The Musgrave Manifesto

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RIP The Weekly News

Sunday, April 26th, 2020

My first job in journalism was as a trainee reporter on The Weekly News. I lasted for five and a half months of a six-month probation period in 1978 before being sacked without any warning. It was a bit of a blow at the time.

The owner of The Weekly News, the Dundee-based D C Thomson, has just announced that the title is to close after 165 years. It is another victim of the decline in print journalism but I am surprised it lasted as long as it did.

Unless you were brought up in the north of England or Scotland in the pre-1980s era, there’s a good chance you’d have never seen or heard of The Weekly News. It was hugely popular in those regions, however, with the working classes, especially women. It belonged to a group of now-generally-forgotten general interest publications such as Reveille, Titbits and Weekend, which were weekly magazines of entertainment.

The Weekly News was by far the most “respectable”. It was wholesome, traditional and conservative, rather like D C Thomson itself.

The company was privately-owned, very secretive and notoriously did not recognise unions. The story went that the Thomson family was offended when some of their workers walked out during the General Strike of 1926, so they were to have no truck with unions after that. The family was said to be so staunchly Protestant that it would not hire Roman Catholics. I don’t know if that is entirely true, but I was asked my religion and my political persuasion at my interview. I was C of E, so that was fine. I probably said I was not interested in politics.

After unsuccessfully applying to many publishers to get a start in journalism, I was advised by a pal from university, David Belcher, who was working for The Weekly News in Glasgow, to write to the company, famously predicting: “If they don’t take you, no one will.” I duly was summoned from London to an interview in distant Dundee – the company paid for my train and overnight hotel – and was subjected to the equivalent of a speed-dating session as I was interviewed very briefly by representatives from some of its many titles, such as The Sunday Post, People’s Friend, Dundee Courier, People’s Journal, Jackie and even Beano and Dandy. I was delighted when I was offered a position on The Weekly News in D C Thomson’s Fleet Street office.

The centre of D C Thomson’s powerful and influential universe was Dundee, which had by far its biggest office. The Glasgow office was a decent size. The Manchester one was smaller and its London one was the smallest, with perhaps about 20 journalists at most plus advertising and other staff. The facade of the building, carrying beautifully-rendered names of four of its titles, is still there, It caused much amusement to employees that the offices stretched above a religious book shop called The Protestant Truth Society. Quite.

The business was run on the strict hierarchic lines that were common at the time, which meant that me as the untrained newcomer was on the bottom rung. The editor was a somewhat crusty Scotsman called David Norrie or Mr Norrie to the likes of me. The popular belief was he was so disliked by his Scottish colleagues that he was exiled to the furthest outpost of the empire. The day-to-day running of the journos was left to the deputy editor, a very nice and supportive Cockney chap called Sam, whose surname I cannot recall. Sam, who’d been aircrew on RAF bombers during World War II, was extremely patient with beginners like me.

The workload – by modern standards and by what I experienced later – was incredibly light. Unbelievably, we had a fixed break for coffee in the morning and one for tea in the afternoon. No one ever worked late as far as I knew. Mr Norrie dashed out at 4.57pm every day to catch his train home and the rest of us departed promptly three minutes later, sometimes to a local pub.

The work comprised mainly or reading lots of local papers to spot a story that would suit our family-oriented stance (so nothing about sex, politics, suicide or other unpleasantness of that type). Then we’d track down the subject via the local paper or telephone directory enquiries – remember them? – and bash out on the typewriter a short newsy piece. I was far too lowly to be asked to write a feature. That was left to the likes of Simon Cornes (later a BBC local radio host and station manager), Mike Burton (who was destined to edit the public service title Municipal Journal) and Kitty Corrigan (who was for many years deputy editor of Country Living).

After a while I was judged advanced enough to be given the Police Flash column to compile. This was a weekly time-consuming task that involved me calling police press officers around the country looking for stories about very large heists or very curious ones. Again, nothing involving violence or unpleasantness was required. Sometime I struck lucky and got five stories with relatively few calls, but usually I was scraping the barrel by the end of a long day on the ‘phones.

Sadly, my wardrobe choices did not sit well with Mr Norrie. I was in my Humphrey Bogart stage and dressed almost exclusively in retro styles from charity shops. Twice he called me over to his desk to “have a wee word”. The first time was because I was wearing braces on my vintage high-rise trousers. “You’ll best be wearing a waistcoat or keeping your jacket on if you are wearing braces, especially as there’s lassies in the office,” he told me quietly. I thought he was joking but soon realised he was serious.

