Mike Terry

Mike Terry, who died on August 29 aged 86, was a journalist of the sort that has now all but disappeared from Fleet Street; many of the tales told about him involved his glass eye – a legacy of the war – staring up from the bottom of someone else’s pint glass.

His career inside the office reached its peak in the 1960s, when he was one of the gifted young editorial figures on Hugh Cudlipp’s Daily Mirror who took tabloid newspapers into the hitherto uncharted territory of in-depth news and features. Terry did so first as the Mirror’s features editor, a pivotal post in the paper’s campaign to show its new ambition, and then as its Northern editor.

Mike Terry, as presented in The Sun after the bingo catastrophe

 

His career beyond the office – usually in the Mirror pub known as The Stab in the Back – was just as celebrated. One colleague recalled being joined by Terry at The Stab. Asked what he wanted to drink, Terry replied: “I’ll have a double brandy and a vodka and Scotch with some ginger ale, and not too much ginger ale.” Having explained that he wanted this concoction in one glass, Terry then added: “When I drink this I may go a bit of a funny colour. I’m taking these tablets to stop me drinking. Take no notice.”

During such hard-drinking sessions Terry would frequently remove his glass eye and drop it into a pint of beer. Occasionally he would forget it in the Gents. Either way, it provoked shouts of anguish from whichever unlucky soul discovered it leering up at him.

Such excesses took their toll, and Terry was fired from the Mirror in 1970. He then found a sub-editing berth on the Sun, gave up the drink, and passed on the fruits of his undoubted charm, talent and experience with unfailing good humour. He did, however, make one notorious cock-up.

This occurred due to an uncharacteristic failure to check the paper’s bingo numbers. The subsequent misprint, on May 19 1984, left 3,000 Sun readers under the impression that they had scooped the top prize of £40,000. One hired a Rolls-Royce to arrive at the paper’s office and claim his “prize”. It was typical of Terry’s good grace that, to assuage readers’ ire, he agreed to appear in an apology wearing a dunce’s cap, under the headline “I’m the Bingo bungler”.

Michael Dungate Terry was born on February 15 1925 in Findon Valley, at the foot of the South Downs. His father, Thomas, a barrel-chested Sussex yeoman who had served in the trenches through most of the First World War, was a stained-glass craftsman. His mother, Ella, had been a nurse. Michael, an only child, attended Worthing Grammar School, but left when his father’s business went bankrupt to start his career in journalism on the Worthing Herald.
Aged 18 he joined the Wiltshire Regiment, where he served as a lieutenant. After D-Day he was involved in fierce fighting around the village of Tilly-Sur-Seulles. After one patrol was cut down by a booby trap, Terry led a platoon to see if there were any survivors, only to trigger a landmine; he lost his right eye in the blast and sustained shrapnel injuries so severe that doctors thought he would not walk again. Despite his wounds he managed to drag one injured soldier back behind the lines, but the rest of his platoon was killed in the explosion.
After the war he remained briefly in the Army before rejoining the Worthing Herald. He then moved to London, working at The South London Chronicle, the Evening News and the News Chronicle. Once, when short of copy for the Evening News’s gossip column, Terry bought a box of live crustaceans from Billingsgate and released them in Mayfair. The story ran with the headline: “Crabs In Curzon Street”.
There was more to him than drinking, crabs and bungled bingo: Terry had a love of poetry and recited beautifully in his rounded baritone. It was a voice he also deployed to great effect while bashing out songs by Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Bill Broonzy at the bars of packed pubs.
He never lost his love of jazz, nor of lone country hikes. One such ramble almost ended in disaster when he fell while descending Great Gable, in the Lake District, after nightfall. Coming to in the dark, bleeding from a cut head and not knowing if he had landed on a precipice, he decided that the safest course of action was to stay awake until daybreak. To keep himself going he set about reciting every piece of Shakespeare he knew. Several hours later he still had not reached the end of his repertoire when dawn enabled him to complete the descent in safety.
He retired to Hook Norton in Oxfordshire in 1988 after helping see The Sun through its troubled move to Wapping.

Mike Terry married Sheila Latham in 1952. She died in 2004, and he is survived by their daughter and by two sons, both of whom work in journalism.