David English, who has died aged 74 of cancer, taught more than 1,000 students to become journalists, and many of them now occupy senior positions in leading news organisations, from national newspapers and broadcasters to the regional press. As the Daily Mirror’s associate editor Kevin Maguire once joked to him, some might consider educating so many journalists a crime. But his students held him in high and affectionate regard, believing their success rested in large part on what they learned from him.
His teaching style was characterised by rigour leavened with humour. David was known for his merciless rewriting and correction of copy with a red pen, but he ensured everyone had fun, was pushed beyond their comfort zones, learned and adopted a professional approach.
Born in Ripon, North Yorkshire, he was the only son of Margaret (nee Thompson) and Elvet English, a shop assistant. His interest in current affairs was inherited from his mother, the daughter of the town clerk, who tested him on the news each morning before he went to school.
David attended Ripon grammar school and in 1967 won a place at Pembroke College, Oxford, to read history. He took a gap year to improve his French and medieval Latin, and worked in a paint factory and a chicken factory – experiences that made him determined to find a career he loved. He joined the Oxford University Labour Club having been a Young Liberal under Jo Grimond, but, disenchanted with Jeremy Thorpe, he saw Harold Wilson as a leader for the future. He remained a strong Labour supporter throughout his life.
After he left university, David was selected as the Labour candidate for Ripon, but was defeated in a byelection and again in the 1974 general election. However, he earned a journalism traineeship with Thomson Regional Newspapers and, after learning his craft within the group’s training system in Cardiff, he was sent to the Belfast Telegraph in 1974 at the height of the Troubles.
It was a difficult environment for a young Oxford graduate. After a colleague was falsely accused of being a special branch agent and ordered to leave, suspicion fell on David. When the police raided the flat below his and found figures from the IRA leadership living there and bomb-making equipment in the garage, he found himself distrusted by both the RUC and the IRA, and was given two weeks to leave the city.
He was redeployed to Sunderland as a local reporter for the Newcastle Journal, but found it difficult to adjust to less urgent news values. He was offered a position back in Cardiff teaching public administration on the same Thomson training course he had attended a few years earlier. It was there that David found his vocation, his home and his future wife, Pat Jones, also a journalist. They were married in 1980, and she survives him.
As the in-house training course wound down, he moved in the same year to the Cardiff University School of Journalism as a lecturer, rising to be director of the newspaper course until his retirement in 2015. He probably taught more journalists than anyone else in Britain.
He also continued his political career for the Labour party, serving as a Cardiff city councillor from 1979 to 2008, and for much of that time was chair of the personnel committee.
On his retirement, he reflected that the fundamentals of newspaper journalism had not changed over his time teaching, holding fast to the traditional standards of evidence-based reporting and checking sources. “We still maintain that you’ve got to have two sources before we let something go into the paper. I’m never that impressed with speculative reporting to be honest, it just smacks of sensationalism.”
But his newsroom discipline was always tempered by a strong sense of mischief. One of his proudest moments came on his last day in the university, when students held a traditional “banging out” ceremony to mark his departure.
The former ITN editor-in-chief Richard Tait, his university colleague, said: “David helped make Cardiff Journalism School what its founder Tom Hopkinson had always hoped it would become – renowned as the best place in the country to learn to be a journalist.”
• David Mark English, journalist and teacher, born 18 February 1950; died 19 February 2024
