Left school at 16, and fought his way to media success
ROB GOLDSTONE grew up in the heart of the Jewish community in Prestwich, north Manchester. His father was a founding member of the Hillock Hebrew Congregation, he attended two Jewish schools and trained as a journalist at a Jewish newspaper.
The portly PR man battled with weight issues from early childhood, according to school friends. “His mum always met him after school with a chocolate bar,” said one, who knew him from King David Infants’ School.
By the age of seven, concerns over his weight meant his parents, Ike and Bertha, sent him to a Jewish boarding school, Delamere Forest School in Cheshire. Later a school for children with special educational needs, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Mr Goldstone was there, it was a charity-run school for children with health issues, whose families and GPs thought would benefit from its programme of fresh air, healthy eating, strict discipline and less rigorous education.
“We were often punished for slight transgressions,” said one pupil who was at the school at the same time as Mr Goldstone. “I remember that once Robert Goldstone put salt on my ice cream. Both of us were punished by being sent to bed straight after tea.”
Mr Goldstone did lose weight at Delamere. But when he left, he failed his 11 plus, and went to a secondary modern, Heys Boys’ County Secondary School, which had a reputation as “very rough”, according to another former pupil. “There was a lot of bullying and aspirations were very low,” he said.
Mr Goldstone left school at 16, having been told by a school careers adviser that “you can’t” become a journalist. Undaunted, Mr Goldstone begged the Jewish Gazette for a job, and became a trainee sports reporter. He then worked for the Bury Times before heading for London where he continued his career in radio and on tabloid newspapers. He moved to Australia, and then established his PR business in New York.