Mike Morrissey obituary

My father, Mike Morrissey, who has died aged 96, received an unusual – yet ultimately prescient – piece of career advice. His English essays at school were routinely dismissed with a sniffy comment from his teacher: “journalese”. Years of hearing this supposed criticism left him in no doubt. A journalist he would be – and what a journalist he became. Born in Bradford, he was the eldest of four children of Jim, a paediatrician, and Winnifred. His father was killed at Dunkirk when Michael was 10 and he grew up with his mother and younger brothers, John and Paul, and sister, Jillian. He went to Downside, a Catholic school near Bath, on a “war-widow’s” scholarship. On leaving school at the end of the second world war, he was employed in junior positions at the Liverpool Echo and the Manchester Guardian. In the mid-1950s, he was offered a one-year contract with a newspaper in Australia. Not long after arriving, he realised he was working for a newspaper that today would be described as a red-top. He approached his editor and asked to be released from his contract; he spent the rest of the year freelancing. On his return to the UK, he met and in 1958 married Bernadette Kearns. Together t