MR HACK - No 43

DEATH OF THE "IRELAND'S SATURDAY NIGHT"

After 114 years the Ireland's Saturday Night is to close.  The last issue will be published on Saturday of next week. The circulation has declined from over 100,000 to just 9,000.  Many Copyboys will have memories of the unique position it once held in Ulster life. For many years it was more than just a sports paper..We grew up with it... some of us worked on it...we called it The Pink...the  readers called it The Ulster (1894-2008)

Comments

[Alastair McQueen]

Sad, but inevitable. The Pink was my first paper - as a 13-year-old schoolboy I was part of Billy Jess's team doing local football reports for five bob a time. I started doing score and scorers of several games in different leagues at the same time in places like Ormeau Park, Falls Park etc before "graduating" to 30 words plus teams. While in Coleraine I covered Coleraine Reserves for the Pink with Mr Mitchell Smyth and the odd time did the first team when Bill Campfield was somewhere else. Then, when I joined the BT, I was part of Malcolm Brodie's soccer team on Saturdays. My most memorable game was being sent to Brandywell to cover Derry City v Linfield in the mid-Sixties. There were hundreds of cops and B Specials on the streets with armoured personnel carriers and water cannon - and this was BEFORE The Troubles! In the Press Box - a big hut - were legends of Ulster sports reporting: Daddy Milligan, Alex Toner, his brother Paddy, Eddie McIlwaine, Adam Coates, Billy Clarke and - possibly - Billy Oliver. Linfield lost and the inevitable riot ensued. The Bluemen decided to attack and to try to overturn the Press Box, but the Gallant McIlwaine beat back the savage hordes as I ducked down filing copy. I got the splash and a byline in The Pink! The paper was a tribute to the professionalism of its founders Malcolm Brodie and Jack Magowan and many others on the BT sports desk including Derek Murray and that brilliant production man Jimmy Walker. When I came "over here" I had the opportunity to see many of the other Saturday night sports papers. Not one of them came close to the Ireland's Saturday Night. I mourn it's passing.

[Alastair McQueen]

Ooops! I didn't mean that Malcolm Brodie and Jack Magowan were founders of the ISN I meant to say founders of the BT sports department and the men who drove it forward and made it such a good sports paper.

[sm]

In the late 50s, while I was working at the Spectator in Bangor, the ISN used to run ocasional little features submitted by readers - Billy Flackes, I think, must have been Features Editor then. He published three articles I wrote over a period of three or four months. They were the first features I'd ever written for payment. On the Saturdays after I'd posted them off, I remember queueing up waiting for the paper to arrive at the newsagents to see if my piece was in. I still have the cuttings.

[Cal McCrystal]

I believe to a fairly large extent Freddie Gamble's weekly column boosted circulation of the INS. I recall neighbours laughing themselves silly at seeing their own patois in print. I recall Bill Campfield who wore what was called (in that very patois) a "duncher". His nickname was "lonely pint". When I once inquired why, I was told that when his turn to buy a drink approached he disappeared, for some reason or other. Bad cess to him!.

[Graham]

David Dunseath on Radio Ulster today recalled the ISN, not just as a sports publication, but as a paper which was full of "lovely features"

I was glad he did, because, in its heyday, the ISN was bought for two reasons - the crack, the features, the cartoons - Larry O'Hooligan, Barney's Blunder, Franc's Diary, Mrs McNeese's column, "W's" weekly perambulations round the Province...plus Show Biz and dance news.

In fact the front page for many years made no mention of sport, being devoted to features, which were also carried on inside pages.

This reporter was responsible for the showbiz stuff for a few years and had his mugshot emblazoned with the title "On The Beat" over five or six columns. As such you got to meet visiting celebrities - breakfast with Marianne Faithfull at the Grand Central Hotel on one occasion, a fairly lively breakfast with Dominic Behan at the Welly Park on another; a morose Jim Reeves at the Ulster Hall and so on....

Ivan Lambert did the dance notes (though sometimes they were written by me under his by-line for reasons I won't go into here) and hung out at Sammy Osborne's, Cecil Clark's, Betty Staff's etc.

So if you had no interest in sport, you still bought the paper. And, if you had an interest in sport, then the ISN was a double treat.

