NEARLY all the material you read in The Irish Times today has been input electronically – via desktop computers in the office, by email from the journalists’ laptops, or from news agencies. But when I first starting working in newspapers, many news, sport, features and business stories were transmitted by telex or dictated by reporters over the telephone to specially trained typists known as copytakers. With my departure from The Irish Times over the weekend, the paper’s last link with that era is severed.
I started my copytaking life in The Sunday Times in London. I joined a team of eight, six of them men. We worked on a rotating shift covering the hours from 10am to after midnight. Each copytaker sat in a booth wearing earphones, typing up journalists’ reports as they spoke. Speed was essential. At first I would pray for a slow, ponderous speaker, but very quickly I found I could type almost as fast as anyone spoke.
Keyboard skills were not the only qualification. I soon discovered how necessary it was to follow the sense of a story. Reporters under stress often made mistakes, but might still blame the copytaker if the mistake got into print.
Good spelling was essential
and grammatical blunders
could alter the meaning of a sentence. I learnt to ask politely if what was said was what was really intended, and laughed at the jokes.
Often the telephone lines in those days were crackling and it was difficult to hear. Tempers could become frayed. You
would often be asked to ring a correspondent back, only to
find the number was wrong.
It was all rather hit and miss, yet very rarely did a story not get through.
My first child was born when I was in London and my colleagues all trooped into University College Hospital with their bunches of flowers to visit me. There were so many men around my bed that the nurses became confused as to who was the child’s father.
After coming back to Ireland I decided that working at night would be conducive to family life so I did some copytaking with The Irish Press and then
came to The Irish Times.
The Troubles in the North dominated the news at that time and a telephone line was kept open for eight hours each day for dictation. The last copytaker on duty often had to stay until 2am. The late Fergus Pyle, who was then northern editor,
would start the day with his Stormont report and every item was covered. Bertie Sibbett of the Belfast Telegraph would dictate stories from the Northern courts, and the shootings, bombings and general mayhem were covered by various reporters. Their accents could be difficult to understand and unfamiliar names had to be spelt out against the background noise of rioting and gunfire.
The stories were often very immediate and if a news conference was coming up the news editor, Gerry Mulvey, would tear the copy off your typewriter, paragraph by paragraph, so that he was familiar with what was happening. He would also give instructions on how the story was to take shape and sometimes berate the reporter, who would moan that nobody in Dublin understood the pressure he was under. There was always tension, but also a sense of excitement and strong camaraderie.
Copy was also dictated by stringers – freelance journalists who worked for a number of papers. They tried to write in our style but sometimes got confused about whom they were dealing with. They didn’t
always take kindly to being reminded that “this is The Irish Times, not the. . .”
Stringers did not receive any public recognition and they were paid per inch of printed text. So they had a tendency to elongate the most mundane event. We dreaded Tuesdays, when a certain county councillor, who doubled as a correspondent, used to phone the paper to dictate the goings-on of the council
meeting with a marked emphasis on his own input.
Stringers also covered many sports events, often from pitches and boxing arenas where the noise level would be so high that nothing could be heard. This got even worse with the advent of the mobile phone. On Sundays four copytakers were on duty to take all the reports on GAA, soccer and rugby games, golf, badminton, tennis – in fact every sport that was practised in the country. One Sunday a reporter dictated his piece while on a train, not realising that when the train went through a tunnel nothing could be heard. There was consternation when huge chunks of his copy did not appear on the Monday morning.
Columnists too dictated their pieces by phone. Claud Cockburn would ring from his home in Ardmore. Conor Cruise O’Brien, after finishing dictating a particularly difficult piece, told me: “You can always tell a newspaper by its copytakers.”
I am still not quite sure how to take that!
So, as the last permanent and pensionable copytaker in these isles (copy agencies, like call centres, have been set up in different countries), I now join the Linotype operators, block-makers, foundrymen and proofreaders in becoming part of newspaper history.
Note: A copytaking service will continue on Sundays only, particularly for Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin, who has been filing copy for almost 60 years.