The second time the problem was my collarless “grandad” shirt. This time the editor asked me what I would do if I was suddenly called to Buckingham Palace to interview the Queen for The Weekly News. I thought such an occurrence was highly unlikely, but didn’t say so and promised to wear a shirt and tie in future.

And so it came to pass that on a Friday afternoon at about 4.45pm I was asked to go down to a different floor to see the general manager of the office, whose existence was news to me. My sacking was quick. Nothing personal, but they did not think “I was on the wavelength of the paper”. I was being given two weeks’ notice but as I’d obviously want to look for another position, I needn’t come into the office again. They handed me my P45. The execution had taken barely five minutes.

I was so shocked that I couldn’t tell my friends in the office what had happened for fear of bursting into tears. So I went home and burst into tears. I did return on Monday, partly to say goodbye to everyone, but mainly so that my pal Rob would not get landed with the dreaded Police Flash ring round. My colleagues were astonished by the news and to their eternal credit a few, led by journo “head boy” Simon Cornes, remonstrated with Mr Norrie that I had been unfairly treated to have been kicked out without any previous warning. No matter, that Monday was my last day.

Coincidentally enough, the only job I could get some months later that was vaguely connected with journalism was to be a seasonal public relations officer with Butlin’s, which was a regular advertiser in The Weekly News.

It was funny too that I made my career writing about clothing when that was what possibly did for me at D C Thomson. RIP The Weekly News. Honestly, it was fun while it lasted.

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2000: A new editor at Drapers Record

Tuesday, April 14th, 2020

Twenty years ago this week I took up the role of editor-in-chief of Drapers Record and its stablemate Menswear.

Although this was an unexpected – and unsought – career move for me, the April 15 2000 i marked the start of a memorable adventure lasting five and half years during which time the current incarnation of Drapers as a pan-fashion industry title was devised and launched under my editorship.
At the time Drapers Record and Menswear were part of the B2B magazines empire of Emap plc , specifically in a division called Emap Fashion. I had been working for Emap since 1996, but I had moved from magazines. I had been on the Events team for a couple of years, running the mainstream menswear fair MXL, an undistinguished exhibition greatly overshadowed by its cool casualwear cousin 40°.

I was enjoying my job and I had no desire to go back into journalism and when my boss, Emap Fashion’s deputy managing director Neshat Ahmed, called me in for an urgent meeting I actually thought she was going to sack me to save the company a bit of money.

But no. I was being “volunteered” (ie ordered) to take control of the great cash cow Drapers Record (aka DR) and its little brother, which just ticked over financially. DR had lost its way with the industry, its reputation was in decline and its revenues were declining. That was not good news for Emap. The 20-or-so-strong team (see the “flannel panel” of personnel here) was demoralised and the previous editor had left rather abruptly at the company’s request.

My brief was to get DR back on track ASAP and to set it and Menswear up so they could be merged to create one title to serve the entire fashion industry. My partner – also my publisher and my boss – in this enterprise was Sarah Cookson, who knew her way round a financial spreadsheet from her background in advertising sales. A Lancashire lass teamed up with a Yorkshire bloke – Sarah and I turned out to be a proper Northern powerhouse. As a reader, I had been particularly irked by DR’s clumsy design. I hated the masthead, with the two words of Drapers Record rendered in different colours. It was a very popular and to my mind pointless design trend at the time. I hated the masthead bar that turned the cover’s portrait shape into something like a square, thereby limiting its visual impact.

And I really hated the horrible mix of ugly typefaces, random coloured letters, colour tints, blobs and other paraphernalia that clogged the news pages in particular. Improving this mess without going a full redesign, with the expert assistance of art editor Alan Bingle, was a high priority for me.

Within four issues putting Drapers Record in just one colour on the mast head made a huge improvement in my eyes.

The great leap forward came with the fifth issue I directed, dated May 27, on which, thanks to Alan Bingle’s efforts, the bar on the cover disappeared and the pages were much cleaner and packed more info on to them instead of wasting space with design “effects”.

Another important change in the May 27 2000 issue was the addition of a photograph of me in the weekly “Drapers Record says” opinion column. I was against the cult of the journalist with the picture byline – the words were more important than who wrote them, I believed – but my boss Sarah Cookson argued correctly that Drapers Record needed a personality, a “face”, with whom readers could identify and that face was going to be mine.

Another issue I remember is from 22 July 2000 when I unveiled my new and soon-to-be-famous spex to the Drapers Record community. From Kirk Originals in Covent Garden, they became my trademark as “That man from Drapers”.

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