On the paper's centenary in 1994 I put up a proposal for a documentary to the BBC, but it was sniffily dismissed as "something the sports department might cover" I couldn't get the person involved to grasp that the Ulster was, as a man vox-popped in the street on tv last night said "an institution"

All sorts of sports were covered - Ivan McMichael wrote a swimming column under the non-de-plume "Porpoise" and was it Stewart Mackay who was "Aerial" with the ham radio notes. All the minor games were resulted (a noun verbed there!) and the boast was that the paper did not go to press until every little result was in.

Who can forget this mammoth operation - with Billy Jess, as Alastair has mentioned,and people like Eddie Lowry, who loved to talk in spare moments about his beloved Castle Espie near Comber.

I wasn't allowed to play any meaningful role in the sports part of it, having disgraced myself by failing to understand what was going on on the rugby field during frozen Saturday afternoons at Mallusk. I was shifted instead to being marked for subbing things like junior football, though I was not always as in-attendance as expected, for reasons which again I won't go into.

But I still appreciated the great weekly achievement of Malky and mah team - and thrilled like everybody else to the immediacy of the front page (when it became sport) with Malcolm at Windsor and Hastings Maguinness at Castlereagh Park. In their prose you could practically hear them speak. They were "live" on ISN Page 1.

What a team. What days. What larks.

[Alastair McQueen]

I remember being at Castlereagh Park for some reason when Hastings was covering the game. He spent most of it in a massive row with some of the local spectators who had taken offence with something he wrote on his previous visit. He argued and argued and Syd Maguire had to keep passing him notes to file when his fixed time calls came through. I should have added earlier that Eddie McIlwaine beat back the Linfield supporters with his notebook when they tried to overturn the Press hutch at Brandywell. And I well remember Mr President in his previous role as Mr Showbiz of the ISN. I also remember being sent with Des Morrow to cover the "news angles" of the North West 200 in Portstewart for the Pink as back-up to Jimmy Walker. Des and I refreshed ourselves so well we just managed to get back from Mr Smyth's "Causeway Coast" in time for work on the Monday. It was almost as if we'd moved 25 Tudor Place to the coast...I seem to recall also being sent to somewhere in Scotland to cover a pipe band contest for the paper when there was no football. I didn't get a dateline - but I got another hangover!

[SM]

Very nearly right, Graham! The late Joe Beattie introduced an amateur radio column about 50 years ago and kept it going, week after week, under the by-line "Rectifier." When Joe died (he was Michael Beattie's father) I took it over and ran it for another 10 years - this time under my own name and radio call-sign. Eventually I ran out of steam - I wasn't in Joe's league! - and reluctantly gave it up. Still - more than 500 weekly columns wasn't bad I suppose. For an amateur!

[Graham]

SOME ISN HISTORY
This from today's Belfast Telegraph

"The ISN was launched by the Baird brothers — William and George, former owners of the Belfast Telegraph — on November 17, 1894, and soon built up a reputation for being the sports bible of Ireland.

"Initially, it was called Ulster Saturday Night, but two years after it hit the streets and because of its runaway success, this was changed to Ireland's Saturday Night — with an edition for the north and another for the south.

"Down the years, stalwart readers of Ireland's Saturday Night re-christened the title — calling it the Pink, the ISN, the Ulster, and the Ireland. Back in 1894, it consisted of four pages, and was printed on pink paper to distinguish it from the main daily, then known as the Belfast Evening Telegraph.

"The ISN survived two World Wars and its staff — journalists, printers and van drivers — battled through riots, gun battles and bombs of the seventies and eighties to get a paper onto the streets, every Saturday night, even when the Telegraph's presses were destroyed by an IRA bomb. During this turbulent time, two of its drivers were murdered and countless others had their vehicles hijacked."

[Graham]

GUARDIAN NOTES ISN KILLING

Professor Roy Greenslade's blog on today's Guardian newspaper internet site, including a dig at Mr O'Reilly, thus:

"Ireland's Saturday Night, one of the world's oldest sports papers, is to close after 114 years. The final edition of ISN will be published on July 26. Circulation had evidently fallen from 100,000 to 9,000 and convinced its owner, Independent News & Media, that continued publication was uneconomic.

