When I first joined the JC as a teenager back in 1981, the paper's past was as much a part of it as the fug of smoke that filled every room, the clatter of typewriters and the dust that settled on the piles of paper on every desk.
There was a library full of cuttings of yellowed newsprint, some of them dating back to the 19th century. There were several members of staff who had served for decades, including one in his eighties who had joined as a messenger boy aged 14, and shuffled into work nearly 70 years later, arriving once a week to check the diary that used to feature on the Judaism page. He would regale us with stories of the past, of delivering letters by hand to Anglo-Jewish luminaries as a messenger, to taking shorthand notes for hours to write verbatim reports of lengthy communal meetings.
As an editorial messenger in the 1980s, there were no letters to hand-deliver, although I did have to go out to buy the editor's cigarettes (Silk Cut). Mostly though I was employed to feed the one piece of technology that made the JC office of 1981 different from that of - say - 1941.
This was a huge facsimile machine - then such new technology that an article about the paper's production, written for the 140th anniversary in November 1981 puts "fax" in quotation marks, and describes the machine as a "mechanical beast".
My job was to feed this monster by hand. Some copy and all pictures could be sent by motorcycle messenger, but most of my time was spent putting news stories and features slowly into the machine's maw.
I turned down a place at university to stay here
They arrived at the printers in Essex, where they were typeset, and I then had to collect the page proofs that it spat out in return to circulate to the editors and the art room, where the smell of smoke came from the art editor's cigars, mixed with the heady aroma of cow gum used to paste copy galleys onto page layouts.
I turned down a place at university to stay at the JC, as an apprentice reporter. The JC provided my further education, a multi-disciplinary course in history, international politics, culture and media studies alongside more formal training in shorthand and newspaper law. I reported from many communal dinners (I had a dark green taffeta dress from Laura Ashley, which my friends borrowed for special occasions); from meetings of the kashrut commission ("Sour faces over kosher milk"); and from various campuses where Jewish students were fighting "Zionism is Racism" motions.
Greville Janner rang the editor to denounce me as "an enemy of the Jewish people" when I reported that some guests did not enjoy an event put on for the 125th anniversary of the Board of Deputies, attended by Princess Diana and Prince Charles, who asked one deputy: "Do you all know each other?"
There were three of us apprentice reporters, and we were determined that we would not follow in the shuffling footsteps of the oldest member of staff. So in our early twenties we all left, first to regional papers and then to nationals, or in one case, television. Over the following decades I worked for the Sunday Times and the Independent, lived in Scotland and the Netherlands, had children and started writing books.
Coming back to the JC - first, temporarily in 2009, then as a member of staff in June this year - has been a curious exercise in time travel.
In 2009 the office looked the same from the outside, but the walls had fallen inside, and the newsroom was open plan, smoke free and relatively hushed. Email and the internet meant there was no cuttings library any more (I wonder what happened to the file containing a letter from a young Robert Maxwell informing the JC that he had been baptised into the Church of England and should therefore not be considered Jewish any more. I remembered that letter when, at the Independent, we reported on his funeral at the Mount of Olives.) There was also no need for editorial messengers. In 2009 menial tasks were given to interns with postgraduate degrees in journalism.
By 2016 the paper had moved to an open-plan office in Golders Green, it had a Twitter account and a Facebook page. Several colleagues remain from the 1980s though, which makes me feel 35 years younger, and the content, although presented differently, often feels familiar.
The splash on the front of the paper celebrating the JC's 140th anniversary edition in 1981 was about the plight of Ethiopian Jews - a subject close to the heart of our then chairman. This week, the features pages have an interview with an Ethiopian film-maker who has made a feature film about a Jewish boy. Inside the paper from 1981 there was a story about the United Synagogue ending 111 years of history by voting to admit women to its meetings - as observers with no voting rights. There was much debate at the time as to whether this cautious step was too little or too much, a debate echoed on the JC comment pages in 2016.
Working for the Jewish Chronicle, then and now, means you occupy a strange space in the community. You're at the centre of things, and yet always on the outside. Everyone hates you, and feels free to tell you so, yet they also want to ring you up for long conversations about how someone in the public eye is definitely Jewish and how they've worked it out. I suspect that many distant relatives have never worked out that I ever left the JC.
"They're using your name a bit more nowadays," one said to me recently. "I bet you're pleased about that."
