In journalism, there are people whose brilliance is known to every one of their departmental colleagues but not to the readers. There are people so idiosyncratic that it is hard to imagine them existing in a more conventional profession. And there are people who stay so long in the job that it becomes impossible to imagine the place without them.
Jeremy Alexander, who died of cancer aged 81 on Thursday, embodied all that in a single individual. For anyone who has ever worked on the Guardian sports desk there is not just sadness but disbelief. It is the end of an era that lasted 57 years. Repeat, 57. He worked for the department from 1966 until his final illness in March. It may even have been his first illness; he claimed never to have taken a day off sick, and his facts tended to be reliable.
He was not wholly anonymous. Longstanding Guardian readers may remember Jeremy’s elegant and lovingly crafted football reports, usually from the nether reaches of league football. But that was a fraction of his contribution. His original speciality was to act as the “stone sub”, spending his evenings in the bowels of the building, trying to ensure the hot metal type had the right words in the right order, which the old Grauniad was infamous for not doing.
When new technology arrived in the 1980s, simplifying the production process, this job mutated into the “revise sub”, still the last line of defence against libel, bad grammar, infelicity and simple mistakes. Calling him hawk-eyed does him scant justice. One is tempted to call him The Man Who Stopped a Million Errors, a phrase Jeremy would have amended on grounds of exaggeration. But there must have been hundreds of thousands.
And he did it all with immense charm. Even the grumpiest old printer melted before a Jeremy request. And the correspondents were familiar with the late night phone call. As Mike Selvey recalled: “He’d say ‘Mike, it’s Jeremy. Lovely piece. But I was just wondering whether it would be better if …’ And he was always right.”
He grew up in Surrey, comfortably if not grandly, and won a scholarship to Shrewsbury school, which he loved: he became captain of athletics and made the first XI at both football and cricket. The 1961 Wisden says JG Alexander was fourth in the averages with fewer outs than not outs. The avoidance of error, already.
At Oxford, he did maths, which might be another hint of his passion for accuracy. Actually, he got a fourth-class degree, now abolished, and regarded by some as far more stylish than a first. He must have had better things to do. Still, he was offered a job teaching at Rugby school and was about to accept when a letter to the Field magazine suddenly bore fruit and offered him a place as a subeditor.
“He was a grammatical stickler even then,” recalled his colleague Gill McGregor, who became a lifelong friend. A couple of years later he began moonlighting on the Guardian; his first football report “by a special correspondent” was a cracker – Leicester 5 West Ham 4 in August 1966, four of the Wembley heroes on display, only a month after the World Cup. Thus began more than 51 years of Guardian football reporting, culminating in a visit to Lincoln’s Sincil Bank, the only league venue he had never ticked off. One early piece in the paper was about a Blackpool win at Millwall, achieved “firmly but not rudely” which summed up Jeremy’s approach to life.
For two decades he combined the Field, with its emphasis on country pursuits, some of them bloody, and the leftie fastness of the Guardian. He enjoyed the combination of this journalistic odd couple. The differing politics simply did not interest him.
But when a point of principle arose he was intransigent. Mike Averis, the long-serving sports editor, saw him as a star turn and wanted him to be as ever-present as possible. Jeremy was willing to become a full-time staffer. But the paper then ran a closed shop, and both management and the National Union of Journalists insisted everyone became a member. Not Jeremy. He thought it was wrong to be forced. And eventually he won: for an equivalent annual donation to charity he was given exemption.
Another sticking point was a refusal to countenance the word “I” in print. It is something that journalists should always spread thinly, like gentleman’s relish. For him it was taboo. Even his retrospective on completing the full set of league clubs avoided it. That was in 2018 when he still had another five years of removing I from other people’s copy. It was all of a piece with his general attitude. Asked if he would like a party when his stint reached 50 years, he insisted: “I don’t want a fuss.” Avoiding fuss was what made him gravitate to the lower divisions.
Other habits annoyed his friends more. He refused to have a mobile phone; in extremis he would borrow one, from a stranger if need be. He did not own a computer, had no personal email. In the office, he could be reached on his Guardian email on which, once he had officially retired and started doing shifts again, he had to be called jeremy.alexander.casual@... Casual? Jeremy?
He was single as well as singular, but had a huge circle of friends, male and female, some of whom camped in his small central London flat for months on end. He ran through Hyde Park regularly, and appeared to age hardly at all. Indeed, he had run a marathon – a qualifying event for the European championships – in 1974, when almost no one ran marathons. (The Guardian took a report from him, self-deprecating as ever but surprisingly full of the forbidden I.)
He also enjoyed opera, theatre and concerts. He almost never saw films. On TV he only watched sport. And his ignorance of popular culture was near total. “He would have heard of the Beatles, I think,” said his brother Rod, “but would have struggled to identify them.”
Yet he was otherwise erudite. Once a burglar climbed through his window during the night to be greeted with a very Jeremyish “Can I help you?” The uninvited guest looked round at the groaning bookcases and general lack of grandeur, said: “Sorry, wrong house,” and left.
Grace under pressure is one of the great human virtues. He showed it then, just as he did night after night, decade after decade, confronted by a tight deadline and the work of more fallible journalists. We will miss him terribly.
