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20 21 Concordia Merchant Taylors’ School Summer 2015
ne of my earliest school
memories after joining MTS in 1983 was
somehow falling off ‘Rickety Bridge’
into the water during the Quarter. I
sheepishly arrived at our English lesson
looking like a drowned rat and Mr
Ritchie was most amused.
Our happy days in the Third Form gave
us a great platform for the rest of our
school lives and our form teacher Bruce
Ritchie played a major part in that. Like
others, whether ex-Third Formers, English
students or cricketers, I was very sad to
hear of his passing in 2012.
From our first days at school we were
always a very competitive bunch and
everything seemed to be a race or a
competition. We would sprint from the
fourth period of the day to the lesson just
before lunch to get a seat near the door
so we could race to the dining hall as
quickly as possible to avoid any queuing.
Bags were flung into the gaps between
sets of lockers and I’m sure that still
happens today.
Playing football with a tennis ball was
another time-honoured pastime. One
highlight of the first year was beating a
masters’ team at Quad Soccer with what
felt like hundreds of older boys cheering.
Our competitive spirits became more
focused on academia around the time of
exams. I remember our results for Latin
and other subjects being pinned up on the
classroom wall and many of us desperate
to see our own and others’ marks.
Languages were my strong point and
we benefited from some great teachers
such as messrs Corns, Drury, Lawson, Pye
and Woolley.
They were all happy years right up
until the Sixth Form when I remember
we used to have a weekly Monitors’
meeting on a Friday afternoon with Mr
Skipper in his office, drinking tea and
sharing school news.
My spectacles may be somewhat rose-
tinted but I’m also sure we actually used
to enjoy Saturday school, especially the
day after Durrants’ Discos when there was
always plenty of gossip to share.
I opted for football with David Green
instead of rugby during the Sixth Form,
and I played (and possibly scored) in the
first soccer match against another school.
Another highlight and eye-opening
experience was Phab Week in the Sixth
Form which I’m pleased to read is still
going strong.
After winning a place at Brasenose
College to read Classics, I thought it was
pretty much ‘job done’ and, possibly like
most students, didn’t spend any of the
next four years thinking about a career.
Life at Oxford didn’t follow much of
an academic timetable with only one or
two tutorials a week and lectures which
were optional. With hindsight I would
have benefited from a little more structure
though I didn’t envy my peers reading
subjects such as engineering who seemed
to have 9-5 timetables and then worked in
the evenings as well.
Post–university, sports journalism
appealed although I hadn’t turned my
hand to much of this at university. I
do recall working on a Hilles House
magazine at school, and I had been an
assistant editor of the Taylorian. If truth
be told this was motivated more by
UCCA (now UCAS) form points and the
opportunity to get our own room than
by journalistic passion. (Some of us had
also previously joined the Meteorological
Society purely as a means of getting our
own office and experiencing the thrill of
having our own kettle.)
After university I was lucky to get
the opportunity to do a fortnight’s work
experience at the Watford Observer
which really gave me the confidence that
journalism was the right path.
I then wrote to all the national
newspapers asking for work, and got
a call from The Independent at the end of
1994. I recently came across a
few ‘thanks but no thanks letters’ I’d
received from pretty much every other
national newspaper.
I managed to get a paid job at the Indy
almost immediately. It was a chaotic
environment as they had only just moved
from City Road to One Canada Square
in Canary Wharf, then a ghost town. The
editors wanted someone to photocopy
and circulate print-outs of news pages for
checking before they went to press.
This role gave me a fantastic
opportunity generally to make myself
useful. I remember one evening 20 years
ago explaining to the deputy editor (who
wasn’t really a football fan) the magnitude
of the Eric Cantona kung-fu kick story
moments after it had happened.
I spent a few brilliant months making
tea and doing photocopying, and making
more tea. You really can’t make people
enough tea. I won the patronage of the
then editor, a fierce Glaswegian man
called Charlie Wilson who, as well as
being a tea drinker, had previously edited
The Times.
According to Fleet Street legend, he
had seen off the print unions single-
handedly when the Times was moved to
Wapping by Rupert Murdoch 10 years
earlier. Despite his fierce reputation,
‘Gorbals’ (as he was known in Private
Eye) was a decent man. He secured me
a place on the prestigious Mirror Group
graduate training scheme – on which, I
hasten to add, phone-hacking was not
part of the curriculum.
I spent two years working as a news
reporter for various Mirror Group titles,
and also for the Independent which,
strangely, was partly owned in those days
by the Mirror Group.
I was on the 18th floor of the Canary
Wharf tower when it was fiercely shaken
by the South Quay bombing in 1996 and
also in the same building working for the
Daily Telegraph five years later during
9/11, when we were evacuated after the
attack on the Twin Towers.
I spent most of my eight years in
newspaper journalism working for
broadsheets (in the days before the
Indy and The Times had moved to
a tabloid format). The tougher and
often journalistically sharper tabloid
environment was certainly an eye-opener.
My first day at the Daily Mirror
happened to be the day after the death
of Diana, Princess of Wales. It wasn’t
the best of starts. I was immediately
reprimanded by the then editor Piers
Morgan for being late although I’d
actually just cancelled a week’s holiday to
help out! I was then immediately sent to
doorstep the Fayed family.
I loved newspapers, but the future didn’t
look very bright for journalists, and my
senior colleagues were adamant that the
best years of Fleet Street were in the past.
I wasn’t convinced I was hungry enough
to get to the top, or indeed confident
about my future earning potential. Even
fifteen years ago, things were starting to
look fairly bleak as more people started to
consume news on the internet.
It wasn’t all bad, though. I was sent by
the Daily Telegraph to the Maldives for
10 days in 2000 to cover Miss World, a
trip which got me my favourite byline
from Paradise Island. I still have Miss
Singapore’s business card somewhere...
Around the same time I decided to
do an executive (i.e. part-time) Masters
in Business Administration (MBA) at
Cranfield School of Management, which
was expensive, but money well spent.
I would thoroughly recommend this
course and business school to anyone.
I started a job 10 years ago working
as an analyst for a then small company
called Econsultancy, which produced
research about the fledgling internet
marketing and ecommerce industries.
This was a great mixture of writing and
business which was becoming more of
an interest.
I loved the esprit de corps of working
for a small and entrepreneurial business
and the world of the internet was a
fascinating field even if not an obvious
career choice after studying Latin and
Classical Greek at university.
The founders were generous and
shrewd enough to give me and other
senior members of the team shares in the
business, a move which ensured stability
for the company and also meant that we
remained loyal and motivated.
The company, now around 80-strong,
was recently acquired by Centaur Media
PLC, a business which is trying to become
more digital and less reliant on print
media advertising.
Following the acquisition, I am still
very much on board as Econsultancy’s
research director, managing a growing
team of analysts and responsible for the
research and content which drives our
subscription revenues. The atmosphere is
a little more corporate these days, though
I still don’t have to wear a tie.
It hasn’t been a textbook career
path by any means but I do believe
that we all have to be more adaptable
than ever. Career changes can be a
daunting prospect but also kick off
exciting new chapters.
I’m delighted that I’m still in touch with
numerous people I met at school and, at
the time of writing, am looking forward
to a school reunion in June, 25 years after
we left.
Linus Gregoriadis (1983-1990) began
his career as a journalist, working for
a number of national newspapers
including The Independent, The Daily
Telegraph and The Daily Mirror. He
now works as Director of Research at
Econsultancy – a firm specialising in
digital marketing and e-commerce
Linus Gregoriadis
O