The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  The feeling, mostly, was that they were at the top of their tree. Almost all of them had worked their way up from local papers in their home area, little old-fashioned weeklies like the Carlisle Journal, then moved on to an evening paper in a bigger town in Yorkshire or Lancashire, before eventually reaching Manchester. Few were graduates, as not many people had been to university in those days, but several had gone to grammar schools. Many had started as boys of fifteen, straight from school, as copyboys or messenger boys.

  On the masthead of the Evening Chronicle it said ‘ONE MILLION READERS EVERY NIGHT’. I could not take in that number. It was about a hundred times the population of Carlisle. It took me a while to understand that ‘readers’ did not mean ‘copies’, which is always a confusion when looking at any circulation figures. Readership is usually based on the notion that there are three readers for every copy of a paper printed – while ‘circulation’ should mean the number of copies actually printed and sold. All the same, were there really going to be one million people reading my lovely polished prose?

  One reason for the thousands of workers was the archaic printing methods, though at the time the process was considered to be state of the art. Basically, however, it had hardly changed since the days of William Caxton. It was really much the same as at Palatinate, just several thousand times greater and more complex.

  Each piece of type, each letter or figure on every page, was originally a piece of hot metal, produced by a linotype machine. It then got laid out in a metal frame, with the blocks placed in, in the shape and size and layout of the finished newspaper page. It was then copied on to a mould, before being turned into a sheet of rounded metal, fixed on to a cylinder which revolved at fantastic speed, with ink being pumped in, and these were the printing presses. I think I have that roughly right, if not the correct terminology. It was so large scale and industrial, like a nineteenth-century steam factory, yet everything was under the same roof, so you could follow or watch the whole satanic process, from start to finish, the raw paper coming in, the massive bundles of newspapers trundling out on monster vehicles.

  Editorially, things were a little more complicated and labour-intensive than they had been on Palatinate, where we published just once a fortnight. For a start, on the Chron, we had about eight different editions – a day. They began first thing in the morning, coming out almost on the hour, all day long. The front and back pages would be slightly different each time, depending on the time of day and any new news that had happened since the last edition, while inside four pages at least were devoted to a particular area or town. The earliest editions went the furthest away, to far-flung parts of Cheshire, so their inside news would be all about the latest excitements in Crewe or Bakewell. Then there would be editions for Eccles, Warrington, Wigan, till eventually, as the day progressed, there would be the Salford edition and then a central Manchester one.

  Today, in newspapers, the process is totally different, almost like a different industry. So much is created and laid out and transferred on screen, the physical presses divorced from the editorial. And, in the world of print, only one edition a day is being produced.

  One of the things that always strikes me about modern printing technology, of newspapers and magazines, is how slow it often is. We could be on the streets in an hour with a different edition, and then keep it up every hour. Today it takes them all day long for one edition of a newspaper, and by then you have usually heard or read about most of the news already online. (Online news is, of course, a different animal.)

  The Saturday afternoon pink ’uns or green ’uns, the special football editions that came out in most big cities in the UK, could be had and read even as you were leaving the match. The result and some details of the game you had just watched would be there, in print, in your hand, as you walked home. Mind you, the blurry, inky, abbreviated words might be hard to read, printed sideways in the fudge – which was what that gap at end of the back page was called. And any report might not make a lot of sense, as the reporter had been sending it over from kick-off on a crackly telephone line, without knowing what was going to happen. Goodness, football reporters have it easy today, with laptops, iPads, computers, mobile phones and other technological wonders.

  I reported to Harold Mellor that first day, the deputy news editor. My first reaction was – is it me or is he a bastard? Or was it my paranoia? I was informed by a senior reporter, with some obvious relish, that Harold did not like graduates, especially those with poor spelling. But he was feared by almost all the reporters for his bad temper, shouting and dressing people down in front of the whole newsroom. He was fond of mockery, very much like that awful maths teacher I had at the Creighton School who would read out and ridicule your dreadful mistakes. He was, of course, almost always right, knew exactly where you had ballsed up, what you should have done, what you had missed, how you had cut corners.

