IN Illinois that year, the six surviving veterans of the American Civil War gathered for their final reunion, while in New York RCA introduced the 45 rpm record. In Evesham, England, Gerry Barnett arrived on his bike for his first day as a junior reporter on the Evesham Journal and Four Shires Advertiser. It was 1949.

Sixty years later – although he’s been a few places in between – Gerry is still there, making him by some distance the longest-serving scribe in local journalism in these parts.

For nearly as long, he’s been married to Margaret (57 years) and run a pheasant, partridge and duck shoot at Hinton-on-the-Green (50 years). Two other achievements almost as remarkable in the trade in which he has made his living.

There aren’t many gamekeeper/journalists.

But there again, Gerry Barnett is not your average reporter. He has been chairman of Wychavon District Council, the first chairman of Evesham and Pershore Housing Association, chairman of Wychavon Festival of Brass and a middle school governor for 25 years among a whole raft of public service posts. He’s seen local life from the inside as well as the out.

Now aged 77, he still does three days a week in the newsroom of your Worcester News’ sister paper the Evesham Journal and the tall, distinguished figure, hovering notebook in hand, is still a familiar sight on the patch.

But it didn’t start out that way, because the young Barnett wanted to be a policeman. When he failed the medical because he needed glasses – no coppers wore specs in those days – his careers teacher at Prince Henry’s Grammar School in Evesham suggested he try for the sports reporter vacancy the Journal was advertising.

Gerry said: “I was interested in sport so I thought I’d give it a go.”

Sixty years on he’s still giving it a go. His first sports job was covering the game between Evesham United and Evesham Town Amateurs.

He recalled: “United won 21-0, which led to the inevitable headline Key of the Door for United” – sub editors being an everinventive species.

But alongside the football and cricket matches and other assorted sports, Gerry had to cope with the flotsam and jetsam of life as a junior reporter.

He said: “The first thing I had to do every day was call on the local undertakers, who would give me the obituary forms of anyone who had passed on since my last visit.

There was great competition in the town with the other paper, the Evesham Standard, over reporting things like this, getting names in the paper. I remember I used to call at the wakes straight after the funerals to pick up the list of mourners – and often I got asked in for a nice ham tea, too.”

Although to outsiders Evesham might not necessarily have appeared a hotbed of front page news, there was enough to keep a young journalist busy. Notably when a circus lion ate its trainer on Crown Meadow, six people were killed in a car crash and after a row with his girlfriend, a young lad shot himself on her doorstep.

Considerably less exciting was National Service in the RAF.

“I completed it without ever seeing a real plane or being posted further than RAF Credenhill in Herefordshire,” said Gerry, whose writing skills were put to use as an organisational clerk for the duration.

Had they known, the military could also have engaged his talent as a shooter. Gerry said: “My father worked on a farm and one of his specialities was catching rabbits. I grew up learning all about snares and traps and nets and ferreting.

A rabbit for the pot was a godsend during the war when meat was short.”

Gerry was given his first shotgun, a little .410, when he was 10 and he’s owned assorted shotguns ever since. For more than 50 years he’s run a private shoot on land at Hinton-on-the-Green, near Evesham. He said: “Nothing too professional. Just 16 friends.”

Nevertheless, its Boxing Day shoot has become such a tradition that last year the event featured in a glossy magazine.

Gerry said: “I don’t shoot so much myself nowadays. I prefer to concentrate more on the rearing and the gamekeepering side.”

Returning from National Service, he worked for the Journal series in Evesham and Tewkesbury until 1958, when he joined the Gloucestershire Echo and spent 34 years as its reporter covering Evesham and the Cotswolds. After his year heading Wychavon District Council, he rejoined the staff of the Journal in 1993 and has been there ever since.

The day I had enough of Sir Gerald's annoying antics and staged a walk-out at his meeting

INEVITABLY over the years there have been characters. Few larger than life than the maverick and flamboyant member of Parliament for South Worcestershire, Sir Gerald Nabarro.

Gerry said: “Nab was a great one for publicity. He was always on the phone telling you what he had done or what he was about to do.

He would go to any lengths as well.

“I remember he was particularly keen we use a piece about something he was doing with local growers, but they were having difficulty organising a time to get together. Eventually I ended up at the Lygon Arms in Broadway at midnight on a Saturday, which was the only time they could meet.

“He had a really annoying habit though. He liked using long words and sometimes during his speeches he would spell them out ‘for the benefit of the members of the Press’. He must have thought it was clever, but I didn’t like it. It made you look silly. It got to such a stage I told him that if he did it again, I would walk out.

“Not long after he was addressing a meeting at the Three Tuns Hotel in Pershore when he started spelling a word out. I had pre-warned my two Press colleagues who were there and all three of us got up and left. Mind you, it was a long way to the door. To his credit Nab apologised afterwards.”

It took a brave man to face down Sir Gerald Nabarro, but then Gerry Barnett is not your average journalist.

He’s a survivor and a record breaker, too.