Career
His columns were simply written, in keeping with his working class readership and comprised slices of human life, including famous people, events and later a personal diary of his everyday life and thoughts - though at times he could be controversial. He worked alongside cartoonist Philip Zec at the Daily Mirror and the pair courted controversy in 1942 with an illustration, captioned by Connor, which Winston Churchill and others perceived as an attack on government. Churchill complained to Cecil King, then a director of the company, of a writer (Connor) being "dominated by malevolence".
Connor forgave Churchill though, and later wrote a moving obituary of the wartime Prime Minister ("Sword in the Scabbard," 25 January 1965) and attended his funeral service at Saint Paul"s Cathedral.
The paper was sued in 1959 and lost. The court case involved both sides lying under oath.
He wrote: "The one thing that brings stature and dignity to mankind and raises us above the beasts will have been denied her - pity and the hope of ultimate redemption."
In the years leading up to his death Connor wrote more humorous columns and was regarded with affection by Mirror readers. Subjects ranged from the time he received wrong number calls intended for the local railway parcels service, to the mysterious person who sent him a fresh goose egg once a year.
Connor was knighted in 1966.
His final column ended with the words "Normal service in this column is temporarily interrupted while I learn to do what any babe can do with ease and what comes naturally to most men of good conscience - to sleep easily o" nights."
He died in hospital a month after fracturing his skull in a fall. Since his death the column Cassandra in The Daily Mirror has continued to be sporadically published. A new columnist, writer Keith Waterhouse, took over Connor"s place in the newspaper, but not his byline.
