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• 23 Oct 2009 12:58

  Like most of us starting out, I had no idea where I would end up, but I wasn’t short of role models. – , planning his future Issue #118 23 October 2009 Our FREE BOOKS offer is extended for a second week – see column on the RIGHT. And Barry Kernon’s TAX GUIDE, for employed, self-employed, freelance and overseas journalists has been updated. Geoffrey Seed’s book, was published yesterday and is available from and And then How to write an intro the young reporter says he’s having difficulty getting into his story. Old reporter asks: ‘What happened?’ Young reporter tells him what occurred. Old reporter says: ‘That’s what you write.’ But, as Dermod Hill says, it’s not that easy when you sit down to write A Feature First day on a new paper nothing can go wrong, can it? As Bill Greaves reports, it’s all about getting the names right. Starting with your own. As we have reported (October 2October 9) it’s 49 years since the News Chronicle folded. The old-timers still get together every year, nowadays at the Witness Box in Tudor Street which, in an earlier life, was known as the Feathers. Here’s a photoof some of the people who attended last week’s reunion. (The caption writer, at least, obviously had a good lunch.)One of the Chron survivors and celebrants, Tom Welsh, thought that having a degree might be an obstacle for landing a job when the looked like throwing him a life-line. But he didn’t hang around long enough to find out. As anybody who’s a regular reader must surely know by now, there’s also an annual reunion (every November) for journalists who worked on Tyneside. Gordon Amory, who has the fairly thankless task of organising it (and who threatens that every year will be the last – and says he means it, this time) raises a glass to some absent friends. – one of the reporters who spent some early years in Geordieland – decides to go it alone when Fleet Street goes putt. Finally do YOU have a contribution to add to Ranters? If you do, there are guidelines at the foot of this page about how to do it. You’ll probably ignore them all, but it’s just about making life easier for the editor (as if you cared about that ) What’s the intro? By Dermod Hill As a news reporter, I often found myself standing in a phone box, staring at my semi-legible scribble with the aid of a pencil torch, then dictating against a tight deadline a viable piece of copy that could be, and often was, printed a few million times and mass distributed to the nation the following morning. But as a feature writer, despite the luxury of time to research and prepare, I often found myself in a quite different situation, slapping the brain, trashing reams of copy paper with failed intros, and sitting in fear of the phone which, when it rang, would always be a voice with the unpleasant demand: 'Where is it?' News will frequently write itself. The juiciest bit goes first, the supporting bits go after, and the least crucial bits go last so that sub-editors, who are simple souls, will know to chop from the bottom upwards. But a feature, typically, has no juiciest bit. It contains no latest development. No firemen fight, no ambulance men rush, no policemen cordon off. In truth, there is no real reason to read a feature at all unless, in the first few words of the first paragraph, something is stuffed that catches the eye and hooks the curiosity, and begins to spin a thread that will pull the reader maybe all the way to the end, a thousand or more words later. For years, after making the transition from news reporting, I suffered badly from writer's block. Deprived of the immediacy, the material at my disposal never seemed to answer the question: so what? I had no shoulders to cry on, no father figures with wise advice to soothe my woes away. Because in my craft ('my sullen art' as Dylan Thomas put it in another context), success in features was widely held to be a trivial matter of 'knack', a mere facility with words. It is no exaggeration to say this 'block', blighted not only my life, but that of my family. I recall one brief to produce 800 words on the subject of Scientology. This neo-religion had received a bad press. It was widely believed to break up families and even threaten state security. It was banned outright in some European countries. Its methods of indoctrination were thought to be synonymous with brain-washing. But all this had been said over and over a hundred times in the press. So what could be my fresh 'take'? I spent hours in the cuttings library of the Daily Mirror in Holborn. I bought