AFTER 53 years running one of the UK's oldest news agencies, providing court stories for countless newspapers including The Forest and Wye Valley Review, veteran freelance journalist John Hawkins has finally called it a day and closed his notebook for the last time.


Recent ill health and ongoing medical treatment have prompted John, 73, to wind up the Gloucestershire News Service just four years short of its centenary.


John’s career started in 1967 when, aged 16, he was recruited straight from Gloucester’s Central Technical School for Boys to become a trainee reporter at the agency.

Five years later his boss Jimmy Hyett, who founded the business in 1928, sold it to him.


He had been well trained as a reporter by that time – he gained a distinction in the proficiency test of the NCTJ (the National Council for the Training of Journalists) and won the South West Young Journalist of the Year competition.


During the ensuing half century in business John – who served for several years as chairman of the Gloucestershire branch of the National Union of Journalists and is now an honorary life member of the union – recruited and trained many young reporters who went on to successful careers in newspapers, radio and TV and public relations.


One of John’s staff did not move away from Gloucester to pursue a career, however – she became his wife! He and Jan, his first employee, were married in 1975 and have two sons and two grandchildren.


Another of John’s early proteges, Ian Bailey, who worked for GNS in the late Seventies and lived in Newent, went on to become the most famous of all his ex-employees – albeit for all the wrong reasons.

After leaving the agency in 1978 and working for some years as a freelance journalist in the UK, Bailey moved to Ireland, where in 1996 he became the only suspect in a high profile murder investigation.


Irish police believed Bailey had killed Sophie Toscan du Plantier, the 39-year-old wife of a famous French film director, at her clifftop holiday home in County Cork, but there was never enough evidence to prosecute.

This did not deter the French justice system, however, and in 2019 Bailey was tried in France – in his absence – and convicted of the murder.

Bailey continued to protest his innocence until his death from a heart attack last year.


John’s memories of Bailey’s time at GNS have led to him being interviewed several times by Irish media and taking part in the award winning podcast West Cork.


Over the years John and his staff unearthed and covered numerous national and international news stories in Gloucestershire – the biggest of which was the horrific case of mass killers Fred and Rose West, who together tortured and murdered ten girls and young women, including daughter Heather, who is buried in Tintern churchyard.


For three months in 1994, as the buried bodies of the victims were found at the evil couple’s Cromwell Street home and two other locations, including a field in Kempley on the edge of the Forest of Dean, the city was besieged by the media, and John and his staff provided dozens of visiting reporters with a base in the agency’s small city centre offices.

"It was by far the busiest and most demanding period in the agency's history," said John. "We were at the epicentre of events which made headlines around the world and because of our local contacts we were able to provide the national and international press with a lot of background information about Fred and Rose, as well as covering every police press conference and development in the search for the victims.


“Our small attic room offices were inundated with both UK and foreign journalists who wanted a base close to Cromwell Street. It was so crowded that some had to sit on the stairs or even on the loo to work on their laptops.”


Recalling the agency’s work on the West case, John said "Because of British reporting laws, the details that emerged from local magistrates court hearings after the couple were charged could not legally be reported in the UK – but this was no problem for foreign newspapers, which were eager for every scrap of information they could get hold of.


"My then business partner Jeff Weaver and I covered all the court proceedings and supplied full reports to media organisations in countries including the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany and Ireland, where the full allegations against the Wests were published long before the British public was allowed to know anything about them."

One of John's earliest assignments as a 16-year-old cub reporter in early 1968 concerned the mystery disappearance of a 15-year-old girl who, it was suspected many years later, was probably one of the West victims.

Mary Bastholm was standing at a bus stop in Bristol Road, Gloucester on a snowy January afternoon when she vanished.

She had been on her way to her boyfriend's house and she was carrying a Monopoly set. Pieces from the set were found at the bus stop but the ensuing police search drew a blank and her fate was never discovered.

John recalls standing in the snow in Bristol Road watching as police combed the area around the bus stop and divers descended into the nearby Sharpness Canal to search for Mary.

When the Wests were arrested more than a quarter of a century later, Fred was asked repeatedly by the police if Mary had been one of his victims – but he refused say.

Her body has never been found and her surviving friends and family still do not have closure.

“It’s a mystery that has remained unsolved throughout my working life and I doubt now that we will ever know the truth about her fate,” said John.