"Belfast Telegraph editor Martin Lindsay said: "The ISN was part of the very fabric of this province in its heyday but, unfortunately, over a period of years readership dropped to the point where publication of the title could not be sustained."

"It enjoyed high sales in past decades, but Lindsay added: "In recent years... sports enthusiasts, armed with the latest digital technology, found new and faster means of getting this information and the ISN readership suffered as a result."

"(Memo to IN&M's chief operating officer, Gavin O'Reilly: do you perchance recall that rousing speech to the World Association of Editors' congress last month in which you said: ""The fact is that newspapers are winning well in a world of heightened digital fragmentation.")

"Anyway, lovers of Ireland's Saturday Night might like to know that the final edition will contain a special pull-out section, tracing the history of the paper from its launch in 1894 to the present. (Sources: Belfast Telegraph/TheCopyboys)

[COPYBOYS PRESIDENT]

NOT A COPYBOY MEMBER?
BUT WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT/REMINISCE ON ISN? YOU'RE WELCOME!
JUST SCROLL DOWN TO COMMENT PANEL (your email address won't be published)

[Graham]

A HoldtheFrontPage website story this week featured the Hartlepool Mail's 24/7 coverage of the Anne Darwin trial. [The 'missing' canoeist's wife]

But deputy editor Gavin Foster's description of it as "the most bizarre trial the town has ever seen" prompted this response from a HTFP reader.

"Your story on the Hartlepool Mail's admirable coverage of the Darwin court case describes it as the most bizarre trial the town has ever seen. But surely that honour will always belong to the hanging of a monkey on Hartlepool beach, on suspicion of being a French spy. Just a thought."

[We were always taught, weren't we, never to say that something was "the first" or as some journalists now insist on writing: "the first EVER" or to say that anything was the biggest, the smallest, or whatever...but they still do, eh?]

[Graham]

Do they put the "B" team on newspaper websites? If so, it's a puzzling decision as the sites are the papers' front windows. Certainly they're a fruitful source of howlers.

The Swansea Evening Post had BRAKING NEWES this week. And a Stoke-on-Trent Sentinel headline read: "SCHOOLS SHUT AS SCHOOLS SHUT AS SCHOOLS SHUT AS STRIKE"

Let us know of any local examples you spot.

[President]

MICHAEL DRAKE
emails as follows

any chance of getting some of the copyboys together for a lunch before we all drop off the tree or the year ends, or whichever comes first ................Drake

[Good idea - what takers?]

[Chairman]

I'm in. The sight of Mickey Drake buying a drink should attract a fair crowd.

[Cal McCrystal]

Great idea! I'd love to meet ya'll Copyboys. Let's organise something.

[President]

Belfast radio station Citybeat (FM 96.7) is running a really jolly phone-in competition this morning.

Various celebrities are mentioned and the big challenge for the listener is to say (guess?) whether the celebrity is dead or alive.

In each case you've obviously got a 50/50 chance of getting it right; good odds. Sounds dead on!

[Graham]

PRAISE FOR ALASTAIR (and the ISN)

There was praise for Copyboy Alastair McQueen on BBC Radio Ulster this morning.

Malcolm Brodie described Alastair as "an outstanding performer in the Falklands War" He said this when quoting from an email he'd received from Alastair lamenting the passing of the ISN.

Malcolm himself described the paper as part of the fabric of Northern Ireland; also said that staff had a loyalty to it he'd never experienced at any other publication.

A listener said it was not a newspaper - it was a tradition. Presenter Gerry Anderson said that in Derry urchins waited for the paper's van to arrive at the bottom of the street.

Telegraph editor Martin Lindsay promised a larger sports section in the Monday BT from now on.

[Alastair McQueen]

Dear Mr President,
I write to protest in the strongest possible terms at yet another snub to The Best Chairman We Ever Had and urge you to use your not inconsiderable influence to once again carpet the editor of The Belfast Telegraph and his acolytes over their inhuman treatment of TBCWEH.
Today the BT rolled out its brand spanking new website and as exiles all over the world logged into it we find that the most recent columns by Our Beloved, Much Adored award-winning Best Chairman We Ever Had included on the site are those from May and June.
This ritual humiliation of such a great personage whose magnificent writings start the week for those of us far away is too much to bear and must have The Old Gentleman weeping into his Wincarnis.
I urge you - on behalf of Copyboys everywhere - to call Young Lindsay to your chambers and give him a good Rooks-ing!

