Waterhouse On Newspaper Style

Editor’s Notes by Stella Bingham

Publisher’s Notes by Revel Barker

Review – Dr Syntax

Rejoice! Waterhouse is back in print
– Dominic Ponsford

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Gentlemen Ranters’ publishing arm was immensely flattered when Keith’s literary executors offered us the book to republish, for it’s a book that most of us have owned and kept within reach for decades – in fact since its original conception as the so-called Daily Mirror Stylebook.

Shame on you if you don’t already own a copy. Double shame if you haven’t read it. Treble shames all round if you’re one of those miserable bastards that ran off a photocopy of somebody else’s copy of the book.

It is available for pre-order, now, from Book Depository (with free postage, worldwide), or on-line from amazon or Waterstones, or on order from any half-decent bookshop, anywhere in the world.

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Keith Waterhouse’s classic manual on the use of language in newspapers has become the standard guide for journalists working in or studying the trade. A wide-ranging handbook of popular journalism it is also the most entertaining book on the art of clear, correct and effective English you will ever read.

‘Anyone interested in clear writing… could read it with profit. For Waterhouse is full of sound advice, amusingly and pithily expressed… anyone reading him must pick up something of the drive, economy, wit and precision of his prose.’ – Evening Standard.

‘What Waterhouse has done is to make the teaching of grammar and writing interesting. This is a minor miracle… this is also one of the funniest books you are likely to read.’ – Daily Mail.

‘A guide to the use of English in the popular press… the result is an amusing guide of wider interest, for hacks and laymen alike… other style books that I have encountered… never approached the sparkle of Waterhouse.’ – Literary Review.

A youngster ambitious to be a good journalist will learn more from reading Waterhouse’s book than from any amount of tuition at a journalists’ training school.’ – Daily Mirror.

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Editor’s Notes

By Stella Bingham

Waterhouse on Newspaper Style has been out of print for 13 years but demand for it, from universities and journalism schools, never ceased. Last year, when a reprint was proposed, Waterhouse was delighted and agreed to update it, ‘removing titles of now-dead newspapers, defunct TV stars etc’ but leaving the quotes and extracts as they stood.‘Most of them,’ he wrote, ‘belong to that timeless world of tabloidese and don’t date at all’.

Sadly, Waterhouse died before he could carry out the work and the task fell to me. The publisher and I decided to leave it almost untouched, as a book of its time and a tribute to its author. Many chapters Waterhouse himself would have felt no need to update. Others, such as captions, which focuses on the sadly diminished world of page three girls, now have a period charm.

Waterhouse on Newspaper Style is still the standard, and most entertaining, manual of tabloid journalism, as important and relevant today as when it was first published in 1989.

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The stylistics

By Revel Barker

When they sit at your feet and ask exactly how it was different in the old days, and why the glory days are remembered as being great, tell them about how Keith Waterhouse wrote the Daily Mirror Stylebook.

The Mirror may have been the most stylistic paper in its heyday, but it had never had a style book. There was a memo floating around somewhere that said, boldly but bluntly: ‘The style book of the Daily Mirror is this morning’s copy of the Daily Mirror.’

Sounds good, except the Mirror was anything but consistent in its styles and spelling. Colonel Gaddafi may have been spelt with a double-D in that morning’s paper, but in the afternoon he could become Gadafi for the simple reason that two Ds would bust in the headline. There could be two dots for an ellipsis, or three… according to width (and sometimes according to whim and no doubt also according to lunch).

Cudlipp thought there should be a hyphen in to-day, but inexplicably not in tomorrow. Fleet-st was presented with a hyphen (and sometimes, though not always, with a full point to show that street had been abbreviated) for no other reason than that it was how the street was listed in the book of London street names that subs used to check spellings (Shaftsbury or Shaftesbury? Hannover or Hanover?).

Features put quotes around book and movie titles, but news didn’t; news would say ‘a hotel’ while features used ‘an hotel’.

Tony Miles, the chairman and editorial director, thought the paper could benefit from consistency and that a style book would help achieve it. Editor Mike Molloy nominated Waterhouse, a literary pedant whose copy, like Cassandra’s before him, was officially untouchable by subs, for the job.

And – here’s the point of the intro – they told him he could go anywhere in the world to compile it.