and read the founding father's book, Dianetics by L Ron Hubbard, the shadowy force behind the cult who was known to his disciples as Elron. A drearier book I had never come across in my life. I also visited Scientology's church in London, basically a shop in an unfashionable fringe of the West End. But could I stitch any of this together into a viable feature? Not I. I had booked a holiday in Cornwall with my wife and two young children, but by the time we departed I had still not cracked the piece. So along with the buckets and spades, the car was loaded with the portable typewriter and my usual few reams of paper. Glumly we all sat in a caravan in Mousehole while I filled rubbish bins with screwed up intros. The solution finally came when the holiday was over. By this time, I had missed so many deadlines the spread that had been allocated in the magazine had been reduced to a back-of-the-book page. My eventual intro was as simple as it should have been obvious. Scientology reached out to from its church in Tottenham Court Road in the form of a young lady with a clipboard and the manner of a brush salesman who hasn't sold a brush all day, imploring passers-by to step inside and take a free personality test. That was it. All complexities evaporated. The reader was posed with the simple issue: what happens when these infamous alleged loonies tap your elbow in the street and ask you to step inside? Read on and find out was the way into my piece. The rest of it then wrote itself in less than an hour. A healthy readers' postbag followed. Could I really have sweated for weeks for this? Did Shakespeare sweat so much over Macbeth? I doubt it. But writer's block is as real as its cause is elusive. And many more tribulations were to come. In features-editor circles at that time it was believed that I had a flair for humour, so whimsical assignments often came my way. At the height of the craze for stand-up northern comedians on television which had brought the likes of Bernard Manning to stardom, I was sent to enrol in something called the Slim Wood School of Comedy in a rough suburb of Manchester The idea was: how do you learn to be a comedian? Slim was basically a superannuated working man's club comic who, in his twilight years, saw a new way of selling his old gag scripts. The training course was of an order unlikely ever to be licensed by the Department for Education. It came with a pile of ready-made stand-up routines, all of which he had worked himself over the years in the bailiwick of oop-north. As a bonus, there was a list of landlady addresses on both sides of the Pennines to help launch your peripatetic career in laughter. The tuition itself took place in a small spare bedroom converted loosely into a studio where student funsters learnt the mysteries of use of microphone, and the timing and delivery of gags. Back at the typewriter I could see that the essence of this feature was to re-cycle the gags and hopefully make the readership guffaw on their morning train. My difficulty was that all the jokes, without exception, were truly abysmal. Forget standing up in front of a tipsy clientele in working man's clubland. The pressing problem now was how to make this rubbish work on the cold page of a magazine with a weekly sale of 3 million. Days passed while I fretted. But eventually, a few hundred cigarettes later, I saw an escape route. Basically it was to come clean on my plight. The angle that finally came to my rescue could hardly have been simpler or more banal. It ran something like: 'Always start on a strong one. The Slim Wood School of Comedy was most insistent on that. But what if, in all the 600 gags they supply you with, you cannot find a strong one ?' Second par: 'Then start in the middle like this. I'm not saying my mother in law is fat. But they had to ask her to leave the beach at Blackpool last year because tide was waiting to come in ' Boom, boom. I was away. Magically, all the awful gags now worked precisely because they were so bad. Not all my assignments were so frivolous. But the underlying issues of form, structure and, above all, the problem of writing intros are the same for any subject. They continue to intrigue me now as I read other people's features, long after removing myself to less stressful pursuits. Can any rules be distilled from these experiences that will lighten the agony of the feature writers of the future? I think there is one. It took me a long time to understand it. In the end, it is never the subject of the feature that counts, rather it is the writer's impression of the subject. It is not