My Olden Days Career

by David Mills (OW 1981)

I left university in 1985 without any clear idea of what to do next. I blame my education. Like most arts students back then, I had been encouraged to disparage business and industry while pursuing the higher life of the mind – not that I had the faintest idea what business and industry might involve, just that they could not possibly be as important and life-enhancing as wrestling with Wordsworth, or pontificating on Pope.

Wolverhampton Grammar School must take some blame for this state of affairs. My memory of careers advice in the 1970s is that it comprised a few suggestions of local industries, which still then existed, for boys not going to university, or the army while those of us hoping for university were patted on the back and left to get on with it.

Of course, Wolverhampton Grammar School prepared us pretty well on the academic front and I marched off to Cambridge where my ability to lounge around reading books and thinking about them was hugely enhanced, while my knowledge of the world outside shrank further.

I had thought I would become an academic but exposure to actual academics while at university cured me of this ambition as I realised, I could not sustain an interest in a narrow enough area of study for the requisite number of years. Meanwhile my contemporaries seemed unnervingly well-versed in what the world had to offer: “banking”, it turned out, did not mean sitting behind the counter at Lloyds, nor did “insurance” mean going round door to door collecting premiums on a Friday night. There was a university careers service, but this was still in its infancy. One of my contemporaries took its automated questionnaire to discover his ideal career. It advised him to join the WRNs. (He ended up in the special forces and MI6 before it all ended in tears – and the pages of The Sunday Times).

Book publishing looked like the ideal career for me. “I’m really good at reading books, so can I have a job, please?” was the basis of my applications. I didn’t get anywhere and instead, took a job as editorial assistant on an art magazine. I didn’t really know what was involved or what an editorial assistant was; there were only two of us on the editorial staff after all. The main reason I got the job, I realised in retrospect, was my willingness to do it for £5,000 a year, which even in 1986 was not realistically enough to live on. I took the job because the magazine was an offshoot of a book publisher, reasoning that I would be perfectly placed for stepping across into the heady world of book publishing. Instead, I discovered that book publishing was not what I thought – there was very little lying around reading books and lots of meetings to brainstorm bestsellers (which largely meant copying books that were already selling well).

In the interim I found that I rather enjoyed working on a magazine – it suited my restlessness. I wrote articles, designed page layouts, edited copy, wrote picture captions and headlines, directed paste-up, commissioned other writers, went out and met people, interviewed famous artists, proof read pages, checked colour registration, replied to readers’ letters, dealt with complaints, talked to potential advertisers, went on press trips (mostly to pencil factories in Nuremberg), helped out on photographic shoots… eventually it dawned on me that I was doing journalism.

The advantage of working for a small outfit was that I was given such a range of opportunity and responsibility so quickly; helped by the fact that due to a series of unfortunate events I was soon in sole charge. I had the insouciance of innocence: had I known the reality of the burdens I was carrying (tens of thousands of pounds in advertising revenues and several people’s jobs dependent on my getting the magazine out on time) I might have wilted but I was shielded by youthful ignorance.

I still wasn’t earning much money, however, and hoping that I might now have some claim to call myself a journalist I wrote to newspapers to see if one of them might take me on.

It was now 1989 and even I had managed to acquire a word processor. Using a media directory, I identified likely people on all newspapers, four or five on each title from the Daily Express to The Times, and using my trusty Amstrad sent them a seemingly personally tailored letter of supplication. I shoved 63 such missives in the letter box at the end of the road, figuring that some law of opportunity must operate if I increased the numerical chances.

Sixty-one of those letters came to nothing. One resulted in a disastrous interview at the, just about to launch, Independent on Sunday with the deputy editor, Sebastian Faulks. The other ended up on the desk of the Managing Editor, Arts and Leisure, at The Sunday Times

In the late 1980s and early 90s, newspapers were expanding rapidly –wholly new titles were appearing, The Independent, Sunday Correspondent, and existing titles were getting bigger, adding more and more pages, and more sections and supplements. There was probably never a better time to look for a job in the press. The Sunday Times was about to launch a separate arts section. My timing was perfect and for once I was applying for a job that I actually had the relevant experience for.

So began what turned out to be 31 years at The Sunday Times. I tell it this way to indicate what seems to me now the casual haphazardness of it all. It can still happen like this, but it is increasingly rare. Most young people coming into the media now have been focussed on it as a career for years and usually complete a post-graduate journalism course. I don’t disparage this, far from it. From tough libel and privacy laws to bribery and freedom of information requests, it is a much trickier field than it used to be and a measure of professional qualification and competence is to be welcomed.

The fundamentals of journalism will always remain the same: it is about finding stories and telling them in the best way to engage people. Being a journalist is like having a superpower that pushes you into events (when often you would rather walk away from them) and emboldens you to ask the questions. In my career at The Sunday Times, I would count being involved in reporting on the death and funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, and 9/11 as the most astonishing episodes. Most of the time it was just fun, such as when I sailed around New Zealand on a tall ship, and sometimes just bizarre, such as when I went back to school as a sixth former at the age of 33. I was asked at the time which school would have enough confidence, in itself and its pupils, to allow a journalist in undercover. Of course, it would have to be one that set its pupils up for life: Wolverhampton Grammar School.