In the course of my Christmas visit home, Florence and Stephen proposed that they make a visit to Blyth when I could take a few days to show them the territory with which I had become familiar, the university city of Newcastle, the Tyne valley, South Shields, North Shields and the resort of Whitley Bay, the next town down the coast from Seaton Sluice. They might walk the magnificent beach just South of Blyth or, further North, they might venture as far as the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, reached across a causeway covered at high tide.

When the dates were fixed for a March visit, I booked Florence and Stephen into Blyth’s Star and Garter Hotel. There was not really any choice in the matter. No other accommodation seemed to offer the level of comfort and service to which we were all accustomed. I was always on the lookout for addresses to which I might reasonably invite a young woman for dinner. There was not a lot of local choice. The Star and Garter had a monopoly in catering for the Rotary Club and the most prestigious town functions. It was well known to Blyth News reporters situated strategically as it was between the Harbour Master’s Office, the Police Station and the Magistrates’ Court.

When I met Florence and Stephen at Newcastle airport – they had escaped the fate of my inaugural journey when fog meant the flight from Dublin was diverted to Prestwick near Glasgow – both were in good form and seemed pleased when I checked them into the Star and Garter. I said I would call for them in the morning to introduce them to the newspaper office in the Market Place and bring them out to meet my landlords, Mr and Mrs Taylor.

At 1.30 a.m. the Taylor’s were woken by the Blyth Police knocking at the front door and asking to see me. As I came urgently down the stairs I could not imagine what might have happened. The message that Stephen had died suddenly in his sleep and that – obviously – I was required at the Star and Garter seemed quite incredible. My state of shock must have made me seem incredibly cold to the dumbfounded Taylors and the constables who offered to drive me to the hotel. I remember saying as I hurried up the stairs to get into my clothes: “I’ll need my cheque book and my address book”.

Stephen’s sudden and totally unexpected death was of course a shattering loss to Florence and I felt inadequate in trying to comfort her and help cope with everything that had to be done.

As she had always been, and always would be, she was methodical and quietly efficient and supremely stoical in the face of shock and grief. Apparently, Stephen had had a massive brain haemorrhage while he slept and showed no sign of pain and said nothing as the fact of his dying woke her. Perhaps his hypochondria had been justified. He seemed to have avoided any suffering, as he would have wished. The undertakers must cut a main artery as he had requested to ensure that there would be no possibility of his being one of those rare cases of assumed corpses waking up in a coffin or mortuary.

In the days prior to and immediately after the funeral I found my propensity to tears most painful. I tended to break down when either explaining the death to others or receiving their sympathy. I did my best to keep my dignity and above all to be close to Florence and to do everything that I thought must be expected of an elder son. My position in Blyth did help somewhat. I knew the police and the coroner so the procedures necessary to certification and funeral arrangements went smoothly and the incident, which would usually have been given a routine mention in the local newspaper, passed unreported.

The details of the funeral and its preparations which stick in my mind have touches of the bizarre about them.

First there was Andy Easton’s advice that since funerals were expensive the business should be given to the undertaking department of Blyth Co-op so that I could eventually claim a dividend on the final cost. I immediately took this advice, opening an account at the Co-op, where I had not as yet been a customer or member. I had assumed that the options for transporting Stephen’s body back to Ireland were either by air or by mailboat, after a long hearse journey across England and Wales. In the course of a surreal conversation with the Co-op’s funeral director I came to understand that Stephen was too tall a man for his coffin to be transported by air but, if given clearance from the family, the undertaker could shorten the body to bring it within the air transport norm. I didn’t even want to think about it and cleared the remains for the land/sea Holyhead/Dun Laoghaire route, while Florence and I travelled ahead by plane from Newcastle to Dublin.

All went according to plan right up to the end of the funeral service at Holy Trinity Church, Killiney, the parish church a little up the hill from the new home Florence and Stephen had bought.

Stephen’s brother insisted that family should carry the coffin from the church to the hearse. John and I were counted as family and joined the O’Callaghan relatives in negotiating the coffin down the narrow granite steps from the church porch to the road. I was at the front and almost lost my grip when I felt Stephen’s body shift within the oak coffin, the feet hitting the front panel with a thump.

When I had been exactly a year in Blyth, the decision was taken, within the Northern Press group of Westminster Press, that I should fill a gap in the newsroom of the Shield Gazette, one of Britain’s oldest evening newspapers. The Northern Press group was then a thriving community of papers. The Blyth News was the engine room for a sister paper, the Ashington Post. There was also a Whitley Bay Chronicle and a weekly paper in North Shields, all printed by the Shields Gazette. There was, in addition, a morning paper in the group, the Northern Echo printed and published in Darlington, where the editor was Harold Evans, already on his way to becoming the legendary insight editor of the Sunday Times.

Evans was a major contributor to the Westminster Press’s weekend courses for their trainees, all of whom were required to take shorthand courses and the correspondence course of the National Council for the Training of Journalists. In addition, at my own suggestion, I went up to the Newcastle College of Printing to follow the one-year course of Preliminary Technical Knowledge of the British Federation of Master Printers. My year at Blyth brought me full membership of the National Union of Journalists. I was initiated into the possibility of making additional money through linage for stories used by more than one paper in the group or from tipping off national newspapers about stories which for one reason or another would not be taken up by Westminster Press papers. On the basis of this first year’s experience and training I was assumed to be capable of making a full professional contribution to the Gazette.

