XCity – City University Journalism Department Magazine 2010

A glimpse into the archives: Tom Welsh and Bob Jones talk through images from the archive

As this year’s students settle into the new £14million journalism department, a trip into the archives brings back an era when copy was churned out on typewriters and classrooms were filled with cigarette smoke. Much has remained the same: local residents are pounced upon by eager vox poppers (spot Barry McIlheney, editor in chief at EMAP, and Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan) , luminaries still come in to impart their wisdom on the industry, and the knitwear is still garish.

Spot Harold Evans, who was then editor of The Sunday Times, giving the inaugural lecture in 1977. Tom Welsh established the journalism courses at City University and was Director of Journalism Studies from 1977-79. He remembers Evans’s advice: “He told the students exactly what I would have wanted: that there is no substitute for hard work, and that a mere desire to write creatively was by no means a good reason for someone to want to become a journalist.”

Bob Jones, who has been at City since 1979 and is now an Emeritus Fellow, remembers the rooms he set up for the course on St John Street. “We only had 28 students in this grotty old building opposite the Peasant pub. We had three newsrooms. They all had a sink so the students could make coffee, and things being as they were they could smoke in there as well.”

John Pilger, and Jon Snow, are shown giving talks to students, as is the late John Dodge, who became Head of Journalism after Tom Welsh left. Harry Butler, pictured with stopwatch in hand, was the industry’s leading authority on shorthand and taught at City for many years.

Interviews: Ruth Lewy and Nick Johnstone

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