Page2RRS

• 02 Jul 2009 19:21

  In Magaluf, at the end of the season, the future of newspapers was there for us all to see.– Colin Dunne   Edition # 102 July 3, 2009 Harold Heys remembers happy days spent mainly snoozing on the Press Bench. Nick Jenkins adds some memories, and some tales about the way it was, to our earlier tribute to Ken Smiley. Bryan Rimmer picked up the ball when Colin Dunne dropped it, and kept running towards the line, without ever filing one. David Baird on taking revenge on newsdesk execs in Biblical proportions. finds his place in the sun. Gentlemen, that reminds me Does anybody still bother about covering the local mags courts? It was cheap copy, after all, like covering council meetings. Ken Lemmon, when he was my news editor on the Yorkshire Evening Post, told me he’d never seen a set of council minutes that didn’t contain five page leads and at least 15 fillers. For freelance agencies, it seems the copy is too cheap. Even in the corrs can’t make a living out of it. Yet in our day (you’ll excuse the expression) every courthouse in the land appeared to sustain freelance operations – some of them of course were the local men doing linage, but some were thriving stand-alone court agency businesses. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that those proprietors claiming to be strapped for cash and bemoaning the cost of ‘newsgathering’ would see the advantage of getting some young hopeful to learn shorthand and then just sit where the real local stories came up. It might be a thought too far, that covering courts and councils was actually the cornerstone of what we used to think of fondly as Democracy. But it was also free, and privileged, and anybody with a hole in his, er, balance sheet ought to appreciate that. There were good stories, local stories, daft stories and sometimes great stories. And the courts and councils were frequently where they started. Nowadays they appear to be overlooked and even ignored. But they were stories that affected the readers of local papers, and were about people they knew. And then every so often there’d be something worth flogging to the nationals. Those were the days, then, that Harold Heys recalls with a sort of fondness. Nick Jenkins (via Ken Smiley) reminds us that a good relationship with Their Worships could also be helpful in court reporting. As for the rest of this week’s fare, it’s very much as it is intended to be, with stories prompting other stories. A bit like being in the pub, then. Which is where we all came in. And, as we like to say, it’s your round, chum. Boys from the black stuff By Harold Heys A few weeks back I wrote a piece about the demise of the District Man. Well, I haven’t found many on a steady trawl through Lancashire. But I did bump into freelance Andy Rosthorn who told me one of his many tales, this one about the time he was a district man in Nelson in the mid-60s. Andy, for those who don’t know him, made his name on the Daily Mail in the 70s and his claim to fame is that he is the only man to have been sacked five times by the Mirror Group. He is a world expert on Rudolf Hess and has more daft newspaper stories than anyone I’ve ever known. In more than 25 years I can’t recall him being on time for anything. Ever. He once rang me as he headed for the Adelphi pub through the grounds of Blackburn Cathedral. He had, perhaps, 200 yards to cover. I shot straight round. He arrived two hours later. I’ll come back to his tale shortly. But first I’d like to bemoan the disappearance of another member of our profession: the Staff Court Reporter. There aren’t any that I know of now, probably because no one can do shorthand any more and magistrates and court clerks don’t take kindly to digital recorders. It was often a monumental bore, but every now and then a spark of magic made it worthwhile. You never knew when it might happen. It could be in the middle of a dull Due Care or a litany of some unfortunates who hadn’t paid their TV licences. How many great tales have been missed in recent years, I wonder? Freelances do their best but it’s a thankless task. Just one example. When the Sunday People entrenched back to London from Manchester in 1988 I went covering my home town of Darwen for the local evening before going off a few months later to fly the racing desk on Eddie Shah’s Post. It was close on 25 years since I’d covered a court but I soon fell into the swing. I’d get a cheery ‘Hello’ from the magistrates, most of whom I knew, and ‘Hiya, H’ from the local villains, all of whom I knew, and then I’d settle in a corner for a snooze. My probation officer pal would give me a dig in the ribs if anything interesting was happening and I’d immediately start scribbling away. Next on the list this particular morning was a non-payment of vehicle excise licence and I decided it was time for a nod. I was awakened by a dig and a kick on the ankle and I went effortlessly into shorthand mode. Some poor sod was explaining that he and his wife had no money as they had just paid for the funeral of their baby who had died from unexplained cot death syndrome. Even better – sorry, worse – it was their second cot death. Magic! I slid over smartly and was interviewing him before the case had finished. It was swings and roundabouts. A few weeks later, I recall, I lost a fiver to Kevin, the probation man. Some yob had assaulted the police and got off with a fine. I’d bet he’d get sent down – just like another yob the previous week. I was so pissed off I went round to the magistrates’ rooms later, knocked on the door, and asked a rather surprised chairman if he could explain why I’d just lost a fiver (I actually tried to draw a comparison between the two sentences). He huffed and puffed and was suitably embarrassed before slamming the door in my face. His embarrassment at so flagrant an injustice (my loss of a fiver) was nothing compared to the time I pitched up late at Padiham court as a junior. ‘Ask at the cop shop,’ I’d been told and the desk sergeant pointed me up the winding stairs.Five doors. All the same. Pick one. Always go for the middle one, was the usual ploy. I swung it open and out fell a brush, mop and, from a high shelf, a metal bucket. Ok. Left to right. Success! An elderly guy was sitting at a desk writing away. Obviously the local man. I edged in and sat besides him, snaffling his court list. ‘Where are we up to, cock?’ I asked. He recoiled and gave me a look that would have frozen hot pot. I slowly took in the room. The open-mouthed police inspector, smirking solicitors, a puzzled gallery ‘Oh, sorry,’ I apologised and made as dignified an exit as I could muster. Leaving the bemused magistrate to get on with it. But back to Andy Rosthorn’s tale of his days covering court and just about anything else in East Lancashire back in the 60s. Andy used to cover Reedley Magistrates where ‘thanks to a gritty hinterland and the mordant wit of its clerk Mr William Whittle, it was always good for a tale or two’. They were NEWSpapers in those days, says Andy. The days of same-day stories in t’ Pink as the evening paper was called. And it was long before police – and council – media management. We well knew that good stories break without warning in the unpredictable battleground of a magistrates’ court. But you tended to get a bit too close to the local villains and vagabonds. He remembers hesitating over the court list one day. It just didn't look right. The defendant's occupation was given as ‘tarmacer’ and he didn't like the sound of it. Macer, to rhyme with racer? – Surely not. He took care to dictate it as ‘tarmacker’ which sounded much better. The following day colleague Peter Storah and photographer Ken Rumney suggested a pint in the Carters' and Motormen's Social Club – otherwise known as the ‘Fast and Slow’. It was a rough joint, rough even for Nelson, but it opened early. It was used for board meetings and deal-making by those itinerant bands who travelled the North of England offering lumps of tarmacadam to homeowners.  ‘Just enough left on the lorry to do your drive, surr.’ They’d just settled in at the bar when they spun round in unison at a thick brogue from a dark corner: ‘Oy! You’re reporters aren’t you?’ And, pointing at Andy: ‘I know you!’ Suddenly, he was alone at the bar. The other reporters and photographers were on the move, edging carefully towards the door. A big guy loomed over him. Hairy. Greasy. And still pointing. At Andy’s nose. He clung to the bar, offering a smaller target. ‘I know you. Saw you at court. You did my case. Story’s in t' Pink The veteran District Man or old-hand Staff Court Reporter will sympathise with the predicament. Somehow, a whispered ‘Only doing my job, pal’ would have had rather a hollow ring to it. Alone, Andy awaited his next move. It was unexpected. ‘Well done, lad! You're t' first reporter to get my job right in all these years. It's got to be tarmacker, hasn’t it? Just like you put. I’m bloody sick of being called a tarmacer every time I’m up. We’re not tarmacers for God’s sake ‘What’re ye ’avin, lad?’ he said, slapping Andy heartily on the back and almost puncturing a lung. By this time, of course, with immediate danger past and conviviality in the air, Andy’s colleagues were more than happy to edge back to the bar to join in the all-round congratulations and bonhomie and to partake of vast quantities of free liquid refreshment from the horny hands of their new friend Tommy the Tarmacker and his fellow travellers. Incidentally, I noticed the Daily Mail a couple of weeks back had Tarmacer in about 60pt in a front page WOB. Tommy wouldn’t have been impressed. Smilin’ through By Nick Jenkins Thanks for Don Walker’s tribute to Ken Smiley (Ranters, June 12). As Don pointed out, there was no job that Ken felt was beneath him. Which was how we came into contact with him while he shifted at Reveille (a -owned weekly paper... ask your parents, or grandparents, as I always tell trainees these days). Ex- trainees Nick Kent, Geoff Stimson and, later, myself found our first ‘Fleet Street’ jobs there, in Reveille’s New Fetter Lane office. And it was there that we came under the spell of the ‘real’ Fleet Street subs who made up Reveille’s regular weekly casual rota: Iain Stevenson, Derek Prigent, Bill Fletcher – and Ken Smiley. Being a weekly, the hours at Reveille were very congenial. A 9.30am start meant that by lunchtime we were ready for refreshment, and ‘lunch’ involved each member of the subs’ desk buying a round at the Printer’s Devil, or sometimes – if we fancied a bit of a stroll – the Bishop’s Finger in Smithfield. It was over these lunchtime pints that we three (joined later by ex-Brighton Argus man Steve Castelli) most enjoyed the company of Ken, who was, being an old-school sub and a journalist who had been around a bit, a master story-teller. Two particular stories stick in my mind – both tales from his early years as a reporter in Belfast. The first is a useful lesson in working relationships with officialdom, and the second just couldn’t happen nowadays, with every reporter toting a laptop. Ken had cultivated a local JP, who would make himself useful when he was struggling to find a court story worth reporting. As a dull court list dragged to a close, Ken would catch the magistrate’s eye. Obligingly – and often to the surprise of the defendant – the JP would suddenly work himself into a rage and launch into a furious tirade: ‘People who ride bicycles without rear lights are the scourge of society... an absolute disgrace... a menace that must be removed from the streets... the entire province must share my sense of outrage...’ This was all delivered at dictation pace and Ken, knowing he now had the page lead he needed, would gratefully get it all down. Including the rather lamer ending: ‘Fined 1s 6d.’ Then there was the time Ken was drafted in as a rugby reporter, producing live copy for his evening paper. How hard can that be, he thought, installing himself behind the aged typewriter in the press box. ‘Coleraine kicked off into a blustery wind...,’ he typed, ripping his first 200 words from the old Remington and handing them to the waiting messenger. As the match went on, he warmed to his task, easily dashing off the required words and sending them off, via the messenger, to the composing room. At the final whistle, he knocked off his final instalment, handed it over, and sat back to relax. Job done. That was when the old Bakelite phone in front of him rang. It was the sports editor. ‘Nice job, Ken,’ he said. ‘Now, we just need your 1,000-word considered report in the next half an hour.’ Which was not easy for Ken. Not only did he have no record of his running report in front of him – but he had absolutely no recollection of what he had been watching for the previous 80 minutes. Have exes, will travel By Bryan Rimmer I am truly, madly and several flagons deeply indebted to Colin Dunne for handing over his wilting quill to me (Ranters, June 12). It may have been a poisoned pencil to him, but it was a passport to exotic bars for me. Of course, once I'd got my feet under his cobwebbed desk, I did have my endless Hunt-the-Eric-Wainwright days which were hard to justify because I could never get my hands on till receipts from The Waiters' Club, allegedly his bolt-hole in Leicester Square; and Alasdair Buchan and I could put only so many darts into the board behind the 4th floor door before being discovered by Derek Jameson. And I could try only so much bullshit on the Reveille Boat People sent as our apprentices before they cottoned on and became executives. But in between our three-hour (on a bad day) lunches I did manage to scribble a few words – even though the Ranters editor claims never to have read one of them. In fact the wonderful Mike Molloy claimed I earned more per word than Arthur Hailey. I'm sure he must have been talking about the quality of my prose. But snigger ye not young Dunne. Let me tell you tales not even your talking dogs dare whisper. My talking dog could. He was called, and I noted it well, Beethoven. Every bark was a gem and every drool kept the cost of my honeymoon down. I'd acquired a bride and taken her to Hollywood for a honeymoon. Those lovely Mirror Group people provided the exes and that nice Mr Ford a scarlet Mustang to prance around the Hollywood Hills. Mr Beethoven, about to hit the world's silver screens, provided the excuse. Better than subbing Callan's diary copy. (Where are you Paul?) But of course it didn't end there. That nice Mr Ferrari (the car chappie) arranged for me to spend time on IpanemaBeach. Until then I'd thought dental floss was supposed to go in your mouth. Then that other Mr Ferrari (the news editor chappie) sent me to the Algarve in search of a naughty lawyer – and he wouldn't let me come back until I'd found him. Brendan Monks and I were devastated. It was the height of summer and all the girls seemed to be so poor they couldn't afford clothes. The expenses were wisely invested in keeping the poor wretches warm at night. For weeks! Some of the days were Hell. A bar somewhere in Scandinavia, I seem to remember. And I even got to Heaven – a gay bar owned by Richard Branson. That, I think, was just before Paradise – a brace of blondes in that cluster of houses in California Then there was the posting to Siberia. Someone tried to freeze me out – but it wasn't that nice Mr Molloy. He paid for me to warm up the women in the coldest place on earth. I think that was after my adventures in Death Valley – allegedly the hottest. Oh these swinging temperatures are making me come over all thirsty. There... that's better. Well, better than swapping the Fourth Floor for real writing. As you know, Col, I never did that. But the stamps in the passports kept coming. I screwed up the chance to help launch a Murdoch title in the US (forever grateful to the wonderful Tony Miles for pretending never to have seen the resignation letter) but then bagged a sabbatical (young readers, don't even bother) to the San Diego Union. It was another hell: 300 miles of beaches and the first assignment to the only nudist one among 'em. Gawd, Col, you'd have hated it. Even tracking down Ronnie Biggs to his new flat in Rio turned out to be a banker. He bought all the drinks in his club and I later flogged his phone number for £500. It was daylight robbery, said the lucky news editor. Squeezed in between these gruelling gigs were hacks' cricket trips to dreadful places like Bali, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, India, Australia, , Zanzibar, Grenada and beyond. We got the taste for it from Alderney, where our first hosts, John Arlott and son Tim, showed us why the island is said to be populated by a couple of hundred drunks clinging to a rock. Colin, it were just like The Stab. My words, meanwhile, lined up in orderly fashion to meet their spike. I, on the other hand, met the other Spike – and spent many happy weeks taking gin and jazz with him while I allegedly put together a series. Mr Milligan was so impressed by my ghost writing (certainly no one believes they saw it) that he invited me to his family Christmas party. And believe me, when it came to the falling down liquid, he was no Scrooge. I even had similar – but not as boozy – adventures with Esther Rantzen. But when we later bumped into each other on Corfu, only husband Des admitted to knowing me. Esther has much in common with Mrs R. Occasionally, I've had to meet real writers. Take Leslie Thomas. We and our respective brides went for a sail around the Med. As an ex- man you'd expect him to be able to take a drink. Two nights and one storm in, with mainsail billowing and the barman barfing, young Leslie reached over the bar and emptied a full three fingers of Scotch into the sink. ‘That's it, Rimmer’, he said. ‘I'm beaten’. And weaved off into the bilges. Or wherever superstars go to speak into the Big White Telephone. Lack of practice, you see. That's what we got on Floor Four. Hours, days and thousands of pounds of it. Commons expenses? Small change. You were there, Col, but ducked out before the mink really lined the coffin. Those MPs know nothing. Duck houses? I know people who bought Cotswold cottages. And Rolls Royces – they snappered them up. And Gold Rolexes from the East and... oh, the list goes on. When I started in Geordieland, apprenticed to the bars of Consett (Guardian), Blaydon (Tyneside Courier), Darlington (Northern Echo) and (Journal), I fondly imagined I might scribble for living. Rimmer, you see, has its roots in Rhymer – a barded fool of sorts. Now, of course, I'm a bearded fool. But I can proudly say that I've made my living as a man of letters – without ever doing a day's work in my life. Colin Dunne, I thank you from the bottom of my liver. Collect call By David Baird Revel Barker wrote a piece (Ranters, June 26) on bizarre cable messages: Gobbledygook missives from unfeeling head offices have always been the bane of far-flung correspondents. While the poor hack suffers fly-blown miseries in malaria-ridden hellholes, his editors loll back in padded comfort, served cups of tea by charming secretaries while issuing impossible orders. For a time I was a stringer for the Canadian newsmagazine Maclean's. My attempts to flog stories to them often hit the buffers. Queries would come back such as ‘Cannot locate Marbella. Where is this island?’ or ‘World shrunk two pages. Re terrorists killing eight, suggest wait until better peg’. When the Spanish parliament was stormed by Civil Guards, I was cabled: ‘Six pages reserved Prince Charles wedding announcement. Will coup bid hold?’ One particular Maclean's correspondent unleashed a particularly satisfying revenge. The story may be apocryphal but some version of it surely occurred. After suffering through mayhem, drought and general disaster in Africa, the correspondent was in a remote corner of the Congo when he received a telex message from Canada: ‘Your services no longer required. Please return all company cards soonest.’ Revenge is sweetest when it is served cold, they say. After careful deliberation, our man in Africa turned up at the nearest telex office at about the time when everybody in Toronto was knocking off for the weekend. ‘See this text,’ he told the operator. ‘Please transmit it to Toronto. Payment collect.’ ‘All of it?’ ‘Yep, the lot,’ said our man, handing the operator a generous tip. On Monday morning staff at Maclean's were staggered to find their wire room ankle-deep in paper. When they picked up a sample, they found the African operator wasn't doing a bad job – Genesis, Deuteronomy, Joshua, they were all there. He was halfway through the Old Testament. A place in the sun Quite a crowd had gathered round Jim Lewthwaite as he laid out his souvenirs on the desk. He’d just returned from Bangkok where he’d been sent to write a series on now what was it? Early Siamese porcelain? Oriental calligraphy? The new spice trade? Actually, no. This was the . So, just for a change, it was a series on sex. From among his mementoes, he selected a scrap of paper bearing his first name. It looked innocent enough. Just his name, Jim, in unschooled and wobbly writing. Hardly worth bringing halfway round the world. It had been written, he said, by one of the young bar-girls he’d interviewed. I said I didn’t think much of her hand-writing. ‘She didn’t write it with her hand,’ said Jim. Let’s move on quickly. We can’t discuss things like this on a family website where any young innocent – Hilary Bonner or Philippa Kennedy – could easily stray in. This was my introduction to life in the . After I walked out of the – okay, flounced, I won’t argue – I found myself in the south of France where the novelist Paul Gallico had died leaving his sequel to The Poseidon Adventure unfinished – a story I’ve related elsewhere. I had been hired to pop in the odd full-stop and, if required, a nifty metaphor or two. Ken Donlan, much-acclaimed and much-feared news editor, had invited me to join the as soon as I returned. So ten weeks later, I found myself walking towards St Paul’s and turning right instead of left. I won’t say I had never been south of Fleet Street before, after all both the Harrow and Scribes were somewhere down there. But it felt strange. Mirror men weren’t accustomed to too much travel. Inside the Sun, that felt strange too. It was a newspaper office at odds with all the conventions of Fleet Street. Where were the leisure classes who populated the higher floors at the Mirror? Where were the storage rooms for writers and mistresses who had slipped from fashion? Where the corridors of the handsomely paid unemployed, some of them ennobled, that we had at Holborn? Before I’d been there half a day, it was clear that here was a completely new system. There was a curious symmetry between stories to be written, hacks to write them, space available and subs to fit them. It flew in the face of everything Fleet Street stood for. The way the Sun played the newspaper game, everyone was on the field and there were no spectators. Murdoch’s plan didn’t seem to incorporate a holiday home for hacked-off hacks. What’s more, I’d seen more reporters in the Mirror office than they had here. Six years after the launch, Larry Lamb, the editor, who was ex-Mirror and ex-Mail, had proved his point. The sexy, slim-line Sun – they should have got me to write their ads – was roaring away. Big momma Mirror, running to fat and losing her looks, was on the slide. I must confess that once I’d got over the shock, it was refreshing to work in an office that was buzzing as opposed to snoring. This is not to say that it was a fun-free zone. Oh no. Have you ever met any of the industrial reporters? I have. If Albert Lamb, the editor, took his nickname from Larry the Lamb in the Children’s Hour classic, then Ken Donlan should really have been called Mr Grouser (No? Ask your dad). When a new district man called in on his first Monday and said it was a sunny day in Birmingham, Donlan snapped: ‘If I want a weather report, old man, I’ll ring the met office.’ He didn’t do the light touch. Donlan tucked Lewthwaite, who was chief reporter, and me away at the back of the building, with John Kay and Peter McHugh, their young industrial team. It was a small room, far too small to accommodate the rowdy energy from the two most exuberant hacks I’d ever met. Laughter, jokes, insults, personal abuse, pub games, laddish dares and challenges, public schoolboy Kay reading out snippets from Wisden, Geordie McHugh singing ‘Whisht lads, ha’ad yer gobs,’ – it was rather like being on a permanent stag party. Every lunchtime and evening, they would charge over to the ‘thirst’ floor bar of the Cheshire Cheese, to join Bob Bedlow of the Telegraph and Bob Porter of the Mail  By the time you added Mick Costello, who was possibly the only diplomat’s son on the staff of the Morning Star who spoke fluent Russian and also liked a fight, and Paul Routledge of , the stag party had become a mobile riot. To soak up the pints, Ron, the waiter, would occasionally smuggle Yorkshire puddings awash in gravy out of the kitchen. Bedlow, who was more accurately known as Bedlam, was credited with this exceptional slice of dialogue when he went to the post office during a Blackpool conference to pick up some wired money. All you need to know is that it was after lunch. Female counter clerk: Can I help you, sir? Bedlow: Yes, a large gin and tonic, please. Clerk: I’m afraid this is a post office, sir. Bedlow: Good Lord. In that case, a first-class single to Euston. The industrial boys had their own Good Samaritan system. If one of them was unable to file his story, because of an unexpected attack by seven pints of Martson’s, then one of the others would cover for him. Terry Pattinson of the Mirror once rewrote his story and sent it to the Mail to help out an incapacitated Bob Porter. Later, Pattinson got a bollocking from the night newsdesk because Bob Porter had got a better story in the Mail Sure enough, when McHugh and Kay returned in the afternoon, bounding in like big puppies, they would, almost certainly, attempt to take someone’s trousers down – if necessary, their own. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if they’d given me an apple-pie desk. Maybe you had to be there, but it was great fun. Amazing really how all this giddiness evaporated at the sound of the soft tread of Donlan coming down the corridor. My memory may be at fault, but I don’t think they ever took Ken’s trousers off. For some years now the Sun has had a much-admired chief reporter called Kay. The director of programmes at GMTV is a McHugh. Obviously it can’t be the two I remember, but it is an odd coincidence. In , they used to say that Donlan, although a legendary news editor, was also an unpleasant bully. I didn’t find this at all. Maybe he’d quietened down by this time, or maybe it was because I was supposed to be writing cheeky, giggly, and preferably naughty features. Ken knew nothing about features. Giggle? – He’d die before he’d giggle. He used to fire people for being cheeky. And his idea of being naughty was to have a polo mint – before noon sometimes. So he used to read my copy with a puzzled look on his face. But he could command space. I wrote my daft bits about sex in Sweden and sex in France, interviewed Page Three girls – and Brigitte Bardot – and then wrote about sex by the seaside and sex in the office. I wrote them, Ken gave them to Larry. Larry put them in the paper. That was it. I even got to do some serious stuff too. In Berlin, to write a piece on the Wall, I was taken round by an Army PR major, who was perhaps new to the job, and a leathery sergeant driver. As we drove along the Wall, I asked whether soldiers from opposing armies still did their traditional exchanges and if there was a chance of getting a bit of Russian militaria for my young son. The major tore a strip off me. It was against Queen’s regs. Most irregular. No soldier would ever do such a thing. Simply wouldn’t happen. Over his shoulder, the sergeant asked me what I had in mind. I said a cap badge would be good. A couple of hours later he handed me one. What happened was that at crossing points, the British soldier would leave a copy of Playboy by the car and conduct a lengthy examination of the rear axle. When he came back, the magazine had gone and something would be in its place. The most prized item was a general’s hat which was rumoured to be made from sable. What, I asked the sergeant, could he get me for a pile of Page Three pictures? ‘For those,’ he said, thoughtfully, ‘I could get you a Russian general’s hat with a bleedin’ Russian general inside it.’ In the passengers seat, the major choked down on his coronary. In Magaluf, at the end of the season, I watched as the shopkeepers took down the inflatable breasts and willies and scrubbed off the boastful graffiti arithmetic (girls multiplied by times), and put out dinky little tables and chairs, with tea-for-two and an Arrowroot biscuit each. Changeover week, when the young singles – Sun readers every one – were replaced by Saga holidaymakers, who had once been Mirror readers. The future of newspapers was there for us all to see. One Spanish hotelier told me that his countrymen believed there were two islands called Britain: one was populated by murderous teenagers, poisonously pissed all day, constantly fighting or fornicating in the gutter; the other was home to genteel elderly couples with walking sticks and squeaky deaf-aids who had very little money but perfect manners. They could not believe they came from the same country. Oddly enough, in an office where almost everyone was writing about sex, there wasn’t an awful lot of it about. It was true there was one near-editor who became entangled with a lady features person. Chris Potter, political writer, certainly did his best of remedy this. At a Tory party conference – and this was long before he was married – he was seen escorting two women, one a little older than the other up to his room. Clearly no harm could come of this because he pointed out that they were mother and daughter. Whatever was going on up there seemed to require a non-stop flow of champagne until eventually the kitchen protested. ‘I’m afraid, sir, it’s interfering with the breakfast arrangements.’ It wasn’t long after that he died. Even so, that was out of town, and it wasn’t much to show for an office where you could witness Kathryn Hadley teasing her wild hair between her lips, Shan Lancaster’s blue eyes in a frame of blonde hair, and Kate Lidgate who appeared to have been designed without a single straight line.   Even in Pacesetters, the women’s department dedicated exclusively to writing about the female orgasm (and where, judging by the noise as you walked past, they were getting the hang of it), they were more interested in getting to the Pineapple gym than men. But the cleaners at the Sun never complained, as they did at the Mirror, that you couldn’t open a door without the risk of seeing a naked editorial bottom bobbing up and down. There was a streak of northern Puritanism at the Sun. Jim Lewthwaite, a brilliant newsman who came from a distinguished newspaper family in (dad, a news editor; brother on the Baltimore Sun), bore a quite startling resemblance to an American film star. One night when he got home late-ish (train problem, no doubt) to Clacton, he stood, swaying a little, in the bedroom doorway. ‘I’ve just met a bird who says I look like Robert Mitchum,’ he pronounced, to the unmoving mound of blankets. All he heard was her voice in the dark. ‘She must be mental.’ Keeps a chap’s feet on the ground. At the time, the Sun had its stars. Walter Terry, the political columnist, was a real heavyweight who’d come from the . John Dodd, firmly in the first division of newspaper writers (and occasionally to be found on this website) was there. So too was Clive Taylor, prince among cricket writers. When Clive retired, Larry Lamb challenged anyone who wanted to replace him to write a job description. At that time, for reasons I can no longer remember, it seemed a good idea to be absent from Britain’s shores for as long as possible. I applied. Larry called me in. He liked it. Frank Nicklin, the sports editor, would be talking to me. Nicklin opened the door to our office and tilted his head towards the upstairs bar of the Tip. As I followed him down the back stairs, over his shoulder he outlined his plans for a new cricket writer. ‘There’s two chances of me giving our cream job to some feature writer,’ he called out. ‘Fat and no.’ Well, he’d certainly talked to me. And anyway, I would only have missed our wonderful British seasons, wouldn’t I? In Jon Akass, I always thought they had the best columnist in Fleet Street. Whereas his rivals elsewhere whizzed off their columns almost as an afterthought to all their books and plays, Jon poured all his considerable talent into his column. Flecked with cigarette ash – picture a speckled penguin – fuelled by carefully calculated gins, in between putting out the wastepaper bin fires which he used as central heating, he turned out a column that was rarely less than wonderful. He avoided El Vino because he thought it attracted posers, preferring instead the shabbier boozers where he would find his friends Dodd and the TV writer Kit Kenworthy. Occasionally, in the company of his friends, Akass would come up with a piercing insight into our trade. In the Coach and Horses one night, steadily filling the ashtray while emptying the gin bottle, he said: ‘Everyone I ever met in newspapers who I really rated, the ones I thought were outstandingly talented, never got anywhere. And the people I identified as no-talent toadies are all in the top jobs.’ I don’t think I ever replied to that. Right then someone came in with some news. Larry was going. We were getting a new editor. Did anyone know a Kelvin McKenzie? Some laughed. Some cried. Some began composing letters for jobs. One or two went home and hanged themselves. Oh boy, another new deal. Just when I was getting the hang of it.       On the shelf ?                                 Ian Skidmore’s Forgive Us Our Press Passes should be made required reading for every child-in-a-suit populating what passes for our newsrooms these days. Grey Cardigan, Press Gazette                                   Millions of his followers throughout the English-speaking world will treasure this book of some of his finest and funniest writingHugh Cudlipp                                   Vincent Mulchrone could penetrate in a flash to the heart of a story in a few deceptively simple words. – Vere Harmsworth                                   Slip-Up ... perhaps the best analysis of Fleet Street at work ever written.  – Keith Waterhouse No journalist can afford to miss this cautionary tale the story of the in-fighting and downfall of all concerned has one rolling in the aisles. Mr Delano’s eye is astute, his ear a credit to his profession at any level; and his wit is accompanied by the ability to write clear English. -- The Times                                   The best book about journalism – ever. – Phillip Knightley   Every journalist should read . So go get yours now. – Roy Greenslade   A classic – Peter Stothard, (Times Literary Supplement)                                     An entertaining historical overview – Roy Greenslade (Media Guardian)                                     Out of the workaday rounds of a provincial yellow journalist, Gordon Williams has scraped together an occupational ambiance as definitive as dirty fingernails... a yeasty mixture of character and social climate... New York Times Book Review   The flavour of this sort of journalistic life is caught as well as in any novel I can remember. Sunday Times   A most entertaining and intelligent novel.                                   : Bizarre and hilarious Nothing shorter than a paperback could achieve a balanced report of the brilliance of the advocacy and summing-up. – Hugh Cudlipp

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• 26 Jun 2009 07:02

