A former compositor for the Weston Mercury has died aged 95.

Ken Tyler learned the printing trade at his father’s shop in Clarendon Road.

He taught gymnastics and basketball, and founded the town’s water polo team.

He narrowly escaped death in 1941, when a bomb fell on a room in the YMCA building he had been in just a minute earlier.

After World War Two, he took his first printing job, before starting his career on the Mercury in the 1960s.

It was his job to pick out the small letters and insert them by hand for each article.

His son, Paul Tyler, said his father told a story about the frame being dropped when it was carried to the print room downstairs.

Paul said: “Literally thousands of individual type blocks were scattered down the staircase.

“Several compositors had to work through the night to meet the print run deadline.”

Mr Tyler was a member of the Weston Horticultural Society, and begonias were his pride and joy.