Oh yes, I remember them well

BERNIE CORBETT, editor from 1985 to 1988, recalls the Journalist of the 1970s and ’80s

I HAVE BEEN asked to write this piece, if I have got this right, because I am the only living elected ex-editor of the Journalist whose whereabouts are known to the NUJ. Please don’t think I am seeking sympathy as an endangered species. In fact I believe journalism — and humanity in general — would be better off if an asteroid flew in and wiped out all the editors from the face of the earth.

When I was a kid we used to sing, “All coppers are bastards”. Maybe we were not wrong, but I have learnt since that assuredly all editors are bastards. I was a one myself, but only for three years.

I had started reading the Journalist in 1969, having joined the union as a cub reporter on a local weekly. The Journalist was then edited by Allen Hutt who was widely admired for doing the layouts on his kitchen table — something the reader could easily believe, and which in fact I later did myself.

More mysteriously, Allen Hutt had a reputation as a guru of typography. Even at the fag end of the 1960s, his layouts had that wartime air of saving paper and squeezing in rather too many brief stories on every page, with pictures varying in size between the postcard and the postage stamp. If that was typography, it is a good job he never went in for civil engineering.

At that time the Journalist enclosed the Institute of Journalists’ Bulletin with every issue. The briefest perusal of the Bulletin was enough to alert the reader that the IoJ was a tiny but vicious gang of boss-lovers, in their element only with a glass of sherry in one hand, a certificate of achievement in another, and the sensitive parts of a chapel rep in a third.

The Journalist recounted wage claims, earnest branch and annual delegate meetings, while the Bulletin specialised in charity press balls, MBEs and a members’ conference in Jersey.

For some reason or other the attempted merger of the NUJ and IoJ, or “trial marriage” as it was known in a weird reflection of the 1960s sexual revolution, was called off in 1971. My reading of the respective journals of the two organisations left me firmly on the NUJ side of the fence.

Over the next few years the Journo gradually introduced a recognisable masthead, a type size readable without the help of a magnifying glass, sans serif headlines, photographs of human beings and other symptoms of modernity.

This was the work of the Blessed Ron Knowles, the most militant individual the NUJ has ever employed. To the consternation of the union’s executive, officers and senior personnel, he had got himself elected by ADM and was thus unsackable. He and they both knew it.

And so the NUJ had an impertinent, rollicking, iconoclastic, strike-supporting, humbug-hating Journalist just at the time when the unions were at their powerful peak, careering headlong towards the Winter of Discontent.

Possibly Ron Knowles had heard about typography, but if so, for him it was an effete and reactionary yoke that would be joyfully tossed aside as events or whim dictated. For him there could be no prissiness about comment is free, facts are sacred ... His Journo would always support the union against the world, but it would also support the members against the union. Ron was a good bastard.

And so to the ridiculous. With Thatcher came Tony Craig, who in a way was even more radical than Knowles — he did away with editing altogether. He believed that what the members wanted (or ought to get) were verbatim accounts of national executive meetings and long analyses of what he saw as the many shortcomings and failures of the NUJ and its horrible members.

He had an awful lot of this stuff, and when he realised there was too much of it to fit in a normal edition, he would simply increase the number of pages to accommodate it all. He would have got away with it if he hadn’t believed that all women journalists were dangerous feminist lunatics.

Tony Craig started printing Varoomshka, a cartoon strip featuring a topless female superheroine, which may have been intended as satirical but came out as plain sexist. ADM was cruelly denied the satisfaction of censuring him because Craig managed to lose his job over something to do with expenses.

Then I was elected to the job. But that’s enough bastards. Ed.

Bernie Corbett is now General Secretary of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain