Such sadness! The Liverpool Post, one of the greatest provincial daily papers, is to close this Thursday after 158 years – another casualty of the winds of change sweeping through the newspaper industry. It was the place where I did my journalistic training, and in its day the paper was an important “seedbed” for Britain’s national media journalists – running the best training school for future media stars in the land. Joe Riley, the distinguished Liverpool Echo columnist, wrote about it in his column the other day:
‘Good to see my old pal Roger Alton, executive editor of The Times, championing the case for a wholesale rejection of the cross-party Royal Charter on press regulation.
Roger Alton incidentally, began his career alongside me as a deputy features editor at the Post, before editing both The Observer and The Independent. At the same table was features editor Michael Hogan, future editor of BBC1’s Nationwide; Nick Gordon, later executive editor of the Daily Mail; and Michael Williams, destined to become news editor of The Sunday Times.’
Further evidence that Liverpool has – and continues to produce – great journalists’
To this list can be added many other Liverpool Post alumni, including Guardian editor Peter Preston, The Times managing editor John Grant, Nigel Dacre, editor of ITN, Derek Jewell, managing editor of The Sunday Times, Charlie Burgess, managing editor of The Independent, Henry Porter, UK editor of Vanity Fair, John Toker, who was the official face of the Leveson inquiry, and the BBC political journalist John Sergeant, who was famously “handbagged” on screen by Margaret Thatcher on the steps of the Paris embassy after the Tory leadership vote went against her. There are many other former Liverpool trainees in senior positions throughout the national media.
Presiding over this school of excellence was the Post and Echo’s enlightened managing director Ian Park, who would have nothing less than the highest Fleet Street standards for Liverpool. Indeed the paper had its own grand London office in the Street itself, next to the Daily Telegraph, where I learnt at the knee of the great Tony Bevins, who was one of the great political editors of his day and went on to ply his trade at The Times and The Independent.
The Oxford-educated John Sergeant, who was a near contemporary of mine on the Post training scheme, wrote in his autobiography: “One of my first tasks on the paper was to detail the Merchant Navy exam results. The headline never varied: M. N. Exam Results. It was hardly the work of a member of the literary world.”
As for me, one of my first jobs was just as junior, but equally important – to ring the port authority and ask what ships were due to berth that day. It is long since the great passenger liners put in on the Liverpool waterfront – and how sad now that another mighty city institution, the Liverpool Post, is to sail off into the sunset.
