Printing press was the daily music of Ted Crosbie's life

IT is my enduring image of a great newspaperman. Ted Crosbie is hunched over the antique desk in his office atop the Examiner Group headquarters in Academy Street, digesting a smorgasbord of printed words.

Irish and British tabloid and broadsheet morning newspapers are opened wide before him — Ted’s breakfast — so many that pages fall haphazardly to the floor.

Words matter to the titan of Cork publishing. He knows their power and never underestimates them.

We’ve all climbed the creaky stairs trepidatiously to the glass-walled eagle’s nest occupied by directors of the Examiner and Echo. It is a command centre variously christened ‘Skylab’ or ‘Intensive Care’ by Crichton Healy, another inimitable newspaperman.

For reporters it could be a walk to the gallows after some monumental cock-up or else to a victory salute after breaking a big scoop.

Ted’s own words happen to matter most of all this morning: he handles them with the delicacy of cradling a Ming vase as he tells his extraordinary life story for my book, Voices of Cork.

He’s in full flight recalling brusque encounters with Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher.

She lived up to her Arctic reputation when the pair met at Press Association lunches and at a retirement party for the PA’s lobby correspondent in the House of Commons.

Ted’s great-grandfather, Thomas Crosbie, had been a founder member of the PA in 1868 — the “milk cow” of the newspaper industry in these islands.

Ted maintained those historic links on December 4, 1979, when co-opted to the PA board, seven months after Mrs Thatcher took up residence in Downing Street.

She apparently gave the Cork publisher a characteristic handbagging every time they met through a series of grunts and growls and what he describes as “mutterings under her breath”.

It seems her mood had darkened following a summit in Dublin Castle with the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey.

Champagne Charlie, like Ted, wasn’t a member of the diminishing Thatcher fan club.

“The interesting thing about my time on the PA is that I witnessed the early Thatcher years and I saw what she did,” he reflects of her legacy. 

“She changed the whole attitude of top management from being liberal to being very self-centred and very finance-centred. She brought out the most unattractive side of the Englishman, namely his greed. What she did was totally necessary in many cases. It was the way she did it and the triumphalist way she did it that I found objectionable. It’s much easier to be destructively unreasonable than to be constructively reasonable. What saved her bacon, of course, was the Falklands War.”

By contrast, Ted got on famously with Denis Thatcher, male consort to the PM.

Denis had once neatly summed up his supporting act as being “always present, never there”.

As Mrs Thatcher droned on at length during one interminable function in London, long-suffering Denis turned to the Corkman and said: “C’mon, let’s go have a gin.” The pair sneaked off for drinks to a pub around the corner.

“He was a most charming man,” recalled Ted, “unlike his wife.”

It was always a source of immense pride for Ted to have successfully steered his papers through monumental changes in printing technology, mostly bloodless, compared to the vicious warfare between employers and unions in London and New York.

To achieve historic advances in technology and computerisation in 1976, 1986 and 1994 required considerable skills of negotiation and the patience of Job — first, as production director and later as chief executive when he supervised every nut and bolt going into the place.

It is clichéd and so trite to say the man had printer’s ink coursing through his veins. Yet this is resoundingly true.

Whenever Ted Crosbie came to my mind through all the more recent tumultuous years for his and other newspapers the same images played like old black and white newsreel.

Shortly after midday he’d leave ‘Skylab’ to spend some time in the greatest place in the world.

I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else either.

You’d find Ted standing alone in the machine room, sleeves rolled up, facing the beast that brought ballast to all our lives twice a day…the mighty Crabtree-Vickers printing press he’d commissioned, put in place and personally launched over one terribly anxious night in May 1976.

It was always such an adrenalin rush for him — me, too — to witness our little daily miracle.

Like a slumbering giant coming to life, the press would first rumble, then roar as the floor vibrated and it gave birth to the ‘new baby”.

It was the daily music of Ted’s life.

He would depart with fresh copies under his arm, his face alight with a mixture of joy and relief.

His passing closes an epoch in publishing history in which many of us felt privileged to participate through our long careers.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, especially in the final years.

It’s a mark of the man that he carried the crosses of personal family loss and also of the perfect storm ravaging his and other papers with typical stoicism, equanimity and quiet dignity.

“You never know what’s around the corner,” he remarked, philosophically, after my last trip up those old stairs. “I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve had a good life.”