Terry Gaylard can look back on 45 years’ experience with the Gazette & Herald with hindsight of 25 years, having hung up his reporter’s notebook in 1990.

Mr Gaylard was born in Bemerton, Salisbury, but moved to Devizes as an infant. The family lived in Avon Terrace and Mr Gaylard attended Devizes Grammar School.

He said: “I was at a loss as to what I wanted to do when I left but I saw an advert in the Gazette & Herald for a trainee reporter so I applied.”

He found himself in the august presence of the then editor, Mr G O Wheeler, who offered Mr Gaylard a trial period of employment at the princely salary of 10 shillings (50p) a week.

He said: “I was thrown in the deep end, covering assize courts, magistrates courts and so on, but I was fortunate that my more experienced colleague John Leech took me under his wing and showed me the ropes.”

Mr Gaylard’s most enduring memory of entering the building in Devizes Market Place was the strong smell of hot lead, as the printing works were behind the editorial rooms at 14 Market Place where they were to stay for the next ten years.

Mr Wheeler insisted that Mr Gaylard learn shorthand and typing so he found himself enrolled at the Devizes School of Commerce alongside a room full of young women, who giggled at the appearance of this gauche young man.

As a 16-year-old cub reporter, Mr Gaylard admits to making some schoolboy errors. He cycled all the way out to Charlton St Peter, near Rushall, on the hottest day of the year to interview a woman who was celebrating her 100th birthday.

He recalled: “I knocked on the door and it was answered by an elderly lady. I explained who I was and congratulated her on her centenary.

“She replied, I’m not 100. That’s my mother. She upstairs in bed, she’s deaf, blind and doesn’t want to speak to you. And she slammed the door in my face. So I had to cycle all the way back without my story.”

Mr Gaylard’s career with the Gazette was interrupted in 1947 when he was called up to do his National Service but his job was kept open for him and he was soon back pounding his beat, and his faithful old typewriter.

One of Mr Gaylard’s most prestigious stories was the trial of Mavis Wheeler, the former wife of noted archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who shot her lover, Lord Tony Vivian, at the couple’s love nest in Potterne in July 1954.

The national press descended on Devizes but the local journalists were given priority when it came to places on the press bench so Mr Gaylard got a front-row view of what was called at the time “the trial of the century”.

But sometimes courtroom drama took place before the eyes of the astonished pressman. Mr Gaylard remembers one occasion when three men appeared before the bench charged with breaking into the Bath Road sub-post office.

Mr Gaylard said: “They were flanked by two policemen but not handcuffed.

“Suddenly one of them grabbed a chair, leapt towards a window, smashed it and jumped out. Then, probably realising there was a bigger drop to the pavement than he first thought, decided to hang onto the window ledge.

“The police immediately grabbed him and hauled him back into the room amid complete disorder. His hands were bleeding.

“The hearing was promptly abandoned after order was restored. And when the man came before the court some days later he was handcuffed – and his wrists bandaged.”

Mr Gaylard was a confirmed bachelor until he went on a coach holiday in the 1980s where he met Jan, an executive working for British Petroleum. The couple were married in 1986.

Now 87, Mr Gaylard is hale and hearty and is still an avid reader of the Gazette & Herald, which was such an important part of his life.