Ruth Jones (copyright private)

A former journalist who was sacked from a regional daily for going on strike has died at the age of 75.

Ruth Jones was one of 28 journalists who was sacked by the Nottingham Evening Post after joining the provincial journalists’ national strike, which began on 5 December 1978.

The dispute ended six weeks later on 17 January 1979 and the Post, which was then owned by T. Bailey Forman, was the only paper in the country not to take back its journalists when the strike ended.

Ruth, who began her career in journalism at the Ilkeston Pioneer and also spent time working at a newspaper in Bermuda, died at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham after a short illness.

A tribute on the website of the National Union of Journalists, by Rochelle Wilson, said that Ruth was born into a Jewish family of six, who moved with her parents during the Second World War from London to Stapleford near Nottingham.

After working at the Ilkeston Pioneer, she landed a job in Bermuda in the mid-1960s where she worked on the Royal Gazette and made an unsuccessful attempt to organise the first union chapel in the paper’s history.

Ruth married fellow Gazette reporter Stan Jones in 1967 and their daughter Miriam was later born on the island.

But their marriage was short-lived and Ruth returned to England where she started working for the Nottingham Evening Post, serving as court reporter from 1970-1978.

After losing her job, Ruth then joined the NUJ-backed independent paper the Nottingham News where she was a reporter from 1979 until 1982.

She moved to work at Gems News service, where she stayed for a number of years.