Pints, misprints, scoops and wheezes: the glory days of the Press

The job interview was brief: there was only question. One which involved my aspirations for the immediate future.

“What are you having?”

“A pint of Guinness?” I replied, hoping it was the correct response.

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By George: George Best is feted by, from left, Dave Guiney, Sean Diffley, Vincent Mathers, Cyril Byrne (senior) and Brendan McKenna

“Right,” said the chief sub editor, signalling to the barman with a raised eyebrow. The barman, who was 20 feet away, raised his eyebrow in reply and gravely angled a glass under the tap. I still remember that glass suckling at the stout tit. I was 18 and it was my first pint as a newspaper “man”.

And I say “man” in the loosest sense of the word. I was gonky, shy and just out of school. I was a “man” applying for a boy’s job – the post of copyboy in the Irish Press. But I’ll come back to that.

I scanned Mulligan’s as my pint settled. The bar was smokier than a kipper’s backside and filled with (mainly) men skulling pints and insulting each other in exceptionally inventive ways.

A huge man, with the body of a docker and the long, silver tresses of a pre-Raphaelite painter, was slopped across the bar. He was asleep. Or he might have been dead. Beside him was an empty milk bottle and a brandy glass half filled with what looked like congealed baby puke.

“Don’t wake him,” warned the chief sub.

“Why?”

“That’s Con Houlihan. He’s been up since 4am doing his column. He’s just taking a snooze.”

It was the 9.30pm “cutline”: the half-hour break when everyone raced from their desks to down pints before the home straight of the production day – the race to deadline.

This may seem a bit mental now – taking a booze break during office hours – but that was the way things worked. The Press had no canteen and this was the only social interaction night workers had. There were rules, though. You couldn’t arrive back late. Slightly cross-eyed, but never late. On one occasion I heard the chief sub berate an indignant latecomer, to be told:

"Well, you try drinking four pints in half an hour." Everyone agreed he had a good point.

The pub was interwoven into our work day. One evening a hack slipped on black ice, breaking his leg, as he walked to the last bus. The next day, colleagues reported that he had broken his leg in two places: Mulligan’s and the Regal.

Booze was omnipresent, but drunkenness was frowned upon. You were expected to hold your drink and work like an ant on speed. The chief sub must have been impressed with my ability to speed drink a pint as I got the copyboy job. Or it might have been the fact that I’m fifth-generation hack (my great-grandfather published the War News for Pearse in 1916). Or possibly because he knew my dad. Or maybe all three.

Copyboy was the traditional route to becoming a journalist. It was menial, involved making tea and carrying stories from the subs’ desk to the caseroom, but it was an indenture which generally led to the subs’ desk or newsroom.

It was a very important job in the days before email. In 1961, copyboy John Redmond was assigned as gofer to snapper Colman Doyle, who was covering JFK’s visit to Wexford. Doyle handed him the roll of film and he ran like hell across the fields, borrowed an unattended bike, jumped into a speedboat on the Barrow, and delivered his cargo in New Ross. He achieved the latter part by placing the film into a rusty beans can which was lowered down to him by fishing rod on the quays.

Note to young hacks: never complain about poor 3G coverage. You have it easy.

I still remember my first night in the newspaper: clanking across the metal gangway over the roaring presses in the machine hall, which always reminded me of a ship’s engine room, staffed by inky men who were blacker than stokers.

The newsroom was the bridge of the ship. The noise was less rhythmic but equally urgent. The evening started with the soft murmur of reporters, banter of subs, clack of typewriters, tinkling of phones and buzzing of unwatched TVs. As the shift progressed, the atmosphere changed and I could almost smell the adrenalin (and soiled underpants).

The pressurised environment led to plenty of sniping, but full-scale rows rarely broke out. One of the cardinal rules was to stay calm under the enormous strain of hitting the 11.40 deadline. Especially if you were a sub-editor with several pages to produce.

It was for this “reason” that women subs were a rare commodity in Irish newspapers until the late ‘70s. There was a ludicrous, macho attitude that they could not survive the workload. The Indo’s Vinny Doyle was the last editor to admit women subs. He wasn’t happy about it and gave the following instruction: “So long as you treat her like the rest of them and work her bollocks off”.

This kind of bonkers mindset was not out of place in an industry that was filled with insane – and insanely talented – people who did some very strange things, but were forgiven if they could deliver the goods.