[Cal McCrystal]

I'm trying to confirm a report that Elton John will sing "Scandal in the Wind" at the bag lady's State funeral.

[Carl Anderson]

It’s only now, with the sad passing of the ‘Saturday Night’, that I realise what an important part it has played in my life . . . and that of hundreds of thousands of Northern Ireland readers.
As a love-lorn teenager, I can remember the ritual of queueing outside one of the major Belfast cinemas on a Saturday evening while the young newsboys passed up and down the line with their cry, which sounded like ‘Suckit’ as eager buyers were invited to buy the paper . . . and did.
The young lady dancers at the Andrews Memorial Hall in Comber didn’t expect the young gentlemen to arrive until they had queued at Miskelly’s to buy their copy and read it on the way to the dance.
I was, of course, privileged to work on the production of the ‘Saturday Night’ between 1961-1978. Those were the hot-metal days and it required a superb organisation of hundreds of people to produce the goods.
There were secretaries from around the country who came in on Saturdays to take the teams before kick-off, and four pars at half-time and full-time . . . the ‘wee men’ from all around the country who covered junior football, men’s hockey, rugby matches. I can remember copy-takers like Jimmy Dubois’ wife Vera, Roy Smyth, the photographer’s then girl-friend Roberta . . . and ‘amateur’ reporters such as John Parkinson, the recently-deceased Titanic historian, who appeared to report the RUC matches in the Amateur League.
Amusingly, we had a ‘wee man’ from the Antrim area, who reported a different Amateur League match every Saturday, but who merely changed the names of the teams in his first-half report. I can still remember the words he started with EACH week. . . ‘Fast end-to-end play ensued in the opening moiety, with defences generally holding the upper hand.’
The training we had was invaluable . . . operating under pressure, against really tight deadlines, whether reporting or subbing. For that, I will always thank people like Malcolm Brodie, Derek Murray, Sammy Hamill, Jimmy Walker. They created a dedication that produced the best Saturday Night sports paper in the world. Second-best never was good enough!
Carl Anderson

[Graham]

SPORTS-SPEAK

What always interested me (a non-sporting type) intensely about the ISN was sports-speak...not always cliche, which is collectible...but some of the creative prose. I'd love to hear a few memorable examples.

Malcolm, of course, would be included but Jack Magowan's stuff I always read. I remember Malcolm reporting from "this sun-drenched soccer-crazy citadel." You can hear him saying it.

[KB]

My old friend Carl Anderson doesn't contribute to this site very often but when he does it's worth the wait.
My own memories of the Pink, apart from being a rather reluctant and often pissed Saturday afternoon sub, are of the home internationals at Windsor Park in the 50s and the community singing led by a gentleman whose name now escapes me. I think the ISN had something to do with that part of the event and it certainly contributed enormously to the content of the match programmes. Full point, new par. (Take new copy from Dr Brodie to fill in the gaps.)

[A.McQ]

STOP PRESS: The award-winning internationally acclaimed column by The Best Chairman We Ever Had is now available on the Belfast Telegraph's shiny new website. Read all about it! Read all about it!

[MS]

offbeat things. On another matter: I see in Somebody gave me a Daily Express the other day and in it I find a story on the ``decline '' in Guinness drinking, pushed out by European lagers. Guinness, it suggests, is doomed. Forty five years ago, when lagers -- (``Mabel'') Black Label, Tuborg, Carlsberg -- first came into Ireland in a big way, the Tele had that story, complete with the necessary quotes from bartenders and drinkers. Guinness was doomed! Maybe one of you guys wrote it. (But we old codgers know there's nothing new under the sun!)

[A.McQ.]

When I first arrived over here forty years ago not many Englishmen quaffed Guinness. Nowadays I notice many many more drinking it, not just Irish exiles or Englishmen of Irish extraction. A couple of years ago I was in a bar in Belfast and my son and I were the only two there that I could see - I hadn't had that many at the time - drinking draught Guinness. Everyone else was either drinking draught lager, draught or bottled cider or shorts. I didn't see any bottled Guinness being necked either. Times change. Lastly, the Guinness over here is much better nowadays than it used to be.

