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• 12 Jan ' 14:30

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• 16 Dec ' 08:16

  Issue # 225December 16, 2011 We are breaking up for the hols today (spend too much time with the Hackademics, and it’s catching) so, first a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous new year to all our contributors, without whom And also to our supporters, the columnists and commentators who have generously helped promote the plot and carried the flame of old hackery around the world. 225 issues (and more than 3 million hits already this year) is something of an achievement, and the buggers who never contribute quite clearly appreciate the efforts of the few who do. Thank you. We’ll be back, DV, on January 6. If you will need reminding, use the box on the right. So, to this week There is currently an Inquiry into the press that wait for it that you didn’t know about. It’s in Australia. And although they know about it Down Under they don’t actually know what it’s about. Mark Day tries to fathom it. We have our own of course (you have heard about it – it was in all the papers) and John Dale has the double this week, first, writing about how the Leveson Inquiry is taking over his life, and then by suggesting, in a worthy rant, how it might have done for Kelvin. But first, a Christmas story from Alan Whittaker about getting a turkey home from Fleet Street. And then Liz Hodgkinson (subs pse chk splg)writes about getting people’s names right. That’s the people who matter the writers. All of the above. Plus the cartoonist. Now we’re going for a long lie down. Have a merry one. If you think you might suffer from withdrawal symptoms in our absence, go and check the books site – http://booksaboutjournalism.com/ – if you’re quick you could still get something decent to read over the holidays. Talking turkey By Alan Whittaker It was a scene worthy of a Christmas card. The advance flakes of the next snow flurry glittered ominously above the street lamps enhancing the seasonal decorations displayed by two of Fleet Street’s most venerable trading enterprises. The grey pre-war holly wreath had once more been resurrected from the cellar and now adorned the entrance to Mick’s Cafe while a delicate necklace of red and green fairy lights added a chic Parisian touch to the Durex display in Hancock’s window. Ian Watson-Jones, who had served 20 something years as copy taster on the Evening Standard and the much lamented Star before joining the News of the World, reckoned we could just make it to the back bar of the Harrow before the snow thickened. He also surmised that the sole occupant of the bar so early in the evening would be John Halcro Ferguson, the Observer’s Latin America guru. ‘And I bet you a large Scotch he mentions South America within two minutes,’ said Jonah. I rashly accepted the bet. Sure enough the only person lurking in the back bar was JHF. ‘It’s turning into a blizzard, Fergie,’ said Jonah amiably as she slipped out of his overcoat. ‘Indeed it is,’ replied the sage of South America. ‘Reminds me of a dreadful night I spent in Patagonia ’ Ian glanced at his watch and smiled. ‘Fifty seven seconds,’ he said. ‘It took him some time to get into his stride but I’ll have a Grouse.’ Jonah was due to meet Joe Adams, crime reporter of the Evening News, who turned up an hour later than arranged accompanied by a shapeless object in a huge black plastic sack on which the tread pattern of a tyre was clearly discernible. He had difficulty squeezing the sack through the pub entrance. Joe apologised for being late but he had been to Smithfield. Before leaving home that morning he had informed Mrs Adams that the usual oven-ready turkey from Sainsbury’s would not be required. There would be a change this Christmas. He would select a bird fresh from the Norfolk countryside. ‘I waited till the market was closing; that’s the best time to get bargains,’ he said, jubilantly pointing to the black sack. ‘Look at that beauty. Weighs a ton and all for three quid. I had a hell of a job getting it here.’ The tyre impression on the bag was the result of trying to heave the carcass out of the path of the bus he was about to board in Farringdon Street. ‘The front wheel ran over the bag when it slid off the pavement,’ he explained. The turkey was indeed rather large. About the size of an ostrich. And severely mangled as a result of its encounter with a number 18. If Joe hadn’t bought the thing the market trader would have had to fork out three quid to get the council to dispose of it. No one in their right mind would contemplate buying such a grotesque creature. No domestic oven was big enough to accommodate it. Joe placed himself by the bar and the black bag by a hot radiator. Outside the snow fell with increasing intensity. An hour or so later Joe slung the bag and its mutilated and slightly warm occupant over his shoulder and headed for the rail head. By taxi. Things didn’t improve. After depositing Joe at Waterloo the cabbie drove off and in the process managed to inflict further grievous damage to the turkey when the rear nearside wheel ran over the bag. The bird was now in a seriously distressed condition. Undeterred Joe boarded his train and stowed his mangled bargain on the luggage rack opposite his chosen seat. That way, he reasoned, he could keep an eye on his purchase. He checked his watch. It would be twenty minutes before the train moved. He must stay awake. The compartment was warm. The Scotch was working its soothing magic and he felt deliciously drowsy. Through half-closed eyes he saw a fur-coated matronly woman occupy the opposite seat. She was built on the lines of Hattie Jaques with a cleavage to match. She looked the type who would have been to Covent Garden for the opera. Joe dozed. An abrupt lurch indicated the train was moving off. The motion roused him and so did the piercing scream from the near hysterical Hattie Jaques look-alike. The sudden jolt of the train had disturbed the black bag above her head and the scrawny neck of the turkey had slipped out and was now nestling, beak down, in her unwelcoming bosom. Another convulsive jolt caused the entire carcass to cascade, first to her head and then to her lap. Joe shuddered at the memory of the woman’s horrified face as one of the turkey’s legs became entangled in her hair. ‘When she recovered she was furious and moved to another compartment,’ he said when he recounted the tale next evening. Mrs Adams didn’t bother to look at his purchase before ordering him to heave it one last time. Into the dustbin. ‘We’re having Sainsbury’s oven-ready as usual on Christmas Day,’ Joe sighed. Busy Lizzies By Liz Hodgkinson If you want to attract attention to the brilliance of your copy, it’s good to have a byline that stands out. That’s easy enough, possibly, if you have a name like Roz d’Ombraine Hewitt, Meredith Etherington-Smith or even Marcelle d’Argy Smith, all of which are completely individual and as such, hard to ignore. But if you are Liz Hodgkinson, how do you differentiate yourself from Liz Hodgson? The answer is that much of the time, you don’t. Although Liz Hodgson and I are completely separate people and have little in common other than a similar name, for most of our professional lives, we’ve been mistaken for each other. It all began when Liz Hodgson started working for the Femail pages of the Daily Mail. No problem, you might imagine, except that I, Liz Hodgkinson, was already there. Before long, her byline was on my stories and my name appeared on her copy. It was inevitable and so one of us had to go. Last in, first out, and it was the other Liz. She then went to the Sunday Mirror and for a time we managed to regain our separate identities. The mix-up resurfaced when Liz and her partner, Ian Markham-Smith – for whom she wrote an affectionate obituary in Ranters the other week – moved to LA. From there they filed many showbiz stories to all of Fleet Street. Once again, my name started appearing on her stories and hers on mine. It got worse when, not infrequently, I was sent cheques that were rightly hers. Of course I returned them and I hope she did the same for any sent to her that were meant for me. I don’t know how the subs thought that I (or she) was writing prolifically in the UK at the same time as filing endless celebrity stories from America but perhaps they simply didn’t ask themselves that logical question. Then for many years, subs seemed able to keep us separate. Their task was made easier now by the fact that Liz and Ian often used a joint byline. I think that both names appeared on their books, as well. But just when I imagined people could finally tell us apart, we are getting mixed up again. Only this week I had an email from a reader about Ladies of the Street, my book about women journalists. The sender, a journalist called Vernon Ram, wrote: Dear Liz:Surely you are the same Liz who did a stint with Ian Markham-Smith at the SCM Post in the early '80s, including a spell at Hongkong Tatler before pushing off to the US and Variety/The Hollywood Reporter?!! Object of this is to congratulate you for Ladies of The Street I have just finished reading, a real show-stopper by any yardstick. Bet you remember visiting us at our home in Lamma Island. Best wishes, – Vernon Ram It’s a lovely accolade but that was the other Liz. I have never worked for the SCMP or pushed off to the US. Liz Hodgson, if you are reading this, you may like to get in touch with Vernon. But it doesn’t end there. Since the book was published, I’ve had several other emails from journalists who say they remember me living in LA and working for US publications. Now, Liz Hodgson and myself are not rivals; in fact, we are good mates and when we meet, we laugh about the byline similarity. Perhaps we have even helped each other’s careers, who knows? But we all like to think we are special, completely original. And actually, the Hodgkinson family mix-up doesn’t end there. My son Tom Hodgkinson, who writes for the Independent on Sunday and is the famous, or notorious, idler, has a rival called Tom Hodgkinson, who writes book reviews and literary articles. I’ve often been contacted by bookish friends to say they have seen Tom’s piece in the Literary Review, or somewhere, only for me to have to tell them, sorry, it’s the other Tom. Now, I gather, the other Tom calls himself Thomas to differentiate himself, but the confusion continues. At least I don’t think they’ve ever had each other’s cheques. Mind, nobody pays anything these days so it would hardly matter if they had. But none of this is quite as bad as Liz Gill and Liz Gill. Again, both Lizzes worked at one time for Femail. One Liz Gill is a journalist, a writer, and the other is (or was) a fashion artist and cartoonist. They are, once again, completely separate people. journalist John Smith, another Ranters contributor, solved the problem of his name by having Plain John Smith as his byline. And of course, he became famous as ‘Plain John’, so much so that is almost became his name. I suppose I could be Plain Liz (my second name is Jane, and that’s plain enough) but I hardly think it would set the world alight. So, to set the record straight once and for all, I am the Liz with that important bit extra: three more letters, to be exact: Liz HodgKINson, author of Ladies of the Street. Ladies of The Streetby Liz Hodgkinson is published by Revel Barker at £9.99. Press Inquiries The Fink By Mark Day We’ve got to hand it to you Poms. You do your inquiries well. You’ve got your Lord Leveson forensically probing the ways and means of the modern media. We’ve got The Fink. You have an inquiry where all parties – politicians, journalists and inquirers – are at pains to say that whatever the outcome, the Press must remain free. We’ve got a political witch hunt where such niceties fail to get a mention. The Australian press has, since its inception, pretty well followed the British path. Decades ago it did so with much tugging of the forelock, but those days have passed. We did, after all, give you Rupert Murdoch in a bit of reverse colonisation, but we have still admired the breadth and creative energy of the British media while allowing the odd tut-tut about its methods. Stings, such as those so mercilessly executed by the Fake Sheik would not pass muster in Australia on two counts – they would break the Australian journalists’ code of ethics which demand that a reporter shall identify him/herself and the publication they work for and if any recording of conversations were clandestinely taken, that behaviour would breach the federal Listening Devices Act. As for phone hacking – it is perhaps a sad truth, but most of us down here are so technologically dyslexic that we wouldn’t know how to do it, let alone be willing to break another law relating to telecommunications interception. No evidence of hacking has emerged in Australia – from hackers, hackees or hearsay. But that’s no matter. The British phone hacking scandal has provided a convenient excuse for a media inquiry, currently under way, presided over by a former judge, Ray Finkelstein and a former media writer and now academic, Matthew Ricketson. The inquiry was set up because our parliament is like yours – the life of the government depends on a coalition of parties. Just as David Cameron needs Nick Clegg, in Australia Julia Gillard needs Bob Brown, the leader of the Greens. For more than 20 years Brown, a Tasmanian senator, has been in the parliament preaching climate change, land care, clean water, the end of coal, banning all nukes – all matters of great importance, for sure, to students and doctors’ wives. But he has been largely ignored by Labor and Liberal governments. In the 2010 election Julia Gillard managed to form a government only with the support of three lower house independents and one Green. In the Senate, she needs all nine Greens to have the numbers needed to pass legislation. Suddenly, Bob Brown is no longer ignored. As a wily old pollie he’s in the box seat and he knows it. During the life of the Gillard government, and Kevin Rudd’s before her, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, notably The Australian, rigorously and relentlessly examined government activities. The Oz has broken story after story about money wasted in stimulus spending designed – successfully, it must be said – to avoid a global financial crisis-induced recession. It has attacked the $36 billion national broadband network spending and declared the Greens a political movement that must be destroyed at the ballot box. Before the hacking scandal Bob Brown had declared The Oz was ‘the hate media’ and after the closure of the News of the World Julia Gillard opined that News had ‘some hard questions to answer’. She never outlined those questions but when the Greens deputy leader Christine Milne argued that the hacking events provided a ‘convenient’ pathway to a full media inquiry’, the die was cast. The tail wagged the dog. So we have the Finkelstein Inquiry, set up to inquire into ‘the effectiveness of the current media codes of practice in Australia, particularly in light of technological change that is leading to the migration of print media to digital and online platforms; the impact of this technological change on the business model that has supported the investment by traditional media organisations in quality journalism and the production of news, and how such activities can be supported, and diversity enhanced, in the changed media environment; ways of substantially strengthening the independence and effectiveness of the Australian Press Council, including in relation to on-line publications, and with particular reference to the handling of complaints; and any related issues pertaining to the ability of the media to operate according to regulations and codes of practice, and in the public interest.’ Not a word, you’ll note, about the freedom or independence of the media. It is refreshing to see high up in the Leveson inquiry terms of reference acknowledgement of the most important and fundamental aspect of the media’s place in society: it is to inquire if there is a need for ‘a more effective policy and regulatory regime which supports the integrity and freedom of the press, the plurality of the media, and its independence, including from government, while encouraging the highest ethical and professional standards.’ The Fink’s inquiry got under way last month. Among the first to give evidence was Greg Hywood, CEO of Fairfax Media, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He began his address by asking: ‘What problem are we trying to solve?’ In a later interview he explained: ‘There were some issues for News International in the UK – a long way from here – and there’s been no evidence that anything like that happens in Australia; none at all. ‘So because something happened in the UK we’re here talking about changes to the regulatory environment, with a whole range of things being floated – government intervention in the Press Council, government funding, a new regulatory environment. My view is that freedom of the press is a precious instrument; you don’t lightly play with it and what we do as a media company in a commercial environment is a very important public good; we ask the questions people don’t like being asked and our communities are, over time, better off because it.’ So far it appears The Fink is concentrating on the structure, the power and the funding of the Australian Press Council, a self-regulatory body funded by publishers but without punitive powers beyond admonition. His report is due to government by the end of February and his recommendations will be incorporated in the much wider Convergence Review inquiry which is looking at broader issues of outdated broadcast regulation. This indicates the true nature of The Fink’s endeavours – an afterthought bolted on to an existing structure as a matter of political convenience. Don’t expect much to come of it. It’s a fix By John Dale I admit it, I’m an addict. I’m mainlining on reality TV in a way that is scary. I always told myself I could fight it. What a fool I’ve been! Now I am waking up with the schedule in my head, cancelling convivial lunches, getting the shakes if I try to withdraw. Lord Justice Leveson is ruining my life. I may consult a lawyer. It’s got the format of Judge Judy, the characters of le Carré, the red herrings of Agatha Christie and the plots of Robert Harris. Off-camera, there’s a sword of Damocles suspended by a single hair and every day, as they deliver another 30,000-odd words, the witnesses invite it to skewer their well-coiffeured skulls or greasy pates. With agonising slowness, revelations are being extracted which are then inserted into the big picture like pixels on newsprint. For us hacks and ranters, and no doubt many civilians, it’s a slow-burning blockbuster. There’s Robert Jay, QC, playing Robin to Lord Leveson’s beetle-browed Batman, and the beautiful Carine Patry Hoskins as a wide-eyed Girl Wonder. On Monday the inquiry into press standards reached Chapter 5: News International Week. I give the following as one exquisite moment of Htchcockian suspense. Jay, who never misses a dot or comma, was in the middle of a lawyerly duel with Tom Crone, former legal manager at News International. He inquired about a reply Crone had given to Adam Price, MP, at a select committee. Jay: ‘If I were to ask you the same question as Mr Price asked you, would you give me the same answer?’ Crone requested the transcript. For two minutes he pored over it. Everyone waited. As we got ready for the answer, the judge looked at the clock and said: ‘It’s time for a short break...’ If it were TV, you’d call this a cliffhanger. It would be ‘Next week: see what happens!’ So people popped to the loo, stretched and yawned, stood up and turned around, shuffled their trousers and underwear, had a natter, took a breather. Five minutes passed. Then the judge reappeared and the inquiry resumed. Crone jumped straight back into his seat, leaned forward and peered over his spectacles. Without prompting he said three words to Jay: ‘Yes, I would.’ Yes, he’d give the same answer. There was a palpable sense of relief or disappointment, depending on your view. I don’t have space here to explain all the complexities. The evidence is long and detailed. In another time and place, Murdoch’s company might have felt honoured to have four days of non-stop coverage devoted exclusively to it. But this was different. News International Week - the announcement acted like a movie trailer, creating such a buzz that various hacks who normally shunned daylight rushed down to the Royal Courts of Justice to hang out like stage door Johnnies. They were initially disappointed in that the first star was himself ‘redacted’, at least visually. Therefore I cannot say whether Mazheer Mahmood wore a lounge suit, his Fake Sheikh gear or dressed as a High Court judge in hope of creating his usual mayhem. I do not know. All we got was his voice, which had the well-rounded vowels of someone used to impersonating Eton-educated desert billionaires.. When he answered questions incompletely, we heard a toughness enter Lord Leveson’s otherwise amiable tone. Maz insisted he had carried out his News of the World investigations as a public duty and denied that he entrapped people by offering ‘golden carrots’. He said: ‘We risk our lives on a daily basis. I live under death threats. I’m proud to have exposed paedophiles, drug dealers, drug runners and the like.’ But he also added: ‘I’m a journalist. We publish stories, we sell newspapers. I’m not a police officer, I’m not a social worker.’ Leveson asked him if a story would be justified simply because an MP was having an affair. Maz: ‘Yes, that’s right. We vote for these people.’ What if it was an actor or author? Maz: ‘No, no, no. MPs hold public office, slightly different for an actor - except if he’s in Hello and cashing in on his family life - a degree of hypocrisy.’ As he left the witness box, the press was allowed to return and the camera switched back on. We saw his place being taken by Neville Thurlbeck, former NotW chief reporter. Because he had been arrested in Operation Weeting, he was not asked about phone hacking. Otherwise his evidence was wide-ranging. Kiss and tell story fees:‘There were six figure sums but rarely. Average for a front page splash was £15-20,000. Authenticity: ‘There was always a myth that we made it all up, and that still prevails. We didn’t. We went to enormous length to satisfy our lawyers it was demonstrably correct - documentary evidence, photographic evidence...a birthday card, gift, phone call. For every kiss and tell that made it, there were were six, ten, that fell by the wayside, even if we believed the story.’ Current situation: ‘The kiss and tell story is now largely dead.’ Privacy: ‘Recently I exposed a politician for having an affair. It made a big story. We thought long and hard about whether we should run it. The man had used his family and happy marriage in his election literature, so we felt justified.’ David Beckham:How much had they paid Rebecca Loos? Thurlbeck paused, saying he was trying to think of reasons why he should not reveal this. Leveson told him to answer. Thurlbeck: ‘A six figure sum, the most I’ve ever paid.’ Jay: ‘Not quite a seven figure.’ That was taken to mean it was nearly a million. What was the justification? Thurlbeck: ‘The Beckham’s had been using their marriage to endorse products, presenting themselves as a fairytale marriage, they married on thrones. I thought it important to expose the fairytale as a sham.’ Jay: ‘What products had the Beckhams sold on this image?’ Thurlbeck: ‘He was promoting Brylcreem, sponsored left, right and centre.’ Was Brylcreem using his family image? Jay suggested there was a difference between ‘implied’ and ‘expressed’ representation - which is becoming a central issue. Max Mosley orgy splash: Thurlbeck accepted that without the Nazi theme, there would have been no public interest justification. On three occasions, the judge intervened forcefully in seeking answers to questions. To one, downplaying to his own influence, Thurlbeck said: ‘Chief reporter, news editor - grand sounding titles, they don’t call the shots at all.’ The judge also told him to a name the newsdesk person who, he said, had instructed him to send the orgy women emails described as ‘close to blackmail’. Jay asked if such pressure was normal journalistic practice. Thurlbeck: ‘It would happen all the time, the broadsheets, TV stations...offering anonymity in return for the story.’ Leveson: ‘Did you give any thoughts to Article 8 rights (privacy) of the women? Yes or no?’ Thurlbeck: ‘There was no discussion of it.’ In his appearance, Tom Crone was asked about News International’s ‘one rogue reporter’ defence. He said: ‘My feeling was this would probably come back to bite the company.’ Leveson: ‘You were certainly right there.’ By my reckoning, we’ve had half a million words at least up to now. There are many more to come. At the same time, there are parallel hearings before other courts and committees, as well as additional revelations, official and unofficial. There is even doubt about whether the NotW was involved in Milly Dowler’s phone hacking, which is what triggered off the inquiry. But it is now way beyond mere hacking in that it is dealing with press standards as a whole. From my own observations, I’d say that Lord Leveson is deeply committed to press freedom. But he is identifying ethical and cultural failings which have become institutionalised in that journalists think they are ‘normal’. His task is to decide how these can be rectified without damaging free expression and commercial viability. If you have not started following it in detail, I suggest you don’t. If you do, you’ll end up in The Priory. I’ve just booked my bed. John Dale is covering media matters on his website johndalejournalist.co.uk Bear baiting By John Dale Delighted as we all are for his thoughtful contributions to the national discourse, there are moments when I long for someone to put a sock in the smug, droning, self-affirming motor-mouth of Kelvin MacKenzie. It’s been a long wait and I’d almost given up hope but then at last a candidate hove into view. Yes, it was Lord Leveson. Again. It is yet another strand of the multifarious services the judge is performing for the good of the nation. A lot of his impact is entirely incidental to his central mission but, for me, he is becoming a bit of a superhero. At its very least Lord Leveson’s Inquiry into press standards is offering five star entertainment and, although that is not its primary purpose, there is a medieval pleasure to see him poking the most ferocious bears of old Fleet Street with a sharp stick. As the best-known old bear, Kelvin has been rather slow in grasping the underlying theme but, in between his bar-rattling rages, he may be getting the point at last. He is in a cage and he is wounded and at bay, just as the tabloid press is wounded and at bay. His ritualistic fury only confirms his impotence, that he is an exhibit whose life force is publicly bleeding away in parallel with that of the journalism of which he was progenitor. He was put on display on the BBC’s Politics Show last week. He thought he was there for his insights. The rest of us know it was just cruel fun. Roll up, roll up, see us bait the Great Bear Kelvin! His temporary keeper was Andrew Neil, the presenter, and his tormentor, in Lord Leveson’s absence, was Chris Bryant, MP. Neil fed his hubris by referring to him as the ‘red top legend’, with an irony in his voice which went straight over its subject’s head. Then Kelvin was invited to comment on various topics and did so with his customary compassion. Referring to illegal immigrants, he recommended that the government should announce ‘we are going to send armed guards over to Lille and actually we are going to shoot them’. It was his bid for a Clarkson moment. Yawn-yawn. Bryant, an old target of the red-tops, had prepared well and now mentioned the presentation that Kelvin had made to Lord Leveson some weeks earlier. Not only had he insulted the judge (and quickly apologised in the Daily Mail) but he had made some unwise boasts about his editing – well, his lack of it – during his reign at the Sun Bryant said to him: ‘I think you’ve owned up now, haven’t you, that you hardly ever checked whether any stories were true because frankly that was irrelevant...’ Kelvin was unusually silent. Bryant continued: ‘And also you spent a great deal of time pooh-poohing the whole idea of any hacking at the News of the World, and I remember going on many programmes with you when you said quite categorically that it didn’t happen, you could not believe that it had possibly happened, that nobody senior would know about it, and anyway even if it did, it didn’t really matter. You said it was a socialist conspiracy...’ The Bear continued to slumber In full flow Bryant continued: ‘...And then you found out that your phone was hacked and suddenly you were upset and thought it awful. Why should anyone listen to a word you say?’ Bryant continued to poke him with a sharp stick, knowing it wouldn’t take much longer to elicit a response. Bryant: ‘All I want journalism to do is return to its old fashioned thing of bringing the truth to light but doing it within the law and not doing it on the basis of deception... At that moment the Bear became roused. Bryant: ‘...Not running headlines about Hillsborough... just lies.’ Now Kelvin started jabbing fingers at him like the sublimated fists of a boxer, yelling: ‘This has got nothing to do with Hillsborough.’ Bryant: ‘It’s about lying...’ If you look at the TV recording, you can see that Bryant is smiling, almost chuckling, enjoying the baiting. In contrast Kelvin looks like a man on the edge. He’s losing it. Was it approaching a Lebedev moment? Not quite. Kelvin merely saw red. He said: ‘That story came from a Liverpool news agency and Liverpool journalists.’ Whoops! (It didn’t – and two hours later he withdrew his allegation and apologised.) The arguing continued, Bryant won, and eventually Andrew Neil restored order in the manner of kindly gent coming to the aid of the wounded old bear. But if Kelvin expected respite, he was disappointed. Neil had his own Leveson-style agenda. It was his turn to pick up the sharp stick and do some poking. He said to Kelvin: ‘I’ve got a broader question. Do you have any regrets or remorse about some of the things you did as a tabloid editor?’ Kelvin: ‘Errrrm...’ It was a long pause. You could see his mind whirring behind eyes that had blanked. Whatever he replied, he would not just be addressing Neil and Bryant. There was a ghostly spectre hovering in the studio – Leveson himself. Anything he said could be used against him when he was called to testify at the Inquiry. So which way should he go? Point blank denial or candid confession to regrets or remorse? ‘Errrrm... probably. Yes. I do.’ Doh! I mean, it was like watching Homer Simpson. He’d done it again, just like at the seminar. Foot in mouth. Hostage to fortune. Dig dig dig. He should have smacked his forehead to make the impersonation complete. You could picture Leveson sitting on the other side of the TV screen, framing a future question now on the lines of: ‘Mr MacKenzie, do you recall your appearance on the Daily Politics show?’ MacKenzie: (feeble squeak): Yeth. Leveson: ‘You admitted to “regrets or remorse”’, did you not? Could you explain what you regretted and what caused you remorse?’ Back in the studio, Kelvin tried to mitigate the damage, saying that he wished he had covered Hillsborough differently. But Leveson is unlikely to confine the questions to that subject alone. Kelvin is a very significant figure in the decline of the British red top from popular and proud to less popular and shameless. His influence, his self-admitted lowering of standards, remains at the root of its crisis. Is he losing his touch? First he has had to apologise to the judge himself. Then he has had to apologise to Liverpool journalists. And still he keeps saying things that will make him even more vulnerable for Leveson’s Day of Reckoning. He thinks he can wing it with a virtuoso performance in the witness box, cracking some third rate jokes from the Sun book of 1980s headlines. But Leveson, although a humorous man privately, does not do humour during evidence. Neither does his lead counsel, Robert Jay, QC, who has yet to smile, never mind chuckle, and has a seriousness of visage that makes Mr Spock look like Les Dawson on laughing gas. If Kelvin takes that approach he will die faster than if he were tarred and feathered at the gates of Anfield stadium. Some say this is a man on the Hubris Express who won’t disembark until it reaches Station Nemesis. But I do wonder. Surely he must notice that he has turned himself into an easy target, inviting Homer Simpson moments every time he puts his head above the parapet. I am glad he enjoys freedom of speech. I will defend his right to do so. But if he retained any of the commonsense he likes to boast about he would enter a state of self-imposed purdah. Kelvin, just go home, draw the curtains, sit in a darkened room, retire from the national discourse and give everyone’s ears a rest. Wait for the call from Leveson. You can have your say there. Can you do it? Maybe, maybe not. But if you do, a grateful nation will surely thank Lord Leveson. #

