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• 05 Nov 2009 08:26

  this is a call to arms, a call for yarns tell us your stories - the bizarre, the silly, the stuff-ups, the literals and the inspired tradecraft from the days when reporters roamed the streets, drank in bars with coppers and crims, or crawled under trams to ask pedestrian casualties if it was their birthday. – Mark Day, writing about this website in The Australian this week Issue # 120 November 6, 2009 To bed a day early this week because we’re in flight and cabin crew still fear that a £300million aircraft can be made to fall out of the sky by a £50 piece of kit from Carphone Warehouse. Anyway, it gives you longer to think about something to write for us for next week. That reminds me sometimes it works. Somebody reads something and is reminded of a story. Just like it used to happen in the pub. That’s how Ranters works sometimes. Thus several fairly oblique mentions of the man last week jogged Neil Marr’smemory of a special gratitude to Cudlipp (even though he never met him) and the warmth it briefly brought him during what was jokingly known as ‘a sabbatical’. While reading his new copy of reminded our man Gordon Amory of the Evening Newspaper Wars in the provinces. Dermod Hill’s piece on a school for comedians prompted Alan Hart to recall writing virtually the same piece (different ‘school’, different principal comic), but then, what’s ever been new in newspapers? While Bill Greaves (also week before last) got John (Charlton) Jackson remembering other reporters who had their names changed by the news desks. (although, despite appearances, his first name is not And) scans his own offering of two weeks ago and remembers that, when Fleet Street went to the dogs, he was ‘lucky’ because he had set up his own kennel as a cottage industry. Baron Cudlipp, Lord Cardigan By Neil Marr My father drummed into me as a child that a true Scot should not read any book by a Welshmen more than once. It only served to encourage them, he felt. Last week’s Gentlemanly Rant, though, embarrassed me into taking another run at Hubert Kinsman Cudlipp’s Publish and be Damned!... it’s the least I can do for a man who bought me a hand-knitted Aran cardigan when I was most in need of one. There was, as some may recall, a quaint Mirror Group tradition called ‘the sabbatical’. This was a full-pay month-long extension to regular holiday allowance imposed every four years on reluctant scribes for their intellectual refreshment. File a piece while you were being intellectually refreshed and you’d also pick up the ackers for that and expenses to boot. I had been lured to spend (with a few weeks’ accumulated days off ‘in lieu of overnights’) a two-month sabbatical interlude writing a book in a remote, bleak, Wuthering Heights-style cottage on the Yorkshire Dales. The owner was a local farmer, a hearty, fresh-faced, horny-handed and honest yeoman, who doubled, when he was not assisting at the birth of lambs or castrating pigs, as Tom Hopkinson, killer freelance of Bradford and its impressively extensive surrounds. Hoppy roused me from my bed on the first morning by clanking at the door. He didn’t knock, he clanked. ‘Breakfast,’ he threatened. He was wearing Yorkshire ready-soiled wellies and toting a stainless steel pail full of milk. And he was smiling the Hoppy Smile™, so I knew there was more to breakfast than met the innocent eye. The smile whispered: ‘Perhaps a taste?’ It was Hoppy’s catchphrase. Right enough, a bottle of The Famous Grouse was submerged in the bucket. Tea was not called for. Thoughts of scones did not enter our heads. We did not take milk. So things went all wrong. After breakfast, we met Wally the Atheist (the local vicar) to discuss theology at the nearest pub, nine miles away, sang Ilkla Moor Baht’at several times with yokels (Hoppy carried the tuba part), rounded up three stray sheep that Hoppy later admitted were not his, phoned the night desk in London (collect) to say we had a lead on Lord Lucan, and committed several other petty crimes before midnight. Back at the cottage, cows with swollen udders were queuing in the dark to be serviced (or whatever Hoppy was supposed to do for them long before closing), and I was given my marching orders by Mrs Hoppy who said I – I – was a bad influence. I drove off in the wee wee hours in befuddlement and my brand new company Escort. The policeman who pulled me from the upside-down wreck of the car some miles later was a friend of Hoppy (everyone who’d ever feasted on Yorkshire pudding or sampled Tetley’s bitter was a friend of Hoppy) and drove me to an hotel where the night porter entertained us with Hoppy tales until my estranged wife reluctantly drove over the Pennines from Lancashire, pre-dawn, and dropped me at a railway