CEDRIC DICKENS was the living embodiment of one of his great-grandfather’s most enduring and best-loved characters: Mr Pickwick. He radiated bonhomie and charm and made friends all over the world in his long quest to promote the love of Charles Dickens’s mighty oeuvre.

Well hidden behind the benevolent and studiedly bumbling persona, however, was a brilliant managerial brain. He treated everyone he met with exactly the same courtesy, yet he had an uncanny knack of getting people to do things they did not think they were going to do or even could do.

He worked indefatigably to save the George and Vulture, the historic inn in the City which Charles Dickens used in his fiction as a frequent venue for Pickwick’s peregrinations and in his own life as a favourite watering-hole. (They still have the cheque for £11 the novelist gave them after entertaining 34 friends there in 1837).

Cedric worked ceaselessly to preserve the heritage of Gad’s Hill, now a girls’ school, the last home of Charles Dickens, and he was a firm ally of the house in Doughty Street, now a museum, where his great-grandfather first lived as a young married man.

Cedric Dickens was born in 1916, the grandson of Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, sixth of Charles’s ten children, an eminent lawyer and Common Serjeant of London, and his wife, Marie Roche, a Frenchwoman who saw to it that French was the first language Cedric spoke, though he claimed to have forgotten it. His father was Philip (Pip), a chartered accountant who became the first secretary of ICI at Billingham-on-Tees.

He lived with his parents in Durham from 1924 to 1929, spent Saturday mornings at the works with the head engine driver, and as a boy he once travelled to London on the footplate of the Flying Scotsman.

He went to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and after taking three trips to the West Indies by banana boat joined the British Tabulating Machine Company in 1937. He liked to say later that the company took it amiss when he joined the RNVR in 1939 — as they saw it, to enjoy himself instead of working on decoding at Bletchley Park. In fact, he had an adventurous war, ending it as a first lieutenant.

While serving at Portsmouth he met his future wife, Elizabeth, when the sight of her as a young Wren at the wheel of a truck caused him to fall off his bicycle. She stopped to help, and he liked to claim that he had been literally picked up by the most beautiful girl in the world. They were married in 1948 and had two children, John and Jane. It was a radiantly happy marriage that was to last 58 years. After demob Cedric rejoined his firm, which after several mergers became ICL (International Computers Limited) where he became director of communication.

Cedric organised a series of luncheons for influential City men who were potential customers for the new technology. He took them to the George and Vulture, to which his French grandmother had introduced him at the age of 17 when he was already under the thrall of The Pickwick Papers. It proved a fruitful venue.

On a lighter note, he organised a series of cultural tours to London hostelries that had a Dickens connection. The tour would take in five pubs on the south side of the Thames and a further five on the way back. At the first pub, Cedric would typically call for a Guinness and order another for the landlord. After two minutes Cedric would give the order “everybody out!” and the party would move on to the next pub where he would order a different drink. Not surprisingly, most of those exposed to one of these cultural tours had only a confused memory next day of where he had been; Cedric knew precisely.

When Cedric retired in 1976, the company decided not to continue the lunches and cultural tours. By this time, however, Cedric had built up such a coterie of convivial characters who took such pleasure in the them that he decided to carry on by himself. So the Dickens Pickwick Club was born. It was not the first: the City Pickwick Club was founded in 1909, for example, and the Pickwick Bicycle Club in 1870. Cedric was intimately involved in both.

The format of his own club hardly changed over the past 30 years. At about 5.30pm the bar is opened. Each member is given a sobriquet taken from a character in the immortal book, and it is Whiffin who calls “Wittles — Gentlemen — Wittles”. All present reply “Muffins”. A fine edition of The Pickwick Papers is then tabled, grace is said and members attack a meal that is heroic in its political incorrectness.

Potted shrimps are followed by silverside of beef and dumplings, treacle tart by stilton. The officers present their reports at one minute each and toasts are drunk to absent friends, fathers and sons present, and guests. After the Loyal Toast comes the big speech of the evening — to the immortal memory of Charles Dickens. There are more toasts and, after grace, The Pickwick Papers is removed but the bar remains open. It says much for the fascination of the club that at one typical evening recently members sat down from Dublin, Sydney, the Netherlands and Texas. So deep is the affection felt for Cedric in America that the Philadelphia Pickwick Club is to hold its own memorial service for him in April.

The dinner last December was well up to the usual form. The “immortal memory” was proposed by the jazz musician Campbell Burnap, “official and personal trombonist to Mr Pickwick”, in a remarkable speech on Dickens and music laced with a number of recorded tunes with a Dickensian connection. Cedric was in his customary roaring form. He asked for the usual silence for those members who “had gone ahead to the great tavern where we shall all meet again”.

Later he remarked — almost in an aside — that he would not be with them at the next annual dinner. But he knew that it would go on as ever, spreading and celebrating what he called, in the last of his five books, the miracle of Pickwick.

Cedric Dickens, steward of Charles Dickens’s legacy, was born on September 24, 1916. He died on February 11, 2006, aged 89.