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• 12 Dec ' 04:21

  Issue 224December 9, 2011 We’re breaking up for the hols next week, so if you have any Christmas stories, please file them now. (Otherwise, we might break up a week early ) If you need to be reminded when service is resumed, please use the box on the right to register. If you are changing your email address, please send a note to the server that usually reminds you that is up. There’s a new book out tomorrow, and it evolved from scribblings for this website. Bill Greaves had penned a few pieces for us about newspaper pubs. He added some more about the favourite drinking places discovered while on the job – and, hey presto, a book was done. There’s just time to order it for Christmas – that is, if you are interested in pubs. If not, you could buy it only to enjoy the odd tales that he uncovered on his travels. Plain John Smith travelled more than most, for the . He recalls how he once went tits-up in the Sahara, in search of a dateline with a difference. Back to pubs and Dan Wooding – there’s a blast from the past – has fond, or not-so-fond, memories of The Stab In The Back. There’s the apparently nigh-on inevitable obit. This time of picture desk man Jonathan Snape. He was, wait for it 41. Richard Stanley has fond memories. And, as usual, cartoonist props the whole thing up. Doing the rounds By William Greaves As every journalist knows, it’s always a risky business to pass by a pub for fear of missing the career-enhancing story that might have been lurking within. Regular addicts will perhaps already be familiar with my own lifelong love affair with the great British boozer, revealed in a series of reminiscences in these columns which positively oozed beer-sodden nostalgia and recalled just some of the unlikely stories to have emerged like genies from the mists of the saloon bar cigarette smoke of the good old days... ...Like the young girl whose first job on her first day working for Sainsbury’s was to unclip every copy of the Radio Times and remove the eight-page advertising supplement for Tesco’s before stapling each magazine back again, appearing under the headline: Good Magazines Weigh Less at Sainsbury’s. Or the Leeds barmaid who came into work heavily bandaged, apologised for her appearance and explained to the hacks at the bar that she had just been bitten by a lion. But enough of that – you’ve heard it, seen it, read it in these very columns. What neither you nor I could have foreseen was how those few disconnected jottings, published here over a succession of weekly episodes last year, would lead me into the most gigantic pub crawl of my life throughout England, Scotland and Wales and end up as a slim volume, celebrating 2,000 years of the British pub. I was goaded into it, of course, by the Chief Ranter himself but I freely forgive him. It has been a wonderful adventure which began by following in the footsteps of George, Harris, J and Montmorency, the wicked fox terrier, on their hilarious voyage of 120 years ago from Thames watering hole to Thames watering hole as told by Jerome K Jerome in his unforgettable Three Men in a Boat And it swelled to take in the country’s highest pubs, its oldest pubs, its smallest pubs, its literary pubs, its haunted pubs, its smugglers’ pubs, its historic pubs, its newspaper pubs and even pubs like the Rover’s Return, the Queen Vic, the Bull at Ambridge and the Woolpack of Emmerdale fame which never existed at all except in the imagination of the soap peddlers. It explored how the Drunken Duck, the Polite Vicar, the Bucket of Blood, Dirty Dick’s and a few other unlikely alternatives to all those Red Lions and Coach and Horses got their name. And it even looked back to Roman times when the invaders merged their beloved tabernae, fore-runners of the wine bar, with Boudicca’s ale houses and spawned an institution that grew to become the trademark of Britain and the envy of the rest of the world. There was, of course, a serious downer. Because of the geography of the quest it could only be covered by car and I nearly drowned in tomato juice. Now that would never have been the case in the good old days when we invariably got home but couldn’t quite remember how. But at least I am alive to tell the tale. It’s My Round – a personal celebration of 2,000 years of the British pub, is published tomorrow at £9.99. It is available with free delivery worldwide (and currently discounted by 9%) from BookDepository, and from Waterstones or on order from any half-decent bookshop. Going tits up By Plain John Smith Geoff Pinnington, editor of the People, loved an exciting, exotic or intriguing dateline. For 10 years he sent me scrambling around the world in search of them: Tahiti, Timbuktu, Mount Everest, the Amazon jungle, Robinson Crusoe Island, the Galapagos, Dracula’s castle, Hiroshima, Yellowknife, Siberia, Poona, Mandalay, Death Valley, Pearl Harbour, Guadalcanal, Copacabana Beach, San Quentin prison, the Bridge Over the River Kwai, the Great Wall of China and many more. So it was that I washed up one night in the Algerian town of Tamanrasset, in the Sahara desert. Tamanrasset burst briefly into the headlines in 1982 when it was the centre of a search for prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark, who went missing for six days after he and two team mates lost their way in the desert while driving in the Paris-Dakar rally. Unfortunately, my arrival failed to coincide with any such entertaining diversions. The only signs of life were two spindly legged donkeys staggering down the main street loaded down with sacks of grain and a band of Tuareg tribesmen racing around in circles on horseback while firing off ancient carbines to celebrate a local wedding. Idly glancing over a map of the area my eye was caught by a tiny black speck way out in the wastelands. Tit. Yes, there was a place called Tit. Intriguing? Certainly. And, apart from its obvious snigger value, it could make its mark as my shortest and cheekiest dateline. Geoff Pinnington would be delighted. But how to get there? Tit was 30 miles away, across blistering desert sands with temperatures in excess of 100 degrees and no paved roads. Local inquiries led me to an amiable Tuareg tribesman called Bechar who sported a single gold tooth at the centre of his ready smile and a fearsome looking dagger tucked inside his belt. ‘You go Tit?’ he inquired, with the puzzled air of a British tourist guide who had just learned that his party of American visitors wished to visit Slough rather than Stratford-on-Avon. ‘Yes,’ I ventured hesitantly. ‘I go Tit.’ The gold tooth gleamed. ‘You come.’ Clutching me firmly by one arm he guided me through a maze of dusty back streets until we reached a shambolic open fronted store selling everything from plastic buckets to second hand hubcaps. Stacked inside its murky interior were bales of cloth and a vast selection of Arab robes. A barefoot assistant scurried across the filthy dirt floor, produced a ragged piece of cardboard for me to stand on and proceeded to attend to my sartorial requirements with all the aplomb of a Savile Row tailor. Fifteen minutes later, in a long white robe and matching multi-layered turban, I emerged from the shop looking like a cross between Ali Baba and Casper The Friendly Ghost. Bechar’s gold tooth beamed approval. ‘Tomorrow,’ he announced triumphantly, ‘we go Tit.’ To avoid the desert heat we arranged a five am start and in the pre-dawn darkness, swathed in my Lawrence of Arabia outfit, I waited for the diesel rattle of a Land Rover, the vehicle of choice in Tamanrasset, an important crossroads for trans-Sahara expeditions. But then I heard a scuffling of hooves and an angry chorus of braying animals. In a pool of light from my hotel window, Bechar grinned up at me, desperately holding on to two cantankerous camels. It was my first close encounter with a Ship of the Desert and the particular vessel that Bechar had chosen for me was obviously in mutinous mood. By way of introduction, the discontented mount pulled back putty-tinted gums to reveal a row of teeth the colour of old snooker balls. Then it spat in my face with admirable accuracy. With loud Arabic oaths and much prodding with a short stick, Bechar forced the braying beast to its knees. I slid on to the small wooden saddle attached to its hump and then the unhappy animal stood up, heaving me giddily into the air. With another gold toothed grin, Bechar set off at a brisk trot. I followed at a juddering jog, desperately clinging to handfuls of the camel’s fur to retain my lofty perch with one hand while using my free hand to frantically readjust the turban, which had fallen down over my eyes. Four excruciating hours later, Tit emerged from a shimmering desert haze and I clambered to the ground in a perspiring heap, sun scorched and saddle sore. Tit turned out to be little more than a nudge-and-a-wink in the middle of nowhere. A scattering of mud-built houses and rush-built shacks. I was met by a reception committee consisting of the village chief, two goat herds and a chicken. Though obviously bewildered by my arrival, the natives were friendly. We sat cross-legged on the ground drinking endless cups of mint tea while two old boys with no teeth regaled us with stories of how their ancestors had fought the French colonialist forces in the great Battle of Tit back in 1902. And that was it. The long trek back to Tamanrasset gave me plenty of time to ponder how the hell I was going to spin a readable piece out of this brief oasis encounter. ‘Rode camel – drank mint tea – rode camel again’ was hardly likely to put me in contention at the British Press Awards. Still, at least I had the intro: ‘I have been keeping abreast of events in a town called Tit ’ The stab in the front By Dan Wooding I was recently back in London from my adopted home in Southern California, where I have lived since 1982, and wanted to take my son Andrew to see the Stab in the Back pub, a place of gossip and heaving drinking, where I had spent so many hours during my years as a reporter with the I had shared with him the strange mystique of this place and as we walked up New Fetter Lane, I was shocked to find it was no more, having been torn down and replaced by a pizza parlour. So for those the few of you who never went to the Stab, I thought I would share some memories of this unique and often bizarre watering hole for (mainly) the Mirror group journalists. My introduction to the Stab came after I had been working for a local paper in Ealing, West London, and was offered a job on the reporting team after getting an exclusive series about the Kray twins in prison. In between the hours of drinking at the stab, I was able to write up stories like Diana Dors’ ‘love affair’ with Elvis Presley; the life of Melody Bugner with her boxing champ husband; and the heart-attack story of Eric Morecambe; plus a host of stories with personalities like Carry On actress, Barbara Windsor and comedian Larry Grayson. Like so many others, I was involved in getting stories on Joyce McKinney, who is now back in the headlines having been featured in new documentary called Tabloid based on Mirror managing editor Tony Delano’s book. Probably the worst thing that happened to me in the Stab was when one evening I heard the words ‘I’m going to kill you!’ issued by a Scotsman who had just ambled into the bar. ‘But why? What have I done to you?’ I asked. The Scotsman gulped a double whisky, turned to me and said, ‘Because you know where Maurice O’Mahoney is and he put one of my friends behind bars.’ The O’Mahoney he was referring to was a London criminal mastermind turned super-grass. A criminal by the age of ten, he had been involved in nearly every type of crime known to man, from hijacking trucks and bank raids to highly professional burglaries and wage snatches. But when O’Mahoney was caught, he informed on more than 200 criminals involved in crimes totalling more than one and a half million pounds. Now O’Mahoney, who has since died, was facing life on the run. An underworld contract was out on him. I had co-authored a book called King Squealer with this criminal who always carried a Magnum whenever we met at a series of secret hideouts. The story was serialized in the Sunday People ‘There is only one thing that can prevent you from dying tonight you have to tell me where that swine is. If you don’t, well I’ve got a knife in my car outside and I plan to get it and slit your throat.’ It was then that Sunday People crime reporter Trevor Aspinall said in his usual less than charming way, ‘Hey, why don’t you just go ahead right now. It’s been a quiet evening so far.’ I tried to ignore his comment and said, ‘But I don’t know where O’Mahoney lives. He never told me where I could contact him just in case of a situation like this.’ The arguments about whether or not I should die continued for an hour amid the smoky swirl of the executioner’s omnipresent cigarette. Drinks were bought and downed and gradually the atmosphere brightened a little. Another twenty minutes passed and suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, the granite-faced Scot crumbled and threw his arms around me. ‘Dan, I came here tonight to kill you. Now I really like you.’ He fished around in his pocket and produced a ten-pound note and handed it to me. ‘Here, have a few drinks on me.’ With that he stumbled out of the bar. I was shaking with emotion and ordered a drink although Aspinall certainly didn’t get a free drink that night. Fortunately, it wasn’t always like that in the Stab, and in fact it was a magnet for celebrities. On one occasion, I was standing next to boxer John Conteh who, at the time was world light-heavyweight boxing champion, and he confided, ‘I can’t believe I am here with all these famous journalists.’ Each lunch hour, the People newsroom would empty out and go downstairs to the Stab and many would stay until closing time. One of our reporters would drink as much as he could and then, one day, he returned to the news room, went to the bathroom to put on a Batman outfit he had acquired, and then sat at his desk and if anyone called him, he would say, ‘Hi there, this is Robin, I’m sorry, but Batman’s not available at the moment.’ On the wall of the pub was a picture of American evangelist Billy Graham with the ’s Cassandra who had challenged him to meet him in a pub for a drink and discussion. When the preacher arrived, Cassandra ordered a beer, while Graham asked for an orange juice and then apparently won over Cassandra who days later wrote in his column: ‘Billy Graham has a kind of ferocious cordiality that scares ordinary sinner’s stone cold.’ The picture on the wall of the Stab, which showed Graham towering over Cassandra, had the caption, ‘You are slowly coming under my spell.’ It was typical of the kind of cynicism that permeated the pub, The name of the Stab in the Back, apparently came from the fact that people came there to verbally do just that. I can remember one lunch time bringing an American pastor into the Stab and, it was quiet as I walked in, except for Revel Barker sitting at the bar. He asked me, ‘Who’s your friend, Dan?’ I explained that it was a Baptist pastor from Southern California and Revel said him, ‘I’ve never been to Southern California.’ The pastor asked him why and he responded, ‘Because it’s full of bloody Yanks.’ However, after the three years of heavy drinking in the Stab, my life was beginning to unravel. I had been receiving death threats from various people I had written about and one night, as I was at my lowest ebb, a friend came to the pub to suggest I might like to now get out and start a new life in a different type of writing. He told me that Idi Amin had finally been forced out of Uganda after his murderous reign there where an estimated 500,000 people had been murdered by him and his thugs, and asked if I would like to go with him there to write a book about it. So I did just that. The book was called Uganda Holocaust, and shortly after it came out, I was offered a writing job in America, which I accepted. I now run my own news service (www.assistnews.net) and have a radio show across America called ‘Front Page Radio’ and an Internet TV show called His Channel Live. But somehow I could never shake the strange affection I had for the Stab and so recently I have featured it in my 44th book – my first novel – called Red Dagger. The pub is discovered by Arch Bishop, a New York-based journalist who had been sent over to London, who spends more time there than actually working on covering the ‘British Beat.’ By the way, the Stab wasn’t all bad, and I have to say that although I am now an insulin-dependent diabetic who is not allowed to drink, I would love to have gone back there one more time to see if my thoughts about it were all true. But alas, all I could do on my last visit was to buy a pizza. Jonathan Snape By Richard Stanley Few newspapermen will recognise the grim and sordid picture of our industry being painted at the Leveson inquiry; a different world from what most of us know, admire and enjoy. Old hands will recoil from some of the wilder excesses being thrown around; younger recruits to the game will be rather baffled by it all. Last weekend I lost one of my best friends, Jonathan Snape, deputy picture editor of Express Newspapers’ production centre at Broughton, near Preston. He had suffered a brain aneurysm a week previously and never recovered. He was one of the good guys. Daily Star Sunday editor Gareth Morgan said: ‘He will be a massive loss to the newspaper. He was here from the paper’s first issue more than nine years ago and was instrumental in helping it become the success it is today.’ Daily Star Sunday sports editor Ray Ansbro, who worked closely with Jon to give the section the picture power it is well-known for, said: ‘Jon was just a fantastic guy and nobody ever had a bad word to say about him. He was a consummate professional and a wonderful human being.’ Picture editor Barry Williamson said: ‘Everyone is just stunned. Jon had a superb eye for pictures, particularly when it came to sport. But, more than that, he was just a great person, devoted to his family, and his passing will leave a huge hole in the lives of everyone who knew him.’ Former International Express deputy editor and Mirror Group IT man Bob Mullett worked with him at Broughton. He said: ‘We had feared the worst but had all hoped for the best. A thoroughly nice chap, good at his job and always smiling.’ Most obits which carry seem to be in memory of grizzled hacks well on their way to their dotage. Newspapermen who had spent a lifetime boozing and staggering their way through colourful careers, pubs, small fortunes and marriages. Jonathan Snape was rather different. He was only 41 and left a widow, Sarah, and six-year-old Oliver. I was with him just a couple of days before he was suddenly taken ill. We had a pint at lunchtime in the local boozer. As we often did. Conversation varied from the occasional annoying problem at work to what we would be making our respective families for their evening meal that night. The usual shit. Men don't go down the pub and just talk about football and tits any more. We'd begun to ‘evolve’ – just like our wives said we would! I remember back to the summer of 2002 and the very early days of setting up the Daily Star Sunday in the ‘frozen North’. I'm the IT guy there, by the way. For the first couple of weeks I sat in the corner of the office keeping to myself, waiting for someone to scream: ‘I can't get this fucking thing to work!' I would then step in before they began to kick the offending computer all round the office. The cries were all from the ‘wordsmiths’. I never got a call from the picture desk. I watched from a distance and it didn't take long to see why. They had their own ‘techie’ on board. I wasn’t threatened, more interested. Who is this guy? More to the point, where does he disappear to at lunchtime? He's not in the canteen and there’s no sign of him at the local ASDA. I stood by the door one day and waylaid him. ‘Where are you off to, then?' I asked. 'The pub. Fancy one?' And that was the start of a beautiful friendship, as Bogart said at the end of Casablanca We struggled through three dummy runs and knocked out most of the kinks thanks to some extra tech support and hard graft from some great operators. But we got there and published our first edition on September 15. Feeling pretty good about what we'd achieved we thought we'd organise ourselves a Christmas ‘do’. Jon, who had started his career as a photographer on northern regional newspapers, took the bull by the horns and offered up a venue with a great location, food, tipple and price that was too good to miss. The place: Nando’s at The Printworks, the former Withy Grove newspaper printing centre in Manchester. Jon’s wife was working for the parent company and we got a good deal on the food, beer and wine. Excellent! Most of the guys had worked out of Manchester on the nationals in the eighties and it seemed a fitting place to celebrate the successful rebirth of northern national newspaper production! Suffice to say, a great night was had by all though not many remember the whole night. Just like the old days, I’m assured. Over the last nine years we spent a lot of time working on technical issues, sorting out Christmas ‘do's’, Champions League football nights out. That sort of stuff. We celebrated together his fortieth last year and, only four months ago, mine. We didn't go more than a day without a phone call or text message. Helping each other in some way or another. I helped Jon's wife with her website and he had some great advice for my daughter on her college photography course. A couple of days before he was taken ill, and with Christmas rapidly approaching, we were discussing Christmas presents for our families. 'Got something for Sarah?' I asked. ‘Sorted,' he said triumphantly, 'She's been after one of those “Parrots” for the car, you know, the hands-free mobile phone kits? I knew she was after one and just told her to order one and get it fitted as my Christmas present.’ The sort of things that pals talk about. He had woken up a little disoriented and confused and with a swelling on his neck. Sarah took him to hospital near their home in Chorley where the medical team examined him before whisking him away to Preston for emergency neuro surgery. Sadly, he didn’t make it. and died after a week of intense medical care. Jonathan Snape My pal ‘Snapey’. One of the good guys.

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• 02 Dec ' 06:04

  Hopefully, while he enjoys a long weekend off, the good Lord Leveson could spare a couple of minutes so I can bend his ear to attempt a definition that he sorely needs for his inquiry into ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the British press’. , into people like John Poulson, Reggie Maudling, John Stonehouse, Jeffrey Archer, Anthony Blunt (the names will be familiar to older readers), into the oddly behaving charity, civil servant or government contractor, and occasionally into organisations like the IRA, the PLO (and the ‘loony Left’, the National Front and the Tory party). (two girls in a bubble bath, made a spread about a film actor): ‘One was foolish enough to tell me without signing a contract. We didn’t pay her. I got a £750 bonus for ripping off the story.’ daughter of actor Denholm Elliott): Tipped off by a police officer, he found her begging. He also found needles and drug dealer notes in her bin. ‘I went too far for that story, someone crying out for help, not crying to meet the fame has died, aged 60. He had a heart attack at his home in France on November 23 – a day after his birthday party - and never regained consciousness. Los Angeles, Saturday November 26, 2011, phone call from a ‘blocked’ number, has to be a journalist methinks. I of course considered myself a ‘photojournalist’, a bit of a delusion I admit, a valuable member of the team I thought, but I soon learnt where photographers really were on the totem pole of intellectual and journalistic order – pretty close to the bottom. Amused was not what his Fleet Street colleagues where after a night with Margaret Thatcher and Denis at the British Consul’s home in Los Angeles. All the reporters from the English papers and television had been invited, standard rules apply, no quotes, no pictures, a pleasant ‘off the record’ night for everyone except Ross, who had only just arrived in Los Angeles and later claimed he was unaware of the rules, after the The pool boys Campbell scoffed. 'Laurence Manifold – sounds like

