Today it's simple. Take along a tablet or laptop, hook it up to the internet, write your copy and send it over. Job done in minutes.
Not in Lowestoft in the early 1970s. There was a club phone in the clubhouse at Crown Meadow where Lowestoft Town played. You had to first ensure that nobody was using this as half-time approached. Thankfully most of the members at Lowestoft knew that you would need the phone at half-time.
You wrote your copy as the match progressed and as the half time whistle went you hurried to the phone knowing that it would only be 10 or 15 minutes before the next half started. You rang the operator and asked for a transfer charge call to the copytaking room which was well staffed on a Saturday with match reports flying in from all over the place.
With any luck you got straight through to a copytaker. Sometimes you had to wait a while. All the time you were keen to get out to watch the second half. You than had to dictate your piece from the first half in a kind of strange language that you and the copytaker understood. It would go something like.
"Lowestoft Town got off to a sprightly start against Woodbridge with cap scorer Fred Smith scoring after two minutes with a volley from just inside the penalty area point par."
Now this will probably sound like nonsense to you, but it did make sense. Cap scorer was an indication to the copytaker that Fred Smith had scored a goal and his surname should be in capital letters. Point par was simply a direction to put in a full stop and start a new paragraph.
So you would rush through your copy hoping that the person at the other end was a fast typist which they usually were. You would then watch the second half and then repeat the process at the end of the game. It had to be done timely because a match wouldn't finish until about 4.50 p,m and somehow The Pink Un newspaper was delivered to shops throughout Norfolk before 6.30 pm. Much of the features it included had been written and type set in advance of course.
It must have been a huge logistical operation. The sports newspaper - called the Pink Un purely because it was produced on pink paper (the Suffolk green un was produced on green paper) - was one of the highlights of the week. When I moved from Lowestoft to work in Norwich I would walk down to the newsagents near my home at about 6.15 on a Saturday evening. There would be a lengthy queue of people there. most of whom had an order for the paper. On returning home I would read it for most of the rest of the evening.
Sadly over the years the enthusiasm for the Pink Un as a special Saturday evening sports paper waned and it went out of production as a special paper many years ago although part of the sports coverage in the Eastern Daily Press still goes under the name of The Pink Un although today it's printed on standard white paper.
When I moved to the Midlands I worked for a few months for a Press Agency named Raymonds which had an office opposite Nottingham Playhouse. Raymonds made much of its money from sports reporting and one of my jobs was to cover Chesterfield who at the time wer in the football league. Their ground was in the middle of town. I believe it has now been pulled down and they play elsewhere.
It was a bit f a do-it-yourself job. There was a small press box. Small because Chesterfield never attracted a great deal of national attention. But often I would have to do reports for Radio Hallam in Sheffield and that meant picking up a large suitcase of equipment and lumping it over the turnstiles which weren't functional as we had to be there early to set up. At the end reporters would be the last people out of the ground and so would have to climb over the turnstiles again. At half-time cups of Bovril were left out on a shelf for the Press and we would take turns to pick this up. Sometimes a fan had taken it and there was nothing there. At the end of the game you had to knock on the dressing room door if you wanted to interview a player.
The afternoon would be a blur - full of sending over copy to newspapers, doing radio slots and generally not seeing a great deal of the game. All the journalists would help each other as most were in the same boat. So there may have been six reporters there of which five missed a goal due to being involved on the phone etc. The reporter that saw the goal would describe it to the others so everyone, to use a cliche, would be singing from the same hymn sheet.
Very often you wouldn't be able to hear what was being said to you from the person at the other end of the phone because of the noise of the crowd which made things very difficult. One day on a Monday I got a call from a news outlet asking me to ensure that "that idiot that did the football reporting on Saturday never does another one."
No it wasn't me. It was the guy who had been covering Derby County's match on the Saturday. Apparently he had dictated a piece when he was live on radio and then did a running radio report when he was having somebody trying to type it in for a newspaper. The problem is he had forgotten which type of Media he was speaking to. The only problem was this man was the joint owner of the company!
Can you imagine how funny it was to tune into Radio Derby to be told "We are now going over to the Baseball Ground (that was where Derby played at the time) where I believe there's been a goal. Over to you David Johnson (not his real name).
"Kevin Hector scorer has just scored for Derby point new par. He headed in a cross form the left point par. " and so it went on with the person in the studio screaming down the phone that he was live on the air whilst dear old David continued to go on his merry dictating way.
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I will finish this blog with another amusing tale from my days on newspapers.
Eventually in Norwich we adopted a system whereby sub editors could design pages electronically (much as I do nowadays for various publications I am involved in producing). We had a three day course to learn how to use the new system but of course it was pretty much trial and error for the first couple of weeks and very difficult until you got used to using the system after which it became second nature.
So there I was on Thursday evening (the day before the papers went to press) sitting at my desk. A few yards away from me was a dear reporter who was rather pompous. We got on fine but, as I've said, he was pompous.
A group of ladies came round my machine (in those days groups were regularly shown round the newspaper offices) and I made it sound as if I knew what I was talking about, when I quite obviously didn't. The group moved on and Mr Pomposity came over to me.
"WELL" he boomed (he usually boomed rather than talked). You young whippersnapper you just made that up. You didn't know what you were talking about).
"Yes," I replied but I tell you something. I will take one of those women to bed tonight.
"WELL," he boomed.
What I didn't tell him was that I was in Round Table at the time. The group was from Ladies Circle which was the female side of Round Table and one of those in the group was none other than my other threequarters.