He chose San Francisco for no other reason than that he’d never been there. He collected a handful of folding stuff from cashiers and jetted off with a suitcase full of cuttings to inspire him.

What emerged, towards the end of 1979, was about a hundred stiffish pages of a cheaply-glued book called Daily Mirror Style, of which 1,000 copies were printed and distributed to editorial staff. Although intended only for internal reading, in the way of things copies mysteriously materialised in other newspaper offices and started to change hands, at a price.

When he learnt that pirated facsimiles were being run off on office photocopiers all over Fleet Street and beyond (and it was easy to copy because the pages fell out), Waterhouse suggested that the book be put on general sale and eventually, in 1981, the in-house publishing arm, Mirror Group Books, took it on, placing around 10,000 copies of the retitled Daily Mirror Style – the Mirror’s Way With Words in bookshops.

It was an instant hit, reviewed everywhere and recommended by everybody from World Medicine to the Cabinet Office as a guide to good plain English,

It became a standard textbook for students of journalism but when it went out of print it was back to the photocopier.

Waterhouse said he didn’t know whether to be flattered or inflamed when a journalism student he met on a train asked him to autograph a photocopy of his work.

In 1989, after he had parted company with the Daily Mirror, it was revised and expanded and published by Viking as Waterhouse on Newspaper Style and in 1993 was taken up and republished by Penguin.

By the time he died last year it was long out of print again, with copies changing hands at up to £50. He was already working on an update – for news, he said, ‘is ephemeral, as are most of the personalities who make the headlines and some of the examples quoted had become well nigh incomprehensible.’

As he’d predicted, when his literary executors offered the book to me for a revised reprint, the transient nature of celebrity fame presented a few problems for the editing. General Knowledge – once a compulsory subject in junior schools – was no longer fashionable; the new generation of aspiring journalists knows of Harry Potter but not of Harry Procter; Billy Connolly but not Bill Connor; Cameron Diaz but not Jimmy Cameron; they don’t read books, or even newspapers. So had they heard of Princess Caroline, or Frank Bruno? If they hadn’t, they bloody well should have.

In the end the challenge fell to Stella Bingham, journalist and sometime Waterhouse wife, long-term partner, supporter and confidante, to sort out the notes, spoken thoughts and plans that the author had for the revision.

The task – as everybody who knows her would expect – resulted in the revised version that Waterhouse wanted: barely distinguishable from the original, merely updated where absolutely necessary solely on the grounds of accuracy or comprehension.

No need to photocopy it.

Waterhouse on Newspaper Style, ISBN 978-0-9563686-9-0, is published by Revel Barker Publishing at £9.99 and is available (with free delivery worldwide) from Book Depository, or amazon or Waterstones, or on order from any half-decent bookshop.

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Putting On The Style

By Dr Syntax

It is not, of course, a style book at all. Waterhouse concedes in his introduction that a newspaper style book is something that tells journalists on The Times, for example, that the house spelling of recognise is recognize.

[In fact, The Times English Style and Usage does no such thing. It used to favour the Greek -ize ending over the Latin –ise: but for 20 years or more, certainly since Simon Jenkins’ time in the editor’s chair, it has adopted –ise in all cases apart from the otherwise awkward capsize and synthesizer.]

Which is more than you can say for the Daily Mirror, for whom Waterhouse wrote the first version of this book. Wade through the back numbers of that newspaper and you’ll find izes and ises intermingled and interchangeable all over the place. When you encounter advertizer, you may feel like pulling out your – or somebody’s – hair.

Waterhouse offers no guidance to the preferred Mirror house style on this matter (if, indeed, there was a preference). Nor does he appear sure himself, and in different places he opts for different endings. You might suspect, from the example he quotes, that he feels recognise is the correct spelling; but in the book he opts for realize, specialize and summarize suggesting, perhaps, that he is as one with The Times, or at least with The Times of his youth. But then he uses revise, not revize, and surprise, exercise, and otherwise.

It’s difficult to avoid the thought that a style book would have helped, here.

But if – in spite of its original title (Daily Mirror Style) – it isn’t a style book, what is it? The clue is in the On in the revised title. It never was, nor did it set out to be, a style book in the accepted sense. It is a treatise, a dissertation, a thesis, a discourse on newspaper style, a critique of newspaper (especially tabloid) language and the way it was ‘developing not to say deteriorating’. It is a commentary on the writing manners and mannerisms of the so-called popular press, a style that these days the so-called quality press is not ashamed to copy.