One evening the editor enquired about the identity of the sub who had pissed through his letterbox and all over his office floor. Naturally, the women subs were ruled out, as this would have been physically impossible for a female to do. And, besides, there were only two of them.

The sub was identified, but as he was one of the best in the business – and only drunk – he was forgiven.

There was an equally perplexing scatological occasion when a turd was discovered on MD Major Vivion de Valera’s windowsill. Its provenance is still a mystery. People were revolted by this, but not surprised. Press people had strong stomachs.

One Presser who had a particularly robust gut was a news executive nicknamed Yum Yum. He was renowned for eating raw mackerel (heads, tails and all) at the bar of the White Horse. One night he was asked to hold a tenner while two punters sorted out a bet over a sports result. He ate that too.

Yarning in the pub about this kind of mad behaviour was one of the most enjoyable parts of the job for me. Older journos would recall a rain- and drink-sodden Brendan Behan sitting, steaming on a radiator demanding money for an article he had yet to write. Or ex-Cumann na mBan firebrand, Maire Comerford, phoning “Ned” in the Aras if she was assigned a story she didn’t want to do.

The early Press had been a haven for demobbed IRA men and women. One republican I had the huge pleasure of working with was living legend, Gerry O’Hare. Stories – true or otherwise – cling to him like limpet mines.

The Belfast man married English journalist – and Press Northern Editor – Anne Cadwallader. When he was introduced to his future father-in-law, a retired British Army major, Gerry declared: “I had a higher rank in our army than you did in yours.”

While the stories that appeared in print were 99.9 per cent true, some yarns about the hacks themselves were suspect. I personally believe the following one about a journo who helped “develop” a yarn about actress, Jayne Mansfield.

When the pneumatic actress visited Ireland in the 1960s, she let everybody down by not conducting an orgy on O’Connell Street (as had been forecast by the clergy). The Press man assigned to follow her was at his wits’ end trying to enliven her visit and get the news editor off his back.

As he was stalking her down a country road, he suggested she slip into a church to say a “little prayer for her family”. While Mansfield fell to her knees (in front of a snapper), the reporter was banging on the parish priest’s door, urging him to turn the “scarlet woman” out of his church.

This kind of pressure to win stories and produce a daily paper under primitive conditions led to some epic cock-ups. On one occasion, a story about the English soccer team included the following line: “They wore the shite shirt with pride”.

There was also the tale of a knocked-out boxer who was “out for the c*nt”.

Sometimes apparently misspelled words were “corrected’, as in the case of “barre” and “bar”. Reporter Maura Kiely saw the intro to her interview with a venerable ballerina amended thus: “The dancer wanked [sic] into the room and headed straight for the bar”.

And then there was the critic who filed the most memorable theatre review ever. For a play that hadn’t opened…

All the foregoing may suggest that the Press was stuffed to the rafters with chancers and alcos who spent all day in the pub. It wasn’t. Booze was always there in the background, but we took huge pride in our work.

We laboured in a Dunkirk atmosphere for years, producing newspapers with meagre resources, and the constant threat of closure. Loyalty to the titles and each other was what kept us going – and the thrill of being first with a breaking news story. We led the field on this. It was common knowledge that the Indo held its front page until the Press had been printed.

The Press closed because of bad management, not bad journalism. But then good journalism won’t ever guarantee a newspaper’s survival. Look at the Trib, where I also worked. A brilliant paper which is now history’s kitty litter. Newsprint is frequently the kindling which ignites social and political change. But the public, through no fault of its own, has a short memory. Once a paper is gone, it’s gone forever.

And another one doesn’t come along to replace it.

That’s why I commissioned the stories for The Press Gang. No one has mourned the passing of newspapers’ romantic, boozy, exciting, funny, un-PC age before the internet. When news was hard-won, with boots on the ground (and faces on the ground too). When not having a coin for the phone box meant missing a deadline – and the public potentially missing a story of national importance.

Today’s young cubs are definitely our equals, but are they as resourceful as we were? Would they survive without Google as a first source? Maybe.

Can they hold their booze and type up a front page lead under pressure? Without spilling any?

Possibly. Just possibly...

[ The Press Gang Tales from the Glory Days of Irish Newspapers is published by New Island, €16.99 ]

David Kenny his own around-Ireland series, Kenny Wild, and is the author of The Little Buke of Dublin, Erindipity, Erindipity Rides Again and The Brilliant Irish Flute, and editor of The Trib: Highlights from the Sunday Tribune. Between 1985 and 1995 he worked as a copyboy, subeditor and columnist for The Irish Press