Obituary
Mick Downing
- The Guardian, Friday 19 June 2009
Mick Downing, who has died of cancer aged 78, was a Fleet Street veteran who combined rigorous professionalism during a 25-year career as a Guardian sub-editor with a commitment to trade unionism that won the respect as well as affection of those who worked with him. Peter Preston, the paper's former editor, would refer to him as "Father Downing".
In 1969 Mick was father of the chapel (FoC), the journalists' shop steward, at the IPC Sun, the respectable broadsheet successor to the TUC-owned Daily Herald, when Hugh Cudlipp fatefully decided to sell it to a Fleet Street newcomer, Rupert Murdoch. It became today's raucous tabloid. Among those told explicitly not to expect a job was Mick. Unhappy exile with the printing and publishing training board in Colindale, north-west London, ended when he joined the Guardian, where he stayed until retirement in 1994.
Mick was born in Lambeth, south London, the son of a railway worker whose own father was a builder's labourer from Cork. He won a county scholarship to Archbishop Tenison's grammar school, Kennington, opposite the Oval cricket ground. But the second world war intervened and the school was closed.
He was initially evacuated to Earley, outside Reading, where a Ministry of Information newsreel showed him demonstrating how inner-city boys could learn to milk cows. On returning to London, scholarship boys were dispatched to prestigious Alleyn's school, in Dulwich, where Mick felt they were treated like second-class citizens. As a result, he left school at 14.
Briefly a railway clerk, he became a postroom boy at the communist Daily Worker (later the Morning Star) where he met Barbara Purkes, a fellow member of the Young Communist League (YCL). They married in 1949. Like many young idealists, Mick and Barbara left the party over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Thereafter, he became a staunch Labour supporter, albeit disappointed enough to resign from the party.
He worked as a reporter and sub on the Greyhound Express, Reynolds News and IPC Sun before joining the Guardian, where he was elected FoC of the newspaper's London chapel (branch) in 1973, a post he held for a decade. That meant difficult negotations with the newspaper's always cash-poor management in a period of economic stagnation, cuts and government pay policies. Mick proved an unflappable master of detail, painstakingly courteous and scornful of fashionable histrionics, ultra-leftism or bad language. He wore jacket and tie long after others stopped.
His meticulous habits made him a natural revise sub, checking the accuracy of copy subbed and ready for the presses. He adapted more readily than many to the demands of new technology in the 1980s. Colleagues, whom he would sometimes lead in singsongs on the train home from Saturday outings, suspect he would not have so enthusiastically embraced 2009's rapid-fire "internet first" habits.
Mick was a school governor, a keen walker, theatre and film-goer, a pillar of the Sydenham (conservation) Society, always well-informed, instinctively generous, but sceptical.
Stomach cancer in 1988 was followed by a brain tumour in 1991. But chemotherapy for colon cancer last year managed only to delay the inevitable.
He lived to enjoy five grand-children by his son Mick and daughter Ruth, though he was not well enough last year to witness Ruth being invested as a circuit judge. They, and Barbara, survive him.
- guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
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