Steve Nolan, the Mr Reliable of the Express sports desk, dies at 69 after a short illness

By BRIAN DOOGAN

Steve Nolan, a highly respected journalist who helped to shape the sports pages of the Daily Express for 30 years in addition to working on other Reach publications, has passed away after a brief illness. He was 69.

His reputation for reliability and straightforward decency was encapsulated by one former Express sports editor who described him as “a rock of a back-bench colleague, Mr. Reliable, a thoroughly likeable bloke who will be sorely missed”.

Nolan began his career on the Stretford and Urmston Journal before he joined the press office of Manchester City Council where he met Janet, his wife of 40 years.

He was responsible for coordinating access for international media when Pope John Paul II came to Manchester in 1982 and celebrated Mass for 250,000 people at Heaton Park. Nolan kept a set of rosary beads he was presented with personally by the pontiff for the rest of his life.

Working shifts on the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, he quickly secured a permanent position with the Daily Star and then the Daily Express and relocated his family to Cambridgeshire when the Express closed its Manchester operation.

Sport was his passion and he supported Manchester City from childhood but his wider interests were reflected in despatches from locations such as the Bahamas and Mauritius for the travel sections of Reach publications.

Neither did he forget his roots, having attended St Mark's Church of England Primary School in Miles Platting, Manchester, where he was a classmate and neighbour of Lesley Ann Downey, one of the victims of the notorious Moors Murders perpetrated by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.

“The knowledge that I could have been one of the victims has stayed with me all my life,” Nolan wrote in the Daily Express on the day Brady (“my very real bogey man”) died in 2017. Nolan was at the funfair on the day Downey was abducted before she was brutally killed.

A keen golfer, he was organising games for his regular partners until his final weeks and had been studying Spanish as part of the u3a Learn to Live project.

Nolan is survived by his wife, three children and five grandchildren. A Celebration of Life service will be held in his memory at 12pm on November 15 at Elton Furze Golf Club in Haddon, Peterborough.

31 October 2024