Mike Morrissey obituary

Other lives: Journalist who helped investigate the source of the ‘Teesside smell’

My father, Mike Morrissey, who has died aged 96, received an unusual – yet ultimately prescient – piece of career advice. His English essays at school were routinely dismissed with a sniffy comment from his teacher: “journalese”. Years of hearing this supposed criticism left him in no doubt. A journalist he would be – and what a journalist he became.

Born in Bradford, he was the eldest of four children of Jim, a paediatrician, and Winnifred. His father was killed at Dunkirk when Michael was 10 and he grew up with his mother and younger brothers, John and Paul, and sister, Jillian. He went to Downside, a Catholic school near Bath, on a “war-widow’s” scholarship.

On leaving school at the end of the second world war, he was employed in junior positions at the Liverpool Echo and the Manchester Guardian. In the mid-1950s, he was offered a one-year contract with a newspaper in Australia. Not long after arriving, he realised he was working for a newspaper that today would be described as a red-top. He approached his editor and asked to be released from his contract; he spent the rest of the year freelancing.

On his return to the UK, he met and in 1958 married Bernadette Kearns. Together they went to Nigeria, where Michael had a contract with the Catholic archdiocese of Ibadan to help found a newspaper in Abuja. This two-year period in Africa led him to volunteer with Oxfam, and he continued to fundraise and work with Oxfam and other NGOs for the rest of his life.

In the early 60s, Mike was hired by Harold Evans at the Northern Echo in Darlington, initially as a subeditor – apparently one of the worst Evans had ever come across – and later as news editor. Among many successful campaigns, perhaps the most significant was the investigation into the “Teesside smell”. After years of obstruction and denial from local industrial groups, they were able to identify the source of the pollution to the ICI plant at Billingham and help bring about legislative change. After Evans left in the late-60s, Mike joined the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette, and was industrial editor there until his retirement in the 1990s.

He was a print journalist through and through. There were always piles of newspapers around the house, and even on holiday he followed a strict reading routine: two morning papers (one local, one national) and a local evening paper. Mike would sit on the beach with a diminishing pile of unread papers to his left and a growing pile of discarded ones to his right. He was rarely seen without an old envelope and a stub of pencil, ready to jot down notes.

Retirement gave him the opportunity to devote more time to his local community and to the Catholic church. For many years, he served as volunteer press officer for the John Paul Centre, a community hub in Middlesbrough, and he worked hard to promote his adopted home town of Saltburn-by-the-Sea.

He is survived by Bernadette and their five children, Martin, Maria, Simon, Anna and me, and four grandchildren.