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He recalls with a shudder covering one key fixture at the old Victoria Ground. "I was on the touchline when Stanley Matthews scored the goal that got Stoke City promoted to the First Division. Unfortunately, I'd used all my 12 plates and couldn’t take the picture. So I did the next best thing — I stood up and cheered like everybody else."

Horace has probably met more celebrities over the years than Michael Parkinson and one encounter he remembers vividly was with the American astronaut Colonel John Glen, at Jodrell Bank.

"I was still a teenager and meeting the first man to walk in space was just incredible. He was a really nice guy, too. The irony was I was talking to the first man to walk in space and I’d got to Jodrell Bank by bus."

He also met Tom Jones, The Kinks, The Who and The Rolling Stones — three times.

"The first time they were relatively unknown — the New Year's Eve band at Leek Town Hall. Later I met them at Trentham Gardens and then The Gaumont, in Hanley."

Horace has also photographed the Queen, Princess Margaret, Princess Di and Lord Mountbatten ("which would have impressed my dad because he served in Burma during the war").

He's been to Wembley with Port Vale, Stoke City and Leek Town, and travelled on the open-top buses with the teams — experiences which he says made him realise how privileged he was to be a press photographer.

Foreign assignments with the Staffordshire Regiment have included an Arctic training course in Norway and a visit to Hong Kong in the last days before the hand-over to China. "I was flown over Hong Kong in a helicopter and lowered on to an RAF frigate for lunch," he says.

Horace, who lives at Trentham with wife Liz, has witnessed the aftermath of terrible tragedies and disasters, too, but he says he can't imagine having any other career.

"Every day is different," he says. "I've gone around and seen people in other jobs and occupations, sometimes doing the same monotonous thing all day and every day and thought how lucky I was to be in my job. I've never wanted to do anything else. I even met my wife at The Sentinel."

Horace is looking forward to spending more time in his retirement with Liz and the family, Melanie, Lisa, Kai and Emily.

As he leaves after 42 years, a few older colleagues still remember the time when Horace was green with envy when another photographer was assigned to take a trip in a glider. "I would have given anything to have gone up in one," he says.

"So I was really grateful and excited when Trevor Slater and Huston Spratt, another former picture editor, sent me to Newcastle Flying Club. They didn’t tell me they flew homing pigeons."

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