Good Times, Bad Times by Harold Evans

Author:Harold Evans [Evans, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History
ISBN: 9781453258361
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

5 The full list was Michael Baily, Patrick Brogan, Jerome Caminada, George Clark, Charles Douglas-Home, James H. Greenwood. John Greig, Richard Harris, John Hennessy, E. C. Hodgkin, Bob Jones, Mollie Keenan, Roy Lewis, C. D. Longley, Brian MacArthur, Innis Macbeath, Kenneth Mackenzie, Hugh Noyes, A. M. Rendel, Geoffrey Smith, David Spanier, Hugh Stephenson, Colin Watson, Stuart Weir, Michael Wolfers, Alan H. Wood, David Wood, and Geoffrey Woolley.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

First Editions

There are pictures of The Times for the year I was born which show the sub-editors of the home department sitting gravely round a polished oval table in a room with a merry coal fire in the grate, like so many directors of an old-established banking parlour shut off from the clamour of events. Claud Cockburn has described how he found a sub-editor in the overseas room translating a passage of Plato’s Phaedo into Chinese, for a bet, while another dictated the Greek passage aloud from memory. Leader writers dined grandly in Private House, the family quarters for generations of the founding Walter family. The editorial rooms – it seems crude to call them offices – were then on the original site of the King’s old printing house in Blackfriars overlooking Queen Victoria Street, where John Walter I founded the Daily Universal Register on New Year’s Day in 1785. The spirits of Barnes and Delane still invested the premises when John Walter III rebuilt them in 1874, preserving the royal coat of arms carved in stone in the spandrel over the entrance, and they probably flitted about the board room of the new post-war block with its splendid view of St Paul’s Cathedral. It is hard to imagine anyone caring to haunt The Times in Gray’s Inn Road. The editorial offices, on the first floor above a lavish marble entrance, have the charm of an out-patients’ registry. There is a large area for the reporters and another for the home and overseas subs and sport, lit dimly by fluorescent tube and drained of style or colour. The home and overseas editors are encased behind high sheet glass. For a few, there is sight of the telex room with its promise of happenings, but the nerve centre of the news desk with its telephones and television is cut off behind more half-partitions of fluted glass. There are corridors with more half-partitions, behind which specialist writers conduct archaeological research on mounds of old journals. Only in the late afternoons, when the night staff take over and reporters try to meet the deadlines, is the void diminished.

I began my first day as editor with a 10 a.m. tour conducted by Charles Douglas-Home, whose appointment as deputy editor I planned to announce in the afternoon. There were signs of activity. The reporters who were in had to make quick decisions: did they talk to the new editor or answer the phone? Encouragingly they all chose the latter. Rodney Cowton, the news editor, was torn between a natural deference and the demands of the news schedule for my first conference at noon.

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