Veteran journalist Frank recalls characters of past

A reader recalled that the offices of the Market Drayton Advertiser were once in the street and thought that the editor was called Archie Brotherton, although she was not sure.

It turns out to have been a near miss, as 87-year-old Frank, from Market Drayton, got in touch to say: "The chief reporter for the Newport & Market Drayton Advertiser for many years was Archie Brotherhood, not Brotherton. He was the reporter in charge of the office at Market Drayton.

"He was born in Newport and went to Adams' Grammar School - I remember this from conversations with him. Then he joined the print department of the Newport & Market Drayton Advertiser in Newport. This did small printing. There was a company called Bennion & Horne in Newport High Street, and the offices were there, at the back. Bennion & Horne were the retail outlet for the newspaper group.

"Then he transferred to the editorial department. The Advertiser at that time, in the 1920s, was part of what later became the Powysland group, owned by the Shrewsbury Chronicle. Archie liked his journalism and represented the Shrewsbury Chronicle in the Ironbridge Severn Valley area and then, in the late 1920s I would guess, he was transferred to Market Drayton, working back on the Newport & Market Drayton Advertiser.

"The paper had offices successively at High Street; two addresses in Cheshire Street; at the bottom of Shropshire Street; and then in St Mary's Street, although Archie was never in St Mary's Street. He left when it was in Shropshire Street."

Frank has a copy of the paper's almanac, diary, and directory for 1939 and it shows that at that time Archie Brotherhood was living at 51 Longlands Lane, Market Drayton.

"He must have passed away in the late 1960s. He was a member of St Mary's Church and at one time a member of the Rotary club. He and his wife Mona lived later at Kiln Bank. They had a son, Ron, who was a police officer in Birmingham."

Frank says Archie was never editor.

"The editor was Bob Pugh and the chief reporter of the Advertiser at Newport was Frank Lawton. Frank was a fusspot stuck 40 years in the past. He was a real oddball and never drove or anything like that. He never typed - he did it all by hand.

"He was the son of the schoolmaster at Newport."

Frank recalls that the editor who came after Bob Pugh was Dougie Watts, although he thinks there was an interregnum in which others came in.

As it happens, Frank never himself worked for the Newport & Market Drayton Advertiser.

"I started on the Wellington Journal & Shrewsbury News in Wellington. I left Wellington Grammar School and went to the Journal in the summer of 1946.

"Then when I came out of the Army in 1950-odd I did a brief time at Wellington. Then I covered Newport and in 1959 I was sent to the far colony of Market Drayton and have been there ever since.

"I reported for the Wellington Journal right the way until 1964 when I started filing to the Shropshire Star, having previously filed to the Express & Star which was running with plenty of Shrewsbury news in it until the Shropshire Star was launched in October 1964.

"Ted Ireland, the first editor of the Shropshire Star, was a pal of mine. I had known him at Shrewsbury where he as the number two reporter at the Express & Star in Shrewsbury where occasionally I would work."