An editor who took voluntary redundancy in May as part of a large-scale shake-up at MEN Media is holding a retirement party next week.

Mervyn Kay had been editor of the Accrington Observer for just shy of 30 years when its parent company announced it was shutting district offices and centralising certain operations.

He has now decided to host a belated retirement do for any of his former colleagues who worked with him on the Observer during his three decades with the weekly paper.

Mervyn was only the paper’s fifth editor in its 122-year history and started out with the Observer as a 19-year-old trainee in 1967.

He spent most of the 70s as a reporter with the Lancashire Evening Telegraph before being head-hunted to return to the Observer as deputy editor in 1978 and then making editor a year later.

The evening begins at 7.30pm on 6 November at the Stanley Street Club, in Stanley Street, Accrington.