I joined the staff on the Daily Mirror in London in June 1973 following two months
working as a casual on the Features sub-editors desk. I was fortunate that when I
found myself looking for work in London, the Deputy Chief Sub in Features then,
David Sinclair, was a former colleague of mine from my days on the Sunday Mail in
Glasgow, who put in a good word for me to be able to get those casual shifts.
Earlier, in Glasgow on the Sunday Mail, after three months as a copy boy (making
tea, running errands, etc), I had spent the following eight years learning how to sub,
scale pictures, lay-out pages, oversee other subs and generally having an excellent
all-round “apprenticeship”. I left to edit a pop magazine, where I was planning the
magazine, commissioning features, interviewing bands, writing copy, designing the
pages and then liaising in situ with the printers in several different locations, from
Dublin to Dunfermline.
When the magazine folded, I moved to London with the Natural Acoustic Band, the folk-rock band I was also co-managing, and spent two years involved in that project, until the main focus of the band I joined the staff on the Daily Mirror in London in June 1973 following two months working as a casual on the Features sub-editors desk. I was fortunate that when I found myself looking for work in London, the Deputy Chief Sub in Features then, David Sinclair, was a former colleague of mine from my days on the Sunday Mail in Glasgow, who put in a good word for me to be able to get those casual shifts.
Earlier, in Glasgow on the Sunday Mail, after three months as a copy boy (making tea, running errands, etc), I had spent the following eight years learning how to sub, scale pictures, lay-out pages, oversee other subs and generally having an excellent all-round “apprenticeship”. I left to edit a pop magazine, where I was planning the magazine, commissioning features, interviewing bands, writing copy, designing the pages and then liaising in situ with the printers in several different locations, from Dublin to Dunfermline, the lead singer, left, the band folded and I was then looking for work..
Which is where I found myself when I joined the Mirror. As I had been used to designing my own pages, both at the Sunday Mail and at the pop magazine, it came as quite a surprise to me that the pages on the Mirror were laid out by a completely separate Art Desk. .
We worked on two shifts on the Mirror Features subs desk, starting at either noon or 3pm. The afternoon shift would be working on the paper two days down the line and would receive the type-written copy from the various writers to then begin editing, rewriting where necessary, checking, liaising with the writers, creating headlines and marking up type faces, all to be checked by the overnight Chief Sub, who would then send the finished version to the compositors for them to set the type and make up the pages overnight. This was all in the days before computers, so judging the length of a story after it had been cut/edited had to be done by counting the words individually or estimating its length through experience. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn’t (some subs were better than others at “casting off”).
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The noon subbing shift the following day would then review the pages set overnight and make whatever cuts were needed when a story was too long for the space allocated on the page plan. Some writers wrote to length (Keith Waterhouse had a regular column space and also supplied his own headlines) but others, such as John Pilger, were allowed to have all their original copy set overnight, which could mean me on the noon shift going over almost line for line with him on the phone (in the days before Zoom and the internet) from, say, China or Bangladesh, taking out words and phrases here and there to make the story fit. Frequently there were also features to be subbed on the day, perhaps covering a breaking story. .
Once all the revisions had been cleared by the Chief Sub and the various editors/writers involved, the pages were sent back to the compositors for the changes to be set and revised by them. This did not necessarily mean that everything fitted after the revisions, so a ‘stone’ sub, who could read type upside down, was on hand to indicate to the respective compositors where cuts had to be made or new headlines inserted. With strong unions in those days, a journalist touching type was a strict no-no. These finished pages were then proofed again and sent back to the editorial floor for final clearance..
During breaks in the process – and in the evenings – there were several pubs in the vicinity that were frequented by different Mirror staff. The White Hart – now a Pizza Express but better known in its heyday as The Stab, as in “stab in the back” – for example, was the Mirror editorial pub, while others such as the Printers Devil (or “Barney’s”) was frequented mostly by compositors and the Mitre by Mirror news desk people..
The pubs certainly saw some lively evenings. In The Stab, for example, the then-Features Chief Sub, Des Lyons, could often be seen and heard regaling fellow journalists on the piano. And after a session in The Stab, it was not unknown for colleagues to take advantage of a fellow ”hack’s” condition, such as the time a Mirror features sub was Sellotaped to a desk on the editorial floor. .
After eight years on the subs desk, the last three as Chief Sub, I moved on to a different area on the Mirror and my subbing days were finished … but not forgotten.
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