[Eddie McIlwaine]

FROM EDDIE McILWAINE
re. the ISN
-------------------

Never mind the football, Franc's Diary was one of the main features in the ISN in its heyday. The original Franc was Tommy Anderson who had a pigeon-loft office on the fourth floor. When Tommy went on holiday I sometimes became Franc and suffered when he returned for using the kind of diary stories he deplored.

Really I'm saddened at the closure of a grand old newspaper with the Malcolm Brodie flavour all over it. I used to report Irish League matches and made many friends in board rooms everywhere.

But my main reason for loving the Pink as we all knew it was the fact that my first ever byeline appeared in the feature pages some time in the 50s - a story about film star Stephen Boyd signing the contract that was to take him to the chariot race with Charlot Heston in Ben Hur. Boyd, real name Billy Millar from Glengormley, used to sit opposite me in the gallery of Carnmoney Presbyterian Church. He was home visiting his parents at Antrim Line, Glengormley when I caught up with him for my first real interview.I've still got the cutting to this day.

I like to think I brought a new style to reporting football with my efforts in ISN. Never mind the goals I did my research before the kick-off and invariably my man of the match was the fella who was also having a birthday, was broken-hearted over a girl or had just got married the day before or in extreme cases had buried his mother.

And of course we had larger than life characters in the game to write about like Wilbur Cush, Jimmy Jones and Bertie Peacock and my close friend, Glentoran centreforward Trevor Thompson.

I remember the joy of remembering that Big Trevor actually started his career as a goalkeeper for the 99th Belfast BB before the Glens discovered he could score goals. Wasn't hard to research that story - I used to play against Trevor for the 53rd Belfast BB.

One afternoon I wandered into the Linfield dressing room at Windsor wearing a black hush puppy on one foot and a brown one on the other. I pretended the black shoe was a surgical boot and limped and limped. But after the game the Blues who had won asked me to do it all over again at their match the following week because I had been their lucky mascot. Needless to say I didn't mention my contrasting footwear colours in my match report.

Experts tell us that papers like the Pink are no longer big sellers because of the internet, television and radio reporting of the beautiful game, but I can't agree.

Dare I say it - football reporting of all sports has become stale and mundane. With a little bit of romance in its pages the ISN could have kept going for years.

It has simply failed to capture the imagination of the sporting public the way it used to.

And I'll probably get into trouble for daring to say that.

Times change and we all move on, but some of my best memories in a long career - I've been around as a pro journalist for 50 years this summer - were forged in press boxes or board rooms or just walking along a touchline to check a score.

One nightmare experience - George Eastham senior manager of Ards decided one season to send his team out without numbers on their backs. What a job I had recognising the goalscorers. Eventually I pleaded with George to put the numbers back and eventually he did.

I mentioned Brodie earlier. He lived and breathed the ISN. The sight of him deserting the press box at Windsor to rush back to put the front page away was a wonder to behold. He must be feeling the saddest of all of us who loved the old rag today.

Wouldn't it be lovely if a Lottery winner came along and bought the title and let the Ronnie Harpers, the Jimmy Walkers, the Eddie McIlwaines and the Jack Magowans stage a fairytale ISN comeback?

Alright - I know I'm only dreaming.

Eddie McIlwaine

____________________________________________________

[Alastair McQueen]

Well, well, well, Mr President. At last The Legend that is Eddie McIlwaine has broken cover and his duck on contributions to this blog. Have you told him yet that he won't be paid for it? Next thing Trevor Hanna will be contributing and then he and Eddie will be rolling round gouging each other on the cyberspace office floor fighting over whose byline should be first! We'll be swooping low over frozen Lough Neagh before you know it............

[KB]

Brilliant, Eddie. In summary - a lesson in what journalism is all about. At least the death of the Pink has done one thing - it has brought out some wonderful reminiscence, beautifully written.

[A.McQ.]

The Best Chairman We Ever Had mentions Jack Bennett in his latest award-winning scintillating column. Is Jack still with us? Last time I saw Jack we had a great time wrapping ourselves around the outside of several pints of Guinness and setting the world to rights in the old Royal Avenue Hotel. I think Eddie McIlwaine was with us, complaining as usual about Trevor Hanna getting more and bigger bylines in the Mirror than him!