  Even at the time, he was considered old school, how hard-faced, loud-mouthed newsroom editors used to behave – the inference being that they had now improved, we were all so much more civilised. But the fact is they had not. And have not. It was the first time I had experienced such a character, but they do still exist on national newspapers. And elsewhere – the bastard boss from hell, driving everyone to a breakdown. In newspapers, it is still often the news editor, or sometimes, on a tabloid, the editor, who is the foul-mouthed ranter, feared by all, but also admired for his professionalism.

  The actual news editor, Bob Walker, when he appeared, was kind and gentle, silver-haired and avuncular, addressed everyone as ‘mister’ and never raised his voice. There was also an assistant news editor plus a female secretary, who were very pleasant too, and they all sat behind a glass-panel partition, keeping an eye on everyone. The only baddie was Harold Mellor. The sight of his finger in the air through the glass panel, pointing in my direction, made me tremble.

  The dozen or so general reporters sat at a very long wooden table, cheek by jowl, each with our own sit-up-and-beg manual typewriter. We didn’t have a phone each, but there were enough to go round in the middle of the table in front of us. When all twelve of us were clattering away, the din was like a cotton mill. Or how I imagined a cotton mill must have sounded, with all the spools and spindles, the banging of the bobbins, the bells and the carriage changes.

  Behind us at an equally long table sat the subeditors, much older, more worn and weary, middle-aged gents who smoked all the time. Their heads were permanently down, frowning, looking miserable and long-suffering, clearly too good for this job, for this world, with one arm poised, about to strike. Pots of paste (for cutting up copy and sticking it back together) were lined up in front of them, and a spike on which they would be about to impale a particularly useless piece of copy, then whoosh, the arm would come down, the offending page had had its life and guts ripped out of it.

  The copy paper came in pads, flimsy, cheap, yellowy typing paper, smaller than today’s copy paper, a bit under A4 size. If there was an emergency, and several were working on a Big Story, all contributing, and all being shouted at by Harold, you would often type out just one sentence. It would look strange and wasteful, so few words on a whole page, but by then it would have gone, a copyboy having whisked it to the news-desk. It would then be rushed to the subs, marked up with cuts and corrections, headlines attached, sizes indicated, and then even more swarms of copyboys would appear to speed it on its way to the men on the linotype machines, where all the letters and words would be turned into hot metal. The roar of the machines, combined with all the manic running about, the noise and shouting, the mad panic to catch the edition, made the whole process appear like controlled chaos. Gosh, it was exciting. Don’t tell me a laptop provides just as much fun and atmosphere.

  On our floor, around the sides, were several offices, with other editorial departments, but I never got to enter most of their preserves. I presumed they housed the feature writer, sportswriters, specialists, women’s page, plus lordly folks like assistant ed
itors with their secretaries. I never saw the editor, Mr Goulden. He seemed totally unaware that I had joined them.

  I was the youngest by far on the reporters’ table. It was only months later that I discovered that another graduate trainee had joined the very same day as me, but she had been placed elsewhere. Something to do with the women’s pages, I think. Perhaps business. It was ages before I even spoke to her.

  I sat between a rather gruff, middle-aged man in a tweed jacket called Mac, who smoked a pipe all the time and hardly spoke to me, and a middle-aged woman, the only woman reporter, called Beryl, small and rather dumpy. She was the most incredible typist. She sat there all day, bashing away thousands of words, yet never seemed to go out on stories. I eventually discovered, by sneaking a look at her copy, that she was mainly working on so-called news features. They were partially disguised advertising features, with the editorial ‘news angle’ being the launch of some new product or department of a big local store. Still goes on today. Even more so.

