Ron Knowles

Editor and troublemaker supreme

IN OCTOBER 1967 the Journalist carried a short report that journalists on the Middlesbrough Gazette had been on strike. It quoted the Father of the Chapel, Ron Knowles, who said: “The chapel members stood united, despite the knowledge that we did not have official union backing”.

This was the first airing of a union phenomenon that swept the British press. Ron Knowles, who has died aged 68, was a primary figure in the “chapel power” movement — the spread of industrial militancy that saw chapels rack up huge improvements in pay and conditions.

The Middlesbrough strike, which was over managers’ failure to pay an all-round increase to some of the staff, ended in triumph. Ron Knowles said: “Everyone got the rise, but that wasn’t the end of it. We demanded an apology and full pay for the time we were out. We won everything.

“After that the chapel was rampant. We didn’t wait to get backing from the union because we didn’t need it. They would send officials to tell us to go back to work and we would ignore them. We had strikes over various issues but they never lasted very long because management were gunshy.”

There were dozens of such disputes over the next 15 years. For a time Ron Knowles was a kind of flying militant, travelling provincial England stirring up action, while raising a family with, eventually, five children.

When he became editor of the Journalist himself in 1973 it was his 15th job at the age of 34, having also worked at, among other papers, the Sentinel in Stoke-on-Trent — where the Journalist’s first editor, Harry Richardson (1908-1917) also began his career — the South Wales Argus, Leicester Mercury, Halifax Courier, Daily Herald (Manchester), Yorkshire Post, the PA, Steel News and the Cambridge Evening News.

He was never fired. He was a skilled sub and a fine writer and moved jobs either in protest at some management stupidity or for better money elsewhere.

His Journalist was pugnacious and aggressive. He received shoals of angry letters that he revelled in publishing — and letters of support came flooding in response. He liked to say that, for trade unionists, “militancy is a state of grace”.

Ron Knowles threw himself into the official secrets cases that arose from the deportation in 1977 of two American union members, Philip Agee and Mark Hosenball. He was a prominent supporter of the defendants in the ABC official secrets trial and was himself a defendant in the related “Colonel B” trial, in which the NUJ was charged with Contempt of Court over an article in the Journalist.

In 1983 he emigrated with wife Marina and their children to Australia. He worked as a sub for papers in Sydney and Hong Kong before retiring in 2004. He died from inoperable brain cancers that spread rapidly and killed him only three months after the first diagnosis.

He was a natural rebel, a troublemaker, a scathing wit, an uncompromising character who inspired huge loyalty and respect even from enemies.

Tim Gopsill