the material itself, it is the light you cast on it that creates interest. Egotism is the very DNA of feature writing and of its near cousins, colour-writing and column-writing. Although it is often good practice in a feature to limit, or even avoid entirely, use of the personal pronoun 'I', the writer must always place himself at centre stage. In features, facts are strictly secondary. It is personal impression that gets you through. Next time you find yourself hopelessly stuck, my advice is not to look for solutions in your material and research. The solution will lie in yourself and how you respond to the information you gathered. As proof, one of the more successful profile pieces I wrote, at least in terms of peer plaudits, was an analytical feature on the actor Laurence Olivier near the end of his long career. I wrote it with all the aplomb and certainty of a person who had never met Olivier in his life, though I had watched him in rehearsal and spoken to many people close to him at different times in the past. Without doubt, my article said more about myself than it did about my subject. But that is exactly what a feature must do. For, in a world that teems with billions of people, it is still the individual that fascinates. And the individual that counts most in feature writing is the hack. Sine qua non. By any other name... By William Greaves However terrifying it might be in every other respect, one of the few redeeming features of one’s first day in a new newspaper office is that you cannot surely have yet done anything to be bollocked for. Providing you had conspired to turn up in the right office on the correct day – no small achievement in itself – and in view of the fact that you had not yet located a typewriter, let alone written anything, it should not be possible to have either cocked up or been spectacularly scooped. In theory. So it was particularly disappointing, after meekly introducing myself to the thick-set prematurely grey character on the news desk of the Manchester Evening News, who later turned out to be an enthusiastic but decidedly ungifted golfer and deputy news editor called Freddie Bannister, to be met with the words ‘Oh f***!’ And before I could think of anything further to splutter, things took an even more decidedly unnerving turn. ‘Bill Greaves? Bill Greaves? You can’t be Bill Greaves!’ Now, at that moment, the only fact of which I was reasonably certain was that my name was Bill Greaves. I had been given the name William some 24 years earlier and as far as I was aware that is what it had remained ever since. And the Greaves bit went back a great deal further. ‘You can’t be Bill Greaves,’ persisted this madman – sorry, Fred, but these were first impressions – ‘for the very good reason that WE ALREADY HAVE A F***ING BILL GREAVES! We shall have to call you Bert.’ The entire reporting staff of the Manchester Evening News could only have been a couple of dozen, so there being two Bill Greaves seemed unlucky. But becoming Bert was downright unthinkable. ‘I have another name,’ I said, a tad sheepishly. ‘It was only my mother’s maiden name and was never meant to be used by anyone...’ ‘What is it, for god’s sake?’ ‘Er, Marshall.’ OK, Marsh – I’ll get somebody to show you around.’ And so the introductions began. The newly arrived Marshall Greaves, somewhat unfamiliar with his own name, tried desperately to absorb everyone else’s. There was the gifted John Dodd, I remember, John Flint, Neil Bentley, Maurice Weaver, Martin Noble, John Cavell, Brian Hope, Jimmy Ross, Ken Drury, John Prince (or did he come later?), Ann Wales, Charlton Jackson.... ‘Charlton,’ said I delightedly, ‘thank god someone else has a stupid name!’ ‘John Jackson, really,’ said Charlton, ‘but there were two John Jacksons when I arrived, so I had to be Charlton. Middle name, you know. Don’t know why. That’s what they gave me.’ In the middle of the editorial floor of the Cross Street headquarters of the Manchester Evening News, two renamed warriors actually hugged each other. As time went by, the other Bill Greaves left to join Border Television, the first John Jackson took his leave I can’t remember where, I went back to being William Greaves on the in Manchester and my cherished colleague Charlton embarked on a distinguished career as John Jackson of the Daily Mirror Some years later, we spotted each other across Fleet Street. ‘Charlton!’ I screamed. ‘Bloody hell, it’s Marshall!’ came the reply. And as we embraced on the central reservation several bemused colleagues on each pavement were left thinking that the world in general, and two parvenus in particular, had gone stark, staring mad. From that day on, whenever we met – which happily was often – we never failed to greet each other by the names with which we were so fleetingly rechristened. Where are you now, Charlton? Speak to me! The Chroniclers Front row L-R: Paddy McGarvey, Betty Thomson (Williams), Jean Nash, Peter Baistow, Vivienne Richards, Liam Hanley, George Vine, Mary Welsh, David Thompson. Back row L-R: Philip Purser, Maggi Vine, Frank Cassell, John Lucas, Denis Pilgrim, Trevor Nash, Peter Grosvenor, Bill Cater, Tom Welsh. [Well, that's what we were sent - Ed.] # A degree of understanding By Tom Welsh Actually, it was just possible for those ‘severely deprived people’ with an Oxbridge degree (Another fine mess, Stanley: Geoffrey Mather, last week) to survive in the Street, as I discovered in the days following the death of the News Chronicle in 1960. When the Chron folded after I had been subbing there for only a year, I had a young family and a big mortgage on our new home in Orpington, so I rapidly put in applications to two papers I admired, the Daily MirrorManchester Guardian, which was just about to start printing in I was vetted by a Daily Mirror executive (can’t remember the name). Then I was seen by Dickie Dinsdale, who was night editor. He was not welcoming. His first comment was: ‘Mr Welsh, I have your letter. You say you want to come and see me.’ He very deliberately repeated ‘come and see me’, emphasising the ‘and’. He said, ‘This grammatical error is a particular aversion of mine.’ My heart sank like a stone. I knew the had a high standard of grammar, and that I should have written ‘come to see’. His next question was equally unfriendly. ‘I see you say you are a law graduate of Cambridge.’ (I got the impression from his tone this was an institution he regarded with the utmost contempt.) ‘What possible relevance could this have in applying for a job on the Daily Mirror?’ I felt my answer was particularly inadequate, but the interview seemed to go on for a surprisingly long time. Dinsdale’s parting shot as I left was that there were now sixty subs (ex-News ChronicleStar) looking for jobs in Fleet Street, and most of them had written to him for a job. I was the first he had seen. He would let me know. As I left the building, dejectedly, I met a sub I knew and he invited me for a drink in the subs’ local (I can’t remember the name of the pub). I asked the assembled boozers, ‘What sort of a person is Dinsdale, to work for?’ They said, ‘He comes out of his office after the first edition waving a copy of the paper shouting ‘What f***ing c**t subbed this f***ing story?’’ I didn’t like the sound of this. I went back into the building, borrowed a typewriter and typed a polite letter to Dinsdale thanking him for seeing me and telling him that I had been offered a job on the (which was true) and had decided to accept it. (I was one of the first three people, two subs and a reporter, Alastair Hetherington appointed in preparation for London publication of the paper.) I then had a couple of drinks before setting off by train to Orpington, where my wife told me she had received a very odd call indeed from someone called Dinsdale, who said I was making a very bad mistake, and he could have discussed very good terms with me. I pondered on this occasionally when, later, as a former Fleet Street sub, I was being brainwashed at the Cross StreetManchester , offices of the Absent friends, plus some present ones By Gordon Amory In a couple of weeks time more than fifty journalists from all parts of Britain – and even from the Mediterranean island of San Serif – will descend on Newcastle for the 19th annual re-union of the Pens and Lens Club. The idea in the beginning was for those who had worked on a national in Newcastle sometime in their career to come back for just one more time Then those who had worked in Newcastle and went to LondonManchester wanted to see their old Geordie mates so they joined in. Luminaries like Brian Park, former chief reporter at the , Roy Spicer of the News Chronicle and then the Sunday Mirror, Rod Tyler (Daily Mail, NoW), Pete Donnelly who subbed Hickey and then Dempster, and Mike Gay – one of the most popular of Tyneside newspapermen – were allregulars until they were called up to the Great News Room. Revel Barker has missed only one gathering and that was because he couldn’t get a boat back in time from a job in Barbados. Roger Scott and Ellis Plaice travelled regularly from France and Arthur Steel who was one of the ’s first Page Three photographers would come with John Knill – the Express picture editor for years who fought his cancer and won. Then Bert Horsfall, the legendry Majorcan free-lance retired back to his home city and was a regular attender until he, too, was elevated. The list goes on and on. For the past couple of years Chris Ward, once editor of the and David Banks, editor of the Daily Mirror, who both started their careers in Newcastle have come along. They will be here again this year as will Sir Stuart Bell, the Member of Parliament who has been a government spokesman during the expenses debacle. He qualifies as he was once a junior reporter on the Blaydon Courier, a weekly paper published not much further than a stone’s throw across the Tyne Former Daily Sketch reporter Terry Wynn, a Papal Knight who once edited the Catholic Universe – as a contrast to Tom Petrie, John Kay and Ian Hepburn who all helped make the newsroom one of the most envied, all worked in Newcastle and will make the trek up North. Chris Boffey of the who started his national career on the Daily Star in Newcastle and is now the chairman of the Journalists Charity will be there along with Terry Manners head of PA. Jim Dumighan who worked with Peter Dimmock and was later head of BBC Sport which was then based in Birmingham and who worked on local papers before joining Tyne Tees, will also make his annual visit. One regular, James MacManus, a Daily Express reporter in Newcastle, now a senior executive with The Times would have been there but for a heart operation. Dennis Brierly, chief parliamentary sub at the Express was also a regular but he lives at Falmouth now and the journey for an octogenarian is getting longer so he and Bert Stimpson, long time back bencher have had to back down. Johnny Brownlee, head of the legendry ThomsonTraining School for Journalists, better known as the BrownleeAcademy when it began is 91 now, lives in North Yorkshire and the journey would be too much for him. He had in his classroom at times names like James Naughty, Sally Magnussen and Andrew Marr. Ill health stopped the journey for people like Mike Warner and Colin Henderson. John Learwood, one of Newcastle’s characters who has been around the city for so long as a freelance and staffer with the Daily Sketch, will miss out for the first time.   Eighty-seven-year-old John hasn’t been well for some time and has been in hospital on several occasions. His tales are legendary and we will miss him. Others come in their place and the new ones will get a special welcome from Clive Crickmer (Daily Mirror) who has been the long-time chairman and whose speech is always the highlight of the day. He does his research well and opens the proceedings, but you could expect nothing less from an opening bowler of high repute. Our thanks have to go to the Press Office at Scottish and Newcastle Breweries who will be changing their name in the not-too-distant future. Unfailingly, year after year they have supported us by sponsoring the reception. They have got the rounds in for nineteen years starting with Jim Merrington when he was PR chief in Newcastle, then Elaine Reed took over. Nigel Pollard has been the head of public relations at the Breweries in London for a number of years now and has had the unfortunate job of announcing many moves and closures the latest, the news that Newcastle Brown Ale will be brewed at Tadcaster. The famous Blue Star that shone over the city of Newcastle has gone. He will be one of our guests on Friday November 6, along with his colleague David Jones. After nineteen years of arranging everything to do with the Pens and Lens Club, I am planning to make this my last. Hopefully someone else will take it over as it has been a wonderful journey for us all but as Ted Dickinson, the very pleasant editor of the Daily Express in Manchester, used to say, ‘nothing lasts for ever’. We will be making it a championship day at St. James’ Park this year. PS: Published and Be Damned! the astonishing story of the Daily Mirror by Hugh Cudlipp and with new introductions by Geoffrey Goodman and Revel Barker will be published that week and copies will be available on the day at a generous discount, hand-delivered by the publisher. Anyone coming to the lunch should let me know in advance on gordon.amory@googlemail.com if they want a copy bringing for them. Many had the original and it is a damned good read for all of us who remember yesterday. When editors go putt Okay, come on, all of you, we’re nearly there. The Life and Hard Times of a Happy Hack is nearing the last lap. After all this time, I couldn’t tell you how delighted I am to report that I