My former colleague and friend Jock Gillespie, who has died aged 86, could truly be said to be a reporter of the “old school”, except that he would have winced at the cliche.
He adhered strictly to a journalistic set of rules, which he applied to the generation of young reporters he trained at the Cambridge Evening News. These included Alan Rusbridger, who went on to be the Guardian’s editor-in-chief. Rusbridger described him in his book Breaking News as “a growling silver-haired Glaswegian with dark glasses and the stub of a cigar permanently lodged between bearded lips. Jock saw it as his duty to school us in hard knocks.”