[Copyboys World Exclusive]

Copyboys WORLD EXCLUSIVE:
Word reaches me in this farflung outpost that a top secret operation to save the ISN is under way. A certain Copyboy, who must for the moment remain anonymous but who has been known as The King Of The Bylines, is contacting his rich friends to try to persuade them to buy the title. Watch this space!

[Maurice Smyth]

FROM MAURICE SMYTH IN NEW ZEALAND

I'd heard of the "Pink's" demise from my cousin Beth who joined the Telegraph [advertising] just ahead of me in 1952. She was also a Saturday copytaker for donkeys.

The first piece I ever wrote with my name on it was for the then ISN editor Tommy Anderson who asked me to respond to criticism by "the shipyard poet" - Thomas Carnduff from memory - who was critical of the time spent in cinemas by the youth of the day. I was running copy, aged 16.

Memory goes back to Ralph the Rover [Billy McClatchey] who turned to soccer writing when his career in the linen industry was over. And to the clever cartoonist who drew the weekly "Larry O'Hooligan" for many years.

Not uncommonly for those in his trade, he was a lonely, sad figure. He walked to and from work from a bleak boarding house in Great Victoria Street. He chain smoked, had no crack and drew great cartoons. The
visage is vivid, the name has gone. An example of his work must surely appear in the final edition.

I still stay in touch with Eddie McIlwaine
and Malcolm who was a mentor along with Cowan Watson and Emil Thompson. Malcolm took me with him back in 1952 to read his portable-typed copy to the ISN sport's news desk when Ireland were "at home" at Windsor Park.

He wrote half a page for the Telegraph's late edition, a full page for the ISN... ah the rare oul' days!

[Graham]

ARTIST - BILLY CONN
creator of Larry O'Hooligan

The artist Maurice mentions was called Billy Conn. He was on the staff, and was just as Maurice describes him. The ash on his cigarette was often longer than the length of the remaining cigarette and I often marvelled at how he managed to draw and move about without it falling off.

His stoicism and Trappist-like qualities were extreme, but he had an observant eye and once drew a likeness of me without my knowing it - until I opened the ISN and saw it alongside an article of mine.

Some of his private work, signed "WH Conn" comes up occasionally at auction, but is not highly priced. I think he was under-rated.

Incidentally, my first by-line appeared in the ISN. That makes three of us so far - Stewart Mackay, Maurice Smyth and myself.
I'm sure it also gave a start to others. It has been under-rated as a nursery!; and also for its entertainment qualities. As I said when I tried to interest the BBC in its centenary it was treated only as a potential sports paragraph.

Finally, mention has been made of the man who lead the community signing on behalf of the ISN at big soccer matches. My memory is that he wore a white suit and was installed in "portable pulpit" just like the ones policemen in Dublin used to conduct the traffic from.

Was it by any chance Tommy Reynolds (aka comedian Tom Raymond)?

[sm]

Isn't it great to see the Copyboys' blog being put to its best possible use? Recalling and passing on some wonderful memories.....that, as they say, is what it's all about.

[KB]

Maybe we should have a memorial 'service' for the ISN, a gathering in some establishment to mourn its passing. And of course Bob Young's song 'The Wee Men,' mentioned before, would have to be sung - if only we could find all the words.

[Graham]

re: previous contribution - I'm not in a position to organise it, but if somebody will, I'll attend.

[Gordon Burns]

FROM GORDON BURNS

I'm devastated....the end of the Pink....terrible news.

I always used to go out every Saturday night just to buy and devour all the footy. My first ever football report for the paper, of which I was immensely proud and thrilled to see in print, was of a Sirocco Works match!!

And then Malcy let me loose on an Irish league game (Portadown) WITH a by-line....I was over the moon. He also gave me 2 guineas to farm it off to several other Sunday papers - I guess he got about ten!!!

