Ian Jack – journalist

Ian Jack obituary – from The Times, Thursday November 10 2022, 5.00pm,

Journalist and editor of Granta and The Independent on Sunday who combined forensic investigative skills with an elegiac writing style

Jack’s effortless prose was the outcome of a never-ending struggle for the right phrase

In the last year of his life, Ian Jack researched and wrote an 18,000-word account of a shipping scandal on the Clyde. It told the story of a botched attempt by the Scottish government to revive a traditional industry by steering orders towards a favoured contractor — a project that ended up costing millions in public money with no ships yet delivered.

It was a forensic exercise in investigation, but it also conveyed a sense of melancholy, as Jack revisited his own childhood memories, recalled the great days of shipbuilding on the Clyde, and spoke to key players in a story of corruption and decline. Published at full length in the London Review of Books, it is a formidable piece of journalism, reminiscent of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier.

[Here is a copy of Ian Jack · Chasing Steel – Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco as published in the London Review of Books 22 September 2022.]

“I really don’t know of anyone else who could pull that off, and make it compelling from first line to last,” said the veteran journalist Clive Irving, who founded the Sunday Times Insight team. “It is a masterclass in personal journalism.”

Much of Jack’s best writing over a lifetime as editor and reporter matches that description. On The Sunday Times he had learnt much from the Insight tradition of investigation, but never wrote like them. He approached stories from a personal perspective, and brought history and humanity to bear.

[In 2015 he wrote West Fife – the march of suburbia has made my old constituency feel bigger which included his memories of North Queensferry and Dunfermline, and in 2019, he wrote Why did we not know_ Who is hoarding the land which includes an account of his childhood in North Queensferry, playing in the old barracks and gun batteries.]

He liked the absurdities of life. Thus, in his powerful exposé of the killing of three unarmed IRA suspects in Gibraltar, published in Granta magazine, he told of trying to buy a map of the town from a street stall. The owner had to seek permission from a higher authority, and made several telephone calls, “successively marked by a rising tone of deference”. He returned to say that the attorney-general of Gibraltar had refused permission to sell him a map.

“The attorney-general himself!” wrote Jack. “This struck me then as the kind of absurd infringement of liberty that might happen in Evelyn Waugh’s Africa. But the better I got to know Gibraltar, the more typical it seemed. Gibraltarians do not suffer from an overdeveloped sense of freedom.”

He wrote for The Sunday Times, The Observer, Vanity Fair and The Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. He also became the editor of writers from Diana Athill and Simon Gray to less well-known authors from India, which he knew well. He contributed regularly to The Guardian from 2001 and began to write a weekly column for the paper six years later.

Jack, second from left, among esteemed literary company on the Booker prize judging panel in 1996

“He wasn’t a polemicist, so it was never simply a matter of taking up a position and arguing it as most columnists do,” said a colleague, David Robson. “Many things made him angry, but he never hectored. He entered the subject and moved around within it.”

He became a foreign correspondent while on The Sunday Times, covering Asia in particular, and fell in love with India, where he spent long periods. He felt comfortable with the pace of life, particularly in Bengal, which he found civilised and traditional, but at the same time he admired the Indian journalists he met, who exposed corruption, often at great personal risk.

He was fascinated by India’s railway system, which he thought was one of the few beneficial legacies of the Raj. Just as he had relished the Victorian tradition of the Clyde steamers, which linked the mainland to the islands, so he loved the way British engineers, many of them Scots, had constructed a rail system that brought together an entire continent. His book about Indian railways was never completed — some say it was never started — but it remained an obsession.

In Kolkata, in west Bengal, he is celebrated as a friend of India, though he was less enamoured by Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism. His book of essays and reportage, Mofussil Junction, paints a nostalgic picture of a largely vanishing India of the past.

In 2009 Jack published a collection of essays entitled The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain, which again prompted comparisons with Orwell. One reviewer noted: “He is up there with a fiction writer such as Alice Munro in his grasp of time’s ebb and flow, his awareness that its strong but rapidly changing currents often leave us wondering not only what we can remember, but what we should.”

Born in 1945, Ian Grant Jack was one of four brothers brought up in a council house at Farnworth near Bolton in Lancashire, where their Scottish father, Henry, had moved from Dunfermline with his wife, Isabella Gillespie (known as Isa). Two of the brothers died young, George of meningitis, Gordon of diphtheria.

