Three cheers rang out to celebrate the life of a great newspaperman at his funeral service.

Friends and family applauded as they bid farewell to John Vivian, better known as JV, who was a consummate wordsmith, former assistant editor and chief sub of the Surrey Comet.

Mourners laughed as former Comet chief reporter Tim Harrison recounted stories from JV’s life and career at the service at Randalls Park Crematorium in Leatherhead led by Fr John Pearson of St Erconwald’s Catholic Church in Walton.

Mr Harrison told the 100 mourners of JV’s creativity and speed as a headline writer who would come up with apposite and witty words at the drop of a hat.

His period of national service as a cryptographer and intelligence officer gave a foretaste of the career with words which was to come.

JV, who died on November 8 aged 76, joined the Comet in 1966 and would end up staying at the paper for 25 years.

He had previously trained at the Llanelli Star, his home town newspaper in West Wales, before his stint of national service in Cyprus, moving on to become the man from the Pru (insurance wasn’t for him) and then returning to his first love journalism by working on a Catholic newspaper in Melton Mowbray.

But it was his time at the Comet which made him a legend to those who knew him.

Mr Harrison said: “A true craftsman, his attention to detail was legendary.

“He could terrify young reporters. You certainly didn’t want to get it wrong. Nick Hopkins, now a senior reporter on the Guardian, recalls that he used to haunt him in life – so goodness knows what fun he’ll have now.”

Mr Harrison said that JV was a larger than life character who often wore a blue knitted bobble hat on top of a woolly mass of hair “which looked like the contents of a cushion”.

He also sported a string vest which showed off his tattoos, and would regularly burst out singing bawdy songs over the noise of typewriters and later keyboards.

He added: “And yet, like the stray moggies that he and his wife Rosie welcomed into their home Walton-on-Thames home, he was a soft pussycat inside.”

After the funeral on Wednesday, November 23, a tearful Rosie said: “It was a lovely service, and a wonderful tribute to JV. It was JV down to a tee.”

Relatives who included his half brother John Mansel who had made the trip from New Zealand, and JV’s daughter Caroline and her family from Wales, as well as friends and former colleagues, made their way to the Watermans Arms in Hersham after the service.

Journalist and social commentator Laura Marcus, who was a reporter on the Comet in the 1980s, said: “JV was an inspiration for everyone lucky enough to work for him.

“He was the best boss I ever had, and the Comet was the best place I ever worked – and he was one of the reasons why it was such a fantastic place.

“He was great fun to work for – he was demanding, but he was always supportive and kind. The service was a lovely, fitting, tribute to a lovely man.”

Haymarket journalist Steve Morgan, who worked with him on the Surrey Herald in the late 1990s, said: “The Celestial Express just got a great addition to its staff. And not a bad shout for the heavenly choir, either – many is the time the silence of the office was broken by his one-man male voice choir outburst.”

“Although I only came in at what I really now believe to be the fag end of journalism (and in JV's case there was always a gasper on the go) it was a privilege to work with him, and those like him, for my first two years on the job; a true newspaper type of the old school, or at least that's how I imagined it.

“Harsh when he had to be, but always, always fair, JV taught me the value of getting it right first time.

He could scare the life out of you, but it was merely part of his charm - that gruff exterior disguised a great warmth.

“There weren't many like him then; there's one fewer now.”

The closing song at the funeral service – one by Tina Turner - summed up the mourners’ feelings.

He was ‘simply the best’.