Nearly famous..

..the
even more smoke filled proof-reading room. Do I remember him? No, but reporters
had normally gone to the pub by the time that we arrived probably straight from
the same hotel. Maybe our paths crossed on the way to The Gresham?
Somewhat curiously I became a member of the proof-reading room through Hugh
Coley who was a close friend of McPhail’s. Something that I either forgot
or that I was never told. Hugh and I were at Art School together and perpetually
short of money, even though New Zealand offered nominal financial support for
students who lived away from home, or my case, whose home had moved away from
them. Hugh was tall, dark, well dressed in a preppy sort of way and possessed
of that peculiar olive skin that looked he had a mild case of razor rash, even
though in those days of delayed puberty he could only raise a delicate line
of down.
Not that I, who sported shoulder length hair and an antipodean version of a
moody Byronic stance could do much better in the way of a facial hair. Acne
I could do in roseate splendour. A beard, no.
Hugh was serious about his art and eventually set of to the Julian Ashton Art
School in Sydney to acquire the underlying technical skills that our Art School
had well and truly not provided in the swinging sixties
How Hugh found out about the job on ‘The Press’ was a mystery and
even more of a mystery was why they accepted us. I remember there being no aptitude
or spelling test. I suspect that they thought that Hugh and I were gay and would
be an interesting adjunct to the existing menagerie of characters. So we started
our working lives as copy-holders. This entailed listening to ‘the reader’
narrate the copy – a freshly inked and slightly damp first pull of the
type – at an incredible speed, generating a sound like a distant cloud of locusts,
while you tried to see if it coincided in any way with the original story. Alternately
you read to the reader and he tried to see the coincidences between what you
buzzed and what was written.
The end result was that, having checked the paper at high speed, I had no idea
what was in it and had to go down to the loading docks to pick up a paper on
my way home. My reading speed went up to 1000 words a minute which make getting
through long books easy, but understanding their literary merit problematical.
The Press was in those days a virtually hand-made newspaper. Reporters wrote,
sub-editors and editors edited it into the house style, the type was produced
line by line and hand set page by page and then each line checked by the readers.
It was comprehensive down to the school sports, bird show results and wool sales.
Mistakes were rare, though usually large, as it is easier to miss a mistake
in a headline than in body text. Why this is so remains a mystery.
The city’s rival “The Star” was far more modern and had abandoned
the reading room for the arcane electronic world of automated page lay-out.
This was brave, verging on the courageous, as the technology was in its infancy,
which meant stories scattered abstractly around the paper, incomplete lines
and atrocious spelling.
Despite the attention to accuracy, fidelity to the original text was not always
guaranteed. Some may recall the English Antarctic explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs
who crossed the Antarctic in 1958. A certain newspaper had the banner headline
“Sir Vivian Fucks at the South Pole’. Being before my time I can
take no credit.
Hours were from 6pm to a theoretical 2am, but for practical purposes one was
out the building around midnight into the puddling dark and quiet of Cathedral
Square. The rare exceptions were the death of a major figure such as Winston
Churchill- who was a long time dying – or an historic overseas event like a
royal wedding.
I remember my starting wage as being £13 4s 3½d, which was brought
round in a small manila envelope on a wooden trolley every Thursday. This was
quite lot of money for an indigent student and my popularity increased immensely,
though my ability to benefit from my popularity was slightly diminished by the
fact that I laboured every night except Saturday and Sunday.
I generally worked with Mike Phillips who had the pale ascetic face of a young
saint. This was appropriate for a devout Catholic who spent the next four years
vainly trying to convert me back from my atheistic, anarchistic ways to the
bosom of the true church. We played chess and argued philosophy when not working.
Before I left, unchanged in my opinions, he came up with the perfect answer
to the predicament my soul was in. “Richard,” he said,” it
doesn’t matter what you believe. You are an artist and doing God’s
work. You’ll go to heaven anyway.”
You can’t do better than that

* The series is available on DVD and highly recommended.