Pretty soon, it dawned on editors that the headline could be on the same page as the text it referred to and, even better, directly underneath. The front-page headline caught on and flourished. The Times was the prominent exception. Among the front pages displayed in the British Library’s excellent Newsroom is that of the 1805 issue of The Thunderer reporting on the Battle of Trafalgar. However, on a slow news day – ie, one without a spectacular nautical victory against the wicked French – the front page was devoid of anything of a topical or, indeed, editorial nature. This was still the case on May 2, 1966. The


Times was then a broadsheet and its front page consisted entirely of small ads. Here were births (from Bennet to Wellington White) and deaths (two-thirds of a column – with readers dying like flies, no wonder action was called for). The same mixture can be seen on page two (wanted: manpower economist in Zambia). Pages three and four had sport and page five arts. It wasn’t until the sixth broadsheet page that the lead story popped up, top left: ‘AA Subscription Going Up.’ It was a modest display but at least bigger than the ‘Latest wills’ slot, bottom left. On May 3, the paper itself was the real news


for its readers. As a front-page poem to the now displaced ads for cooks and paying guests put it, ‘Page One on graver issues must brood.’ Above the fold alone, there were 11 stories. The rumour was that, at the Times daily conference, a tricky question had been posed: “What would a real newspaper lead on?” The answer came in its first front-page headline: ‘London to be new HQ for NATO.’ Again, these were early days. It was not quite as memorable as The Sun’s ‘Gotcha’ would be in 1982 or ‘Whose Finger?’ (on the nuclear trigger) with which the Daily Mirror had attacked Churchill in 1951 as a warmonger. These were the two headlines that sprang to


Ian Jack’s mind when I asked the former editor of the Independent on Sunday about headlines which lingered in his memory. And he should know: “I won the headline


writer of the year award in the British [now National] Press Awards in 1995 – but I can’t now remember what the headline was.” It deserves resurrecting here, although it wasn’t the Sindy’s lead story: ‘4,000 Moles in Blackburn, Lancashire’, which picked up on the Sergeant Pepper track, sat happily above a wonderful piece about a lottery winner from that town


whose previously secret identity was revealed by his neighbours. Another of Jack’s memorable headlines never appeared on newsprint – only on celluloid: “In ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’, much of it filmed in the offices of the Daily Express, two front pages are prepared – ‘World Saved’ and ‘World Doomed’ – because the film ends on a cliffhanger.” The page proofs with these messages bring the film to a close. Trevor Grove, late of the Sunday Telegraph, was another former occupant of the editorial chair (the collective noun is a ‘splash’ of ex-editors) whom I asked about his high points in the history of headlines. He judged that the best Sun splash was ‘Bin Bagged’, printed when Osama Bin Laden was killed. He added, “My first journalistic job was at The Spectator. It included proof- reading the books pages. A review of a batch of sci-fi novels was marked ‘Heading to Come’. ‘Good one,’ I thought, and that’s how it appeared.” In view of the nail-biting court battle under his editorship that they entailed, it is natural that Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian had ‘A Liar and a Cheat’ and ‘Aitken: He Lied and Lied and Lied’ in his list. He also gave a thumbs-up to the Mail’s ‘Murderers’ (ie of Stephen Lawrence) and a thumbs-down to ‘Enemies of the People’ (the judges who declared that Brexit required a Westminster vote). He gave an honourable – or perhaps dishonourable – mention to The Sun’s ‘Freddie Starr ate my Hamster’ and to ‘If Kinnock Wins Today Will the Last Person to Leave Britain Turn Out the Lights’. The less familiar but intriguing ‘Enough is Enough’ in 1968 was the attempt by the Mirror, or at least of chairman Cecil King, at a coup against the Labour government; in fact it was the whacky King who was axed. Ian Jack suspects that these clever creations


may, like The Evening News, be a dying breed: “An interesting development in headline writing is the change that online publishing and search engines have brought about. Headlines that use word play – the subeditor’s delight – have almost vanished. Now they need to reflect the bare essentials of the story, or a search engine won’t find them.” He quotes The Sun’s famous example above


its match report when Caley, aka Inverness Caledonian Thistle, thrashed Celtic: ‘Super Caley Go Ballistic Celtic are Atrocious’. (The Liverpool Echo had earlier referenced the same Mary Poppins tongue-twister but never mind.) “My guess is that this would these days be rendered as ‘Shock Defeat for Celtic’ or something similar,” he concludes.


theJournalist | 17


Looking back to:


1896


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