Former regional press journalist and magazine editor Ron Knowles has died, aged 68. Ron spent 16 years working for local newspapers before taking over as editor of the Journalist, the National Union of Journalists’ magazine. He later became national organiser for the union and was even involved in Official Secrets cases about deported American journalists. Here, the Journalist’s current editor Tim Gopsill recalls Ron’s life and career.

The union is mourning one of its most influential activists, who died on Monday. Ron Knowles was editor of the Journalist from 1973 to 1981, and a national organiser from 1981-83, but his influence spread far wider than that.

Born in October 1939 in Northumberland, Ron moved to London when he was two and then moved again aged seven to Stoke-on-Trent where he was educated and started his career with The Sentinel, in 1957.

He went on to write for South Wales Argus, Leicester Mercury, Halifax Courier, Daily Herald in Manchester, Yorkshire Post, Middlesbrough Gazette, Evening Echo in Southend, Press Association, Steel News and the Cambridge Evening News.

From the late 1960s he was a leading light in the “chapel power” movement – the spread of industrial militancy that saw NUJ chapels rack up huge improvements in pay and conditions that raised journalists, particularly on local and regional papers, to as high a point as they have ever achieved.

As Father of Chapel at the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette in 1967, he led the first unofficial “chapel power” pay strike, which was a total success. They even won back their pay for the days they were on strike.

Over the next 15 years dozens, possibly hundreds, of disputes followed around the UK, in a movement that culminated in the most significant strike in the union’s history – the seven-week stoppage that brought out 9,000 provincial journalists and won a nation-wide pay increase of 14 per cent. The Newspaper Society had offered 5 per cent.

Ron took the lead too in actions in defence of press freedom, notably in the sensational Official Secrets cases that arose from the deportation in 1977 of two American journalists, Philip Agee and Mark Hosenball.

He was a prominent supporter of the defendants in the ABC official secrets trial and was himself a defendant in the related “Colonel B” trial, in which the NUJ itself was charged with Contempt of Court over an article in the Journalist.

Ron was made an NUJ Member of Honour in 1985. In 1983, Ron emigrated with his wife Marina and their five children to Australia.

He was a skilled sub-editor – and a fine and witty writer – and worked as a sub for papers in Sydney and Hong Kong before retiring in 2004.

I visited him in Australia just two weeks ago and, when reminiscing on his NUJ activities, he cited the Newspaper Society strike as his proudest moment.

He died, aged 68, from inoperable brain cancers that spread rapidly and killed him only three months after the first diagnosis.

Ron was far from the only fearsome NUJ activist of those momentous times but there was something special about him.

He was an inspiring character, utterly honest and uncompromising, a great leader, great company and a great friend to many colleagues.