Don Leigh, co-founder of one of the newspaper industry’s best-known news and picture agencies, Cassidy and Leigh, died on Friday, three days short of his 89th birthday. He passed peacefully in his sleep after a short illness, ending three years of dementia’s cruel confusion.
My father, Don, was a newspaper man through and through. Aged 16, he landed his first job as a cub reporter on the Wythenshawe Recorder on the sprawling Manchester council estate on which he grew up. While sifting through his belongings over the weekend, I came across a letter he wrote to the managing director in May 1957, in which he asked for a £2/10 shilling-a-week raise – a request he hoped would not be considered “too audacious” given how hard he worked. He spent many hours sat outside the local ambulance station, ever alert for the sniff of a good story.
Before journalism, one of Dad’s early endeavours was working as a magician. For most of my life, I had always believed he used the stage name, “The Great Donleno”. Among his belongings, I found a letter from a church hall secretary thanking “Mr Donleno” for an outstanding show, while there’s a business card that simply states: “Donleno – Miscellaneous Magical Mysteries”. I sincerely hope he wasn’t exaggerating for all these years when he claimed to be known as “The Great…”.
A few months after requesting his pay rise, Dad began his national service with the Royal Army Service Corp, based at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), NATO’s military HQ, located at Rocquencourt, near Paris. At sixty words per minute, Dad swore he was the fastest in the typing pool but, as he only ever pecked away with two fingers, while others touch-typed, I always remained a little sceptical…
After National Service, Dad returned to the Recorder before joining the liberal-leaning News Chronicle. In 1961, he linked up with Denis Cassidy, his old pal from Xaverian College (then a Catholic grammar school in Manchester) and decided to launch an agency. Looking for an area of the country that wasn’t well covered, and after inquiries with the news and picture desks of national newspapers, they settled on Guildford in Surrey, establishing the agency in April 1961.
The agency – officially called Southern News Service, but known as Cassidy and Leigh – soon became one of the most prolific of its day, covering IRA bombing atrocities in Aldershot, Guildford and Caterham; the Royal Family; and breaking a string of big news stories across the home counties. Denis left the agency for some years after being offered a job in Fleet Street. Don stayed on with Denis’s brother Peter Cassidy, who was the agency’s picture editor for many years. Cassidy and Leigh operated successfully for 42 years.
Among Cassidy and Leigh’s former staff were: Greg Dyke (later director general of the BBC), the late Harry Aspey (who became managing editor of the Press Association) and a string of Fleet Street big hitters, both reporters and photographers, too many to name individually.
Dad, who lived in the village of Liphook, Hampshire, for 61 years, retired in 2005. His beloved wife Sandra died in 2010, a few months short of their Golden Wedding Anniversary.
Denis died in April 2017 aged 82. His actress daughter Raquel Cassidy, a star of Downton Abbey, visited Dad just a few days before he died, along with former Cassidy and Leigh reporter Rebekah Jackson.
Denis and Don were founding members of the National Association of Press Agencies (NAPA) of which Denis was still President up to his death.
I was the only of Dad’s four sons to follow in his footsteps (all pictured below), starting my journalistic career doing weekend shifts for the agency. My brothers Mark, Philip and James all wisely steered clear of the industry.
I vividly remember helping Dad file copy as a 14-year-old boy. If a big story broke at the weekend, he would file his story to the Mirror, Sun and Mail, while I used our second phone to file to the Express and Star. It was back in the days of copy takers, and “is there much more of this..?”
Dad’s funeral will be held at the Catholic church in Liphook late next month.
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