station. On the way, she asked me how Hoppy was and could he really eat a pint glass. So I went to Edinburgh, my home town. There, I would settle into a garret, buy a typewriter from a junk shop I knew on Leith Walk and get on with the book (nearly three decades later, I can almost remember what I think I intended as maybe its opening paragraph). Hoppy had returned my rent money in real paper beer tokens, so all things were possible. Almost. Auld Reekie was bloody freezing and what clothes I owned – other than the Marks and Sparks sweater and jeans I stooped up in – were being rescued from the boot of the company car by firemen with cutting gear or used as grease rags by the oily and taciturn chaps at the Mirror garage in I desperately needed an Aran cardigan. Something tae keep oot the cranreuch, ye ken? It was a bitter time, was that. I was a reporter on the Sunday People back then and had found a soul brother in Clive Hadfield – we were both enjoying spousal separation for the first time and homelessness, spending most of our nights in 24-hour discos in Leeds or on the benches of a friendly pub we sponsored in Wigan – and phoned him at the office (collect) to express my misery in hopes of support. (By the way, a japing photographer called Ronny Baybutt was once asked to check Clive and me into an hotel in Peterhead or somewhere under false names during the Yorkshire Ripper fiasco: Clive became known thereafter as Amos Collier; I was Gladstone Martburton.) ‘I’m afraid Hoppy will never speak to you again, Gladstone. His wife might find out he doesn’t really hate you,’ Amos said. ‘And you can’t have another car until you get back to work. And, no, the garage hasn’t found your clothes or your flugelhorn. Terry Lovell says you’re a disgrace to the art and Andy Leatham is writing a song about it all. Alwyn Thomas and Maurice Chesworth have written the music. Ken Bennett will play drums. Oh, and I hear PJ Wilson has knocked you back for that Sunday Mirror spot because he says he can get two for the price of one from the training scheme. They’ve changed landlords at the Pig and Whistle, too, so you’ll have to collect your sleeping bag.’ ‘Any good news, Amos?’ ‘Well, thee and me just got the Cudlipp Award for the Helen Smith* story.’ While Clive had gone no further on this yarn of sinisterly covered-up homicide than Harry Ramsden’s famous fish and chip shop in Guiseley, I’d suffered continental breakfasts all over Europe and Fookeen Wong fried chicken as far away as Kuala LumpurPenang; twice thrown out of Saudi, so at least I didn’t have to eat there. ‘How much?’ ‘Down the middle. Couple of hundred each.’ ‘How much is a hand-knitted Aran cardigan?’ I bought it from a posh shop in Princes Street . Magnificent it was. All the colours of the rainbow, heavy as chain mail and as waterproof and windproof as a Highland phone box. And with enough change for a session at Jingling Johnnies, a mere stumble from the back door of the ScotsmanEdinburgh Evening News Darned hot it gets in that wee submarine of a bar. Off comes the Aran cardigan. I never saw it again. That hand-knitted Cudlipp prize will, no doubt, have seen someone through a few chilly Scots winters (probably a Daily Record reader). But, like many here, I’ve a lot more to thank Hugh Cudlipp for than a woolly jumper. Now to defy my Old Man and give a worthy Taffy another read. He was just an exceptional chap to some contributors to GR who knew him face to face, but I don’t mind calling him a hero. We never met, so harsh reality doesn’t intrude. He bought me an Aran sweater and he helped create the proudest newspapers I’ve ever hacked for. *Editor’s note: Nurse Helen Smith and her Dutch boyfriend fell to their deaths from the balcony of a swish Saudi apartment during a boozy night with high-rolling neighbours in 1979. Her ex-policeman father, Ron, cried murder. The story of political cover-up dominated world headlines for a year. Marr and Hadfield were later credited in Paul Foot’s The Helen Smith Story with making the long awaited no-accident case through good, old fashioned journalistic probing (and a few pints with an honest pathologist). Thirty years later, Helen’s body is still in cold storage, probably holding the record for the length of time a corpse had lain in a mortuary fridge. Her father is still on the case. Somebody should write a story. News of the World By Gordon Amory It was absolutely marvellous to read again. The opening pages are intriguing, not least the newspaper war between the Berrys and the Northcliffes that was still a sad chapter of newspaper life when I was young. The Evening World came to Newcastle in 1929 and after a print run of only a very short time, the presses were halted and Northcliffe went off to Bristol, leaving Newcastle wide open for what became a big