Jack’s father had been the fourth engineer on a British India Line cargo ship, but came ashore to marry Isa. The only work to be had in 1929 around Dunfermline was down a coalpit, so a job in a Lancashire mill beckoned. For both Ian and Harry, their father was a strong influence. He had left school at 14, but went to night school and classes where he learnt about geology, astronomy and philosophy. Harry said: “I can remember as a lad, overhearing him (a factory mechanic) arguing with a close pal (an ex-slate miner) about the ideas of Immanuel Kant.”

Jack went to Plodder Lane council school in Farnworth, until his parents returned to North Queensferry in Fife in 1952, when he was educated at the local school, then Dunfermline High School. He never went to university, perhaps because he had been taken off Latin classes at school, and never caught up, despite being remembered by his teachers as an exceptional pupil.

A brief period working in Dunfermline public library was followed by a job on the Glasgow Herald, and then two local papers, the Cambuslang Advertiser and the East Kilbride News, from where he moved to the Scottish Daily Express, at a time when that newspaper was a big-selling broadsheet, whose editor in Scotland, Sam Campbell, coined the motto “If the story’s good enough, always yield to temptation”.

In 1970 he joined The Sunday Times, where he was chief sub-editor, then editor of the Look page, commissioning editor on the colour magazine, and editor of Atticus. He wrote on subjects as diverse as the decline of steel-making in Consett, the bright young things of Oxford, and the literary row that pitted Frank Kermode against Christopher Ricks at Cambridge. To each he brought an unbiased curiosity about the vagaries of society. He left when Rupert Murdoch took the papers to Wapping, despite the efforts of Andrew Neil, the Sunday Times editor, to keep him. “Ian Jack’s departure provoked the most serious internal crisis of my editorship,” wrote Neil later.

In 1979 Jack married Aparna Bagchi, a psychoanalyst and therapist, whom he had met in India, but the couple were divorced in 1992, and six years later he married Lindy Sharpe, then a journalist on The Independent on Sunday, later an academic, working with the Centre for Food Policy.

They lived in Highbury, north London, but spent many weeks in a rented house on the island of Bute, which Jack found advertised in the New York Review of Books. He had always wanted to return to the Clyde, and finally the couple bought a house on Bute, from where he could view the liners coming in to his beloved river. They had two children, Bella, a civil servant with Natural England, and Alex, who works in the renewable energy sector.

A gentle, shambolic figure, unkempt in appearance, he was a tireless worker, rising at five in the morning to meet deadlines, which he never missed. He found writing hard, and what emerges as effortless prose was the outcome of a never-ending struggle to find the right phrase and the well-balanced paragraph. His big investigative articles included the sinking of the Titanic, the Gibraltar shootings, the vast costs of maintaining Trident submarines, the Hatfield rail crash of 2000 and the Ferguson shipyard scandal.

The most striking article was his 1985 account of the Heysel stadium football tragedy, when Liverpool supporters clashed with Juventus fans at the European Cup final, and 39 people died after a concrete wall collapsed. He visited Liverpool and Turin to gauge the atmosphere of both cities in a moving and perceptive essay.

These long-form articles were balanced by lighter pieces that nevertheless involved just as much work, such as his book on the singer Kathleen Ferrier, and an inquiry into the background of a famous photograph of Harrow boys in their monkey jackets outside Lord’s cricket ground, always held up as the epitome of class divisions but, after Jack tracked them down, revealing a more poignant back story.

The Hatfield train crash became a short book, The Crash That Stopped Britain, and inspired a play by David Hare, The Permanent Way. His collection of articles, Before the Oil Ran Out, includes a long and elegiac essay about his father called Finished with Engines, which is a masterpiece of its kind.

He would have rejected the Orwell comparison — he hated Nineteen Eighty-Four as a novel, and thought Orwell’s pessimism about humanity affected. The writer Neal Ascherson was not so sure. “Orwell really did believe in a better socialist future that was bound to come in spite of empire blimps and servile London communists,” he said, “whereas Ian, it seems to me, looked back on old working-class life and thought something priceless — certainty, security, ‘decency’ — had been lost for ever. ‘Decency’ was a big word for both of them.”

What never left Jack was his passion for those innovations of a vanished engineering past, the towering arches of the Forth Bridge, beneath which he spent his childhood, the great locomotives of the Indian railways, and the steamboats on the Clyde. One of his last outings was on October 14 when he attended the Clyde River Steamer Club’s 90th anniversary dinner.

Ian Jack, journalist and editor, was born on February 7, 1945. He died after a short illness on October 28, 2022, aged 77