A FORMER manager at the Barnsley Chronicle has died after contracting coronavirus.
Alan Argyle, 74, a resident of Holly Tree Lodge care home in Shafton, died on Sunday.
A former manager of the Chronicle’s printing press, his widow Jennifer described the paper as ‘his life, apart from golf’.
Alan started working at the paper in 1975, when he and Jennifer moved to the house on Cliffe Court, Monk Bretton, where they lived for most of their 53 years of marriage.
Jennifer, 74, said: “He would come in exhausted sometimes, have something to eat and put on his casual clothes, and then go back again.
“There was always something cropping up.
“He’d have a few hours sleep and then get up at 7am to go back in the morning.
“It was either the Chronicle, or his golf.
“He loved his family - especially his granddaughter Maisie. He worshipped the ground she walked on.”
Alan and Jennifer met when they were just 11 and stayed friends as they played cornet in the same brass band.
They started courting at 15 and got engaged on Jennifer’s 20th birthday, getting married a year later.
Alan worked in printing his whole life, working in Leeds and then Peterborough when the couple moved there for a few years.
They then moved to Barnsley, where Alan stayed at the Chronicle - bar a two-year break - until his retirement at 65.
“We’ve had a long, happy life together,” said Jennifer.
“I’d never been to Barnsley before we moved there, but we’d heard about the flat caps and whippets and all that.”
Alan lived with Parkinson’s disease for the last 14 years of his life, and later had Lewy body dementia which led to him needing constant care.
Jennifer nursed him for more than two years, before a hospital stay led to him being taken to Holly Tree Lodge.
He was tested positive for Covid-19 last month, and died the day before what would’ve been his 75th birthday.
“He was very comfortable and looked after, the staff thought the world of him,” added Jennifer.
Alan leaves Jennifer and a son, Mark, and daughter, Sarah, and granddaughter Maisie.
