Bob Jones obituary
My friend and former colleague, Bob Jones, who has died aged 87, was the longest serving teacher in the journalism department at City University in London, and one of its most colourful characters.
Bob began at City in 1979, when he joined the innovative journalism diploma programme, and he helped launch the international journalism MA in 1982. He retired, as an emeritus fellow, in 2007. But in a way he never really left City: his heart was always in it.
He was born in Wolverhampton, to Violet (nee Hughes), a housewife, and her husband, William, who worked as a quality inspector at the local Goodyear tyre factory. After leaving Wolverhampton Municipal grammar school, Bob attended Birmingham University to study geography, but by then had already caught the journalistic bug, and spent most of his time searching for scoops for the student newspaper, the Guild News.
After a stint as a reporter on Investors’ Chronicle he moved to New York, in 1959, to work on Forbes magazine as associate editor. In 1961, while at the Statist current affairs magazine in London as assistant editor, he began investigations into Robert Maxwell’s dodgy dealings, and continued them when he joined the Times in 1967 as a features editor on the business desk.
He left the Times in 1973 to take up research posts first at Manchester Business School and then the London Business School, before starting at City’s journalism department.
At City (now City, University of London), Bob led the move away from the old technology to new, computer-based journalism. He also helped to run the Stern (now Stern Bryan) Fellowship, which allows one British journalist every year to spend three months working at the Washington Post, and City’s annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture was largely his initiative. In the late 1990s, with Peter (now Lord) Hennessy, he set up the journalism and contemporary history degree jointly offered by City and Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary, University of London).
With his vast knowledge of the industry, his endless anecdotes, his humour, his enormous range of contacts and above all his commitment to principled reporting, Bob’s teaching was greatly appreciated by many hundreds of fledgling journalists. He also had amazing charm: once when I visited him in hospital he had managed to persuade the nurses to allow him to smoke secretly in a tiny broom cupboard.
He is survived by Janet (nee Wilkinson), a teacher whom he married in 1967, their daughter Holly, and two grandchildren, Joe and Dulcie. Another daughter, Katharine, died in 2011.