6 1950s

Can you remember - asks AA Gill in this week’s Sunday Times - how grim and threadbare Britain was in the 1950s?  Rationing, as we are still being reminded,  persisted until 1953 - its presence insidiously suggestive of a Philip Larkin poem - though I can’t remember that it lasted quite as long as it did.   I have a clearer recollection of buying pounds of chocolate on my first trip to Belgium as a schoolboy soon after the war, and the exhilaration of being able to do so. My first sight of a neon-lit city - post-war Brussels, of all places - was part of that experience, as was my first taste of veal and, at the Cite Universitaire where we stayed, my first bowl of edible porridge.

Yet returning to Edinburgh as a trainee journalist in 1956 after two years in Paris was not all gloom and despair.  The streets, it’s true, remained largely devoid of restaurants, but the ones that were there included a few worth eating in, particularly the excellent Cafe Royal with its stained glass windows and wonderful waitresses, the St Giles Grill and the smart Aperitif, the cosy Cramond Inn and the resourceful Ricky’s at Tollcross.

True, the National Gallery seemed puny compared with the Louvre, and Calton Hill with the Butte Montmartre, but completing my newspaper  training, as I was  now on the brink of doing,  felt  like graduating from college.  Working for the Evening Dispatch with Alec Bowman as the most benign of editors, and with the bustling old chief reporter Bobby Leishman as my attentive overseer,  I was for a time blissfully happy,  Along with  the leader writer  Alastair Stuart, I started a monthly two-page spread of paperback book reviews, reputedly the first of its kind in Britain.

Leishman, in a state of constant anxiety, was a rubicund perfectionist, a stickler for good syntax who forbade me to write such ineptitudes as “Following the concert, the conductor fell off the platform.”  The word I needed to use, he huffed and puffed, was  “after.”  The conductor was not following the concert.  It’s a crime, I’m sorry to say, which is still committed by most newspapers today.

Bobby also had a thing about pianos, which were never to be described as bad or out of tune. “It causes pointless trouble,” his voice of experience  would splutter. “You never hear the end  it. Every piano tuner and piano owner  in Edinburgh will want you sacked.”    Though the paper’s  theatre critic was permitted to reprove, if necessary, actors at the King’s or Lyceum, humdrum shows at the Gaiety, Leith, or the Palladium, Fountainbridge, were sacrosanct, no matter how embarrassingly unfunny they were. Bobby was a joy and an education  to work for, once you got to know his quirks.

Nevertheless I sensed that the day was coming when I would need to move

on. Edinburgh, for all its virtues, seemed at the time  no substitute for Paris. While I rejoiced in being simultaneously a music critic, film critic, and art critic, and in making a host of new friends, I still yearned for somewhere else.   Within a few years of coming home, when the dull Karl Rankl was succeeded by the even duller Hans Swarowsky as conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra, a possible exit route suddenly materialised for me  in the form of an advert in the New Statesman announcing a job as sleeve-note editor at the headquarters of an international record company in Holland. The company, I suspected, could only be Philips. I instantly applied, was interviewed in London by three sturdy Dutchmen, and found myself appointed.

My enthusiasm for jazz as well as classical music, for Dave Brubeck as well as Leonard Bernstein (both of them Philips artists), did not go unnoticed by my interviewers.  Nor did  the meagreness of my Edinburgh salary which, as it soon turned out,  was about to be doubled.  Yet kissing the Dispatch goodbye was not easy. I had prospered there and enjoyed my work.  But the paper’s days were numbered. Before long its owners, the Thomson Organisation of Canada, would buy out its Edinburgh rival, the Evening News.  Then, instead of closing down the News, they closed their own less prosperous Dispatch instead.

The News offices at the bottom of Cockburn Street were bought by the district council, and eventually became for some years  the headquarters of the Edinburgh Festival. The News was shifted to the lofty Scotsman building in the North Bridge, though it remained, in my view, a less interesting paper than the Dispatch. Today, despite further changes of premises, that is the arrangement which, for better or worse,  still stands,  though the Thomson Organisation itself moved out some time ago.  Such are the vicissitudes of British newspaper life.

3 July 2014