Guardian journalist who played a pivotal role in the paper's successful move to London from Manchester
Brian Jones was a pivotal figure at three moments of Guardian history. He was one of the tiny band of Guardian subeditors who came to London from Manchester in 1961 and helped launch the London-printed editions of the paper: he literally brought the paper south. Five years later, as production editor, he oversaw a sweeping redesign of the old, staid Guardian as it struggled for survival in a hostile Fleet Street environment. And a decade after that, as northern editor and then deputy editor, he helped complete the move to London, ending separate publication in Manchester and helping secure the paper's future for a new era.
Brian, who has died aged 78, was a Guardian man when the paper needed him: a board member of Guardian newspapers in the turbulent 70s and the first director of the Guardian Foundation in the 90s. But he was also an influential journalist in his own right, editor of two famous regional newspapers – the Bath Evening Chronicle and the Bristol Evening Post – and a renowned teacher of journalism at home and abroad.
Brian was born in Liverpool and educated at King William's college, Isle of Man (the school that still sets the Guardian's ferocious Christmas quiz). For five years, after national service, he learned his trade, reporting and subediting on the Isle of Man Examiner, the Ilford Recorder and the Lancashire Evening Post before, in 1959, getting a job on the Guardian as it dropped "Manchester" from the masthead and prepared to sink or swim in alien but advertising-rich London. Alastair Hetherington, then the editor, rated him highly. He was a fast worker with "excellent news judgment" who "did not spare himself" (high praise from the Stakhanovite Hetherington). But Brian was more than a hard-working professional.
He was wonderfully calm in a crisis. He was companionable. Everyone who worked with him liked him. He was full of wry humour. Long, hard nights of producing the paper with Brian were simply enjoyable. His team often went home early in the morning as happy as if they had been to a good party. The controversial redesign after the days of near-merger and collapse in 1966 was a success because (while Hetherington havered for a time) he backed and delivered it. Brian then left to edit in Bath, but returned to the Guardian to take charge of its Manchester editions and, as it transpired, to end their separate identity when fate and continuing financial peril meant that I (as the very new editor) was required to close down most of the Manchester operation and make dozens of journalists redundant. I could not have done that without Brian. He was the man on the spot his journalists trusted. His word and his concern were manifest, and totally dependable.
After that, he came down to London himself, as one of my two deputy editors, cementing the move of offices and production to Farringdon Road and taking a place on the paper's board. But Brian, with four children and a wife he loved, all living too far away in Wiltshire, felt pulled in two directions. It was a human dilemma he could not resolve until, suddenly, he abandoned London and journalism and headed west for the first job he could find, in public relations. But it didn't work out. Divorce left Brian free to return to journalism and its grinding hours again. He became editor of the Bristol Evening Post for much of the 80s. And then, because he had always relished the training of future journalists, he made an international reputation for himself through his work for the Guardian Foundation throughout eastern Europe once the cold war had ended.
Brian eased himself away from newspapers in the late 90s to start a bookshop – Past Masters – in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, and to create a fresh life with his new partner, Fran. He wrote as well as sold books – on subjects as widely different as independent journalism in Romania and the history of Bath rugby club. It was a full life, cut short by a debilitating neurological disease, after which he used a wheelchair.
Brian was the best kind of journalist, a man who never made headlines himself but – honest, shrewd and caring – seemed to combine all the virtues of a regional experience with a professional decisiveness that ranked with Fleet Street's best. The Guardian owes him a debt; but so do many hundreds of writers and subs on papers far and wide who will remember him and his tutelage with gratitude and affection.
He is survived by Fran and his children.
• Brian Jones, journalist, born 10 January 1934; died 14 October 2012