Special award for Echo correspondent Mike Elliott
LOUGHBOROUGH Echo correspondent Mike Elliott has been rewarded for a second time for his work with local parish councils.
Mike has run his own freelance journalist company, Elliott News, since 1960.
Thirty years ago, after he had been attending their monthly meetings for over 10 years as a reporter, Mike took on the clerkship of Shelford Parish Council when they could not find a replacement for their retiring clerk.
He is still clerk there and, amazingly, he is also clerk to another 16 councils in various parts of Nottinghamshire, including Costock, Wysall, Willoughby on the Wolds and Widmerpool and, somewhat ironically, Bunny, where at the age of 18 he wasn’t given the job because he was told he was too young.
Forty years later he was appointed!
A long standing member of the 5,000-strong Society of Local Council Clerks - he was for seven years its national secretary, annual three-day conference organiser and editor of its magazine.
And now has received his second award from the society, both for long service and a citation: “in appreciation of his outstanding service to the members of the society and to the clerks’ profession.”
The award was presented to him as a surprise at the society’s annual conference last month.
His first award was in 2005 when he became the first clerk in the country to receive the Society’s Outstanding Contribution Award “in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the progress of the society and to the clerks’ profession.”
Mike, 80 next year, says he regularly works over 80 hours a week and has no intention of retiring just yet.
He has contributed to the Echo’s columns for 57 years and began his work for them as the East Leake correspondent in 1960.
Many of the stories he has written on the village dating back to the 1960s are in the files at the village library.