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• 01 Dec ' 22:02

  Issue # 223 December 2, 2011   Small techie problem this week - so if the links don't work, scroll down to find the stuff.   We all know the feeling. You’re watching TV or a movie and see somebody portraying a newspaperman and you think: ‘That’s not how we do it. We don’t behave like that. We don’t act like that. We don’t talk like that ’ Then you watch live news coverage of a government inquiry, where a witness appears, purporting to be a ‘real’ reporter. And you think, ‘They’ve got the wrong guy. That’s not a newspaperman – it’s a bit-player from Absolutely Fabulous.’ So it was, at least for Revel Barker, watching The Leveson Inquiry, live but at a 2,000 mile distance, courtesy of that nice Mr Murdoch’s Sky News on-stream. , our man inside the Royal Courts of Justice, couldn’t believe his ears, either. But then he’s another reporter from the old school; he worked on investigations for the under Jack Crossley and alongside Harry Longmuir and George Gordon. No wonder he was bewildered. Thence we turn to the sad news of the demise – at the grotesquely young age of 60 – of an old chum, Ian Markham-Smith, who was a real reporter, a successful staff man and an even more successful freelance. Liz Hodgson, who shared many of the honours with him, recalls one of the good guys. His death also prompted snapper Paul Harris to recall a few memories of working with some of the good old boys working Tinseltown. Then Keith McDowall, prompted by John Rodgers’ account last week about the agencies he ran in London, tells how the boys on weeklies with their own linage pool competed against the agencies who tried to nick their copy. And, as usual, our cartoonist props the whole thing up from the picket line. I call myself a reporter By Revel Barker Hopefully, while he enjoys a weekend off, the good Lord Leveson could spare a couple of minutes so I can bend his ear to attempt a definition that he sorely needs for his inquiry into ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the British press’. Only one definition, m’Lud. But it’s an important one. The word is Reporter I spent the bulk of the 1970s doing ‘investigations’, first for the , then for the Sunday Mirror, into people like John Poulson, Reggie Maudling, John Stonehouse, Jeffrey Archer, Anthony Blunt (the names will be familiar to older readers), into the oddly behaving charity, civil servant or government contractor, and occasionally into organisations like the IRA, the PLO (and the ‘loony Left’ and the Tory party). The description on my business card – although it wasn’t the sort of job where you handed many of them out – was Reporter There’s an argument that all reporters are investigative – that it’s the only sort there is. If you sit in the office duplicating the agencies or putting your name on PR handouts, you are not a reporter at all. At absolute best, you’re a sub in a suit. (Younger readers may need to ask an older colleague, if they can find one, what ‘a suit’ is or was; basically it refers to the way that people who went ‘on the road’ – another old-fashioned expression – used to dress.) A reporter is somebody who turns up a piece of information (it may be just a snippet or it may be the whole kit and caboodle) and enquires into it further. When I was a child we called it ‘digging’. A reporter doesn’t accept any information at face value unless he is confident about the source and, even then, about the source’s own motivation in talking. Fleet Street was littered with the corpses of reporters who didn’t check their facts and their sources (although El Vino was also full of the ones who screwed up and managed to overcome their failures). And when he gets sufficient to make what he considers is A Story, he tell his boss (maybe the news editor, in some cases the editor directly, sometimes both) about it and, depending on the substance and the provenance, may be directed to the office lawyer to explain and justify why the newspaper thinks it’s important and intends to use it. A reporter understands the meaning of a story ‘being in the public interest’. One easy example is the politician who’s been elected on the basis that he’s a family man (he’s used pictures of the wife and kids in his campaign) but has been discovered playing away. There are even easier examples – if they can be unearthed – like the guy who has relationships that conflict with what he’s paid to do, especially if it’s out of the public purse. Some journalists have become totally confused by ‘public interest’. The News Of The World, apparently, thought it was any story that might interest the public. But it’s not so. (I realise I am in danger of offering a second definition, here, when I’d promised only one. But let me digress and tell you a story ) I stumbled across a case where a top civil servant – very top, in the Ministry of Defence – had a brief encounter with a male prostitute. In effect it was an accidental relationship, and when he realised what he’d done he immediately reported himself to security, to the Special Branch and to the intelligence services. When I interviewed him he made a full confession. And – here’s the kicker – when the editor read the copy he asked me: ‘What, apart from causing severe shame and embarrassment to a senior civil servant, is our justification in running this story? The man was clearly not a security risk because he’d covered his own back. He wasn’t a potential subject for blackmail What is the public interest in a man, any man, paying for sex with a tart, if it doesn’t conflict with his job or even with his private life?’ And the copy went into the safe for another day. And that’s another story, maybe for a quiet week at But back to the plot. A reporter, with what looks like the basis of a story, makes enquiries. He knows, for a start, about all the reference books and about places like Companies House; he probably has access to a reverse telephone directory. And there are all sorts of little wrinkles he can use to find somebody’s address that I am not going into, here, because I am not being paid to teach journalism. I’d only mention (and, honest, this is not intended as a boast because everybody could do it) that in all my years as a reporter I never failed to make contact with anybody whose telephone number was ex-directory. What a reporter doesn’t do – or didn’t – was employ a so-called ‘private eye’ to do the job for him. For god’s sake how did that habit ever take off? What sort of editor or news editor originally told a hapless hack: ‘What? You can’t find the facts? Why not employ a private detective?’ Honestly, it’s beyond belief, isn’t it? Somehow we managed. There were brilliant investigations and exposes when we were going through the mill that were all handled successfully without recourse to devices through which you could hear people talking inside a house, and without bugging their telephones or intercepting their voicemail. True, in those days we didn’t have the equipment. I’d like to think that we were so proficient that we didn’t need it. Paul McMullan, whose evidence to Lord Leveson is ably dissected below, said he had ‘a surveillance van’. A what ? And that the kept a fleet of a dozen cars for tailing people. Can he be serious? Did the editor and the managing editor know? Did the bean-counters? He also said naively that the Screws reflected what the readers wanted, which was why it sold so many copies every Sunday. He even described it, without a hint of shame, as a ‘daily mirror’ of what the readers wished to read. Oh no it bloody wasn’t. Let me end with a small but vital home truth for the benefit of Mr McMullan and his sometime colleagues, and for the current generation, and perhaps even more importantly for Lord Leveson. The papers do not supply what their readers want, and they never did chiefly because nobody in charge of putting a newspaper together has ever met a reader. Reporters sometimes, though obviously less frequently these days, met actual readers, but reporters don’t have any say about what goes into the paper. Editors give the readers what they, the editors, want to see in it. Readers, on the whole, like what the editors give them; if they don’t, they stop buying it, but declining circulations clearly don’t affect the contents of the papers. If they did, they wouldn’t be full of so much crap. I hate to say it (that’s lying) but the forgotten editors of the distant past had a clearer idea of what kept the readers happily buying their product. Which is possibly how they sold newspapers by the millions. As Uncle Theodore said in Scoop: ‘Change and decay in all around I see ’ Gutted by the gutter press A man with the looks and voice of Roland Rat proudly presented himself as the face of the gutter press this week, explaining that he was a dedicated seeker after truth and justice, someone who had tried to hold power to account. That was his own appraisal. An alternative view might be that Paul McMullan was sleaze made flesh, amorality personified, ethics denied, a foot soldier in a semi-criminal press underworld. These are opposing interpretations. You pays your money and you makes your choice, at any point in between. One can only imagine which view Mr McMullan triggered in the panic-stricken offices of tabloid editors. It was a defining moment for the Leveson inquiry and, perhaps, for our industry. Here Lord Leveson saw his challenge encapsulated in one person. How do you deal with journalists who hold a different view of right and wrong, of compliance with the law and of the exercise of compassion? On Tuesday we saw the best and the worst of journalism cohabiting at the Royal Courts of Justice. The inquiry has started to resemble in part a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Hearing. In the morning a leather-jacketed Nick Davies delivered a masterclass in the kind of admirable investigative journalism that has led to the present proceedings. He followed Richard Peppiatt, one-time Daily Star reporter, who had switched sides and now wished to apologise to people he had once written about. Then, after lunch, it was the turn of Mr McMullan. If Davies were to be cast as the revolutionary hero, and Peppiatt as the brave hack struggling with his conscience, then McMullan would be the secret policeman. The nation has to thank him for his candour. In his position most of us would have dissembled, ducked and dived. In fact he leapt ahead of the questions, so eager was he to follow his professional instinct and give us revelation, sensation and headlines. As a former deputy features editor of the News of the World, he offered insights into the editorial initiatives that had ended with the paper’s demise. Although it has gone, its culture, ethics and practices may have been embedded elsewhere. He testified for two hours. Here’s some extracts from his evidence as he discussed the 300 articles he had written, without once losing a libel case. Anti-paedophile campaign: ‘I’d written something and created a riot and got a paediatrician beaten up. You like to do something that has impact.’ Editorial selection: ‘This is what the people of Britain want. I was simply serving their needs... the judge and jury are the readership.’ Phone hacking: ‘Phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool given the sacrifice we (journalists) have to make to get to the truth.’ Milly Dowler:‘...The hacking of Milly Dowler's phone was not a bad thing for a journalist to do... (it was) a well-meaning journalist on their side looking for Milly, and how annoying it must be for Pc Plod. Our intentions were honourable.’ Ends and means: ‘Most of us would have done what was required to get a story. You don’t just go to a paedo priest and say, “Are you a priest because you like abusing choirboys?”... Any means is fine by me if the target is worth it. The end justifies the means. Kelvin MacKenzie said that if you didn’t get caught you got the Pulitzer; if you get caught you go to prison.’ Voicemail interception: ‘Not uncommon. [Judge warned him against self-incrimination.] I swapped Sylvester Stallone’s mother for David Beckham’s. Once I rang up David Beckham and he answered (he impersonated Beckham’s voice). I didn’t hack his phone in that instance.’ Editors’ awareness:‘Yes. We did these things for Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson...Andy Coulson brought that practice with him when he was appointed deputy editor.’ Brooks and Coulson: ‘They should have been the heroes of journalism but they’re the scum of journalism in that they dropped me and my colleagues in it. How dare they throw us to the wolves?... The little men - the reporters - were screwed big time by our bosses.’ David Cameron:Cameron had been ‘moulded’ by Brooks. ‘We have a future Prime Minister cosying up to the arch criminal.’ Editorial checks: ‘The first thing the editors ask is where you got the story from. Senior editors listened to messages.’ Other culprits: ‘Phone hacking was widespread across Fleet Street.’ Paparazzi: ‘They don’t give a hoot what you’re saying here [in the Inquiry]. They just want to get pictures and send them back to Mexico.’ Subterfuge: ‘I used to pose as a drug taker, drug dealer or a millionaire from Cambridge.’ Photo stealing (referring to a photo taken off a mantelpiece): ‘Rebekah Brooks said, “No, put it back, we’re not allowed to take stuff,” and Piers (Morgan, then NoW editor) said, “Who cares?” and we put it in the paper.’ Ripping off:(two girls in a bubble bath, made a spread about a film actor): ‘One was foolish enough to tell me without signing a contract. We didn’t pay her. I got a £750 bonus for ripping off the story.’ Car chases:‘Twelve pool cars, switched around. Before Princess Diana died, it was such good fun.’ He claimed most celebrities ‘enjoyed’ being pursued, that Sienna Miller and other complainants were the exceptions. Dustbin rifling:‘Yes.’ Privacy:‘Privacy is the space bad people do bad things. Privacy is for paedos, privacy is evil and brings out hypocrisy.’ Expenses fiddles: ‘We were not well paid. I was on £60,000. So I claimed £15-20,000pa, of which £3,000 was legit.’ Press Complaints Commission:‘The glory days of the 90s when it was so much fun before Diana died... people do take notice and are reigned in.’ Jennifer Elliot (daughter of actor Denholm Elliott): Tipped off by a police officer, he found her begging. He also found needles and drug dealer notes in her bin. ‘I went too far for that story, someone crying out for help, not crying to meet the News of the World. I asked, “Would you have sex for £50?” and she went, “All right.” Was she a prostitute [as described in story]? It gets worse. I took her back to her flat and took a load of pictures of her topless. She was in the grip of addiction. I wanted to help her but I was driven to write the best story I could. When I heard she’d killed herself, I thought there’s one I regret - but there’s not many.’ The first week of evidence to Leveson was bad enough, especially that from the Dowlers and Kate and Gerry McCann. This week it got worse. A dignified Christopher Jefferies described what it was like being the centre of a newspaper witchhunt after being wrongly arrested for the Joanna Yeates murder in Bristol. He said: ‘I was effectively under house arrest and went from friends to friends - rather as if I were a recusant priest at the time of the Reformation I suppose, going from safe house to safe house.' Ann Diamond said she’d been deliberately targeted by Murdoch newspapers because, she believed, she had dared to challenge Rupert Murdoch over some of his newspapers’ journalism. Richard Peppiatt confirmed that the Daily Star could only be described as a newspaper in the loosest sense in that they invented stories without any real basis. He said they had also exploited race for commercial purposes... ‘This will sell us more papers if we keep banging this drum.’ Of his own reporting of Matt Lucas’s partner’s suicide, he said: ‘I’d like to apologise to his family. I accept no one held a gun to my head. I feel very ashamed... the tabloids are only interested in what they can get away with.’ Alastair Campbell, former spin doctor to Tony Blair, summed up the wider impact of Leveson revelations: ‘Now the public know the truth, they are horrified and they are demanding Parliament does something about it.’ The inquiry is compelling in the way an internet suicide site might be compelling. For journalists and readers of , there is only despair. It has a long way to run yet. Perhaps someone will yet offer hope. John Dale's website dedicated to the Inquiry is at johndalejournalist.co.uk Ian Markham-Smith By Liz Hodgson Ian Markham-Smith, of Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mail National Enquirer fame has died, aged 60. He had a heart attack at his home in France on November 23 – a day after his birthday party - and never regained consciousness. I am devastated and numb, and overwhelmed by the messages I have received from old friends and colleagues all over the world. Ian joined his local weekly, the Farnham Herald, when he left school and moved on to the Birmingham Post, where he was property correspondent in the early 1970s, and did shifts on the News of the World Daily Mail in Manchester. From there he went to the Sunday Telegraph and quickly to the Daily Mail, where he was a foreign fireman. Ranters readers may recall his memories of the twin Dutch sieges a few months ago, and he also spent months in Kenya, covering Idi Amin, and escaped from a Ugandan jail with a photographer by stealing a visiting priest’s car and gunning it to the border. Like so many of Fleet Street’s best in the 1970s he was lured to the National Enquirer and worked in the London office, first as a reporter and later as European bureau chief. That was in the glory days, when Enquirer people travelled the world on Generoso Pope’s credit cards. We met about that time, though we always disagreed exactly how: he maintains he was doing a Saturday shift at the Sunday Mirror and I bought him a cup of tea; I say he was doing Saturday duty on the Daily Mail and came to the White Swan to have a drink with Richard Moore while I was also on a break. In 1980 we decided we’d had enough of England and thought of moving to Paris, where he had spent a lot of time for the Daily Mail It didn’t quite work out like that: we went to New York to talk to papers there about supplying copy, and Ian ended up being offered the job of news editor of Globe, which was then based in Montreal and had offices in New York. So off we went to Montreal, but a trip to Los Angeles in the middle of a bitterly cold winter convinced us that that would be a better place for us, so we severed our ties with the world of actual paid employment to become freelances. After a couple of years we were offered jobs on the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, but shortly returned to the UK, where we briefly worked for Laurie Manifold in investigations on the before heading back to Los Angeles. Ian made the headlines on his own account at that time, when the actor Sean Penn beat him up in Nashville, Tennessee, leaving him with post traumatic stress syndrome and hearing loss in one ear. But that did not slow him down. Throughout his life he was plagued with health problems – he was born with disabled legs, got a heart infection in Kenya, had prostate cancer in his 20s – but always shrugged them off and got on with life. Then came another stint in Hong Kong, where he was in PR for a while before becoming deputy editor of the Sunday South China Morning Post and then editor of Tatler He was always a bon vivant, and his time at Tatler saw him become a fixture at cocktail parties and banquets, when he was not propping up the bar at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, and he was a guest presenter on local radio and regular in gossip columns. But Hong Kong can be very claustrophobic and we decided to regroup, and headed back to England to sort out our options. Ian became assistant news editor of the Sunday Mirror in 1989 but left after a row with the then editor, Eve Pollard, over coverage of the first Gulf War, and back we went to Los Angeles. There he spent a lot of time on the road, mainly for the Sunday Mirror, doing backgrounders – or ‘first fucks’, as we called them – on people like Sharon Stone. He also spent a lot of time trying to get Kim Basinger’s first husband, make-up artist Ron Britton, to talk. That was a godsend because in the dark days after the death of Diana, when there was no work, Ron called out of the blue and we ended up writing a book about Kim with him, for John Blake. More books followed, on Jerry Springer and Nicolas Cage. During this time we were seriously thinking about our dream of a house in France, where we had owned a flat since the early 1980s, and after exploring Provence decided to stay in the Alps, where we already had many friends. Thanks to the contacts we had built up over the years we were able to keep up the Los Angeles end while spending most of our time in our mountain chalet with our dogs. Ian died days after the 10th anniversary of our moving in, and just like the outpouring of support I have received from journalist friends, local friends, both French and English, have been a great help. He was an incredibly loving and generous man, never begrudging the many visits to England to take care of my parents in their last years, and devoting himself to his mother and aunt. This year we were blessed to see a lot of old friends, many of whom we had not seen for years – Graham Gadd, Laurie Manifold, Peter Burden, Tony Frost (a close friend from California whom Ian first met in Kenya), and many old Sunday Mirror mates at Tony Bushby’s splendid 70th birthday bash. He truly was a one of a kind. Working with giants By Paul Harris Los Angeles, Saturday November 26, 2011, phone call from a ‘blocked’ number, has to be a journalist methinks. ‘Ian Markham-Smith is dead’, the voice said. The caller was another snapper as it happened. We had both worked with him. We shared some thoughts about Ian, ex Fleet Street journalist who came to Hollywood in the early 80s, drunken poolside parties, packed with other hacks, mostly from Fleet Street but occasionally Australia, typically on evenings like these they where full of back stabbing conversations and alcohol. One particular Markham-Smith exclusive stuck in my mind. It was the mid 80s and Ian Botham's career was winding down and his manager had spread the story that Ian was coming to Hollywood, where he had ‘an appointment at Universal Studios’ and he was staying in luxury in Santa Monica. Markham-Smith fixed an interview with the manager who confirmed the details. What he did not know was Markham-Smith already had the truth: the appointment at Universal Studios was buying a ticket and going to the Studios’ theme park as a visitor, The luxury home was in a back garden of a friend in Santa Monica double page spread in the Daily Mail with pictures and an apoplectic Botham and manager the next day. When I hung up, I reminisced some more about the legends and names, some dead, some still hacking away, those masters of the written word who came to Hollywood, either on assignment or as bureau chiefs or foreign correspondents, some to stay and others to return to London, or other parts of the globe, seeking a good story and a living. In Hollywood. They all needed snappers. I was one and I worked with a steady stream of Fleet street legends that came to town. I of course considered myself a ‘photojournalist’, a bit of a delusion I admit, a valuable member of the team I thought, but I soon learnt where photographers really were on the totem pole of intellectual and journalistic order –  pretty close to the bottom. It had been an odd path to Hollywood for me, growing up in North Devon, witnessing Jeremy Thorpe's adventures, at 29 leaving in 1975 and going to Africa and ending up in Hollywood, late 1977. In Rhodesia I had met photographer Terry Fincher; I had just been served a deportation notice and was considering my options, about to be thrown out the country. Terry was about to loose his ex Fleet Street, west coast photographer, Bob Aylott. He said to me, ‘Bugger this serious shit, you should go to Hollywood, you will never regret it.’ Boy was that guy ever right, he got me an assignment from the London Sun to cover Prince Charles and a royal tour of Canada. After Prince Charles, I went to Los Angeles. One of my first assignments and lessons came from Brian Vine, Daily Express New York Bureau Chief and another legend. My mistake after the assignment? Sending an invoice for the agreed fee and no expenses Next thing I got was a call from another photographer who worked for Brian, Akhtar Hussein, based in Dallas Texas. ‘Hey, Brian has asked me to explain expenses to you; breakfast, lunch, dinner, miles, hospitality, the best hotels, best cars if you rent one, always load the expenses, they will be paid. Never, never send an invoice again like the one you just sent, its been ripped up, re submit.’ That was it, a great lesson. In the 70s if you were a new ‘snapper’ to Hollywood you would soon work with Ivor Davis, he had blazed a path of glory as an English journalist working in Hollywood from the late 60s. If legend and my memory are to be believed in 1975 Douglas Thompson, then on the night desk of the Daily Mail and John Hiscock working on the night desk of the London Sun, went for a drink after their shift and somehow 24 hours later found themselves on the beach in Santa Monica, California, and calling back their desks to explain ‘the situation’. Apparently they where forgiven, becoming for at least the next 10 years correspondents for those same papers on the west coast of America. Paul Dacre arrived in Hollywood about 1978, then working for the Daily Express in their New York bureau. We put together a speculative feature on a possible Kennedy movie to be made made a great spread for Dacre, clearly a guy destined for greater things. Ian Brodie who had previously been editor of the Scottish Daily Express and famously closed that title in Scotland came to Los Angeles and lived in Topanga Canyon, a community famous for rock legends and hippies living there, like Supertramp, Neil Young, Jim Morrison. Ian started a local newspaper, The Topanga Messenger. For years he was the Daily Telegraph west coast correspondent. We did assignments for all the Telegraph titles. Once, on a scandal involving fraud, perpetrated by a South African multi-millionaire who had fled South Africa and came to live in La Jolla, California, we went for a straightforward door knock. No answer, so we broke into the guy’s garden, jumping over the fence , we went to the back of his house and could see the man through the window. Ian started hammering on his window, screaming for an interview, it was another lesson, these Fleet Street guys do not take no for an answer. The Kings Head was a meeting place for almost every UK journalist visiting LA, a pub in Santa Monica owned by Phil Elwell from Birmingham; propping up the bar over the years I rubbed shoulders and shared pints with Les Hinton, Piers Morgan, Paul Connew, Barry Wigmore, Tony Frost but rarely Ross Benson. There was a man cut from another cloth. ‘Dear boy,’ he would say to me, ‘we need to proceed to Mexico and meet the Shah & Empress of Iran.’ Ross was a man of great style and panache. He is the only journalist I have travelled with to whom, on a flight, female flight crew would surreptitiously hand their phone numbers and tell him where they where staying. He would downplay the story of being invited to swim with Princess Margaret when she stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel ‘Dear boy, I observed protocol and swam two feet behind her, I was there to amuse.’ Amused was not what his Fleet Street colleagues where after a night with Margaret Thatcher and Denis at the British Consul’s home in Los Angeles. All the reporters from the English papers and television had been invited, standard rules apply, no quotes, no pictures, a pleasant ‘off the record’ night for everyone except Ross, who had only just arrived in Los Angeles and later claimed he was unaware of the rules, after the Daily Express ran the exclusive. Phil Finn, George Gordon then there was Paul Connew, initially greeted with enthusiasm by his colleagues when he was assigned as west coast correspondent for the , he shook the established way of Californian laid back tabloid journalism to the core; bloody fellow worked to hard, how did he do it ? Before Connew's arrival most foreign correspondents would wait for their Los Angeles Times to be delivered to them at dawn, that being about 3 pm in London, plenty of time to rip of the top stories and file. What the sneaky Mr Connew did was go get a first edition about 1 am (about 9 am the same day in London) from the downtown office of the LA Times and file before going to bed, allowing editors to walk into the 10.30 am morning news conference with new stories to be developed in the next 7 hours while the competition napped. This screwed everyone else because by 7 the next morning in Los Angeles the already had people working on stories, photographers, sources, allowing them to file before closing the edition that day and beating the competition, usually by 24 hours. Connew would not stop, despite the pleas of his rivals and comrades so everyone else had to compete, evenings ruined. I can only imagine Connew’s fortitude and energy came from his ability to sleep at the drop of a hat, anytime of day, even if you were eating with him. Peter Mckay was another great guy who came with a different attitude and plan to being the west coast correspondent of the Daily Mail, based in Los Angeles. He replaced Peter Sheridan and decided to base himself in Santa Barbara 70 miles outside LA. His plan was to avoid breaking news, which was always a nuisance and interfered with being a true foreign correspondent, having fine lunches, writing meaningful stories about society and business one of which took us to Benton, Arkansas to interview Sam Walton, at the time the richest man in America and founder of Wal Mart. His people when we turned up at his company headquarters told us to get lost in no uncertain terms. Mr Walton does not do interviews, he awakes at 5am every day and comes to the office, he has no time for you. So it’s back to tried and proven Fleet Street techniques, the doorstep. After a night of fine dining and wine, it’s 4.35am and I am alone in a car, slumped behind the wheel outside Sam Walton's home. He comes out in his pick-up and drives into the centre of town, parks, gets out and goes into a shop, the lights come on: he is in a barbers chair getting his haircut. I shoot through the window world exclusive. Later when I called Peter McKay who was just waking up his subsequent interview with the hairdresser revealed that Sam Walton did this once a week, always paying $5 and leaving no tip, always leaving with the hairdresser’s newspaper. It’s great to work with the greatest. There were also women Fleet Streets legends. Wow they could be tough to work for, demanding and unrelenting, they knew they had to be better than their male competitors and most of them were. I grimaced at the pharmacy having been dispatched by Jean Rook to get a box of Tampax; that seemed to me the acid test of a snapper’s compliance – control exercised early by many female big names. Jean left you in no doubt of her abilities and reputation as a star and legend of Fleet Street. She was followed by Hillary Bonner who got me in terrible trouble for not getting the right pictures of Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neil during an at home, not to mention almost being thrown out of Michael Caine's home , having been told before entering to leave her alone with Michael and to go into his rooms and get some special exclusives, pictures on the walls, inside his bedroom, etc. After about five minutes Caine noticed I had disappeared, he found me and demanded the film.‘Don’t ever do that again when we work together,’ said Hillary, scolding me in front of Caine. She told me ‘to sit down and behave’. Phillipa Kennedy of the Daily Express caused more grief. My wife was friendly with Jane Seymour and using that contact I got Phillipa an interview in her multi million dollar Santa Barbara home. But the resulting double page spread, with banner headline, ‘Me Jane, Me Perfect’, destroyed our friendship with Ms Seymour. Other greats Caroline Graham, Sharon Churcher, Annette Witheridge all still doing a great job, tormenting photographers with a work ethic that is hard to compete with. In 1994 I started a celebrity photo agency that I sold to Getty Images at the height of the dot-com fever in 1999. I left Getty in 2000 but continued to snap away because of a non-compete agreement. When that expired in early 2002 I started another celebrity photo agency which is today PacificCoastNews.com with offices in London, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles, living in California with my wife Petronela and two kids. It’s been a strange and exciting life, an incredible journey, but I would not have done it any differently. Let’s hope for reincarnation and next time I will return as the brightest on the planet, a reporter for a tabloid. Or is that dream now over? The pool boys By Keith McDowall John Rodgers told us a lot last week about financial engineering but not much about the kind of journalism produced by the agencies he ran. A good job he did not depend on the South London News Agency because my pals and I on the South London Press left very few crumbs lying around for them In particular I worked closely with Laurie Manifold – praised rightly by Liz Hodgkinson in the same last week. He was Manifold of Southwark and I was McDowall of Bermondsey. By the time the SLNA had rushed out for the very earliest edition of our twice-weekly paper, our stuff was safely in the hands of the copy tasters in Fleet Street With colleagues like Gabriel Stokes, Tommy Hughes and the late Brian McConnell – who got decorated for going to the aid Princess Anne in a kidnapping attempt – the SLNA were on thin gruel in their pokey office in East Dulwich. We operated much nearer the action out of an office over the Elephant & Castle tube station, knew our ‘manors’ thoroughly and were very seldom beaten to the punch by the SLNA locusts. If, as John Rodgers tells us, Mike Anderson left his agency in the hands of his wife when he went off to the Daily Mirror she would not have had a lot to do. And the fact that we knew he was sitting on the Mirror news desk explained why that newspaper was always phoned last when we had a very hot tip. Manifold, Tommy Hughes and I worked for several years on Saturday shifts at the People too and we all had our share of being Tom (Duncan) Webb's witness-assistant on some horrible assignments. It was not my cup of tea but Laurie was identified by Sam Campbell, the editor, as a likely successor to Murray Sayle, and Webb's permanent sidekick. So to try him out Laurie was sent to cover the East Coast floods in 1953 and made a good job of it. Campbell came over and asked me: ‘This pal of yours – what's his Christian name? ‘Laurence.’ Campbell scoffed. 'Laurence Manifold – sounds like Melody Maker. What's his second name?’ And that was how for some years Laurie had to labour along as the upmarket Charles Manifold. It did not stop him becoming a much praised fact digger – a trait well honed on the excellent 120,000 a week selling South London Press which trained us. Me? I went off to the Daily Mail and quit the People as soon as I was offered a staff job. Laurie joined the permanent staff of the People so our paths diverged. I dropped £1,500 a year when I walked into Northcliffe House but it was the paper on which I always wanted to work and it was time to find out if I could make it. I stayed 13 years, becoming industrial editor. But I bet the South London News Agency was pleased in East Dulwich when at last our team broke up and they could start scavenging again on other people's hard work     Ranters

