Eric Gordon

I WOULDN’T be writing this column and you wouldn’t be reading if it wasn’t for the man who founded our newspaper more than 1,000 editions ago.

The Westminster Extra – or the West End Extra as it was first known – was let loose by Eric Gordon, an editor who saw the importance of local newspapers and how they could change lives.

Wednesday marked the second anniversary of his death, a moment of reflection for so many of his former colleagues and friends of the paper. Maybe it was for some of his old adversaries too; those who had come to respect his dogged determination.

These two years have flashed by and everybody in our news room presses on as the collective custodians of the papers he had imagined.

The Westminster paper had begun as a ‘slip’ in the Camden New Journal, the award-winning weekly in the neighbouring borough, but – as Eric probably always thought might be the case – it proved too popular to be contained there and became the newspaper for Westminster in its own right.

An editor who was still wielding his red pen into his 80s, Eric had proved to be an inspirational mentor to a whole cast of journalists.

That’s not to say he couldn’t be a cantankerous man to work with, sometimes cartoonishly grumpy, even annoying.

He was, however, usually right.

The idea was never to get rich or work to make profits for distant shareholders. He championed the newspaper’s independence from the big conglomerates and, despite the thinnest of budgets, led a title which punched its weight.

Time marches on, and the paper has had to adapt to the changing conditions. But whatever route it takes, Eric’s gruff but avuncular voice still guides everything we do.