  http://www.northtrek.co.uk

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• 25 Jun 2009 22:24

  Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – Issue 101 June 26, 2009 Another saunter through the groves of Ranteria. Lucky dogs, that’s what we were, to have experienced the greatest of the great days. And Alasdair Buchan picked up a genuine lucky dog. But was anybody out there, reading about it? It’s a question we often ask ourselves. Ignore the hard-drinking image, suggests Geoffrey Mather;there was hard graft, too – long shifts, plus a defenestrating editor known to the staff as ‘Strangler’. It used to be said that there was nobody on earth who the national lads couldn’t find in a hard day’s work. After all, Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs (and Tony Delano wrote a book about it – see the column on the right). There has been only one recorded failure, and Garth Gibbs forged a career out of not finding the guy. When it all worked out, there was the prize – rare in the early days – of a by-line on the copy. Sometimes, as Stan Blenkinsop recalls, it would even be your own name. And then there’d be by-line beer to celebrate the event. But by-lines seem cheap, now. You don’t even need to write the copy yourself. Eddie Rawlinson discovered a chap who probably never got a by-line. He didn’t start in the game until he’d retired from his employment in t’mill. But happily he knew a story when he heard one Plain John Smith recalls a snapper who could get his foot in the hallway, against all odds. Do any of these people – and these skills – exist, these days? Do exes still exist? Colin Dunne returns to a favourite Ranters topic, with some memories and some myths. Lucky, for some By Alasdair Buchan Many years ago when I was on the Daily Star the editor decided we had to have a mascot. I was told to go and get a dog which I was to take to events such as the National Boat Show (which we sponsored) and have it photographed with celebrities. Realising that straightforward refusal could offend, I went along with it hoping that something would turn up to put an end to such a humiliating – and potentially unending – assignment. First I had to get the dog. So we went to the Battersea Dogs Home where, on their advice, I got a beautiful mongrel puppy and I was photographed holding it as it licked my face. We ran it big all over the front page (Save this Dog at Christmas, you know the sort of thing) and asked readers to suggest a name for the Daily Star mascot. (My instruction was that the entry nominating Lucky as a name was to win – remember that name in a moment). Next came the question of where the dog was to live. I said no; the photographer, Stan Meagher, said no. He said he already had a dog. I played the trump card of the new baby at home being enough for one reporter and the snapper had to take the dog home. To cut a short story shorter. Lucky went home to Stan's, developed distemper and died within days. Then Stan's family pet caught distemper and died too to the great distress of Stan's family. Fortunately the mascot idea died with Lucky. And the point of the story? We never mentioned Lucky again and not one reader ever contacted us to ask what happened to the dog. Or to the competition. So never get carried away with concepts like ‘Our readers’ or ‘Our viewers’ – the bastards aren't reading or watching. Muse, music and muscle By Geoffrey Mather I have served a number of editors. One drank 40 cups of tea a day and I made them all. Another, upon whom I called, always had plenty to drink but no food in his fridge. I had to invent a reason for bringing food. ‘I just happened,’ I said, ‘to have been to the supermarket...’ He did not believe me. A third said, ‘Thank you for inviting me out to dinner tonight.’ I said, ‘I can not recall inviting you.’ He replied, ‘Oh yes you did. Half past seven. Put it on your expenses.’ But the most flamboyant, the most boisterous was Dick Lewis, known to the staff as ‘Strangler’ Lewis. I had no good reason to meet him. I was subbing away on an evening paper, happy enough where I was, but a friend, who had moved to the , suggested my name to him and he called me for interview. I arrived around six o’ clock and was taken into his office, where he ordered two cups of tea from Carrie, his secretary, and drank both. We had an affable conversation, none of it about newspapers. He was more concerned with Army matters. He was, I gathered, a former major in a combative unit, and I had a horror of those. I had been in 6 Airiborne Division, not because I was combative in any way, but because I thought I needed to be surrounded by competent fighters in case I was threatened. My insignificant role in 6 Airborne pleased him no end, but he was cautious. ‘I might not like you,’ he said eventually. ‘On the other hand, you might not like me.’ We left it at that and I headed for the pub next door. I found later that he ran from his office shortly afterwards and said, ‘Where is he? I want him.’ That is how I arrived at the Daily Express. I was quickly told that when, as deputy editor, he asked for a wage increase which did not come, he picked up the editor and held him out of a second floor window. The rise duly appeared. I stayed well away from windows in his presence. If a sub-editor arrived who appeared to have muscle, Dick would feel the arm admiringly and suggest that they might have a trial of strength at a convenient time and place. I was glad not to have muscle. He had no dislike of people. He just thought of conflict as a manly pastime. Seen in the street, he looked like a successful lawyer: brief case, bald head, heavy spectacles, dark suit. He would sit on the back bench at night poring through the proofs, altering headlines, and sometimes he would vanish for a day or two. He appointed one sub-editor to play the piano at the Press Club on the grounds that we did not have a pianist sub-editor at the time. He was a very good pianist and an excellent sub and went to the for better things. On one occasion there was some story in Ireland which required a reporter and photographer. (This was in the expansive days when journalists were more important than accountants.) They arrived in the pub – the one next to the office – and said the planes were full so they could not go. Lewis loudly ordered them back to hire a Dakota for themselves and that plane, if I remember rightly, carried around 40 seats. It was normal for the time. When the pub caught fire, Dick was in his element. The firemen all came in brandishing their axes and hoses and disappeared upstairs to the seat of the flames. We went on drinking below, although I thought Dick a bit fidgety. He was indeed. He began to send up pints, and finally joined the firemen in hacking away at things. They all came downstairs refreshed and a departing fireman gave his verdict, ‘Best bloody fire since Belle Vue.’ I liked Dick Lewis. He filled my vision nicely. There was nothing underhand about him. He was just honestly flamboyant. It is said of him that he went to Ireland to fire a journalist, and arrived back days adrift having given the man a rise. When he demanded a drink after time somewhere among the forests of hand pumps that we recognised as , he was refused. ‘Tell them who I am,’ he said to the poor journalist chosen to keep up with him. The man weakly explained and slumped to the floor. Dick thereafter carried out a further conversation. Each time he wanted confirmation from his companion, he hauled him up from the floor, then dropped him again. Another sub-editor arrived home in a taxi after an hour or two, or a day or two, with Dick and as he emerged from it, his wife was approaching with a friend along the pavement. ‘You have not met my husband, have you?’ she said, and at that moment, he fell, inert, to the ground. These stories – and there are many of them – might suggest that working for a newspaper was a simple matter of drifting through days in an alcoholic haze, all paid for in expenses. Not so. There was drink. There were also 12 and 14-hour days for executives. And if stories broke, nobody ever questioned whether they had finished a shift. It was hard graft and there was a spirit of endeavour and achievement. Drink was the companion of endeavour. The ones who progressed most were not the double-firsts but the street-hardened. There was a news editor who, only once, was found without an answer. If you said of a man arrested an hour before, ‘What size waist was he?’ the news editor would have an immediate answer – ‘36. And he was wearing a belt.’ Colour? ‘Brown.’ Eventually, an editor asked him a question he could not possibly answer correctly – I forget what it was – and he said, ‘God, look at that.’ We all looked out of the window. A flock of birds was going by. ‘What’s so remarkable about that?’ said the editor. ‘Well,’ said the news editor, ‘an hour ago, they were over Bridlington.’ In those days you could get four sub-editors battling with each other to produce the best headline for a five-line brief. People left reasonably quickly if found wanting. They were not fired. They were invited to find another job within a month. It was discreet, and hard, and honourable, I thought. Sub-editors came in on trial – a night’s work to test them. They were handed stories like the rest of us and never told that they were subbing for the spike. So they sweated. One man was so overawed he could not think of headlines at all. Since I recognised that stage and happened to be sitting next to him, I did them for him. He got the job and became an editor himself. Dick Lewis went to eventually, and life became a little grey as a result. Geoffrey Mather maintains his own excellent website at http://www.northtrek.co.uk:80/ and this week writes about the comparison between the movie industry and the world of newspapers as we knew it. Looking for Lucky By Garth Gibbs For a third of a century now Fleet Street scribes have spent countless hours and thousands of pounds searching for Lord Lucan. Deep down, they have heaved a great sigh of relief every time they haven’t found him. It’s not that they haven’t been searching for him as vigorously as they would search for a blank restaurant bill - it’s just that the game would be spoilt if he ever turned up. For as that brilliantly bigoted and crusty old columnist John Junor once cannily observed: ‘Laddie, you don’t ever want to shoot the fox. Once the fox is dead there is nothing left to chase.’ With that in mind I regard not finding Lord Lucan as my most spectacular success in journalism. Of course, many of my colleagues have also been fairly successful in not finding Lord Lucan. But I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else. I spent three glorious weeks not finding him in Cape Town, magical days and nights not finding him in the Black Mountains of Wales and wonderful and successful short breaks not finding him in Macau, either, or in Hong Kong or even in Green Turtle Cay in the Bahamas where you can find anyone. The most recent success in not finding him – or anyway, not finding him definitely – is down to William Hall and Mike Maloney. William and Mike thought a hippy called Jungle Barry, who used to hang out in Goa, may have been him, but it turned out he wasn’t. The Right Honourable Richard John Bingham, Seventh Earl of Lucan, vanished on November 8 1974, leaving behind a couple of letters, a bloodstained car and a dead body. In his absence, a jury returned a verdict that the Earl had murdered his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett. This raised a few eyebrows among the aristocracy because there was such an acute shortage of nannies at the time. Then a couple of years ago the High Court declared Lord Lucan officially dead, but no journo with a current passport accepts that. He’s called Lucky and if he’s Lucky he’s still alive and out there. James Nicholson, Prince of Darkness, remembers the breathless excitement in the Daily Express newsroom one evening when the night news editor was off as a result of an industrial injury (gout) and a reporter was sitting in for him. Suddenly, the phone rang and a voice declared: ‘I have found Lord Lucan and I demand my reward.’ ‘Where are you phoning from, son?’ ‘Newcastle.’ ‘Newcastle upon Tyne ‘Yes, mate. That’s the one.’ ‘Forget it. Lucan wouldn’t be seen dead in Newcastle. But listen, if you happen to go on holiday to Bali or even Singapore and see him there, don’t hesitate to call us. And don’t forget, you can reverse the charges.’ John Penrose, while on the , also found some fame while not finding Lucan. Somebody reported that Lucan was on a microscopic island in the Pacific, somewhere in the vicinity of Guam, and John hurried out, flying to Montreal, across to Vancouver, and down the western seaboard to Los Angeles. Then a flight to Guam and eventually a two-seater Chipmunk to the tiny island. It wasn’t that tiny. It had a hotel and a bar. And guess who was sitting at the bar? Yes, Lucky Lucan himself, sipping Scotch. But as Lucan stood up Penrose thought: ‘He’s too short to be Lord Lucan.’ Then he noticed the man was barefoot, so it could well have been Lucan. Lucan disappeared into the night and John went for the glass. He picked it up in a bar cloth and rushed to his room where he carefully packed it in his suitcase. He lost Lucan but the next day announced to the office that he at least had the Earl’s fingerprints, proof that the man was still alive. ‘Come back at once,’ said the news desk. Well, coming back at once was not that easy, of course. But he did eventually arrive at Heathrow. He went home to change, left his suitcase there and popped along to the office. He telephoned Scotland Yard’s Fingerprint Bureau and announced he had the Earl’s fingerprints. The Yard said that was all very well but, actually, they did not have Lord Lucan’s fingerprints on file. They did, however, have lots of fingerprints from the house in which nanny Sandra Rivett was killed. Penrose rushed home to fetch the glass. But his mother had unpacked his bag and there was the glass - on the draining board. He was horrified. But he did what any hack would have done under the circumstances. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘please pass me that glass.’ He wrapped this up carefully, too, and took it along to Scotland Yard. To this day he is very philosophical about it all. ‘At least I found out my father didn’t have a criminal record,’ he says ruefully. By-line beer By Stanley Blenkinsop So another great newspaper tradition is no more. Buying by-line beer is now as extinct as carbon-copies, working on the stone or calling for ‘Copy!’ Remember the thrill of the first time your name appeared above your story – especially on your first national – and it was drinks all round at the office pub. Far, far better than even the satisfaction of carving your initials on a tree for the first time News editors happily signed approval when the cost of by-line beer was disguised as mystic mileage, un-eaten meals for the day or even a spurious overnight allowance. Today the majority of national journalists rarely leave their offices but rewrite agency copy with the aid of phone calls. Sometimes their names appear in the same edition on three or four different stories from different corners of the country. When I graduated to the Daily Express in Newcastle upon Tyne 50 years ago, some staffers went without a by-line for years. Three or four by-lines a year was then regarded as a first-rate score – and each one with its ‘by-line beer’ celebration. In 1958 my north-east photographic colleague Jock Johnson got an exclusive picture of the re-arrested jail breaker Foxy Fowler (then a nationally-known criminal). It filled three quarters of the then broadsheet front page under the headline ‘Fowler Foxed’. And it was captioned ‘Photograph by Robert Johnson’ – his first by-line in 16 years. But no-one realised it was taken by Jock, the name bestowed on him by all and sundry when as a teenager he moved from his native Scotland to Tyneside. Then as the mystery of Robert Johnson mounted, Jock shyly confessed the picture was his – and the resulting by-line beer bill almost bankrupted him (even with the exes fiddle). One of the most prolific by-line accumulators was Syd Foxcroft, a fellow Geordie who joined the old Daily Herald as their north-east staffman in the same week that I went to the office 300 yards down the street. I know of no reporter who had more copy published than Syd who moved to the pre-Murdoch Sun when the died in 1963 and then to the Sunday People. Throughout his national career, Syd kept every cutting – from page one splashes to two-line shorts - neatly pasted in broadsheet-size cuttings books. Each book was neatly dated and the final page listed the numbers of by-lines, publications, exclusives (including even exclusive briefs, marked with an ‘E’), splashes, page leads and picture captions in that volume. Then there were also running totals on the same page as the ‘library’ grew. If asked at any time Syd would tell you the current total – especially the bylines – which when I last asked him in 1970 were numbered in thousands. Some of this rubbed off on Clive Crickmer, who worked with Syd until the old Sun changed hands, at which time he was given a free transfer to the . In no time at all – or so it seemed - Clive was celebrating his 1,000th by-line. (It seems like a lot, especially to our office-bound colleagues, but the maths suggest it is merely four by-lines a week for five years, which in those days was not unusual for our most productive district men.) In his daily bulletin to all Daily Express staff, legendary editor Arthur Christiansen, once a weekly newspaperman on Merseyside, wrote one day: ‘Until now I thought Poole was in Dorset but now I find he is our new man in . Today he has a splendid centre column on page one beneath the proud by-line of Leslie Poole. A first class piece of writing for which he has my warmest congratulations.’ Sadly my first centre-column in the then World’s Greatest Newspaper (4,350,000 copies daily in those days: now 713,000) was not so successful. It was my fourth day in Newcastle office half a century ago. I picked up a story from a local weekly about an eight year old girl who had been badly mauled by a dog which was then shot dead by police. Children who had previously played with the dog then blamed the girl for its death and send her to Coventry When the first edition came out, it was the much prized centre column with a by-line. The night news editor – a fellow Geordie – rang me to tell me the news. I was over the moon. Then ten minutes later he called back: ‘The editor doesn’t like your surname – says it’s too long for a start and wants you to suggest something shorter or it will be marked By Express Reporter for the remaining editions.’ I was furious. ‘If I can’t have my name, I’m not making up another one,’ I exploded. And so it was Express Reporter for another six months. Another by-line mis-hap hit my Newcastle colleague, Alan Baxter, and myself when we filed a world-exclusive on the first human to catch foot and mouth disease – a male Northumbrian farmworker. We filed the copy: By Alan Baxter and Stanley Blenkinsop. But the sub-editor involved abbreviated the by line to By Stanley Baxter. It was used through the first two editions (including the north-east) before the error was spotted. Next day the news editor, that fiery Scot Tom Campbell, stormed up to the offending sub and bellowed abuse at him. The sub spluttered back: ‘But there is a Stanley Baxter, isn’t there?’ To which Tom bawled back across the editorial floor: ‘Aye, there is. He’s a fucking comedian – and so are you!’ A weaver of tales By Edward Rawlinson Jess Duxbury was a ‘six-loom weaver’ until the time when he retired at 65. The old age pensioner was then offered the job of collecting advertisements for his local give away, as freesheets were known in the 1950s. The four page broadsheet paper was printed on a flat-bed Furnival machine averaging 360 hand-fed sheets an hour and it took two days to be printed, folded, packed into bundles then delivered along the streets of Padiham, a town in East Lancashire with a population of 15,000. At the age of twelve Jess, like other children of his age, had started work as a ‘half timer’; that meant half a day at school and half a day in work until he was 13, then he’d spent the next 52 years of his life weaving cloth in a noisy cotton mill, and being responsible for the efficient output of six busy looms at a time. Getting out and about and meeting people when collecting adverts gave Jess a new lease of life and with a lifetime passion for words he asked the printer whether, instead of having just adverts in the paper, he could write some local news for it, which was agreed and Jess was into local journalism. He was collecting advertising and writing reports for the Padiham Advertiser with one snag, there was a lack of space for his flow of words. Jess's knowledge of football found him writing sports reports with no chance of them getting into his ‘freebie’ but his hand-written copy was passed around by him in the pub on a Saturday evening. His fellow drinkers encouraged him to submit his copy to The Pink ’Un, the late Saturday sports edition of the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, and although he didn't get any actual reports into it he got a regular ‘ordered job’ phoning in the football result of Padiham FC and sometimes even other people’s copy on Burnley from Turf Moor, for which he was paid a few bob. His knowledge of what happened on his local patch was such that it was said nobody turned over in bed without Jess being aware of it and he’d know of a news story almost before it happened. I met Jess in the mid 50s while I was working for the Daily Express and he became a good contact. Our first link came when he telephoned me late one Sunday night to tell of an amusing story that had happened that very evening when a local scoutmaster was marching his troop to a special evening service at the parish church in Padiham. As it was dark the scoutmaster was at the back of the troop carrying a lantern for safety reasons. That had been required by law since 1951 when a group of Royal Marine cadets were mown down by a bus while marching in the dark at Chatham in Kent. [Twenty four cadets were killed and 18 were injured.] As the Padiham scouts turned left and went up the steps into the church the scoutmaster, instead of following his troop, did a crafty right turn and went into the back yard of the pub opposite, but was seen by two ladies of the church as he banged on the pub back door and was allowed into the darkened public house. Pubs didn't open until 7.00pm on a Sunday and the scoutmaster was in for a bit of ‘early doors’ while the scouts were in church. His irreverence annoyed the ladies so instead of going into the service they waited outside the pub to see what time the scoutmaster came out from this house of sin. After the service, as the troop re-assembled, the scoutmaster had made another crafty move and was back with them, but he was having difficulty trying to get the lantern lighted. It was said later in court there had been a strong smell of drink. The Mayoral party with the vicar led the procession away from the church with the scouts following and it was then noticed by the local constabulary that the scoutmaster appeared to be wandering about as he followed the procession and his oil lamp was going from side to side like a ship’s lantern in a storm. The two ladies had pre-warned the local police inspector of the man’s condition when watching him leave the pub – little did they know the scoutmaster had also been there at lunchtime. Already warned by Jess Duxbury that the scoutmaster would be up in court the next day and they had no local court reporters, we were in for an exclusive. The scoutmaster was fined for being drunk in charge of a troop of boy scouts. A great exclusive from our Jess. Today a story like