After 60 years in newspapers, I’m Logging off for the final time ...

After six decades in journalism — 40 of them writing the Ulster Log — I’ve reached the crossroads in my eventful career. In other words, the traffic lights of my journalism are about to go permanently red and I’m going to retire.

Mind you, it has taken a lot of deliberation after four decades of being a columnist and 20 years before that as a reporter, with the Larne Times, the Belfast Telegraph and the Daily Mirror.

I can tell you it was a privilege to return, eventually, to the BT, where readers seem to enjoy my quirky style.

Now, I’m going to concentrate on my memoirs, going back to my days as a schoolboy when the realisation dawned on me that I was born to be a writer.

I’ve put together some stories that I’m proud of, although I dislike the word ‘exclusive’.

And I’ve made special friends in the print business — distinguished journalists like Roy Lilley, a former editor of the Belfast Telegraph, and Robin Walsh, a former controller at BBC Northern Ireland.

Sadly, other colleagues have passed on down the years — journalists like Graham McKenzie, Trevor Hanna, Ted Oliver, Norman Jenkinson, Alan Giff, Neil Johnston, Ted Scanlon and the brothers Bob and Colin Brady, to name but a few.

So, while I’m still around, I have to tell you that I first entered the Belfast Telegraph building on Royal Avenue when I was 14 years old.

You see, the Telegraph used to store giant rolls of newsprint in a stable at Carnmoney Presbyterian Church, where my father was caretaker, and the drivers used to give me a ride to and from the newspaper’s headquarters.

As I grew older, I used to perch on one of those rolls in the church stable, pretend I was a reporter and scribble out stories, including an authentic one about a Spitfire that crashed out of control on the outskirts of the village.

It scared me half to death, as the plane knocked a chimney pot off a house across the way from our place just before it came down.

It was inevitable that, one day, I would join the Belfast Telegraph’s staff. I was deputy news editor for a while, but the highlight of my time was going to the Nobel Peace Prize Awards in Oslo with Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan in 1976.

I’m also one of the few Ulster journalists who has witnessed the black cap going on the head of a judge at a murder trial.

It happened in 1961, when I covered the trial of Robert McGladdery, who was found guilty of killing Pearl Gamble and was hanged in Crumlin Road Prison.

He was the last man hanged in Northern Ireland and the trial was conducted by Lord Justice Curran, whose own daughter, Patricia, had been murdered in 1952.