have finally detected some sort of pattern in my working life (‘career’ would be pitching it a bit high, I think) which I think may also explain the meaning of the universe. My personal journalistic journey, which took me over 40 years, went from Waterhouse to Waterhouse. That is, from Waterhouse, R, known only as Mr Waterhouse to me, first name unused, deputy editor, chief reporter, and sub of the Craven Herald in the Yorkshire Dales, where I first laid my fingers on a two-cwt Underwood To Waterhouse, Keith, who bought me my first drink in the Stab, the pub in London; one half of bitter. It’s neat, isn’t it? Two more contrasting bookends to a working life you could hardly imagine. The first Waterhouse went on his way some years back, and now Keith has also left us, which sort of takes it full circle. Can we just for a moment rewind back to the young Dunne, the skinny spotty one, working for the first Waterhouse? Like most of us starting out, I had no idea where I would end up, but I wasn’t short of role models. Should I follow the tall and charming Ron Evans, who I remember eating a daffodil sandwich at the cricket club dinner. Why? He was bored. Drunk? Possibly, but it doesn’t do to be censorious. Or how about Bill Freeman, who drove his new Ford Popular for 50 yards on the Draughton Road ? What’s so special about that? Well, the car was upside down at the time, thus founding the Holy Rollers Club. And what about Don Mosey who had the nerve to marry a girl called Josephine (Josie Mosey?). Heroic figures all, men of daring and imagination to a 16-year-old school-leaver like me. They showed me the way, too. Just to prove my admiration was not misplaced, they all went on to even greater triumphs. Via the Telegraph and Argus in Huddersfield and the Sunday Times in London, Ron became boss of Harlech Television. Via the Yorkshire PostSunday Express, Bill became editor of the Sunday Mirror in Manchester. Via the Yorkshire Evening Post and the Daily Express in Manchester, Don became a commentator with the BBC’s celebrated Test Match Special team. He was the only man I ever knew who was brave enough to call Fred Trueman by his middle name – Seward. But the one I should’ve been watching was Bill Mitchell, the quietly smiling chap who moved a few miles up the road to join the Dalesman magazine. Why did I miss him? Perhaps because he didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and – to the best of my knowledge – never smuggled a girl out of the Town Hall dance and across the road into the office to get his face slapped. Bill was also a Methodist, which – and here I speak as the owner of the most slapped face in the Dales – was not one of my ambitions. And, let’s face it, the Dalesman, quaint and cosy as I saw it, didn’t fit the snap-brim, poker-playing, bourbon-drinking image I was hoping for. Yet 40 years later, standing amid the smoking ruins of old Fleet Street, it was Bill Mitchell who came to mind. After all the politics, manoeuvring and back-stabbing of the nationals, what could be better than life on a cosy little countryside mag?From my weekend cottage in West Sussex, bought with the overspill from my last divorce, I looked out towards the Inspired by the Dalesman, I would start my own magazine right here. I hadn’t been so excited since Mr Waterhouse first put my initials on a review of Settle Amateur Operatics’ appalling production of The Desert Song This was a wonderful time, dreaming up my magazine, planning the content and the style – everyday stuff to the Molloys, the MacKenzies and the Lambs, but new to me. It would be defined by all the things it wasn’t: no politics, no celebrities, no crime, no glossy gossip, and none of the bubbling malice of the tabloids. Like the Dalesman, it would be A5, pocket-sized. A traditional country magazine. Diaries from farmers and countrywomen, history, natural history, lots of humour, with a strong dash of nostalgia. Real people, real life. Readers would wallow in its warm affection. Downs Country – that’s what I’d call it. Oddly enough, the mag, which liked my words almost as much as I liked their cheques, was still flourishing. What I didn’t realise at the time was that my future, and that of several other innocents, was decided on the putting green at the Northcliffe Golfing Society tournament. A tall, blonde, athletic Australian woman sank a brilliant putt to win the cup for Lord Rothermere’s team. Next thing, Nick Gordon, editor of has gone, and Dee Nolan’s in the chair. Lesson for young journos: forget Pitman’s, get out and practise on the putting green. Her first job for me, via