Terry Fincher was one of the finest Fleet Street photographers of his generation. He was equally adept at capturing a vivid and telling image from a war zone as he was in photographing royalty, heads of state and film stars. He won the British Press Photographer of the Year award an unprecedented four times.

He was a photographer with a conscience, and a brave one too. Once, while in Port Harcourt in 1968 covering the Nigerian-Biafran civil war, a car drew up in front of him and two badly beaten men, their clothes torn and their hands bound behind their backs, were bundled out of the car on to the ground by Nigerian soldiers. In the tense atmosphere Fincher was advised not to get involved. He decided instead to exchange a few words with the men and discovered that they were English engineers who were suspected of being mercenaries.

A commanding officer prodded them with a swagger stick and issued an order. As they were led away Fincher took several surreptitious pictures of them with his Leica held at hip height. “It suddenly occurred to me that they might be walking to their execution,” he recalled. He remonstrated with the Nigerian colonel, protesting the pair’s innocence, and, to the astonishment of all present, the men were immediately released.

Like most war photographers his moral sense was often sorely tested. He once found himself taking pictures of a dying soldier in a tank in the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 when Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations launched an all-out attack on Israel. The soldier was being gingerly removed from the tank by his Israeli comrades and was clearly identifiable. Fincher, torn between the need to do his job and concern for the soldier’s family were they to see his distressing photograph, reluctantly filed the image which was published soon afterwards. His dilemma preyed on his mind. However, he was greatly relieved when he later met the soldier’s widow who told him that it had been a great comfort to her to see her fatally wounded husband not alone but in the arms of his fellow soldiers.

Terence Edgar Fincher was invariably known as Terry. He was born in 1931, in Putney on the south side of the river Thames. His father was an amateur athlete and his mother, Ruth, was a nurse from Northern Ireland. Fincher’s first job, taken when he left Clark’s College in Putney at 14 was as an electrician’s mate. It was 1945.

The company was based in Central London, near St Paul’s Cathedral and Fleet Street, the ancestral home of British journalism. “One day I saw a photographer rushing off to an assignment somewhere,” he recalled. “He was carrying a large plate camera with a flashlight attached. It was the kind of camera that I was itching to get my hands on. I realised that I had to do something fast, so I told my mother about my dreams.”

At first Fincher found employment as a messenger boy at the Keystone Press Agency, running many miles of errands each day, in all weathers. “Nothing could dampen my enthusiasm for Fleet Street,” he said. Having demonstrated sustained enthusiasm for the trade he was to spend his life in, Fincher’s mother bought him an old folding camera.

Early notoriety came in 1947 while travelling on a number 14 bus. Fincher spotted a policeman holding up the traffic and shepherding a swan across Putney Bridge. He’d already learnt the professional value of carrying his camera with him wherever he went, and was ready and able to jump off the bus and photograph the scene. The picture was published in all three London evening newspapers.

He covered the sensational murders at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill in 1953, but the turning point in his career came with the Suez crisis in 1956 when he was 25. His poignant image of a mother consumed with grief chasing a cart bearing the corpse of her son established him as a photo-journalist of singular talent. Fincher stopped the cart so that the woman could cradle her son in a final farewell. The following year he won the British Photographer of the Year award. At the time he was the youngest person to win the accolade.

He worked for the Daily Herald from 1957 to 1961, when he joined the Daily Express, then one of the bestselling newspapers. He was made chief photographer. Most unusually, but in recognition of his talent, he was given his own page: the picture showcase was called the Fincher File.Over the years he covered every major war and trouble spot around the world, including the Cyprus emergency, which began in 1955, the unrest in Aden in the 1960s, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He photographed both the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars of 1967 and 1973 respectively. Fincher did five tours of Vietnam. He was also in Nigeria, Biafra, and India.

“I had tight deadlines and had to tell the story in one or two pictures,” he recalled. “The agency training of picking your shots never leaves you. That old saying, ‘a thousand words’. Well, I had to sum it up in a picture, and if the paper only had room for one, then it had to be the one that was worth a thousand words.”

Fincher remembered one episode in Vietnam when he was with the Life magazine photographer Larry Burrows on the American-held Hill Timothy. They had dug a trench, which they were hiding in. The stench of war hung in the air. Dead bodies lay near by. Fincher felt very lonely. He wanted to go home. He could have run for a helicopter, but didn’t.