Eric Gordon never actually left the Communist Party. ‘The bloke who was supposed to bring the party cards out to China left them in London,’ I remember him saying. But even if the cards had arrived in Peking, I’m fairly sure he’d have found another reason for the party to have left him. Eric was just too difficult to belong to anything.

Growing up in Tufnell Park, I read two local papers – the Camden New Journal and the Hampstead and Highgate Express. The latter was good as local papers go, but it was always full of grinning private school kids on results day each summer, and it had a tendency to be rather smug about its exclusive patch.

The New Journal was different. It gave high billing to the deaths of lonely pensioners, and reminded its readers that there still was, or at least should be, such a thing as society.

It still gave five or six pages over to readers’ letters – at a time when most local papers were having to beg people to write in. It still employed multiple reporters and covered Camden Council like the nationals cover Westminster, only with a more serious attention to policy detail. It clearly worked: in one London borough, the Journal had almost twice the circulation of the New Statesman nationally.

That was down to Eric, who died this week aged 89, after 38 years as the New Journal’s editor, and the committed team he built around him. Often infuriating, normally grumpy and always demanding, he left each of his young mentees with a skill set no journalism masters course could match – along with a fervent belief in the power of dead tree to give a voice to the voiceless.

By the end of my first day, I felt like an actual journalist, and had three bylines under my belt when I first spoke to Eric a few days later. That was a product of the culture he had created, where even 16-year-old work experience kids were trusted like they were old hands. He muttered something about Joseph Conrad and asked if I’d come back to help out on press days – when, helpfully, I had the afternoon off from sixth form.

Eric would work at a desk in the newsroom, which by my time was a prefabricated extension in the garden of the Camden Road shop-front affectionately called ‘New Journal Towers.’ Marking print-outs of reporters’ copy with a red pen, more often than not he would hand my stories back, telling me I’d missed the crucial angle. It was always somewhat terrifying when he grunted ‘uh, Joseph.’ After failing to object to my new moniker for a few weeks, I knew it was too late to be anything else.

There was never much time for chatter on press nights, but I was desperate to hear about his past. I knew that in the 1960s, a young, idealistic Eric had worked for a state publishing house in China – where he became fascinated by the Cultural Revolution taking place around him. After deciding to write a book about the phenomenon, he eventually left the People’s Republic with a stash of research notes hidden in his luggage.

However, he did not fool the border guards, who suspected him of being a spy. After two years of house arrest in a small hotel room, Eric and his young family were eventually deported after he signed a confession. Years later, New Journal reporters researching the incident discovered a memo from his constituency MP Margaret Thatcher, who said his predicament was ‘his own stupid fault.’

Eric had referred to Mao as ‘behaving like an emperor’ in his notes, but even imprisonment and denunciation could not dent his socialist beliefs. ‘Considering that throughout the Cold War days several British journalists were known to have worked for MI5, [the accusation of espionage] was not a particularly outrageous assumption, I suppose,’ he wrote in 2008. ‘So, by and large, I have no illusions about Mao or the Chinese Communist Party. However, I have never gone along with the shrill denunciations of the Cultural Revolution or of Mao.’

Born in 1931 into an orthodox Jewish family in Manchester, the teenage Eric was dispatched to a rabbinical college in Gateshead – before, for reasons that remain mysterious, he was transferred to an equivalent institution in Stamford Hill, north London. His brother Jeff was already in London and had joined the Communist Party. He helped Eric to ‘escape’ his future vocation.

Eric had dreamed of working at the Daily Worker before he went to China – and after his return, he became news editor on the Camden Journal, a struggling local paper owned by a major news group.

At the peak of Britain’s industrial militancy in the 1970s, Eric became active in the National Union of Journalists. He also directed the papers coverage towards real community issues. So when the paper’s owner, Courier Press Holdings, announced the Camden Journal’s closure in December 1980, the community was up for a fight.

Eric led a walk-out which lasted a year – and published a strike paper, ‘Save the Camden Journal’. As well as the three north London titles which formed the Camden Journal’s chapel, suburban papers in other parts of London downed tools for a day a week in solidarity.

From April 1981, Courier papers elsewhere – in places such as Leamington Spa, Rugby and west Wales – came out indefinitely. Camden Journal strikers toured the country drumming up support and picketing printworks. Knowing their phones were being tapped, the journalists would make bogus calls to one another with misleading information on picketing plans – and they would then witness police assembling for a stramash, only in the wrong place.

The strike ended after the National Graphical Association, which represented printworkers, pressured the journalists to go to arbitration. But after Courier agreed to sell the Journal for a pound, the Camden New Journal was born from the ashes. With support from businessman Frank Branston and reporter Angela Cobbinah, Eric took the helm.

Howard Hannah, a fellow striker who still works at the New Journal as arts and letters editor, remembers how the ‘clueless’ journalists had to learn about the business side of the paper as a matter of urgency. ‘A lot of other papers people have tried to start up have failed precisely because they couldn’t survive in the commercial world,’ he says. ‘That’s what Eric did, while holding on to the politics and the community aspect. That was his genius.’

I moved on from the New Journal, but I always stayed in touch – dropping by New Journal Towers, reading the paper each week, and writing the occasional piece. I would also get sporadic calls from Eric, asking me to clear up an arcane matter of internal Labour politics, or announcing – well into his ninth decade – that he was in Glasgow.

On the night of the 2017 general election, I was reporting from the Islington count for the Morning Star and bumped into friends from the New Journal’s sister Islington Tribune among the press pack. At about 4.30am, we failed to find an off-licence that would serve us, and headed back to Camden Road.

There was Eric, at 86, sipping red wine as he watched his old friend Jeremy Corbyn defy the pundits and destroy Theresa May’s majority. I wanted to ask him how it felt to see the Left so close to power, having been in the wilderness for so much of his life. But such existential questions could wait – he had a paper to get out.