My former colleague and friend Jock Gillespie, who has died aged 86, could truly be said to be a reporter of the “old school”, except that he would have winced at the cliche.
He adhered strictly to a journalistic set of rules, which he applied to the generation of young reporters he trained at the Cambridge Evening News. These included Alan Rusbridger, who went on to be the Guardian’s editor-in-chief. Rusbridger described him in his book Breaking News as “a growling silver-haired Glaswegian with dark glasses and the stub of a cigar permanently lodged between bearded lips. Jock saw it as his duty to school us in hard knocks.”
He was born Fulton Gillespie, but later known widely as Jock, in Stirling, central Scotland, the son of a miner, James, and his wife, Barbara (nee Myles). He began to read and write when he was five. Throughout his life reading was his passion, followed closely by jazz and his family. He left school at 14 to become an apprentice compositor at the Falkirk Herald, where his ability to spell was spotted as he corrected page proofs. His editor brought him upstairs to the newsroom when he was 16.
In a letter to Rusbridger in 2016, Jock recalled that a junior’s jobs in 1956 included covering local antiquarian society debates, market fat stock prices in old pence and farthings, shipping movements and cargoes, cinema synopses, miners’ welfare committee meetings, best cake at WI fetes, best bull at farm shows, sports of all kinds, courts, councils and other public bodies. “The editor was a gnarled ex-PoW. He checked and double-checked everything. One name wrong, one fat stock price a farthing out, then type it all out again from the beginning.”
Jock moved from the Falkirk Herald to the Daily Record and the Sunday Mirror in Glasgow before heading south in the early 1960s when he married, joining the Cambridge Evening News in 1963, where he stayed for the next 34 years.
His commitment to old school reporting did not extend to learning shorthand, but his notes, carefully written on folded copy paper, and an excellent memory served him well, particularly during his nine months of meticulous reporting on the manhunt for the “Cambridge rapist” Peter Cook, who attacked a string of women in the mid-1970s, and the subsequent trial. His CEN bosses thought he had a better oversight of events than the police. Crime and health reporting were the keystones of his career. He could be direct to the point of rudeness, but he was highly respected both inside and outside the newsroom.
In 2000 Jock’s son Scott died after an overdose of heroin, about which he wrote movingly in an article for the Guardian. He told a Commons select committee that it was not heroin that killed his son but the criminalisation of heroin, and urged decriminalisation.
Scott was one of the children of his first marriage, to Pauline (nee Whitaker), which ended in divorce; they also had a daughter, Fiona, and Jock adopted Pauline’s son Mark. He married Annemarie Russell (nee Stark), in 1983, and she brought two children, Bernhard and Crystal, to the marriage.
Annemarie survives him, along with Fiona, Mark, Bernhard and Crystal.
