Exactly 40 years ago yesterday, one of Dublin's great newspapers, the Dublin Evening Mail, closed down. Once, it was required reading at teatime for generations of Dubliners, a surprisingly homely, almost innocent, mix of news and features. Jottings by Man About Town and cartoons, including Jiggs and Maggie and Mandrake the Magician, were very popular, writes Hugh Oram
The paper carried regular listings of progress reports about people in isolation hospitals, such as the old Cork Street Fever Hospital and Cherry Orchard. Patients could be "satisfactory" or "not so well"; fortunately, they weren't listed by name, merely by number. An Óige and cycling notes, a "Lost and Found" column, limericks and even a spot for lonely hearts were also part of a time-worn tradition. If anyone had a pet dog or cat missing, they could be sure of an editorial mention in the Mail. The most widely read part of the paper was Letters to the Editor. For years, a well-known encouragement in Dublin was: "Write to the Mail about it". This unchanging formula yielded a solid circulation of some 100,000 that passed from generation to generation.
First editor
The paper started life in 1823 and its first editor was Joseph Timothy Haydn. Within a month, it had become the city's best-selling newspaper, at all of 2,500 copies an issue. Haydn's previous claim to fame was that he had been horsewhipped by the aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for having made disparaging remarks about the ADC's parentage. But the owners of the Mail were so concerned that Haydn's impetuous nature could land them with big libel suits, they paid him off handsomely; he was just over 40 when he took a comfortable early retirement.
Throughout the 19th century, the Mail prospered against its competitors, including the Evening Irish Times and then the Evening Herald. The Mail was helped by such star writers as Bram Stoker, a feature writer and drama critic for the paper. It also had a claim to a big technical advance. In 1898, it became the first newspaper in the world to use wireless telegraphy for sending copy.
The yachting correspondent had found himself becalmed by heavy fog, so his copy was days late in arriving. Then he sent regatta results from what was then Kingstown by the new technology and they arrived instantly.
But the Mail also attracted a certain notoriety, particularly after Queen Victoria's last visit to Dublin in 1900. A compositor of nationalist hue was said to have had the august queen "pissing" instead of "passing" over O'Connell Bridge, but despite years of research, no one has been ever been able to authenticate the story by finding a copy of that particular edition, which may have been changed with unusual alacrity.
Inside the Mail, the room for reporters and sub-editors was a genteel, clubbable kind of place, an entirely male enclave, where everyone was Mr This or Mr That. Once, a great scandal arose when Joe Anderson, editor between 1936 and 1958, a genial man, sacked a reporter for having a bottle of whiskey in his desk.
Another reporter, Ernie O'Reilly, came to a bizarre end. He had a holy horror of cars, considering them a dangerous invention, so he never drove, going everywhere instead by taxi. One night, coming back to the Mail's offices at the top of Parliament Street, just opposite the old City Hall, his cab was collided with another vehicle on Capel Street Bridge. Poor Ernie O'Reilly was thrown through the windscreen and a sliver of glass sliced his jugular vein.
Saturday sports edition
Normally, the first edition of the Mail came out at 3 p.m. and a small crowd looking for copies gathered at the works entrance, at the back of the Mail's offices. But Saturdays were special, when the Sports Mail came out at 7 p.m. I remember Alfie Dalton, for years overseer of the compositors, telling me how all the sports results came in handwritten on hundreds of scraps of paper. As many as 30 compositors set them in hot metal type; the air was filled with the clatter of the Linotypes, with heat and dust, yet miraculously, from this hellish but organised chaos emerged a word-perfect sports edition.
When the Irish Times building caught fire in 1951, the Mail immediately rushed to help and by 4 p.m. that day Irish Times sub-editors were ensconced around the subs' table in the Mail. The next day, the Mail printed a four-page emergency edition of The Irish Times.
For many years, the war cry of the Dublin newsboys was "Herald o' Mail". Then along came a brash interloper, the Evening Press, launched in 1954 with a brass band and elephants along O'Connell Street. The new paper was the death stroke of the Mail. Three evening newspapers for Dublin were just too many and the old Mail, a venerable dowager of the Victorian era, just couldn't cope with the upstart. On the very last day of 1961 came the final blow, the opening of Telefis Eireann. These days, reflecting a worldwide trend in the newspaper business, Dublin has just one evening paper, the Evening Herald.
Change to tabloid
The Irish Times had made a last gentlemanly effort to save the Mail, in 1960, by buying it for £200,000 and transferring printing to its own press. Ken Gray, the former Irish Times deputy editor who died recently, played a big part in changing the Mail from broadsheet to tabloid, very revolutionary in those days. He also wrote a column for the Mail on that new-fangled entertainment, television.
With the takeover by The Irish Times, a strange daily ritual ended at the Mail. Since it closed the Dublin Daily Express in 1921, every publication day it had printed one copy of a single sheet of the Express, just with the masthead and date, to preserve the title.
The very last editor of the Mail was a young journalist with a great reputation for sniffing out news at 500 paces: John Healy. He went on to become a household name in the 1960s when he began his Backbencher column in the Saturday Irish Times. He was also the proud possessor of a Rolls-Royce, never a common form of transport for Dublin news workers. The last issue of the Evening Mail, priced at three old pence, came out on July 19th, 1962. It was signed by such luminaries as Sean Ó Ceallacháin, Paddy Downey and Peter Byrne in the sports department; Ken Gray; Jim Downey and John Healy. One of the young fellows there, Michael Hand, went on to become editor of the Sunday Independent.
The 1960s turned out to be a remarkably innovative decade for The Irish Times itself under the editorship of Douglas Gageby, who had been first editor of the Evening Press, the paper that had scuppered the Evening Mail.