David English, who has died aged 74 of most cancers, taught greater than 1,000 college students to grow to be journalists, and lots of of them now occupy senior positions in main information organisations, from nationwide newspapers and broadcasters to the regional press. Because the Every day Mirror’s affiliate editor Kevin Maguire as soon as joked to him, some may think about educating so many journalists against the law. However his college students held him in excessive and affectionate regard, believing their success rested largely on what they realized from him.
His educating model was characterised by rigour leavened with humour. David was recognized for his cruel rewriting and correction of copy with a purple pen, however he ensured everybody had enjoyable, was pushed past their consolation zones, realized and adopted an expert method.
Born in Ripon, North Yorkshire, he was the one son of Margaret (nee Thompson) and Elvet English, a store assistant. His curiosity in present affairs was inherited from his mom, the daughter of the city clerk, who examined him on the information every morning earlier than he went to highschool.
David attended Ripon grammar college and in 1967 received a spot at Pembroke School, Oxford, to learn historical past. He took a niche yr to enhance his French and medieval Latin, and labored in a paint manufacturing facility and a hen manufacturing facility – experiences that made him decided to discover a profession he cherished. He joined the Oxford College Labour Membership having been a Younger Liberal beneath Jo Grimond, however, disenchanted with Jeremy Thorpe, he noticed Harold Wilson as a pacesetter for the long run. He remained a powerful Labour supporter all through his life.
After he left college, David was chosen because the Labour candidate for Ripon, however was defeated in a byelection and once more within the 1974 basic election. Nevertheless, he earned a journalism traineeship with Thomson Regional Newspapers and, after studying his craft inside the group’s coaching system in Cardiff, he was despatched to the Belfast Telegraph in 1974 on the peak of the Troubles.
It was a troublesome surroundings for a younger Oxford graduate. After a colleague was falsely accused of being a particular department agent and ordered to go away, suspicion fell on David. When the police raided the flat beneath his and located figures from the IRA management residing there and bomb-making tools within the storage, he discovered himself distrusted by each the RUC and the IRA, and was given two weeks to go away town.
He was redeployed to Sunderland as an area reporter for the Newcastle Journal, however discovered it troublesome to regulate to much less pressing information values. He was supplied a place again in Cardiff educating public administration on the identical Thomson coaching course he had attended just a few years earlier. It was there that David discovered his vocation, his dwelling and his future spouse, Pat Jones, additionally a journalist. They had been married in 1980, and she or he survives him.
Because the in-house coaching course wound down, he moved in the identical yr to the Cardiff College Faculty of Journalism as a lecturer, rising to be director of the newspaper course till his retirement in 2015. He in all probability taught extra journalists than anybody else in Britain.
He additionally continued his political profession for the Labour occasion, serving as a Cardiff metropolis councillor from 1979 to 2008, and for a lot of that point was chair of the personnel committee.
On his retirement, he mirrored that the basics of newspaper journalism had not modified over his time educating, holding quick to the standard requirements of evidence-based reporting and checking sources. “We nonetheless preserve that you just’ve acquired to have two sources earlier than we let one thing go into the paper. I’m by no means that impressed with speculative reporting to be sincere, it simply smacks of sensationalism.”
However his newsroom self-discipline was all the time tempered by a powerful sense of mischief. One among his proudest moments got here on his final day within the college, when college students held a standard “banging out” ceremony to mark his departure.
The previous ITN editor-in-chief Richard Tait, his college colleague, stated: “David helped make Cardiff Journalism Faculty what its founder Tom Hopkinson had all the time hoped it could grow to be – famend as the perfect place within the nation to be taught to be a journalist.”
