All newspapers have their particular stars, people who, as they say in the trade, “sell papers”, whose names are paraded at the top of page one, who are regularly in demand to appear on TV and radio. But they also have, in much greater numbers, people whose names are largely unknown outside their offices but who essentially make a newspaper work: those who set the agenda, plan and devise, knock unruly copy into decent order, or, as leader writers, furnish pieces of an authority matching the best of their columnists’, yet have no name attached.
One outstanding such figure at the Guardian was Geoffrey Taylor, former foreign editor and northern editor in Manchester, assistant editor and chief leader writer in London, who has died aged 89. And if the outside world knew little about him, that was what Geoffrey preferred. Modest and self-effacing, he would never have sought the limelight. He was always a Manchester Guardian man, used to modes of procedure where personalities were rarely on display.
He joined the paper as a foreign news subeditor in 1947, 12 years before it dropped Manchester from its name and 17 before it moved its headquarters to London. The Manchester Guardian had always been a very serious newspaper, and Geoffrey in all his various berths on the paper was a serious man. That sometimes caused him anguish.
As a leader writer in London he had charge of most of the world. There were exceptions: Peter Preston as editor wrote about the US and there were others on hand with expertise in other regions, but the rest fell to Geoffrey. Sometimes he grieved at having to write about countries he had never visited, and at being expected, in the Guardian’s tradition, to advocate how they should deal with problems he only imperfectly knew.
He was happier on his familiar territories, especially Africa, which he had often visited in his days as foreign editor, and arms control, always his particular interests – and as leader writer on Ireland, where he could visit the place he was writing about, form close links with some of the politicians at the heart of the peace process and envisage a political entity which he called the Islands of the North Atlantic, IONA.
However, Geoffrey was by no means stern, unyielding or a stranger to entertainment. The truth was quite the reverse. During one of Labour’s leadership battles, he wrote a series of leaders in Shakespearean verse that greatly delighted readers who remained unaware of the author. In 1977 the Guardian staged perhaps the most successful April Fools’ Day hoax in newspaper history. The idea came from an advertising man, Philip Davies, and several others had a hand in it, but it was Geoffrey’s wit and invention that brought the republic of San Serriffe gloriously and lastingly to life. When on the morning of 1 April he appeared in the office canteen, the whole place broke into applause; Geoffrey promptly retreated.
Rarely did the erudition and elegance of Geoffrey’s writing have a name attached to it, though from 1985 to 1991 he wrote an inventive and often zany Monday morning column called Terms of Reference; one characteristic piece took the form of a series of letters addressed to such diverse figures as the Spanish prime minister, the Wykeham professor of logic at Oxford, and the chairman of the red deer commission at Inverness. It was characteristic of Geoffrey that sometimes he would ring the duty editor in charge of the night’s publication suggesting that his column be dropped, since he had come to feel it was dangerously over the top.
Geoffrey was born in Sheffield, the son of Edward Taylor, who taught music and maths at Sheffield City grammar school, and his wife, Winifred (nee York), also a musician. He attended King Edward VII grammar school in the city. Like several distinguished Guardian figures of his era – John Cole, who became deputy editor, Harry Whewell, who became northern editor, Francis Boyd, political correspondent and Norman Shrapnel, sketchwriter – he did not go to university, though his erudition far outstripped that of many who had.
Instead, at 17, in the closing years of the second world war, he came close to joining the Royal Navy. Turned down on medical grounds, he enlisted instead with the Sheffield Telegraph, where he worked till he joined the Manchester Guardian, during which time he met his first wife, Joan Lawrence. Nearing the age of 30, he felt drawn to working in Africa, and placed an advertisement in the Times that was answered by Mirror Group newspapers, who dispatched him to the Lagos Daily Times in Nigeria. He returned to the Guardian after three years and began the process that brought him in time to the heart of its operations in London.
Joan died in 1973. He later married Janet, the former wife of the celebrated Guardian feature writer Geoffrey Moorhouse, becoming stepfather to their four children, one of whom, Brigie, to whom he was devoted, as she was to him, died in 1981 at the age of 16. For a time they lived in Hertfordshire, but Geoffrey had a yearning for Yorkshire and in 1978 they were able to buy a house they had coveted in the village of Litton, near Skipton, even though it meant taking on the running of the village stores and post office. Once, such a major relocation would have been incompatible with writing for a national newspaper, but huge technological changes had now made it possible.
Guardian visitors constantly descended on Litton, more often, perhaps, than Geoffrey preferred. He and Janet were famously sympathetic and generous, as my own family came to learn, but over the years he increasingly seemed to treasure peace and quiet, and time alone to read and reflect. He had also begun to work on the history of the newspaper, taking up from the point where its previous historian, David Ayerst, had finished – 1956.
This assignment, which took up his final years on the paper before his formal retirement in 1988, was pursued with his habitual mixture of dedication, diligence and intermittent unease. He worried that some of his judgments might be too harsh, though in fact some reviews found the book excessively charitable: one, in the Sunday Times, by a one-time Guardian staff man, Anthony Howard, was thought to have hurt him badly.
Thereafter he and Janet left Litton for her native New Zealand, where they lived in Christchurch for the rest of his life. He returned to Britain only infrequently, looking up a selected band of old friends and colleagues. He had by then ceased to be a regular reader: the paper had changed too much for his taste.
He is survived by Janet, by his son, John, and his daughter Celia – another daughter, Helen, predeceased him – from his first marriage, by three stepchildren, Jane, Andrew and Michael, 10 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
• Geoffrey Duke Taylor, journalist, born 26 August 1926; died 29 July 2016
