Ronald Atkin, a former sports activities editor of the Observer, was a journalist of impeccably excessive requirements, whether or not taking care of different writers’ copy or fashioning his personal, often on top-level tennis or soccer matches. However as a consultant of an outdated Fleet Road newspaper group that didn’t take itself too critically, he additionally had a capability to snigger on the foibles of his career.
In an amusing piece written in 2012 for the web site of the Sports activities Journalists’ Affiliation, which had voted him their journalist of the 12 months nearly 30 years earlier, he listed among the some ways wherein his byline had been mangled over time. Among the many variations, he had been Atkins, Aitken, Atkinson and Hatchkin, and typically Rod or Tim reasonably than Ronald. Within the quotation for his or her supreme award in 1984, even the SJA had managed to get it fallacious.
Ron, who has died aged 92, tended to get issues proper, whether or not because the tennis correspondent and occasional soccer and cricket author for the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph and the Unbiased on Sunday, or because the writer of books on the Mexican Revolution, the Canadian Mounties, the retreat from Dunkirk and the 1942 Dieppe raid. There was additionally a information to the world’s best bars – a product of his convivial nature, one other attribute of the outdated Fleet Road.
Two years after the dying in 1982 of his first spouse, Brenda, he married Julie Welch, an Observer colleague whom he had inspired to develop into the primary lady to cowl English league soccer for a nationwide newspaper. Early in her profession as the one lady within the press field, Welch had endured – amongst many different egregious examples of sexist behaviour – the expertise of being grabbed and kissed by the supervisor of Stoke Metropolis, Tony Waddington.
As her division head, Atkin wrote instantly to Waddington, first asking for an answer to the issues the paper had intermittently skilled in securing passes for Stoke’s matches. “Till you accede to this request,” he added, “I need to ask you to cease kissing our reporters.”
He was born in Aspley, a suburb of Nottingham, the place his mother and father had been employed in necessary native industries. His father, George, labored at Raleigh, then the world’s largest cycle manufacturing unit, whereas his mom, Winnie (nee Truman), was a lacemaker. He attended Excessive Pavement grammar faculty earlier than leaving at 16 to affix the Nottingham Night Publish, then one of many metropolis’s 4 each day papers.
Within the basic development for these exhibiting aptitude and enthusiasm, he went from messenger to repeat boy to reporter and subeditor.
In 1953 he arrived in Bermuda for the primary of two spells working as a reporter on an area paper. Again within the UK 4 years later, he took informal subbing jobs on Fleet Road and married Brenda Burton, who had been a neighbour in Aspley, and two of whose sculptures had been chosen for the Royal Academy’s summer time exhibition. After the beginning of their first son, Tim, the household returned to Bermuda, the place they stayed for a pair extra years earlier than settling again in Britain with a second son, Mike, and a job for Ron as a downtable sub on the Day by day Mail.
Saturday subbing shifts on the Observer’s sports activities desk led to the provide of a place as deputy to the sports activities editor, Clifford Makins, working with such star writers as Hugh McIlvanney and Arthur Hopcraft, who turned his nice associates. There was additionally the chance to contribute the occasional match report till he was promoted to sports activities editor after Makins’ departure in 1972.
He was additionally starting to write down books, with a selected emphasis on navy historical past. The success of his account of the 1910-20 Mexican revolution, printed in 1969, enabled him to construct a home on the Costa Brava in Spain which might stay a base for household holidays.
In 1975 Donald Trelford, the Observer’s editor, determined {that a} change was wanted. Ron was supplied a alternative of writing jobs and opted to develop into tennis correspondent, concentrating on a sport he liked. With its journeys to the main tournaments in New York, Paris and Melbourne in addition to Wimbledon, this was an task that might carry him nice enjoyment and plenty of extra friendships over the following few many years, in addition to the chance to ghostwrite the autobiography of Fred Perry, the good prewar Wimbledon champion.
In an period when journalists and the heroes they wrote about stayed in the identical lodges and sometimes ate collectively, Arthur Ashe, the 1975 Wimbledon champion, turned the godfather to Ron’s fourth son, Nick. The third son, Lucas, had already acquired his personal well-known godfather: Brian Clough, the good supervisor of Nottingham Forest, the membership that held Ron’s allegiance all through his life.
A broad vary of sporting pursuits was mirrored on these Saturdays when there was no tennis to write down about and he would go off to cowl a soccer or cricket match.
Whereas on vacation in France with Julie and their youngsters in 1994, he realized that he was being made redundant by the Observer. He had already been approached to develop into tennis correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph and was comfortable to take each the redundancy cost and the brand new job. An additional swap to the Unbiased on Sunday in 2000 gave him a number of years with a cheerful group, writing about tennis, soccer and different sports activities till that, too, got here to an finish in 2008.
He continued to write down each day notes for the Wimbledon programme into his 80s, to take heed to the music he liked (he had seized the possibility to see Frank Sinatra at Carnegie Corridor throughout one among his journeys to New York for the US Open), and to learn his favorite authors, who included Paul Theroux, Garrison Keillor and Robert Harris.
He’s survived by Julie, whose e-book The Fleet Road Ladies was printed in 2020, and by his 4 sons, two from every marriage.