The move to South Shields meant a change of digs and through a Gazette small ad I found the Sveden family in a brick terraced house at the high end of Erskine Road, where there was a view of the open sea from the top floor, and the ground floor faced the brick wall screening the street from the railway serving the Westoe Colliery, whose coal-washing tower dominated the local skyline. The Svedens offered me the back ground-floor room looking out on a small yard in which I could also keep my newly acquired – and unreliable – second-hand Morris Minor car.

I liked Mr and Mrs Sveden. The husband, Albert, was something of a quiet philosopher retired from working as a draftsman at Reyrolle, one of the major industries along the river which for many years had made Tyneside one of the workshops of Britain. Like all regions dependent on industries such as mining and shipbuilding, the sixties saw the towns made famous by the industrial revolution slide more and more into decline. North Shields, South Shields, Jarrow, Hebburn, Wallsend, Gateshead – all were part of the catchment area of particular interest to the Gazette.

Among journalists, evening paper work is recognised as one of the toughest battlegrounds there is. First editions may begin to go to press as early as 11.30 a.m.. From the day’s start at 9.00 there is pressure to work on, tidy up, or follow up stories breaking overnight or carried in the national press. Then all local stories, many of them from the Magistrates’ Court, which may only begin to take cases from 10.30, have to be dictated over the phone to typists, or typed up in the office, for submission to the subeditors as quickly as possible.

The reporters and subeditors had scheduled deadlines for all the editions and I found this a relentlessly tough discipline – I never fitted comfortably into the working patterns of old hacks who seemed quite relaxed about taking time for a drink after their courtroom stint before strolling back to the newsroom.

When, years later, Hollywood presented Jack Lemon being cigaretted as he typed out his last-minute scoop in The Front Page, I could assure friends that there was not that much exaggeration in those manic scenes. Pressure on the Gazette was heightened by competition with the Chronicle, The Thomson Evening paper circulated all over Tyneside as a sister paper of the more serious Newcastle Journal.

Once the news rush was over around 3 p.m., life at the Gazette became more relaxed and enjoyable. There were regular features to be written. Opportunities for book reviewing also came my way. The Chief reporter would toss a volume on to my desk saying loudly – to raise a laugh in the newsroom – “Here’s a good one for you, you’re the only one here with any education.”

And in a formal sense that was true. There was no other graduate on the staff, even if there was a great deal of intelligence and an encyclopaedia of experience drawn from what one old-timer constantly called “the university of life”.

Since I was considered to have done a good job on the church notes for the Blyth News, writing their weekly column of news about religious events under the pseudonym, Lindisfarne, I had to take over the Gazette’s church notes, again a weekly column and this time under the pseudonym Bede. (The Venerable Bede was a medieval bible translator who had worked in a monastery at Jarrow. He is better known to readers of 1066 And All That as the Venomous Bead, and his monastery is little more than a heap of stones on a waste site adjoining a slipway, unless it has been restored since for the tourist industry.)

After a few weeks, in which I found it even more difficult to extract information from local churches than it had been in Blyth, I suggested to the editor that the Church Notes simply be dropped on an experimental basis to see if anyone would notice. No one did.

To my amazement, one of my book reviews was noticed. I had no idea that book publishers collected newspaper reviews and even sent copies to the authors concerned. When I was thrown a book of poems called “Refusal to Conform” by James Kirkup, I was told to do a good job because Kirkup was a local boy. Thanks to my lack of a girlfriend and of any great distractions other than drinking with the lads – entertaining but disastrous for head and stomach – I had plenty of time to invest in my major review.

I began by collecting all the Kirkup cuttings from the Gazette files. I then went to the public library and borrowed all the Kirkup books I could find there, reading them in chronological order. When I then sat down to type my considered piece on what Kirkup claimed would be his “last poems” I had a thesis with which to conclude, namely that these would not be Kirkup’s final poetic writings. I declared the South Shields born author to have a strong muse which had simply run out of forms. Both I and the newsroom were suitably impressed when some weeks after publication an airmail letter arrived from Japan bringing thanks from James Kirkup for a most perceptive review, written on the back of a postcard of Mount Fuji. A dried gentian was also enclosed as a gift.

Feature writing and book reviewing were the bright side of working in provincial journalism. Day-to-day reporting was the hard part. And in South Shields in the winter it could be very hard. Sometimes the speed with which local intelligence came in, or the detailed coverage demanded for some local incident, seemed to me to create situations which pushed the ethics of journalism to the limit. In almost successive weeks towards the end of the year, I found myself first on the doorstep of a woman who had not yet heard of the fatal shipyard accident in which her husband had died and, worse still, seeking interviews from the no-longer bride-to-be and two young widows of a stag-night car crash which had killed groom, best man, and groomsman. The car crash gave me my first front-page main lead. There were no thanks for that, except from the news editor, who said I had done a good job on the story.

Read more: 1963 – From South Shields to York