Job that's taken me to the moon

Walking into the T&A office to start work 40 years ago this month was like coming home.

I’d been in the building many times before. During more than five years spent working for the Wool Record trade magazine up on Kirkgate, one of my jobs had been to bring photographs in to the T&A process department and call back later to collect the plates made from them there, to be sent to the printers at Idle.

There were other reasons, though, for this feeling of belonging. I’d spent the previous six months working in Halifax, learning in the Evening Courier’s sub-editors’ department how to convert my trade-journalism skills to meet the needs of a local newspaper.

Lively town though Halifax was (and still is), it was foreign parts to someone born and brought up in north Bradford. Now, though, I was returning to my own territory. And what’s more I was joining a newspaper with which I’d been familiar throughout my life.

While I was growing up the T&A had dropped through our family letterbox every day. Now I was married, it dropped through my own letterbox. I read it avidly. I admired the work of the likes of Peter Holdsworth, the erudite drama critic, and Don Alred, who as crime reporter (doubling as Bradford City reporter) had covered all the big murders and mysteries. To me these men were legends.

And now, on December 2, 1968, at the age of 24, I was to find myself working alongside them. What a thrill!

I bedded in easily to life in the news sub-editors’ department. They were a welcoming bunch, most of them members of an earlier generation – men who had seen wartime service and from my youthful perspective seemed old (though looking back I realise that they were probably at least a decade younger than I am now).

There were two other youngsters in the department on that first day: Dave Hutchinson, another born-and-bred Bradford lad who I found myself sitting next to, and who was just my age, and Leon Hickman, the innovative new chief sub-editor who had arrived in the slipstream of Peter Harland, the whizz-kid new editor.

A year older than me, Hickman had brought a breath of fresh air to the subs’ room – which, admittedly, wasn’t universally appreciated by the older hands. It suited me, though, especially as he (just like me) had a passion for writing and set up a “young people’s” page to provide himself with an outlet for it. I quickly climbed aboard the bandwagon.

Life settled into a stimulating if busy pattern. Subbing by day, I was soon the “splash” sub handling the big stories. I loved the challenge of old-style scissors-and-paste subbing long before the days of computers. When man first walked on the moon I went into work early the following morning to be confronted by a mountain of copy from Reuters, the Press Association and local reporters who had been seeking Bradford reaction.

Cranking up the adrenaline and working against the clock, I pasted and hacked and rewrote and turned it into a compelling narrative of the previous night’s momentous events. What tremendous job satisfaction.

But I was working in the evenings, too, in my role as a writer, reviewing local pop and rock gigs and interviewing people for the young people’s page. My first by-lined work for the T&A was an interview with disc jockey John Peel, who was compering a Fairport Convention gig at the University.

It and the many other pieces I subsequently wrote eventually earned me a transfer to the features department, first as deputy and then as features editor – a job I did for nearly a dozen years, during which I was able to introduce my first major column, Priestley’s Patch. That focused on the home life of the Priestley family and continued over the years until the members of that family became sick of having their activities reported for the amusement of T&A readers.

However, the job of features editor involved more subbing than writing. Faced on top of that with an increasing administrative burden and with no great aptitude for “man management”, I took the opportunity of a change of editor to seek a change of role.

Terry Quinn, a dynamic Scot who took the T&A by the scruff of its neck and shook it hard, agreed to let me take on a full-time writing role. In fact he was happy to do so because it let him install an appointee of his own choosing as features editor.

And so began the most exhilarating and rewarding few years of my career. Quinn worked on a broad canvas, seeing the T&A as a major player in the provincial newspaper world – more of a regional daily than a local evening.

He was keen on design, certainly. But he was also a writer’s editor – inspiring, encouraging, appreciative.

He it was who thought up the title of North of Watford, the long-running column which three times earned me the prize of Yorkshire Columnist of the Year in the Yorkshire Press Awards and once added to them Yorkshire Journalist of the Year.

