The Times - UK (2020-10-17)

the times | Saturday October 17 2020 1GM 33

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“my whole life would have been

changed disastrously for the better”.

The subs’ bench occupied by

Bryson in the 1980s was also a

leisurely place. In Notes From a Small

Island, he wrote that “on the

Company News desk where I worked

as a sub-editor, the five-man team

would wander in about two-thirty

and spend most of the afternoon

reading the evening papers and

drinking tea while waiting for the

reporters to surmount the daily

challenge of finding their way back

to their desks after a three-hour

lunch... At about half-past five, we

would engage in a little light subbing

for an hour or so, then slip our arms

into our coats and go home.”

Yet Bryson credits his success as a

writer to his years as a sub: “Your

focus is to get rid of flabbiness and

try to compress things into the

simplest, most direct way of

expressing them.”

That pithiness was on display in

Bryson’s hilarious account of The

Times in the grip of the print

unions. Vince, a member of

the National Society of

Operative Printers and

Assistants (Natsopa),

presided over the wire

room: “5ft 6ins of wiry

malevolence in a

grubby T-shirt”.

Every evening,

Bryson would

nervously knock on

Vince’s door to ask if

he might find the Wall

Street report wire copy

“among the reams of

unwatched paper tumbling

out of his many machines”?

“I don’t know wevver you

noticed,” Vince would say, “but I’m

eating pizza.”

“Well, then, how about if you just

tell me where it is and I get it

myself ?”

“You can’t touch nuffink in here,

you know that.”

The all-powerful unions, the

kippers and the coal fires are no

more, but the craft of subbing

remains as vital as ever.

So, as you read these words,

remember the sub-editor who

arranged them there, and who so

often makes bad writing gooder.

Ben

Macintyre

@benmacintyre1

Need a new writer? Send for a supersub

Bill Bryson and Graham Greene honed their literary talents working on sub-editing desks at The Times

B

ill Bryson is laying down his

pen and retiring from books.

The funny, insightful,

amiable, furry and hugely

popular American writer will

be missed, and nowhere more than

here, for he is an alumnus of that

unsung university of literary talent:

The Times subs’ desk.

Sub-editors are the boiler room

engineers of newspapers, the experts

who take out the mistakes, fit the

headlines, correct the spelling,

improve the grammar and frequently

save people like me from looking

extremely stupid. They can be

pedantic. They

are essential.

They love

words. And they

sometimes

emerge as great

writers.

Sub-editors get

an unfairly bad

press. In his

novel Towards

the End of the

Morning, the

former journalist

Michael Frayn

described the sub’s

job as: “Check all

facts and spellings.

Cut the first and

last sentences and

any adjectives. And remove all

attempts at jokes.”

This is a calumny. Bryson was a

sub on the business section of this

newspaper for several years in the

early 1980s, and later described the

experience as “the best way to learn

how to become a writer”. Among his

predecessors were Jan Morris, then

James, the travel writer and

historian, a sub-editor on the paper’s

home and foreign desk in the early

1950s.

Not everyone made the grade.

Charles Dickens never got through

the door: his uncle,

John Henry Barrow,

was on the staff of

the paper and tried

to get his “clever

nephew” a job but

was told there was

“no vacancy”.

Rudyard Kipling

was a sub on the

rather less distinguished Civil and

Military Gazette in British India in

the 1880s. Guy Burgess did a trial as

a sub-editor on the home desk in

1935, but was not offered a job — a

decision that the editors would have

taken even faster had they known he

was already a Soviet spy.

But the most celebrated Times

sub-turned-writer was Graham

Greene, who joined The Times in

1926. The world of the sub-editor
      was somewhat different then. Tea
      and cake were laid out by servants at
      exactly 5 every afternoon. Greene’s

colleagues included a war veteran

with a metal plate in his head, “a

small elderly Scotsman with a

flushed face and a laconic humour

[who] drove a new sub-editor hard

with his sarcasm”, and a young man

named Stokes with a morbid fear of

sardines who “was plump & drank a

lot of olive oil to keep him so”.

Greene’s boss was so polite he

apologised every time he asked his

underling to do any work. In his

copious free time, Greene worked on

his first novel, The Man Within.

