A FORMER editor of The Press has died from cancer, aged 74.

David Kernek, better known to many including Press readers under his adopted surname of Flintham, was editor of four important regional daily newspapers - the then Yorkshire Evening Press, the Bath Evening Chronicle, the Brighton Evening Argus and the Northern Echo.

He was in charge of the York newspaper in the early 90s, just after it had moved from Coney Street to its current base in Walmgate.

David Nicholson, who succeeded him as editor in 1993, said:“When I followed him into the chair at York, he was very generous with advice for this newbie editor.

“He will be a big loss.”

Robert Beaumont, who was chief leader writer and chief feature writer under David, said he was one of the finest editors he had worked under.

"His intelligence, editorial judgement and writing skills marked him out as a first class journalist," he said.

"He was a joy to work with and was an extremely charismatic man. He loved his time in York and made many friends there."

David, who was born in London, lived in Bath with his wife, Diana Cambridge, who is also a journalist and writer, and their daughter Clare.

Allan Prosser, who worked with David, both as his editor and his managing director, said he was 'kind, considerate, witty and intelligent.'

He said: "He had very good political instincts and his direction and influence on that aspect of The Northern Echo’s coverage during the bitter and divisive miner’s strike of 1984-85 was full of clarity and consistency. I also remember him confounding Margaret Thatcher at a meeting when she turned on him and said ‘Well, I don’t know whose side you are on!’

“David was on the side of ordinary people, and against the pompous, the self-interested, and anyone he regarded as anti-democratic. He had an outstanding grasp of history and an impressively economic writing style in which every word earned its place. He tried to share this talent with many young journalists embarking on their careers.

“David’s mother, Greta, fled from Linz in Austria to London in 1939 as a 19-year-old to avoid the Holocaust. By the war’s end, she was a young mother ― and a penniless, stateless “enemy alien” ― living with a toddler in the home of a man who had employed her as housekeeper.

"When she became pregnant by him, David, the new arrival was put up for adoption after she made an unsuccessful attempt at abortion. David did not meet his birth mother for 45 years and, when he did, he began using her family name, Kernek.

“David was a journalism fellow of the University of Minnesota and spent a year in the United States. This encouraged at least two dominant interests in his life: photography, at which he excelled, and a love of the Rolling Stones, about whom he had an encyclopaedic knowledge, particularly of their Blues roots.

“After retirement his energy and love for journalism could not be contained and he launched and maintained a hyper-local news website, The Bath Telegraph, which took a wry look at the activities of local authorities and statutory bodies."