'Backroom boy' of newspapers dies aged 91

May 23 2009 by Rob Pattinson, The Journal

One of the Journal and Evening Chronicle's most experienced and longest-serving 'back-room boys' has died aged 91 following a 51-year career with the newspapers - broken only by his wartime service and five years spent as a Prisoner of War.

He was even tracked down after the war by a fellow P.O.W camp inmate whose only clue to his whereabouts was the chorus of the Geordie Anthem 'Blaydon Races'. And he helped smuggle a German nun out from under the noses of Soviet Russian soldiers.

David Massey - almost universally known as Dave - joined the Evening Chronicle and Journal as a messenger aged 14 in the 1930s and trained as a photographic engraver in a department which he oversaw for 14 years before his retirement in December 1982, aged 65. He also worked overtime on the Sunday Sun.

He was brought up the eldest of four brothers in the village of Lemington in Northumberland where he attended Sugley Church of England School. As a talented footballer, he was school football captain and represented his area, Newburn and District, in many matches.

By 1939 he had notched up a local league medal and a Northumberland County championship win with Bell's Close.

Mr Massey joined the Evening Chronicle and Journal in 1932 as a 14-year-old messenger at the height of a legendary Tyneside newspaper war between the Evening Chronicle and then newcomer Evening World.

The bitter battle saw rival paper lorries thundering head to head through the cobbled streets to be first with the news from the presses to the news-stands, and led to a fair few 'dirty tricks' along the way as each side sought to sabotage the opposition.

Within weeks of his starting, the Evening World had folded.

At 16 he was offered the choice of training as a journalist, or as a photographic engraver converting photographs into a printable format - a job dubbed 'the aristocracy of the print' because of its highly skilled nature and long apprenticeship.

Having quickly established the vast difference in pay between journalists and the princely printers - a situation which continued largely until the 1980s - he decided to accept the five year indentured apprenticeship as a photographic engraver which he completed just as the Second World War

began.

In 1940, aged 22, he was called up into the Tyneside Scottish Regiment of

the Black Watch and sent with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to

Northern France, while his job was held-open for the duration of the war,

should he survive.

In May 1940 - exactly 69 years ago - He took part in the last major

counter-offensive by the British against the German invaders around the

French town of Arras, where they faced attack from tanks commanded by

German Panzer tactical genius and 'father of the Blitzkrieg' Heinz

Guderian, a rising but as yet unknown star called Rommel, and an SS

Totenkopf division.

After giving the Germans 'a bloody nose' but lacking sufficient

reinforcements, his units threw everything they had at the enemy before

being encircled just as the rest of the BEF was ordered to make its escape

and retreat to Dunkirk where the miraculous evacuation took place.

Cut off and officially posted 'missing in action' (it's in your cuts

somewhere) , Mr Massey was captured in late May 1940 and force-marched to

Germany as a prisoner of war. From there he was transported to Poland in

cattle truck trains and put to work road-making, stone quarrying,

lumberjacking and labouring in lime quarries and kilns, surviving on meagre

rations and the contents of much-valued Red Cross parcels.

Tragically he also saw colleagues shot by guards in the camps or on work

details, though he also spoke of lethal retribution taken by POWs of all

nationalities to secure rough justice through staged 'accidents' against

those judged guilty of war crimes. He also recounted how on work details

he had seen German army trucks enter Polish villages where women and

children were roughly rounded up sent off in one direction - and the men

in another.

Much of his five years of captivity was spent in Stalag 8b in Silesia -

dubbed in some histories as 'Hell Camp' because of the tough conditions.

He was nicknamed 'The Demon Barber' for his role as camp hair cutter.

In January 1945 he was again force-marched by the, this time retreating,

Germans, until overrun by Soviet Russian troops in Eastern Germany in

May. (This little known episode of the war has been dramatically chronicled

by John Nichol, the former RAF flight lieutenant from the North East who

became a POW after his Tornado was shot down in the first Gulf War, in his

book 'The Last Escape: the untold story of Allied prisoners of war in

Germany 1944-5').

Badly injured in hospital - and, he always maintained, effectively held

'hostage' by the Russians who wanted the British authorities to return to

them for execution the 'anti-Bolshevik' Cossacks who had fought with the

Nazis - Mr Massey and his colleagues were eventually released to the

Americans. But even this was not without incident. As they were transferred

from the Soviet to the American occupation zone, he and his colleagues

smuggled out in their truck - by sitting on top of her as she lay along the

bench - a German nun, who had tended them in hospital, to help her escape

an otherwise almost certain fate.

After a period of recuperation he rejoined the Newcastle newspapers in

1945.

But there was a final twist. One of his German POW camp colleagues,

Londoner Alec Jay (father of former Sunday Times City Editor John Jay) ,

tracked him down some years after the war by arriving at Newcastle Central

Station on a business trip and remembering the line about 'Scotswood Road'

from the Geordie anthem Blaydon Races. Mr Massey had never lived in

Scotswood Road, but some of the people Mr Jay encountered on it pointed him

towards Lemington village where the Massey family indeed lived. The reunion

story of the pair - who had last seen each other on a working party at

Setsdorf POW camp in the Sudentenland in 1943 - was covered at the time in

the Chronicle under the headline: ''Blaydon Races' gave the clue'.

Mr Massey was a keen golfer at Westerhope Golf Club and, with his late wife

Irene, a talented bowls player at Benwell Hodgkin and Summerhill Bowls

clubs in Newcastle. In 1958 he won the national Hastings Open pairs

competition.

After the war Mr Massey and his family lived in Benwell before moving in

the 1960s to Chapel House. Nine years ago Mr Massey moved South to Surrey

to be closer to his immediate family.

He is survived by his son Ray, Transport Editor of the Daily Mail (who for

three years to age 16 was also a Saturday newsroom messenger on the Evening

Chronicle and football Pink), his daughter in law Elizabeth, and his

grandsons Cameron,11, and Aidan, 8, with whom he spent his latter years in

Surrey.

Between them, David and Ray Massey have clocked up 78 years of continuous

service in the newspaper industry.