With money apparently no object in those more affluent days, for a while I seemed to spend my time writing major descriptive pieces about events taking place in West Yorkshire or travelling around the country on stories or interviews.

After the horror of the Bradford City fire, I was despatched to Aberfan, where the school in that South Wales village had been engulfed by a deadly mountain of pit spoil, to see if Bradford could learn any lessons from the way the people there had dealt with their tragedy.

I was a regular on the trains to London, to interview major names such as Sir John Harvey-Jones, the chairman of ICI who became Chancellor of Bradford University, or Bradford-born Dame Barbara Castle. I spent time at the television studios, sitting in on a day’s recording of Grange Hill or attending the launch of the summer or winter BBC schedules and hobnobbing with the stars.

When Bradford’s Mandy Shires won the Miss World title I was at that final at the Grosvenor House Hotel, and next morning joined the press pack which besieged the TV-am studios at Camden Lock to interview her.

And I landed an exclusive interview with Paul McCartney at the BBC Television Centre after a session of the morning programme Saturday Live. I wrote it up, it seems everyone back at the T&A got all excited about it and wanted to have some sort of input, and it ended up being rewritten by a committee – to my dismay.

Overall it was a glorious few years during which my mother described me as a “born-again journalist”.

Nothing lasts forever. Terry Quinn moved on and around the same time the mood among provincial newspapers changed. They began to look inwards to their communities rather than out at the world. There was still writing to be done, but the emphasis was now on interviews with and quotes from local people.

At the heart of my job in recent years has been North of Watford, the walking column (what a pleasure that’s been to do), the nostalgia/local history of Past Times and Remember When?, editing the Letters page, sorting out readers’ complaints for Feedback and co-writing The Scribbler column.

Not a bad way to earn a living, actually. Not quite as exciting as what went on in the years that came before, but I shall still miss it.

And most of all I’ll miss you, the readers – my fellow Bradfordians who part with hard cash for your copy of the T&A and whose interests, preoccupations and concerns I’ve done my best to represent.

I’ve been deeply touched by the messages of appreciation of my efforts over the years and of good wishes for my retirement (and by the surprise gift from the Lord Mayor, a splendid wine decanter engraved with the Bradford coat of arms which was presented when I went along to a small pre-Christmas reception at City Hall for the local media).

Many, many thanks to all the people who have written, e-mailed, telephoned or stopped me in the street. I head into relative obscurity knowing that I’ve made a bit of a mark. It might be only modest, and it won’t last – but it’s nice to know that, for now at least, it’s there.

I have a big favour to ask of you, though. Should you come across me in a year or two, please, please, please don’t ask me, “Didn’t you used to be Mike Priestley?”

Happy to share life with Sam

Some readers have been kind enough to say that they particularly enjoyed the occasions over the last ten years when I’ve written about my grandson, Sam. So here’s an update.

Sam will be 11 next month, and bound for “big school” in September. Time flies. He’s still our only grandchild, and likely to remain that way. So understandably we cherish him and make a bit of a fuss of him.

With him, we have the sort of patience and wisdom that was denied us when our children were his age. Most grandparents are like that, I think, learning from their mistakes as parents to get it right next time.

Sam’s our pal. He keeps us young. He comes to stay with us every second or third weekend, when we play games, build complex Lego models, watch the sort of TV that ten-year-olds like, and go to see (and usually thoroughly enjoy) the sort of films at the cinema that we would never had chosen if we didn’t have him around. And one week every year he goes on a seaside holiday with us.

We realise that it isn’t likely to last. In another couple of years his voice will be breaking as his hormones kick in. There will be more exciting things to do with his time than spend it with his grandma and grandad.

But hopefully the bond between us will have been forged strong enough for him to keep us in his life. And hopefully, too, when we’re both long gone he’ll remember with warmth and affection for the rest of his years the happy times he shared with us.