Robert Armstrong, who has died from a brain tumour aged 76, was a Guardian sports writer, specialising in football, rugby and tennis, his own game. Known for the “no frills” accuracy of his reports, he filed reassuringly ahead of deadline from World Cups and major tours in far-flung corners of the world, as well as from Wimbledon.
But he also left his mark on the paper for which he worked for almost 30 years as a highly effective National Union of Journalists (NUJ) official, championing better pay and conditions for his colleagues.
As he would sometimes emphasise, Robert came from a tough background. Born in Belfast, the eldest of five children of Florence, a music hall artist, and Archie, a shipyard fitter who later had to travel abroad for work, he was raised on a Protestant council estate. Robert’s path to a wider world came via a scholarship to the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, for which he remained grateful.
At Queen’s University he studied psychology and was an active supporter of the emerging civil rights movement. But his focus on the student newspaper led to a job offer from the Middlesbrough Gazette. Moving on to become an arts/features subeditor in the Guardian’s Manchester office, he later transferred to London, eventually deputising both for the football correspondent, David Lacey, and for David Frost, whom he succeeded as rugby correspondent in 1987. He held the post until shortly before he left the paper after a falling out in 1999.
With a studious appetite for books and natural curiosity (Robert particularly enjoyed conversations with children) the side of his trade he most relished was interviewing sportsmen and women, not all of them talkative. Yet his nephew, the Labour politician Liam Byrne, recalls that his interviewees would “open up freely and expand on their deepest concerns and ambitions. He was always discreet, took only what was relevant. There was a decency and humanity in his reports.”
None of which prevented him being an unflinching negotiator, witty but often acerbic. I first met him – my oldest friend in journalism – in 1968 on union business at Middlesbrough where the Thomson group’s NUJ chapels were meeting to coordinate negotiations.
In Manchester he became father (convenor) of the chapel and worked with his London counterpart, Mick Downing, to win concessions on pregnancy leave, a nine-day working fortnight and the principle of voluntary-only redundancy, most of which still stand.
The management’s point man was the deputy editor, John Cole, of later BBC fame. Despite John’s impatience to get back to the high politics of Ted Heath’s “Who governs Britain?” election in February 1974, we kept him up all night to clinch a deal on the dubious grounds that a victorious Heath would impose a pay freeze. Downing was the more emollient, but had Robert’s respect. “You worry me, Mick,” he once joked. “You’re honest, but you’re not stupid.”
In retirement on the Dorset coast with his second wife, Merete Bates, a painter and former Guardian arts critic, Robert immersed himself in music, history and film (he boasted “the best collection of European DVDs in southern England”) and his community. Labour being a no-hoper in rural Dorset, he stood unsuccessfully for the county council as a Lib Dem. He was still walking the Jurassic cliffs until shortly before his death.
He is survived by Merete, their children, Adam and Galina, a son, Hugh, from his first marriage to Joan McClune, which ended in divorce, a daughter, Katherine, from a previous relationship, and three grandchildren.