  I was very surprised to discover she was a Cambridge graduate, the only graduate in the newsroom. I wondered why she had never moved on to higher things, and seemed content to remain here, doing this sort of humdrum work. I didn’t ask her, of course. That would have been very condescending, coming from somebody who knew nothing about anything and had just arrived.

  There was a senior reporter called Stan who had worked in Fleet Street, as he told me, several times, and a handsome, thirtysomething man about town called Terry Cringle, who always signed himself TC, as everyone would know him. Then there was a tall, affable, tweedy, well-spoken rather dishevelled reporter who later became a priest. And an old hack in a wide boy’s shiny suit called Arnold Field, who worked funny hours, including Sundays, manning the newsroom in case any stories broke. He was Jewish, which was why he was prepared to work Sundays. He was the first Jewish person I had ever met. There had been none in Carlisle, nor any at Durham, that I was aware of.

  Being a graduate trainee was a joke, in that there was no formal training, nothing you had to learn, no exams you had to pass. So unlike today, now they have tried to turn it into a profession, like a doctor or lawyer. Almost all aspiring journalists have first of all to be a graduate, then they have to do a postgraduate year on a journalism course, at places like Cardiff, City University, Preston and elsewhere.

  Someone in the newsroom suggested, in passing, that I might learn shorthand, as they could all do it, having mostly learned it while young, starting on local papers from school, but it was not insisted on and no one had checked whether I could do it. I found a shorthand teacher who charged only half a crown. I went to her house each week along with about five teenage girls, who had just left school. They were all eager and quick and bright and I was put to shame by my slowness and incomprehension. I did eventually learn a few grammalogues, but gave up totally after a few months. I decided that if I wrote things down in my own sort of scribbled shorthand notes, and then typed them up quickly, I would capture most of it. But if I left my notes for a few days, I found I could not understand a word.

  No mention was made of going to any legal lessons, about libel and slander and copyright, which I suppose would have been helpful. Nor was I taught anything about subediting, about layout, production, measuring and marking photographs or the technical side, which today I am sure all young journalists are expert at. You were just meant to pick it all up, on the job.

  It was hard in a way to see what the advantages of the graduate trainee scheme were – apart from the good fortune of being on it, allowed straight on to a professional paper without having any experience. I did hope that one extra advantage, unless I fell out totally with the dreaded Harold, was that I might be fast-tracked, moved around, given the chance to try different sorts of journalism. That’s what I thought Mr Fraser had led me to believe. But it seemed, in those early Manchester months, that I had imagined this. I was being left to make my own way, in my own career.

  The first story I remember getting into the paper, after just a few weeks, which I had done, was all mine, as opposed to rewriting or following up something, was headlined ‘crumpsall vandals strike again!’ I am not sure now, and wasn’t clear even then, where Crumpsall is. I was taken there in a photographer’s car, as some reader had rung in about panes of glass being broken on a local allotment. Who was behind it? Was it an orchestrated campaign? We got there to discover an angry old man, who had arrived at his greenhouse to find all the windows broken. He was ranting and raving, vowing what he would do, and was more than happy to stand, gesticulating and looking furious, over and over again, till we had enough suitably dramatic photographs to stand up the story.

  But I did get some really first-rate on-the-job training when I was given what we would now call a mentor, a senior reporter, who turned out to be of enormous help. He was called Barry Cockcroft, tall, dark-haired, endlessly enthusiastic, who came from Rochdale, where he still lived. He had gone to Manchester Grammar School, a fact which was hard to escape as he usually wore their old boy tie and managed to draw attention to it, which of course was a great help in Manchester where for decades it had been, and still is, an excellent school. He had become a journalist from school and worked firstly on the Rochdale Observer. He was only four years older than me, but seemed much more experienced and knowledgeable.

