Nick Kent

Nick’s funeral will be on August 19 [2025] at midday at Seven Hills Crematorium near Ipswich (Seven Hills Crematorium, Felixstowe Road, Nacton, Suffolk IP10 0FG). There will be a wake in a nearby hostelry. If you are planning to attend the funeral please confirm to Geoff Stimson: geoffstimson@hotmail.com

Donations in memory of “Nick Kent”  may be made to Cancer Research UK. The funeral service will be available to watch on demand via https://watch.obitus.com  – username sere0367, password 909157.

There will also be a memorial celebration of Nick’s life on November 11 [2025], from 12-5pm at the Phoenix Arts Club, 1 Phoenix Street, London WC2H 8BU. The venue is in the basement of the Phoenix Theatre in Charing Cross Road; the entrance is just round the corner in Phoenix Street. To give us an idea of numbers, please also email geoffstimson@hotmail.com if you are interested in coming to that event.

With thanks to Geoff Stimson: Nick Kent, one of the best sub-editors ever to work for the Mirror, was charismatic, multi-talented and a fine headline-writer, and was popular wherever he worked. The best way to know how good a sub was is to ask his chief-sub, so here is what two of them from Mirror features think. Don Walker: “I’ve just been remembering how Nick and a few other madmen very kindly saved my sanity when I had been dumped (for the first time and totally unprepared) with the usual Thursday evening tsunami of copy for Saturday’s paper. Terry Dickie, the artist, looked at the chaos and at me, and said: ‘You’ve been saved, Don. Here is the cavalry! They’re all bloody good!’ And he was right. They were, especially Nick… I had never seen a man faster with a dazzling headline. God bless his memory, and RIP.”

Neil Murray: “I have often quoted what I think was one of the best (if not the best) headlines produced when I was chief-subbing. Nick was overseeing a Thursday-for-Saturday story about a film called The Swarm that involved using three million bees, one million of whom, it was claimed, had had their stings removed. This was at a time when people could still see two films when they went to the cinema – the main film and a ‘B’ movie. Anyway, Nick’s headline was: THE UNSTUNG HEROES OF A BEE MOVIE. Loved it!”

I first met Nick when we were on the Mirror Group training scheme in the West Country, although he was in the year above me and based in Exeter while I was in Truro. By the time I followed him to London he was already an established sub at the Mirror-owned weekly newspaper Reveille. He was doing casual shifts on Mirror features after work, and had become the Reveille FOC union rep at a time of strikes and action to try to get journalists a slightly larger slice of the cake. The slogan was “Three Grand in My Hand” – a fortune in those days.

Nick was never far from getting into scrapes. He was a Suffolk boy, and when Ipswich Town reached the 1978 FA Cup Final against Arsenal he managed to get us two tickets. He was delighted when Ipswich scored what turned out to be the winner, but I had to physically restrain him as – being Nick – our tickets were in the Arsenal end…

Nick was too good to stay at Reveille for long, was soon taken on by the Mirror full-time and instantly became one of the stars of the desk, subbing the big multi-day series by the likes of Joe Haines, Paul Foot and Paul Callan. It prompted the same Terry Dickie to comment: “He’s come up so fast, he’s in danger of getting the bends.”

It was a surprise when Nick suddenly announced he was leaving the Mirror to join the small start-up publishing company Ringpress, founded by another former Mirror sub, John Sellers. Ringpress was as multi-formatted as Nick – producing the Blue Peter Annual, a monthly greyhound racing newspaper, a series of dog-breed books – and Nick still found time to come back to the Mirror to run the production of the weekly Mirror Woman supplement as well as countless other one-off pull-outs. He always had a huge amount of energy to go with his seemingly effortless flair.

When Ringpress Books was sold in 2002, Nick took early retirement. He and his first wife, the novelist Deanna Maclaren, moved to Cannes, where he discovered a passion for long-distance walking in the mountains above the Côte d’Azur and in Liguria. He also regularly worked as a volunteer driver, enabling people with disabilities to experience the joys of the mountains he loved. Retirement also meant that he had more time to play golf, hone his interest in wine-tasting, and enjoy classical music and opera. But journalism wouldn’t lie down so easily and he soon began to write arts features for Riviera Reporter magazine.

After the break-up of his marriage, Nick got together with Antonia Owen, daughter of Peter Owen, whose eponymous publishing company was one of the oldest and most respected independent producers of international fiction and non-fiction. In 2014, Nick returned to London to become managing director of Peter Owen Publishers until its sale in 2022, when he and Antonia retired. By this time Nick and Antonia had married and moved to Suffolk. She survives him, together with their parrots Groucho and Doris.