My father, Alan Knowles, who has died aged 94, was a journalist with the Bolton Evening News for a decade after leaving school, and with the BBC from the early days of television news in the 1950s until his retirement. His passion was for trade unionism, and he held local, regional and national office with the NUJ.
He was born in Bolton, some time in the summer of 1927, the youngest of three children of Frank Knowles, a linotype operator at the Bolton Evening News, and Ada Melling, a cotton mill worker. Alan’s birth certificate recorded 20 August but no one ever really knew, as the pressures of his mother’s illness took precedence over his father’s trip to the town hall to record the date, which was by then forgotten. His mother, Ada, died when he was three, from heart disease caused by rheumatic fever.
Alan lodged with neighbours and relatives from a very early age and remembered his first day at school, aged four, riding a tram on his own, having been told to get off where all the other children got off. After his father remarried, he gained two more siblings.
A scholarship boy to Bolton school, Alan left at 16 to earn his keep. He started as a cub reporter with the Bolton Evening News and was called up to the army just as the second world war was ending to spend two years in Germany, mostly in Berlin.
After the army he returned to the newspaper in Bolton and won an English Speaking Union scholarship to the US. He interviewed James Cagney in Hollywood and, offered the choice between two presidential hopefuls, John F Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, chose to meet the latter.
In 1959 he joined the BBC in London as a subeditor at Alexandra Palace. He soon returned to Bolton as a journalist in the Manchester newsroom, and stayed with the BBC until his retirement in 1987. He served his union as father of chapel, branch secretary, member of the NEC, and chair of the radio and television journalists’ council, and was made an NUJ member of honour. He was intensely proud of my career in journalism as a manager, but would always try to persuade me to go on strike. He went on his last picket line in Manchester, aged 80, in the rain.
He had a near photographic memory and an unmatched speed as a touch typist, but never learned to change the ribbon!
My mother, Mary (nee Ashworth), whom he married in 1953, recalls their disastrous first date (to see a movie – she hated the cinema) and the near-fatal second date when their rowing boat on Windermere was swamped in a storm. They celebrated their diamond wedding in 2013, having moved to Islay in 2009, to live near my sister, Jean, the GP in Port Ellen.
Looking out to sea from their cottage near the Laphroaig distillery, my father, a lifelong Guardian reader, did not see a ferry boat coming in on its morning run – to him, it was a seaborne Guardian delivery vehicle.
My father was kind, gentle and modest. His greatest happiness lay in being a husband, father and grandfather.
He is survived by Mary, Jean and me, two grandchildren, David and Andrew, and his siblings Frank and Margaret.
