Chief Reporter MIKE LAYCOCK today marks 30 years’ service at The Press. Here he recalls some of the more memorable stories he has covered – and reflects on the changes York has seen since 1984.

THE biggest stories often began with a call in the middle of the night. I would groggily reach for the phone to be told something had happened which would change the world – or at least some people’s world – for ever, and could I come in to help tell the story?

Well yes, no journalist ever wants to miss the big one, although annoyingly I arrived in York six months too late to cover the Minster fire.

I had just gone to sleep one night in 1991 when my deputy news editor rang to say the Gulf War had started. I thought she said: “They’ve dropped The Bomb,” and for a scary moment believed it had gone straight to nuclear, before she clarified matters: “No, a bomb.”

We gathered at the office and worked through the night to bring out a war special, monitoring the TV and radio channels and ringing those people we dared to wake in the early hours for their opinions.

Another night in 1997, I had a call at about 5am from my editor, telling me Princess Di had been badly injured in a crash in Paris and we were going to bring out a Sunday edition. By the time I got to the office, Diana was dead. Again, we had to call the great and the good to tell them the news and ask for their reactions. I remember a colleague ringing a North Yorkshire MP to be greeted by a rant along the lines of: “What the ******* **** are you doing ringing me at this ******* time of night?”

When he found out why, he apologised and immediately paid a shocked tribute to the Princess.

I headed out into York at about 7.30am to do a vox pop, wanting to test the public’s initial reaction. I started speaking to a woman before I realised she was in floods of tears. I thought perhaps she'd had a row with her partner and apologised for bothering her. No, she said, I’m crying because I’ve heard Di is dead.

It was only then that I really began to comprehend just how big a story this was going to be. Later, when our news vendor set up his stall in Parliament Street, a queue developed along the street, of tourists, shoppers and residents, desperate to read about the tragedy.

Another wake-up call came at about 6.45 am on February 28, 2001. My news editor said someone had called the paper to say her husband had rung her from a train which had crashed near Selby. He was okay but others were badly injured, and some might have died.

I threw some clothes on – not enough as it turned out later – and drove to Great Heck as fast as I could, becoming one of the first reporters to arrive. I will never forget the surreal scene that greeted me: fire engines, ambulances, police cars everywhere, a helicopter taking off, and the twisted, shattered carriages of a GNER express train lying strewn across a field.

It was impossible to tell how many people had died but it looked as if it could be dozens or scores. The eventual toll of ten dead and 80 injured was terrible but it could have been so much worse: the best possible tribute to the strength of the carriages’ construction.

It was a bitterly cold day and I became almost hypothermic as I trudged round the village, gathering reactions, and then joined a melee of some 80 reporters on the railway bridge asDeputy Prime Minister John Prescott arrived to give an impromptu press conference.

I was soaked like a drowned rat as well as cold when I met Prime Minister Tony Blair during the floods and torrential rains of November 2000. The PM was flown in and whisked to the Foss Flood Barrier in a limousine. I ran down to the barrier through rain-lashed streets. I wanted to present a dossier about the newspaper’s campaign to save Ryedale from flooding, which I had been running for the past month.

Spotting Alistair Campbell, I took a deep breath and asked if there was any chance of a quick presentation to the PM, maybe away from the rest of the press mob. Campbell was eerily pleasant, and I soon found myself inside the building, handing the dripping dossier over to a bemused-looking Blair. Ryedale eventually got its flood defences and I'm proud The Press played its part in helping the community win them.

It's also been good to have been involved in campaigns over the years which have helped make York and the UK a slightly better place, for example by closing a loophole in the law on child abduction, raising funds to create a lasting memorial to those who served and died in Afghanistan, raising awareness of poverty in York and reducing the toll of deaths and injuries through accidents on the A64.

York then

THE author LP Hartley wrote: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Well, York was certainly a different city, and people did things very differently, when I arrived at The Yorkshire Evening Press on December 10, 1984, to start work as a reporter.

There was no Barbican auditorium, CPP, Grand Opera House, Monks Cross retail park, Designer Outlet, Outer Ring Road, City Screen Cinema, York St John University, Novotel, Vue Cinema or Hilton Hotel. But there was a huge train-making factory and a shock absorber factory, a Terry’s chocolate factory and another one run by Rowntree, a Leak and Thorp department store, and an ABC cinema and there was traffic weaving past shoppers all day long in Coney Street and Parliament Street.

And as for the newspaper’s headquarters in Coney Street – well, that really was a different, analogue world. I entered a nicotine-stained, smoke-filled newsroom full of clattering typewriters, with stories hammered out two paragraphs to the page.

Deeper into the bowels of the building – nowadays the riverside home of City Screen – were the roaring presses, frankly well past their best, printing a broadsheet newspaper full of fuzzy black and white pictures but also live stories as they broke through the day.

Was York a better or a worse place to live? Well, if you had a job with an average wage, you could at least afford to buy your own home in the 1980s. I could buy an admittedly small and rather dilapidated two-bedroomed house in Bishophill for £17,850 – about two and a half times my salary. But unemployment was considerably higher – far worse in York than the national average in those days, as the city’s traditional industries shed jobs. And the city was culturally a shadow of the thriving, cosmopolitan centre it is today, with its superb venues for live theatre and music, exhibitions and festivals.

And The Press? Well, I miss the rolling presses thundering away, and the late edition which could be out on the streets by mid-afternoon with a story which only broke at noon, and I miss the colleagues who have left, in some cases before they would have wished. But the digital revolution, with its computers, internet, mobiles, smart phones, Facebook and Twitter, has brought its own opportunities and excitement, opening up a whole new way of breaking the news as soon as it happens.

And despite the technological changes, the job, at its heart, remains the same: telling the people of York what is happening in their city, and where it’s happening, and how, and why, and it’s a job I love.

The Press has a vital role to play in keeping its residents informed, aware and involved, as well as challenging, questioning and scrutinising those in power, and long may it continue that way.