A Boy's Own interest in statistics, nurtured in his youth, made Norris McWhirter, who has died at the age of 78, the co-founder in 1954 of the Guinness Book Of Records with his younger twin, Ross, who was murdered by the IRA in 1975.
Norris McWhirter edited the Guinness book for many years and made it a world bestseller with more than 100 million sales.
McWhirter was a dedicated and even obsessive collector of quirky facts. He was also a fighter for "personal freedom" - causes which almost always turned out to favour the political right. The less assertive of the identical twins, his reaction against his public school background - hinted at in his attitudes - made him dislike regimentation, especially state regimentation.
It was his father who made him conscious of politics and the media. McWhirter senior was managing editor of Associated Newspapers. He brought home 150 newspapers a week, on which his sons feasted.
Norris was born at 7.40 p.m. on August 12th, 1925; Ross was born 20 minutes later. They were at Marlborough together and both joined the Royal Navy in the second World War, serving in the Atlantic and Pacific.
They returned to civilian life after 1945 and went up to Oxford together. At Trinity College, where he read international relations and economics and took a master's in contract law, Norris became famous as a sprinter at international level, as a blue and as a long-distance runner alongside Roger Bannister.
In 1950 the brothers set up McWhirter Twins to sell facts to newspapers, and Norris acted as a broadcaster and sound engineer when Bannister became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes in 1954. Then there was a fortunate coincidence.
At that time Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of Guinness, failed to settle an argument. It was about which was the fastest bird in Europe, the teal or the plover, and there was no reference book with such information.
Beaver discussed his difficulty with the McWhirters, on the recommendation of their friend, the athlete Christopher Chataway, who before going into Conservative politics had worked for Guinness. In 1954 the McWhirters came up with their formula for preserving exotic and esoteric facts and figures on all sorts of records.
Their rules about what they would not include were characteristic. The supernatural was not acceptable: "You can't get embroiled in ghosts."
Sex was not acceptable: "You can get those records out of medical literature, but ours is the kind of book maiden aunts give to their nieces." Criminal feats were not acceptable: "We don't want them imitated." Records such as the number of marshmallows swallowed at one sitting were not acceptable: "You could get a child asphyxiating while trying to break a record - the only death we've had was a man on a billiards marathon who had a heart attack."
The murder of Ross McWhirter by the Provisional IRA in November 1975, after he had offered a £50,000 reward for information on terrorists, caused Norris great grief, but at the same time prompted him to say that the murder had made him feel "not half a man, but two".
He took on something of Ross's militancy and, coincidentally, days after the murder, he helped to launch the National Association For Freedom, later to be known simply as the Freedom Association.
The most important of the rights and liberties the association had been formed to defend, he said, was the right to live under the queen's peace. "Its preservation," he said, "is surely the prime responsibility of the government, and dereliction of that duty is the ultimate indictment. Neglect is the final failure."
McWhirter spoke out against causes he was doubtful of and awarded bouquets to those he approved. He gave medals to athletes who boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics and defended sportsmen who went to South Africa during apartheid. In 1989 he sought an injunction in the High Court to prevent the International Cricket Conference - the game's disciplinary body - from imposing a four-year ban on players visiting that country. He was contemptuous of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, especially when it took what he considered to be cynical, moderate stances designed to conceal a communist-serving agenda.
McWhirter also helped to set up the Ross McWhirter Foundation. This honoured individuals who had fought tyranny - usually communist tyranny. After such activities, his modest CBE, presented in 1980 in the second year of the Thatcher government, may have seemed a paltry reward.
He spent his later years travelling. Returning from South America at 74, he announced that he had visited 101 of the 190 countries then existing in the world. He had been to the driest place on Earth, where it had not rained for 450 years, which was "like the moon".
He reported, too, that he always lost weight when he travelled, because sometimes he could not eat the available local food. He had once seen a Chinaman selling big rats nailed to a pole: "I don't know whether they were delicacies. Maybe they taste nice, but you wouldn't knowingly eat one, would you?" No one could ever accuse him of political correctness, yet his personal charm and straightforwardness could disarm even those who would otherwise have found his views uncongenial.
His hobbies included collecting "significant" books, especially those signed by their authors. In 1957 Norris McWhirter married Carole Eckert. They had one son and one daughter. In 1991, after the death of his wife, he married Tessa Pocock.
Norris McWhirter: born August 12th, 1925; died April 19th, 2004