When John started work, the disseminating of news stories to the media was a slow and laborious process.

Every report had to be dictated over the phone individually to 'copytakers' at each of the national and regional newspapers in turn, as well as the regional TV newsrooms. Filing one story could take an hour or more, depending on the speed of the copytakers.

Later, a Telex machine became the agency’s first electronic means of sending out reports – but still at a very slow rate, as it could dispatch to one recipient at a time.

Then the computer era dawned and over the course of the next few years it became possible for an almost unlimited of stories to be dispatched each day.

"At first we found it incredible that we could write a report and send it to numerous news desks at the press of a button," said John. "Nowadays we all take the speed of electronic communication for granted.

“It's astonishing how much that has changed in my lifetime – my boss Mr Hyett told me that not many years before I started work he had to take a basket of homing pigeons with him when he went to cover local cricket and rugby matches.

“The birds would carry his handwritten reports back to the local newspaper office because there was no public phone near the venue for him to use!”

John’s career included 20 years commentating on Gloucester Rugby Club matches, both home and away, for local radio stations.

Some club grounds offered reporting facilities that were far from ideal. At one club in South Wales, John found that the socket for his BBC microphone was on the roof of the grandstand, exposed to the elements.

With nowhere to shelter, John had to commentate throughout the match as snow and sleet descended upon him

And at a London club, John discovered that the microphone socket was inside a cupboard in the bar – making live commentary of the action impossible.

John also covered Gloucester Rugby’s home matches for many years for most of the national Sunday newspapers.

He recalls sitting in the Kingsholm press bench rubbing shoulders with former rugby stars who had become media pundits – among them Welsh legend Barry John, former England and British Lion prop Mike Burton, and Gloucester’s record points scorer Peter Butler, who won two England caps.

John also worked for many years in his early career as the official shorthand writer for the local bankruptcy court and as public relations and press officer for the Gloucestershire branch of the National Farmers’ Union.

The agency’s core activities, however, were always to provide full coverage of Gloucester Crown Court, as well as local magistrates courts, industrial tribunals and inquests.

John and his reporters were also regularly commissioned by national papers to cover breaking stories around the county, often involving Royalty, because Prince Charles, Princess Anne and Prince Michael of Kent all had their homes in Gloucestershire.

Attending polo matches at Earl Bathurst’s Cirencester Park became one of John’s regular assignments in the 1990s when Princes William and Harry were children, and frequently went to matches, often with their mother Princess Diana, to watch their father play.

National newspapers had an insatiable appetite for news and pictures of the Royal youngsters and their mum at that time, and John was commissioned by the Press Association for several years to cover every polo match they attended.

In 2003, the Princes were involved in an incident on the Cirencester Park estate that led to John getting a Royal ‘scoop.’

The brothers had been at a polo match to watch their dad play and William was driving back across the 15,000 acre estate in a VW Golf when he overtook the 8th Earl Bathurst, who was at the wheel of his old Land Rover.

Unaware that the princes were in the car, the Earl chased after them, determined to give the driver a piece of his mind for so blatantly exceeding the estate’s 20mph speed limit

But two Royal protection police officers who were following the Golf went to William's rescue, pulling in alongside the irate Earl to explain the situation and prevent him confronting the princes.

The next day numerous journalists arrived at the Earl’s farmhouse home to ask for his account of what happened – but one by one they were turned away at the door by Lady Bathurst, who told them her husband was still in bed and not receiving visitors.

When John arrived on the scene, he found disconsolate reporters and photographers milling around in the lane outside the Bathursts home after they had all tried and failed to speak to the Earl.

“Oh well, I’d better try too,” John told them as he walked up the driveway to the farmhouse.

When Lady Bathurst opened the door and began telling John that her husband was not available, the Earl, wearing his dressing gown, suddenly appeared in the dark hallway behind her.

To his surprise, John was beckoned in by the Earl, who proceeded to give him a full interview sitting at his kitchen table and recounting the events of the previous day.

As John left the farmhouse with a notebook full of comments from the Earl, other journalists – anxious about what they might have missed – were clamouring at the door.

But they were told that the Earl would not be speaking to anyone else, as he had already said everything he wanted to John.

“I’d got a real scoop on my hands and I immediately set to work on my laptop in my car outside the farmhouse to send the full exclusive interview to the national press,” recalled John.