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• 24 Nov ' 20:03

  Issue # 222November 25, 2011 We start with the Leveson Inquiry on the grounds that it’s still too new to have become boring (but it will, Oscar; it will). The thing is that it could in theory produce at least one good story a day for its entire run, and it could be of constant interest to the readers, but it’s the papers that will tire of reporting it. Newspapers by definition want new subjects (not necessarily the same as ‘news’) and my guess is that they will get bored with the story before the readers do. Anyway, we are not reporting it, so much as critiquing it, commenting on it. And following the opening suggests that the gurus who offered their expert advice to the Inquiry, before it started, may soon find themselves hopping about on the wrong foot. Hardly changing the subject, but opening it up a bit, Liz Hodgkinson relates how we – and especially the, ahem, weaker sex, used to go about investigations when she was a lass. John Rogers writes about the London news agencies of our youth (it appears that he owned them all). Ted Grahamremembers Pater Caney, a sometime sub, andSteve Linde of the Jerusalem Post describes a gentleman of the press. And Colin Dunne, idle on parade, joins the army and discovers a two-sentence definition of journalists that Lord Leveson might feel inclined to keep in mind. All this, plus our cartoonist, , still on the subject of ‘culture’ in the newsroom. Street of Shame As the evidence poured out in a torrent, it dawned on me that some very senior journalists have been lured into a trap. Lord Leveson may have constructed it inadvertently. More likely, it was a cold, calculated act to corner Fleet Street’s big beasts, lock them in a cage and then poke them with a sharp stick. The trap was so obvious, nobody saw it, and now it is too late. These thoughts ran through my head as I sat listening to the witnesses streaming through the Royal Courts of Justice in the second week of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards. Their testimony was overwhelming. Only a fraction of it could be adequately covered in the newspapers and on TV. At both macro and micro level it shamed Fleet Street, and we can expect lots more of the same, day after day, until mid-January, by which time the tabloids might well be having a nervous breakdown. I cannot read Lord Leveson’s mind but it is difficult to believe his inquiry is not already accepting there is more than a prima facie case of journalistic corruption and debasement. One month ago he seemed such a kindly old gent when he sent out invitations to the press to participate in ‘seminars’, saying: ‘Come along, tell me what you think.’ It was flattering to be on his list and so, in their self-important ways, various Fleet Street legends stepped up on stage to tell him how great they were. They spouted freely about the goodness embodied in the Press Complaints Commission and preached the virtues of our current system of self-regulation. From the side of the hall, Leveson watched and listened, as a cat might watch a mouse. He sat motionless, silent and poised. He did not contribute. He made no remarks, no comments, expressed no opinion, although some say he occasionally purred. He let others do the talking. It was a lawyer’s trick. Here’s some rope. Have you enough to hang yourself? Here’s a pot of Dulux. Bet you can’t paint yourself into a corner. Ooh, you can. What a clever boy! At lunchtime, over M&S sandwiches, everyone nattered as if at an embarrassingly dull party. Well, the party is over. This week he started calling the victims, those who found themselves in the palm of a berserk giant. When Bob and Sally Dowler began to speak, how Paul Dacre must have wished he could eat his words. Every headline more or less read the same with pictures of Mrs Dowler, hand clasping her brow, describing the false hope that was raised by someone hacking into the phone of her missing daughter Milly, later found murdered. ‘I rang her phone. Bob. I said, she’s picked up her voicemail. She’s alive!’ This was a decent mother and her equally decent husband. But it wasn’t just the Dowlers. It was witness after witness – not just headliners like Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan – but lawyers, agents, a footballer and others. Kate and Gerry McCann were devastating. Piece by piece, the reputation of Fleet Street was being dismantled. As I listened I found myself recalling Dacre saying older journalists had been ‘outrageous’ in the old days and loftily, authoritatively, informing the judge: 'The Press Complaints Commission has changed the very culture of Fleet Street.' Yes, I kept thinking but in which direction? How eagerly Dacre and other notables – Roy Greenslade and Bob Satchwell in particular – took the bait and fell into the Leveson trap. They have made themselves hostages to fortune, as they will discover when they too give evidence. Leveson speaks softly and carries a big club. The big club is Robert Jay QC, the inquiry’s counsel, and to describe him as forensic is like saying CSI is a shambles. There is not enough wool in New Zealand to pull over his eyes. With the Steven Lawrence trial taking place at the Old Bailey, this was an important week for Paul Dacre. But that hearing was overshadowed by Leveson. Yes, Dacre is a great editor – some say the greatest – but that will count for nothing here. What counts here is that he has been the most prominent advocate of self-regulation through the PCC. If the judge finds the PCC has failed as a regulator (rather than as a mediator) as looks highly likely, then someone will have to carry the can. The PCC chairman, Lady Buscombe, was the first futile sacrifice some time ago. But the big beast is Dacre. I can’t help but feel the word ‘sorry’ might be more usefully and frequently deployed. Nothing can take away his journalism. For that he will always be a revered, if controversial, figure. But he may yet face his darkest hour. Forgive me if I do not give a shedload of evidence in detail. I don’t wish to duplicate what is available elsewhere. I also accept that up to now we are hearing only from the ‘victims’, and so it is one-sided. But the ship is holed below the waterline. One witness, Graham Shear, summed up what he experienced as a solicitor constantly having to firefight false stories on behalf of celebrity clients: The press made a conscious calculation regarding the cost of stories and the risks. To claim to be exposing hypocrisy in others while they themselves were acting unlawfully was the ultimate hypocrisy. ‘They were almost untouchable, at a fever pitch of trying to produce stories. They lost their moral compass and it became systematic to push the boundaries. They were untouchable and could do almost anything. As I explained in last week I have set up a site dedicated to this media scandal but, like much better resourced outlets, I am overwhelmed and failing miserably to fulfil my mission. I do believe that the inquiry should be fully reported – in a Leveson Made Easier sort of way – but even the Independent have a limit on how much space, and staff, they can devote to it. Good stories are being buried alive under even better stories. Eighty per cent are not seeing the light of day. Hugh Grant’s evidence – even when subbed down – was still 9,000 words; I subbed Robert Jay’s opening address to a mere 22,000 words. Yes, twenty-two thousand. But they were all very pertinent. Although this is too much for newsprint, it can be easily accommodated in our brave new online world. I wonder whether any readers – perhaps, like myself, self-diagnosed with OCD – might be happy to work with me on this project which, with various legal proceedings possible, may last for two years or more. * The evidence is streamed live and available as transcripts at http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/ The raw transcripts are unpublishable without editing. I need some skilled hands to knock them into shape, with subheads, rather as I did imperfectly here – . You don’t have to leave your computer and you are welcome to improve on my rough model. Other Ranters might like to help me cover the wider story in person, with supplementary interviews, revelations, speculations and investigations. We are reporting on the reporters, and their editors and publishers, and Ranters know the field. Email me at johnkdale@msn.com It won’t complicate your income tax return. Your remuneration will be the same as mine. A fat zero. How we did it, in the old days By Liz Hodgkinson As the Leveson Inquiry gets under way, younger readers of this site – I’m assuming there are some – might wonder just how journalistic investigations were carried out in the olden days. How did we cope without corrupt coppers, mobile phones, digital cameras, email or laptops? How were the investigations organised? To what dirty tricks did we stoop and did the end justify the means? Most often, we would try to get jobs in the organisation or company we wanted to expose. During the few days of this job, we had to take secret pictures, ask awkward questions and tape conversations, none of which was an easy task when we were supposed to be ill-educated, semi-literate menial workers. And frequently, the reporters called upon to get these jobs were young women. One of the first was Mary Beith, who exposed the notorious smoking beagles story in the 1970s after securing a job in the animal laboratory where they were forced to chain smoke. This story, still remembered today, was followed up by the story of the beagles that were bred for vivisection. This time it was Shan Davies’ turn to infiltrate the breeding farm. She managed to get a job as a kennelmaid at the farm in deepest Wales, after being quickly trained in kennelmaiding by Jean Manifold, the dog-breeding wife of Sunday People investigations chief Laurie Manifold. To nail this story, Shan had to take photos of the beagles and their conditions, at the same time measuring the cages and taking details of the labs where the beagles were to be sent. Her only way of communicating with Manifold’s department was to make a check call from a phone box a mile away from the farm. Every night she had to send her report and a roll of film by Royal Mail – there was no other way. She just managed to post off the last reel of film before she was caught taking pictures and ordered off the premises. Laurie Manifold, who was probably the best newspaper investigations chief ever, knew that reports and film had to be sent daily, otherwise they could be destroyed by the owners of the establishment being exposed. Total secrecy was paramount and it was not easy. At the time Shan undertook her first investigation, she was just 23, and her success in this story led to her being asked to conduct other undercover work, such as getting a job in an old people’s home to expose the dreadful conditions there, and to pretend to be a prostitute, to expose a vice ring. The work could be dangerous and frightening and Shan experienced several nasty incidents, such as being knocked unconscious by the girlfriend of a murderer in a pub. Very often, the young women who did undercover work were completely alone and the entire story depended on them. I was never as intrepid or willing as Shan but I had my moments, such as having to expose dodgy sex doctors and seedy abortion clinics and massage parlours. The terror of being discovered was immense and I was always sure the bosses of these clinics and parlours would be able to hear my heart pounding. Anthea Disney, then at the , blacked up, or ‘Indianed up’ to become an Indian girl and report on racial discrimination from the inside, as it were. She had to take a pill to change the colour of her skin, but her investigation was wholly successful and her story made a huge series. Those were the days, you might say, when newspapers carried out genuine investigations, without recourse to cheque books, private detectives or bent coppers. There was enormous attention to detail when planning one of these investigations, and Laurie Manifold, at least, left nothing to chance, even making Shan write letters of application that were full of spelling mistakes and in childish handwriting. The satisfaction and sense of triumph when you nailed a dishonest or illegal organisation was second to none. But it did require considerable acting ability and ingenuity on the part of the infiltrator. It was no good just getting a job in an old people’s home or animal laboratory; you had to be utterly convincing when you were there. In her early days, Rebekah Wade, as she then was, conducted some investigations of this type – but is anybody doing them now? It seems that all that most young women journalists want to write about are their boyfriends, hairdos and drunken dinner parties. Perhaps – at least one can hope - one result of the Leveson inquiry will be to bring back proper investigative journalism. More stories about the part women played in journalism’s heyday can be found in Liz Hodgkinson’s entertaining book, Ladies of the Street, published by Revel Barker. Model agencies By John Rodgers Paul Fievez's recollections of his days at London News Service and subsequent career in Fleet Street were admirable, instructive and fascinating. But not surprisingly there was a bit of confusion about the many agency names in use in those days – lots of news desk people were confused too. I hope he will not be too embarrassed to learn that North London News Agency was never owned by Tommy Bryant but was a forerunner of my London News Service where Paul starred as a photographer. Bryant originated Fleet Street News Agency and though I helped him set up office above Peel's Pub in December 1961 it took ten years of intense rivalry before I added FSNA to my bewildering array of Company House registered titles. I joked that I owned more agency names than staff members so it is not surprising that confusion existed. There were one or two good reasons for the multiplicity but first I need to explain how it came about. Putting the names into Google will produce little or no information so it might be useful to set the record straight for anyone wishing to know about the multitude of freelances and agencies that once covered our capital city. I spent no more than three months working for Bryant but it was long enough to encourage me to try my hand at the game when we parted acrimoniously. I had nothing better to do while I waited for Bert Pack to make good his promise of holiday casual shifts on the Daily Sketch My only means of transport was a bicycle so it made sense to concentrate effort on the ground I could cover by pedal from my council flat in Holloway. Hence, my first credit line – Rodgers of Islington The name did not suit Lee Lester who became my partner when he, too, left Bryant's employ. We eventually changed it to Headline News Service, rented an office in Hornsey Road, Holloway, and took on a couple of reporters. When I got that call from Bert Pack in the summer of 1962 I turned him down because I was earning much more money as a freelance. In my place I suggested Harry Edgington. He repaid the favour by alerting me to the possibility of acquiring North London News Agency where he once worked. It was the mid 1960s and I was looking for a way out of a souring relationship with Lee. NLNA was set up by Les Taylor in Muswell Hill as early, I believe, as 1939. After the war, he formed a company called Consolidated Reports with two other independent freelance outfits, South London News Agency and West London News Agency. Mike Anderson was the boss of South London and signed it over to his wife when he joined the news desk. I hope someone can tell me who was the man behind West London News Agency. I remember only that he left to write film scripts. When I secured ownership, the three agencies were operating from the same offices in Kings Cross Road under the leadership of Larry Novell. Lee Lester sold me his share of Headline News Service and joined The People as a staff reporter. I set about getting the second letter in the word NEWS, East London News Agency. Unfortunately, Harry Mitchell thought I was too young and inexperienced to ramrod his outfit and sold out to my arch rival, Tommy Bryant. I was so annoyed that I went to Companies House and registered every variation on the name that I could imagine: East London News Service, East London Press Agency, East London Reports, etc. For good measure, I protected my other titles with similar variations. By the end of the exercise, I had about 18 names I could use but none of them was as all embracing and evocative as Fleet Street News Agency. For the sake of simplicity, I plumped for London News Agencies We operated as LNA for at least a year before photographer Roy Reemer accused me of plagiarism. He was a commercial photographer who acquired the library of the long established but by then defunct London News Agency Photos. I decided to avoid an expensive legal battle by replacing Agencies with Service. London News Service survived longer than the offices in which it was born. They suffered severe fire damage after late shift reporter John Penrose stubbed out a Gauloise and went home. The search for new premises led me to Red Lion Square where Joan Barratt was seeking to retire from the photographic agency started by her father at the dawn of press photography. Before any legal agreement had been drawn up, she announced to the staff of Barratt's Photo Press that I was to be its new boss. News soon reached Bryant who hurried back from his annual summer holiday and, once again, trumped my bid. As always, he made Joan promises he could not keep. Tom Merrin once described Bryant's technique as 'the birdseed ploy'. He would entice the budgie from its cage with a promise of birdseed for life. A pension of little but often can appear attractive to retirees. But Bryant's promises were about as reliable as Equitable Life guarantees. Despite disgruntlement from duped sellers and fierce attention from Scotland Yard over snatched pictures, Bryant continued to extend his empire until 1972 when we began jousting for ownership of Sport & General, another venerable picture agency. It was almost in my grasp when I received a surprise call from my rival. ‘Why don't you buy my outfit with the money you are about to spend on S&G?’ he said. That evening, in my car, tearful Tommy admitted he was unable to pay his firm's wages. He had tried to buy Sport & General with a loan from its bankers, NatWest. They agreed, providing he moved all his accounts from Barclays. When Barclays found out, it promptly called in all its extensive loans to him. I was so moved by Bryant's distress that I turned down his offer of every area he controlled. Greater London and its environs would be enough to handle. And I was determined to conclude the deal with Spit and Gob, as the picture agency was sometimes affectionately termed. So now I had the outfits I had long prized, ELNA, Barratt's, and FSNA. With them came Thames Valley News Service with offices in Kingston and a number of court stringers such as Brough of Bow Street and Hadfield of Croydon and others I've forgotten. Too many names, too much confusion, so why keep any? Well, for one thing, they often came with goodies attached. Those were the days when national newspapers paid small weekly sums to stringers and agencies to watch out for their interests. Lose the name and say goodbye to the retainer. When accountants took control of newspapers, those piddling amounts went anyway and that enabled me to streamline our business titles. But there were still advantages to be had through multiplicity. Sport & General's name, for example, was a passport to sporting events whereas Barratt's Photo Press was guaranteed to play a part in the Royal rota. Both were too respectable to countenance paparazzi practices but not London News Service. Since it handled foreign sales for the News of the World, it was obliged to dirty its hands. More important was multiplicity as a defence against legal actions. If necessary, an offending title could be closed down without harm to the rest of the organisation, as we had to do with East London. But my best business name was one few knew because as a holding company it never traded. Instead it owned all the valuable assets of the organisation. It proved to be a better safeguard against libel damages than any insurance policy. Peter Caney By Ted Graham Peter Caney was found dead this week at the obscenely young age of 62. Appropriate, isn't it, that he died as he lived, alone in his bachelor flat. I first met Peter in the early 70s when he worked on the . He had a prodigious talent and I soon hired him for the subs table. He didn't take long to join the mouse race and could have gone much further, so much further, but for a character fault that dogged him all his life – a disdain for authority. On the Mirror, if it couldn't be done his way, it couldn't be done at all. I've lost count of the times I would tell him to speak up and then shut up. Sadly, he never listened and a parting of the ways became inevitable. He moved to the Express where he was mainly the man responsible for the introduction of what was then called ‘new technology’. He knew exactly what he was doing, but, again, when it wasn't done his way he moved on, but this time with a handsome redundancy cheque. After messing about for a couple of years, he left The Street to take up residence in La Manga Club, a sporting resort in south-east Spain. He was a charming man, and a great favourite with the ladies. My daughter revealed when I told her of his death that he was her first adolescent crush. I considered him a friend, we spent at least a dozen golfing holidays together, and he was always warmly welcomed by my family when he visited our home. His death is a terrible tragedy for a young man who could and should have made it big time. I can't get over the feeling of waste. But at least when he died he took with him his own worst enemy. Rest in peace Peter, at last. Our gentleman in Jerusalem By Steve Linde (Jerusalem Post) Eric Silver was a superb journalist with an elegant style, as well as a thorough gentleman who respected the people about whom he wrote – and both of these qualities shone through in the news stories he penned while based in Israel for more than four decades. By Eric Silver, Dateline: Jerusalem, a book of his dispatches from 1967 to 2008 – many for the Guardian and the in the UK – has just been published, three years after his death at the age of 73. Bridget Silver, his wife, came to the Jerusalem Post recently with a copy of the book she had compiled, which I devoured in a week. It is the type of book you can read slowly, though, one article at a time, and I thoroughly recommend it to readers interested in Israel’s past and future. Sir Martin Gilbert correctly observes in his ‘Appreciation’ that the articles tell us not only about the country’s history, but about its soul. ‘Each article published here is worth reading, and each article has lessons that can be pondered,’ Gilbert writes. ‘Even the articles of several decades ago have relevance today.’ The Leeds-born, Oxford-educated Silver was first dispatched to Israel by the Guardian following the Six-Day War in 1967, and five years later he also became the Jerusalem correspondent of the Observer But although he became a veteran of the foreign press corps here, writing for several other foreign publications – including the Jewish Chronicle in London and the Los Angeles Jewish Journal – he also wrote for local publications, including the Post and the Jerusalem Report. (He had initially served as a Post correspondent in London in the 1960s.) Silver fell in love with Jerusalem, which became his home, and the city where he and Bridget raised their three daughters. Unlike the West Bank and Gaza, he wrote – somewhat prophetically – in a dispatch for the Guardian on June 24, 1967, ‘the future of Jerusalem is a problem of a different dimension. The Old City has gained such symbolic significance for the Israelis that it is hard to conceive giving it up ‘Emotions are controlled but strong. When I visited the [Western] Wall all was very calm till one woman suddenly cried, “Let there be peace in the land and the whole world.” Universal amens were released like pressure from a vacuum.’ In another dispatch five years later, titled ‘Two states projected for co-existence in Palestine,’ Silver gives the other side of the story: ‘Mohammed Abou Shilbayih is a dreamer. But then, as he disarmingly reminds you, so was Theodor Herzl. Last year Shilbayih’s Arabic testament, No peace without a Palestine Free State, sold out in four days. ‘This week, like the founder of political Zionism 76 years ago, Shilbayih has followed it with a manifesto. His theme is still that Jews and Arabs must stop brandishing guns and slogans and learn to live together in a land where they both have roots.’ Silver’s first big stories as a foreign correspondent were the Lod massacre in 1972 and the Yom Kippur War a year later. The book includes profiles ranging from Shimon Peres’s rise to power and Menachem Begin’s peace treaty with Egypt to Ehud Barak’s bold gamble at Camp David, a tribute to Yitzhak Rabin, and Binyamin Netanyahu – Israel’s best salesman – selling himself. In between, there are also fascinating dispatches on Ariel Sharon’s formation of Kadima, the spate of suicide bombings following Yasser Arafat’s arrival in the Palestinian territories and a piece for the Jewish Chronicle in 2003 on ‘Where and who are the Jewish settlers.’ ‘In contrast to their television image, not all of the settlers are religious,’ Silver writes. ‘Nor is the settlement enterprise an Anglo-American bunion on the toe of sabra Israel.’ The book ends, eerily, with a comment after the attack on the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva on March 14, 2008, in which eight students were murdered. ‘It is a sad truth that the Mercaz Harav massacre highlighted the fragmented state of Israeli society,’ Silver writes. ‘Almost all the mourners at the memorial service and the funerals that followed it were drawn from the pro-settler religious Zionist community Israel has become a tribal society.’ Martin Woollacott sums up Silver’s legacy nicely in his ‘Afterword’: ‘Eric Silver lived in the wonderfully named Street of the Prophets in Jerusalem, and the consensus of his friends was that he looked the part,’ writes Woollacott, a colleague at the Guardian. ‘Tall and commanding, and with an always evident confidence in both speech and writing, he was one of the foremost journalist interpreters of the Israeli scene for British and other English-speaking readers for over 30 years, and at the same time a very English presence within the Israeli press corps. ‘If he was not literally prophetic, he was nevertheless an extremely accurate and reliable guide to the complexities of Israeli politics.’ By Eric Silver, Dateline: Jerusalem is published by Revel Barker Publishing at £15.99. It is available on-line from BookDepository (with free postage, worldwide), from amazon-uk and amazon-us, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, and all the major retailers, or from any half-decent high street bookshop. The army game By Colin Dunne I can tell you exactly where it was that I heard the most pin-point accurate definition of a journalist. It was in the education building at Catterick army camp, and it was an army psychiatrist, a major, who came up with it. He was trying to find a suitable career for me, and, not entirely to my surprise, he was struggling. I’d spent the morning doing the general intelligence tests – you know, if an elephant is smaller than a bee, then write zebra, that kind of thing. I love those. I wasn’t quite so happy with the practical tests. These were things like a drawing of a well, with bucket and handle. He asked which way would I turn the handle to send the bucket down for water. In the background, you could see the outline of a house. The answer was obvious. ‘Why not just go in the house and use the tap?’ I suggested. The major took a deep breath and then, abruptly, stopped whatever it was he was going to say. I expect it was thank-you. It was just after that, when he’d studied my test papers, that he came up with a two-sentence description that covers almost every hack I’ve worked with. Later, later. What made it even more odd was that he had no idea that I was there as a journalist. At that time, the mid-sixties, I was writing a daily column for the Evening Chronicle on Tyneside. It was a fairly desperate harum-scarum operation, an ideal job for someone who had given up sleep. Flies with blue bottoms looked on me as one of theirs. I can't remember exactly why I came up with the idea of spending a week in the army as a normal recruit , but it may well have been to get a rest. The military wasn’t exactly a family tradition. I think we had a genetic aversion to uniforms, unless it was a nun’s habit by way of disguise. Whenever war broke out, the Dunne males took up their traditional position: next to the exit. In our family, the MC medal stood for Monumental Coward. I was drummed out of the cubs for my sloppy sheepshanks, and I’d escaped National Service on account of my bad back. When asked what brought it on, I said the colour khaki and raised voices, and that was me out. Once they were convinced they weren’t being sent up, the Army PR people loved the idea. But it had to be authentic. They’d drop me into Catterick with a new intake and no-one would know And that’s exactly how it was. I was pitched in with a dozen or so others who were all so delighted to be in the Army that they were practically squeaking with pride. Those who were placed in command were so precisely in character that I suspected they were left-overs from a war-time black-and-white film. With a name like Beverley Yates, our captain could hardly have been a night-club bouncer or a career burglar. A tall, languid young man, he looked a little lost without a teddy-bear. Our growling, grizzled and battle-battered sergeant, Evans, was the one who’d rescue you from no-man’s-land, no mistake. Corporal Baines, ex-boy-soldier who had yet to attempt his first smile, would throw you straight back into no-man’s-land. It was a week of merry-go-round of racing – ‘at the double’ – for kit, making beds, standing next to them and saluting, grabbing grub, polishing boots and buttons, jumping around in the gym, and hour after hour learning to march. Up-down, up-down, one-two-three, from the left you effing halfwit. You know the sort of thing. The baby-faced corporal gave it as his opinion that Mrs Dunne should have kept the afterbirth and thrown me away. I believe he went on to write scripts for Bernard Manning. The boys loved it. At night, dizzy with exhaustion and delight, we rubbed hot spoon handles over chunks of volcanic rock that may one day evolve into boots. The more they blasted and bulled, the more we felt like soldiers. This was the Army, Mr Jones. Although, strictly speaking, I wasn’t a part of it, it was impossible not to be swept along with the rest. When they jumped, I jumped. I shrank under the frequent tongue-lashings and glowed at the rare praise. Yet somehow I failed. For one thing, I couldn’t speak the language. When Sergeant Evans commanded me to stand to attention in front of him, he seemed unaccountably distressed by my reply. ‘Absolutely, sergeant,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry – I’ll be right there. Just give me a couple of minutes, if you don’t mind.’ Eyes popping, he stared at me as though I was an unpolished button. I couldn’t somehow pick up the rhythm of military speech. Mine didn’t have the rat-a-tat-tat of command-and-response. With me, it was more like a chat over afternoon tea with my Auntie Madge. It came as something of a surprise when the padre, in his welcoming speech, assured us we would never be subjected to any bad language. Swearing at soldiers was not allowed, and if we heard any we were to report it. Since all week we had been called B-words, F-words and even the less popular C-word, we lined up bemused as the young corporal addressed us afterwards. ‘As you ’ave just ’eard, you will ’ear no swearing ’ere.’ He screwed his face up into a vicious grimace as he added: ‘You bloody THINGS!’ The earlier stuff sounded like an average morning in any newspaper women’s department, but that th-word really shook me. Somehow the soldierly style was beyond me. I couldn’t march. I’ve no idea why, but the harder I tried, the worse it got. My marching somehow looked more like a foxtrot. Corporal Baines took it as a personal challenge. He lined up alongside me and we marched together, left-right, left-right, left-right. The idea was that with him next to me, I would inevitably follow his example. Why it went wrong I’ll never know. Instead of me catching his rhythm, he caught mine. In no time at all, the two of us were happily fox-trotting round the square together. I may have failed to adapt to the Army, but at least I’d made the Army adapt to me. On the corner of the square we could see the sergeant doubled up with laughter. The young corporal rather lost his military discipline. He raised his little corporal’s stick and smashed it down on a wall. Splinters flew everywhere. If that was the general’s baton he had in his knapsack, that was his promotion buggered. In the evening, as we did our letters home, I somehow became spelling consultant. The Glasgow lad, whose mastery of English was a work in progress, sought my help with telling his girl-friend what he was going to do to her when he got home. ‘You’ve spelt it wrong,’ he protested. ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s a c in it. Otherwise it would be a three-letter word.’ On the Friday, when we were preparing to go home, Roy, a Birmingham boy, was distressed to learn he couldn’t wear his uniform. ‘Me dad’ll be browken-hearted,’ he said. ‘Would it be alroit if I took a boot ’ome. For a towken, loik?’ Capt Yates’ mouth twitched at the edges, but his face remained straight. ‘It’s against Queen’s Regs of course, but pop it in your suitcase and I’ll pretend I don’t know.’ Roy the boot-smuggler was overjoyed. That definition? To the best of my knowledge the Army psychiatrist had never met John Akass, Paul Callan, John Kay or Bill Greaves, but his judgment seemed to cover most hacks. Lining up my two test papers, he frowned. ‘You’re a bit of a funny one, Dunne,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I’ve seen your sort before.’ Then came his assessment. ‘From the IQ tests, you appear to be reasonably intelligent.’ He paused before adding the final line. ‘On the other hand, you can’t actually do anything, can you?’ So what career was open to the intelligently useless? He looked at my hands. ‘Morse operator,’ he said. ‘You’ve got long fingers.’ #