So it isn’t a how-to-do-it book, nor is it a guide to how not to do it.

Rather, it is a railing against the lazy way of writing headlines and, to a lesser extent, body-copy.

The first person who wrote Dollar Takes A Pounding, was surely clever, and Say Hello To The Good Buys may be difficult to beat on a shopping feature. The sub who put up Phew, What A Scorcher (the first time) was, unquestionably, inspired.

But the difficulty arises when subs are too idle to think of anything new and trot out the old favourites so they become clichés – and a cliché, remember, was a stick of prepared type kept within reach in the days of hand-setting because it was going to be needed day after day.

The sub who thought of First Of The Phew for the start of a heat wave was writing for his mates, though, rather than for the readers.

So what Waterhouse gives us is a jolly romp through (mainly) the red-tops in the company of an apparently grumpy old man who, you might think, sometimes protests too much.

He is clearly enjoying himself immensely, and the readers share the fun of finding shock-horror in the easy headlines above jollified copy.

In any case, what would be the alternative to tabloid headings as we know, and have come to expect, them? Newspaper headlines are more than labels, but not much more. Readers, insofar as they are ever actually conscious of headings, are surely entitled to share the fun. And, let’s be honest, the familiar is the more comfortable.

It would be a bold reporter who attempted to write a story about bingo without including the words eyes down… And an even bolder sub who let it go without those words. Could anybody envisage a story about a bell-ringer who didn’t drop a clanger? And if a council is cleaning up graffiti isn’t the writing already on the wall? (Waterhouse found a mention of writing on the wall in a Mirror edition in June 1939…)

He doesn’t suggest alternatives although, if anybody could have done that, it would have been the founder-president of the Association for the Abolition of Aberrant Apostrophes.

Without doubt he was, if not the greatest living author in his day (which ended only recently), certainly the greatest journalist-author. And I think I’m right in saying that with Billy Liar he was the first living author to have a book on the Eng-Lit O-level syllabus.

There is much to learn from Waterhouse’s Style. For example, his explanation of the difference between which and that is simplicity itself – yet still ignored, or misunderstood, by the vast majority of ‘professional’ writers and editors.

The rules of English are, he says, there to be broken; the exception to that rule being the rules laid down in his book. But just a minute, Lord Copper: he breaks some of them himself, and ever since the first, exclusively in-house, edition, it’s been a bit of a game for self-styled wordsmiths to spot his own deviations from the form. Doesn’t he stray, in places, with the which/that dilemma and the less/fewer rule? The problem is that it’s Waterhouse; it is impossible to tell whether he has broken his own rules in error (surely not) or deliberately, by way of a small joke or as an amusement for the careful reader.

The Cabinet Office listed the book along with Fowler and Partridge as recommended reading in urging civil servants to adopt plain English. It was a set book for student journalists from the first public printing, and a popular guide for students of English, although it had been out of print for years.

This is basically because the reader learns from the book during a delightful journey that doesn’t appear, en route, to be anything remotely related to education.

And that, to put it simply, was always Waterhouse’s style.

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Rejoice! Waterhouse on Newspaper Style is back in print

By Dominic Ponsford

This is fantastic news - Keith Waterhouse on Newspaper Style is being republished.

I believe it is based on his Daily Mirror styleguide from around 1980, which Press Gazette recently published some extracts from.

I foolishly lent my copy of the book to a colleague and never got it back, so resorted to photocopying every page after borrowing a copy from Trinity Mirror.

This book is a must-read for all journalists - but especially useful for all student journalists and lecturers.

Details of how to buy a copy can be found on Gentleman Ranters where there are also extracts, a review and the story behind it.

Dominic Ponsford is editor of Press Gazette.

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The Theory And Practice Of Lunch

Publisher’s Notes by Revel Barker

Let’s Do Lunch – Ian Skidmore

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Keith Waterhouse is very particular about what lunch is not: ‘It is not prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gateau with your bank manger. It is not civic, commemorative, annual office or funeral. It is not when either party is on a diet, on the wagon or in a hurry.’

He is equally precise about what lunch is: ‘It is a mid-day meal taken at leisure by, ideally, two people. Three’s a crowd, four always split like a double amoeba into two pairs, six is a meeting, eight is a conference… A little light business may be touched upon but the occasion is firmly social. Whether they know it or not, for as long as they linger in the restaurant they are having an affair. The affair is lunch.’