John Koski, was to interview Anne Robinson. Now I’d known Annie as a near-neighbour in Derbyshire when she was married to Charlie Wilson. I’d known her partner-manager-husband, John Penrose, when he was a young reporter on the . At that time, I was living near Tunbridge Wells and John used to visit the town occasionally to see a female freelance who made a living writing for Forum (and occasionally the Mail) about surgical enhancements to her body and their effects on her social life. Penrose, I understood, was helping her tighten up her prose. By this time, Penrose and Robinson were halfway up CelebrityMountain, I’d interviewed her before for magazines, so it should be no problem. Exactly John’s phrase when I rang him. So I was astonished when he rang back later to say Annie wouldn’t do it. For me? No, I wasn’t the problem. She wouldn’t do it for Dee. I breathed in deeply and reached for a pen. I’d need a note of this. Why exactly was she refusing an interview for Dee Apparently Annie had somehow formed the impression that when Dee and Penrose were colleagues on the Mirror they had worked so closely together they had momentarily merged. A ridiculous idea. Complete nonsense. Penrose was a man of legendary celibacy, a man who had never shown the slightest interest in tall blondes and wouldn’t dream of sullying his desk with one. And Dee too. Although her grip on the putter had attracted some admiration, she was a woman of impeccable reputation. There I was, stuck in the middle. The weakest link. It’s a wonder no-one thought of turning it into a television quiz show. I told Koski. He said: ‘Bloody hell, I can’t tell Dee that,’ but I never did discover what he did tell her. So there’s the truth. If, even at this late date, I can help to save the reputations of two fine journalists and bring peace to the tortured mind of a telly presenter, then these jottings have not been in vain. Meanwhile, Downs Country was coming on apace. I placed ads in several local papers looking for writers and illustrators. An avalanche of mail hit my Sussex cottage. I set off driving around the south to assemble my talented team who were going to fill my magazine at ten quid a go. Slowly it built up. A farmer to write a diary a naturalist to do notes a dainty lady dealer for the antiques page a designer for an international pharmaceutical firm who loved drawing old country gates a young man who could compile a crossword full of local references an historian who could bring country houses to life Local enquiries steered towards a man who used to sell ads for the local papers. He’d look after that for me. What had been the dining room in my cottage near Midhurst became the office. One second-hand desk £10. One boot-sale chair £5. One rickety filing-cabinet £2. So far so good. But it struck me that for all this flying around and the adrenalin rush of putting the magazine together, I had no idea how to get it to the shops. What I needed apparently was a distributor. I approached one, and to my amazement discovered that I had to audition in front of them and make out a case for my magazine. If I convinced them, they’d take it around the wholesalers; if I didn’t, they wouldn’t. After some hesitation, they decided to accept it. But they didn’t like the pocket size because it wouldn’t slot in with the others on the shelves and could easily get lost. Because it was so much against the tide of celeb and glam mags, they weren’t totally convinced it would sell. But, no matter, they took it on. Partners came and went. Originally, I’d planned it with Joe Houlihan, one of ’s commissioning editors. He backed out when he was offered a tempting job at LWT. It was the start of a distinguished career in television where he is to this day. After Joe left, an accountant came in, then backed out. One or two others showed an interest, then backed off. By this time I had become so obsessed with the idea that I think I was incapable of sharing it with anyone. It was my baby. It was also my £10,000 backing it. What was the problem? The Dalesman sold 70,000, most on subscription (which meant they kept all the money) and it was stuffed with ads. If it worked in Yorkshire then surely my magazine, tailored exactly to the more sophisticated and wealthy audience in Sussex, couldn’t fail. Could it? Feeling a little guilty, I explained to my eager contributors, most of whom had never been published before, that I could pay only £5 for a one-page piece, £10 for two pages. But I’d signed an awful lot of cheques by the time the first issue was ready to go. A good friend put me on to Sue Miller, a