Time travelling in Image magazine
I was thumbing through an Image magazine from March 1980 — one of a number of old periodicals lost in a drawer for many years, writes Brian Byrne. More intent on the design of the 44 years-old publication than anything else, my attention was suddenly caught by a picture of my wife, Viv, making a phone call at one of those open air American public kiosks. Then I realised that I had written the article for which the photo was an illustration. And I had provided the photos, taken the year before while we were on an American holiday. All of which explained why the magazine was still around.
The article was Keeping In Touch by phone, American style. Against the background of one Michael Smurfit having recently vowed to bring the Irish telephone service properly into the 20th century, as chairman of the new state agency Telecom Eireann. The agency was established by the then Minister for Posts & Telegraphs, Albert Reynolds TD, to run the service on a commercial basis. At the time it was still taking months, sometimes even years, for people in Ireland to get a phone installed in their homes and the waiting list stood at 160,000 — in America they could get a phone the same day they ordered it. Plus a lot of phone-based services. Smurfit was promising to make the improvements here over five years. We were, though, still a long way from achieving the performance of American telephone companies, where at the time there were 150 million private telephones, their owners talking to each other nearly 800 million times a day.
After all these years, my Image piece still reads well. Though against today's then undreamed-of plethora of communications underpinned by the internet, there's a quaintness about it. It even made me nostalgic for more innocent non-social media times.
But the magazine also jolted other memories. As I browsed other articles in the 96-page issue, names and connections jumped out. Tom Savage, whom I knew from his occasional tutoring in the Catholic Communications Centre where I had worked, and later that year was to become a colleague when I joined the RTE It Says In the Papers panel, was writing book reviews for Image. Muttering darkly about doing so in the era of the spy novel. “My problem with spy fiction is that I can never understand the plot,” he wrote. “I've read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and watched it through twice on television and the only thing I'm sure of is that the boy soprano had a lovely voice."
The books he was reviewing in this 1980 month were much more to his taste, though. Whip Hand by Dick Francis, a writer with the ability to leave his reader stay the race to the final page, “and stand sweating at the cleverality of it all.” He also had Brian Moore's The Mangan Inheritance on his list, a writer he described as 'unrivalled' in developing a sequence of events that "leave the hero or heroine in quicksand up to the lower lip." Tom also had a profile feature on author Richard Llewellyn, who penned the classic How Green Was My Valley about life in the Welsh coal valleys of the 1930s. The accompanying picture shows Tom writing his notes while interviewing his subject, reminding me that he always hand-wrote his It Says in the Papers scripts. I used to bring my own portable typewriter into RTE for mine, because the newsroom machines were in such an atrocious state of repair and clogged with cigarette ash. Tom is no longer with us, but he was both a colleague and friend during my early RTE days and someone I had great regard for.
Still flipping the pages, I came across a Motoring feature written by rally driving legend Rosemary Smith, previewing an upcoming Irish Motor Show. It was to be towards the end of that decade before I became involved in automotive journalism, and some years after that before I actually met Rosemary. A wonderful, no nonsense woman and a lot of fun with some wicked stories about her life and the people in it. Over time she also became a friend with whom I and others enjoyed lunch several times a year. Rosie passed away just a year ago.
Another feature in the Image issue was Till Death Us Do Part by Lavinia Greacen, about grief and how people don't always deal with it well. The connection here, I was to get to know her husband, Walter, during the late 1990s when I used to design the twice-yearly brochure for his Curragh Travel business, its office based in Newbridge. Walter, a most genial man, died in 2013.
Magazines generally get thrown out when their next issues come on the newsstands, and today the print periodical is in fact in almost terminal decline. But going through this particular one was a time machine journey. Not just for my own — sometimes tenuous — connections in it, but things like the advertisements: Over the years your face will say thank you — Ponds Cold Cream; When was the last time a man said you had a great pair of jeans? — Pretty Polly tights.
There was an interview with Cliff Richard, The Holy Roller, by Geraldine Swarbrigg — the very Christian singer told her one of his favourite past-times was playing old rock and pop tunes on his personal juke box. A 13-page fashion spread shot on Cyprus highlighted the work of Richard Lewis, who had trained at the Grafton Academy of Dress Designing — coincidentally where Rosemary Smith had trained in her first career as a dress designer, and where she got first place in her cohort. And Miranda's Diary in the back end of the magazine may have published only black and white photos, but it was the place to have your picture featured if you were, or wanted to be seen with, the social great and good. I never made it there ...
Thumbed over and over during their months in homes and hair salons, magazines like Image were the social media of the day. Immortalising life on that best of archival medium, paper. The instant and soon-gone stuff streaming by on Facebook et al today will never have the same romance.
But the phones did get better.
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