part of the Kemsley Empire. A lot of debris was left behind and a lot of journalists were without work for many years – in fact many had to get jobs as clerks and other menial tasks as those who had left local evenings like the Shields Gazette, Evening News Evening Chronicle for a bright future never got jobs again until the start of the 1939-45 war. Len Fenwick was chief reporter of the World and I got to know him very well when he was press and entertainments officer for Tynemouth –a job the council made for him. George Buglass, who was chief reporter of the Evening News when I worked there, had some time working as a clerk in the council office. Jimmy Slater, the last survivor of the World, who died last year, had to freelance for many years, as F L Johnson, editor of the Shields Gazette, ignored him whenever there was a job vacancy, and Jimmy disliked him until the end of his days. Jock Johnson, my predecessor on the Daily Express, had been chief photographer on the Evening World with a photographer called Whitehead who I would see frequently out and about covering sports jobs when I was young. He struggled to make a living, never getting a job on a newspaper again. I would feel sorry for him but he was always a cheery chap. Taffy Davies was still around when I joined the SketchNewcastle. He was a sports reporter but did news stand-ins for the two veterans, Rupert Morters of the and Reg Butler at the . Taffy (he also broadcast under the name of A T Davies) once told me that the day the Evening World closed he was covering an away match with Sunderland and the message came through for him not to send any copy. The manager of Sunderland at the time was a flamboyant character by the name of Johnny Cochrane and he told Taffy not to worry as the club would pay his wages for the foreseeable future – and they did. Taffy was a tall handsome bloke who had a string of beautiful girls when I knew him and he would be then in his late fifties. What of course was interesting to men was that the Evening World office had been purpose-built outside the gates of St James’ Park, where of course the eventually had an office and a staff of more than a dozen. By then it was called the Motordrome and owned by Minories Garages. Memory Lane! The thief of bad gags By Alan Hart DermodHill’s story of intro-writing in Ranters (October 23) reminded me of one of my own favourites – which by an extraordinary coincidence flowed from a story Dermod had written. Back in 1972 I was the newest recruit as a staff reporter at the News of the World in Manchester. The northern news editor, Ollie Bachelor, asked me to see whether there was anything worth following up in a story in the Liverpool Echo. It concerned a Scouser called Frankie Ray who had opened a school for comics in Wallasey. I interviewed Frankie, who posed for photos in true showman-style with a phone to his ear and a giant cigar jammed in his mouth. He was claiming to be a comedian who had enjoyed a successful stand-up career in the United States and now wanted to pass on his expertise to would-be comedians back in Frankie was full of himself and desperate to impress, but there was something that didn’t ring true about him. I wondered whether Frankie had ever really gone to Hollywood Back at the office I did a cuttings check on comedy and came across that article by Dermod in the about the Slim Wood School of Comedy. This was the self-same seat of learning described by Dermod in his piece. The whiff of rodent became more pungent so I called on Slim’s home-cum-school in Moss Side, Manchester, and asked him if he’d ever heard of a rival called Frankie Ray. It turned out he had been a pupil at Slim’s school a year before. Frankie had photocopied Slim’s lessons and the sort of gags that bring groans when they emerge from Christmas crackers. So I had my story about The Thief of Bad Gags. But Slim enhanced it further with an anecdote about Frankie which was funnier than any of their jokes. As a publicity stunt while studying at Slim’s school, Frankie had visited the local Labour Exchange under the name of David Houston claiming he was out of work and looking for a job as a lion tamer. It had aroused press interest and given him the publicity he craved. But there was an unfortunate side-effect. The Labour Exchange made a few calls and landed him a job as a lion tamer at Chipperfield’s Circus. This was not part of the script and it seems that Frankie was anything but amused. He got as far as posing with a chair and a whip, but fled when he was told he would actually have to enter the lions’ den. My intro ? Have you heard the one about the ex lion-tamer who opened a tiny office above a sweet shop and called it The Universal Comedy Studio? Alan Hart was a staff reporter on the News of the World from 1971-2000. He now works as a freelance travel writer and is the British Guild of Travel Writers’ current UK Travel Writer of the Year. The name game By John Jackson It was great to read the reminiscences of how plain Bill Greaves and John Jackson had to change their names for by-line purposes once they joined the Manchester Evening News in those fun days of the early 1960s. From this end of the story, Charlton lives on. Each weekend I receive a catch-up call from Jack McNamara, the MEN’s long-time rugby league correspondent, with a welcome in that never-lost Kiwi accent: ‘How’s it goin’, Charlton?’ My two buddies Alastair McQueen and Phil Mellor still call me Charlton. Mind you, in 1959 when I joined the MEN, Charlton was not a bad name to have, especially in Manchester. A certain (in those days, blond haired) footballer was the local hero and on the big screen Charlton Heston was the film star everyone knew. And as Marshall will remember, the news editor Mac Campbell always summoned one as Mister. So Mr Marshall Greaves and Mr Charlton Jackson ringing across the news room sounded far more impressive than Mr Jimmy Ross. It was a great training ground. The editor was Tom Henry (such a Manchester United fanatic that when they were trounced 7-1 away to Newcastle he demanded the headline be ‘United in eight-goal thriller’), and his deputy was an eager young chap called Harold Evans, who had the habit of sitting on your knee to change an intro Whatever happened to him? Marshall and I were not the only ones forced into ‘middle name’ changes. A young reporter named John Clarke joined the at a time when the veteran cricket correspondent of the then sister paper Evening Standard was John Clarke. The older, and prone-to-be grumpy Clarke raised merry hell when he received the new arrival’s expenses. A look back through files will show that the suddenly found a reporter called Hardy Clarke. Recently departed SUN political editor George Pascoe Watson was minus George throughout his news reporting days. On his arrival editor Kelvin McKenzie decreed that his name was ‘too f ing long’ for the SUNso for years he was plain Pascoe Watson. My colleague P J Wilson lost his Peter from the start because of another sports writing legend, so was by-lined James Wilson. And in another direction former editor Richard Stott was turned down for a job on The Guardian as ‘it would be difficult’ because there was already a Richard Scott, Richard Gott, Mary Stott and Catherine Stott. Also at the we had Barry Stanley, the man who managed to get shot in the arse while sitting in a Jeep with the infamous Col ‘Mad Mitch’ during the Aden conflict. When he left to join BBC Radio he upped his name to Barrington Stanley. Barrington’s career with a microphone was short lived. When sent by the World At One to interview a young Brigitte Bardot, his first live question was ‘Do you like sex?’ – and the two of them filled the airwaves with embarrassing giggles. And finally to the problems of having a common name like John Jackson. In Manchester I became Charlton as there was already John Henry Jackson. As I headed for fields afar overseas he went to the The People. On return to I phoned the Odhams’ switchboard and asked to speak to John Jackson of the The People. A voice answered ‘Jackson’, and I said ‘Hi John Henry, John Charlton here’. ‘Who is that speaking’, was the brusque response. ‘John Jackson’ ‘And to whom do wish to speak?’ ‘John Jackson of ’ ‘Well you’ve come through to John Jackson of The Eagle’. Much safer to stick to Charlton or Marshall ! No, no regrets Did I really say that? ‘Luckily, I had my own magazine’? Hand me the tissues while I dry my streaming cheeks – half laughter, half grief. 'Luckily', indeed. Although, I suppose, that was the way it felt when I saw the van chugging round the village green to deliver the first copies. My cottage is just off the green in West Sussex, so I had to push my wheelbarrow down the lane to take delivery of them. I expect Rupert Murdoch does much the same. In the kitchen, I was fizzing with excitement as I broke open the first box. There it was, smiling up at me, the first issue of my own magazine: Downs Country, masthead below a charming cartoon illustration of a village. Then, as I flicked through the pages, delight turned to despair. The print was so feint some pages were quite difficult to read. The pictures were grey. The entire magazine looked as though it had been printed with dirty bath water. After all my efforts, this was shattering. I would’ve wept then if I hadn’t been afraid of washing the print away. After all that effort, driving hundreds of miles to find contributors, coaxing and encouraging writers and artists, then all the endless hours of writing and re-writing, chopping to length, headlines, all with the thrill of seeing