An editor and storyteller

Andrew Trimbee, the founding editor of the Arabian Gulf's first English-language newspaper, is a journalist of the old school.

I first met him in 1991, in the shabby offices of the unusually named Leeds Skyrack Express, a local weekly freesheet in Yorkshire, when he was its editor and I was begging for my first job as a cub reporter on my local rag, in the time-honoured fashion.

What I didn't know then was that Trimbee was far from the typical small-town hack. He was a Fleet Street journalist of high repute, a Yorkshireman come back up north for personal reasons.

Shortly after I left, he did as well, to resume his Fleet Street career on The Daily Telegraph.

After his own stint as a cub on his local paper, the Halifax Courier, he had worked with the legendary Harry Evans (now Sir Harold Evans) at The Northern Echo, was a staffer on the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph and spent two years working in Nairobi, Kenya, as a sub-editor on the East African Standard.

And he had spent several years in the Gulf, initially in Bahrain, where he had accepted a job as the first editor of the Gulf Weekly Mirror, which launched in January 1971, and later in Dubai.

His new book, The Inshallah Paper, covers his eventful years at the Mirror's helm. Packed with sketches of colourful characters and anecdotes both poignant and amusing — some downright hilarious — it is an enjoyable and endearing look at the region in flux, when the oil trade was in its infancy, the British were pulling out of the Trucial States and Shaikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi was working towards a new state which would become the UAE.

But it is Trimbee's deep admiration for the region and its people that make it such a joy to read. "I feel instantly at home with Bahrainis," he said over the phone from his holiday home near Grenada, in Spain. "I have a genuine love for Bahrainis and a great affection for the Gulf and Dubai."

Besides the natural desire of a storyteller to tell his story — and there are elements of a ripping yarn about The Inshallah Paper — this love has driven the book.

"One of the reasons is to show the Gulf people as they actually are, in the wake of 9/11, and to show Islam for what it is: It's a caring religion. I wanted to explain this, to show the people, their courtesy, their hospitality; how Islam looks after people less fortunate. I wanted to proselytise for the region."

Many of the problems Trimbee found in the Bahrain of 1971 will be familiar to expats today: high rents, salaries that don't stretch quite as far as expected, bureaucracy, and the gaping gulf between managers who expect everything done immediately and a workforce that would rather do it later.

He also found problems particular to a start-up: non-existent organisation, half-hearted planning, no staff and the burden of sorting it out on his own shoulders.

That he not only survived the experience but succeeded in it and came to love it offers a lesson to every foreigner coming to the Middle East.

"I look back on my time in the Middle East and I feel enormously comfortable in that environment.

"We eschewed the expat community. All our friends were from the Bahraini community. In Dubai, we knew many local people.

"Working abroad completely opens up your mind. It gives you a completely different view of things. I lived in Bahrain for six years, and it rounded off my personal education in a way I couldn't have imagined. It changed my life, even more so than Nairobi.

"Lots of people say they want to travel and work abroad, but very few actually do it — the ones that do are an exception."

Setting up a newspaper from scratch is no easy task, even in these days of the internet and desktop publishing. In the days of typewriters, linotype and compositors (the trade that named the "cut" and "paste" functions on your computer), it was tougher still.

Trimbee produced the first issue a week after landing in Manama. "The Mirror arrived on an unsuspecting world," he said. "It had no prior publicity in any way. But in no time it established a circulation base.

"It became the most-read thing for local people. There were incredible stories. The government was very supportive.

"The standards of the Mirror improved until after nine months it was at a British standard."

But it wasn't all plain sailing. With a small staff, Trimbee had to be both editor and writer — and the job of an editor is to be a public face of his or her newspaper as much as it is to actually edit it.

Early mornings doing the rounds, long stints in the office writing and editing, evenings glad-handing, smiling and picking up gossip at parties, six or seven days a week.

It was hard work, something Trimbee says he got used to in his second stint at the Northern Echo, when he served as its chief sub-editor, the closest thing a newspaper has to a regimental sergeant major. "You have to have a stubborn streak in this business," he said. "If you don't, you'll go under."

The stubborn streak was something I recognised from our days on the Skyrack, which he refused to treat as a little local rag it was, demanding high standards from staff and printers. "It's an easy thing, if you aren't careful, to drop your standards. I'd sit at my desk at the Skyrack thinking, ‘Would it get past Frank Peters, my old chief sub?'"

Anyone who has worked on a newspaper will tell you that they attract oddballs, eccentrics and characters. And that is just the staff.

The Mirror's character was Ralph Izzard, a near-legendary longtime Fleet Street foreign correspondent who became a Mirror columnist.

He in turn seemed to attract more than his fair share of oddballs and eccentrics, and many of The Inshallah Paper's laughter-snorting passages revolve around Izzard's gentlemanly, slightly bemused attempts to put up with his friends' antics.

All in all, The Inshallah Paper is a warm, highly readable account of life in an Arabian Gulf of yore but it still resonates so profoundly in the Gulf of today that you will find yourself annoying family and friends by reading passages aloud.

And, of course, it is also an account of a newspaper industry of long ago, when journalists wrote shorthand and the typewriters that hammered out the copy could be rebooted with a paperclip if they crashed.

"This business, as it was, has changed irrevocably," said Trimbee when I pressured him to make a comparison of old and new. "This is an old writer's observation, but being completely honest about it, there isn't the degree of professionalism that there was. It isn't there. Maybe there isn't a need for it — it's more involved in the technical side. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's not like it was."