July 3rd, 2004Maeve remembered her start in journalism in a tribute to her first editor, Douglas Gageby, who died in June 2004
“There is a dangerous tendency of thinking your own time was the best, and there were no days like your days. Journalists fall into this trap more easily than anyone else.
It’s as if we want people to know what stirring times we lived through, what dramas our newsroom saw and what near-misses we had, and what amazing never-to-be-equalled camaraderie we all shared.
All over Ireland this week there will be people telling such tales of Douglas Gageby’s time.
And even as I write his name I feel forward.
I never called him anything except Mr Gageby.
I met him when I was a 27-year-old schoolteacher in Dublin, sharing a dream with half the country that maybe I could write if someone would let me.
Even when I nearly caught up with him in age and we were friends, when he asked me to call him Douglas I could never do it. He was too important.
At the job interview where he asked what I would do if I were to run the Woman’s Page, I suggested that we relegate fashion to one day, cookery to another, and then get on with what people would be interested in on the other four days.
He asked mildly what I thought people might be interested in, and I blinded him with my views.
“Of course, she’s never worked a day in her life in a newspaper,” he said to Donal Foley, the news editor.
“She has to learn somewhere,” Donal said, and Mr Gageby nodded and said that was fair enough.
So who wouldn’t love someone who took such a mad risk?
My memory of those days was that he seemed to be for ever in his office.
Day and night.
That wasn’t possible because we knew he had a great family life, he often talked about his children, and he always talked about his wife, Dorothy.
He was invited everywhere, but he was never a great one for going to receptions or dinners, except the Military History Society of Ireland which he was very keen on.
He was handsome, he was confident at work, he was happy in his home life, he was courageous and he was dragging the paper into modern times.
No wonder so many of us were mad about him.
He had, of course, a short fuse.
There is nobody who doesn’t have a Mr Gageby experience of some kind. Like when he would bellow his annoyance at something that appeared in yesterday’s paper.
There was never such a thing as today’s paper, there was the one we had written yesterday which, according to him, was full of faults and mistakes and unbelievable oversights, or tomorrow’s, which was going to be spectacular and we would stick everyone else to the ground with our stories, insights and backgrounds.
I have seen Mr Gageby incandescent with rage about a sportswriter who said that a match was a nip-and-tuck affair and gave no further detail, and a financial journalist who said the agm of some company was predictable, but hadn’t explained what had been predicted.
He has been white-faced over someone who missed the one big row that week in the Senate, or called the ceremony that happens in England the trooping OF the colour when there should be no OF in it, apparently. And somebody invariably got it wrong, and somebody else invariably let it past.
I have been at the receiving end when the Woman’s Page had a series of apologies in it.
We regret that when we said 11½ pounds of split peas, we actually meant 1 to 1½ pounds of split peas.
We regret that when we said this dress in Richard Alan’s cost £20 we actually meant it cost £200.
We regret we have given the wrong number of the Gay Switchboard, the wrong score in the All-Ireland.
His eyes were narrow. I wondered how I had ever thought he was handsome.
“Your page is a laughing stock,” he said. “With the possible exception of the Straits Times in Malaysia, I have never seen a worse features page.”
My face was scarlet for 48 hours. I contemplated emigrating.
Next week it was forgotten and we could breathe again.
But, by God, how he stood up for us, all of us.
He never gossiped about one to another, and he fought our enemies and people who said we were less than great.
He said that we reported what we saw.
Even when his back was against the wall over what we had reported or misreported.
We knew we would not be sold down the river.
And I know he had hard times in Stephen’s Green clubs when some of us were a bit light-hearted about the British royal family
And though I lived my whole life slightly in awe of him, it was not of his doing. He was warm and friendly and interested in the lives of all his workforce.
When I took all my courage in hand and invited him to lunch with us, he said he would come if we had one course, and that he really liked sardines with lemon juice. He may, of course, have been protecting himself and Dorothy against botulism, since they knew only too well some of my limitations through the cookery page and my misunderstandings of presenting food.
If you were going to lunch with someone who had used a picture of open-heart surgery to illustrate veal casseroles perhaps you, too, might have asked for sardines.
But we lunched happily summer after summer, alternately in their house and ours.
And it was wonderful to be in the presence of a couple who loved each other and never felt they had to hide this from anyone else.
I would have liked them to live for ever as part of all of our lives.
But they didn’t, and I hope their family will always know how many of us got a great and exciting start in our writing lives under his editorship.
And how proud we were to be part of the time when he took our newspaper out of the shadows and into the light.
Every time I think of Mr Gageby I straighten myself up a little and hope to try and do him some kind of credit somewhere along the line.