SIMON HOGGART REMEMBERS BILL HANLEY

You'd have to be a pretty assiduous Guardian reader to remember the name of William Hanley. He worked at the paper for a few short months in 1968-69, and was a very talented reporter. His first article was a front-page scoop which he got by the unconventional but effective method of asking some senior politician "Hello, have you got a leak for me?".

I knew Bill well as he and I were supposed to begin work on the same day (he had just graduated from the LSE) but the mental health problems which ruined his life meant that he arrived weeks late. We shared a flat, and he tried cooking. It was not his forte. He fried an egg for so long that it fused with the pan. Once our dinner was burnt tinned risotto with steel-hard sprouts.

Bill was one of those people for whom life is just too much of a challenge. He showed me a letter from his bank manager, asking what he was going to do about his overdraft. "I'll write a cheque to cover it," he said triumphantly, and he wasn't joking.

On the other hand, he very often was joking. I suppose what he suffered from would now be called bipolar disorder. When he was on the high curve he was probably the most entertaining company of anyone I've ever met. In the late-night drinking clubs which adorned Manchester's version of Fleet Street he could keep teams of idealistic hacks and cynical printers doubled-up laughing with a tightly-controlled stream of hilarious consciousness - rather like Eddie Izzard, I sometimes think today. When the audience had succumbed totally he could say anything at all: "Have another cream cracker!" would bring whoops of helpless delight. He came from a working class family in Birkenhead, who found him bewildering. Bill used to claim he was a changeling.

He was fired, and I could see why - he failed to turn up at a story once too often, and on a newspaper a day late is irrecoverable. We kept in touch; I felt like the lucky twin, the one who survived. Now and again, he'd request money, often curiously precise sums: "I would be most grateful for £17.99 for a new pair of shoes," or "Please forward £15.35 for the train fare to Glasgow, where I have an interview with a horse-breeding magazine."

None of the job applications came to anything; the gap in his CV was just too great. And nothing, neither psychotherapy nor drugs, stopped his condition from worsening, though it was a pulmonary embolism that finally killed him last week. But he attracted great loyalty from people who saw the brilliant mind behind the mental wreck, and I suspect there will be many at the memorial gathering next month.