Dalesman editor bids a fond farewell

3:32pm Thursday 31st January 2008

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It might seem a little odd that, after 20 years or so wandering round the Yorkshire Dales chatting to folk, that I had never before met the subject of today's column.

He has, after all, been the guardian of a Dales institution for 14 years, a journalist like me, and our career paths have been very similar.

Terry Fletcher and I have worked some three miles apart for more than a decade and yet we met for the very first time when he announced that he was retiring from one of the most enviable jobs in our trade: editor of Dalesman, the pocket-sized slice of North Yorkshire which he and his staff export to subscribers all over the world every month.

There is, perhaps, a reason for this and, if I am honest, it could be professional jealousy. I was once, you see, group editor of the Town & County Magazines which published, among others, the monthly glossy, Yorkshire Life.

One of my targets was to take on Dalesman to rip off some of its massive circulation and, just as important, some of its advertising revenue. And - confession time - I never landed a glove on it!

The readers' loyalty to this quirky little magazine is virtually unique in my experience. Perhaps this is down to the character of the people who love the Dales, because the only other publication that shares this luxury is in your hands, dear reader: the Craven Herald.

But we have been going for more than 150 years. Compared to that, Dalesman is nobbut a youth - and it couldn't have started at a worse time.

Its first editor (one of only four), Harry Scott, launched the first issue from a bedroom of his house in Clapham in April 1939, six months before World War Two broke out and brought with it, among many other hardships, strict paper rationing which reduced even national newspapers to four flimsy pages.

Terry Fletcher, now retiring editor as Editor No 4, was born then.

He came into the world in Harrogate in 1952, the son of a local businessman and a nurse from Scarborough, which meant he spent most of his childhood travelling away from the Dales he later came to love as a walker and a climber.

He went to a Roman Catholic school in Leeds and then knocked on the door of the Harrogate Advertiser and asked "Gotta job?"

As he admitted in his office in a converted water mill on the Broughton Hall Business Park: "I thought it was that easy. Only later did I find out that a friend of mine, who eventually made it to the Sunday Times, had written 600 letters before he got his first job in journalism."

Terry then followed the "through the mill" route which was standard practice in those days: district reporter in Wakefield for the Yorkshire Post, a spot of freelancing in Barnsley, back to the YP to climb to news editor and then assistant editor.

"It was a classic pattern for reporters like me," he said. "I got shot at in Ulster, threatened in the Middle East and organised the team that covered the Lockerbie aircraft bombing. It was, I suppose, a long way from the Dalesman."

Even this came about as the result of a news story. He was sitting on the YP news desk one quiet night when an MP contact rang him in high dudgeon to ask: "Is it true that they are moving the Dalesman to London?"

This was some 15 years ago when Timothy Benn, a major London publisher, had bought the magazine - and a cottage in Wharfedale.

Terry checked out the story, found that no move was planned - "That would have caused an absolute uproar" - but also discovered that Benn was looking for a new editor.

"By this time, I had spent years walking and climbing in the Dales," he recalled. "I had never dreamed of looking for such a job, but I thought: Why not? I applied and here I am."

What editorial policy did he decide to follow?

He replied: "I was always resolutely upbeat, to do positive not negative stories. I learned early on not to get involved in politics.

"We carried a mildly anti-European Union advert and got dozens of letters of protest from readers saying they didn't want that sort of thing in the magazine. And it was an ad, for goodness sake.

"The only time I got more protesting letters was when I printed the wrong grid on the crossword. All hell broke loose over that..."

Been there, done that Terry: one of the classic editor's nightmares.

Hope you enjoy your retirement and get in all that walking and climbing you plan from your home in Glusburn.

And a word of advice to you, successor Paul Jackson, Editor No 5: check and double-check that crossword grid.

Good luck!