The Evening Standard’s long-serving deputy chief sub, Robin Britcher, retires this week, bringing to an end a 45-year journalistic career.
Britcher, 61, who spent 22-years on the daily, began his career in the Fifties as a teenage office boy on the New Musical Express, where he met a youthful Cliff Richard promoting his debut single Move It, and gave his hero Lonnie Donegan an unexpected extra chart hit by inserting one of his singles into the Top 30 as he gathered chart information and found himself a single short of a hit parade.
He moved on to become a trainee reporter on the Tonbridge Free Press before progressing to the subs bench at the Kent & Sussex Courier, Western Daily Press in Bristol, the Kent Messenger and Brighton’s Evening Argus.
He then moved to the London Evening News, before shifting on most of the major national newspapers after its collapse in 1980.
He eventually moved on to the Evening Standard, while continuing to shift on the Daily Mirror’s entertainment subs bench at weekends – a period where his career briefly overlapped, in the early Nineties, with his son, Chris Britcher, who was starting his journalistic career working with Rick Sky.
He says his ambition in his retirement is to raise chickens at his Kent home while becoming the centre of attention for his three grandchildren.
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