Hugh Herbert
Obituary: Gifted Guardian feature writer and incisive copy editor.
Hugh Hebert, who has died of cancer at the age of 74, was a shrewd page editor and gifted writer who hid the first talent behind a front of mild benignity and displayed the other in the Guardian features pages for almost 30 years. With features subeditors frequently doubling as writers, a tradition built up in the days when the Manchester Guardian was a great regional paper with a regional paper's staffing, the Guardian was made for Hugh.
Slight of figure, he adopted a cloak of near invisibility, which he threw aside with the occasional startlingly acid assessment of a colleague's performance. In those pre-computer days he didn't booze, didn't throw telephones around or shout, and didn't stamp out of the composing room in despair because he didn't have to: the stonehands who put the pages together liked him and pulled their fingers out for him. When a features colleague came in waving the current copy of Transatlantic Review containing a short story with Hugh Hebert's byline, Hugh merely shuffled his feet in embarrassment. The fiction he continued to publish from time to time constituted his private life and he was determined that it would stay his own business.
It was quickly apparent at the Guardian that he was a skilled interviewer; what doubled his value was that he was a brilliant copy editor as well, sympathetic to the writer (a comparative rarity on newspapers), acute not just in picking up errors, but also in spotting slackness of argument or story construction and supple in reshaping pieces that were not quite up to scratch. He had a wide knowledge of the arts, particularly literature and drama, and took over the page which in those days contained the arts reviews and a feature of broader interest; he easily handled a team of famous and long-established critics, such as Neville Cardus, filing handwritten notices on music by personal courier, and Philip Hope-Wallace, grumpily phoning scintillating opera reviews from draughty telephone boxes for the late editions; legends, both of them, but not necessarily always amenable to suggestion.
Hugh was born in Edmonton in north London, the son of a man who rejoiced in the name of Hugh Ricardo Melbourne Hebert; he chose his son's second name, Vyvyan, as a homage to his footballing hero, Vivian Woodward of Tottenham Hotspur and England, the Beckham of the Edwardian era - one of life's little ironies, since Hugh grew up without a scintilla of interest in sport. From Edmonton, the family moved frequently, mostly in East Anglia and always one pace ahead of the bailiffs, as Hugh put it. "No school is good enough for my son," Mr Hebert Sr said, and to prove it moved Hugh from one private educational establishment to another about as fast as the family changed addresses.
Nevertheless, when, at the age of 16, Hugh acquired his school certificate (the 1940s equivalent of GCSEs) his father insisted that he should quit school and start earning. He did a bit of this and a bit of that until, at 18, he was called up for national service; as he was not too enthusiastic about training to kill people he was allowed to join the Friends Ambulance Service, although he was not himself a Quaker. Posted to Germany, where British forces were helping to rebuild the shattered infrastructure, his first task was to construct a bicycle shed and to help build a chapel.
On demob he moved into Millwood House, a Quaker hostel in North Kensington, where everybody mucked in, sweeping floors, washing up, and peeling potatoes, all of which were familiar to him from his national service. Here he met his wife to be, Eileen, who came for a single night before taking a job selling books in Foyles, and also Christopher Driver, his features editor to be (obituary, February 19 1997). Driver and Hebert launched themselves into journalism from the hostel at about the same time. Hugh started in trade magazines, the most illustrious of which was the Muckshifter, "the journal of water engineers", before joining the Financial Times at the beginning of the 1960s.
He was not altogether happy there and was glad to accept the Guardian job offer put to him by Driver, not least because the features department was a band of friends. When Peter Preston became features editor in 1968, he had made it a condition that he would have a page opposite the editorials to look after, something that no British paper at the time had. In its first few years it was a page of news backgrounders rather than, as now, of columnists, and was produced under tight deadlines with work by reporters who first had to file their news stories to the news desk. Preston's unsurprising choice for his editorial production man - copy editing and layout - was Hugh, the unflappable pro.
As the paper expanded, Hugh moved out of editing work and concentrated entirely on feature writing, finishing his career in 1994 after a spell of television reviews and interviews.