“I was happy on The Times, and I

could have remained happy there for

a lifetime,” he wrote 40 years later. “I

remember with pleasure the slow-

burning fire in the sub-editors’ room,

the gentle thud of coals as they

dropped one by one in the old black

grate.”

He got through his subbing shift

with the help of two kippers, a pot of

tea and a slice of syrup roll.

Greene believed

that the skills he

learnt as a sub were

central to his writing:

“I can think of no better

career for a young

novelist than to be for

some years a sub-editor on

a rather conservative

newspaper,” he wrote. “He is

removing the clichés of reporters; he

is compressing a story to the

minimum length possible without

ruining its effect.”

In December 1929, with a novel

published, Greene announced he

wanted to write fiction full-time. The

editor was incredulous that “one of

our best and quickest sub-editors”

wanted to leave, and tried to tempt

him to stay with the promise that he

would one day be allowed to write a

third leader. Fifty years later, Greene

reflected wryly that if he had given

in to the blandishments of The Times

TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD

politicians are professional not social.

Nobody sits down with an actual

friend and begins negotiating the

terms on which they are speaking

while googling under the table to see

if they are still in the job you

thought. No genuine social occasion

begins with a discussion about

whether there is time for starters or

ends with a guest unfurling a two-

week-old unreported press

release boasting of a 2 per cent

increase in apprenticeships/

motherhood/apple pie and

asking if you can get it in the

paper.

When I invited an SNP MP

to lunch once, she brought

along her uninvited

researcher for a free feed,

declared everything off the

record, and fired off a series of

randomly generated party lines.

“Never mind the soup, it is thin

gruel that Scotland gets from

Westminster.” She then refused to

share her mobile number “in case my

child’s school needs to get through

one day”. Then there was the junior

Tory minister who wanted me to

take him to the eye-wateringly

expensive Roux restaurant because

“he needed to be near parliament”

but balked at the idea of just meeting

in parliament.

There is one upside of all these

restrictions. If another lockdown

happens, Nigel Farage cannot be

pictured in a pub, pint in hand,

gazing approvingly at a faded print of

Spitfires, wondering if they could be

used to sink migrant rafts in the

Channel. No more hacks fawning

over his four-bottle bonhomie. Like

Samson without hair, Morecambe

without Wise, Meghan without the

media, Farage might cease to exist.

And we can all drink to that.

Westminster

hasn’t been so

dry since the

days of the

fun-sponge

Cromwell

P

oliticians are awful. I mean

there are varying degrees of

awfulness, obviously, from

the bullying bigots to the

platitudinous plonkers, but

they’re generally best avoided.

Meeting them is an occupational

hazard as a political journalist,

braving the halitosis and the hubris

in search of a scoop. But, just so

we’re clear, we’re not friends.

Some hacks didn’t get this memo,

and carry on a bit too enthusiastically

with the enemy. Convivial lunches

become birthday dinners, then

wedding invitations, pool parties and

weekend mini-breaks: journalists,

spin doctors and MPs writhing

around in a soup of sunscreen and

rosé and disdain for absent wretches

who, you know, have actual friends,

like normal people.

Well, the party is over. Sir Lindsay

Hoyle, who remains the Commons

Speaker despite his obvious calling as

a genial ironmonger on Coronation

Street, has banned booze. It is the

first time parliament has gone dry

since 1653 when notorious fun-sponge

Oliver Cromwell declared that the

only thing anyone was going to

down was the monarchy.

Teetotal Sir Lindsay has called time

on boozing in parliament because

some MPs have constituencies that

have been forced to shut their pubs.

Which has all the logic of your mum

telling you to eat your dinner

because there are children in Africa

who would love a quarter of a Fray

Bentos pie and some mashed potato.

London’s Tier 2 ban on households

mixing indoors has also prompted

much head-scratching over whether

it applies to journalists and

politicians or whether they can carry

on boozing for Britain because it’s

“work”. For me, all encounters with

Matt Chorley

Listen to Matt Chorley

every Monday to

Thursday, 10am to 1pm

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Using pen and paper, and when smoking was allowed, in the Times sub-editing room around

the time of the Second World War. Bill Bryson and Graham Greene were subs on the paper

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