John Davies
JOHN Davies, who has died aged 90, was a highly regarded financial journalist who spent his career with the Glasgow Herald and the Daily Telegraph. During the Second World War he was in The Herald’s Fleet Street office and while at the Telegraph was involved in widening the scope of the City pages.
Until then, financial affairs were basically reported in specialist papers such as The Financial Times and other newspapers tended to give rather scant coverage to business matters. Mr Davies played a major role in expanding the coverage of, for example, the stock market, and its daily movements. He made the reporting of company affairs and takeovers less fraught and more understandable.
John Charles Edward Davies was born in Brixton and educated in a local school until aged 13. The war broke out and his formal education was interrupted but at 15 he got a job as an office junior in the Fleet Street office of The Glasgow Herald. It was a long hard day and working conditions were challenging. The sirens often screamed and air raids made getting out a daily paper difficult. One morning, Mr Davies found Fleet Street cordoned off because unexploded bombs had landed in various nearby offices – one precariously at the bottom of the lift in The Herald’s office.
He was still under age so he could not join the forces and commuted to work from south London – at night he served with the local fire-fighting teams. They were dangerous years, two bombs on time fuses forced his family to flee. The Glasgow Herald printed many of the stories that were sent up from London. They could, for example, print information and photographs of the Blitz in the capital but officials tried to limit the coverage of the bombing of Glasgow and Clydeside. In fact, Glasgow was often referred to as “a town in western Scotland”.
Mr Davies joined the East Surrey Regiment shortly before the end of the war, and decided not to go for a commission as any advancement would have meant him joining the Indian Army – which would have necessitated learning a local language. On being demobbed he returned to the Glasgow Herald as a trainee financial journalist. He was to spend 20 years in the office involved not only in the day-to-day reporting of the stock markets and company news but building up a knowledge of the large Scottish companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange – the numerous investment trusts, Distillers Co Ltd, John Brown and so on. He was promoted to the post of deputy City editor.
The London office of the Glasgow Herald was an active centre of many future leading figures. On one occasion a noisy junior was so irritating Mr Davies that he locked him in a room. The offender, Joe Haines, later became Harold Wilson’s press secretary at Number 10 and played an influential role in both of Wilson’s Labour administrations.
Mr Davies then spent a few years in the Scotsman’s City office before accepting the post of senior company reporter on the Telegraph in 1964. It was the era of major takeovers in the City and many companies were floated on the market. Mr Davies proved invaluable in assisting the Telegraph to expand its City and business coverage. He not only knew the background of the fast expanding companies but had excellent contacts with their chief executives. This wide experience of City practices made his appointment as the Telegraph’s City news editor totally appropriate. His analysis of a news story and the angle that should be pursued in its reporting was invariably sound and balanced.
Whereas Mr Davies enjoyed an understanding relationship with many senior industrial executives, he faced some annoying calls from the Daily Mirror’s Robert Maxwell. He delighted in ringing Mr Davies as deadlines approached to check what the City pages would run the next day.
Mr Davies was involved in the creation of the Telegraph’s popular Money Go Round section on a Saturday which was aimed at members of the public who were considering entering the financial services industry by investing in pension schemes and the like. Mr Davies, who retired in 1988, married Irene in 1949. She predeceased him and he is survived by their three sons.