He enjoyed his retirement "pottering around" with his wife Eileen, who survives him.
· Hugh Vyvyan Hebert, journalist, born July 26 1932; died June 3 2007
Slight of figure, he adopted a cloak of near invisibility, which he threw aside with the occasional startlingly acid assessment of a colleague's performance. In those pre-computer days he didn't booze, didn't throw telephones around or shout, and didn't stamp out of the composing room in despair because he didn't have to: the stonehands who put the pages together liked him and pulled their fingers out for him. When a features colleague came in waving the current copy of Transatlantic Review containing a short story with Hugh Hebert's byline, Hugh merely shuffled his feet in embarrassment. The fiction he continued to publish from time to time constituted his private life and he was determined that it would stay his own business.
It was quickly apparent at the Guardian that he was a skilled interviewer; what doubled his value was that he was a brilliant copy editor as well, sympathetic to the writer (a comparative rarity on newspapers), acute not just in picking up errors, but also in spotting slackness of argument or story construction and supple in reshaping pieces that were not quite up to scratch. He had a wide knowledge of the arts, particularly literature and drama, and took over the page which in those days contained the arts reviews and a feature of broader interest; he easily handled a team of famous and long-established critics, such as Neville Cardus, filing handwritten notices on music by personal courier, and Philip Hope-Wallace, grumpily phoning scintillating opera reviews from draughty telephone boxes for the late editions; legends, both of them, but not necessarily always amenable to suggestion.
Hugh was born in Edmonton in north London, the son of a man who rejoiced in the name of Hugh Ricardo Melbourne Hebert; he chose his son's second name, Vyvyan, as a homage to his footballing hero, Vivian Woodward of Tottenham Hotspur and England, the Beckham of the Edwardian era - one of life's little ironies, since Hugh grew up without a scintilla of interest in sport. From Edmonton, the family moved frequently, mostly in East Anglia and always one pace ahead of the bailiffs, as Hugh put it. "No school is good enough for my son," Mr Hebert Sr said, and to prove it moved Hugh from one private educational establishment to another about as fast as the family changed addresses.
Nevertheless, when, at the age of 16, Hugh acquired his school certificate (the 1940s equivalent of GCSEs) his father insisted that he should quit school and start earning. He did a bit of this and a bit of that until, at 18, he was called up for national service; as he was not too enthusiastic about training to kill people he was allowed to join the Friends Ambulance Service, although he was not himself a Quaker. Posted to Germany, where British forces were helping to rebuild the shattered infrastructure, his first task was to construct a bicycle shed and to help build a chapel.
On demob he moved into Millwood House, a Quaker hostel in North Kensington, where everybody mucked in, sweeping floors, washing up, and peeling potatoes, all of which were familiar to him from his national service. Here he met his wife to be, Eileen, who came for a single night before taking a job selling books in Foyles, and also Christopher Driver, his features editor to be (obituary, February 19 1997). Driver and Hebert launched themselves into journalism from the hostel at about the same time. Hugh started in trade magazines, the most illustrious of which was the Muckshifter, "the journal of water engineers", before joining the Financial Times at the beginning of the 1960s.
He was not altogether happy there and was glad to accept the Guardian job offer put to him by Driver, not least because the features department was a band of friends. When Peter Preston became features editor in 1968, he had made it a condition that he would have a page opposite the editorials to look after, something that no British paper at the time had. In its first few years it was a page of news backgrounders rather than, as now, of columnists, and was produced under tight deadlines with work by reporters who first had to file their news stories to the news desk. Preston's unsurprising choice for his editorial production man - copy editing and layout - was Hugh, the unflappable pro.
As the paper expanded, Hugh moved out of editing work and concentrated entirely on feature writing, finishing his career in 1994 after a spell of television reviews and interviews.
He enjoyed his retirement "pottering around" with his wife Eileen, who survives him.
· Hugh Vyvyan Hebert, journalist, born July 26 1932; died June 3 2007
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