A LARGER-THAN-LIFE former Warrington Guardian reporter who went on to edit the Daily Mirror, the New York Daily News and the Sydney Daily Telegraph has died at the age of 74.

David Banks was an outgoing pub raconteur and it is claimed that he once drank three pints of beer in 12 seconds to prove the point. He was also one of the most controversial figures in the annals of Fleet Street because as night editor of The Sun he kept the paper rolling during the 1980s Wapping strike.

Banks was born in Warrington in 1948, the eldest of four children of Arthur Banks, known as Bill, a foreman at the British Aluminium factory, and his wife Helen.

As a youngster he was a choir boy at a local church, grew up in a council house and attended Boteler Grammar School, leaving with five O levels, before joining the Warrington Guardian as a trainee reporter.

Shortly afterwards, he was spotted by a Daily Mirror executive, not because of his journalistic talent but because he had a big personality to match his gentle giant frame.

Banksy, as he was universally known, joined the Mirror’s Manchester office as a sub-editor before transferring to London where he honed his skills as a tabloid headline writer.

By 1979, he was the paper’s production editor before moving to America to work on Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. His next move, in 1981, took him to The Sun and he was night editor during the bitter Wapping strike when he had to lie on the floor of a bus every day as it crossed the print union picket line.

Banksy then left Britain for a spell to edit the New York Daily News and, in 1988, the Sydney Daily Telegraph. By 1992, he was back in Britain as editor of the Daily Mirror, where he was told to make redundancies and left after two years.

A career switch into radio followed and he worked for Talk Radio and LBC, originally the London Broadcasting Company. Later on, he was a columnist with the UK Press Gazette and the (Newcastle) Journal and fought a successful battle with leukaemia.

He is survived by his wife, Gemma, and two children: a son, Tim, who runs a restaurant in Ghana, and a daughter Natasha, who followed her father into journalism and works for The Guardian.