Michael McNay

Michael McNay, who has died aged 91, may not have been an immediately recognisable name to many Guardian readers, but he more than anyone else shaped the modern appearance of the paper.

During a 37-year career he covered many areas of the paper as a subeditor, but also as a writer mainly on arts subjects and as the Guardian’s design editor at the time of its radical remodelling in 1988.

The innovative design, encompassing the presentation of articles, headlines, spaces, the expanded use of photographs, new typefaces, even a new masthead, hurtled the paper into an era decisively removed from its cramped, dowdy and often amateurish past, its cloudy pictures and, largely as a consequence, its reputation for often hilarious spelling errors.

If the twin impetuses for this were the sidelining of the print unions following Rupert Murdoch’s clandestine removal of his papers to Wapping and the initial success of the Independent newspaper, the Guardian’s redesign was both radical and challenging to the other broadsheet national newspapers, which gradually followed suit. But it was McNay who had many of the original ideas, argued for them in the face of some internal opposition and mastered the use of the then new Atex computer system. He was, in the words of the Guardian’s history Witness in a Time of Turmoil (2025), “the most vociferous and talented, even belligerent, advocate of newspaper design”.

McNay, a substantial presence and keen rugby supporter who had played hooker for London Scottish, could indeed be passionate in arguing his corner. In the words of Linda Christmas, who worked in the paper’s features department in the 1970s, he was “the only journalist I know outside of movies who, in a heated moment, threw a telephone across the room”, though she added that he was well informed, funny and damned good company.

At the time of the paper’s Sarah Tisdall crisis in 1983, when a fax detailing the Ministry of Defence’s plans to limit protests outside the US air force base at Greenham Common, Berkshire, had been sent anonymously, the paper was ordered by the court to hand it over so that the junior civil servant who had sent it could be identified. The court judgment resulted in anguished editorial discussions over whether to comply or not and McNay tried to seize the fax out of the editor Peter Preston’s hands so that he could destroy it and thereby take the rap himself. A vain and tempestuous gesture as it turned out: the paper could not defy the law, the fax was handed over, Tisdall was identified and subsequently went to jail.

McNay was a son of the Raj, born in Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan, the youngest of three sons of an army staff sergeant and western front veteran, later a warrant officer, Harold McNay, and his wife Eleanora Yanischek, born in London to refugees from Silesia (now in Poland). He was lucky to survive a severe case of typhoid as a child, but went to Britain only at the age of 12, after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Educated in Co Durham at Darlington grammar school, he did his national service in the Royal Corps of Signals and won a place at Balliol College, Oxford, to study English, only to leave after a year for failing the preliminary examination in medieval English, which he hated and did no work for.

Photograph: Tate Publishing

A series of jobs followed, including temporary work for a tailors’ firm in Jermyn Street, before obtaining trainee reporters’ jobs on the Oxford Mail and then the Bedford Times. He joined the Guardian as a subeditor in its Manchester office in 1963. A flavour of the routine in those inky cut-and-paste days was included in a memoir he gave to the paper’s archive in 2001: “It was a gently civilised life in which the major effort was to stay awake. You arrived in the evening to find a fresh pot of glue on your desk alongside a pair of scissors and a neat pile of copy paper with a clean, freshly ironed towel and a piece of soap in the top drawer. The dark wood panelling, the frosted glass, the big ceramic fittings in the lavatories gave [it] the air of a gentlemen’s club.”

Moving to the features department in Manchester, McNay became fascinated with page design and was given more leeway, especially after Preston, the future editor, became features editor, determined to make the pages appear more coordinated and coherent when the department was moved to the London office, and page proofs no longer had to be sent by road or rail back and forth.

He became arts editor, writing characteristically vigorously about art and cinema, and latterly producing artists’ obituaries for the paper. His one of Patrick Heron led to a book for Tate’s St Ives series (2002). Others included Artists and Their Studios (2008), providing the text to go with photos by the paper’s picture editor Eamonn McCabe, Hidden Treasures of England (2009) and Hidden Treasures of London (2015). In 2003 he was a founder member of the Hazlitt Society, formed out of the restoration of the Soho grave of the 19th-century essayist William Hazlitt.

By the mid-1980s it was becoming clear that the Guardian needed a redesign and McNay, as the most vociferous internal critic of the paper’s limitations, was placed in charge of the project. He enlisted the graphic designer David Hillman, who had already worked on the Sunday Times, and gave him a broad brief: “We regard ourselves as basically a text paper but with decided ambitions to use pictures better … We decidedly don’t want a deja-vu appearance … We want to look modern.” Preston agreed to the investment on being shown the original design.

In preparation McNay trained to use the new Atex system, using it more easily than most others managed, and he would train the subeditors and rigorously patrol the redesign, its pages more boldly laid out, its pictures given more space and its articles less squeezed and jumbled. The front page, which he laid out, would have only one or two stories on it instead of the previous 10 or 12. Not all subs were happy, and McNay became known as the thought police for his vigilance. By the time he retired in 2000 the paper’s appearance had been changed for ever.

McNay concluded his memoir: “The Guardian must always be about its writers, but I made my career in production on a gut instinct that, whether or not I could make it as a writer, helping to shape the paper physically would be a necessary and deeply satisfying job of work. Every time I see the paper now, I look at it with pride.”

In 1957 he married Marian Milne, with whom he had two children, Lois and Ross. After their divorce, in 1974 he married Sue Pilkington, herself a subeditor, and they had a daughter, Anna. She died last year, and he leaves his children and five grandchildren, Morgan, Maisie, Freddie, Solly and Isla.
Stephen Bates

Ian Mayes writes: Mike McNay radiated creative energy. His great achievement was, indeed, the 1988 redesign, using a unique combination of Helvetica bold, and what seemed to some effete, to others, elegant, Garamond italic. It was widely copied both inside and outside the industry.

It was Mike who persuaded Peter Preston to go the whole hog, and include the almost sacred masthead, the Guardian title, in the redesign. Mike took Preston to the studio of the designer, David Hillman, where he resisted the latter’s suggestion to take the whole paper from broadsheet into tabloid: it was too soon, too radical. At Preston’s bidding they went back to the Guardian on the bus. They were, in fact, in this and other projects, a closely bonded pair, the relationship based on the greatest mutual respect. Preston, in entrusting Mike with the redesign had, in effect, put the welfare of the whole paper in his hands. There was opposition even in Preston’s editorial bunker. Mike prevailed.