My father, Alan Knowles, who has died aged 94, was a journalist with the Bolton Evening News for a decade after leaving school, and with the BBC from the early days of television news in the 1950s until his retirement. His passion was for trade unionism, and he held local, regional and national office with the NUJ.
He was born in Bolton, some time in the summer of 1927, the youngest of three children of Frank Knowles, a linotype operator at the Bolton Evening News, and Ada Melling, a cotton mill worker. Alan’s birth certificate recorded 20 August but no one ever really knew, as the pressures of his mother’s illness took precedence over his father’s trip to the town hall to record the date, which was by then forgotten. His mother, Ada, died when he was three, from heart disease caused by rheumatic fever.