“It was really just a case of being in the right place at the right time that got me the exclusive, and it must have been very frustrating for everyone else who had tried and failed to speak to the Earl!”

John estimates he and his colleagues have written literally millions of words and sent out more than 100,000 news stories in his 57 years of journalism.

But none of it would have happened had things gone well when John was offered a week’s trial at the BBC West regional TV newsroom in the summer of 1970.

The Points West news editor had heard 19-year-old John being interviewed on a Radio 4 news item about a bomb scare in Gloucester bus station, and was so impressed by his ‘broadcaster’s voice’ and fluent delivery that he offered him the trial with a view to recruiting him as a trainee TV reporter.

John was sent to the very first Glastonbury Festival (then called the Pilton Pop Festival) to assist Points West reporter and well known BBC Newsround presenter John Craven with his coverage.

But unfortunately for John, his arrival at the festival site coincided with him suffering hay fever for the first time in his life.

He was so afflicted by sneezes, streaming eyes and nosebleeds that he spent the day in the festival first aid tent, unable to play any role in the TV filming, and his plight proved fatal to his BBC prospects.

“It was a boiling summer day and we’d only just arrived in the festival fields – where T-Rex were the hot new band – when I had the mother of all nose bleeds, so spent most of the time in the first aid tent. I didn’t get offered a job, so I stayed with the agency and the rest, as they say, is history,” said John.

He has reported on many other major news stories during his career – including a murderous attack on a Cheltenham MP and a councillor by a constituent armed with a Samurai sword in 2000, the deaths of four passengers from Gloucestershire in a train collision in London in 1999, and the cases of four delinquent teenagers dubbed ‘Safari Boy,’ ‘Pyjama Boy,’ ‘Pocket Money Boy’ and ‘Canal Boat Boy’, who were controversially given holidays and other treats by Gloucestershire social services in the 1990s in a bid to steer them away from crime.

It was an experiment which was condemned by Prime Minister John Major in Parliament. All four of the ‘boys’ continued their criminal lifestyles into adulthood and John saw them all in court many times after the failed experiment.

On one occasion, John had to write about himself when he became an integral part in of one of his own news stories.

One morning in April 1997 John received a press release from Gloucestershire Police appealing for the public’s help to locate a disabled man called John Elliott, who had collapsed at his computer keyboard somewhere in the Cotswolds area while playing online Scrabble with a woman in Chicago.

Mr Elliott had typed: "I've fallen on the floor and I can't move or see. Please get help for me,” and then passed out.

As the police made enquiries to try to track him down with the help of online Scrabble players in America, Canada and the Isle of Man they were beaten to it by John Hawkins – who simply rang directory enquiries and was given numbers for several John Elliotts, one of them in Didcot, Berkshire

He rang the Didcot number and the man at the centre of the emergency answered the phone – still lying on the floor where he had collapsed hours earlier.

After confirming that it was the right Mr Elliott, Hawkins called Thames Valley and Gloucestershire Police, who thanked him for his help and sent an ambulance to Mr Elliott’s aid


In 1991, the attempted murder of a Gloucester couple who were attacked, tied up and sent careering down a steep Cotswold hillside in a burning car led to a unique reporting experience for John


The two victims, Ivor Stokle and his partner Pauline Leyshon, suffered horrific burns but survived the murder bid and were able to identify the three people who tried to kill them.

During their recovery, the couple asked their lawyer for advice on how to deal with the inevitable press interest that would accompany the trial of the three accused – and he told them about John and his agency.

As a result, John met with the couple and they appointed him as their exclusive press agent, entrusting him to write and issue their full account of their ordeal, as well as supply pictures of them at the murder scene and images of the injuries they had suffered.

“It was the first and only time that I had total control of a major story that made news around the world,” said John.

“As a result of their decision to speak only to me they were able to benefit financially from the fees that the national and international media paid for their story and pictures. It was an additional source of compensation to them for what they had been through.”

The strangest assignment John ever received was to play the role of ‘Inspector Nobby Nipple’ - a character invented by the Sunday Sport newspaper to judge entrants in a competition to find the woman with the longest nipples in the UK!

John had to pose as the ‘inspector’ to be photographed measuring the nipples of a Stroud woman who had entered the competition – an unnerving experience that he will recount in more detail in a book he plans to write about his long and varied journalistic career.