An influential Bolton journalist who was a major figure in trade union life has died at the age of 94.

Alan Knowles was the youngest of three children of Frank Knowles, a linotype operator at the Bolton Evening News, and Ada Melling, a cotton mill worker who died when Alan was three.

He was a scholarship boy at Bolton School and left at 16 to earn his keep. He started as a cub reporter on the BEN but was called up to the army just as the Second World War was ending and spent two years in Germany.

After being demobbed, he returned to the newspaper and won an English Speaking Union scholarship to the US. Here, he interviewed James Cagney in Hollywood and, offered the choice between two Presidential hopefuls John F Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, he chose to meet the latter.

In 1959, Alan joined the BBC in London as a sub-editor at Alexandra Palace. He soon returned to Bolton as a journalist in the Manchester newsroom and stayed with the BBC until his retirement in 1987.

During his working life, he served the National Union of Journalists as father of the chapel, branch secretary, member of the NEC and chair of the radio and TV journalists’ council. He was made an NUJ member of honour.

He went on his last picket line in Manchester, aged 80, in the rain.

Alan and his wife, Mary, were married for almost 60 years. In 2009, he left Bolton and moved to Islay in the southern Hebrides to be near their daughter Jean and he died peacefully there.

He is survived by his three children Mary, Jean and Peter, two grandchildren David and Andrew and two siblings Margaret and Frank - a former BEN photographer.

Alan was buried with his NUJ lapel badge on his jacket.