Michael Jamieson, former multi-award winning feature writer on the Evening Chronicle, has died aged 88.
Mike was well-known in the North East in the late 1980s and 1990s for his groundbreaking Greenwatch environmental column and his weekly jazz-blue-roots music column, both published in the Chronicle.
Greenwatch won him seven awards, three of them national, and the music column ran for 17 years, until 2003.
The campaigning Greenwatch was the first of its kind in the regional press at a time when the environment was still a novel topic in the British media.
As a result of its local fame Mike was co-opted onto the Newcastle Gateshead Initiative’s environmental committee and brought in to lecture to environmental students at Sunderland University.
Mike’s varied journalistic career included sub-editing on national newspapers as well as the Chronicle, and feature writing and sub-editing on sister paper The Journal.
As a fluent German speaker he worked for four years as journalist-translator on Germany’s national news agency, DPA, in Hamburg, and for about two years was news writer/radio news presenter at the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation’s English language shortwave service in the Swiss capital, Bern.
From 1994 until his retirement in 2003, Mike ran his own successful one-man media consultancy, producing publications and press releases for a variety of organisations, including the Newcastle City Council-led East End Regeneration Project.
A memoir he wrote about his National Service was published as a 22-part series titled Last of the National Servicemen in online publication North East Bylines.
Journalism apart, Mike played harmonica with several local groups and, in a bill announcing his blues playing at a concert at Newcastle’s Live Theatre, was proud to be described as a “virtuoso harmonica player”.
He was also proficient on the piano when playing Great American Songbook and Duke Ellington numbers, though he didn’t perform in public and in later life, due to osteoporosis, sitting at the piano became too painful.
Mike, who lived in South Gosforth, leaves a wife, Wendy (well known in the North East as a psychotherapist under her professional name, Wendy Burrows), a daughter and son, a stepson and three grandchildren.
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