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• 18 Nov ' 10:31

  Issue # 221November 18, 2011 A funny old week, in which the Daily Mirror apologised in a Page 2 correction (they’re all getting in to this idea) for a mistake in referring to the, er oh yes to the Daily Mirror. They got the quote wrong. Well, it happens, I guess. At least, it happens in the modern That was in coverage of the Levenson Inquiry into phone hacking. You’ve heard about the inquiry, of course. It was in all the papers. You may even be bored by it already (and it started in earnest only this week) but, hey, if you’re not interested in newsmen’s behaviour and ‘the culture of the newsroom’, maybe you shouldn’t be here, anyway. We have a (very) brief critique of the story so far, and a piece about how it drove our man in the press bench back to his roots. But, by way of a change, we also have a follow-up to last week’s ‘affectionate memoir of Guy Rais’, this time by Stephen Bates an affectionate memoir of Barbara Taylor Bradford by old-timer Harold Lewis (who worked with her as a child on the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds) and a reminder of the days when spelling was still considered important, by Jim Anderson So, let’s update you quickly on Levenson, and give reporter John Dalehis musing, and then crack on. We’ll end the column, as usual, with cartoonist James Whitworth () watching a movie about tabloids Here’s the (very) brief Levenson: In his opening address to the Leveson Inquiry last Monday - 14 November 2011 - Robert Jay QC displayed a forensic mastery of his brief which ought to have some potential witnesses quaking in their boots. His performance showed he was in a different league from the keen but sometimes meandering MPs on the select committees. He is Don Bradman to their knockabout village cricket teams. But at 24,478 words, with few of them wasted, his presentation was the length of a novella. John Dale has reduced it slightly, to 22,450 words. He sticks faithfully to Jay's text and chronology but has put in subheads and some bold type to give it a clearer structure on the written page. He hopes that helps. Jay sets out the roadmap for the months ahead and, if you’re interested in the big picture, it’s worth taking some time over it. As of this date, it is probably the best overall summary, pulling together the many threads of the story. You can find it at http://johndalejournalist.co.uk/qcs-opening-address-in-full-clarified.php Have notebook, will scribble By John Dale The reason for the Leveson Inquiry into the media was not actually to set up the Lord Leveson Phonetappers and Pen-Shunters Social Club or, indeed, to indulge any form of Fleet Street nostalgia whatsoever. I know that, of course. But it's a pleasure to stare into some claret-red face from the past, feign horror and exclaim in the disappointed tones of Bernard Manning: ‘%@!* me, but I thought you were dead!’ The face stares back with rheumy, hooded eyes which confirm you have hit a chord before replying with equal disappointment: ‘I thought you were *%@!*&$ dead too!’ ‘Well, I’m not.’ ‘Neither am I.’ ‘Fancy one in The George?’ ‘Don’t ask silly questions.’ And as you trot over the road, it seems like only yesterday that you were treading these same cobbles made holy by the spilling of blood, sweat and fizzy keg beer. I used to spend a lot of my time hanging around the lowest dives in EC4 – Scribes, the Harrow, the Cheshire Cheese, El Vino and, even worse, those most notorious haunts of habitual criminals, the Old Bailey and the High Court. We were reporters. We were a happy bunch of boys and girls. We worked together, drank together, argued together and had fun together. But then the Murdoch meteor plunged to earth and we were blasted to the four corners. I landed in Camden. Others touched down at Canary Wharf or Kensington High Street. We lost touch. We made new friends. And then, a few months ago, the finger of serendipity prodded me in the chest. In a tiresome, argumentative and troubling way, I have always been interested in the theory of popular journalism as well as the practice. It sounds a bit pompous, I know, but for me, as a kid living in a northern town, the Daily Mirror of the 1950s was a window on the world, all the way from The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club to New York and Moscow and the then Peking. Through its inky smudges, it imprinted not just its newsprint on me but its principles. I’ve never been able to wash them away, even if I’d wanted to, and they were the reason I have been a hack for the last 47 years: tabloid journalism with sense as well as sensationalism. In May I stopped being editor of a woman’s real-life magazine and, a few days later, I saw an old man blinking into a TV camera and murmuring ‘This is the most humble day of my life.’ Ping! What the Murdoch taketh away, the Murdoch could now giveth back. I would reclaim the title I love the most. Reporter. It was Jack Crossley – of the Observer – who used to tell me ‘reporter’ was the proudest title in newspapers. I reckoned he thought I was simple. Now I know otherwise. And so I unilaterally appointed myself ‘Your one-stop phone hacking correspondent’ and announced I would be returning to my old game, my old patch, like a gypsy’s dog rediscovering his favourite lamppost. readers may be slightly interested in some of the practical points, bearing in mind it is a different world out there from the one I knew in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I had to learn fast. This is what I did. Website. I googled around and asked for tenders from various web-builders. One priced it at £15,000, another £5,000. Other people showed me what they’d had built for them, often for more than £1000. You gotta be kidding! Then I discovered Yola. It’s free and DIY. Within an hour or so, I had a prototype up and running without my once threatening to smash up my machine. So it really is idiot proof. Have a look at what I’ve done – http://johndalejournalist.co.uk/ You can do it as well. You can change your content at will. You don’t have to beg someone to do it for you. Facebook: I set up a separate John Dale Journalist page. It could develop, with attention. Linkedin: I set up a profile. For building up professional contacts, this has been extremely useful. Twitter. Mmm, I hesitated. If anything had convinced me that Stephen Fry was bonkers, then it was his twittering obsession. What was the point? Why would I want to tweet? It was moronic. But younger journalists told me otherwise. Last weekend I registered and tried my first timid tweet. I gazed at the screen and then a miracle happened. I got it! I understood. It all fell into place and now I am a twitterer, with a moderate habit. And I follow Stephen Fry although he doesn’t follow me. Business cards: I downloaded an App, designed and printed them myself using shiny photographic paper from W H Smiths. I can change them at will, rather deviously, like James Garner in the Rockford Files Office: I hired a desk in a media centre in Chiswick High Road, at £5,000 a year. Big mistake. I cancelled it and joined Soho House, at £1,200 a year, getting four very sociable bases in Chiswick, Soho, Shoreditch and Notting Hill, as well as access to others in Berlin, New York, Miami and Los Angeles. Thus I am up and running. On Monday, this week, I am disembarking at Temple tube to be down at the tail end of dear old Fleet Street to attend court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice where Lord Leveson has opened his inquiry properly. I am attending the hearings, although not religiously, and I will also be attending The George and the Cheshire Cheese and El Vino and maybe the Harrow, in the company of some old friends. Sadly, Scribes has gone. I know, I know. Lord Leveson has other, more important things on his mind than my nostalgia, and I have the insatiable maw of a website to fill, a regular column in Press Gazette to write, and the demands of the Chief Ranter to satisfy. But I still wish to thank his Lordship for accommodating some old memories and nurturing the Lord Leveson Phonetappers and Pen-Shunters Social Club. Some of the evidence will be broadcast on normal news channels, as it merits. The full evidence, including video, will be streamed on the inquiry’s website. More gentleman Guy By Stephen Bates Roland Gribben's affectionate memoir of Guy Rais in has evoked awe-stuck memories of my early days as a junior reporter at the in the mid-1980s, watching Guy in action. Then nearly 40 years into his career on the paper, he was still a formidable – and dauntingly enthusiastic – reporter. I remember the story of his encounter with Churchill at Chartwell slightly differently from Roland; I am pretty sure Guy told me that Churchill had actually started belabouring him with his walking stick as Guy approached him. ‘Rais, , I wonder if I could ask how you are, sir?’ After that, he could at least retreat, bruised, to a local phone box to tell the newsdesk that the old boy seemed to be in vigorous health. But the tale may have become exaggerated in the years of telling and the former premier apologised in writing (to the proprietor, not Guy) later. Sitting at the next bank of desks in the Fleet Street newsroom, it was a revelation to me to watch the contrasting telephone techniques of Guy and another veteran Alf MacIlroy in action. The latter was all obsequiousness, which even in those days seemed a little excessive: ‘A J MacIlroy, , troubling you...’ whereas Guy was volcanically rude as he bustled, usually successfully, past some flunkey of a secretary or a PR person on the line: ‘I don't want to talk to you. I don't want the monkey! Get me the organ-grinder... Stop wasting my time!’ to be completed as the phone went down with the mock-outraged expostulation: ‘Flabby dog!’ Guy really had seen and done it all: beside the court cases, there was the Great Train Robbery, the Paris air crash, glorious Goodwood every year and numerous other trips to France, Guy having long since persuaded the authorities on account of his name that he actually spoke French. And his eye could grow misty at the thought of old stories: when there was a coup in the Seychelles, I can remember him saying: ‘I remember being sent to cover a coup there in the fifties. Boat train to Marseilles, steamer across the Med, train from Alexandria to Mombassa, then hire a dhow across the Indian Ocean three weeks it took.’ What happened Guy? – ‘Well, I came ashore on the jetty and said: Rais, Daily Telegraph, where's the coup? And they said, It's all over So I got back on the dhow. Six weeks out of the office and not a word filed ’ Was it all true? I hope so, or at least a little bit, for it brings back the flavour of the old Fleet Street in our drabber, digital first times. Belated happy birthday Guy Stephen Bates worked for the Daily Telegraph, 1984-87 before moving to the Daily Mail and, since 1990, the Guardian. Leeds and Bradford By Harold Lewis Barbara Taylor was little more than a slip of a girl when she taught me the importance of commitment. No, we are not talking about anything on a personal level here, I barely knew her, but rather about mastering the art of manipulation. It happened after Alan Woodward, then the bluff but consummately good natured editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds, found himself temporarily bereft of his long-time secretary and cast around for an emergency replacement. As his newly appointed office boy, not that long out of short pants, I was sent scurrying around the building with urgent messages to various department heads. Eventually, Barbara, who had joined the paper in the typing pool (the reason she was probably short-listed for the stand in secretarial position), but had then rocketed up the editorial ladder, was dragooned into taking the job. Then, I believe, women's page editor, dressed like a Dior model, svelte and scented, she arrived in the editor's office like a breath of fresh air, the antithesis of the drab harridan who normally carried out Woodward's drudge work. (It's a fair question to wonder what the union did about this at the time. I'm afraid I have no idea. I do know that it would never have happened on our watch when Ronnie Maxwell was the FOC and I was the deputy at the What Barbara probably knew, and probably nobody else did, and what probably kept a smile on her face, was that she would be leaving the paper soon to take up a new post as fashion editor at Woman's Own. There was no point in rocking the boat. What nobody knew, not even Barbara, was that some time after that she would become Barbara Taylor Bradford, the internationally famous author of more than two dozen blockbuster novels and now one of the fifty wealthiest women in Britain. Her first novel, A Woman of Substance, is an enduring best seller and ranks as one of the ten top selling novels of all time. Moreover, Barbara also shares what is probably a unique honour with the Queen... her image has graced the postage stamps of no fewer than three islands, Grenada, St Vincent and the Isle of Man. Back then, either 19 or 20, she exuded charm in spades and more than a measure of subtle cunning. And she was obviously not going to let the unsought temporary job that had been foisted upon her ruin her day. If she felt demeaned, she certainly did not show it. Nor was she going to allow her temporary transfer deter her from her normal daily agenda. She explained to me – the details are lost in the mists of time – that she had to go out and would probably not be back by the time the editor returned from lunch. She concocted a carefully crafted story (surely a sign of things to come) that I was to relay. ‘And don't forget,’ she insisted, and these words are indelibly imprinted, ‘When you have explained why I will be late returning to the office, you also say: “That will be all right, won't it?” That's really important. Be sure to get his commitment.’ Of course, when Woodward came back he wanted to know where she had gone. I trotted out my party piece. And then the kicker: ‘That will be all right, won't it, Mr Woodward?’ When he harrumphed his assent, I knew the deal had been sealed and I had learnt a lesson more important than anything I could have culled from a book. When Barbara returned, burdened as I remember with high-end designer shopping bags, she simply picked up her shorthand notebook, ascertained that I had spoken to the editor, tapped on his door and returned to her secretarial duties. So far as I know, not another word was said about her absence. Certainly, he never mentioned it to me and, as he often dropped me off on his way home in the evenings, he had plenty of opportunity to do so. Get the commitment. It was the credo wily hacks once lived by. Alas, now slaves to their flashing screens, they probably no longer need to resort to such subterfuge. As I hear it, they never talk to anybody any more. I before E, except By Jim Anderson Why is the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street still an important event for reporters and authors everywhere? Because it is a mnemonic to help us remember how to spell siege as opposed to seize. When he was chief sub at the Evening Standard in the 1970s, Roger Bryan, walking down Oxford Street in central London, saw a copy of his paper on the news-stand with SEIGE in the splash headline. ‘My first reaction was Oh No, and the second was Well, glad I’m on a day off, he writes in his book It’ll Come In Useful One Day, a wonderful collection of mnemonics, acronyms, verses, old wives’ tales, puns and acrostics designed to help us remember and recall bits of information. The idea for this book was born that day. Roger learnt the mnemonic Siege of Sidney Street (si for siege, si for Sidney) and has been compiling more ever since. The Standard is not the only London evening newspaper to have fallen into the seize/siege trap. A year or two before the Evening News did it too. It was in those exhilarating days when the evenings published seven or eight editions a day, slamming breaking stories into the paper far faster than any computer can manage today. One such story that rapidly became a splash was of police trapping a burglar in Kensington that turned into a siege, or as the News had it seige. The edition had been on sale for at least an hour when the news editor, Percy Trumble, leant across to the backbench and said: ‘I’ve got a reader on the phone who says that we can’t spell siege.’ The outcome was that the backbench supremo who had written the headline himself, the much-loved Phil Wrack, had SIEGE printed in letters two feet high (how many points is that?) and hung it from the ceiling above the subs’ table. The subs, needless to say, felt insulted by the insinuation that it was their error. Hundreds, if not thousands, of reporters have had reason to thank Roger Bryan over the past 40 years or so. For, as a sub, chief sub and even more exalted posts on the Yorkshire Post and in Fleet Street, he has corrected and polished their disjointed copy to make it presentable for publication. How many actually sought him out to thank him personally? Precious few, I bet. Well, they can make up for it now by buying his book. And, if they cannot remember how to spell seize, he even has a mnemonic for that: ‘SEize the day, sail the high Seas’, and one to spell mnemonic itself: My Nice Editor Measures Out News In Columns. The book cautions all of us not to rely on Spellcheck (particularly those who work for Morgan Grenfell which can easily translate into Morning Greenfly); it tells us how to recognise the phases of the moon, how to remember the rivers in Yorkshire (Surely Una Never Was A Careful Driver), the counties of Northern Ireland (FAT LAD), our times tables, how to convert Celsius and, probably most importantly, how to tell Ant from Dec. The above examples may be flip and not important, but this is a book to amuse and entertain as well as to help us to remember and there are hundreds of clever tricks to stimulate the mind too. As Roger says, It’ll Come In Useful One Day at ‘an examination, an interview, an application for a job, at a dinner party, a pub quiz, an appearance on University Challenge or even Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ One of my favourites sections is Creature Collections, a selection of collective nouns that the late Nigel Thomas compiled for the Mail on Sunday style book: many date back to the fifteenth century and include the magical ‘An exaltation of larks’ ‘A wickedness of ravens’, and finally ‘A siege [correct] of herons’. The just published second edition even has a world exclusive: Roger has discovered what is probably the oldest written reference to that mnemonic Thirty days hath September There is a 15th century manuscript in the Harley Collection in the British Library which says: Thirti dayes hath November, April, June and Septembir.Of XXVIIJ is but oonAnd alle the remenaunt XXX and i. It’ll Come In Useful One Day, by Roger Bryan. Second edition now out: £11.99 + £2.80p&p. Order at www.rogerbryan.com Jim Anderson worked for Roger Bryan on the subs’ table at the Mail on Sunday.

