A Complete Explanation Of Everything

Rising from the Ashes (Morning Star, Saturday August 2 2008)

Morning Star chief subeditor JAMES EAGLE proudly surveys a week when Blitz spirit and solidarity kept this paper’s lifeblood flowing.

LIKE most journalists, I’m not a morning person. Late nights and late starts tend to come with the territory.

Like most workers in any job, I particularly don’t like Monday mornings. And I especially don’t like them when I get woken up by a phone call at 5.45am telling me that the Star’s newsroom has been gutted by fire and it’s possible that we may not be able to put a paper out for days or even weeks.

But sometimes days unfold like that whether you like it or not. And so it was that half-past-six on Monday morning found me standing around outside William Rust House with Star deputy editor Bill Benfield, who had himself learnt the bad news a couple of hours before from company secretary Tony Briscoe. He, in turn, had received an unwelcome 3am wake-up call from the fire brigade.

Things did not, if I may be allowed the understatement, look good. The armoured door which was intended to keep out thieves and fascists had also kept out the firefighters for well over an hour.

Although they eventually broke through it - getting through two cutting blades in the process - they were forced to smash a top-floor window so that they could get water on the blaze straight away.

At least that allowed some air into the blackened wasteland of the newsroom, which was still filled with the acrid stench of burnt plastic and coated in a thick layer of black ash.

The post-apocalyptic effect was topped off nicely by the fact that a great chunk of suspended ceiling had collapsed under the jets of water, covering the news desk and floor in mushy plaster. The power was out, the phones were off and the internet connections were dead.

Grim? Definitely. But fatal for the paper? Not a chance. Star journalists would move heaven and earth to avoid losing an edition - that kind of commitment comes with the territory too.

And we quickly realised that the new technology which your sterling fundraising efforts helped us buy last year meant that, against all the odds, we could still get the Star out that very day.

So it was that, after an hour or so spent wading around in ash and sludge salvaging what we could from the office, we became surely the first national paper in history to produce an edition from staff members’ front rooms.

While Bill and Tony held the fort at William Rust House, working out how to get the office back up and running as soon as possible, news editor Daniel Coysh took his reporters round the corner to Bow to set up an emergency news desk in one of their homes.

And, with help from my deputy Charley Allan - who had uncomplainingly sacrificed his day off to keep the Star running - the subs desk installed itself in a terraced house in Hackney, with computers propped up on coffee tables and every square foot of floor covered in cables.


Hardly ideal working conditions, but there were no grumbles. Quite the opposite, in fact, as Blitz spirit took hold and staff doubled their efforts with smiles on their faces.

The first couple of days were just about survival and we were forced to cut back to eight pages to lighten the load. But no-one wanted to short-change our readers, which is why we went back up to 12 as soon as possible and why we’ve pulled out the stops to get the usual 16-pager out on Saturday - with extra colour as a bonus.

We’re not out of the woods by a long way, though. We hope to move back into the admin floor at William Rust House next week, but the newsroom will be out of action for months for cleaning and repairs.

We’ll get there, though, have no doubt about that. I can’t lavish enough praise on our workers, both the journalists who’ve turned in unstinting work to keep the paper coming out and the admin staff who are slaving away to get our offices ship-shape again.

But, more importantly, all of us at the Star want to thank you, the readers, who have flooded us with messages of support and sympathy and with financial help to steer us through.

It’s the worst crisis that we’ve had to face while I’ve been at the Star. Fingers crossed, it’s the worst crisis that we’ll ever have to face - I’m not sure any of us want to go through this again.

But the support that you’ve shown us makes it all worthwhile. It’s that solidarity which inspired staff to these efforts in the first place.

I don’t think that any other national daily could have kept publishing through troubles like this, but that’s because they don’t have what makes the Star so special.

• James Eagle is chief subeditor of the Morning Star. He could do with a long holiday.