Still in the pink
FRANK KEATING
What's pink and green and read all over? It is season's end as well in the nooks and crannies of the whole attendant subculture, and the reverberating presses of teatime Saturday are stilled for their four-month break. Last month in the Guardian a cloistered social historian, musing on the archaic quaintness of our urban forefathers, inquired when the last Saturday evening sports paper had been published in Britain — and from all points came a shoal of letters trumpeting the certain existence still of football's fabled greens and pinks, lauding the bonny health still of Sheffield's green 'un and Southampton's pink, Newcastle's green on the Tyne, Stoke's pink on the Trent . . . From Northampton, Norfolk Nottingham, north, south, east, west came hurrahs of survival for soccer's 'specials'.
In this age of satellite, Ceefax and Internet, diehard devotees still reckon old ways best. Journalists, too, because this two-hour Saturday Test Match represents the most frantic, fevered, skilled and rewarding task of their trade, even though this phenomenon of provincial publishing might be miles off the sharp radar of Stephen Glover's media studies curriculum. Every big city on Saturday night is garlanded in pink or green — except the biggest, for it is precisely 30 years since London's Evening Standard closed its Saturday operation.
Stress in the workplace? Writing for one is tension enough. but tly subbing a Saturday green 'un. You are still in an adrenalin haze on Monday. In Bristol in the late 1950s we were humiliated if our World was offstone at 5.01 and the Post had made it at 4.59, and I still sweat at the recall of fierce fret and exhilaration while trying not to mislay a torrent of paper flying at me which logged, as it was happening. the utterly vital progress not only of Bristol City or Rovers but Minehead Reserves or Minety Extra B. I had cut my teeth up the A38 at Gloucester's Citizen where, first day, the editor proudly took me to the roof to show me the pigeon-cote where some Saturday reports would arrive. Arnold Bennett lived, and I looked up that night his Five Towns yarn, when the frantic Sentinel subeditor unfastens the tube of paper from the bird's leg: 'Midland Fed: Axe Lltd v Macclesfield Tn. Abandoned after 1/2 hour. Fog. 3.45pm.'
Glasgow pioneered Saturday soccer specials. By the 1890s 18 were registered, and when linotype, web-fed rotary presses and telegraph and telephone were plugged in, every city boasted green, pink or both. And instead of pigeons, or cyclist 'runners' from sports field to newspaper, vast teams of copytaker-telephonists were engaged for the Saturday mania. In 1905, the London Star green 'un was printing 6,000 copies a minute between 4.50 and 5.25.
As a boy in the late 1940s, we foot-stamping faithful would gather in the winter's gloom at Stonehouse post office, straining for the van with the Citizen pinks from Gloucester; then, for a double fix, we'd leg it to the LNER station where a quire or three of the Bristol brace would be slung from the passing train. Once, under the platform gas lamp there I saw a landgid lustily snogging her soldier chap — as he studied his green 'un over her shoulder. Same all over Britain, as Alister & Ward noted in their treasured, classic urban 1950s history Barnsley (Crowbeny, 1981): 'On Saturday evenings the Barnsley streets became a sea of Green 'Uns . . . then perhaps a meal at the bus-station cafe, or a visit to one of the eight cinemas or a dance-hall. Occasionally a man could be seen reading the Green 'Un behind his partner's back as they waltzed.' Colourful pinky-green days, and happily still with us.
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