More Editors in My Life (1)

The twilight of my career as staff music critic of The Scotsman began in the nineteen-eighties with the retirement of Eric Mackay, second of the two great editors for whom I had worked, and the appointment of Chris Baur as his successor. Baur, a journalist of established seriousness, was Mackay’s man. He had been a reliable financial and political writer on the paper, and Mackay, himself a political authority of courage and distinction, gave him his blessing - which only went to prove the old adage that nobody should be allowed to appoint his own successor.

Baur, a solemn, sometimes morosely brooding presence - nicknamed Chris Bore by some of the less sympathetic of his fellow journalists -   was prone to stalk  conspicuously up and down the newsroom thinking out his wording for whatever article he was working on. Though by no means ineffectual, he was never a specially popular member of the staff and, on becoming editor, he made no effort to rectify this.

His brief reign, admittedly, began at a difficult time, when the paper was switching from the use of portable typewriters, much loved by hard-hitting journalists, to what had become known as “new technology,” involving the use of desktop computer screens.

The system adopted by The Scotsman, and presumably backed by Baur, was not welcomed by many of the journalistic staff, who believed that it had more business orientations than journalistic ones.  But it was just another of the changes, seemingly accepted by Baur - himself a noticeably untidy typist - which were inexorably leading to one of the most traumatic journalistic strikes in the paper’s history.

Baur’s task, come what may, was to keep The Scotsman coming out each day, unimpeded by strike action.  Freelance journalists were hired to replace staff - the bulk of us - who had downed tools and been shut out of the premises.  It was a dismal time during which we were all  theoretically  dismissed. On one occasion, inadvertently finding myself speaking to Baur on the phone, he invited me to return to work.  “Come back in,” he  said amicably.  “It’s  business as usual.”

Though it seems a long time ago, the memory sticks.  And though Mackay, too, had endured staff strikes, he weathered them to his own - and our - satisfaction, ensuring that while the strike continued, the presses did not roll.   But Baur, as a newly appointed editor, lacked Mackay’s vast if ultimately somewhat wry and world-weary experience and expertise. Within a short time, and after a few further editorial dramas, he had departed.

For me, the principal problem of working for him lay in his lack of interest in, even apparent disdain for, music. It was something towards which he seemed not only unsympathetic but actually opposed. He simply could not grasp why a paper had to have a staff music critic (in this, though I did not know it then, he was ahead of his time, for staff music critics in Britain today have become an almost extinct species).

Though Baur tolerated my presence, he seldom supported or encouraged me, and made clear that he deemed music criticism to be an unnecessary, indeed incomprehensible, aspect of journalism. How could anyone write in a newspaper about something so arcane? How could anyone write about something as abstruse as music at all?

Mackay likewise lacked enthusiasm for music, but saw it in newspaper terms as a necessary evil and always gave me sufficient space and encouragement to express myself.  He even, or so I was told,  bought a copy of my edition of the Collins Encyclopaedia of Music for one of his children.

Indeed, as Philip Hope-Wallace of The Guardian and BBC once famously remarked, the best sort of editor is one who does not know the difference between Bayreuth and Beirut but who does not interfere. Mackay did not interfere.

Baur, on the other hand, favoured using the paper’s resources in other ways. When, at one point, I became embroiled in a public brawl with Scottish Opera over where its future should lie, he printed a short statement to the effect that The Scotsman and Scottish Opera “needed a rest from each other.”  The Scotsman would therefore stop reviewing Scottish Opera and cease commenting on its policies. He had, at a stroke, deprived me of my power as an opera critic.

He could, I suppose, simply have sacked me. But he refrained from going that far. The trouble was that, having forbidden me to write on the subject, he was in difficulties finding a way of letting  me restart.  The opera company, as I believed, was on the wrong track after many rewarding years of being on the right one. But I was being consistently prevented from saying so, or from suggesting what might be done. The road remained blocked.

Yet the passing of Scottish Opera’s golden years, one of the pinnacles of which had been the company’s visit to the Fenice Theatre in Venice, incorporating a residence at the great Hotel des Bains, long associated with Diaghilev and Thomas Mann, was something Eric Mackay had encouraged me to chronicle.

Invited to stay with the singers in the grand old hotel, I had been able to observe them, and write about them, at close quarters in the most atmospheric of settings.   And watching the scenery arrive at the Fenice by canal was certainly an experience worth writing about. So, more distressingly, were the managerial mishaps that began to befall the company a short time later. later. But by then Mackay had retired and I was deprived - albeit only briefly -  of my opportunity to write about them.

Yet  every responsible music critic finds himself at some point in his career involved in such occurrences, and is lucky when his editor lets him deal with them in his own way. Mackay placed that trust in me. Baur, alas, did not, and when, before long, he resigned I could only rejoice that I had regained my freedom.
18 October 2015