osman exuded confidence. Lord Mountbatten told him that when he pushed for independence as Viceroy of India, “I f—-d up.” Harold Wilson’s wife, Mary Wilson, gave him a handwritten poem she had composed immediately after their interview.

He covered Vivien Leigh’s successful effort to save the Haymarket Theatre and spoke with Jayne Mansfield about her fondness for small automobiles in England, where she felt at ease because she had two English grandparents.

Posted initially to Cairo, he had a big scoop when Queen Dina, King Hussein of Jordan’s ex-wife, told him she had no access to their daughter, Princess Alia.

After five months of meticulous talks (which made the foreign editor concerned), Osman submitted her request to the King, which resulted in the girl’s return after five years. One of Osman’s most rewarding tasks was a lengthy investigation into overseas slavery for The Sunday Telegraph.

Beginning at the Mali consulate in Jeddah, where he purchased a postcard labelled “Slave of a Tagui chief,” he travelled the western Sahara trafficking route, interviewing slaves.

One, the mother of a two-year-old girl who had been kidnapped, beaten, and sold, was featured in a hard-hitting series of pieces titled “Slavery Lives On,” but the paper determined its readers did not want a thorough account of female circumcision.

His portrait of his mother and daughter appeared on the 1963 Anti-Slavery Society Christmas card; he later brought his proof to the future King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who abolished slavery and paid both slaves and owners.

Osman also wrote on the kingdom’s first girls’ school, though he was not allowed to interview the students. The king was later killed by his nephew.

As an old-fashioned Telegraph correspondent, Osman would have likely continued his acclaimed career with little notice when the BBC offered him a job with greater money and a better pension in 1965.

He found radio and television to be very different, and he sometimes felt like a Times reporter who had found himself working for the Daily Mirror instead.

The news content contained a significant amount of garbage. He despised not only the unfair attacks on the BBC, but also the Corporation’s practice of referring to terrorists as “militants,” “activists,” or “dissidents”.

Unlike newspapers, which did not encourage correspondents to mention themselves, a broadcast reporter was exposed to the public.

An outburst erupted when he mentioned a pony named “N—-r,” while another complainant objected to a killing Nigerian army officer being interviewed in front of a presidential palace “as if he were a footballer”.

When viewers complained, management allegedly cited Osman as being politically incorrect. He was deployed to cover the Cyprus Emergency and the Dalai Lama’s journey from Tibet to India, but was ejected from Southern Rhodesia following UDI.

While travelling in Uganda with his second wife, Virginia Waite, a Telegraph reporter who died in 2015, they awoke to find troops deliberating whether to execute them.

When Virginia asked in Swahili, “Hello, where’s the lion?” the senior officer present fell out laughing.

Three years after being deported, Osman returned, only to be asked by President Idi Amin, “You have been reporting that I am mad. “Osman, do you really believe I am insane?” Osman prevaricated like a politician.

Later, he witnessed Amin preside over an open-air treason trial involving two ministers and the local Anglican archbishop, who nodded silently from the dock. The following day, it was revealed that all three had died in a car crash.

Amin drove him to Entebbe Airport, where he placed a transistor on his vehicle bonnet to listen to Osman’s broadcast, which questioned the official account but focused on a disagreement with President Jimmy Carter.

Amin told him as he signed off, “Osman, you very good reporter [sic].” A BBC governor thought he could have been more forthright, but the director-general praised his guts in returning to Uganda.

The news desk pushed him to travel quicker and faster, and he once used three different passports to cross borders in the Middle East in one day, gradually becoming conscious of his popularity.

Listeners came out of blocked homes to greet him; work was halted in one town during his broadcast; and one man stated he named his son after him.

When Osman was sent to Moscow as communism crumbled in 1980, he counted out the old Politburo members and conducted a massive 26-hour broadcast in which he ultimately broke the news to the world about Leonid Brezhnev’s death.

But he also caused severe anger by exposing that, despite Russia and South Africa’s public animosity, the two governments were coordinating over hidden gold and diamond trades; although he was not ejected, he was barred from attending official gatherings for a while.

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