10 Amsterdam or Edinburgh?

As I soon realised, my job as a BBC newsroom sub-editor in London in the nineteen-sixties could be no more than a dimly interesting stop-gap.

Basically the work, though carried out by people of considerable intelligence and experience, was little more than secretarial. A senior editor would bring me a printed news-agency news story and read out, in his own words, the bits he wanted  to incorporate in the next radio news bulletin. I would then dictate his words, as accurately as I could remember them, to a typist, who would pass them back to the editor.

If the result differed in any way from what he had said to me in the first place, it would be returned to me for correction. Then I would pass it back to him. It was a tedious process, with no scope for creativity, and it continued on a punishing time schedule involving three-day stints lasting from ten in the morning until ten at night. As  your reward you were then given three days off, followed by an even more soul-destroying three-day stint from ten at night until ten in the morning, with a further three days off in compensation.

The night shift, which was spent assembling the early morning news bulletin, was even drearier than the day one. If you were lucky you could rest your head on your desk for a few minutes and snatch some sleep, but this tended to be interrupted by the crotchety night editor, a man called Beevers who accused you of slacking.

The one break in the monotony was the opportunity each morning to hand the bulletin, story by story, to the news reader. If the reader happened to be the famously jovial Frank Phillips - who would remind you never to refer to the chief constable of Kent in case he tripped over the pronunciation - all was well. But the icily aloof Alvar Lidell’s rebukes were less harmonious. Hating it if a sub-editor stood directly behind him as he read, he would ominously switch off the microphone and order you to  shift position to where he could see you. For me the best moment of the morning came when, at 10am, I was released from Broadcasting House and could stroll down to Piccadilly for coffee and croissants at Fortnum and Mason before heading home to bed.

Yet I made friends during these endless months in the galleys, as Verdi described his early life as an opera composer, and one of them was a quiet Irishman called Brian Parker, an associate of the novelist JP Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man, and a fascinating source of information about Dublin’s literary life.

But it was not enough.  Dreams of returning to Holland began to obsess me, and so did the lure of working more creatively in the London office of The Scotsman which, on the corner of Bouverie Street, fulfilled my ambition, now stronger than ever, to become a Fleet Street journalist. Though I was aware that it would mean a drop in salary - the BBC at least paid rather well -  I decided to approach Alastair Dunnett, by then The Scotsman’s flamboyant impresario of an editor, to see what he could offer.

10 August 2014