designer who’d worked on major titles like Good Housekeeping, and who would do the design and put it on disk for £1,200. A not-quite-so-good friend put me on to a printer – that was going to cost around £5,000. My £10,000 was already slimming like a weight-watcher. No matter. We’d soon be up to 70,000 sales, the ads would flood in. Oh yes; the books Diana, friend, neighbour and book-keeper, agreed to do a day a week to keep an eye on the accounts and the post when I was up in London ‘Tell me,’ said my accountant IanSpring (who was also accountant for Paul Foot and his father Michael, and Tony Miles and Mike Taylor from the Mirror), ‘I’m interested in your earnings pattern. At the moment you come up the A3 to earn money, then go back down to lose it all again.’ He had a point. This was the early 1990s. Around that time, Dee Nolan made the big announcement. would cease to be the best general magazine since Picture Post; it was to be a women’s magazine. Newspapers were now encroaching on the colour ads that had been the exclusive province of the colour supps. YOU would be left with the ads for elasticated trousers, nylon sheets, and pendants with astrological signs which would then drive away the glossy upmarket ads. Downward spiral closure. There was a personal factor too. The rumour was that Nick, much admired as an editor with the golden touch, didn’t have many friends close to the throne at Associated. Even since that winning putt, Dee had been working quietly with David English on producing a new woman’s mag, while Felicity Hawkins kept the old YOU going. Felicity left to become deputy ed of the Sunday Mirror with oversight of their magazine. And YOU did indeed become a woman’s mag, which guaranteed its survival. Sadly, it didn’t guarantee mine. Writers who’d enjoyed fees of up to £2,000 for several years were informed the fee was now £650. It really was all over. The revolution that had swept the offices down to Docklands or out to Kensington and whisked scores of stunned hacks off to early retirement, redundancy, or a job driving taxis in Tonbridge, had caught up with me at last. After two weeklies, three regional dailies, two national staff jobs and writing for everyone from The Times to Women’s Own as a freelance, four decades of arranging and re-arranging the 26 letters of the alphabet into interesting shapes, I’d hit the buffers. Luckily, I had my own magazine ### Contributing to Ranters Contributions are welcome at all times. But the preferred deadline is the Sunday before publication (the site is updated every week on Thursday night for Friday). And yes, we appreciate that a little bit of deadline adrenalin often helps, but very few of the stories are time-sensitive and we have other things we could be doing during the week. Exceptions can always be considered – subject to arrangement and depending on urgency. Please contact the editor first (it avoids duplication and may save effort). The address is at the top right on this page. Don’t use words like Ranter as a catch-line or subject line (believe it or not, it’s already been used). 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This is a hangover from manual typewriters and lino machines – nowadays the computer does the spacing for you. Paragraphs are not indented, and not justified. Don’t put breaks at the end of lines. Use only ‘hard breaks’ (CTRL+ Enter} for paragraphs. Words like editor take lower case. Words like whilstamongst have never appeared in newspapers, except in ads for malt whisky and vintage port. Newspaper titles are italicised the Sun, the , but The Times. Once requested, Word attachments are preferred. The default language is English (UK). Headline suggestions are always welcome, but may be changed, according to lunch. Here’s the thing. If you don’t do it, the editor has to do it for you. And he’d rather not mess with your copy.   If you are not already on our journalists’ mailing list, and would like to be reminded when the site is updated, send your name and email address to   Use the same link if you have recently changed your email address.   We do not send any other emails and do not share the address list with anybody.   We are extending the free books offer for a second week. Listed below are the 12 titles published by Learn more about each or every one of them by clicking on the author’s name in the . The titles are:     Crying All The Way To The Bank (Liberace v the Daily Mirror and Cassandra) Published yesterday Publish and Be Damned! (The astonishing story of the Daily Mirror)

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