Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn at Eric Gordon’s funeral on Thursday

TO be an active fully, engaged and iconic newspaper editor at 89 is an achievement itself.

But Eric more than just achieved. He succeeded.

Go back to the 1970s and the NUJ strike over local journalists’ rates of pay and the determination of the union to prevent non-union journalists taking the strikers’ jobs.

Later the Camden Journal title was sold for £1 and the Camden New Journal was born in 1982. Eric became its editor and 40 years later the paper is one of the most respected in the country.

A free paper and one of quality with all the best traditions of strong and fearless reporting of all the issues facing the community.

Not being run for the profits going to distant and demanding financiers, but solely to keep it going and being the voice of the community. Good local papers are the very centre and heart of a democratic society; without them we are weaker.

Eric used the CNJ to establish the Islington Tribune.

He had a long and wonderfully varied life.

Born into a working-class Manchester Jewish household, growing up during the war apparently gained his love of music, especially Mozart, by his father telling him the clicking of wheels of a railway carriage as they travelled from Manchester to Newcastle was music.

Eric was famously placed under house arrest in China during the cultural revolution in 1967 when living in a commune and writing notes for a book. The notes were misunderstood and he was arrested.

A rich life well-lived, and with the love of his family and generations of journalists who were all the better at their profession for knowing and working with Eric.

We have much to thank Eric’s campaigning for. Our Whittington Hospital survived the attack on its A&E department, and thus its very existence because of the support of Eric, the Islington Tribune and the brilliant work of reporter Tom Foot.

My best memory of Eric? In the 2015 Labour Leadership campaign I held a campaign rally in Ebbw Vale at the Nye Bevan Stones. As I was speaking about the NHS, there was a slight figure engrossed in a notebook, writing my words down. It was Eric, supporting our NHS.