The Theory and Practice of Lunch is an authoritative and delightfully witty manual on the art of taking the most agreeable meal of the day, written by a shrewd observer of the passing show who listed his sole hobby in Who’s Who as ‘Lunch’.

‘Informative, sensible, well-written, entirely unpretentious… well worth the price of a bottle of house red’ – The Observer.

‘Part of its charm is that it has been written with so much obvious pleasure that the enjoyment seeps out of the pages.’ – Roy Hattersely in The Listener.

‘Relentless opinionated and very entertaining… irresistible.’ – Kingsley Amis in The Spectator.

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Publisher’s Notes

By Revel Barker

Lunch with Waterhouse wasn’t so much a meal as a celebration. Even getting there could be an adventure.

Like the time he stopped for a pre-lunch livener in a pub in Fetter Lane and asked the manager to turn down the volume of the juke box.

Impossible, said mine host, because ‘the staff like it.’

So Keith asked for change for a pound note, pumped the shillings into the machine, pressed the buttons for Amazing Grace 20 times… and walked out.

Although, strictly speaking, Lunch is not the same as Journalism, this book is included in our collection of Fleet Street classics because, in our day, the two pursuits were often indistinguishable.

And Waterhouse had the reporter’s ear, even when lunching…

Capri. An open-air terrace restaurant in the shade of an orange grove. A perfect day. The scent of bougainvillaea mingles delicately with the aroma of cannelloni.

A Yorkshire couple pause and study the menu. Below the expanse of white tablecloths is a steeply-sloping vineyard, and far below the harbour is the Bay of Naples, and far away on the shimmering horizon, like a brushstroke in a Chinese picture, is a smudge of purple which is Vesuvius.

The lady tugs her husband’s sleeve.

‘Come on, Ronnie – you don’t want to eat out in t’street.’

Or:

You are unlikely, anyway, to encounter the reception accorded me in the restaurant of the National Hotel in Leningrad some years ago when, after days had seemingly elapsed without even sight of a menu, I despatched my Intourist guide to complain about the service.

Another fortnight went by. Then the kitchen doors swung open and an alarming procession consisting of the chef flanked by all his kitchen staff marched purposefully in my direction. The way I tell it now, most of them were brandishing carving knives and cleavers, but that may be an embellishment. The rest is not.

The deputation arranged itself around my table and the chef addressed me through my guide. ‘Upon receiving complain of guest, kitchen committee has met in emergency session in spirit of self-criticism. Kitchen committee has passed unanimous resolution calling for improvements from all restaurant workers.’

Since a response seemed called for, I made a short speech to the effect that we all had our off days, and the delegation trooped back to the kitchen.

At last a waiter appeared and we asked for a menu. He shook his head regretfully. Lunch, he said, was off.

If you ever have one of those days when you can’t get out for lunch, this is the book to read, mark, and inwardly digest.

For it’s simply the next best thing to lunch…

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Let’s do lunch

By Ian Skidmore

When I die I hope to spend eternity in some celestial dining room in a culinary Valhalla where flights of angels will guide me to restaurants with ever-changing menus. It was never the galleries and concert halls that lured me to a strange city. It was the restaurants. In Vienna, Sachers; in Amsterdam, The Five Flies; in Paris, Allards; in Bruges, The Golden Basket.

Now, like the Earl of Rochester, I have been driven from the pleasing billows of debauch onto the dull shores of lazy temperance and am permitted to dine out only in books.

The philosopher Roger Scruton writes about wine in a way that one feels it on the palate. The immortal Cassandra is to omelettes what Wordsworth was to daffodils. Stay Me With Flagons, by Rabelaisian Irish barrister and bon viveur Maurice Healey, is a rollicking read. Bernard De Volvo's The Hour is the driver's manual of the dry martini. But favourite among my banquet of books is Keith Waterhouse's seminal work The Theory and Practice of Lunch, which I am now delighted to see reprinted. It is more than a book: it is the key to a way of happy life. No one ever put anything better than Waterhouse. Let him explain his purpose:

I know of only one pleasure of the flesh more acceptable than lunch – and lunch is so perfect a curtain-raiser to it that they make a classic double bill. But it is exclusively in praise of the supporting attraction that I am here to sing... It is the institution of lunch itself, over and above its edible parts, that I find so very agreeable.

