Veteran Kent journalist Ken Bindoff has died at the age of 93. In a career spanning more than 60 years, Bindoff covered many big news stories affecting Kent and the Channel, from shipwrecks and murders to the Torrey Canyon oil disaster and the hunt for the Great Train Robbers.
He lived in Broadstairs for most of his life after being sent there as a child to recuperate from TB. At 17, Bindoff persuaded the editor of the Ramsgate newspaper, the Thanet Advertiser , to let him work unpaid during his school holiday.He enjoyed it so much that he never went back to school.
At 21 he moved to the Kent Messenger in Maidstone, then on to the South London Press and finally to Fleet Street and the Daily Mirror .
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After the second world war, Bindoff joined the London Evening News, becoming their Kent coast reporter for the next 27 years. He covered stories like the 1946 wreck of the American liberty ship, the Helena Modjeska, on the Goodwin Sands.
He also reported the 1955 beach shooting of American serviceman, Napoleon Greene, below the North Foreland lighthouse. His story and photographs of the incident went round the world.
On one of his stories he met a Daily Express reporter, June, whom he married in 1947.
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A former chairman of the Kent branch of the NUJ, Bindoff left the Evening News in the 1970s to join the Kentish Express as a district reporter before he and his wife founded their own news agency covering Thanet.
He leaves behind a widow, daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter
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