  I went out with him on jobs for some weeks, trailing in his wake, watching and admiring his expertise, whether on a murder, a serious road accident, a big fire or some other local news event. He would work out what had happened at once, identify the main characters, then grab the chief policeman on the case, get some quotes from him which he scribbled in his notebook, then perhaps the chief fire officer, or a doctor, all of whom he seemed to know by name. Then he would find an eyewitness, someone involved in the incident, get some sentences from them, then it was a mad dash to the nearest telephone box, hoping to get there before the Mail, Mirror and Herald, but most of all our deadly rival, the Evening News.

  I would stand outside the phone box, my foot in the doorway to keep out anyone else, and listen in total wonder as Barry dictated 750 words in perfect English, in well-formed paragraphs, the whole story, with a beginning and end, doing it instantly, yet he had not written down a thing, apart from the quotes. How did he do it? He must be a genius. I am never going to manage it.

  After a few weeks, when I was at last sent out on my own on some news story, I managed the quotes-gathering okay, worked out who the bigwigs were, and even tracked down locals for the next slip edition. What we always had to do on any half-decent story was find participants and witnesses from different parts of the region, get a quote from them, with their age, job and street. ‘Anybody here injured and from Wigan?’ we would shout, going round the wounded and the bleeding. If they said no, they were from Chester, you would move on quickly. The Chester edition would have gone ages ago. Who needs them now?

  Having got all the details and suitable quotes for the next edition, I would crouch behind the telephone box, rather than stepping inside and putting in coins. Then I would start desperately scribbling down my whole story, with crossings-out, changes, by which time I had lost about an hour. When I eventually got through and dictated it to copy, Harold would come on and scream at me, ‘What the fuck have you been doing? The Evening News has already got it on their front page, get back at once and update it, you dozy sod.’

  I got better, but I was never very good at immediate news stories, too concerned with trying to write them, bring in a bit of colour and character. Eventually I realised that Barry’s amazing skills were partly a trick, honed over years of doing the same sorts of stories. He had a format for a traffic accident, a fire, an assault, a murder, which he could repeat almost every time, just changing the names and details.

  For the first few months I was not in fact allowed out very often. I was stuck on the desk, answering the phone, following up piddling stories, getting quotes, rewriting hand-outs and releases. One of the daily duties I seemed
to be landed with was the dreaded calls. They had to be done each morning, as early as possible. You had a list of about ten numbers, for the local police stations, fire stations and main hospitals, and a contact in each who was supposed to answer questions. You would ask about an incident overnight, and hope they would tell you, and check on any running stories, such as people who had been taken into hospital earlier in the week – were they stable, coming out soon, or had they relapsed? Then you would write up a little paragraph, hoping Harold would not go mad because you’d forgotten to ask the one vital thing.

  Obviously I can spell, do spell, but I am always in such a hurry, even now, that I bash on without checking. I rarely look back to see how I spelled a place or a person’s name the first time, so it can vary, all on the same page. I tell myself I will go back and correct, but I don’t always. I suppose it is like leaving my clothes lying around. I expect others to go round and tidy up the spelling after me.

  ‘This John Smith,’ Harold would bawl at me. ‘Are you sure it is not Smythe? And did you check he is not Jon, short for Jonathan? You didn’t? You think you did? You’re bloody lying now. Then ring him back, at once, you . . .’

  Making a phone call out of the Manchester area was a minor event in itself. It had to be legitimate, and not a personal call, and you had to go through the switchboard, so they would always record it if, say, to take an example at random, you had rung Somerville College, Oxford, JCR phone box.

  I never got expenses, as such, not for meals or buying people drinks, though I am sure the more senior reporters, especially the crime reporters, had generous expense accounts. I had to go almost everywhere on the bus, which I could claim, but now and again, if it was fairly important, I was allowed to go in an office car. I loved that. It felt like ‘hold the front page’. Even better, more impressive, if I zoomed off down Withy Grove, tyres screeching, with a photographer. They were always local, knew their way around, the short cuts, the back entrances, the tricks to pull to get into places, whereas for me Manchester was still a vast alien land. I could hardly understand the accents, never mind the maps.