His perfect lunch was at ‘the vine hung terrace of Locandra Cipriani, the famous trattoria on the island of Torcello...’

I have always mourned the fact that I have shared a poker table with Waterhouse but never a lunch table. Now I learn with deep sadness that I have shared a restaurant, but at different times.

His contents page is a degree curriculum in the Luncheon Art. ‘What Lunch Is’, ‘What lunch is not’, ‘Duties of a lunch companion’, ‘Bad Companions’, ‘The care and training of waiters’...

‘Lunch,’ he wisely opines, ‘being an absolute. In its perfect state it is incapable of anything but the most superficial of changes or improvement... it is a prime example of that, which if it did not exist it would be necessary to invent... lunch is a celebration like Easter after winter. It is a conspiracy. It is holiday. It is euphoria made tangible… Lunch, as opposed to dinner, is where you can invite a charming lady without her boring husband, or a fascinating man without his boring wife. Dinner is an obligation or even a retaliation. Lunch is free will.‘

The chapter on what luncheon is not will bring many a glad cry from dedicated lunchers.

It is not a meal partaken for nourishment. It is not prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gateau with your accountant or bank manager.

It is not literary, civic, commemorative, award presentation, annual office, or funeral. It is not when either party is on a diet, on the wagon or in a hurry. Despite Stephen Sondheim’s toast to the Ladies Who Lunch, it is not going Dutch. It is not what Foodies do when they go out in the midday sun. It is not taken perched on stools at a ledge. Deli food is delicious but it is not lunch.

It is not, as a rule, business

Ever the thoughtful host Waterhouse lists useful phrases:

‘Why don’t we start the proceedings with a nice glass of champagne?’

‘You’re not in any great hurry to get back, are you?’

‘Could my guest have a packet of Benson and Hedges, please?’

‘Let’s have the other half while we look at the menu.’

‘You may have whatever you wish, my love.’

‘Could I have my chips on a side plate, please, so that my guest can dip into them?’

‘Taste this – it’s delicious.’

‘Mmmm – yours is good too.’

‘Do you think we could manage another bottle?’

There is no component of the glory that is a companionable lunch that misses the benevolent Waterhouse eye.

By the coffee stage, tablecloths are supposed to look the worse for wear. If the cloth does not look as lived in as Spencer Tracy’s face, then the lunch has been a failure. It should bear the honourable scars of battle – wine stains, soup stains, olive oil stains, spilled coffee, cigar burns – and be strewn with campaign debris in the way of bread crumbs, spilled salt, wine corks, toothpicks, sugar cubes, chocolate mint wrappers, cigarette packets and what have you. The waiter who obliterates this impressive detritus is as a vandal wrecking the Albert Memorial.

As an aperitif I am a three martini man, made to a recipe originated in the New York Mafia and brought home by Brian Hitchen. Waterhouse has bent his mighty brain to this important curtain raiser. Alas he comes out strongly against more than two aperitifs, saying with justice that four aperitifs constitute a drinking session.

My own favourite opener is a vodka martini, if it’s so well constructed that it leaves me stirred not shaken. A properly-prepared Bloody Mary, with ‘all the works’ as barmen are fond of designating their arsenal of Tabasco etc, is alternatively a perfect curtain-raiser to lunch. A strong Bloody Mary, in the course of blowing one’s head off, clears the sinuses, activates the palate and generally tones up the system, thus fostering the complacent delusion that you are taking something breakfastly wholesome like bran flakes.

Otherwise, what you will, with tonic or soda and lemons.

Lemons bring the Mediterranean to the table. The absence of lemons brings a touch of the Irish Sea.

I could go on stealing his phrases for hours, but enough. Pausing only to regret that our age is unique in history in that the old get their ideas from the young so that a generation exists to whom wise words mean nothing. An age of LSDTs – money, drugs and hallucinations.

We gourmands were better served in the nineteenth century by a north country squire who invented Mr Jorrocks, a foxhunting cockney grocer with a giant appetite whose cri de coeur was ‘Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.’

I hope when I am ushered into that celestial dining room I will find Waterhouse has bagged the best table for us. I wish Mr Jorrocks and all right thinking lunchers, ‘Bon appetit!’

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