The editors in my life (1)

As a staffer - meaning staff writer or, in my case, staff music critic - I worked in my time for seven editors, three of them on the fine old but now long defunct Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, where I did my journalistic training, the others on the Scotsman.   Joining the Scotsman in the days when the distinguished  J Murray Watson was editor had been my original aim, and he was willing to take me on.  But my inability to ride a bike - I suffered from a fear of falling - meant that I could not do night duty and  cycle home afterwards. “Can you not learn?”  asked Murray Watson, pointing out that night duty was essenetial for a trainee on a morning paper.  “No,” I replied. We had reached, as we agreed, an impasse.

The alternative was to join the Scotsman’s sister paper, which was what I did.  As an evening paper printing its first edition at 11am, the Dispatch had more congenial hours.  I could catch the first bus to work in the morning  and be on the Waverley Bridge before 7.30, which was the earliest I would start. My editor was Albert Mackie, author of a book about whisky and a humorous poet and playwright who set himself the daily task of writing a topical editorial poem on the leader page  under the nom de plume of Macnib. This had to be sent downstairs for setting  shortly after 10am, but sometimes he forgot or was too busy - King George VI died one morning just before the paper went to press - and he would receive an urgent call at the last moment, which meant that he had immediately to scribble some lines or get someone he trusted to do it for him. On one occasion the task came my way.  It was the only time I wrote a poem for a newspaper and the only time Macnib’s style resembled William McGonagall’s.

Albert Mackie was an amiable editor, running a bit to weight, with red hair and a red moustache. Like the rest of us he worked without ill-will on Christmas Day, and got the paper off to press. Together we once wrote a revue for performance by the Gateway Theatre company, which in those days included Lennox Milne and Edith McArthur, with Rikki Fulton as guest star.  Mackie wrote the words and I the music, and Jack House came over from Glasgow to review it, not altogether favourably, though otherwise it did well and extended its run.

Perhaps Mackie was too good-natured to continue editing the Dispatch when, at the same time as the Scotsman, it was suddenly sold to the Thomson Organisation from Canada, but he worked hard to survive.  One of the first actions of the new owners was to install a lift, something the lofty building on the North Bridge had lacked, because its previous proprietors - one of them a tall, elegant, disdainful dilettante who strolled through the corridors with a whippet on a leash - did not want to make life too easy for the staff. Until then we had all had to climb the paper’s  multiplicity of stairs.  Even Roy Thomson,  when he came into the building (like the rest of us) via the rear door off the Fleshmarket Close, had to pad his way to the posher portion of the paper before mounting a formal marble staircase which was banned to everyone else. I never saw any other person use it, other than Festival celebrities,  until Magnus Linklater became editor of the Scotsman forty years later, by which time the rest of the staff used the lift.  

One of Albert Mackie’s special virtues was that he was a literary man who made the Dispatch a genuinely literary newspaper, filled with reviews as well as sports news and obligatory local stories and reports of business dinners, which we  took our turn reporting. Though everyone started work in the early morning we did not finish until our final tasks of the day were complete. But as music critic I did not, at that time, have to return to the office after a concert in order to write my review. I could write it at home and take it in the following morning. Nevertheless these were long days for which nobody was paid overtime.

As well as carrying lengthy reviews - I had more space than most newspaper critics now get  - the Dispatch also had its weekly radio page, for which, before TV had properly got going, I wrote a regular column, along with quite lavish book pages including a centre spread on paperbacks.  The first book I ever reviewed was Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s pioneering Record Guide, for which I was allotted 750 words.  For an apprentice critic, the paper was a pleasure.  Every idea I came up with was accepted and when the revamped Bavarian State Opera visited Covent Garden in the 1950s, I was sent there to write about Richard Strauss’s Arabella, Die Liebe der Danae, and Capriccio. Edinburgh Festival coverage was, of course, comprehensive, and my annual preview filled a page. The first year Sibelius was omitted from the festival, my rebuke to the festival director was delivered below a picture of the composer with the heading, in heavy type, ABSENT.

But the good times suddenly ended.  Mackie, who had been having to supply the Thomson Organisation with a list of each member of his staff’s daily output in column inches, realised that we were all under threat and was himself one of the first to go to the wall. Until then I had never witnessed a sacking. He was succeeded by Jack Miller, a tyrannical news editor from Fleet Street. Life under Miller, which ended for me when I was conscripted into the RAF, will be described in a future reminiscence.
8 June 2014