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• 11 Nov ' 05:54

  Issue # 220November 11, 2011 We’ll get round to the Leveson Inquiry in a minute; we don’t want to appear preoccupied with the thing. The important news is that Tabloid, the movie based on (but not giving credit to) Tony Delano’s brilliant book, Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon goes on general release next week. Apparently the BBC plans to screen it next year, after everybody who wants to, will have seen it. Our advice is that if you want to see examples of Fleet Street’s finest at work – including a photographer (Kent Gavin, of course) becoming Reporter of the Year – you should buy the book. Better value, better fun, better story, better told. Joyce herself, poor old tart, still doesn’t seem sure whether it’s good for her image or not (it’s not), so she’s employed Shyster, Shyster and Shyster to look after her interests. Still, the news of the film’s release brought back memories for Tim Minogue – about the first scoop on the story and a photographer who didn’t win any awards at all. forgot to send a birthday card to his old chief reporter Guy Rais, so he’s written a piece about him, instead. John Shone writes about how Fleet Street tumbled to the cost of living. What’s that got to do with the price of fish? That’s where it started. New reader Phil Johnson remembers great days in Ancoats Street. And so we come to the Leveson Inquiry The jury may still be out on whether journalists nicked pictures in the old days (but there is no evidence yet to suggest that we did). Peter Smith says that he didn’t, but he remembers being asked to return one that he’d borrowed. And Paul Fievez compares the differences between then and now (apparently stealing, or using photos without permission, is common practice these days). props the whole thing up. Monkey business By Tim Minogue readers will remember how, in autumn 1977 and spring 1978, the nation was gripped by the Case of the Manacled Mormon. A former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, had for three days, with the aid of a male accomplice, Keith May, held prisoner a young missionary, Kirk Anderson, with whom she was sexually obsessed. At a subsequent court hearing it was revealed that, after kidnapping Anderson, the former beauty queen had kept him manacled to a bed and had forced him to have quite a lot of sex, supposedly against his will. McKinney famously told the court: ‘I loved Kirk so much that I would have skied down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose.’ This is now the subject of a documentary film, Tabloid, by Errol Morris, which tells the story of the media frenzy surrounding the case, in particular how the Molloy scooped the Jameson , which bought up Joyce’s super-sanitised story, with revelations of her escort girl past, nude photos and all. As ajunior reporter on the Mirror Group’s Plymouth training scheme I played a very small and inglorious part near the beginning of the saga. I was on the Tavistock Times and had been seconded to its sister paper, the Okehampton Times, for the week. My senior colleague, David France, had a tip from a police contact that we should head up on to Dartmoor, where we’d find ‘something very interesting’. As tips go, it was one of the vaguest – Dartmoor being a rather large area – but we had a bit of luck. Driving rather aimlessly about we spotted an unmarked Ford Escort ahead of us. It was pale blue and had an unusually large aerial. That and the fact that two large coppers were in it gave it away as a police vehicle. We followed it to a remote farmhouse, which, it turned out, was where McKinney had had her way with young Kirk -- and the Okehampton Times had beaten the world’s press to it. We arrived shortly after McKinney and the exhausted Mormon had been taken away, but police had not had time to seal off the site properly. The breakfast things were still on the kitchen table, although sadly no manacles were in evidence. ‘Quick! Get some pictures before we get kicked out of here,’ we told the local wedding photographer – whose name I forget – who worked part-time for the paper. Pause. ‘Come on...’ Silence. ‘What’s up?’ ‘Er, there doesn’t seem to be any film in the camera.’ By the time David and the shame-faced snapper had returned from the 15-mile round trip to Okehampton, I’d been booted off the farm and the police had set up a cordon about half a mile away, so the only picture anyone could get of the place was a distant one of the roof. And by then, of course, various hacks from the nationals had turned up, including Geoffrey Lakeman (then in his final weeks at the Telegraph, before moving the ) and the ’s Syd Young. So I made a few quid out of them. But there was to be no Inside-Sex-in-Chains-Love-Nest photo scoop. These days the photographer would have avoided the no-film situation, by having a digital camera. But would, no doubt, have neglected to charge the battery. Editor’s note A Mr Shyster writes: Joyce McKinney, subject of Errol Morris’ documentary Tabloid, has filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court against the filmmaker and other individuals and associated companies such as Moxie Films, Sundance Select and IFC Films. McKinney alleges among other things misappropriation of likeness, defamation, misrepresentation, fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress and breach of contract. McKinney asserts in the suit that she was approached in 2009 and led to believe that her cooperation in a project for a Showtime series would help clear her name in connection with a long-ago scandal. Instead, she claims, the resulting movie held her up to public ridicule and reinforced a false image of her as having kidnapped a Mormon missionary in England in 1977 and holding him against his will and repeatedly raping him. She was arrested and British tabloids and TV had a field day with what became known as the ‘Manacled Mormon’ story. McKinney maintains that she was rescuing her fiancé from a cult. In an effort to gain access to photographs, home movies and other memorabilia, the suit claims, representatives of Morris including a person identified as Ajae Clearway and Mark Lipson repeatedly badgered her and tricked her into letting them carry away plastic bins full of newspaper clippings and other material that Morris was allegedly going to peruse for images he could use in the documentary — which plaintiff maintains she had been falsely led to believe would be part of a Showtime series. Additionally McKinney alleges that during the course of her interactions with people associated with making the movie, Lipson agreed to help save her service dog that was scheduled to be put to death at a pound but instead allowed it to happen then taunted her about it. In November 2010 McKinney says in the suit she traveled to New York City to the Doc NYC festival to see the film that Morris had made. Afterward she became distressed at ‘having been deceived’ about how she would be depicted, the movie’s revival of the ‘Manacled Mormon’ story and use of personal memorabilia she claims was stolen as well as many purportedly false and negative statements and portrayals in Tabloid. McKinney is seeking unspecified compensatory, punitive and other damages as well as civil penalties, attorneys’ fees and court costs. Gentleman of the press Private Eye dubbed him ‘Gentleman Guy Rais’ when he ticked off fellow reporters because he felt they had been discourteous to then Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. Guy attracted many other sobriquets during a Fleet Street career stretching over 35 years with the and embracing everything from cod wars to a pub crawl with the Duchess of Argyll. He buzzed like a bee, dressed in Telegraph grey and his trade mark slimline moustache gave him an under-stated air of authority. He could be mildly explosive, appropriate of course for a man born on November 5 1919 and named Guy. ‘Silly old fool,’ was a frequent signing off sound after unproductive phone calls. He's just celebrated his 92nd birthday, cementing his position as the Telegraph’s oldest surviving news room based reporter. (Clare Hollingworth, former defence corr, at 100 has the edge in terms of years but not unbroken service). He was the consummate professional capable of infiltrating a restricted Vatican conference with the aid of a London Underground pass and .displayed diplomatic talents in exclusively obtaining the photo-finish picture of a Goodwood race where blinkered stewards had named the wrong horse as winner and rushing it to Fleet Street. He went home with 10 bob – the equivalent of 50p – for his first week’s effort as a very junior reporter on the Evening Argus in Hastings in 1936. Wartime service found him in the Middle East, producing a news sheet based on BBC bulletins after a hazardous episode at St Nazaire and post-war a spell on the Eastbourne Chronicle was followed by the move to the Telegraph as South Coast correspondent. He arrived in Fleet St in grand style with the news editor of the day waiting outside 135 to send him on his first assignment – a murder case – in a chauffeur driven Daimler. Guy’s acquaintance with prime ministers did not start and end with Callaghan. He had an intriguing encounter with Winston Churchill after being sent down to Chartwell for a health check story. A grumpy Churchill was alarmed at being found by Guy outside walking and gave the startled reporter a piece of his mind. Churchill twice phoned Viscount Camrose, the Telegraph proprietor at the time, eventually explaining that he didn’t want anything reported about being seen outside his home because he had called off a week-end with the Queen on the grounds that he wasn’t well. Churchill’s comment that Guy had been courteous and restrained provided lift-off for the Rais career. He was effectively chief reporter in the days before the title had been discovered. Major court cases became his speciality. They included the murder trial of Dr Bodkin Adams, the Eastbourne physician who had been GP to Guy’s mother and Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, who gave birth to the Telegraph’s famous or infamous Page 3. His foreign correspondent’s career blossomed with the US troop landings in Beirut, the Nyasaland riots and the Algerian civil war among a long list of credits. He scooped the world with a powerful interview with General Jacques Massu, de Gaulle’s ally, during the Algerian conflict and was rewarded by having it on the font page of Le Monde. Furious French reporters took their revenge when they used Guy’s bowler – the identification for a neutral – as a pissoir. Belated happy birthday, Guy Fishy business By John Shone Reading Ian Kerr’s tribute to Clive Crickmer and his account of the tedious jobs given to juniors on the Evening Chon at Newcastle (Ranters Oct 21) reminded me of the mind-bogglingly boring tasks that I had to undertake in the early days of my career. After a stint as a copy boy in the newsroom of The Sporting Life, I pestered my way to the top floor of 107-109 Fleet St and the offices of Fishing News, the weekly trade paper for those brave souls who plied their trade in the coastal waters of the British Isles and the cruel seas off Iceland in trawlers, herring drifters and similar craft ‘I’m afraid the job’s gone,’ said editor Lloyd Butcher, when I phoned to enquire about a vacancy for an editorial assistant that I’d seen in World’s Press News. But encouragingly, he added: ‘We might have something else coming up in a few weeks.’ I rang him virtually twice a week for the next month until the kindly Scot finally relented and called me in for an interview. A week later, I was boarding a No 4A bus from Islington to Ludgate Circus to take my place as a proud protégé of the news editor, Mr Thomas H Bailey. In between making copious amounts of tea and running errands to Jolly’s sandwich shop on Ludgate Circus, I found myself churning out fishy stories from places as far afield as Mallaig and Mevagissey, Lerwick and Lowestoft, Peterhead and Port Isaac. I never got to visit them. It was all done on the phone, or by processing the lineage copy that came in from our stringers on the Aberdeen Press and Journal, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, the Fleetwood Gazette... But I did make it to Billingsgate, where, thanks to the cheery market porters, I quickly expanded my vocabulary. Every Tuesday I took the bus from outside the Daily Telegraph offices to wend my way around the fish wholesalers to pick up the latest market trends in cod, halibut, lobsters, whelks and prawns. To these, I added statistics on catches from ports around the country to produce a whole page of fish prices that were analysed avidly by those in the know, in the same way that the gambling fraternity studies horse-racing form. There was no room for error, I was told sternly. Livelihoods depended on it. To me, as a 17-year-old, it was a bit of a bore, but I just had to get on with it, along with filing countless photographs of fishing boats, counting the lineage so that contributors could be paid, and ending my day with a trip to the parcels office at Waterloo station to put the day’s output of the editorial team on the train to our printers in Poole. Every Friday, when the results of the printers’ labours arrived in Fleet St, there was another important, but menial, task to perform: The Retrospect. It involved going through the paper and summarising the main stories of the week. This was Mr Bailey’s idea to make sure that there was no shortage of copy when Christmas came around and the usual flow of material from our stringers dried up. For the Yuletide edition, two or even three pages were given over to The Year In Retrospect. It worked well until the lad who took over from me when I was given extra subbing responsibilities became rather lax and decided that he couldn’t be bothered with the weekly chore. Now, being a part-time chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, Mr Bailey never swore, but you could hardly measure the height of his dudgeon when he asked for the Retrospect copy a week or so before Christmas, and found that The Year comprised just eight lines. My lazy colleague spent several long nights delving back through the files and a week or two later he was delving the job vacancies for a new position. After three years of Mr B’s tutelage, it was time to move on, and attending a food trade conference with other trade press journalists I was fortunate to meet T E Clark, editor of the Grocers’ Gazette, who examined my shorthand as I sat next to him and promptly offered me a job at £500 a year more than I was getting at Arthur J Heighway Publications. There was just one snag: because of my experience with the fish markets, I was to take responsibility for updating the Price Guide, the Gazette’s monthly supplement which listed the price of everything from Kellogg’s Cornflakes to Oxo cubes so that grocers across the land knew exactly what to charge. (Of course, even back in the mid sixties, Jack Cohen of Tesco and Lord Sainsbury were starting to change all that). It seemed another dull job, but, after a month or two, I began to notice that the inflationary spiral resulting from the economic policies of Harold Wilson’s Labour government were taking their toll. Food prices were rocketing – and this was a great story. Every month, I totted up the number of price increases notified by the food manufacturers and compiled a piece for the news section of the paper. But my news editor, Tom Batty, another kindly gentleman, felt it was worth more than that. ‘Give PA a ring,’ he suggested one Friday, ‘and put something over to copy.’ And that’s how my stories went national and caused ructions in parliament. The feedback, via Durrants’ press cuttings service, showed that our monthly round-up on food prices was making the splash not only in provincial papers such as the Edinburgh Evening News, the Liverpool Echo Wolverhampton Express and Star, but was being picked up and commented upon by The Times, the Mail and even the BBC. The Tories had a field day during Commons Questions, casting a black cloud over ‘Sunny’ Jim Callaghan, the chancellor of the exchequer. He must have been ruing the day that I’d decided to start counting up the price rises but, typical politician, he accused the Gazette of distorting the figures We stuck to our guns, of course. But I sometimes wonder what old Jim would have said if he’d found out that the source of the Great Food Price Scandal was an 11-plus failure with not even an O-level in maths. I guess he would have sworn like a fish porter. After 50 years in newspapers, John Shone works part-time as a news organiser with BBC Wales in Wrexham Great days, old Sport By Phil Johnson Just recently I discovered the wonderful Gentlemen Ranters and have spent many enjoyable hours trawling the archives, loving the reminiscences, remembering many of the people mentioned, and relishing the tales of the ones I don’t. But the accounts of the demise of the old Sunday Sport were the ones that really caught my eye. Because I was there for six of the ‘glory’ years. When it had humour and – whether you liked it or not – an identity. Then, sadly, for the next three when humourless clones in suits with no idea what the paper was about started on the company’s destruction. But for those six years the Daily Sport was the finest job I had known. Working with great operators like Les Groves – the best chief sub I ever knew – John Stead and Jim Copeland. Plus Andy Carson, tough and fearless but always straight – when straight meant straight. I admired that. Mix in Jeff McGowan, Neil Mackay and Bob Wilson from the newsdesk and the eccentric but brilliant art editor Mike Burnham and it made quite a team. (How I fondly remember Neil`s tales of chasing my hero George Best all over Europe for the . They brightened many a rainy Ancoats afternoon after we got back from a long break in the Land O’Cakes.) This was a time when the news subs – yes, news subs – were taken round the corner to the Indian for monthly brainstorming sessions. The only banned topic was work. But when we had work to do we did it and the papers – technically at least – were up there with the best. I eventually found myself moved to features and made a nice little niche there. One of the big reasons for the paper’s existence was to sell David Sullivan’s sex products and strip shows. There was also the occasional competition. More of that later. Nobody else on the staff wanted anything to do with this so I made myself the expert. A world of mysterious memos from Sullivan, strange sex products being delivered to my desk and constant trips to the lightbox to examine pictures of nude models to illustrate the ‘editorial’ I produced. I had charts that nobody else understood. To be honest neither did I. At the conference I announced the space I needed and nobody blinked. I was left totally to my own devices. Occasionally I was asked if I could at least try to make these endless ‘puffs’ look a bit like news. But when I said this was how Sullivan wanted it shoulders fell and the room went silent. At the peak of the Daily Sport success we ran a competition for a Harley Davidson that led to one of the worst moments in my 40 years in journalism. As with all Sport promotions it ran for far too long. But in the end we had five sacks filled with entries. Then came the only instruction I was given. For God’s sake just pick a winner who looks ‘decent’. Now all I had was the entries, many dog-eared and illiterate. But there was one I remembered. Neatly clipped from the paper, good handwriting and – unbelievably – the spelling was correct. But I needed more information and – posing as a market research worker – phoned the guy. He spoke in a clear voice. Not Eton, but good enough. I had my man. I quickly ended the call. The winner was announced and the photoshoot – it was in London – arranged. A couple of days later the pics were due to arrive and all morning I was pestering picture editor Paul Currie. A bit later he came over to my desk and said solemnly: ‘You had better come over and take a look at this.’ I went to the terminal and what I saw took me to the verge of collapse. (I was under the doctor for blood pressure at the time and I’ve often thought if I can survive that feeling I can survive anything). Astride the gleaming Harley was a cross between Ernie the fastest milkman and a Homepride flour grader. A total wally. I was finished at the Sport But no. Not a word was ever said. I think others in senior positions must have taken all the flak for me. As I stated earlier, they were all so terrified of being asked to take over my role that I was fireproof. Great days indeed. Phil Johnson was chief sub on the Bolton Evening News while shifting for both Mirrors in Manchester before joining the Sport. He left in 1997 to move to Tenerife. Leveson Inquiry Borrowed photos (1) By Peter Smith So no-one will ever admit pinching a photograph from a mantelpiece or sideboard? Really? It’s a well known ‘fact’ that hoards of hacks nicked pictures from grieving families but, when push comes to shove, it wasn’t me, guv. That was the message I read in . Well, I have to admit, neither did I pinch one – but I do recall acquiring one in circumstances of the utmost discretion. I was a reporter on The Star, the London evening that folded 51 years ago last month along with its morning stable mate, the News Chronicle. There had been a murder in Soho, or it might have been an attempted murder – from this distance in time I can’t remember precisely which. A young, er, lady, employed at Freddy’s club in Greek Street had stabbed her boyfriend, had been arrested and I was to obtain a photograph of the culprit. Perhaps I should explain here that I already had some knowledge of Freddy’s club. A good friend of mine – later to become the respected managing editor of a reputable, broadsheet ‘quality’ national newspaper – had discovered a simple way of gaining entry to this establishment without payment of any ‘membership fee’. He simply went up to the bouncer at the door and asked ‘Is Freddy in?’ The bouncer would nod and say ‘Yes, he’s upstairs’ and in we would all troop. This went well until the fateful evening when my friend walked up the bouncer with the usual enquiry to be told: ‘Yes, I’m Freddy. What d’you want?’ The memory cells have obscured how we got out of that one. But I digress. Clearly, winkling a photograph of the lady from Freddy would require some discretion; it wouldn’t do at all, I assumed, to reveal we wanted it to illustrate a report of a murder. I can’t remember exactly what tale I told but I did acquire the photograph. And I didn’t steal it. I rushed back to Bouverie Street in triumph to tell the news editor and hand the photograph to the picture editor. I had barely got back to my desk in the reporters’ room when the phone rang. It was Freddy: he wanted his photograph back – and soon. I stalled, assuring him that I would return it just as soon as the picture editor had finished with it. Fearing threats of retribution from Soho heavies should we dare publish it, I asked him why he wanted it back so quickly. ‘I’ve only just heard she’s been arrested for murder,’ he said. ‘And I want to get out a special programme and posters with her picture in them.’ What is it they say about ‘any publicity ’? Borrowed photos (2) By Paul Fievez John Dale's thoughts on Lord Leveson's enquiry, and the submissions to it by (among others) Paul Dacre, (Gentlemen Ranters 218) stirred the memory banks. In the very early 1970s as a young photographer I found myself employed by John Rodger's London News Service. LNS and its rival, North London News Agency run by the late Tommy Bryant, were at that time the agencies where young reporters and photographers, not yet quite ready for Fleet Street – but on their way – went to get a year or two's hard experience, and have a few rough edges smoothed off. Except that neither John nor Tommy (both graduates of an earlier and much harder generation of newsmen) was interested in smoothing rough edges. They surgically removed ’em – using angle-grinders and chainsaws. If you did not shape up pretty dammed quick, you were out. Two very hard schools, but which between them produced many good reporters – many of whom went on to become senior executives on Fleet Street, plus some very talented prize-winning photographers. Because of the nature, and the modus operandi, of the two agencies they inevitably got the assignments that news and picture editors on the various nationals did not wish to assign to their own staff doorsteps, court 'snatches', death-knocks. Pick-up/collect pictures were all big business then, and both LNS, and NLNA excelled at them. As an added bonus, whenever there were complaints, enquiries, or potential legal problems, news and picture editors, and editors themselves, had the get-out of saying: ‘This story/photograph was supplied to us by a usually reliable freelance agency – whom we shall not be using again....’ But of course, they did. As I say, 'collects' were big business, and as John Dale points out we were all very good at 'conning' or 'blagging' our way into – and sometimes out of – situations. Yes we were duplicitous, and stretched the line to breaking point, but did we actually steal? I think no, perhaps, and well your honour, it depends! I recall one occasion, in the 70s when we had obtained the name of a victim of an early IRA London bomb Incident. A handful of reporters from the nationals were on the door-step. I was the only photographer. It was agreed that if the widow would let us in, I would get as many pictures of her, and collects of the victim, as were possible, and then leave the reporters to it. LNS, as an agency, would ensure that every paper would get a fair crack at the photographs. So we knocked on the door, and the lady came out to talk, or rather to tell us to piss-off! As we pressed our case, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure climbing out of a back window of the house. It was Tommy Bryant. Seeing me looking at him, he raised both hands. In one was several framed photographs, and with the other hand, he gave me the V sign. To this day I wonder, was he already in the house before we arrived, in which case why did he use the window to make his exit? Or, did he use our arrival on the front door as a distraction, and nip in through an open window, and help himself? Only two people know for sure, Tommy, and the widow. Tommy is certainly long gone, and the widow probably is too. Time moved on, and I did too. As a staff photographer on the , I and another snapper were sent with reporter David Ian Pryke (remember those two first names, they are relevant to the story) to try and get an interview, and of course, the family album from the wife of a particularly vicious criminal who had just been arrested. Before we knocked on the door, David said: ‘Leave the talking to me until we are in the house.’ We knocked, and David, a tall elegant man, well dressed, and with a dapper moustache, introduced himself. Politely raising his trilby, ‘Good evening, madam,’ he said. ‘D I Pryke I think you might be expecting us.’ David – remember those two first names – never actually said he was a policeman. But the lady had obviously had enough previous experience to link, and interpret, the letters D I in a different way... Was it our fault if she added two-and-two together and came up with five? Naturally, we left with the family album. I admit to having pulled many stunts over the years but like John Dale I can put hand on heart and say that I never stole a picture. If sent out to get a 'collect' or 'pick-up' picture, we snappers knew that we could not leave anything for the opposition. There was no point in walking away with just one picture, and leaving the rest for another photographer or worse, an agency, to obtain. We would take the lot. Negatives too were borrowed – and returned in due course. By hoovering up everything and anything that could be used as an illustration, we had of course 'stolen' a march on the opposition, and many a photographer and reporter has been heard to ruefully say; "That thieving so-and-so snapper/scribe from the Mail, the Express, Mirror (name whichever rival comes to your mind) has 'nicked' the whole bloody lot..." They meant of course that we had 'nicked' the prize from them, and I wonder if over the years, a big myth, and an even bigger misnomer has been created by people who did not understand the terminology, or perhaps by reporters/photographers working for the opposition,(including myself from time-to-time), who were trying to justify their own lack of success to their various news and picture editors. On the subject of theft, Lord Leveson, (if he reads Ranters), Paul Dacre, and indeed, other editors too, should consider that in reality much more theft goes on today, than it did thirty or forty years ago. In the old-days it would sometimes take days, or even weeks before the names of victims became public knowledge. Then, to track people down, teams or reporters and photographers would spend much more time going through the racks of telephone directories, trade directories, and electoral roles that every office kept up-to-date. Further time would be spent tramping the streets, knocking on doors to find the next-of-kin. Invariably, the victim's families would have had at least some time to get used to the news of a loved one’s demise, before the inevitable death-knocks started. Today however we have a different situation. Thanks to the Internet, within hours – sometimes minutes – of a story starting it is on the web. Be it a shooting on an American university campus, Derrik Bird's rampage through West Cumbria, British yachtsmen kidnapped by Somali pirates whatever. Within minutes we all not only know about it, but there are also frequently live web-cam pictures, names of both perpetrators, and their victims, being published live on blogs and forums – often before any next of kin or relatives even know the full extent of a situation, and what happens ? I'll tell you. I spent the last few years of my Fleet Street career as a night picture editor. Sorry, the confidentiality clause in the Industrial Relations Court settlement forbids me from naming the newspaper concerned, but trust me, this is how it goes. Within seconds of a story breaking, news and picture desks are all assigning reporters photographers and picture researchers to log-in to Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Friends Re-united. All of the other social networks and personal web-sites are Googled and scoured for pictures and information. If there is a live web-cam, pictures are grabbed and frequently published without any regard to copyright. Likewise, any images on the social sites and personal blogs or web-sites of anyone involved are all also grabbed before anyone has a chance to close the site down, and are then published, syndicated, used on television, re-published or broadcast repeatedly. Sometimes with a small acknowledgement ie Picture: Facebook, but more usually without. And of course, all current news and picture editors do know that someone, somewhere does actually own those pictures or images. They are published without regard to ownership, copyright, payment, or regard for permission to use them. My Lord Levenson, if you do actually read Ranters, is this not too theft, and on a much bigger scale than we 'old-boys' would have ever even considered? When newspapers and TV grab material and pictures from the Internet, they do so with the justification that having been 'published' on the web, the pictures are now in the public domain, and thus freely available. While it is technically true that anyone with internet access can view the material, it skips the point that someone, somewhere does still actually own it, and might not (probably not) have given permission for subsequent publication in other media. Speaking from experience, I know how many times in recent years I have seen a picture that someone has downloaded being squeezed into a late edition, on the basis that the story comes first, and the day desks or lawyer can sort out any problems tomorrow

