Press photographer Garry Atkinson is about to stand down after almost 40 years with the newspaper. STEPHEN LEWIS looks back at his award-winning career.

THE porter at York Railway Station must have wondered what on Earth was going on. An ordinary-looking man in a checked jacket, open-necked shirt and light-coloured slacks was boarding a train for London. And for some reason, a photographer from the Yorkshire Evening Press was taking a great deal of interest in him.

That photographer was Garry Atkinson. You can see the bemusement on the face of the porter in the background.

And the man Garry was making such a fuss about? None other than Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon.

After almost 40 years as a photographer at The Press, during which he has met and photographed prime ministers and royalty, The Pope (during a visit to Knavesmire) and comedy legends galore, those brief minutes minutes with the first human being in history to have set foot on another world still rank high in Garry's list of memorable moments.

The astronaut, who passed away a couple of years ago, was famously private. And when Garry and reporter Andrew Hitchon turned up at York Railway Station in 1999 after hearing that he and his wife were to catch a train to London, they thought they were going to be disappointed. "I have to tell you guys I don't do interviews," Armstrong said, when Andrew introduced himself.

For a moment, says Garry, there was just the sound of those feet that had once walked on the moon echoing along the platform. Then the astronaut relented. He chatted to Andrew as he and his wife walked to their carriage about their love of England, and what they were doing in York. And then, when an awestruck Garry plucked up courage to ask for a photograph, he was all courtesy. "Certainly", he said - and posed for Garry in the door of the carriage .

"He was so nice," Garry recalls. "You occasionally get to meet your heroes in this job, and when they live up to your expectations, that's lovely."

Next week, after almost 40 years, Garry will take his leave of The Press. For his colleagues, it feels very much like the end of an era.

The 58-year-old joined the then Yorkshire Evening Press as an indentured apprentice in August 1974 straight from doing his A-levels at Tadcaster Grammar. He went for a couple of interviews - including for a job at Rowntrees - but decided he didn't want to work in an office.

When he saw the advert for an apprentice photographer, he thought it looked interesting. After being interviewed by the newspaper's chief photographer Fred Spencer and the deputy editor Don Wilkinson, he was taken on - even though he admitted he had only ever taken one photograph in his life before. "Fred Spencer didn't want a David Bailey, he wanted someone he could train in his own way," Garry says.

Garry has taken thousands of photographs in the nearly 40 years since - and has picked up hatfuls of awards along the way.

He was there on May 31, 1982 - a Bank Holiday Monday - when Pope John Paul II visited York. More than 200,000 people crowded onto the Knavesmire that day. Garry got there early, and had a prime position on a scaffolding tower: but was still overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. "It was extraordinary," he says.

When the great floods of 2000 hit York, he went out with a man who had a rubber boat. They rowed up a street in Fulford that had been inundated, and the boat's owner got out to inspect some flooded cars. The rain was torrential - you can see the drops spitting up from the surface of the water in Garry's photograph. But the resulting picture - one of his many award-winners - puts you right at the scene.

Garry was naturally in the press pack on April 6, 2001, when Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie arrived for the re-opening of the Jorvik Viking Centre after a refit: but managed to step back from the press of photographers long enough to get an extraordinary picture of Cherie photographing her husband. "It gives you the sense of what a media scrum is like," he says of the image.

One of his most memorable jobs was attending the World Hot Air Balloon Championships at Castle Howard in the 1970s. It was the first - and last - time they were held here. The weather saw to that, says Garry: it rained and blustered almost continuously apart from the one day he was there.

He managed to get a stunning photograph of 30 or 40 hot air balloons being inflated to the roar of scores of burners, while light shafted down from a broken sky above. The assembled press photographers then drew lots to see who could go up in a balloon - and Garry won. It was a beautiful summer evening, and once they had risen high into the air, the person with him suggested he look down through gaps in the basket. He did so: and there, about a mile below he says, he saw Castle Howard.

Another photograph - this one nominated for a prestigious industry photograph award - also showed a hot air balloon. Astonishingly, it was taken inside a cooling tower at a power station near York. The photograph is amazing, showing the balloon rising up past the smooth inner walls of the tower towards the daylight beckoning above.

It is in the nature of a press photographer's job that, over the last 40 years, Garry has had to attend some dreadful tragedies. He was at Lockerbie: and, in January 1989, he was detailed to drive down to Leicestershire when British Midland Flight 92 crashed onto the embankment of the M1 motorway near Kegworth in Leicestershire. Forty-seven people died that day and 74, including seven members of the flight crew, sustained serious injuries.

Without doubt the most traumatic incident he ever photographed, however, was the Hillsborough disaster. He'd gone along that day as the friend of Press Association photographer John Giles just to watch the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

As the tragic events unfolded, as fans began spilling over the fence at the far end of the ground from where he was sitting, he found himself almost numbed, unable to take in what was happening. He knew it was serious: but it wasn't until later that he realised people had actually died that day.

Not knowing what to do, not wanting to get in anyone's way, he reverted to being a journalist, and took a photograph with a telephoto lens. It showed three ordinary fans, their faces creased with shock and dismay, desperately performing CPR on a friend lying on the pitch. He took it because he wanted to show the efforts that ordinary people made to help their friends, he says. But it was deemed too sensitive to print at the time: and it is still too raw and too sensitive to print even today.

It has been an interesting life, says Garry. People sometimes ask him how he could have stayed in the same job for nearly 40 years. If it had been an office job, he wouldn't have done, he says.

But the thing about being a press photographer is that you never known from day to day, what you will be doing next. "You just never know what's going to happen."

And his favourite photograph from all those years? Impossible to say: but he rates pretty highly his picture of the Duke of Edinburgh apparently being pursued by a T Rex. It was taken in July 2000 when the Queen and Prince Philip visited an exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum. Garry spotted the dinosaur, and positioned himself ready for the royal couple's arrival in the room. He had literally seconds to get the picture: but it won him another award, and a round of applause on awards night when the image was projected on a screen as he went to collect his piece of silverware.

“That was a great moment,” he says.