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To mark the Pic’s 60th birthday, we explore its origins – and discover how it is still going strong today.
By Simon Hart
As the Catholic Pic’s snapper, to use newspaper parlance, for more than three decades, Tom Murphy photographed some of the most highprofile figures of the late 20th century – from Pope John Paul II to Princess Diana to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Yet, as he ponders the enduring significance of the Pic on its 60th birthday, he summons the memory of a less glamorous but deeply moving assignment.
It was a visit to a 16-year-old girl, terminally ill with cancer yet chosen to feature in the Pic to shine a light on her fundraising activities. ‘She was a terrific fundraiser for Cancer Relief and had raised a whole lot of money,’ recalls Tom. ‘She had a growth on her face, though, and didn’t want to be photographed. I said, “If you trust me, take your bandage off and I’ll photograph you like a model”, and she did and I did. The growth on her face was hidden by her leaning on her hand. ‘I got a letter three or four months later from her mum to say she had died but what I’d done made her so happy,’ adds Tom. ‘After that I came home and I sat down on the settee and cried.’
As we look back on the Pic’s contribution to life in the Archdiocese, 60 years after its founding, this is a tale told to underline what Tom and others who have worked for the publication consider both its central purpose – and its appeal. ‘For a journalist, good news isn’t news, but good news was the news that the Pic thrived on to boost people,’ he explains. ‘It was rarely bad news in the Pic – it was people doing things for others who were in even worse circumstances and my job was to keep that in the public awareness.’
The business of providing news for the Archdiocese of Liverpool began with the inaugural issue on 7 January 1962. It featured on its cover the then Archbishop of Liverpool, John Carmel Heenan, being greeted by a young boy on his visit to bless the offices of the new publication. The price on the cover was 6d and there was the promise of ‘27 packed pages of local news’, including a message from Pope John XXIII.
This was five days after building operations had begun on the Metropolitan Cathedral (which would open five years later). Inside there was news that the number of Catholics in the diocese was now over half a million. Alongside the news stories was an interview with Tommy Steele, appearing in Humpty Dumpty at the Liverpool Empire.
There was a Junior Pic section and three pages of sport. Among the ads, the new Hillman Super Minx was on sale at the Airport Garage on Speke Hall Road for the price of £727.
Sixty years ago, Harold Macmillan was prime minister and Queen Elizabeth II was approaching the 10th anniversary of her accession to the throne. The Cuban Missile Crisis was 10 months away and so too, coincidentally, was the Second Vatican Council. It would not conclude until 1965. For the Pic’s first three years, Mass was still universally said in Latin.
‘A new friend’ The Pic’s first editor was Norman Cresswell who wrote in his maiden editorial: ‘We intend that the majority of people will recognise a new friend in the Catholic Pictorial.’ The 31-yearold Cathedral Record had been
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incorporated into the diocese’s new weekly and the Record’s last editor, Father Bernard Dickinson, duly became associate editor of the Pic. Bob Azurdia, the future BBC Radio Merseyside presenter, was chief reporter. Cresswell, who split his time between editing the Pic and working for the BBC in the Midlands, promised that the Pic would be ‘an action paper, above all else. Make no mistake about it, the Pictorial believes in Catholic action, not flimsy criticism, not subtle digs – you will hate us a little from time to time – but creative action.’
According to Tom Murphy, who worked with the Wirral-born Cresswell between his own arrival at the Pic in 1977 and the older man’s retirement in 1988, here was ‘an intellectual and deeply faithful man’ who was also later the first editor of the revived Catholic Times. He recalls how every Thursday Cresswell would travel down to Shrewsbury, where the paper was printed, to review the first edition. Distribution reached Wrexham in north Wales. For a period in the early years, there was even a Westminster edition.
Remembering some of the highlights of his long career at the Pic, Tom notes wryly that his first job was ‘photographing hundreds of schoolkids in red, white and blue hats and what seemed like hundreds of street parties all over the diocese’ to mark the Queen’s silver jubilee. His portfolio would include images of the Queen along with prime ministers from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair.
Subsequent milestone events included the 1980 National Pastoral Congress when delegates converged on Liverpool from across England and Wales, and ‘15 or 16-hour days was the norm’ for Pic staff. A year later came the Toxteth riots after which Tom witnessed the leadership provided by Archbishop Derek Worlock and his Anglican counterpart, Bishop David Sheppard. ‘They were at the forefront of trying to get the rest of the country to believe Liverpool is not a bad place,’ he says. ‘The Pic was one of the ways they used to help with that message.’
He saw the pair play a prominent role again in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster of 15 April 1989. There was a service at the Metropolitan Cathedral the following day which drew huge numbers, both inside and outside. ‘It was testament to the work of Worlock and Sheppard that both cathedrals were filled the day after the tragedy, with around 10,000 surrounding the Metropolitan Cathedral,’ Tom relates.
He has fond memories of Archbishop Worlock and offers the following insight into their working relationship: ‘I took a picture of him in a school one day and he couldn’t understand why because he wasn’t doing anything, he was just walking out of a door. He looked at me as if to say, “Why did you take that picture?” and then he turned round and above the door was the sign ‘The chosen one’. He thought that was hilarious. He didn’t make any attempt to stop me publishing pictures like that but next time he’d look across the door to see what was there before he came out!’
Memorably, Pope John Paul II would affirm the work of Archbishop Worlock and Bishop Sheppard during his visit to Liverpool in 1982, when the Pontiff visited the Anglican Cathedral before then celebrating Mass for the Feast of Pentecost at the other end of Hope Street.
The Pic would later report on further ecumenical advances including the
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creation of the Merseyside and Region Churches Ecumenical Assembly (MARCEA) and the signing of the Covenant of Unity by Merseyside’s Church Leaders. Tom highlights the importance of these efforts to bring people together and cites as one final example the response of the Archbishop and the Bishop to the IRA’s 1993 Warrington bombing, which claimed two young lives. He says: ‘They were very quick and loud to stand together and say, “This is wrong. Stop.”’
Changing times Back in the present, the longestserving member of the Pic team is Alan Birkett, now 60 but only 17 when he first walked into the old offices of CPMM Ltd (formerly Mersey Mirror), the publishers of the paper, on Prescot Road in Kensington in 1979. ‘It seems like it has always been part of my life,’ says Alan, and with good reason: after all, he was born just seven days after the first issue came out in January 1962. Over the years Alan has witnessed much change. There have been office moves to Stafford Street, then Mann Island and, most recently, to Victoria Street in Liverpool City Centre. The permanent editors he has worked with comprise Norman Cresswell, Father Paul Thompson, David Mahon and now Peter Heneghan. Different places and faces yet he believes that the spirit instilled by Cresswell lives on. ‘It is one of those places where you enjoy your job and that’s why you stay. He instilled that in people because a lot of people stayed for a long time – you enjoyed going to work.’
Alan’s role today is to design the Pic, which entails ‘every month trying to complete a jigsaw, putting all the news and pictures together and making them look attractive to people so they want to pick it up and read the magazine.’ The fact we are talking about a monthly magazine points to
