The art of a good sub, by one of the world's best writers.
At the close of the 1960s, after some years of aimless wanderings, I decided that abroad was not to my taste, and persuaded my American wife to return to Dublin with me and settle there. In those days, Ireland prided itself on being behind the times, and the frantic 60s felt to us more like the fallow 40s. There was, however, one significant difference: jobs were plentiful. I had hardly been back in Dublin for more than a week or two when I landed a job as a subeditor on the Irish Press.
I knew nothing of the inner workings of a daily newspaper, and on my first ‘casual night’ I floundered. The chief sub gave me a two-paragraph story, and when after half an hour or so of laborious word-shifting and relentless cutting I handed it back to him, he leaned down by my ear and assured me in a menacing whisper that I was fooling nobody. Baffled, I consulted my neighbour, who was of that species dubbed by Gore Vidal, ‘the wise hack’. He glanced at my handiwork and said: ‘The headline you wrote is longer than what you left of the story.’
The job of the sub is simple, on the face of it. He – and in my day all 19 of the Press subs were men, or at least of the male gender – is given a piece of copy written, more or less, by one of the house reporters, or from one of the news agencies, and goes through it correcting errors and, in the case of foreign stories, adapting them to house style, and lastly devising a headline. He then passes the copy back to the chief sub for checking, after which it is sent to the printers upstairs.
Since the Press was a morning paper, we laboured by night. The editor, who had no love for subs, defined us as ‘people who change other people’s words and go home in the dark’. There were two shifts, from 5:30pm to 1am, and the graveyard shift, 8:30pm to 4am. We worked in a large, dirty, open-plan office that we shared with the news desk and the sports desk.
Cigarette smoke fogged the air, copy-boys ran in and out, everyone shouted and no one listened. I quickly became accustomed to, indeed I came to enjoy, the glorious cacophony of a newspaper office going at full tilt, with a deadline looming ever nearer. In those days it was still typewriters and copy paper, and headlines were handwritten in duplicate and pinned – yes, pinned, with a straight pin – to the copy, the original going upstairs and the carbon remaining with the chief sub, so that the blame for a blooper could be easily apportioned.
The war in Northern Ireland was as yet only a gleam in the nascent gunmen’s eyes, and most of the stories we ran dealt with parish-pump politics, agriculture or sport. While the rest of the world was in its accustomed turmoil, the Press, for which Ireland was the omphalos of the universe, took scant notice.
All the same, on occasion we had to turn to the foreign desk for something strong enough to lead the front page. There was, for instance, the Night of the Welsh Miners.
It was coming up to Christmas, and the best the news desk could offer us was a report on the annual spate of yuletide pile-ups on the roads. Could we really lead the paper on ‘a sharp increase in drunk-driving charges’? Then, with an hour and a half to deadline, the telex room came to our rescue with an Associated Press report of an explosion at a Welsh coal pit, which had left scores of miners trapped hundreds of feet underground. Hooray!
I was given the story to sub. The weather in Wales was terrible, with snow and sub-zero temperatures and Arctic gales. Shivering wives were gathering at the pit-head, rescue units were being rushed to the scene, the Prime Minister was due to make a statement from Downing Street. The AP correspondent told of a small boy tugging at his coat and asking, ‘with a sob’, if his dad was going to be all right. This wasn’t coal – this was gold.
The story was subbed, luridly headlined, set in type and fitted lovingly into the front page. It was 10 o’clock, and off we went to the pub for our half-hour break, known in the trade, who knows why, as ‘cut-line’. Round the corner and next door to a harness-maker’s workshop was that splendid old Dublin institution, Mulligan’s. We didn’t go there, because if we did, we would want to stay. Instead we went down the road to the Silver Swan, known to us, half-affectionately, as the Mucky Duck.
We were finishing our pints when, at 10:25pm, a newsflash came up on the telly behind the bar: Welsh mine emergency ended, all miners safe. There fell a terrible silence, broken at last by the chief sub’s furious snarl: ‘Well, fuck them anyway.’ We would have to settle for the drunk drivers.
