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Bath Chronicle readers always got their news, even if, as Emily Williamson discovers, it wasn’t always conventionally printed. This article was originally published to celebrate 125 years of the Chronicle.

There’s not much that has been able to stop The Chronicle hitting the streets of Bath – even if it means one of the reporters bringing her father out of retirement.

That was during the lightening strike staged by members of the NUJ at The Chronicle in April 1989, which ended up being a six week dispute.

A team of nine Chronicle staff did the work of 25 to 30 people in order to ensure that the paper still came out every evening.

And one member of the editorial team, Judy Boyd, resorted to coaxing her journalist father out of retirement to make sure all the local stories were covered.

She said: “By then we had computers which were before his day, so we had to find an elderly typewriter for him to write up stories, and then they had to be keyed in again.”

Sandwiches and drinks were brought in at lunchtime so workers didn’t have to walk through the picket line of their colleagues.

Judy said: “As colleagues and friends I suppose I felt sad that we were on different sides.”

But she said that personal experience with the union meant that she didn’t in any sense have difficulties of conscience.

John McCready, assistant editor of The Chronicle at the time, said: “It was all very amicable – we used to take them out coffee.”

And even during the 15 week strike by production staff in 1980, Chronicle workers still managed to put out a daily emergency newsheet. And later a dispute over pay for working bank holidays meant 24 Chronicle journalists walked out for two days in August 1985.

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