MCCRYSTAL, Cahal 1935-2021

[Richard R]

From the Times death notices of 11 August 2021: MCCRYSTAL Cal on 5th August 2021, aged 85. Beloved husband of Stella for 63 years, devoted father of Cal, Damien and Kieran, loving grandfather of Jemima, Kit, Eliza and Amelia. A much-respected Fleet Street journalist who will be missed by friends and colleagues around the world. Died following a short illness.

Obit from the Times of 11 Aug 2021:
E X T R A C T
Cal McCrystal obituary
First crime reporter for The Sunday Times who became trusted by the Krays after being given the job of penetrating London’s gangland
...Cahal McCrystal was born to Charles McCrystal and his wife, Mary (née McKeown), in Belfast in 1935, the second of their three sons. Charles McCrystal was a compositor and part-time journalist by trade, a Gaelic scholar by profession, and a socialist in his ideals. The family were Catholic, in culture if not in observance, but the hard, binary division of Northern Ireland was not for him. “If Ian Paisley hadn’t been a religious tub-thumper, he’d have been a great socialist,” the senior McCrystal once remarked to his son, who inherited many of his father’s open-minded attitudes and wrote about him movingly in a much-praised memoir, Reflections On a Quiet Rebel, published in 1997. The book revealed the complexity of Ulster life, and how the Troubles had caused hurt, disappointment and alienation in both father and son. There had been warnings. Cal himself was the main author of a celebrated but anonymous Sunday Times investigation, “John Bull’s Political Slum”, published in 1966, which exposed the trickery of the loyalist establishment....

...In 1958 he married Stella Doyle, the daughter of a Belfast builder, and before they left for London in 1964 they had a family of three sons: Cal, now a theatre director; Damien, a media consultant [see below]; and Kieran, a psychotherapist. In London, Stella became a social worker. The couple were warm and generous hosts at their home in the northern suburbs: for nearly half a century they gave memorable Sunday lunches and dinners for a generation of Sunday Times journalists who found it hard to separate work from pleasure and colleagues from friends. He is survived by Stella and their three sons and four grandchildren....

Cal (Cahal) McCrystal, journalist and writer, was born on December 20, 1935. He died following a fall on August 5, 2021, aged 85
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cal-mccrystal-obituary-pwrg5vwgq

His middle son, Damien Peter Adam Doyle MCCRYSTAL, m 1990 Amanda Elizabeth Singleton Cayley b 1966 d of Mark Singleton EVANS MBE b 1933 and Belinda Jane 1940-2014 d of Sir Kenelm Henry Ernest CAYLEY 10th Bt 1896-1967 and (Frances) Elizabeth Edwyna BREWIS 1908-74, scion of that gentry family of Norton Grove, and had a son and a dau.