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Where are they now?Gerry Kreibich

Gerry Kreibich, formerly lecturer in charge of journalism courses at Sheffield’s Richmond College (later Stradbroke College) for about 10 years, now describes himself as a freelance journalist, lecturer and musician who does just enough in those three roles to keep himself happy!

He still lives on the hillside in glorious Matlock Bath, Derbyshire, and he and his wife Una will be celebrating their golden wedding in a couple of years. (“Time for one of those sitting-on-the-sofa photographs in the local paper!” he says).

Gerry started his career on the Warrington Guardian and was later a reporter on the Manchester City News, a sub on the Newark Advertiser and a roving Peak District man on the Derbyshire Times.

His happiest time as a practising journalist, he says, was as editor of the Matlock Mercury.

“I didn’t think, when I joined it, that I’d be in Matlock for the rest of my life,” he says. “But Matlock Bath is pure magic and we’d never leave.”

When he went into full-time training in the early 70s, Gerry joined Ron Eyley and Frank Littlewood at what was then Richmond College.

“We were constantly experimenting, in those early days, with the best ways of helping trainees,” he recalls.

“A few ground rules were applied by the NCTJ, but we were largely free to develop our own ideas.

“They were wonderful times – we knew all the students well because in those days there were only six colleges and only 300-or-so trainees in the whole country at any one time.

“The result – everyone went straight into a job at the end of the full-year course, in fact the best of the bunch usually had two or three jobs to choose from.

“I loved facing each new group at the start of a full-year course and telling them, absolutely truthfully, that we were going to give them a pretty tough time but that they would all get jobs.”

Gerry’s proudest claim is that he launched and ran what was then Britain’s only ‘training newspaper’ – the little Richmond Reporter that appeared every Wednesday during term-time and was eagerly read by staff and students.

“It had everything,” he says. “Real stories, real deadlines, real scoops that were picked up by the nationals . . . and real apologies whenever there were mistakes!

“There are several hundred UK journalists today whose first experience of chasing a real story was on the Reporter. I still occasionally hear from some of them.”

After early retirement in 1989, Gerry continued as a part-time Sheffield lecturer, and for five years he ran a ‘writing for newspapers’ module at the University of Derby. He worked with overseas students for the Thomson Foundation, and spent two weeks in Accra teaching Ghanaian journalists.

It was in Ghana that he had the thrill of playing jazz with an African group, and music has steadily become a larger part of his life.

He now plays solo piano in a restaurant and occasionally with a jazz trio. He has busked in Paris, ‘guested’ with musicians in Norway, played in a New York bar, had a summer job playing in a taverna in Corfu…and has even sat up in his little attic studio fitting music precisely to horse movements for dressage riders!

“Retirement is great,” he says. “It’s just a pity you have to wait so long for it…”

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