Dublin in those days was a rackety little city implanted like a cracked molar at the mouth of the Liffey. We tried to cock a snook at faceless ones in power, but we knew well that if the cock was just that bit too snooky, we would suffer the consequences. John McGahern was sacked from his teaching job when his novel The Dark was banned by the Irish censorship board. The priest who was his boss told him it was bad enough that he had written a dirty book, but he had compounded the outrage by going out foreign and marrying a Finnish woman – a divorced woman, at that – ‘while half the women of Ireland had their tongues hanging out for a man’. That might be so, John responded, ‘but they weren’t hanging out in my direction’.
The Irish Press was founded by Éamon de Valera, one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, who would go on to become Taoiseach and later President of Ireland. De Valera’s son Vivion took over from his father in 1951 and ran the paper until his death 31 years later. Major Vivion, as he styled himself – he had been in the army during the war, or The Emergency, as it was known in neutral Ireland – was a wonderfully eccentric character, and as strait-laced and proper as a Victorian aunt.
Not always, though. I am recalling the bleak winter evening when he called the paper’s executives to his office and laid out before them the company’s dire financial situation – the Press was forever teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
The execs listened in sombre silence to his jeremiad, at the end of which he sought to lighten the atmosphere with an anecdote. His father, he said, when he worked here at the Press, had a secretary of long standing who looked after him with nun-like devotion. Leaving the office one night, Dev forgot his fountain pen, but Miss Prim found it and put it away safely, leaving for him a note that read: ‘Your pen is in my drawers.’ Here Major Vivion paused. ‘However,’ he said, ‘the poor lady, hastening to finish up and go home to her tea, had run the words “pen” and “is” together, to form an altogether different word.’
The room blanched. Had he really said what they thought he had said? Could he really have told a risqué story about his father, the Father of Our Nation? His schoolboy’s dirty chuckle proved that indeed he had. We were never to think of the Major, or his exalted progenitor, in quite the same way ever again.
From the outside, we must have seemed a heartless bunch. The nightly transformation of the day’s horrors into neatly packaged ‘stories’ made us skittish. And as the 1970s went on, we had homemade horrors aplenty. Still, though, the subs’ desk rocked with laughter. Recently I chanced to meet a friend from those days, who remarked with a wistful smile, ‘You know, I would have worked there without pay.’ So would I, probably.
In time, through a series of deaths and departures, I found myself elevated to the position of chief sub – or perhaps I should say lowered, since being the boss was no fun at all. As a sub I had been as a child at play, taking apart the bricks of a story and arranging them in a new and, I hoped, more elegant order. Now I was merely the invigilator of other people’s assemblages.
Of course, even for me there were still some jolly moments. The senior sub on the desk was a smoothly silver-haired gent of the old school. One could have said of Leo what Virginia Woolf said of T. S. Eliot, that if he could, he would have worn a four-piece suit. He was extremely learned – fluent Latin and a sound grasp of Greek – and went on annual pilgrimages to Medjugorje and other holy places devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary. When the lurid IRA groupie Dr Rose Dugdale was finally captured, I thought Leo a safe pair of hands to sub the story.
In Ireland, as you probably know, policemen are known as guards. Leo hummed his way through the account of the long hunt for Dugdale – who in her glory years had stolen millions of pounds-worth of paintings from Sir Alfred Beit and bombed an RUC station from a hijacked helicopter – and returned it to me with a neatly chiselled and, in its way, accurate headline: ‘Massive guard mounted on Dr Dugdale.’
‘Le-o,’ I said, and gave him a look, to which he responded with a guileless smile that could not hide the merry mischief-maker behind it.
But I was hardly one to talk. Years before, when I was still a lowly sub, I had edited a front-page lead story about a breakthrough in the Irish government’s efforts to wrest control of education from the hands of the religious. I still blush to think of the headline I attached to it: ‘Nuns agree to lay principals’. Here, I forgot the second of the two things the wise hack had assured me every sub must have: a filthy mind and a firm grasp of the laws of libel.
