Mervyn Dane, who has died aged 87 in Enniskillen, started out in journalism so young that he was almost refused entry to cover a court case on the grounds he was underage.
As a newcomer on the Fermanagh Times, the now-defunct Enniskillen weekly, he travelled by slow train to the village of Trillick to cover a preliminary hearing in a murder case in 1945. He was getting his bearings in the courthouse when he was approached by the clerk of the court who wanted to know what he was doing. When Dane told him he was a reporter, the clerk asked him his age.
“Sixteen”, said Dane.
“My goodness, you’re a juvenile! You shouldn’t even be in here,” the clerk said.
The new reporter had to make his first stand for the rights of the press. He was eventually allowed to remain.
For the next 49 years, as a journalist in Enniskillen, his personal and professional life flowed into each other, never more so than one night in 1954.
He was covering the opening of a hall in the village of Lack and stayed on for the dance after the formal proceedings. He was much taken by one young woman who ended up travelling back to Enniskillen on the same bus. It crashed on the journey. He got a vivid, first-person report for the following week’s paper and also made the better acquaintance of the woman by ensuring she got home safely. They subsequently married and celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last year.
High-profile role
Mervyn Albert Dane
started his career the week of VE Day in May 1945. The first two years were with the now defunct
Fermanagh Times
, but in 1947 he switched to another Enniskillen weekly, the
Impartial Reporter
, where he remained for 47 years, mostly as a reporter, but also as editor for 12 years before stepping down for health reasons in 1987. He continued as a reporter until he retired in 1994.
His high-profile role as the Impartial Reporter's main writer, along with regular reports for BBC Northern Ireland, made him one of the most recognised names and voices in Fermanagh for decades.
He met everyone who came to Fermanagh and covered everything that happened in the county. He met Queen Elizabeth for the first time when they were both teenagers - she was the 19-year old Princess Elizabeth at the time, on a visit to Fermanagh.
Court cases provided a lot of copy in the early days, and the best of them often involved poitín. On one occasion the defendant was denying the suspect liquid was poitín at all. The magistrate poured some of it on to blotting paper and put a match to it to see if it would burn, confirming it was alcohol.
“Whoosh, up it went,” Dane recalled. “A policeman had to come rushing in with a fire extinguisher.”
The Impartial Reporter was traditionally the unionist paper in Fermanagh, with the Fermanagh Herald more identified with the nationalist community. But the Trimble family, the founders and long-time owners of the Impartial Reporter, had always imbued it with a tolerant ethos and a culture of even-handed professional journalism.
Professional skills
Dane was a perfect fit: his personal qualities of outgoing good humour, fairness and decency, along with his professional skills – excellent note-taking, accurate summarising and clear writing – played a big part in the paper’s success in attracting readers from both sides of the religious divide.
His successor as editor, Denzil McDaniel, built on his legacy to make the paper one of the most successful cross-community titles in the North. Under McDaniel and current editor Sarah Saunderson the paper has won a remarkable series of Northern Ireland and UK regional press awards.
For nearly 50 years, the small reporters’ room revolved around Dane, crackling with his cheerfulness and frenzied echo of his manual typewriter. He typed very fast: for the sake of speed, he stripped it of its outer casing, so he could quickly remove jammed copy paper.
He remained one of Enniskillen’s most engaging personalities after his retirement, and there was widespread delight when he was awarded the MBE in the British honours list for services to journalism in 2003.
He is survived by his wife Betty and children Noelle, Caroline, Tommy and Lily.