God be with the days when editors were like this. The scene: Westmoreland Street, central Dublin. The time: middle of the last century, when the world was still viewed in black-and-white. The doors into The Irish Times offices burst open as "a remarkably bulky member of the human race" hurls himself through them at high speed.
“He is wearing an enormous wide-brimmed sombrero, and his coat, open and flying from his shoulders like a cloak, billows out behind him. He has a round, chubby, reddish face, perfectly circular glasses, which give him a slightly Billy Bunterish expression, and under his snub nose a dark moustache from the centre of which protrudes a Sherlock Holmes pipe, firmly clenched between his teeth. The momentum with which he has precipitated himself through the swing-doors carries him half-way through the front office, almost to the foot of the staircase. The small group of people who were lying in wait for him now surge towards him, and then appear to be sucked into his wake, like flotsam behind a great ship.
“Without slackening in the slightest and removing the pipe from his mouth, he accepts with a grunt the bundle of papers proffered to him by Twitchy Doyle, takes whatever it is Mrs Molloy is pressing on him, and has brief exchanges with some of the others. ‘Sorry, not tonight. Come and see me tomorrow afternoon.’ ‘All right, make out a docket for half a guinea and I’ll sign it, but not now.’ ‘See Mr Newman about it at four o’clock tomorrow.’
"And before they have realised what is happening he has disappeared, bolting up the stairs two at a time. For such an enormous man, clearly approaching his fifties, he is surprisingly agile and light on his feet, ducking and diving through the group of supplicants with a skill born of long practice. He is Robert Marie Smyllie, editor of the Irish Times, widely known in Dublin as 'The Editor'."
Delightfully eclectic
Thus Tony Gray describes
RM Smyllie
– Bertie to some, The Editor to others – at the start of his hilarious biography,
Mr Smyllie, Sir
, a sort of love letter to both the man and his time, both long gone.
But a snapshot of those times is now on display for all to see at the Little Museum of Dublin, the capital’s museum of the moment, a delightfully eclectic collection of all sorts of interesting things and people associated with the city. If Howard Carter had peered into No 15 St Stephen’s Green instead of through a crack into King Tutankhamun’s tomb, he would still have reacted by exclaiming that he could see “wonderful things!”
On Thursday, a small room devoted to telling some of the story of The Irish Times and loosely built around the presence of Smyllie, was opened on the museum's top floor, beside another room dedicated to U2 and another that, when finished, will tell the story of Dublin's nine-times lord mayor, Alfie Byrne.
The room contains Smyllie’s desk (or perhaps more accurately, a piece of office furniture at which he is reputed to have sat), his portable typewriter (we’re fairly sure of the provenance of that), his desk lamp (ditto) and much more besides – bits and pieces and images from a 150-year newspaper history.
I have been collecting Irish Times memorabilia since the announcement in January 2005 that we would leave D'Olier Street and move elsewhere – a place that turned out to be, thankfully, just across the road in Tara Street. I felt strongly that there were all sorts of items in D'Olier that shouldn't get left behind or end up in a skip.
If as a newspaper we believe in, and extol, the importance and value of heritage (and we do) then we should do something about our own; we should tell our own story and use it to, hopefully, engage with our readers, especially younger ones, for whom a newspaper today, if they read one at all, is merely one of many sources of information and is something accessed through a smartphone app.
A proposed exhibition space and interactive facility on the ground floor of our then new home did not materialise, sadly. However, thanks to the Little Museum, some of what was planned has come about. "It's a small space but we've done a lot of unusual things with it. It's playful," says museum curator Simon O'Connor. O'Connor and museum director Trevor White like surprises and what O'Connor terms "invisible technology that's interactive".
To you and me that means that when you open a drawer, there’s likely to be something intriguing inside, some little gem with a story behind it.
“There’s lots to explore, lots to see, and listen to as well. There’s a bit of a radio play – a narration by Róisín Ingle with an actor playing the part of Smyllie based on a recording of his voice,” says O’Connor.
A small space is right – but it’s well used. For now, however, the gentlemen’s club-style fireplace fender, made from brass gantry tubing, which long-standing company chairman Major Tom McDowell salvaged from one of the paper’s old printing presses, must remain locked up in a cupboard press in Tara Street. So too the massive Edwardian timber fire surround which I and some of the paper’s security staff dug out of his D’Olier Street bunker-like office and which now sits in a basement shed-type compartment in the Tara Street car park.
And that’s to say nothing of the more than 400 bound volumes of the newspaper, dating back to the 1890s that are in a Deansgrange warehouse (bought from a Belfast loyalist museum that was throwing them out – but that’s another story).
The room also has a framed original of Smyllie’s famous VE Day front page from May 8th, 1945. At the time, the newspaper was subject to government censorship, the blue pencil scoring out any hint of partisanship. But with the censor gone home for the night, Smyllie tore up the approved front page and remade one that included seven small photographs – showing King George, President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, General Eisenhower, and Field Marshals Alexander and Montgomery – arranged in a giant V (for victory) shape across the page.
It was kept by a reader of the newspaper who treasured it so much that, when placing it safely in his attic, he wrote across the top of it: Do Not Destroy. It was discovered by his family after his death some years back and they gave it to the newspaper.
To my shame, I have mislaid the name of the family.
I hope they will contact me again so their father may be given due credit, in the Editor's Room at the Little Museum of Dublin.
