obituaries


it on the top deck of the school- bound bus, he met Maureen Neenan, and they began the relationship that was to end only with her death in 2023. He became a trainee reporter


in Essex on the Grays and Turrock Gazette; Maureen moved south too, to train as a teacher in Roehampton. Tey married in 1963, and John


took a job on the Hartlepool Mail. Tim, the first of their eight children, was born the next year. He was to stay in that region for


the rest of his life, with a move to the Sunderland Echo in 1974, where he became features editor. He never wanted to go to Fleet Street – he liked the rootedeness of regional journalism – and he politely rebuffed those in the NUJ who encouraged him to stand for general secretary. He helped set up the north east


press awards and was one of the region’s leading NUJ activists. Elected to the national executive, he became president in 1972 and chaired the Wexford Annual Delegate Meeting (ADM) in 1973. He was already a father of six


John Bailey


In the politically volatile NUJ of the 1970s and 1980s, John Bailey, who has died aged 86, was the glue that held the union together – the only person who commanded the trust, affection and admiration of all sides. He was president and general


treasurer during the 1978–79 provincial newspaper strike, the biggest and costliest dispute in the union’s history. John, temperamentally a conciliator, played a decisive role in calling for the strike with a crucial intervention at the national executive council (NEC) meeting in 1978. But he knew it could break the


union financially. Leaving others to rally the troops and deliver the stirring speeches, he concentrated on protecting the union’s funds and limiting the political damage of the post-strike blood-letting. If the union came out of those turbulent decades financially and


politically intact, the credit belongs to Bailey more than to any other single person. John Bailey was born in Southend,


the only child of an army officer who was posted to Jamaica when John was eight. For the next eight years he was educated and taught his parents’ Catholic faith by American Jesuits at Campion College in Kingston. Catholicism stuck. He never


missed Mass on Sunday. Before meals in the Bailey home, grace was said and, when he ate out, he said it quietly to himself. He was at heart a pre-Vatican II Catholic, instinctively uncomfortable with the 1960s modernisation of the faith. His Catholicism was understated but implacable. Back in England aged 16, John


went to St Chad’s, a Catholic school in Wolverhampton, and the next year, while ‘larking about’ as he put


(there were two more to come) and, in the ADM creche, they met the children of Journalist editor Ron Knowles. Going into the conference chamber, one of the Knowles children asked: “Which is your dad?” A Bailey offspring pointed to the stage and said: “He’s the one on the altar.” Wexford was a hard ADM to


chair. Irish businesses had decided to show the few hundred journalists in their midst some lavish Irish hospitality, so most of the delegates arrived at afternoon sessions late, and full both of political passion and alcoholic refreshment. It was a combustible mixture. And there was a motion of no


confidence in general secretary Ken Morgan, which stood a good chance of being passed. John was passionately opposed –


he admired Morgan and thought the motion unfair. He managed the remarkable trick of chairing the debate with impeccable impartiality while still making his feelings clear to delegates. No one else could have got


away with it, and John did not disguise his satisfaction when the motion was soundly defeated. It


was an extraordinary display of gravitas from a man who was still only 33. Tat gravitas made him a


supremely successful general treasurer for the rest of the decade and the first years of the next one. He was always elaborately


courteous but, when he rose, in a calm and measured way, to oppose suggestions for spending the union’s precious financial or political capital, he generally got his way – his gravitas was not an act but who he was. In the evening, over dinner with


other NEC members, he was excellent company, laughing and joking, and no more sober than anyone else. He had charm as well as gravitas. He resigned as general treasurer


in 1982 but remained a key figure locally in Hartlepool and Sunderland. His advice was still sought by


successive general secretaries, in particular his old friend Harry Conroy (1985–90) and his new friend Michelle Stanistreet (2011–24). At Stanistreet’s request, he returned to the national stage as a member of the standing orders committee. Around the turn of the century,


the Echo made him redundant, and he worked in the Sunderland City Council press office until retiring at 65. Meanwhile, he found other


outlets for his restless urge to improve the world. He resurrected Te Northern


Cross, a Catholic newspaper in the north of England, edited it for more than 25 years, and was proud of keeping it as a printed paper. He was heavily involved with voluntary organisations, and two in particular – Street Angels and Churches Together. Despite being diagnosed with


heart failure, in early June he came to London for the launch of the late Lionel Morrison’s autobiography, detailing Morrison’s imprisonment in South Africa for fighting apartheid. Tat Sunday morning, he was still


staying with his daughter Dympna in Croydon when he died, suddenly, of heart failure. He already had his suit and tie on, ready to go to Mass.


Francis Beckett theJournalist | 21


NUJ


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