Editor whose ‘love for Bath was palpable’ dies aged 74

A former editor of the Bath Chronicle has sadly passed away at the age of 74.

David Kernek lived in Camden Road, Bath, and had a long, illustrious career with stints as a lobby correspondent and as a deputy news editor at Darlington paper the Northern Echo and the Western Daily Press.

He became the editor of the

York Press, the then Bath Evening Chronicle and went back to edit the

Northern Echo too, but was never at home when he was away from Bath.

“I’m a fish out of water up here,” he would say, and would disappear back to his home in Bath at every opportunity.

David, formerly known as David Flintham, was also known as a talented leader writer.

Peter Gibbs, who worked with David on the news desk of the Western Daily Press, remembered him as “a very experienced, well respected journalist”.

Another colleague, Graham Holburn, said: “David was a deeply cerebral man who was leader-writer for the Western Daily Press in the early Nineties.

“He could write with great knowledge and gravitas on virtually any subject, which added hugely to the paper’s reputation at the time.”

Allan Prosser, who worked with David as both his editor and his managing director at The Echo, considered him to be kind, considerate, witty and intelligent. “He had very good political instincts and his direction and influence on that aspect of the Northern Echo’s coverage during the bitter and divisive miners’ strike of 198485 was full of clarity and consistency,” he said.

“I also remember him confounding Margaret Thatcher at a meeting when she turned on him and said, ‘Well, I don’t know whose side you are on.’ “David was on the side of ordinary people, and against the pompous, the self-interested, and anyone he regarded as anti-democratic,” said Allan. According to David, the most difficult story he ever investigated was about himself.

“I traced and then met my birth mother, who came to England as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938,” he wrote last year in Bath Life magazine. “She was at the outset not pleased to see me, but that changed quite quickly.

“I don’t regret a moment of what was a long, often frustrating, but ultimately successful search,” he said. “We found, having been separated when I was one week old, that we had much in common.”

In fact David’s mother came to London from Linz as a 19-year-old to avoid the Holocaust. By the end of the war, Greta Kernek was a penniless young mum and an “enemy alien” living with a toddler in the home of a man who had employed her as his housekeeper.

When she became pregnant by him, David, the new arrival, was put up for adoption.

When David finally met Greta, 45 years later, he began using her family name.

He spent part of his retirement photographing Bath, and took more than 1,000 photos between the turn of the century and 2019.

He immortalised it all – glamour, grit, old pubs, and hen parties – and our colleague Imogen Mcguckin at Bath Live collaborated with David on a photo story at the very start of her career as a reporter.

“David was one of the very first people I interviewed when I started my job at Bath Live and I remember him being very patient and kind,” she said. “He took time to explain the background to each of his photos to me, a newcomer, and his love for Bath was palpable.

“He had a great sense of humour and he liked to show a different side of the city through his lens, shedding light on homelessness, hen parties, and even Bath’s random palm trees.”

David Kernek was 74 and is survived by his wife – the writer Diana Cambridge – and their daughter Clare.