it come together For this disaster. Only the cat’s speedy reflexes and years of practice saved it from my boot. By the time I’d got to bed, I’d decided I would have to abandon the whole enterprise. The next morning, I was having breakfast, wondering what I was going to do with three boxes of magazines that appeared to have been printed in invisible ink, when the telephone rang. It was a woman. She’d got the magazine. She’d read it (she must have had the eyesight of a sniper). She liked it. In fact, she loved it. So did the next 20 or so calls, who all wanted to know when the next one was out and how they could subscribe. The next day the letters started coming. Again, they all thought it was wonderful. They spoke of its gentle charm and intelligent wit and what a change it was from everything else on the news stands. I realised what had happened. Normal readers don’t care about the production values: all that matters to them is the content, and they were more than happy with that. From wrist-slitting despair to open-the-champers joy in half-a-day. Come to think of it, that describes how the next six years went. I’d look with pride at my little mag slowly moving upwards. Then I’d look at my bank balance, rapidly moving downwards. The Agony and the Ecstasy: My Life in Publishing. Guess which one won in the end. No, don’t. Let me tell you. In the meantime, there was the second issue to put together. Encouraged by the response, I set about it with great enthusiasm. I found the cartoonist to do the cover behind the bar of the Elsted Inn, just up the road. Malcolm was an architect in West London who had a great gift for Beano-style cartoons. Anthony Howard I found at the Meridian Television studios where his Country Ways series was a lovely piece of lyrical filming. His brother Phillip was well-known for his column in The Times and their father, Peter, had been assistant editor of the half a century earlier – he was also the captain and scrum-half of the England rugby team. An intelligent and cultured man, Anthony had developed a distaste for modern media, so of course he loved Downs Country. For the next six years he wrote a column for me for which he would never accept a fee. Given the cynical nature of our trade, I was surprised by the way several hacks sprang to my aid. Kit Kenworthy and John Dodd, both former writers, pitched in with excellent pieces. So too did John Koski, still with YOU mag. Charles Lyte, former gardening columnist for the , came up with an off-beat page. He could justify it financially with the thought that the fee, pitiful though it was, could be seen as a decent bottle of wine. Liz Gill, ex-, ex-Times, came up with one of her superb light pieces. My days with YOU magazine were coming to an end. Of all my old chums, only John Koski remained. Jonathan Bouquet had moved to the Observer, Joe Houlihan was rocketing up the ladder in television, and John Chenery (ex-husband of Amanda Platell: and whatever happened to her?) ended up in Canada One of my last jobs for them was to interview Neil Lyndon, a gifted writer and columnist. He had published a book that calmly made the argument that – with early pensions and longer lives – modern women were perhaps not so savagely persecuted as we’d been told. He was buried by a howling mob of testicle-tearing feminists. Oddly, YOU mag, now edited by Dee Nolan, didn’t use the piece. Neil was fascinated by my attempt at publishing. He had once bought a weekly newspaper in Suffolk, a venture that ended in disaster. Seeing my struggle, he would sometimes turn up on the doorstep at breakfast, having travelled all the way from Suffolk, to help. That, I thought, was true generosity. Even better, he wrote a series about his younger days living in mid-Sussex. It immediately created a mystery. He mentioned all his fellow pupils at village schools around Cowfold. Several of them contacted me to say that, although his stories were all true, they had no memory of a Lyndon. Tentatively, I asked Neil about this. ‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘The explanation will be in the last word of the last piece.’ It slowly unrolled, His father was a successful show-biz agent in , who became embroiled in a funny-money scandal and he went to jail. His wife, Neil and his brother, had to do a midnight flit and took her maiden name of Lyndon. Until then – the last sentence read – he had been called Neil Barnacle. It was a wonderful series. We published it as a small book and at the launch in the pub in Cowfold all his childhood friends turned up. ‘Good to see you, Barney,’ they said, a nickname he hadn’t heard for more than 40 years. Neil’s only fee for all this profitless endeavour was the occasional pint. But the only writing he has ever done unpaid became quite seriously rewarded when the Daily Telegraph ran a large chunk from his book and paid him a large chunk in return. Which proves something (I’m not quite sure what) quite conclusively. I wrote the Editor’s Notebook, a light piece at the front. More often than not, I wrote most of the letters’ pages, frequently picking fights with myself. I would usually have to do a couple of interview pieces. Several of the contributors’ columns had to be re-written or at least given a final polish, then the whole lot had to be put on disc ready for the designer. One way or another, I tapped in over 20,000 words for each issue. I managed to dig out an excellent advertising man for the eastern area. For the rest, I had a series: three thieves who made off with the cash, two drug addicts who converted it into something injectible, a whole raft of incurable liars, one agoraphobic who tried to sell without leaving home, and one man who went potty. He rang me from the psychiatric ward to say he was still on top of the job. The trade – that is distributors, retailers and advertisers – said quarterly mags didn’t work: no continuity. So I upped it to six times a year. They still shook their heads. Up again to 10 issues a year. Yet somehow it wasn’t making an impact in the newsagents. It was a mystery. Some would take two or three copies, often stuffed away in a corner beneath the Benson and Hedges. Yet whenever I tried to discuss it with them they fled into the back room. I even offered them a plastic stand so they could put the magazine on the counter. They weren’t interested. Gradually, I found that the only way forward was to promote Downs Country myself. With my little plastic display stands, I persuaded all sorts of outlets, from pubs to antique shops, to sell it. Soon I had dozens of outlets. The only snag was that I had to race round re-supplying them and collecting the cash. The other good news was that, right from the start, subscriptions had arrived in a steady flow. Scores became hundreds, hundreds became thousands, and Diana, my neighbour/friend/bookkeeper had to set up a database to service them all. What we needed was more promotion. I dragged myself off around the Women’s Institutes with a jokey little talk about how a hopeless businessman like me tried to start a magazine. At the first meeting, a hearty lady asked me about my fee. I said I didn’t know there was a fee. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘You’re not much of a businessman, are you?’ So a couple of nights week I would be rushing around the south coast talking about Downs Country, and selling a few at the same time. At least, as a hack myself, I was able to drum up some publicity. I slipped pieces into most of the local papers, bobbed up on local radio, and even on regional television when Mike Vestey did a couple of pieces. To my great delight, the Daily Telegraph did a full page piece. It was written – beautifully, of course – by the talented Elizabeth Dunn, who came down with her husband Peter, who’d written for several of the broadsheets. I remembered him from the Yorkshire Post, a lifetime earlier. They liked the idea so much that they launched a similar mag in Dorset It was heady stuff. Between the writing and the re-writing, the in-putting and the rounding up of material, I was in a whirlwind of non-stop action. At the keyboard by 6am, often I’d still be rushing around at 10pm. Another possible partner arrived. Jim Dalrymple, my former colleague from Mirror-Record days, came down to see the operation. This, he said, was exactly what he’d always wanted. Something to call his own. What was I doing that day? I showed him. I was writing, then running off, 140 letters to send out with the mag to pubs and hotels, suggesting they should take out subscriptions for their customers’ enjoyment. Then I had to sign them all. Then I had to address the envelopes. Then I had to take them to the post office. Jim went grey. ‘Haven’t you got someone to do things like that?’ Yes, I told him: me. Jim, who’d recently won the writer of the year award and who’d just written a much-praised piece on Mike Tyson for the colour supplement, slipped quietly away. Wise man. By this time, my old world seemed like a half-forgotten foreign land. Whereas once I might’ve been worrying whether I could remember the Turkish for blank bill, now I found my problems were getting a crossword with local clues and someone to compile a country quiz. Restaurant bills lay in front of me unclaimed. I met Timothy Benn, originally one of the Benn Brothers publishing company in Kent. He’d taken over the Dalesman, so now we had a man who lived in Tonbridge running a magazine in the Dales, and a Dalesman running a magazine in the Downs. How about a swap? He thought not. Every day there were new subscribers. To my surprise, I found