David Banks
Rupert Murdoch’s right-hand man during the Wapping dispute who went on to edit the Daily Mirror
DAVID BANKS, who has died aged 74, was an old-school tabloid newspaper editor but one of the first to embrace the technological revolution that heralded the demise of hot metal in Fleet Street.
“I learnt how to typeset by computer,” he recalled, “probably the first British journalist to do so.” It was a skill he learnt in the 1980s during a stint in New York before returning to Britain and Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, as the paper’s parent company News International squared up to the print unions following the move to Wapping in 1986.
Imposing, loud, overweight, and invariably known as Banksy, he became a key figure during the siege of “Fortress Wapping”, when trade unionists went on strike in protest at the introduction of labour-saving new technology. During the nightly blockades of the company’s dockland headquarters, Banks remembered being driven into work to shouts of “Scab!” while lying on the floor of a bus on which bottles and other missiles rained down.
Like The Sun’s editor Kelvin Mackenzie, Banks had mastered the Atex system in New York, and he was able to iron out the inevitable bugs that baffled many of the computer-illiterate journalists. It was largely down to Banks that the paper continued to publish without a single edition lost.
He had worked for The Sun since 1981, first as a sports sub-editor and later as night editor and then production editor. During a career hiatus he followed Mackenzie to the tabloid New York Post, becoming managing editor.
For two years from 1992, he edited the Daily Mirror before becoming editorial director of the Mirror Group and consultant editor of the Sunday Mirror.
In 1998, Banks moved out of newspapers when Mackenzie, who had headed a consortium to acquire Talk Radio, invited him to co-host a breakfast show with a former Sun colleague, Nick Ferrari. The exuberant duo presented the Big Boys’ Breakfast
show, a daily antithesis to the Today
programme on Radio 4.
On air, Banks suppressed his propensity for colourful language but proved a natural comedian with a notable lack of gravitas, his on-air breathlessness a relic of the 70-a-day cigarette habit he had given up in 1982.
“He has one of those gasping, huffing voices,” noted David Sexton in the Telegraph, while the paper’s revered radio critic Gillian Reynolds declared: “The Big Boys Breakfast
makes me grind my teeth, tear my hair out and laugh and laugh and laugh,” an encomium that Banks and Ferrari seized and turned into a promotional jingle.
The show was cancelled, however, before the year was out as part of the relaunch of Talk Radio as Talk Sport, and Banks spent two years on the breakfast show at LBC before returning to print journalism as a columnist with the trade paper Press Gazette.
The son of a factory foreman, Arthur David Banks was born on February 13 1948 in Warrington, now in Cheshire, and grew up on a council estate. At Sir Thomas Boteler, a grammar school founded in the 16th century, he appeared as Ruth, singing contralto in The Pirates of Penzance, and was head choirboy at St Elphin’s parish church.
Leaving school at 16 to train on the Warrington Guardian, he joined The Journal in Newcastle-upon-tyne as a reporter, and later the Mirror in Manchester as a sub-editor. Moving to London, his talent as a headline writer was quickly recognised and by 1979 he was the paper’s assistant chief subeditor.
In the same year, Kelvin Mackenzie persuaded him to join him at the New York Post. With no prior knowledge of lay-out, Banks was delighted when “Macfrenzy” taught him tabloid presentation, and how to elude Murdoch’s calls, before returning to London to edit The Sun.
Two years later Banks followed him as an assistant editor back to London, where
Mackenzie persuaded Murdoch that Banks, who had bought his first computer in 1980, was the ideal frontman for the approaching Wapping revolution.
After learning computer typesetting in Chicago and New York, Banks returned to train and lead what he called Mackenzie’s “Dirty Dozen”, the men and women who kept News International’s titles afloat during the print strike in 1986. He found the nightly confrontations upsetting, and although the paper billeted him in a nearby hotel he longed to return home to his family in suburban Kent.
With the move successfully accomplished, Banks went back to New York to work briefly on the Daily News, where he was remembered for the front-page headline CHOPPED TO PIECES – over a story about a man who had fed his wife’s body through a woodchopper.
From the US, Banks moved to Australia to become deputy editor of
The Australian and in 1988, editor of Murdoch’s Sydney Daily Telegraph.
In 1992 he returned to London as editor of the Daily Mirror. During his tenure he famously published close-up pictures of a leotard-clad Diana, Princess of Wales, taken by secret cameras at her health club, and fired the paper’s campaigning columnist Paul Foot in 1993, having refused to publish a piece by him criticising the
Mirror’s new management. Banks reflected on both these career landmarks, declaring himself “a seven out of ten ratbag” for the health club episode, while judging Foot insane and his rejected column a “finely turned suicide bullet”. After two years in the editorial chair he was “kicked upstairs”, first as editorial director and later director of corporate communications at the Mirror Group. Retiring to rural Northumberland, Banks had been diagnosed with leukaemia but continued to write, turning in a popular weekly column for The Journal about life in his village. According to his former radio partner Nick Ferrari, one of his proudest moments was being invited to Hartlepool to unveil a statue of Andy Capp, the Mirror’s long-running cartoon layabout.
David Banks married, in 1975, Gemma Newton, who survives him with their daughter and son.