'I don't know why you keep going back there. It's never going to be a big story." It was early in 1969 and I had been asked to come along to the Sunday Times to discuss joining the paper. The senior executive who was interviewing me was talking about Northern Ireland, way back in those innocent days when the civil rights movement was in its infancy, before the arrival of the British troops or the birth of the Provisional IRA.
"My editor thinks it's a story," I said humbly, lacking the courage to walk out of the room there and then. I was working at the time as a reporter on the Observer. I had been sent to Derry in the autumn of 1968 and had been deeply shocked by what I saw there. Back at the Observer, where the great and the good discussed apartheid, the precise state of the Cold War, human rights abuses across the world, nobody had ever heard of Northern Ireland. It simply didn't figure in the British media.
At the Wednesday morning editorial conference I started to talk about what I had seen in Derry - the desperate poverty, the discrimination, the hopeless feeling that nothing would ever change. Above all, there was the fact that these things happened to people because they were Catholics.
David Astor (a former editor of the Observer who died last week) cut me short. "Go away and write it," he said. "Write as much as you need. It's our job to find the space." The article was carried in the newspaper on October 6th, 1968, the day after the first civil rights march in Derry was beaten off the streets by the RUC. The paper carried it on the front page beside a picture of Gerry Fitt, at that time a Westminster MP, with blood streaming from his head. It caused quite a stir.
Much more important, though, was that Astor kept sending me back, week after week, to Northern Ireland. Often there was little to report. The civil rights marches were determinedly non-violent and respectable, led by men and women who believed that political and social justice could be achieved by these methods. There was little interest in the British press. But Astor persisted in running front-page stories, backed by editorials pleading with the British government to introduce substantial reforms before the situation exploded.
He got little thanks for his pains. I learnt afterwards that he came under considerable pressure from the British government to give up the reports from Northern Ireland because they were causing serious embarrassment abroad.
This was a distance from the way I had joined the paper some years before. I had been working as a feature writer at Vogue, and Astor had read an interview I'd done with Philip Larkin. I was invited to join the paper as fashion editor. I knew little about fashion apart from what I'd absorbed at Vogue by watching people like David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton, but I jumped at the offer.
The Observer under Astor's editorship was already legendary. His famous editorial excoriating the British government's attack on Suez in 1956 lost the paper many readers and even more advertising revenue, but became a flag for campaigning journalism. Orwell had written for the Observer. So had Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Koestler and other political giants.
Amnesty International grew out of an article in the newspaper. It campaigned against apartheid and for a settlement which would give justice to the Palestinians in the Middle East. Among people who wrote for the paper while I was there were Patrick O'Donovan, Neal Ascherson, Philip Toynbee, Kenneth Tynan, Mark Frankland and Michael Frayn.
As it turned out, my ignorance of fashion wasn't a handicap since the Observer didn't really approve of such frivolity anyway. I found the job extremely difficult, and my task wasn't made easier by the fact that my early pieces had to be read not only by the editor but by the science correspondent. I solved the problem by treating the subject as a mix of theatre and social history which pleased my colleagues but not the advertisers.
One of Astor's great qualities as an editor was that he didn't put his journalists in boxes. One day when I was struggling with an article on the hidden significance of the miniskirt, I got a call from the arts editor.
"Ken is going away for a few weeks. The editor wants you to fill in." My stunned silence left the obvious question hanging in the air.
"I don't know why," he continued in a puzzled tone. "He says he thinks you'd be a fresh voice."
Going to Northern Ireland was almost as fortuitous. By that time I was writing a weekly column, another idea of Astor's , which looked at the problems which ordinary people experienced with the institutions of the state.
I'd written to Gerry Fitt, who turned up at the newspaper with a battered suitcase full of newspaper clippings. Before I knew what was happening, he had whisked me off to meet Austin Currie and then on to Derry.
I must have been a sore trial to Astor at that time because my reports from Northern Ireland were both emotional and partisan. But gradually he and other people at the Observer taught me to be a journalist. What I learnt there shaped the political and social values which have guided me ever since.
One of the most important lessons which Astor taught me is that an independent, liberal and crusading newspaper is crucial to the health of a democratic society. It is a thought which has been much in my mind in recent weeks as we, at The Irish Times, have faced our own crises.
mholland@irish-times.ie