ROBERT Houston, sports and music journalist, the brains behind Royalty magazine and a champion of the miners, died last week. He was 66.
Mr Houston was born in the pit village of Baillieston, near Glasgow, in 1939. His father William was a steelworker.
Bob left school at 15, taking a job as a trainee journalist on the Coatbridge Advertiser, where he became a jack-of-all-trades.
His sister Jean remembered how much he loved the Advertiser because he had “a chance to do everything from court reporting to writing about football”.
In 1963, he moved to London with his wife Judy, and rented a flat in Finchley Road, where they brought up a son, Marco, and a daughter, Tanya. Both attended Hampstead School.
Marco said his father was a “sociable and gregarious person” with a “robust sense of humour”, who enjoyed playing football in Golders Hill Park and going for drinks at the Refectory pub in Golders Green.
There he developed an ear for jazz, becoming a regular at Ronnie Scott’s club in Soho. He blended his passion for journalism and music during a spell at the Melody Maker.
In 1970, he became editor of The Miner newspaper when Joe Gormley was leader of the National Union of Miners. But he retained his interest in music. His son Marco said: “Not many people know that Bob started a music magazine in the 70s called Crème. It covered rock, jazz and pop and was as influential as anything he had done before and started the careers of many writers, like Clive James, who were unknown at the time.”
Daily Mirror writer Paul Routledge remembered how the “big sociable Scot from a pit village articulated the hopes and fears of the miners and their families,” describing The Miner as “an award-winning tabloid that was a credit to the union”.
In the late 1970s, Mr Houston worked as a sports sub-editor on The Observer and in 1981 launched his first publication, Royalty magazine.
To many, the switch to publishing a gossip magazine about the royals was puzzling.
But his son Marco said his father never lost his support for the miners or the unions and that Royalty was the culmination of his personal goal to publish a successful magazine.
He said: “Bob started Royalty because he thought it would be a successful magazine and he has been proved right.”

TOM FOOT