The Kirk’s gospel
according to
St Marx
Hamish Henderson and Scotland:
a crucible of experiment
Tessa Ransford
on a prophetic
visionary
Get SR free in
your inbox three
times a week
Click here
Owen Fenn,
an award-winner at the Y0ung Scotland Programme,
writes in today’s SR
Click here
Lockerbie
An overview by Morag Kerr of the Justice for Megrahi Committee
Click here
SR Anthology 2012
Click here
The Cafe
The Cafe is our readers’ forum. Send your contribution to islay@scottishreview.net
Today’s banner
Near Commonwealth House (HQ of the Games) – just in case anyone goes hungry
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
The local press has
been sacrificed
to corporate profit
I agree with Kenneth Roy’s nomination (18 April) of the Bellshill Speaker as the best-titled of any Scottish local newspaper. Also, it was appropriate. The Speaker did exactly what it said on the masthead; it spoke in a quiet, civil voice, and when the locals referred to it as the Squeaker, they did so with affection. Over the years it turned out some very good journalists, among them Tom Christie, who went on to become ‘The Judge’, on the Sunday Mail and John McCalman, whose career continued with distinction on the Glasgow Herald.
In my time, in theory, Robin Stirling edited that paper in tandem with the Motherwell Times, but in practice it was free-standing, and whoever was there ran it, aided by a team of stringers who were usually idiosyncratic, and often downright eccentric. One bloke, a football freelance with no journalistic standing or training, made it his practice to learn a new word every week from the OED and include it, or a variant of it, in his report. It could be there are still people in Bellshill who are wondering exactly what a ‘homoncular winger’ is. Another, a contributor of wedding photographs, had the odd habit of telling groups to ‘Say sh*te’ rather than ‘Cheese’. This led to some very odd expressions among the celebrants in the photographs he submitted. To linger for a moment on wedding photographs, in the days of photographic plates, before web-offset ended their use, there were certain pitfalls to be avoided, and lessons could be learned the hard way. One of these was never to cut two wedding pics to the same size. The dangers of this were illustrated in Motherwell in the 60s, on an occasion when the wedding photograph of the son of the grand master of the local Orange Lodge appeared above a caption belonging to a happy couple who had tied the knot in the town’s Roman Catholic Cathedral.
Those days are gone, and certainly not for the better. However, I would not blame this demise on The Johnston Press alone. Their acquisitive hysteria may have been an overreaction to the aggression of others. From those early days of decline, the entity that is now Scottish and Universal Newspapers played an equal part in the decline of the Scottish independent weekly press. Whoever was to blame, what they did was to sacrifice service, standards, and the jobs of many local printers in the name of corporate profit.
Quintin Jardine
With regard to the first instalment of Stop Press, I never knew Alastair Dunnett but heard enough about him to conclude that he was indeed one of the Scotsman’s ‘great editors’. But ‘the last great editor’? Surely that epitaph belongs to Eric B Mackay, who held the chair from 1972 to 85 and under whom the Scotsman (in 1979), reached its highest ever circulation rate – selling 99,000 copies a day, on average.
It has been said that this success was largely down to the Scotsman’s coverage prior to and after the devolution referendum for which, as editor, Mackay surely must deserve some credit.
Ken Houston
Kenneth Roy replies: I agree – Mackay was a great editor
Susy Macaulay
SR sends its best wishes to Island News and Advertiser
Paul F Cockburn
Even though in Scottish eyes it is a given that Thatcher could do no right, Mr Cameron’s implication that she undertook the defence of the Falklands for purely political reasons is a bit thin.
Dominic Lawson in the Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk
makes a better fist of explaining why it was not, and why Blair’s intervention in Iraq and Cameron’s adventure in Libya probably were, than I can.
Elaine Jamieson
George Gunn writes with insight and passion (3 April). ‘The "heat death" of modern poetry, the loss of linguistic energy, is a far more pressing and anxiety-inducing problem for it allows us to appreciate poetry less.’
There is truth here. We must understand both words and love if we are to survive, if our children are to survive. And for that we need poetry. As to funding I do not know. The gentlemen and ladies come and go through misty rooms, sweating, generally just moist. Any gifts they leave are welcome, ever more seldom. Reality surely is that the world is being reordered. I thought at first the changes to come – and they will – would be the greatest since the second world war. I underestimated. What we face, financially and socially, is more akin to the plague years of the 18th century. The government – any government – cannot save us.
Yet as we battle through the decades let poetry, indeed, somehow, flourish.
Angus Skinner
Have just read Dr Morag Kerr’s neat and tidy summary of the Lockerbie case (18 April) from the bomb-salesman’s perspective, but that is all it is. Explosions are, essentially, either accidental or deliberate. Why go down the Crown conspiracy route like a person hypnotised? Where is the evidence of a bomb? Why is the other door of investigation, marked ‘Accidental’, padlocked shut? Is it because Mossad planted an early seed after the crash? Are people forgetting that?
Such prejudice is not helpful to an open inquiry into what caused the multiple explosions on Maid of the Seas.
Robbie the Pict
Book a table in The Cafe. Email islay@scottishreview.net
