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Personal tribute to former city editor

Ian Richardson, the legendary former city editor of the Birmingham Post, has died aged 86. Here, Nevill Boyd Maunsell, the man who succeeded Ian in the role, pays his own tribute to his former boss. (First appeared in the Birmingham Post).


Ian Richardson was one of those very rare journalists, whose integrity, commitment and professional skill actually shaped the nature of the publication for which he worked and wielded influence far beyond its regional base.

Quite early in his tenure as city editor he established The Birmingham Post as the indispensable journal of record of West Midlands industry and business, while at the same time providing an authoritative, but highly personal commentary on national and international events.

At a time when most financial journalism was ponderous, Ian did this with a light touch and a gift for well-aimed exaggeration. He was a combative journalist, who took sides in takeover battles and boardroom disputes, often with a touch of humour, occasionally with his tongue in his cheek.

His ringside and shamelessly partisan account of a Birmingham takeover saga – Bristol Street’s bid for Griffiths Bentley – caught the eye of the judges of the sought-after Wincott Prize for financial journalism in 1974. He became the first winner of the award for a journalist working for a regional paper.

That year he was also appointed to the Royal Commission on the Press charged with examining the state of what was then a heavily unionised newspaper industry.

Ian’s own politics came from the libertarian left, laced with an instinct to be against the government of the day. In the 19th century he might have been a Birmingham Radical.

He detested over-mighty trade unions whose closed shops in Fleet Street were threatening the viability of much of the newspaper industry and the personal freedom of journalists and printers who did not belong to them.

His staunch membership of the Institute of Journalists effectively barred him from work on several national titles – to the great benefit of The Post.

In all his years with this newspaper, I believe he only once considered the offer of a job elsewhere. That came after he was the joint winner of the national Wincott Prize in 1981.

This was recognition of Ian’s long, heartfelt, often vitriolic campaign against the industrial policies of Margaret Thatcher and, above all, Sir Keith Joseph, through the early 1980s.

This destroyed much of Britain’s traditional industry and left an industrial desert stretching from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

Early on, Ian recognised the consequences of aggressive free market policies in a deep recession made worse by an over-priced pound, and lambasted them accordingly.

For all his trenchant writing, Ian was an instinctively modest man who wore his distinction lightly. Yet, more than one past editor of The Post may recall, he could be fierce in defence of the City Office and its role in the paper.

Unlike many journalists, he was an accomplished and witty public speaker, much in demand at events in Birmingham. He spoke at the memorial service for his former deputy Margaret Reid, who had gone on to chronicle the fringe banking crisis at The Financial Times and write a book about it.

It was attended by several former fringe bankers as well as an array of Treasury officials, City grandees and politicians.

Ian eyed them and began: “There could be no greater tribute to Margaret than this gathering of the great and the good, and a number who would not expect to be described as either.”

He was a superb boss and a great teacher, demanding in that he worked, harder, longer – and better – than the rest of us. His standards of accuracy, thoroughness and respect for the English language were unrelenting.

Yet he was unfailingly considerate and good humoured in the face of his staff’s foibles and follies. I worked for him for 20 years. It was a privilege and a delight.