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• 04 Nov ' 00:36

  Issue # 219November 4, 2011 Your usual Ranters fix comes in the form of a two-parter, this week. First, there’s the usual type of fare – an essay and the inevitable obits. Then Part Two is a special supplement, dedicated to reader reaction to claims being made at the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking by people who, as we said , either should know better or possibly don’t know at all. It includes contributions from Revel Barker (with a little help from Paul Callan), Brian Hitchen, Roy Greenslade, Chris Sheridan, John Rodgers and Alan Hart. A total of more than 300 years experience in there, somewhere. But first Tomorrow, November 5, marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Robert Maxwell. To many it was and remains a mystery: Assassinated by a team of frogmen who came on board from a midget submarine and might have represented Mossad, the KGB, the CIA or even MI6? Or fell off the back of the boat while having a pee? Pick your own conspiracy theory. Or believe this one, which is closer to the truth, by , who vividly remembers that night and recalls looking out from his then north London eyrie and commentating: ‘I know Maxwell wasn’t universally popular, but fireworks the length and breadth of the land seems like overdoing it a bit.’ Roland Gribben remembers another larger-than-life, but slightly more down to earth character, Tony Conyers who died last month, and reveals along the way how we came to have Indian restaurants in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Larger than life, did we say ? How about Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile, disc jockey and (cut-price) newspaper columnist, introduced to the print in the first attempt by the Sunday People to appeal to ‘the youth market’. Colin HendersonJohn Rodgers remember their walks on the wild side. And Ted Graham has an add to the memory of Phil Walker (reported here October 14). But don’t forget the Leveson Supplement Drowning They say that when a person is drowning, his entire life passes before his eyes. Robert Maxwell, clinging to the gunwale of his 180-foot luxury yacht, Lady Ghislaine, somewhere off the Canary Islands, wasn’t actually drowning yet, but his mind seemed concentrated on memories concerned with that particular way of death. He was five years old, standing on the parapet of a narrow rickety wood and iron bridge over the fast-flowing Tisza river in Solotvino (Ruthenia), shaking with fear but trying not to show it while his slightly older friends dared him to jump. So he jumped, of course, losing consciousness as the flood tide smashed his head against the rocks below. When he came to they were standing around him, saying what a fool he was, because they knew he couldn’t even swim Now he was sitting on the earth floor of his parents’ home, with Uncle Shlomo telling one of his stories in front of the fire. Shlomo had gone with a friend to join the California gold rush and they’d been amazingly successful – they were both bringing home rucksacks filled with gold. But as their ship left San Francisco harbour it was hit by an earthquake and started to flounder. Lifeboats were lowered and the passengers ordered to jump for them. Shlomo threw his bag overboard, then followed it and clambered into one of the boats. His friend refused to be parted from his rucksack and jumped with it still on his back. He sank and was never seen again. ‘I often think about that,’ Shlomo would say, in the firelight. ‘And I wonder, did he get the gold, or did the gold get him?’ Did I get the gold, Maxwell was wondering now as he stared down at his white nightshirt flapping furiously above the even whiter, brighter, swirling 14-knot wake as it reflected the clear November moonlight... Or did the gold get me? His father, Mechel, had never seen any gold in his life. He’d been a huge man, taller even than his son had grown, powerfully built, a hard-working peasant who scratched out a living buying and re-selling cattle. He also sold hides to leather workers and supplemented his meagre income by working as a woodcutter or farm labourer and, even, dabbling in a bit of cattle rustling, which was fairly common in that part of the world. When the Germans came they took most of the family to concentration camps but his father was put on an old boat loaded with other Jewish prisoners and taken into the Baltic where the Germans scuttled the ship. They all drowned. But Maxwell wasn’t drowning, yet. Maybe drowning in self-pity. He suddenly shed an unexpected tear for his father’s memory, but he didn’t do self-pity. Except there’d been that time when he thought – knew for sure – that he was about to die. He had cried when the doctors diagnosed cancer in both lungs and told him he had four weeks to live. For God’s sake, he was 32, already a father of six children (there’d eventually be nine), and controlled one of the most lucrative markets in scientific publishing. He was on top of the world. He’d cried when he looked at a vase of flowers and realised he’d never taken time to appreciate beauty, nor to spend time with the children. He also cried because he hadn’t known what to believe might happen next, and although he consulted a rabbi, then a Roman Catholic priest, an Anglican vicar, and even somebody from the Christian Scientists, they had offered no comfort that he could comprehend. If only he could have another chance, he’d thought, he could do everything differently That opportunity had come, but only after they had removed one lung (and found the tumour on it to be benign) when his adoring wife Betty had scoured London for a second opinion and found a specialist who knew what he was talking about and who declared that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the remaining lung. He hadn’t done badly, after that, had he? True, there’d been setbacks. He’d been cheated out of attempts to buy the News of the World, the Daily Herald, and there’d been that temporary hiccup when the Board of Trade described him as being ‘unfit for the stewardship of a public company’ – but he recovered from all that and acquired the jewel in the crown, the group of newspapers. Eighty million was all he’d paid for it, not much more than the value of the shares it held in Reuters, and the Holborn building was valued at 500 million, just for the site. But in negotiation he’d worn down the owners, Reed International, and then – without even losing a job – he’d turned a virtual loss-maker into a profit of £80million in his first year. Then he’d bought the Manchester plant for a pound. Nobody played poker with Robert Maxwell. That’s what he always said. At least, nobody played poker against him and won. On this day, November 5, 1991, he employed maybe 20,000 people in 26 countries. He owned two Gulfstream jets and his own helicopters, rented the largest council house in England, had interests in newspapers in America, Canada and Kenya, in TV in the US and in Europe he was the biggest publisher and printer in Europe and the second biggest printer in the United States So what had gone wrong? The very last meeting he’d had in his office, only four days ago, before flying off to Gibraltar to join his yacht, had been to share a drink with a departing aide, and the guy had given him a bit of a character reading (well, he had nothing to lose; he was leaving). And he’d complained that, although he had been theoretically employed as an ‘adviser’ Maxwell had frequently turned a deaf ear to advice. The aide had reminded him of the disastrous investment in creating ‘the first 24-hour newspaper’, the London Daily News, an experiment that had lasted five months and cost maybe £25million. Then there’d been The European – ‘the first national newspaper for Europe’ – that had been researched and planned as a daily with a projected circulation of 750,000 but had been launched instead as a weekly and now had more writers than it had readers. And the staff buy-out he’d offered to the Sunday People. He’d given them a year to prove that they’d be competent to run it and they had done that – putting it into profit for the first time in decades, so he’d changed his mind. ‘Reneged on the deal’ was how they saw it. But it could have been a good idea, especially if he kept the printing. There was his habit of offering highly paid jobs to journalists who came to interview him, and to anybody who was sacked by Rupert Murdoch, and that Japanese guy who he’d met on a plane and appointed as a finance editor without learning that he didn’t even understand English His interference with the editorial staff – sacking or even giving hefty pay rises to journalists without consulting the editors. Bullying and sacking all the other staff, often for stupid reasons (like the security man who had opened the door for him without first asking to see his ID card ) And his insistence on his own name and photograph appearing regularly on Page One of his papers. Hugh Cudlipp – who he had asked to make himself available as a ‘consultant’ – had warned him that there was too much of that. He’d told Maxwell about a Catholic newspaper that had once carried only two pictures on its front page for the Easter edition: one caption had been Our Lord and the other was Our Editor The diatribe had continued for maybe an hour, the aide in full flow while helping himself to the drinks cabinet. But nobody could say Robert Maxwell was intolerant. He’d listened more or less without interrupting. He’d finally walked the chap out to the lift – something he hadn’t done even when Mother Theresa had come into the office – and told him: ‘You’ve never been anything but a friend to me, and you’ve never given me anything but good advice. Maybe I should have taken more of it.’ He’d probably been most right (damn him) about Rupert Murdoch, ‘that Antipodean Ned Kelly’. While it was true that when they’d ‘played poker’, commercially, Maxwell invariably won, this chap had been telling him that he won only because Murdoch had just kept upping the ante until the prize was over-priced, and then withdrawn from the duel, leaving Maxwell to pay well over the odds in every negotiation. And he’d told him before. There may have been something in that argument because look at him now he was facing bankruptcy for something like 50 million, which would have been pocket money a year ago but was more money than he could find last week. The City had said that his companies were 1.3billion in the red. He disputed that, naturally, nevertheless he’d had to borrow £526million out of the pension fund in an effort to keep himself afloat over the last couple of months. Afloat ? Ah. That brought him back to the reality of his current predicament. His fingers were aching with hanging on to the back of the boat and his shoulder muscles were screaming with the torture of bearing his 23-stone weight for so long. He was hanging there because he’d realised that he had gone too far, this time. He’d become a busted flush. He’d exposed himself to the extent that his only future was one in which nobody – Downing Street, the White House and the Kremlin, not even the Labour Party – would take his calls or ever take him seriously again. His only option, he’d decided before the weekend, was to vanish totally from the scene. The Atlantic was so vast that he’d disappear, but his body would never be found and he’d be a perpetual mystery, like Lord Lucan. Everybody would talk about him for years to come: Whatever happened to Robert Maxwell? It would be the man, not the money, that they wondered about. However second thoughts, now. If only he could pull himself back on board. He could solve everything. He’d started again when he got a second chance of life and he’d recovered from that setback with the Board of Trade report. If he could only get another ‘second chance’ he could be a different person, a better person, next time round. He’d start listening to advice. He’d even told the bloke who complained he never listened to advice to come back on Tuesday ‘so we can look again at your figures and round them up a bit’. And today was, what? Monday already. Oh yes. He’d take more advice and be less of a bully to the staff and much more of a nice guy and would keep his promises. Yes: much more of a nice guy. If only A young crew member appeared on deck carrying a mop, checking that everything was shipshape before the boss came out for his early morning stroll. He went to the back of the yacht for a pee and, unbuttoning his shorts, realised that he was pointing his privates at the publisher, who looked up anxiously and sobbed, pathetically: ‘Help me please.’ The yacht was stopped, the crew called and all eleven of them struggled to prise Maxwell’s chubby fingers from the gunwale and lift his obese frame to safety over the wires and the railing. Maxwell lay on the deck, in agony. ‘You useless bastards,’ he panted, his one lung retching. ‘How long have I been hanging there, unnoticed? And what’s the first rule of seamanship? A constant watch, all round, that’s what. And you bastards didn’t notice me hanging off the back. You’re all fired!’ And that was when they picked the bugger up and threw him over the side. Former reporter Revel Barker worked for the Mirror Group for 27 years, and for all three London titles (Daily Sunday People) either separately or jointly: on investigations, defence and foreign; then in management as editorial adviser, foreign manager, editorial relations manager, and managing editor; he was also director of Mirror Colour Print and managing director of People Publishing plc. Tony Conyers By Roland Gribben The ubiquitous Tony Conyers was never lost for words. The talented, engaging, versatile reporter was capable of holding a conversation or conducting an interview in five or was it six languages? He largely taught himself French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Russian, oh yes and studied Chinese in a career that stretched from South London to Moscow and the Commons. Sadly he was bereft of words during the closing days of his life as Alzheimers took its toll at the Journalists' Charity care home in Dorking. Tony had a zest for life and the tall story but rarely talked about his fascinating pedigree. On his mother's side he was directly descended from Gen William Palmer (1740-1816), one-time confidential secretary to Warren Hastings during the early days of the Raj in India and;the East India Company’s ambassador to the Moghul court. He married Princess Bibi Faise, a descendant of Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal and their now famous family portrait by Zoffany features on the cover of Dalrymple’s book, White Mughals The Indian connection extends to London. Tony’s grandfather Edward Palmer founded Veeraswamys in Regent Street, the first Indian restaurant in Europe, in 1926 and the introduction for some of Fleet St's finest to the world of the curry. Tony’s 59 year partnership with his wife Jean was filled with children and grandchildren and a deep tenderness. Jean was confined to a wheelchair after contracting polio in Spain while five months pregnant with their fourth child but continued to work, dug herself into gardening with an RHS diploma and was responsible for seeing the huge plot at the Dorking home got lots of TLC in between keeping a watchful eye on Tony. South London Advertiser, where he met Jean, was Tony's training ground at 16 after leaving school equipped with French and Spanish. National Service found him in the Army Education Corps in Trieste where he took the opportunity to learn Italian and help fellow servicemen overcome their inability to read the sports pages. He preferred to return to the SLA rather than take up the chance to go to university and moved to the Jersey Morning News, the Isle of Wight County Press Romford Times before reaching Fleet St, courtesy of the Sunday Pictorial Daily Mirror. The addition of Arabic to his language portfolio made him the ideal candidate for covering the Algerian War while his French connection meant he was frequently assigned to the Paris office. He moved to Spain for the Daily Sketch in 1958, then back to the where he spent two years in Paris and distinguished himself covering the student riots and de Gaulle's funeral. He moved from tabloid to broadsheet in 1969, joining the Daily Telegraph team of newsroom based reporters required to carry passports to equip them for sudden forays to foreign crisis. Vietnam, Egypt, Libya, India and other hotspots found their way into the Conyers’ passport before he spent two years – 1973-75 – running the DT Moscow office. His final reporting spell in the Commons lobby was almost peaceful by comparison and a stretch on the newsdesk before retirement provided the opportunity to mentor a new generation. Retirement in a 14th century cottage in rural Suffolk transformed him into a country lover and gardening enthusiast. He maintained Fleet St and writing links as night news editor on the Sunday Telegraph and editing the parish magazine and found his National Service experience useful as chairman of the local British Legion branch. The distinctive Conyers chuckle echoed around many hostelries along with his eureka moments. He startled fellow hacks one day while brushing up on Chinese. He shouted: ‘I've discovered the Chinese word for table tennis It's ping pong Now then now then By Colin Henderson When Nick Lloyd, his missus Eve Pollard and David (the Road Runner ) Montgomery showed up at The People in 1982 they came with a list of features and contributors that were for the axe. Top of the chart, guys 'n' gals – Jimmy Savile. And so, after almost 20 years, one of the most banal Fleet Street columns ever came to an abrupt end. True, it contained the odd reference to The Beatles, Elvis, Top of the Pops and the like, but Jimmy came up with little of substance. And he resisted the best efforts of the news desk to get him to mark their card about the music scene's bad boys. ‘I know lots but I say nowt,’ said Jimmy, who always feared that the People's own sleuths might turn him over, as several papers did at various times but with little lasting effect. He did, however, write wryly about his stints as a hospital porter in Leeds and his regular visits to some of the most violent patients at Broadmoor. ‘Trouble is that other visitors who don't know me often take me for one of the inmates,’ he was keen to tell people. Surprisingly, despite all his TV and radio shows and his wrestling and charity work involving endless motoring in his camper van, which he liked us to believe was a ‘mobile knocking shop for the young ladies’, he never failed to file. Even when on freebies on the Canberra, which he took often, the radio officer got his stuff back. When in London on a Friday he took great delight in coming into the office in his garish tracksuits and causing a stir among the secretaries as he handed over his copy. Never more than 250 words, it was written in ballpoint, sometimes pencil, on lined paper torn from an exercise book. The writing clear, the spelling good and there was always a narrative. Sometimes Jimmy would walk in with small, good-looking young men ‘chauffeuring’ him in his white Roller. We always wondered about them. And we debated endlessly why Bob Edwards and then Geoff Pinnington kept Jimmy on the books. Apparently it was because he was a name and he was cheap. ‘I get peanuts for this but at least I get my name in four million-plus papers every week, which not many other DJs do,’ he said. (The People circulation, 5.8million at its zenith, fell to below 4million shortly before Lloyd succeeded Pinners). Like many fund-raisers, Jimmy was notoriously tight with his own cash. He liked taking part in the the People's famous though-the-night, 50-mile staff walk from London to Brighton. But it took a lot of hints for him to pay for a round as we nursed our blisters and got pissed the following afternoon in our seafront hotel. This was nothing compared with the time Jimmy came into the office and confessed. A year earlier he had had a ‘tug’ from the taxman. The Revenue had got wise to his ruse of being paid in kind as often as possible – cigars, jewellery, holidays It wasn't quite in the Ken Dodd league but the accountants he had been forced to employ had had a hard time helping him. They warned of a possible jail term. ‘I had to see the Revenue's head honcho this morning and he really put me though it,’ said Jimmy. ‘Then he said, “Mr Savile, you are worth far more to this country on the outside than behind bars”.’ The upshot was no court proceedings but a sizeable repayment of tax. ‘Now,’ continued Jimmy, ‘let's celebrate.’ And he sent down to the canteen for packets of crisps all round Colin Henderson was on the People for 28 years. Jimmy Savile dubbed him and Man of the People sub Alan Hitchings his ‘Iron Men’ for their Brighton walk exploits and a venture with him on Ben Nevis that led to the Lochaber Mountain Rescue team being called out. By John Rodgers The death of Sir Jimmy Savile at the age of 84 has me diving once more into my leaking memory tanks. I can't come up with much more than you already know about the former Yorkshire coal miner who made it big on radio and television, instantly recognisable by his catch-phrases, accent, large cigar, track suit attire and yet quietly devoted to his mother and charitable causes. What I do remember is that he involved me in one of the toughest challenges an armchair sportsman has ever undertaken. Savile first came to my attention in 1960 when I was working in Yorkshire as a reporter on the Hull Daily Mail. He had gained a reputation as a disc jockey at the Leeds Mecca Locarno dance hall. My wife Margaret and I were still keen on strutting our stuff in those days so we took a coach to the county capital. The thing that impressed me most about that evening was Jimmy's outrageous dyed blond (and sometimes tartan) hair. In those days, men did not resort to artificial beauty aids. Certainly not in the north of England where they still dressed like Andy Capp in the Daily Mirror cartoon, tie-less, collar-less shirts, baggy trousers held up by braces and big leather belts. It never crossed the mind of a fashion conscious patronising London face that a musical revolution was about to explode in Liverpool, a port town just like Hull but on the other side of the Pennines. Six years or so later, Jimmy Savile was a big name in show business, hosting television's main popular music show and writing a column for the Sunday People where I was a regular casual reporter. Much to my surprise, I discovered that the blue and white silk track suit was not all show and that man with the large cigar and loud appearance was, in fact, a fitness fanatic. Even more shocking was the discovery that my piss-artist colleagues in the editorial room had been cajoled by Savile into taking part in a Sunday morning hike. On further thought, a stroll across the Sussex Downs exchanging shop gossip while working up an appetite for a traditional Sunday lunch of roast beef, Yorkshire pud and roast potatoes, washed down by pints of foaming ale, was an appealing concept. Being a freelance can be a lonely business. Still building up my London press agency, I had little occasion for pastimes. I worked every day of the week for as many hours as I could stay awake. On Saturdays I would dash from my agency desk to the Odhams plant in Long Acre, Covent Garden, where Britain's second largest circulation newspaper was published, to start an evening reporting shift which rarely ended before 1 am. The information I gained during my shift was worth more than the £7 I was paid. It gave me a jump start on most of my competitors the following day. But just as important was the chance to network with other journalists – freelances and newspaper staff men hired by the People to help out on publication day. By taking part in the hike, I would prove my worth as a man and bond to some extent with those peers who were usually my rivals. I'm sure it was only after I agreed to take part that Fred Boulden, a large cuddly man, gave me the full SP. We were not driving to the countryside for some leafy five mile tramp over hill and dale. Instead we had a dawn start for a 50 mile slog on paving and tarmac from London to the sea side town of Brighton. Gulp. To withdraw now would show me up as a total flake, never to be trusted again. I would have to tough it out. I even turned down my wife's offer to tag along by car to offer encouragement and supply sustenance. I did not want her to see my humiliation if I failed to complete the journey. I still had about 15 miles to go and was staggering along the highway on my own, in deep agony and envious at the thought of Jimmy Savile entertaining fitter participants at a stupendous finishing party when a car drew up. Fred Boulden got out, put a friendly arm around me and dissolved any remaining resolution to complete the task. ‘You were so out of it, staggering from side to side, that you looked as though any minute you would fall under a passing vehicle,’ Fred told me later when I claimed I would have achieved the distance but for his intervention. I don't remember any celebrations in Brighton. My feet were too blistered to take part or even take the train home. Instead I gladly accepted the humiliation of having my gleeful wife collect me by car. # Phil Walker (contd.) By Ted Graham Your obit, may I say, does not do justice to Phil Walker, who was one of the last great characters of Fleet Street. I joined him on the subs table at the Daily Mirror in January 1971 and his first words to me were: ‘Hello fuckface’. I had arrived with a reputation that I would go places, and Phil already had his mind set on going further. And he did always remain one step ahead. I was deputy to him as chief sub and deputy to him as night editor. When the Molloy/Stott axis saw him forced to leave, he happily acquired a home at the But it was his ability to drink and work that impressed even his enemies, and he had few of those. In those far-off days when your ‘break’ on the subs table was meant to be an hour, Phil would sometimes return three days later. I remember vividly trying to get him back to work after one ‘short’ break of three hours, but, even with the help of Phil Bunton, he ran us three times through the revolving doors at the Holborn office before escaping to another drinking haunt. One Saturday night, having finished his Saturday shift, his first wife was told that he had fallen down the escalator and was seriously hurt. She rushed to the hospital only to find him sitting up in bed gabbling to the nurses. Stella was so incensed that she probably inflicted more damage than caused by the fall down the escalator. He was a great mate, and found lasting happiness with Sharon with whom he lived in harmony in Norfolk. He was also a great journalist, producing headlines such as the great wally of china, inspired by Prince Phillip´s description of the Chinese as having slitty eyes. goodbye america on the picture of a disgraced Richard Nixon leaving the White House. My own favourite was what kenneth does to get a little more. Very simply, the veteran actor Kenneth More was having problems with fertility and his doctors advised him to rest his testicles in cold water before intercourse. Not bad for the Mirror´s trade mark Page 3 with two lines of 72pt across seven columns, 16 characters a line. His spells at the Star were often disrupted by his booze problem, but with only a few exceptions he was a well loved man. When he left the , I threw a dinner for him at the Savoy attended by the back bench and several subs. It was a great success because of the easy charm the little man could exude. I still have his notes on the special menu of the evening: ‘Ted and Phil, we´re like Clough and Taylor’. And we were. Our paths crossed many time during the late 80s and early 90s but sadly we lost touch. However, to reach the age of 67 with only one lung and probably liver and kidneys shot to pieces is no mean feat. So another one bites the dust. # ### supplement – part two, november 4 2011 The Leveson Inquiry So it’s been the topic of conversation all week, not only in our in-box but wherever journalists have been gathering or emailing and on hack-related websites all over the place: Did reporters and photographers steal photographs from (mainly) bereaved families, or did they only say that they did? editor Paul Dacre had told a high court judge that when he started in newspapers in the 70s ‘it was not uncommon for reporters to steal photographs from homes.’ Industry guru Roy Greenslade and Bob Satchwell from the Society of Editors agreed with Dacre that, prior to the setting up of the Press Council and the Editors’ Code, journalists’ behaviour had been ‘scandalous’. So last week we asked whether they knew this sort of thing happened, or had only been told that it happened. , reporting their claims before the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking, threw out the challenge – if you ever did it, or saw it happen, tell us who, where and when. The evidence is in. We have established that it happened. Just once, so far as we know. But that single instance was perhaps enshrined in the journos’ (and maybe the public’s) subconscious for ever more. That’s not to say that impressionable reporters and photographers didn’t thereafter assume that nicking photos was what they were supposed to do. But we still haven’t found anybody who did it, or saw anybody else do it. All we know is that everybody knows that people did it. They think. Revel Barker, with help from an old friend, reports on what might – with a single concrete instance – be the origin of a myth. Brian Hitchen, on the other hand, remembers that the Daily Mirror employed a chap whose job was Picture Snatcher (and snatcher, in this instance doesn’t mean cleverly snatching pictures on the fly, but ‘collecting’ them). Hitch colourfully describes the operators’ ‘sleight of hand’ which may be why even he doesn’t actually say he saw it happen was quick to confess that he had ‘no personal knowledge of picture theft though I recall hearing about it many times.’ Quite. Chris Sheridan says that the practice wasn’t necessary because bereaved families were generally relieved to talk to anybody, and happy to be helpful. John Rodgers (Fleet Street News Agency) has more experience than most and he says you could beg, borrow or even buy a ‘collect’ pic. But what you didn’t do was steal it. Alan Hart says that yes, there have been changes since the editors’ code was introduced. But they were not all for the better. And photo-stealing wasn’t part of the picture. And as usual has the last word. Moving pictures By Revel Barker In the end, of course, all that was needed was a good old fashioned reporter – one with a good memory, good contacts, and an unswerving eye for accuracy. Step forward (some of you may need to sit down at this point) my old chum and long-term colleague, Mr Paul Callan, late of the Daily Mirror – but never late into El Vino – and still scribbling occasionally for the Daily Express... He remembers The Angry Silence, a 1960 black and white movie starring Richard Attenborough as Tom, a factory worker who is sent to Coventry by his workmates for refusing to join an unofficial strike. ‘There is a telling scene,’ says Paul, ‘in which a Daily Express reporter, played by Bryan Forbes, steals a picture from Tom's mantelpiece and slips it into his pocket. Forbes, who also wrote the screenplay, had clearly done his homework and even his conversation with the newsdesk has a familiar ring of authenticity.’ Then, he recalls, ‘the picture, of the character played by Attenborough, appears on the front page of the next day's Express.’ In 1960, remember, the Express was The World’s Greatest Newspaper, and was a star (excuse the expression) in its own right. The following year another movie, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, revolved around that newspaper and its reporters, with editor Arthur Christiansen appearing as himself. In 1960 and 1961 ITV ran 39 episodes of Deadline Midnight, based on the exploits of journalists on a thinly disguised Express newspaper. Was this then, half a century ago, where some of the myths and the ‘traditions’ of the game started? Where did Forbes get the idea? Callan delved into his tattered contacts book, found an ex-directory number, and made the enquiry. And Forbes, now 85, told him that it had actually happened to him and his wife, Nanette Newman. Some reporter (not from the Express) interviewed him and stole a picture. He said: ‘I thought it would just give an extra edge to the scene in The Angry Silence when the reporter, played by me, conned his way into the house and took the picture. So I wrote it into the script.’ It doesn’t require much of a stretch of the imagination to work out what happened next. Some wide-eyed civilian asks: ‘Is that the way you reporters work?’ – Oh yes. We’ve all done that sort of thing. But have we? Apparently not. # Snatch team By Brian Hitchen Picture snatching? Of course it happened. Only those inexperienced in light-fingered newspaper practices could possibly be unaware of it. It's probably stopped now, simply because reporters don't go out doing any reporting any more. And most of the pictures in newspapers and magazines, come from agencies. Well into the late 60s, the Daily Mirror had a man on its photographic staff whose job description was Picture Snatcher. His name was Sidney Brock, and he was the brother of the Queen's gynaecologist. For most of the year Sid Brock wore a bowler hat and a riding mac over a well-cut, pin-striped suit. He carried a Gladstone bag, similar to those in which doctors and surgeons carried their instruments. Because he was so well dressed, and comfortable in a council house or a castle, Sid Brock could get in anywhere. His speed of hand was legendary. He could make a picture of a loved-one leave its frame on the mantelpiece or grand piano, and disappear into his Gladstone bag in a blink of the eye. But Sid was a gentleman, as were so many newspapermen. Their antics would these days cause the quango amateurs on the PCC to choke on their chocolate biscuits. After having the pictures copied in the Mirror darkroom Sid, and the rest of his gang, would always return the originals, sometimes enclosing extra copies, with a hand-written thank-you note. I knew of two Mirror photographers whose sleight of hand would have put stage magicians to shame. While one sweet-talked and photographed the ‘client’, the other glanced through the family photo album, lifting any pictures he thought might be useful. These pictures were always known as ‘collects’. Neither photographers nor reporters looked upon the practice as stealing, because, after copying, all the originals were immediately returned to their owners. I don't remember anyone complaining, and sometimes the picture desk received notes, thanking them for sending additional copies of the loved one. Life was more fun in those days, and newspapers had news in them. How different from the celebrity stodge they now dish out daily, to simple-minded readers who think the characters on East Enders, Emmerdale and Coronation Street, are real people. Poor saps! # Veteran reporter stands up for his old colleagues My old friend and colleague, John Dale, has taken issue with me (along with Paul Dacre and Bob Satchwell) for daring to suggest that journalistic ethics in the past were virtually non-existent. In a gentlemenranters rant [last week], he argues that our views of past reporting sins have been wildly exaggerated. In essence, he accuses us of myth-making. Older, and departed, journalists ‘are being slagged off by their younger counterparts’ at the Leveson inquiry. He writes: ‘The current generation is sacrificing the reputation of their predecessors in order to rescue their own... We were not angels, just as today's reporters are not angels, but we were probably no worse and – yes, I'll say it – perhaps better.’ Where's the proof that family photos were stolen from the home of the bereaved, that harassment and subterfuge were common, and that people's privacy was regular invaded? Well, I concede that I've no personal knowledge of picture theft though I recall hearing about it many times in the past. It isn't something the culprits are likely to admit nowadays. As for the other abuses, I point to the memoirs of Harry Procter, Hugh Cudlipp, Cyril Kersh, Duncan Webb, Gerry Brown and many more – most especially including the more recent book by Sharon Marshall (Tabloid Girl) – plus a variety of contributors to the esteemed gentlemenranters site itself. These contain anecdotes in which there is no attempt to conceal unethical practices. There may be some boasting. But the picture that emerges is one of cavalier behaviour by reporters in the pursuit of stories. John seems to believe that there is a Greenslade-Dacre-Satchwell ‘party line’ to ‘smear our history’ as part of a strategy to bolster self-regulation. For my part at least, I can say that isn't so. I was simply keen to place the current situation in context. Reporting, particularly in newspapers that rely on human interest stories for the majority of their content, has always had its dodgy side. The editors' code of practice, in existence since 1991, did undoubtedly improve matters in certain areas. But it did not prevent the rise, only in certain papers, of even darker arts – routine subterfuge, covert filming, gross intrusions of privacy, the use of agents provocateurs and, of course, phone hacking. That said, there is much wisdom in John's piece, which deserves to be read in full. And given his long pedigree in the business (including a lengthy spell at the Daily Mail), his unilateral decision to report on the Leveson inquiry is welcome. See his website, johndalejournalist.co.uk, which is dedicated to the inquiry. Meanwhile, perhaps there are people willing to prove John wrong by going on the record about ancient misbehaviour, including the theft of pictures. # The death knock By Chris Sheridan Once upon a time, I remember when reporting for the Daily Mirror from Newcastle being sent to York late one afternoon. News editor Leo White wanted the reactions of a couple whose daughter's body had been found that afternoon on moors above Pately Bridge in north Yorkshire. The girl had been missing for some time. Being a non-driver at the time, I took the train. Although somewhat worried about how I would handle the doorstep bit, I was also worried that the journey might be slow, that I would be late, too late for anything useful. However, I was able to counteract this pressure by use of a beer or two. It was after dark by the time I got to York, grabbed a cab and trundled out to the target. The street was deserted so I assumed the competition had all been and gone. To my amazement, however, as I got out of the cab, a police car pulled up outside the house and two got out – a male and a female. Well, I'd watched enough Z-Cars to work out that these were bringing the poor parents the bad news. Luckily for me, I had not quite beaten them to it. So I loitered nearby until they re-emerged and, after an appropriate pause, I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. To my amazement again, the couple, though clearly distressed, seemed pleased to see, me, invited me in and produced tea and a useful chat. They even offered pictures, so no need to do anything sneaky as in tales of yore. No distracting, no shinning up drainpipes, no sleeving of a trophy. In fact pictures were unnecessary because the earlier stories of the girl's disappearance had produced all those. As I suspect in many, many other such cases, the nearest and dearest just wanted the opportunity to talk it over with someone. Anyone. Whether they did so with my erstwhile colleagues who may have appeared later I do not know. # Beg, borrow, or buy but don’t steal By John Rodgers Picture snatching? It all depends on what you mean by snatching, or come to that, stealing. I collected countless photographs and frequently made more money from them than from my own snaps or the stories I wrote. I never found it necessary to physically take a print without consent. Sweet talking usually did the trick. If that didn’t work, the promise of money often did. If I had the opportunity, I would always look at the back of prints for the name and address of the photographer. Should the owner not part with the print, I would then approach the photographer. Theft of information, possibly. Sneaky, certainly. Just as important as collecting a photograph was to get permission to publish. This is where many reporters and their monkeys slipped up in the haste to get back to the office with their trophies. I found it best to write a receipt for the goods promising to return them as soon as I was finished with them. The wording demanded a signature attesting to the donor's ownership and, incidentally, gave me and my agency all rights. And, naturally, I would not be finished with the photographs until there was no chance of anyone else getting their sticky fingers on them. Morally reprehensible, probably. There were several occasions when we were beaten to the collect picture but not to that all important document giving us the rights to negotiate a payment on behalf of the copyright owner. Among the most valuable was a video of a man being attacked by a lion at London Zoo which was in the possession of BBC TV. Among the most memorable was an iconic image of the bearded Ripper which a rival freelance was also flogging. Fortunately, my agency had possession of the photographer's negative and sole publication rights from the commissioner. One of my reporters asked me to reimburse £50 he said he paid a porter to snatch a photograph from a murder victim's flat. Despite the temptation, I ordered him to return the photograph because I did not want to be involved in theft. I have suffered the inconvenience of having Scotland Yard detectives raid my library and confiscate photographs to which I did not have clear title. The pix of super snouts slipped to me by the Yard’s own intelligence section proved particularly embarrassing. But that's another story. What I did learn in my years of ‘snatching’ photos is that I could not rely on newspapers to protect me as a source. So it paid to take great care. Occasionally we came unstuck. The father of Michael Fagan, the young man who broke into Buckingham Palace and woke up the Queen, threatened to sue us for selling photographs of his son which we had bought from his wife. He claimed he was the true copyright owner and as he had legal aid he could pursue us endlessly without cost. He suffered a heart attack before we got to court which brought an end to months of hassle. # I didn’t want to do it By Alan Hart My hearty thanks to John Dale for redressing the balance on behalf of journalists of a certain age (last week’s ). Like many scribblers of my generation, I had heard stories of photographers who removed family photographs from mantelpieces while the backs of grieving relatives were turned. I had always assumed them to be apocryphal. How could it be otherwise? The danger of the theft being noticed while the snapper was still in the house would have been enormous. And if the photographer made good his escape with the stolen photo, his larceny would have been obvious when the photo appeared in his newspaper. Either way it would surely have led to a complaint and the danger of being sacked. It seems extraordinary to me that journalists of the stature of Paul Dacre and Bob Satchwell should take these old scribes’ tales seriously. I was a staff reporter on a weekly, an evening and, ultimately, a national tabloid, and never once saw or heard of it actually happening. There have, of course, been some dramatic changes in press freedom during my career. It may be hard for younger journalists to believe that there was a time when it was possible to sign up key witnesses in major court cases. Long before the trial, and before they gave evidence, these people would have signed contracts to tell their exclusive stories at the end of the case in return for large sums of money. It was also possible to name and publish photographs of rape victims. I well remember how the law was changed to prevent this happening as a result of specific cases that caused outcries at the time. When Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were arrested for the Moors Murders, the main witness against them was David Smith, who had been present when they killed their last victim. Smith was a hot property and he agreed to a deal with the News of the World for £1,000 – a huge sum in the mid-60s. Smith had been signed up by Manchester-based staffers George McIntosh and Nick Pritchard, who then had the job of ‘minding’ him in the months leading up to the trial. After Smith had given evidence for the prosecution, the first question posed by the defence lawyer was: ‘Is it true you are being paid a substantial sum by the News of the World for your story?’ Smith told the QC it was none of his business. At this stage Nick Pritchard, sitting in the press benches at Chester Crown Court, was trying to make himself invisible. The eminent judge then intervened and told Smith he must answer the question. Smith then scoured the packed gallery where the reporter was trying to slide out of sight. ‘Shall I tell him Nick?’ asked Smith. A law banning the paying of witnesses prior to trials was brought in shortly afterwards. When I joined the News of the World in 1971, the paper carried a huge number of lengthy court cases, many of them involving rape or indecent assault. In those days the victims could be named and their photos published – with or without their consent. This changed in the mid-70s after a prominent case in which a policeman was charged with the rape of a performer with the Black and White Minstrels. (This was a group of white singers and dancers who blacked their faces. Don’t ask me why). Newspapers decided it was shocking that this pretty young woman, whom they named and pictured, should have her identity revealed. They campaigned successfully to change the law. But not before they had one last story about the lady in question. After her attacker had been convicted and jailed, she was due to appear in Morecambe in a stage version of the Black and White Minstrel Show. I was among the reporters and photographers who were allowed to take seats in the theatre as they rehearsed the show. When the rape victim finally took the stage, we could hardly believe our ears as she sang her opening song. It was... ‘You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it.’ And they say the press are insensitive. Alan Hart was a staff reporter on the News of the World from 1971-2000. A book he ghost-wrote for a Coronation Street legend, entitled Jack Duckworth And Me, by Bill Tarmey with Alan Hart, is now available in paperback. #

