I'm honoured and very pleased to announce this week that we have a new scribe, Sinclair Newton, who has now joined the team to contribute his humorous column - Sober Life, which will surely offer an alternative well-balanced line-up to our weekly Electronic whiz-bang.

Sinclair is a genuine touché-á tout Jack of all trades in search of harmony and replying on logic rather than instinct. He will express himself in wonderful lucid, jargon-free English, not just because he writes with the authority of a genuine scholar, but also because he has cleverly adopted an already fascinating subject to make it appeal to the interest and assumptions of contemporary readers.

I first met this no-nonsense professional and amusing character in a Manchester City centre pub during the middle 1970s when he then sported a bubble-cut hairstyle and wore a large gold ring in the lobe of his left ear.

In those days Sinclair was the assistant News Desk Editor for the North of England office of the Daily Mail national newspaper. He was similar to an orchestra leader but instead of him being in the band pit he use to sit around a large desk in a huge room with several other news editor journalists to gather in the news stories of the day. His job then was for him to make the all important and vital decisions of which reporter to send out who he thought would be best mentally equipped with the proper cutting-edge to cover the particular story in question.

I was also working then for the Daily Mail news desk and my job was to chaperon the superstar playboy crime reporter of the day, Ian Smith. Amongst many other pinnacle stories, we covered the notorious "Yorkshire Ripper" until Peter Sutcliffe was eventually caught in the act at the beginning of January 1981 in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.

Those were marvellous heady days for all concerned when our minds would be rock solid together from the perils of the go-it-alone and with hand-crafted guidance our energy levels would rise, filling us with enthusiasm and self-confidence to achieve the all-clear know-how of a more in-depth man-to-man bonding.

It stands to rhyme and reason that there are many interesting stories still to be told from those would-be exciting times. However, unless something has not been written down it doesn't exist and without any hard-done-by feelings this is a wait-and-see basic recipe for disaster.

Nevertheless, to cut a long story short, I left England at the time of Peter Sutcliffe's arrest and drove here to live and spend more halcyon days on this unique island of Ibiza. Sinclair stayed in his job until they closed the main northern office of the Daily Mail in Manchester and he then took a lucrative redundancy pay-off to embarked on new career in the middle 1980s.

At the beginning of the 1990s and two wives later, Sinclair decided to come and give it a go at living and hopefully working here in Ibiza. Unfortunately, the dreaded booze got the better of our Sinclair and he had to depart from the island in a hurry the same year due to ill health of both body and mind and return to recover in the UK.

Concluding: with time as a healer after a tremendous struggle and battle, Sinclair's will power has won the day and the good man now no longer drinks any form of alcohol whatsoever. Therefore, I believe that we're all going to enjoy the weekly column from Sinclair - Sober Life.

Sinclair Newton's first break into journalism came when he was offered a job as office junior at the Evesham Journal.

Read Sinclair's Obituary 'Death of a former news editor'

https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2007/news/death-of-former-news-editor/

Gary Hardy

garyhardy@ibizahistoryculture.com