My friend David Upton, who has died aged 73, was a consummate journalist who played leading roles on daily newspapers across north-west England.
Equally adept as writer, editor and page designer, it was his skills with people that set him apart. In a trade full of loud opinions and big egos, his was the calming voice, invariably laced with a great one-liner. Kind, open and friendly, as well as tall, dark and handsome, he was a man to look up to – and not only physically.
David’s talents caught the eye of editors, and by his mid-30s he had risen to become deputy editor of the Blackpool-based West Lancashire Evening Gazette, where he spent 28 years.
He was born in Crosby, Lancashire (now Merseyside), but the family soon moved to Sale, near Manchester, where his father, Norman, was a manager at Lewis’s department store; his mother, Carol (nee Woods), worked in a tobacconist’s. While at Sale grammar school, David was taken to see Twelfth Night, which kindled a lifelong love of theatre.
He left school at 16 to join the Altrincham Guardian as a trainee reporter. Married to Sheila Naden at 18, he was a father, to Lisa, before turning 19. He worked on evening papers in Stoke-on-Trent and Oldham before heading to Blackpool in 1972.
David and Sheila split after 10 years. He then fell in love with Jane Inman. They married in 1981 and settled in Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool. Their son, Jamie, and a daughter, Katie, completed a happy family. Work was rewarding too. It was the golden age of local newspapers – before the vampiric web giants began to suck away their lifeblood.
In 2000 David took up a new challenge as assistant editor of the Lancashire Evening Post in Preston. But endless staff cuts and plummeting circulation sapped his enthusiasm and he quit at 60 in 2010, leaving him free to review theatre across the north-west for the British Theatre Guide and for the Post and the Gazette.
A professional to the last, he filed his final review two days before starting chemotherapy to treat chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. From his hospital bed, his wry sense of humour intact, he wrote that, if the treatment worked, it would be like a “full factory reset”, but that there were no guarantees. And he was keen to relate that his betes noires – Brexit, the Tories, Trump, the Daily Mail – remained unchanged. Sadly, the reset was not to be.
David is survived by Jane, Lisa, Jamie and Katie, two granddaughters, Megan and Hazel, and his elder brother Reg.
