Theatmospherewasakintothatofa library, only quieter and depressing
DIFFICULT THOUGH it is to credit now, in Jewish terms the only way was Essex in the 1970s. So much so that the started a weekly insert to attract new readers from the then thriving community.
An Essex boy in those days, I got the call from deputy editor Geoffrey Paul to be the junior reporter on the
team. It meant giving up a job with a merchant bank — a relief at the time, foolhardy in retrospect — and extending my Central Line commute beyond the City to Chancery Lane and the paper’s Furnival Street offices.
It became quickly apparent that not all the top brass were enthused about the spin-off project. The
bunker was sited well away from the main news operation and although Geoffrey was encouraging, there was otherwise little interchange. A winter of economic uncertainty and power cuts helped seal the supplement’s fate and I was moved onto the main staff. That’s when proper culture shock kicked in.
No open plan offices then. The key editors had their own enclosed dens on the second floor, some with red lights on the door deployed to repel unwanted visitors, or indeed any intrusion from other staff members. The lesser luminaries and reporters were squeezed together in a room next to the loos. If memory serves, there was no one within 30 years of me. Mutual antipathy was rife among many of the long-servers, who conversed only if strictly necessary. The atmosphere was akin to a library reading room, only quieter and depressing, the silence broken by the clatter of the urn pushed by the ancient tea ladies.
For light relief, I sloped off to the lair of the proof readers, who were my own age, or the compositors in the basement, for more engaging and sweary banter. Just never ask them to do anything off the clock. They were also lunchtime companions in the pub next door, where few of the editorial staff ventured. However, alcohol was consumed on the premises at what to all intents and purposes was a Christmas party, one of the rare occasions when members of the various departments mingled, sometimes drunkenly amorously.
Our irrepressible advertising chief was Tony Mandelson (father of Lord Mandelson), who was invariably found holding court, glass in hand, at the more lavish functions.
By modern day journalistic standards, things were largely relaxed — at least until Ned Temko took the helm in 1990. Press nights could be curtailed if the editor had theatre tickets; the editorial offices had emptied by lunchtime Thursday and similarly on Friday (essential for Shabbat, my not necessarily religious colleagues insisted).
Reporters’ duties were more clearly defined and I was allocated the youth beat, both for obvious reasons and because pretty much everything else was taken — and zealously guarded. One senior reporter covered just about every communal dinner, if only with the proviso that a second ticket was made available. “I couldn’t enjoy a lovely meal knowing my wife was at home eating a boiled egg,” he railed plaintively over the phone to organisers.
My early years are now largely a blur — I had forgotten my time on the foreign pages until going through back issues researching the 175th anniversary magazine which accompanies this week’s edition. But I recall being sent undercover to expose a missionary group attempting to attract young Jews and explaining to a senior Board of Deputies executive that the Belsen reference in the Sex Pistols’
was ironic rather than antisemitic. And that at no point did Johnny Rotten sing that “Belsen was a gas”.
I also remember spending considerable time in the office of Geoffrey Paul, by then editor, during the 1981 Test series against Australia, which came to be known as Botham’s Ashes. Geoffrey had the only television worthy of the name in the building. He was not a great cricket fan, but luckily theatre critic and deputy editor David Nathan was. Carrying on David’s mantle, his son John now reviews theatre for the paper.
As more young journalists joined — many of them going on to jobs on daily papers — the was dragged reluctantly into the 20th century. a logical successor to the Redbridge news pull-out, was introduced. Entertainment features were included on a more regular basis and pictures were used bigger and more interestingly.
Fax replaced Telex, a game-changing development for a journal placing great store by its international coverage. Typewriters and Tippex were succeeded by word processors. And yes, the original Amstrads were considered the height of technology. The reality was that my office WP spell-checked my name as “Barney Toboggan”.
A virtue of life on a smaller newspaper is the opportunity to work across sections, although that can have its drawbacks. At one point during Ned’s tenure, I was in charge of news, sport and business, with the late nights the responsibility entailed. But Ned was not one for the early finish and would stay on for as long as necessary — and often beyond, irritatingly inserting Americanisms into copy. He would have been in his element in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, web and social media.
Ned was also an enthusiastic member of the far from all-conquering cricket team and never quite lost the habit of dropping his bat, baseballstyle, before setting off for a run.
Despite the modernisation on a number of levels instituted under Ned, the retained a different vibe from most national papers, something brought home to me when at my secondary job on the sports desk at the
The decamped to Canary Wharf well before the left the Fleet Street area, by then a journalistic desert. Not that Golders Green is exactly Media City. Or as near to town as Chancery Lane.
People ask why I have stayed so long — my glib response is I would have been paroled for a double murder well before now. Beyond inertia, the answer would be the paper is a one-off — a local, national and international operation which breaks major stories without neglecting its communal heartland. Proving the point, I’m off to put some Shabbat UK images onto a page.
I was sent undercover to expose a missionary group’