My pal Alan Lyons, who has died from a lung situation aged 75 after affected by COPD, was a Guardian information subeditor for round 37 years.
He was born in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, and adopted on the age of three by Kath and Eddie Lyons. Eddie was with the Royal Corps of Military Music, and Kath was a caretaker. After travelling round with the Military, the household settled in York, the place Alan attended Archbishop Holgate’s college, leaving at 18 to turn into a trainee journalist with Hull & Grimsby Newspapers, 1967-70.
He moved to the Yorkshire Night Press in York, after which to the Day by day Mail in Manchester. Between newspaper jobs he labored as a bus conductor, and at Rowntree’s chocolate manufacturing unit within the metropolis, and wrote a novel. He joined the Guardian as a house information subeditor within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, and in addition filed Saturday soccer experiences for the Mail on Sunday for quite a lot of years.
On the Guardian, Alan helped to coach colleagues within the early days of recent expertise, and was a union official for some time. Plenty of colleagues have talked about how useful he was after they first joined the paper. In later years on the Guardian he returned to York to dwell.
He performed an energetic half in Labour politics within the metropolis, and carried out in Shakespeare performs and within the York Thriller Performs. He additionally gained an English diploma from Queen Mary and Westfield Faculty, College of London, in 1995, and an MA from York College in Modern Writers: Fictions of Battle two years later.
His travels included residing in a kibbutz in Israel, journeys to Spain, Germany and Italy, an intensive tour of South America that took him to the southernmost tip of Chile, and a closing journey overseas to Jordan with relations.
After his retirement in 2012, he volunteered on the Amnesty bookshop in York. Though more and more confined to his flat, he was in a position to have a good time his seventy fifth birthday with household on the Minster Inn – one among his favorite pubs in York, together with the Blue Bell – earlier this 12 months.
He was obsessed with Manchester Metropolis and Bob Dylan, politics and literature.
Alan is survived by two cousins, Molly and Linda.
