Express deputy picture editor Gordon Lang worked
By TERRY MANNERS
THE legendary glass bulletin board that displayed a cruel sea of editors’ bollockings to staff over the years, as well as the odd pat on the back and appointments for those on the slippery slope to stardom in the Black Lubyanka, was not a much-loved relic of the past as a former deputy picture editor remembered.
Former Daily Mail sub Margaret Ashworth, who runs the new fun and informative news website Ashworth & Ashworth on Substack with her husband Alan, tells me that her father Gordon Lang, was deputy picture editor of the Express in the Golden Years, working with Arthur Christiansen and Derek Marks, among others.
He left the Express in 1973 with a pay-off and hopped right into a job on the Telegraph, where he stayed for 10 years. Magic, eh?
Lang, who selected the pictures for the dummy Express newspaper used for the classic movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire, starring Christiansen, wrote a memoir about his life. It included some of his time on the Express and it seems he was not a fan of the bulletin board.
He wrote: “Derek had adopted the great Christiansen’s custom of issuing a bulletin each afternoon commenting on the morning’s paper. The former editor had used the bulletin largely to tell his staff what he expected and what he wanted the “Express Way” to be. But the Marks approach was very different.
“He appeared to be writing his bulletin not so much for the enlightenment of his staff but more to impress the proprietor, boardroom and management with his own qualities in the exercise of disciplining them.
“What else could explain the fact that his bulletins ignored any satisfactory explanations he had received to the complaints and just repeated word for word the charges?
“It was a charade which so enraged me that whenever I was in charge of the picture desk, which was about a third of a year, I would not have a copy of the Marks bulletin displayed on our own board and threw it into the wastepaper bin!”
Lang goes on to tell how former managing editor, Eric Raybould would “also play the charade”. He said: “Raybould would pick up the intercom and give me a dressing down for something either I or the picture desk had left undone. I knew that when I was summoned to see him, I would find the editor sitting beside him as his audience. I was never wrong!
“My reputation was being put at stake to enhance Raybould’s.”
That’s newspapers!
Bulletin note: Arthur’s bulletin board now looks down from the wall in my study and I often wonder about the stories behind it.
29 September 2026
