Former Town Crier owner, Sir Ray Tindle, dies at 95

Sir Ray Tindle, 95, of Farnham, England, died Monday, April 16, 2022. He was chair of Tindle Newspapers until he turned 90 and became president, stepping down to allow his only offspring, Owen Tindle, to chair the newspaper group that had, at one time, included 200 or so titles from Wales to the Isle of Man and then Idyllwild.

From July 4, 1994 until June 28, 2013, his company owned the Idyllwild Town Crier, its only U.S. acquisition.

Sir Ray paid a visit to Idyllwild every year with his widow Lady Beryl until he could no longer travel because of health issues. He was a collector of old cars and antique spoons. In Idyllwild, he discovered a 1931 Ford Model A for sale and purchased it to drive when he visited, storing it at the office on Village Center Drive. He had it shipped to England in 2013 when he sold the Town Crier.

The couple loved staying in a particular cabin at Idyllwild Inn and hosting a dinner for Town Crier staff on their visits where Sir Ray would recite off-color jokes from his little black book and remind them that England entered World War II in 1939, two years before the U.S.

Born in 1926, Sir Ray served in the British Armed Forces after leaving school, serving in East Asia from 1944 to 1947.

After the war, he bought his first newspaper, the Tooting and Balham Gazette, with his £300 demobilization payment. He told the Town Crier in 1995 that he had wanted to be a newspaper man since he was aged 12.

The same year he bought the Town Crier, 1994, he was knighted. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1987 and knighted in 1994 for services to the newspaper industry. The 1994 honor also was for his efforts to improve the United Kingdom’s unemployment problems.

For more than a decade, his company operated employment centers in various U.K. cities where entrepreneurs were allowed free rent for 12 to 24 months to begin businesses. If the business succeeded, the owner would have the confidence to sign a lease elsewhere and if it didn’t, Sir Ray said, then nothing was lost.

Tindle Newspapers recently described him as a “newspaper man through and through.”

Often asked why he bought a newspaper in Idyllwild, his son Owen told the Town Crier in 1994, “Mel Hodell [former U.S. newspaper broker] had been in touch with us for the last seven years, sending us details of U.S. newspapers from time to time. The first one that really caught our eye was the Idyllwild Town Crier … We wanted to expand and my father has a sweet spot for America.”

The Chronicle Publishing Company of San Francisco had owned the Town Crier since 1989 after Co-publisher Dorothy Hunsaker died in January of that year. The Chronicle bought the paper from her widower, L.B. Hunsaker. The Hunsakers were the last mom-and-pop-type owners at the time until Jack and Becky Clark purchased it in 2013. Becky was the former publisher-editor from 1996 to 2009.

When Sir Ray sold the newspaper in 2013, he also sold the building to Shiloh Christian Ministries that still operates in that location.