William Reginald Mitchell (15 January 1928 – 7 October 2015) was a British writer who was the editor of Dalesman magazine for twenty years and over a sixty-year period wrote over 200 books, hundreds of articles, and delivered many talks on the history and physical and natural evolution of North Britain, with particular emphasis on the Yorkshire Dales, Lancashire and the Lake District. These include biographies, social history, topography, and natural history of the regions. In the course of his career Mitchell made and collected many taped interviews with people of these regions - now housed at the Universities of Leeds and Bradford - representing a unique archive of dialect and history. Life and career W R Mitchell was born in 1928 at Skipton, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His family worked in the local textile industry and were staunch Methodists; a religion that played an important part in Bill Mitchell’s own life in later years; he was a Methodist local preacher for over 40 years. In 1943, aged 15, Bill Mitchell joined the 'Craven Herald' regional newspaper as a junior reporter. After national service at Royal Navy air stations, he returned to the newspaper, but in 1948 was asked by Harry J. Scott, editor of Dalesman, to join the staff of the magazine. Dalesman, founded in 1939, is a well-regarded regional magazine still in publication today, and has since its inception has documented the lives, past and present, of people in the Yorkshire Dales and the wider Yorkshire countryside. From 1951, in addition to his work with Dalesman, Mitchell began editing 'Cumbria', a magazine that covered the Lake District area of England. In the course of his journalistic work, he met and interviewed many people, which subsequently formed the basis for his feature articles and many of his later books. In 1952 he married Freda Bancroft and has two children, David and Janet. In 1969 Mitchell became editor of Dalesman, a post he held until his retirement in 1986. Yorkshire Television marked his retirement with a programme about his life, narrated by Alan Bennett. Following his retirement, he established his own publishing company, 'Castleberg', from his home in Giggleswick, near Settle, North Yorkshire. In 1996 Mitchell was awarded the MBE for his services to journalism in Yorkshire and Cumbria, and received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Bradford. In the same year