I had branched out into a tea-shop. From studying the illustration of the cottage on the contents page, readers would track me down. ‘We’ve come to the home of Downs Country,’ they would announce. They were mostly ladies in their middle years, with sun-hats and West Highland Whites. I learnt to stock up on the Earl Grey. What wasn’t quite such great fun was the way the money I pumped into the magazine slowly drained away. Although my round of private sales was flourishing, in the newsagents it was static. Slowly, I began to see why. The wholesalers control what goes into the newsagents. Some magazines you see everywhere: some, like mine, hardly at all. Eventually I got to know a man who knew that side of the business. How could I ensure that Downs Country got into all the shops and supermarkets? ‘For that to happen,’ he told me, ‘money has to change hands.’ Voice trembling, I asked how much. ‘More than you’ve got.’ I sat in my office that night and read through the file of letters from readers saying how much they loved Downs Country. I looked at the list of 2,500 subscribers. Without someone to sell ads and without a real presence in the shops, it didn’t mean a thing. I was beaten. After six years of 18-hour days and seven-day weeks I was exhausted, I’d lost a stone in weight (for me, about a quarter of the total) and more money than I ever want to think about, it was all over – the course I’d set out on nearly 50 years earlier. That was the day I saw Bill Freeman come into the Carla Beck Milk Bar in Skipton, his riding mac swirling, on a break from covering the magistrates court for the Craven Herald. I thought then what a great job that was. And now I’d reached the end. After 32 issues, Downs Country was done. Only one copy had made a profit: £32. 24. We broke open the tap water that night, I can tell you. I was done too. Call me daft – you wouldn’t be the first – but I never for a minute regretted it. In a trade where we all become very familiar with the Two Imposters, this was undeniably a Disaster. That’s the odd thing. It still feels like a Triumph to me. In a rare moment of insight, I was right that morning in the milk bar. It was a wonderful job. What I didn’t know, however, was that I’d just slipped under the net. I’d caught the last 50 years of newspapers at their best, and Old Fleet Street at its finest and funniest. That was my great good fortune. If you’ve been following my journey from the Ladies’ Happy Hour to Brigitte Bardot, from North Rib rugby team to Botham in Barbados, from Settle Amateur Operatics to Anthony Hopkins, from Tems Street , Giggleswick, to Thames-side, Chelsea, then it’s probably because it was much like your own. Almost every hack of my generation followed this path. It will never happen again. Someone really ought to put this down on paper, you know. Unless, of course, that’s what I’ve just done. Join the Syndicate From time to time (but no more frequently than that) we remind readers about the Ranters own Lottery Syndicate. We are certainly not trying to encourage anybody to gamble with their pension, such as it is. It’s just that, well, if you’re one of those people who like a flutter, being part of a syndicate increases your chances of winning by a few thousand per cent. We set this up a couple of years ago and now have a number of syndicates running, with varying degree of success. Most of the big wins these days are apparently won by syndicates. Ranters Syndicate is run for us by a firm called VWD and it is totally kosher and regulated by the Lotteries Council. You can join in, or learn more, by clicking . You then click on the Join Now button and complete the application form. Alternatively, while you’re thinking about it, you can have a free ride by playing Grab A Grand. Click the link, sign in to the site, nominate your lucky numbers and for the next three weeks you have a free go on the UK Lottery. If your numbers come up, you get £1,000 – and it’s cost you nothing. The only downside (if it is a downside) is that you’ll also get a reminder from VWD explaining the benefits of playing in the syndicate. Obviously, it’s up to you whether you follow it up. You can always press the delete button – it doesn’t affect your entry in Grab A Grand. You can join the Syndicate regardless of the part of the world in which you live, although some governments have rules against their citizens playing foreign lotteries. There are even ways around those, but it’s probably unwise to explain them in public. Anyway, it’s up to you. It’s more fun than buying a card from the supermarket, the odds are better but, as the saying goes, you have to be in it to win it. You can use the Syndicate to play the UK Lottery, Euromillions, or both. Here’s the link, again.

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