My former colleague Charles Levitt, who has died aged 83, was an inspiration to scores of young journalists throughout his long career. He was a newsman to his core and spent his working life writing and broadcasting with consummate skill. His shorthand was so accurate he once read it upside down during a live news bulletin.
Charles was born in March, Cambridgeshire, the only child of Percy and Olive. He left school at 15 and started work at the Ely office of the Cambridgeshire Times. On his way to work one morning the 19-year-old witnessed a dramatic event that almost killed him. Later he recalled "a small plane fell silently out of the sky a few hundred yards in front of me, hit the top of a building tearing off the wings, flopped onto the street, skidded and slid into a shop, shearing off the tail fin. I ran into the shop to find the pilot dead. Being first with the story is every journalist's aim, but I worked on a weekly paper which had gone to press that morning so the story appeared a week later, having run in all the nationals the following day."
Continue reading...