A Word In Your Ear with Roy Edmonds - May 23, 2019

Having said that, my late mother was captain of Cheadle-Hulme Girls’ First-11 cricket team back in the 1930s.

Now, in the traditionally conservative north, lassies are rolling up blouse sleeves for beefy highland games. Scottish organisers want more female competitors to throw the hammer and toss the caber (a tree trunk).

It reminded me of one of the unintentionally funniest headlines I’ve seen in a newspaper, this paper in fact, when highland games were planned at Stanley Park.

We sub-editors kept a rogues’ gallery of double-entendre headings which had been spotted or, even better, had escaped notice and been published.

These often involved serious news stories, court reports or even tragedies when a hard-pushed editor was trying to devise an eye-catching headline to fit an awkward space with deadlines approaching. There were double-checks, of course, but gaffes can slip through.

One court headline with a rather perverse sexual twist, involved a would-be car thief who’d been caught acting suspiciously but who also, according to his defence lawyer, had been behaving out of character following a romantic upset.

It read, ‘Man unhappy in love tried card doors’. Well, it paints an odd picture, doesn’t it?

More grimly, there was the notorious headline on a suicide/accident story, ‘Man hit by train was depressed’.

Ah, but, back to those cabers. Organisers were short of entries for their Scottish Games in Blackpool and a sub-editor, perhaps too innocent (or bravely impish) for the job, devised the news-page main heading, ‘Search is on for tartan tosser’.

“Very funny,” commented an observant senior editor passing by, who instructed, “Change it!”

So the young, rather coy sub-editor did so, to, ‘Search is on for Scottish tosser’.

For Roy’s books visit royedmonds-blackpool.com, Kindle or Waterstones.