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• 29 Oct ' 16:14

  Issue # 218October 28. 2011 Oh dear. Lord Leveson’s inquiry into newspaper hacking hasn’t even started in earnest yet – he’s wisely still trying to get an understanding of what newspaper reporting is all about – but already it looks like it’s about to get off on the wrong foot. The good judge is in grave danger of being side-tracked – nay, actually misled – by old hacks’ bullshit and bravado. Maybe we’ve only ourselves to blame. We lived a sometimes romantic (always seen by outsiders, at least, as being romantic) life and, let’s be honest, we tended to over-egg the pudding a bit, not least among ourselves. Thus, for example, we told how reporters swiped photos off people’s mantelpieces, and snappers peeled pictures out of family albums while grieving widows were putting the kettle on for us. The trouble is that that sort of ‘rat-like cunning’ (call it theft) has found its way out of folk-lore and out of the pub and into history. Did it ever happen? Answers in an email, please. Of course, it may have happened somewhere, once. The point is that it was never the routine. It wasn’t necessary. The past generation of reporters tended to quickly acquire the gift of the gab – often picked up from watching old photographers at work among the readers. Ask how journalists inveigled their way into people’s confidence or employed mild deceit to get into places that were out of bounds, and that’s another story. Stealing cherished photos from bereaved families? That’s a completely different kettle of worms. Lord Leveson was advised twice last week that if he needs – as he readily admits he does – to understand the ‘culture of the newsroom’ before embarking on his inquiry proper, he should start by reading this website. He should, certainly, start by reading this week’s edition, where John Dale, our man in the press seats, reports that his lordship is being fed duff gen by people who should know better – but who possibly don’t know at all, because they’ve only heard the stories. In other words, it’s all hearsay – something that judges don’t normally find acceptable as evidence. Anyway, you be the judge But, if we aren’t telling our own history right, how are we doing with other people’s? The latest issue of Journalism Practice looks at ways in which journalism uses history and historical sources ‘in order to better understand the relationships between journalists, historians and students of journalism’. Tony Delano has written the foreword to it (lifted and reprinted here), considering the difference between those tradesmen – and suggests that yellowing cuttings from the library might be more reliable than academia’s ‘published works’. The only trouble is that, last time we looked, Fleet Street’s finest were not using cuttings: they were relying on Google. And we all know how reliable the Internet can be, as a source of facts. You need to check ‘em, says Professor Delano. Then check ‘em again. Still in the library, Revel Barker received an email from former colleague Linda McKay bemoaning absent friends mentioned here . That somehow (it’s truly astonishing how the memory cells work) reminded him, as he was able to remind her, about the time she was sentenced to spend a week among the cuttings, on a Publisher’s Must, checking the reported history of the 1960s. But what, then, about the journalist AS historian? readers will (should) be aware that this month we published a book of selections of essays on the Middle East by Eric Silver, former doyen of the foreign press corps based in Jerusalem. It has already received rave reviews from Tel Aviv to Golders Green. Roy Greenslade is the latest to peruse a copy. And for those tyros among our readers who are still hoping to make themselves indispensable in the office, cartoonist offers a tip... Excuse me, Paul, I am not a thief By John Dale Did you ever steal family photos off someone’s mantelpiece while they were blinded by tears? Did you see anyone else do it? I didn’t. Yet, according to some of our marginally younger brethren, we were all at it, not just ducking and diving like dedicated Del Boys, which is tolerable, but actually nicking and lifting like Oxford Street pickpockets, which is certainly not. I was a reporter. I was not a thief. Neither were my colleagues as far as I know. I resent anyone, however elevated, telling Lord Justice Leveson otherwise. We were not angels, just as today’s reporters are not angels, but we were probably no worse and – yes, I’ll say it – perhaps better. I make this point emphatically after attending the seminars being held by Lord Leveson into the culture, practice and ethics of tabloid newspapers, in preparation for the opening of his judicial inquiry. Editors and publishers, academics and regulators, have been staking their ground. They are delivering speeches, digging in and establishing positions. As they do so, I am alarmed at the main strategy. Put simply, it is: blame the old shufflers because they’re too demented to resist – or six foot under. In front of Lord Leveson, older journalists are being slagged off by their younger counterparts. The current generation is sacrificing the reputation of their predecessors in order to rescue their own. ‘Let me assure you,’ Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, told the judge, ‘the British press is vastly better behaved and disciplined than when I started in newspapers in the seventies. Then much of its behaviour was outrageous. ‘It was not uncommon for reporters to steal photographs from homes. Blatant subterfuge was commonly used. There were no restraints on invasions of privacy. Harassment was the rule rather than the exception. The Press Complaints Commission has changed the very culture of Fleet Street.’ That view was endorsed by Professor Roy Greenslade, ex big shot at the Mirror, Sun ‘I didn’t think I’d ever say this – I agree a great deal with what Paul Dacre had to say, particularly regarding the standards he came into in the seventies,’ he declared. ‘There was no Code in those days and so we learnt ethics on the hoof and so there was that kind of scandalous behaviour.’ Then it was the turn of Bob Satchwell, of the Society of Editors. He too repeated what was becoming the party line. There were 200 people present. I seemed the only person present to raise an eyebrow... Assertion had become the received wisdom. Well, sorry to spoil the party. Now I do not say we were vestal virgins. We were not. But it is too convenient for the current crop of senior journalists to talk up the sins of the past in order to re-frame the failings of the present. The worse they paint pre-PCC days, the more they can claim to credit the PCC with improving things. By smearing our history they seek to show the effectiveness of self-regulation. By shifting blame, they are conjuring up a useful scapegoat, one less argumentative in that a lot of it occupies the cemetery. I too want self-regulation to continue. But while sharing their ends, I question their means. I have been involved with the national press since 1964. Were we really as shoddy as the Italian-cut mohair suits we favoured? Take photo stealing, which is always the first allegation Mr Dacre raises, the pocketing of photographs of murder or accident victims from the mantelpieces of their bereaved mums/wives/husbands/children. While they sobbed, you nicked the picture. You’d think we were taught it in our 1960s training. I reported for some of the most competitive outfits – Raymonds of Derby, Hopkinsons of Leeds and Bradford, and the – and I swear I never saw it. I think back to the very decent men and women who were my colleagues. They would not have done it just as I would not have done it. It was not even necessary. We were skilled in gaining trust – easier then, I think – and when we did the ‘death knock’, we respected our interviewees and in return they respected us because our newspapers were about real people and real lives, not ersatz celebrities, and the readers understood we were doing a job. We’d ask for photos and in nearly all cases they would be fetched and entrusted to our care. Theft would have been redundant. I repeat, I never saw it happen and I never heard of it actually happening. Maybe I’m an innocent fool. Perhaps Paul Dacre witnessed it. If so, let him say where and when. And if he did see it, what did he do about it? Turn a blind eye? I offer the same challenge to Roy Greenslade and Bob Satchwell. Yes, there may have been the odd rogue reporter or photographer but before you casually smear a whole generation, make sure you can prove it. I await your replies. And I make a supplementary point: which would be worse – stealing Milly Dowler’s photo or hacking her phone? It’s hard to say. And both are illegal, so equally outside the Code and equally useless in its validation. Next, Paul Dacre referred to harassment. I give credit to the PCC for working hard on this. Today’s targets can get the PCC to email newsdesks warning them they could be in breach of the Code. We didn’t have that in the old days. But – and here I reveal trade secrets – that was never really the way editors intended it to be, anyway. In theory we were supposed to be making a nuisance of ourselves outside someone’s front door, hoping they would crack and talk. Individual members of the pack would keep receiving further instructions from their desks to ‘knock again’ or ‘put another offer through the letterbox’. But these orders – usually counter-productive, frequently stupid – were mediated by the reporters on the ground. Although in theoretical competition, we would transfer our loyalty from the newspaper to our fellow hacks. We would become a team, deceiving our newsdesks in an agreed strategy, covering one another’s backs. We either failed or succeeded together – in the spirit of D’Artagnan: all for one, and one for all. The newsdesks knew. It enabled them to maintain a fiction of dynamic activity to the editor. The editor knew too. But the Mail wouldn’t leave the scene until the Express left. The wouldn’t quit while anybody else was left. And so it strung along, entirely without hope or purpose although entirely amicably. We frequently sat in the pub, leaving one person ‘on watch’. Next, privacy. In his inter-generational slur, Paul Dacre made no mention of the associated topic of trial by media. Let me rectify that grave omission. In the old days, we complied with the law of contempt. When police pulled people in for questioning, we published only the basic facts in order not to create prejudice. Compare that to last Christmas, when an innocent next-door neighbour was taken in and asked about the death of Joanna Yeates in Bristol. Mr Dacre’s front page read: murder police quiz ‘nutty professor’ with a blue rinse. Others were much, much worse. Eight nationals including the Mail later apologised and paid the man damages. Two, the Mirror Sun, were heavily fined for contempt. I search my memory in vain for a pre-PCC case that was worse than that. The same goes for the Maddie McCann disappearance. Yes, we dealt with similar cases. But when the facts ran out, so did the copy. We didn’t just make it up wholesale. Again, various newspapers have been forced to pay up and apologise, the Mail among them. As I say, the PCC has worked hard on privacy but I doubt Mr Dacre’s favourable estimation is shared by the Bristol schoolteacher, the McCanns, Colin Stagg (wrongly accused of the Wimbledon Common murder) and various other victims of the post-PCC press. And I haven’t even got round to phone-hacking – thousands of cases – and the hiring of private investigators. All right, phone hacking was not possible 20 years ago. But don’t let’s kid ourselves about private detectives. They have generally been used to carry out dodgy enquiries at arm’s length, to maintain editorial deniability. I never hired a private detective.So I refer again to the vilifying of the old days. I admire Paul Dacre. Some argue that he is the greatest editor of our time. He is also our most forceful advocate for free speech, warts and all. But the leadership he has shown at Derry Street has not always been equalled by that he has shown at the PCC. There is nothing wrong with the Code. The failure has been in its enforcement. But rather than admit this, he blackens the names of those who preceded him. I look forward to seeing how his argument stands up under cross-examination at Leveson, when he is called to give evidence on oath rather than a mere presentation. He wants self-regulation. Most journalists do. Yes, in the old days we were tough and extremely competitive. We were imperfect. But we were already practising self-regulation – in our cases personal, not collective. We do not merit being made an inter-generational scapegoat. And, for Paul’s benefit, I’d like to add this: Old tabloid journalists have human feelings too. You can follow Find John Dale’s Leveson website at www.johndalejournalist.co.uk It’s a fact or is it? By Anthony Delano All journalists of a certain vintage remember newspaper libraries that could produce worn envelopes packed with cuttings on almost anyone and any event. They also remember news editors – and lawyers – reminding them that because something could be found in those clippings it was not necessarily right. Check, young reporters were told. And if there was time, check again. Such advice was never applied to the contents of the books many libraries would also come up with for ‘background’. Hard covers signified authenticity. That assumption was not always justified, particularly when an historian made tendentious use of similar clippings as a prime source or failed to evaluate them adequately. For the better part of a century the accusation that Spain had sunk the battleship Maine as one of the causes of the Spanish-American war of 1898 was accepted as an invention of the ‘yellow’, ie popular, Press. Historians preferred the less sensational explanation of an accident on board, thus allowing several generations to be educated in the belief that the war had been popularised by a dodgy premise engendered by hysterical newspapers. Nearly a century later evidence emerged that the yellows might actually have been right. The Zimmerman Telegram, a magisterial work by the queen of historians, Barbara Tuchman, is flawed by an account of Japanese incursions during World War One that depended on a fictitious account by a rogue journalist that, even at the time, was convincingly refuted. Plenty of blame, then, to share between both occupations. In these and similar instances of inaccurate historiographic framing to which contributors to this issue draw attention it was historians who undertook the rectification. But instead of waiting for later scholars to question the accepted, journalists could just as easily have trawled through the same faded cuttings and seen a different image in the rear-view mirror. They did not do so because of an implicit demarcation: yesterday belongs to history. But, as the Hollywood re-makers like to say, what goes around comes around. Those stories and many more that were buckled into the protective armour of hard covers began as journalism. So, to twist Marx’s over-quoted aphorism into a new shape, journalism repeats itself first as history then as journalism again. The distinction between practitioners was not always sharp. One of the earliest journalism degree courses, at the University of Missouri in 1878, was taught in the history department, an arrangement followed in other places if only because academics were wary of letting a streetwise intruder run loose amid the ivy. Eventually, of course, American journalism teaching was all but subsumed in the great wave of academic enthusiasm for Mass Communication in which narrative was trumped by methodology, measurement and theory. Journalism teachers who valued message more than media – scorned by media sociologists as ‘green eyeshades’ – lost much of their independence. But a significant number of dissidents thought salvation could lie in a renewed alliance with History. Gene Roberts, a managing editor of the New York Times and a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, was arguing back in 1996 that history departments would make better partners in the study of journalism than ‘communications esoterica’. In the same decade, when the University of Michigan ended the autonomy of its department of journalism and absorbed it into ‘communication studies’, Jim Tobin, a Detroit News reporter with a PhD in history, explained why ‘the academy’s attitude towards journalism usually ranged from vague distrust to outright contempt’: it is partly motivated by a competition for cultural authority – a competition over who gets to speak the truth to the public. The academic who works on a single article for months believes not only that he simply knows more than a reporter writing for tomorrow’s paper – which is usually true – but also that he holds to a higher standard of truth. His own motives are pure; the journalist’s are commercial. Yet every day the academic realises that he speaks the truth only to a small band of colleagues and mostly indifferent students, while the reporter speaks dreck to an audience of millions. So when it comes time to evaluate a journalism department, the academic says, ‘why should we teach students to do this shit?’ [Carey, J. (Ed.) (1996) Journalism Education, the First Amendment Imperative, and the Changing Media Marketplace, Middle Tennessee University Press, p. 24] Perhaps because journalism wormed its way into British higher education rather later than in most countries, things worked out differently. The kind of academic misgivings Tobin described meant that some courses had to be labelled Journalism Studies but, if anything, Media Studies and Cultural Studies, or at least the parts of it that are not mere A-level material or just plain silly, are frequently incorporated into Journalism courses here, rather than the reverse. Without any ringing declaration being made, it seems accepted that journalism is not a communication medium but a process, a practice. Another consideration in Britain is that history seems in danger of being downgraded, when not entirely abandoned, in secondary education and is losing ground at university level. Putting aside any consideration of how this might have come about, could it be time not merely to question the officers-and-men distinction between historian and journalist but for journalism to come to the rescue of faltering history departments? The ranks have never been entirely closed off. Distinguished academic figures like A J P Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper were happy to have the exposure – and the income – that came from servicing the popular prints, even when they were doing it to reinforce the prejudices of a proprietor-patron. Television studios seethe with ambitious history dons churning out programmes that are essentially journalism. Meanwhile, as to the use journalism should make of history (and historians), there no longer seems to be reason to accept that one begins only where the other ends. The contributors to this issue show what good stories there are to be found, even if they disturb audiences conditioned by historical myth-making. Today’s research resources make it possible – even without Wikileaks – to mine raw sources, locate original material. Do what journalists are supposed to do: scrutinise, question, assess, report. Don’t let them get away with anything. Anthony Delano, sometime chief New York corr, chief European correspondent and managing editor of the , is a visiting professor at the London College of Communication. He is also author of Slip-Up – how Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard lost him, Joyce McKinney and the case of the manacled Mormon. Both are now available in paperback and as e-books. A trivial pursuit By Revel Barker We realised from the start that Robert Maxwell wasn’t the sort of proprietor who took employees’ days off all that seriously. So when we saw him come into the office on the first Boxing Day after he’d taken over, with a box of Trivial Pursuit under his arm, eyebrows were raised. Was the publisher, perchance, about to suggest a post-prandial board game in the Oak Room as a concession to those execs required to work through lunch on the bank holiday? Did he fancy quizzing the staff on their knowledge of recent history? Fat chance. It had been his wife Betty’s brainwave to delay Maxwell’s instant return to work after picking clean the turkey carcass with his fat fingers on Christmas Day, 1984. She thought he might be tempted to sit a little longer with the family if she introduced him to Trivial Pursuit – especially if it was the 1960s edition, a decade that Bob knew something about (and it was always advisable to offer him a game he’d got a chance of winning). So it had kicked off. And the first question put to the paterfamilias was: Where did The Beatles play their first public concert in the United States? ‘Washington Coliseum,’ said Maxwell, quick as a flash. Nope. Carnegie Hall ‘It was the Washington bloody Coliseum,’ said Bob. ‘February 1964. I was there!’ Well, it says ‘I don’t care what it says. Watch my lips Washington Coliseum. I was there.’ It’s only a game, dad. ‘Then it’s a stupid bloody game.’ Next round What was The Beatles’ first number one hit record in the UK charts? ‘Please please me,’ says Cap’n Bob. No it was Love me do, dad (Look, I wasn’t present, but I did get the story from – so to speak – the horse’s mouth. It doesn’t take a vivid imagination to assume that what followed was the overturning of the board game, if not the entire table, as Maxwell stormed out to cross the lawn of Headington Hill Hall for the sanctuary and sanity of an office where he was the only person with the answers whatever the question.) So next day, Boxing Day, there was Maxwell plonking the box on the desk of his editor-in-chief, Bob Edwards, proclaiming: ‘They are selling this shit to the public – and all the answers are wrong!’ I hurriedly (and politely, for Bob Edwards and I were friends) explained that I had better things to do with my time and the problem was eventually dumped on the slim and attractive shoulders of Linda McKay, a young reporter on the Sunday Mirror. After all, we reasoned, Trivial Pursuit was currently the most fashionable family board game; thousands of people would have been playing it over Christmas. If its answers were wrong it was an instant page lead in anybody’s book. So Linda was dispatched to the library, fount of all perceived knowledge, to check the veracity of 6,000 questions and answers. She wasn’t aware of which answers were disputed. You can guess the rest of this story. While, as far as Robert Maxwell was concerned, two wrong answers out of two equals a 100% failure rate, it transpired that 5,998 answers, checked against every source from Encyclopaedia Britannica to the Mirror’s own cutts, were accurate. Only two – The Beatles first US concert and their first No 1 UK hit – were wrong ‘Thanks for reminding me of that,’ said Linda this week. ‘Happy days Only Maxwell could have got the only two questions with the wrong answers. The questions were subsequently changed, so all my research hadn’t gone to waste. Carnegie Hall was actually the second US concert venue, but Washington Coliseum was the first. ‘In fairness to the game’s publishers, Record Retailer, the trade magazine used by record shops, did cite Love me do as The Beatles’ first number one. But every other source – New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Record Mirror and the Daily Mirror top ten agreed with Maxwell that it was Please please me (Yes, folks, that’s how thoroughly cuttings were checked in the old days.) ‘It’s a question that still causes arguments and even brawls in pubs all over the country,’ said Linda. ‘In fact most pub quiz masters have actually been advised to drop it.’ There are lessons to be learnt from this. One is that if you are looking for team members for a pub quiz you should get Linda on your side. The second is not even to think about playing against her at Trivial Pursuit – especially if you’re using the 1960s edition The man behind the dateline By Roy Greenslade Journalist Eric Silver was sent to Israel by the in 1967 in the aftermath of the six-day war. Five years later, he became the Jerusalem-based correspondent for the and the Observer He later freelanced, working for several papers, and for more than 40 years, until his death in 2008, he filed what his publisher calls ‘elegant and incisive essays’. Many of them can be found in By Eric Silver: Dateline Jerusalem, a book compiled by his wife, Bridget, which was published this week by Revel Barker. The selection provides ‘a unique insight’ into the Middle East conflict, writes Barker. And the 's current Jerusalem correspondent, Harriet Sherwood is appreciative too. She writes: ‘It's the impressionistic and observational pieces that I really loved, evoking a different kind and pace of journalism – reflective, rich, textured and, yes, slower – than that which predominates today.’ The 's Donald Macintyre, who has written an introduction to the book, recalls a man who was unstinting in his help to other journalists. He was always willing to share his formidable knowledge. In his tribute to Silver, Macintyre writes: ‘If you asked him for advice, as I repeatedly did on all sorts of matters, historical, cultural, religious, in the hideously confusing maelstrom that engulfs the Jerusalem correspondent, Eric almost always knew the answers but on the rare occasions he didn't he would know someone who did. “And you can mention my name, if you like,” he would say modestly. And of course it invariably helped if you did.’ So, asks Barker, who should read his book? Then he answers his own question: ‘Everybody who wants to be, or was, or is, in journalism... especially those interested in foreign affairs; everybody who wants to know more about the Middle East than you get in snatches of film on TV; libraries, embassies, diplomats, historians, soldiers and teachers; schools and universities; Arab and Jewish organisations and Israeli-Arab institutions; all Jews, Arabs, and Christians ’ , published by Revel Barker Publishing at £15.99, is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com and from all half-decent book stores.

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