Doug won the bosses’ respect
A RESPECTED photographer with a fund of anecdotes, former NUJ stalwart Doug Avent has died at the age of 87. He was chief photographer of the Harrow Observer for 20 years until he retired in 1986.
Doug took an active role in chapel and group chapel affairs and was Father of the Chapel at Harrow for many years. Cheerful, jovial, conscientious and unfailingly courteous, he was a knowledgeable and able negotiator, much consulted by younger staff.
He was popular not just with colleagues but also managements, who admired him as a man of his word. He achieved much by his considerate and commonsense attitude, and was immovable on matters of principle.
Doug Avent begin an apprenticeship as an architectural and fine art photographer at 15 and joined the RAF in 1941 as a photographer. After the war, he got a job with a Fleet Street picture agency and later worked for the Willesden Chronicle and Kilburn Times. In 1960 he joined King and Hutchings’ flagship weekly the Middlessex Advertiser (later the Uxbridge Gazette), moving to its sister paper in Harrow six years later.
In the 1970s Doug ensured that his members were fully behind the NUJ strikes in provincial newspapers. Staff of the titles owned by parent company Westminster Press mounted mass pickets that gained the support of printers at the Uxbridge printworks.
Kay Shelley