[Cub]

Extracted from Malcolm Brodie, The Tele: A History of the Belfast Telegraph (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995) (This section actually written by Derek Murray):

“Sport is, at times, mixed with tragedy, one such tragedy occurring at Ibrox in Glasgow on 2 January 1971 when sixty-six people died. The Telegraph has its own telephone box at Ibrox as it does at all the main British soccer grounds. One of the things which happens in a situation like this is that the size of the story you are about to witness comes to you slowly. [Malcolm] Brodie, having loaned his phone to John Rafferty of the Observer, set out to get information on what was happening at Gate 13, where, it seemed, the crowds were not clearing quickly at the end of the match. He passed Jock Stein of Celtic and Willie Waddell of Rangers as they walked across the pitch, trying to find out what was happening. Then it unfolded – a tragedy now mourned jointly by Rangers and Celtic fans. Jimmy Walker, who succeeded [Murray] as deputy sports editor, a post he held for twenty-seven years, remembers that day well:

It was just an ordinary match until shortly before the end when news came through that just as Rangers had scored an equaliser in the last minute, some of the crowd trying to return to the terraces had encountered others leaving, and as a result the crush barriers on a section of the ground had collapsed. We were in the middle of a major story but it was obviously going to be too late for Ireland’s Saturday Night. Or was it? I made the decision to turn out an extra edition and even ran into the various pubs near the Telegraph to bring printers and process workers in. Malcolm was reporting the game – and the tragedy – so we worked hand in glove, and with Malcolm’s graphic report embellished by wire pictures of the catastrophe taking up a magnificent and brand-new front page spread, we were out on the streets in rapid-fire time. We were the first paper in Britain to carry the story and I went home that night with the sense of job satisfaction which only the newspaper business can give you. Of course, on the following Monday there were all sorts of front office post-mortems as to why we had to bring out an extra paper with all the production costs which went with it, but Malcolm blew the arguments out of the water with a typical salvo. As far as we were concerned we had done our job as newspapermen and I received his full backing.

[Graham]

Cub rightly reminds us of an era when the public service element of newspapers perhaps loomed larger than it does today.

I well remember the special edition four-pager the Belfast Telegraph put out when the Princess Victoria went down with 133 people drowned, with the bodies being brought into Donaghadee.

No advertising in it, therefore just cost, no profit - the paper anxiously grabbed and scanned for names of the known dead and the known survivors; but still an overall profit both in money and reputation...at the end of the year.

I am sure it was a natural reaction to put that paper out and that nobody stopped to ask, or even think, how much will this cost? It was when the paper passed out of local ownership that things began to change...one argument against central national and international ownership.

So what kind of newspaper ownership can best serve any community, while still making a decent profit, rather than a pre-ordained target profit - "20 per cent return on capital wanted per annum" for instance.??

[Chairman]

Perhaps the problem is that newspaper owners don't aspire to a decent profit. The aim is to make a killing. Newspaper ownership used to be a rich man's hobby. Now it is a corporate giant's milch cow. Trouble is they all expect the milch without the expense of feeding the cow.

[Graham]

Much more succinctly put that I did. Perhaps what we're trying to define here is the difference between profit and greed?

[Graham]

**EXCLUSIVE** - THE "I.S.N" BLUES

As long as half a century ago the malaise known as the ISN Blues was well recognised. This was the complaint which afflicted those Belfast Telegraph reporters who were roped in to sub sport on the Pink - but didn't know anything about sport, or sometimes even about subbing. This much-feared half-shift drove some to drink, others to feigned illness, some to late arrival, some to a mixture of all three.

Mary Alexander was the news editor's secretary. I think she had also worked on the photographic department. Her favourite saying when things got stressful was "Niver ba'ar" - her message being to take it easy and not to worry too much.

Her catchphrase was enshrined in this recently rediscovered song entitled "Those Old Pink Blues"

THOSE OLD PINK BLUES
If you're roped in for The Pink
And your heart begins to sink
And you feel you'll have to think
About goal and try and rink
Niver ba'ar boy, niver ba'ar

If you've never kicked a ball
And you've never heard the call
To go out and give your all
And you boggle and you stall
Niver ba'ar boy, niver ba'ar

When the copy starts to flow
"Did 10th Old Boys win 2-Oh?"
And it's piling in like snow
"Where did that ******* **** go?"
Niver ba'ar boy, niver ba'ar

All together now...
Should you worry, should you think
About what's gone in The Pink?
NIVER BA'AR BOY, NIVER BA'AR

[This comes from 1958. The air to which it was to be sung is unknown, as is the author - though Bob Young would be suspected]

[Graham]

**EXCLUSIVE** - THE "I.S.N" BLUES

As long as half a century ago the malaise known as the ISN Blues was well recognised. This was the complaint which afflicted those Belfast Telegraph reporters who were roped in to sub sport on the Pink - but didn't know anything about sport, or sometimes even about subbing. This much-feared half-shift drove some to drink, others to feigned illness, some to late arrival, some to a mixture of all three.

