The Rev Ian Gregory obituary

Original article by Jackie Gregory

There was a point in the 1980s when the Rev Ian Gregory, a former journalist and church minister, who has died aged 93, was himself making the news. In the time of Margaret Thatcher, the yuppy and union battles, Ian, my father-in-law, launched a campaign to bring back courtesy. Ever with an eye for a good headline, he called his campaign group the Polite Society.

The landline in his Staffordshire house lit up with calls from newspapers and broadcasters around the world. The Los Angeles Times quoted Ian as saying that Britain had rebutted many enemies in the past 80 years, but “in 1986, the British people face national defeat at the hands of a sinister foe: our ignorant and ill-mannered selves”.

During this heyday there was a warm seat for Ian on breakfast TV sofas, often side-by-side with pop stars – Rick Parfitt of Status Quo wore a Polite Society badge on his leather jacket for years after they met.

Although the Polite Society may have had a conservative, nostalgic whiff about it, Ian was a radical in his Christian ministry. Ordained in 1983, he was a much-loved minister at King Street Congregational church, Newcastle-under-Lyme, who was not afraid to question faith, and invited people to think rather than accept.

He was one of few ministers who would marry divorced people. He blessed babies in pubs – because he believed in meeting people where they felt comfortable – and he held Christmas services for licensees. A pub chain asked him to train staff in the importance of courtesy, and this led to a hostelry in his home town being named after him: the Polite Vicar.

Born in Bolton to Gabriel Gregory, a Congregational minister, and Lilian (nee Unsworth), a teacher, Ian went to Silcoates, Wakefield, a boarding school for the sons of Congregational ministers, then Peartree secondary school in Derby. In 1953 he went to Lancashire Independent College, a theological institution in Whalley Range, Manchester, where his father had also studied.

Ian became a journalist after leaving college following a “scandal” when a bottle of ginger wine was found in his room there. He said what made him a good journalist – getting things done by deadline and “being impatient with wafflers” – did not sit well with being a church minister, so the ministry had to wait. He knocked on the editor’s door of the Stockport Advertiser in 1954, was given a reporting job, and was told that all journalists wore a trilby hat. Ian took to it, and a trilby became a wardrobe staple.

Ian was one of the first journalists to work at BBC Radio Derby when it launched in 1971; his combative interviews with the then Derbyshire county council leader, David Bookbinder, were well known. He retired in 2003. He continued questioning up to his death, reading theology and science books, and writing pamphlets from his garden shed office.

Ian is survived by his wife, Trisha (nee Donaldson), whom he met in 1960 and married five years later, their children, Russell (my husband), Rachel and Jamie, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.