My friend Mike Walsh, who has died aged 77, was an award-winning World in Action reporter and campaigner. Among his many memorable television investigations were the first exposure of the notorious landlord Nicholas van Hoogstraten and the first documentary about Alzheimer’s disease. He also shone a light on the fraud epidemic along the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Mike was born in Beckenham, Kent, the only child of George, a bodybuilder who coached Great Britain’s 1936 Olympic weightlifting team, and his wife, Eileen. Mike’s father died when he was 12 and he was raised by his mother in Brighton and south-west London, where he went to Shene grammar school. One the ration book generation of bright grammar school children, he was the first person in his family to go to university. After studying history at Hull he started his career as a journalist in 1965 at Municipal Engineering magazine, where we first encountered each other and, more importantly, where he met his future wife, Kim Proctor, who worked in the advertising sales department.
Active as a Labour party member in the 1960s and 70s, Mike joined the leftwing newspaper Tribune in 1969, establishing a reputation as an outstanding reporter and commentator on national and international politics. Then television called. He worked first on the documentary programmes TV Eye and Union World, a Granada series devoted to trade unions, and then for World in Action for 12 years as a writer and reporter. He won six national and international awards for his work.
After World in Action Mike freelanced in television. He also co-authored five books with a former Granada colleague, Don Jordan, among them an unauthorised biography of Van Hoogstraten and a factual historical thriller, The King’s Revenge, which documented the way in which Charles II hunted down the men who had signed his father’s death warrant.
Mike’s work was fuelled by a profound sense of fairness and decency coupled with a strong commitment to fighting inequality and exploitation. He also possessed an acute ability to spot a big story in the small print around apparently more important issues. The courage and doggedness he showed in his work were the qualities he also displayed as a centre-half or goalkeeper, which led to his park football team-mates dubbing him “Iron Man Walsh”. Robust in the tackle, he was always genuinely apologetic to opponents as he picked them up.
Football, or rather The Arsenal, was one of his passions, along with John Coltrane, Raymond Chandler and black-and-white films, usually with subtitles. Kind and self-deprecating, Mike was a very funny man with a contagious giggle. He was great value over a pint.
Mike and Kim lived for nearly 50 years together in their Notting Hill flat in west London. Their mutual devotion was never more evident than in Kim’s selfless care for him during his final illness.
He is survived by Kim, his step-daughter, Dani, and two grandchildren.