Mary Alexander was the news editor's secretary. I think she had also worked on the photographic department. Her favourite saying when things got stressful was "Niver ba'ar" - her message being to take it easy and not to worry too much.

Her catchphrase was enshrined in this recently rediscovered song entitled "Those Old Pink Blues"

THOSE OLD PINK BLUES
If you're roped in for The Pink
And your heart begins to sink
And you feel you'll have to think
About goal and try and rink
Niver ba'ar boy, niver ba'ar

If you've never kicked a ball
And you've never heard the call
To go out and give your all
And you boggle and you stall
Niver ba'ar boy, niver ba'ar

When the copy starts to flow
"Did 10th Old Boys win 2-Oh?"
And it's piling in like snow
"Where did that ******* **** go?"
Niver ba'ar boy, niver ba'ar

All together now...
Should you worry, should you think
About what's gone in The Pink?
NIVER BA'AR BOY, NIVER BA'AR

[This comes from 1958. The air to which it was to be sung is unknown, as is the author - though Bob Young would be suspected]

[Graham]

HELLO? COPY?

"Sad news for sports stringers as Ireland's Saturday Night, one of the world's oldest sports papers, closes after 114 years.

"Not only did the paper actually pay you on time, but it was staffed by the nicest copy-takers on this earth.

"For those of us who have had to juggle six different running reports for six different newspapers - sometimes for matches we weren't even at - those lilting female tones almost made the mental chaos worthwhile" -

[Press Gazette, Grey Cardigan's column, July 25 2008]

[Graham]

Lady of the house just returned from busy local shop which stocks tons of newspapers - wide assortment from Belfast Telegraph, Irish News, News Letter, Guardian, Financial Times, Mirror, Mail, Daily Sport, Irish Independent etc etc. - piled high, big turnover.

She asked what time the "ISN" comes in at of a Saturday evening. (They're open to late) Blank stares all round. "The wha'?" She persisted a bit ("They seemed to think I was mad") Turned out they don't stock it. Not only that -
the....staff....had....never....heard....of...it!

Seems we're on different planets these days. But who are the aliens - the We-us tribe or Them'uns? Huh?

[sm]

It also seems that anyone wanting to get a copy of ISN tonight has no chance. I've tried from early morning - no extra copies are being printed, I'm told, and newsagents are getting only their normal supply which have already been commandeered by the regulars.

[Chairman]

It turns out the final edition of the ISN isn't the collector's item you thought. There was a pile of them left over at the BP petrol station this morning. I bought four copies for SM but it turns out he doesn't need them now, so anyone who has trouble getting a copy, if they'll send me a stamped addressed envelope and £5 handling fee, I shall forward them on.

[Cal McCrystal]

Am I the only one puzzled that the ISN in its demise is being treated as some kind of a religious relic? Get a grip, Copyboys!

[Graham]

[NIGHT, Ireland's Saturday - passed away July 26 2008 after a long illness, due to neglect from erstwhile readers. Deeply regretted by many who never bothered with it.]

Surely, Cal, you haven't been away so long that you've forgotten that death has its own ritual in Ireland, north and south.

It involves manifestations of mourning and recall. The killing of the ISN has penetrated the normal hard shell of our journalistic hearts, allowing us one of those maudlin periods of emotion that we do so well...when there is a peg to hang it on.

As for relics, see our membership list.

[KB]

Excellent summary by the Chairman. Perhaps he should decree that this correspondence, like the ISN, is now closed.
Incidentally, I'm sure other Copyboys will be as enthralled as I was to read Ed Curran's column in today's Belfast Telegraph in which he muses about being able to watch pictures of the Twelfth while sitting in his 500-year-old holiday home in south west France. How marvellous.

[A.McQ.]

Ye can take the man out of Ulster....but ye can't take Ulster out of the man! What a way to spend a holiday. Now I know why I left.