that would probably not even make the paper. At the time tip-offs such as that were the life blood in the fight for newspaper circulation; whether they came from a local freelance correspondent or a contact like Jess; they created good warm gossip from the heart of a nation still reeling from the horrors of a war. After finishing work the tap room once again became the barrack room. A meal on the kitchen table could wait while lads who had spent years away from home were reunited in the pub. Television hadn’t yet destroyed the art of telling a good tap room tale or relating a story that had appeared that day in the Daily Herald or the Mirror. That story from Jess is just one of his many that made the Daily Express Contacts like him disappeared with the stroke of an accountant’s pen when the idiots took over the asylum. Ringmaster of the Flying Circus By John Smith When I joined the Daily Mirror as a reporter in the early 1960s the photographic crew was a talented and disparate bunch, a kind of amalgam of The Wild Bunch and The League of Gentlemen. It included Freddie Reed, Bela Zola, Dixie Dean, Sid Brock, Eric Piper, Monte Fresco, Tom King, Charlie Ley, Bunny Atkins, Kent Gavin, Doreen Spooner, Alisdair MacDonald, Bill Malindine and Cyril Maitland. Also on the staff was a grumpy and taciturn character called Freddie Cole, a former taxi driver who had got his foothold in Fleet Street by photographing car crash sites and another newsy overnight snippets which he encountered while driving his cab in the wee small hours. The pix were sold as early edition fillers to the (then) three London evening papers, The StarEvening NewsEvening Standard When his shift at the Daily Mirror was over Freddie would sit at home illegally monitoring the police radio and passing on information to the news desk. He insisted that this service should remain unpaid and anonymous. A typical call from Freddie would go something like this: ‘This is you-know-who. No names, no pack-drill. Police investigating suspicious fire in Oxford Street . Over and out.’ But the most intriguing of the photographers was Tommy Lea who dressed, spoke and acted more like a country clergyman than a battle-hardened foot-in-the-door Fleet Street snapper. Beneath the neatly parted hair and National Health glasses lurked a first class operator whose guile and rat-like cunning were essential professional qualifications that were eagerly embraced by an ambitious tabloid hack such as myself who could only stand back and admire the deft footwork of this camera-toting conman. Tommy’s benign and diffident approach enabled him to wheedle his way into the front line of many a major news story, from a hospital ward full of air crash survivors to the closely guarded gates of a top secret military establishment. He famously figured in a court case which to this day is used as a benchmark in discussions about the press and privacy. Sporting a smart dark suit and a bright red carnation, Tommy had sweet-talked his way into a high society London wedding in 1945 by announcing that he was from ‘the paper of the times’. But he was rumbled after snatching a couple of quick pictures, and the bridegroom punched him and smashed his camera before throwing him out. A subsequent magazine article which labelled Tommy and the Daily Mirror as the ‘gutter press’ led to their both unsuccessfully suing for libel. In a scathing summing-up, Mr Justice Hilbery suggested that Tommy thought he had ‘some high mission as a press photographer to portray to the vulgar, the idly curious and, on some occasions, the morbidly minded, the private lives of other people.’ Looking at some of today’s celebrity-obsessed tabloids, one might think that little has changed. However, my own most treasured memory of Tommy in action goes back to the day in the 1960s when he and I were despatched to a small Bedfordshire town to cover the murder of a young girl who had been raped and strangled on her way home from a village dance. We arrived at the family home to find the Fleet Street Flying Circus encamped by the garden gate of a modest, neatly kept terraced house. To cries of ‘Yer a bit late’ and other more ribald greetings from the assembled shambles of reporters and photographers, we were told that the dead girl’s mother was alone in the house, but no amount of inducement would persuade her to make any comment, pose for any pictures or hand over any family snaps. Blinking behind his thin-rimmed glasses, Tommy went into his archdeacon act. ‘Er, I think we should sort of, well, have a go John, don’t you?’ he said, making it sound like a stammering invitation to invest a tanner on the hoopla stall at a church fete. Reaching into his pocket, he produced a packet of cigarettes and lit one. ‘Now, John,’ he murmured, in between cough-ridden puffs, ‘I know you are the writer. But would you mind leaving the talking to me on this one?’ Intrigued, I nodded and followed him up the garden path, watched with interest and not a few scornful smiles by the press pack. Tommy’s gentle but insistent knocking at the front door eventually led to it being reluctantly half opened and we were confronted by the murder victim’s mother, tears staining her face and a pinafore covering her simple blue dress. ‘I’ve got nothing to say,’ she announced mournfully. Tommy went into full vicar-mode. ‘Of course you haven’t, my dear,’ he said. ‘What could you possibly say? What could ANY of us possibly say?’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You have lost the daughter you loved. And here we are bothering you and trampling all over your nice clean doorstep. I can tell, you see; I bet you scrubbed this doorstep this morning.’ Bemused, the mother looked down and nodded. ‘I thought so,’ beamed Tommy. ‘Just like my old mum. Always kept a clean doorstep.’ Then he took a mighty drag on his cigarette, which by this time had a produced a tip of faltering ash. ‘And with a lovely doorstep like this, the last thing you would want is me dropping my cigarette all over it. Is that an ashtray I can see on the table in the hall?’ Fag hand outstretched like a cavalryman’s sabre, he glided past her into the hallway and I followed, mumbling apologies. Minutes later we were cosily installed in the kitchen while mum made a cup of tea, Tommy banged off a couple of snaps of her before making his choice from the family photo album and I coaxed some words out of her about the heartbreak of losing a daughter (sorry, but we old hacks still talk in tabloid headlines). As we drove back to London I said to Tommy: ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’ He gave me one of his beatific smiles. ‘Only when the occasion demands,’ he said. JOHN SMITH began as a messenger in the London offices of Westminster Press, then went to the Muswell Hill Record, the Paddington Mercury, the Brighton Evening Argus, the Bristol Evening World, the Daily Sketch, the Daily Herald, the Daily Mirror in London and New York and finally to The People where he did a globe-trotting column as Plain John Smith Blank expressions All these years later, it still makes me laugh now when I think about it. There’s a Daily Record minor executive peacefully sleeping at home. Two in the morning. Telephone rings. Dozily he picks it up. A voice which at that time had instant recognition across several continents bellows in his ear. ‘Why are you giving away my fucking money, mister?’ It’s not difficult to imagine the rest. Did he fall out of bed? Probably. Did he experience several near-fatal heart attacks? Almost certainly. The addition of ‘mister’ at the end of such a sentence was always particularly ominous. Dithering and quaking simultaneously, he comes up with a rhetorical question. ‘Is that er, is that Mr Maxwell?’ At this stage in his career, Cap’n Bob doesn’t think it necessary to produce proof of identity. This time his voice rises to a roar. ‘WHY ARE YOU GIVING MY FUCKING MONEY AWAY?’ No ‘mister’, this time: doubly dangerous. What had happened was that while the world and Scots execs were restoring themselves with dreamless sleep, Robert Maxwell, finding a moment to spare in the middle of the night, was flicking through some old expense sheets. Much the same as you would yourself, I suppose. One of them, from a photographer (Ian Torrance, I think), includes £5 for coming seventh or thereabouts in a photographic competition. He’d claimed the same on his exes because there was a tradition then – not any more, I’d bet – that the company would match any prize money. This he attempts to explain. Unfortunately, Mr Maxwell is not a keen adherent of Scottish traditions. It is, he says, his fiver (can we take the f-word as read, now?). He wants it back. By return. Or exec and photographer will both be fired. End of conversation. When we all first stepped into the wonderful world of free money – or expenses, as it was called – we didn’t know it was going to end with nocturnal telephone calls which would imperil both job and sanity. Even so, we sort of knew it would all hit the buffers one day. You’ll have to excuse me for a moment while I explain something to that sub on the Indie who, at any mention of old-style Fleet Street, e-mails me about dishonesty and false pretences. Now my first thought is always to wonder how anyone without at least a brushing acquaintance with dishonesty and false pretences could hope to make a living in newspapers. Are all the monasteries full? My next thought was that someone should explain to these young puritans that the expenses system involved neither. So here goes. Sit down, sonny, hang your halo on that hook, and I’ll explain it very slowly. This was how the management chose to top up our salaries during what was called a Pay Freeze. No-one was deceived. There was no fraud, as such. Every journalist knew roughly what he was allowed to charge. It suited the management because they could change our income by the week, if they so wished. We were probably foolish in going along with it, because this part of our income didn’t figure in holiday pay or pensions: great for them, not so great for us. But journalists, simple folk at heart, liked the idea of collecting cash from a sliding window on the ninth floor and going to the pub. It was fun, it seemed slightly dodgy, and it could be creatively challenging – all things that our raffish lot loved. Now we’ve cleared that up, can we carry on? We’ve all got our favourite exes story, but let me go first, okay? My first expenses scam was one I inherited from Bernard Ingham. As a district man for the Yorkshire Post in Halifax, he had – so it was said – introduced ‘the Calder Valley calls’, a 40-mile trip each day that added up to a large chunk of mileage at the end of the week. The best thing about the CalderValley calls was that you did them on the telephone, which made it even more profitable. When I took the job, a few years after Bernard, I was looking forward to this weekly bonus. It never came. The news editor cancelled them in the first week. By then Bernard was probably making daily calls to New YorkMoscow – bet you anything he never went. If you’d spent the week in the office, it required some ingenuity to make it look convincing. Once I remember finding a really good story on someone else’s expense sheet. It was Peter Stubbs’, the photographer who’d left them in the typewriter. It was a headline he’d lifted from the Accrington Observer about a woman who confiscated some kids’ football after it landed in her garden. He deleted it from his exes and substituted another one I’d found for him – about a beauty contest in Rhyl, I remember – and the football story made a Page Three lead. It was a tradition which quickly established its own classics. Everyone claims at some time or other to have paid for a mooring for a boat or for being towed out of a bog (‘money for old rope: £5’), some of which may even be true, and all the show-biz writers in London were always delighted to see their Scottish counterpart, Billy Sloane ‘Entertaining Mr Sloane – £30’. Small triumphs like that were very satisfying. And there was the story of the photographer (said to have been Tommy Lyons) who, just before Christmas, charged: ‘One year’s reversing mileage – 187 miles.’ Asked to explain it, he said: ‘You know when you’re looking for a house and you drive a bit past... then you have to back up to it. Or when you drive into a cul-de-sac and have to reverse out. It doesn’t show on the milometer, but I did 187 miles like that, this year.’ We all have our personal favourites. Mine was typing out the simple, unadorned sentence: ‘Medical treatment following fall from coconut tree: £50, see bill attached.’ It was perfectly genuine. There I was lying on a beach in the Seychelles (I was doing a piece on the shooting of the Pirelli Calendar) when I saw some local lads run up the slanting trunks of the trees and chop off some coconuts. Looks pretty easy, I thought. So I tried it. Running up was fine until I looked down I fell off. I cut my arm open trying to grab the trunk on the way down. I was hoping someone would query it so that I could relate this story: of course, no-one did. Certain skills were required. I think it was Paul Hughes who showed me how a line of firmly-struck full-stops enabled you to tear off a potentially embarrassing letterhead so that it looked as though it had been ripped off a waiter’s pad. Thus a bill for a shirt from the Savoy Tailors Guild could in seconds become a receipt for entertaining unidentified ‘Scotland Yard contacts’. If you were lucky enough to have bills from some distant country, preferably in early Sanskrit, you didn’t even need to do that. After six weeks in Iceland (fishing wars), the first thing I did was to ring the accounts department and ask if any of their staff spoke Old Norse. No-one did. After that, the extension I built on my house was always called The Cod Room. Sadly, I never truly mastered the language of accounts departments which was the key to it all. After a serious clamp-down on advance expenses, which threatened massive unemployment in the restaurant trade around Holborn Circus, it was said that Keith Waterhouse had cracked the code. He simply wrote ‘Cash Adjustment: £50’ and the cashiers, who recognised their own tongue, were more than happy to hand over the money. There was a similar device used by freelances when – as happened very occasionally – they were paid twice for the same piece. Feebly, I used to hang on to it in the hope no-one would notice. They always did, and I always had to return it. But those who were smarter than me would send a note saying: ‘I regret we have no machinery for effecting this repayment’, and it was never queried after that. One of the saddest sights I ever saw was when I shared a room with Jim Lewthwaite on the Sun. He was sitting typing out some exes, cursing foully with every key-stroke. It was enough to break any hack’s heart. Ken Donlan had presented Jim, John Hiscock and Dougie Thompson with air travel cards so they could whiz off on major international stories. After a few drinks in the top bar of the Tip, John and Doug decided to try them out. They went to Heathrow, took a flight to Los Angeles, and never came back. While they sat in the Californian sun, Jim was left to complete all their back expenses in Bouverie Street . By the way he spoke, you’d never have known they were all good friends. Years later, after a month at the Hacks’ Holiday Home, otherwise known as the National Enquirer in Florida, I sat down to do my four week’s expenses. ‘Those are no good,’ one of their staffmen said, pointing to my pile of bills, ‘they’re all blank.’ From my pocket I produced a set of multi-coloured pens and pencils. I thought of all those great creative artists who’d gone before me Penrose, Jackson, Hagerty, Williams, men whose creative genius did for the expense sheet what Sam Beckett did for literature. How fortunate for me that I should be the lucky one chosen to take this ancient wisdom out to our innocent colonial cousins.‘Let me introduce you to an old Fleet Street tradition ’ Now, like the lamplighter and the candle-maker, the Old Exes Forger of yore is no more. One day, I’d like to think he will appear in those illustrations of the Street Cries of Old London Town. A hack crouched over his typewriter calling out: ‘Any blank bills? Any blank bills?’ Book deal During this week amazon-UK has been offering copies of the new book about Liberace’s libel case against the Daily Mirror and Cassandra at a 30%, then a 20%, then a 5% discount, with free postage in the It appears to be the early birds that get the best deals. You can find out more and the current rate by clicking But if you are feeling especially barmy, you can buy it from Anybook-UK for a mind-boggling £41.46. In her foreword to the book Solicitor-General Vera Baird described it as ‘a fabulous historic court battle, from a different age.’ And the Law Society Gazette reviewer said the text had him laughing out loud. It’s difficult to imagine that the lawyers found it funny. But Hugh Cudlipp had decided that the paper should fight the case because he thought it would be fun. Nevertheless, at 180,000 words, Crying All The Way To The Bank should be excellent holiday reading for anybody interested in newspapers and journalism. Read more, if you haven’t already, in the Ranters archive edition of June 5 (it’s over there on the left. Or click on the date to save the effort of scrolling and looking.) Other books in the same collection of newspaper classics are also available from amazon. And some are also discounted, although by smaller amounts. Ladies Of The Street by Liz Hodgkinson, the story of the unsung and largely unknown contribution of the fairer sex to the history of national newspapers, is described as being in stock, with only a couple of copies available. So are Slip Up, the story of how Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard lost him, by Tony Delano Ian Skidmore’s hilarious autobiographic account of his days in newspapers and broadcasting, Two novels, The Upper Pleasure Garden by Gordon M Williams and A Crooked Sixpence, by Murray Sayle And two collections of newspaper writing at its best, Author royalties of these last two go to charity. And if you are too poor to buy them for yourself you can of course order them from your local library. ###

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• 19 Jun 2009 04:30

  The news story must be the only human activity which demands that the orgasm comes at the beginning. – Vincent Mulchrone Issue # 100 June 19, 2009 Letter from the editor: have your typing fingers seized up? Is your memory addled? You’ve lost the skill (or the will) to write? What made us special? It’s like war, says Vincent Mulchrone Maybe it was particularly like the First World War, says Cassandra: Oh the noise, and oh, the people But what were we doing there, in the first place. For Ian Skidmore it was just another of life’s embarrassing accidents. It used to be fun, Ken Ashton remembers. But is there much of it left? In the days before mobiles and blackberries and laptops, sending cables used to be fun, says Revel Barker And Colin Dunn recalls the moment when he finally knew for sure exactly what, and where, he wanted to be We know you’re out there For this week, our one hundredth edition, we are carrying some readers’ requests – some of the (thankfully, many) pieces we’ve carried that you’ve told us you liked. We’ll probably carry some more of your old favourites next week. The webcounter thingy shows that 2,140.115 people clicked on to the site in the immediate past 12 months (we’ve been running for 23 months). Presumably you, the reader, account for about 52 of that number – unless you return to the site during the week, in which case it may be 53. That’s one helluva lot of readers. And it means that something like 99% of you don’t contribute anything to it. It’s just another free ride for newspaper people. If we’d only had the foresight to find a way of charging a penny a visit But that wasn’t the plan. The idea was, and incidentally still is, to run a website for the benefit of contributors. While being cross-examined by Gilbert Beyfus QC when he was being sued for libel by Liberace (you may have heard about that – it was in all the papers), Cassandra was asked whether the content of his columns was ‘governed by purely circulation motives’. He replied: It is not in the slightest. It is curious, Mr Beyfus, but I am not concerned with the circulation of the in any way. I am concerned with the privilege of having this particular pulpit to say what I think and what I believe in and I do not care about the circulation of the Well, it’s much like that at Ranters. Circulation means nothing to us. Two-million-plus seems a fairly impressive figure (although we’re aware that some sites get that many every day) but since we don’t carry ads it is effectively no different from having 2,000. Of course, it is nice to know that your stuff is being read, even if the webcounter is usually the only way of knowing. But It is run entirely for fun. That’s our fun. The contributors’ fun. Insofar as any talent is evident, it’s basically the only talent we happen to have. I have rarely met anybody in this trade who hasn’t had a tale to tell. It was often impossible to stop them retelling them. Isn’t that why we were in the business in the first place? Some of you are probably still boring people to death in the pub with stories that start: ‘That reminds me of the time when ’ So remind us. Risk boring us. Our rejection rate (yes: this may be apparent) is very low. As Vince Mulchrone writes (below) the tales engendered by a lifetime in journalism beat anything he would have experienced as a window dresser at C&A Modes. And if you can’t write, well presumably you can read. Buy a bloody book. They were actually chosen for you. If you haven’t already done so, click on bookshop in the content column (up there on the left) and check them out. Otherwise, we might not reach the 200 mark. And then you – rather than the contributors – would be the first ones to complain. Now let’s get on with the fun. What makes us special By Vincent Mulchrone It’s like war, of course – 90 per cent sitting on somebody else’s laurels, the rest sheer panic. If, in the panic, you can find the words to convey the blood and sweat of the revolt in Oojiboo, and (which is frequently more difficult) get them back to a sub-editor worried about his train home, then you are a reporter, and the happiest animal on earth. It is a thrill that lasts clear through to the next issue of the paper. And it is like war in that only the happy moments are retained in the ragbag of memory. The snubs from the great, the terror of not having coped, the other fellow’s scoop, all the group anxieties of the idiot, exacting trade, can be swamped by one good story. Today’s. ‘I’m from the Daily Mail.’ It is a frail laisser-passer, no matter what the name. Few concierges in Beirut have heard of Lord Northcliffe. Yet it has opened doors that would otherwise be barred to one so obviously devoid of any talent but the rough cunning and low-born persistence required of a reporter. Just now and again the huge improbability of the situation strikes home – and you have to hold hard not to yelp aloud with disbelieving delight. Like – well, like thinking about catching the 6.27 home and fetching up instead, at midnight, 30,000ft above Cyprus, listening to George Brown speculating on Labour’s forthcoming majority. (He was out by 40.) And, for all that, not even listening properly to Mr Brown. Because, farther up the Prime Minister’s plane, Lord Mountbatten’s stockinged feet were sticking out into the aisle. The sleeping Supremo, haggard with grief, was hitch-hiking like the rest of us to the cremation of his old friend Pandit Nehru... Sensible English serge in Delhi’s dust, no time for food, nothing stronger than Coke at the cable office, sweat dripping on to a notebook crammed with jibberish impressions... There must be an adjective that will bring the first par alive. There must. There is. But where is the bastard? The news story must be the only human activity which demands that the orgasm comes at the beginning. The foot-in-door training was useful of its kind, but it didn’t help when a tumbler of whisky and soda crashed at the Queen’s feet on the quarterdeck of Britannia, causing 200 guests to freeze into a Bateman cartoon. The Queen was entertaining the New Zealand press. We Poms volunteered to hold up the bars in case the royal yacht listed, or something. I was performing this serious task with Freddie Reed, the Daily Mirror’s great cameraman, when the Queen happened by and asked us what we were laughing about. My story had been one about drink. She laughed. Freddie laughed so heartily that his glass slipped from his fingers. The lady’s aplomb is proverbial. She told a story to match. She never even glanced down. That evening Freddie Reed was the ‘pool’ photographer alone in the foyer of the local theatre, waiting for a ‘one shot’ picture of the Queen. When he pressed the button his flash failed. He stood to attention as she passed, his mind on other things but loyalty. She paused in her stride to say, for his ears alone: ‘Just isn’t your day, is it, Mr Reed?’ I hope I won’t bore my grandchildren with that story. But at least it beats anything I would have had to tell them had I stayed where I started, which was dressing windows for C&A Modes. Of the two geography mistresses I have had, I prefer the Queen. She it was who took me to the incredible temples of Katmandu, to the chain-mailed horsemen of Kaduna, to the sunset on the Khyber, to the opera in Munich. (When I spent Acts II and III in the basement bar, she made no murmur. Teachers just don’t come like that these days). No other trade would have paid one to swim at midnight in Alice Springs, or fish Loch Ness for its Monster with a bottle of Malt for bait, or open National Tequila Week (a purely personal fiesta) in Mexico City, or marvel at grey Jerusalem flushing apricot in the dawn. When the barricade went up in Algiers the thought came, too, that it would be neither sweet nor fitting to die for one’s intro. If I stand up on this balcony I have a great view and quite possibly a bullet in my left ear. I might get a half-column on Page One. ‘It is with great regret that we announce...’ Am I old enough for a commemoration service in St Bride’s? Anyway, do they do it for Catholics? But if I go on crouching behind the balcony’s parapet I will see nothing. The man, on the other hand, will dash out into the square to save somebody from under a hail of lead. Which is precisely what he did. (I solved my problem by bobbing up and down wearing a look which tried to convey ‘This is a Franco-Algerian affair and I am a British journalist whose first duty is...’) Deadlines, like fear, heighten perception magically. But, as they heighten, they narrow. A coach-borne tourist knows more of Isfahan than I do. I know the concierge, the man at the cable office, the man at the airport. I can move faster than a tourist, so fast I sometimes don’t know which city I’m waking up in because the hotel bedroom came from the same American mind. The symbols on the bedside push-buttons have all finally jelled into the same pattern. The lady with the feather duster, the man with the tray of drinks – all walk briskly across buttons from South Bend to Samarkand. Just one extra button – with a geisha, perhaps, or flamenco dancer – might identify the dawn. After a bad night, you might have to wait to identify the breakfast waiter’s language before you are sure you have made it. Sometimes he is the only man who wants to know you. You are there, as like as not, because something has gone wrong. The press is bad news. You can feel yourself growing the extra skin. This explains, in part at least, why journalists live, and drink, and move together, whether it’s at an Assize pub in the West Country or in a press camp at war. (I think the trickiest spot I was ever in was outside a Welsh court where a popular mayor had been accused of tickling trout. All that saved us was the fact that the press men happened to be as beefy as the locals.) We also stick together because, by and large, we prefer our own company to that of the prevaricators and liars and self-seeking schemers whose words we affect to take down. Diabolical phonies abound. I have never known one fool a group of journalists. Bluster doesn’t work with us and flattery rarely (though, Heaven knows, we tend to sob at a kind word). Our papers do not pay us to be savage with the weaknesses and foibles of our leaders. But it is our private delight to savage them for the knaves they frequently are, if only to buttress a self-esteem we are losing. It is a compensation, I suppose, for the times we have had to fawn, or wait someone’s pleasure, or choke on an insult, because the clock was ticking and the deadline never waits. Yet I wouldn’t want to be anything other than a reporter. My friend James Cameron put it better than I could when he wrote: ‘I know with what cavalier disdain even the ostensibly serious aspects of newspapers are regarded by those who never had to try to form a thought at any time, least of all under the pressure of a looming deadline, a thirst, a ringing phone, and an uneasy conscience. It is rather sad that we should ever imagine it otherwise; it is a salutary thing to recognise the inconsequential nature of one’s own accomplishment.’ Inconsequential was never an adjective that could be applied to Cameron’s reporting. But the salutary warning is one we all know. We face it every day, every edition. That is what makes us special. And don’t you try to tell me otherwise. ·        A collection of some of Mulchrone’s best writing, confusing entitled The Best Of Vincent Mulchrone, is one of the classic books preserved for Ranters. Caution – men working By Bill Connor (Cassandra) I have been on Fleet Street for thirty years and I have never laughed so much. There is no other job like it, so preposterous, so wildly improbable. The task which we impudently assume is to chronicle the whole pageant of life, to record the passing show and then, with unforgivable brazenness, to draw conclusions, to give a verdict and to point the moral. Damn and bless our bloody eyes. I would never advise anybody to come to Fleet Street. Learning this trade is like learning high diving – minus the water. But I wouldn’t have missed it for all the treasures of Araby. The man who when he was asked what it was like to be in the First World War said: ‘Oh, the noise, and oh, the people!’ You can say the same thing about Fleet Street – ‘Oh, the noise, and oh, the people!’ You can get used to the noise but I’ve never got used to the people. The lovely nuts. The gorgeous crackpots. And all those wonderful, generous, self-derisive folk who spend their lives making dirty great black marks on miles and miles of white paper. Newspaper people are the greatest company in the world. They know but they willnever learn. Fleet Street is a pavement where the manhole covers are missing. The aspir­ants who walk down it are warned by notices which say: caution – men working. They stride on and in a trice are below ground. I know. I’ve done it. Fleet Street is snakes and ladders. Fleet Street is the greasy pole with the old duck pond waiting scummily below if you fall off. I know. I’ve done it. Fleet Street is the slippery slide with the banana skin laid there for all to see. And the saints and sinners go marching on until bingo we all fall down. I know. I’ve done it. The way to get on in Fleet Street is never letit be known what you want to do. Hide Ambition’s dark face. Never ascend the heights. The newspaper business, especially in Fleet Street, is over-shadowed by an angry towering mountain with the summit lost in the eternal hostile snows. Way down in the warm valleys below the foothills, life in the print business can be serene and relaxed. The place is stuffed with bee-loud glades where the idle, as well as the able, the incompetent as well as the efficient can relax. The vegetation is thick and the great warm fronds provide shade for those who wish to lie down in the noonday sun. Reporters, sub-editors, feature men and sports writers can all have a relatively pleasant time and, if they wish, can make love to the secretary birds under the kindly foliage. A littlefarther up the mountain, the foothills begin and the humming birds are no longer seen. The flowers are still bright, but there is a freshness in the air that old journalists suspect and young ones too often relish. Above the foothills you can see the sky between the trees. Still farther up, the foliage begins to diminish. There is a nip in the air and old hands shake their heads. The conifers grow shorter and more stunted. The undergrowth thins out. Bushes take the place of trees, and there is little cover under which to hide. But the eager beavers press on. Like young wild pigs they grunt and bolt around, sniffing the freshening wind. Far below in the valley there were flowers and berries and fruits to be found. Here there is little. Nor is the bark of the trees edible. But still rooting and snorting, the ambitious porkers press on. It is the charge of the Gadarene Swine in reverse – upwards instead of downwards – to disaster. Above the bushes comes the scree. Above the scree come the boulders. Above the boulders, the snow line. The ambitious journalists have thinned out now. Some are exhausted. Others are killedby their fellows. But here and there a burly brute with a red gleam in a beady angry eye that indicates the fevered image of the Editor’s Chair, still scrambles and scrabbles upwards. I call them to come back. But it is too late, and as I stumble down the mountain to the softer climes below, I see the last of the Go-Getters, the I-Believe-In-Me mob, struggling ever upwards. Little black dots slowly ascending the North Col. Ultimately, one of them makes it. O the Power! O the Glory! But they have still reckoned without the Abominable Snow­man – the mysterious yeti, nine foot tall, covered in silkyginger fur with great gorilla-like feet leaving imprints in the dazzling snow. Sooner or later they meet him face to face, and another familiar mountaineer has the millstone of Editorship around his neck and dies the death. And the faithful Sherpas who always knew that one glance from the Abominable Snowman meant disaster were right. Editors! I seen ’em come. And I seen ’em go. But way up on the mountain overshadowing Fleet Street the Abominable Snowman goes on for ever. So, young stranger, my advice is don’t come near us. Don’t come in ‘for the water’s warm’. It’s not, it’s hot. It’s also freezing cold and it’s rough too. But it is the best, the finest, the most furious, the most exciting bath of life that anybody could ever take. But, for Gawd’s sake, mind the plug ’ole. ·        Cassandra At His Finest And Funniest, the pick of pieces by the man often described as the greatest newspaper columnist of all time, is another book that has been preserved in the classic collection of books by, and for, journalists. Button up your overcoat By Ian Skidmore I worry when people, usually mothers, ask me how I got my start in journalism. And not only because the question carries a sub text: ‘If a prat like you can do it, it will be a doddle for a bright child like mine.’ Mostly I hesitate, because everything that has happened to me in my career has stemmed from an embarrassing accident. In this case going to prison. Only an army prison and I was guilty of nothing – but then they all say that, don’t they? I suppose I could explain the issue by saying ‘It was because my greatcoat was unbuttoned, coming out of a pub in Thetford.’ We were a night away from a draft to Palestine and were celebrating in a last chance saloon called the Green Man. I was a lance corporal in the Black Watch (RHR) who had somehow got mixed up with an RASC unit in the days when Englishmen dominated the Highland Division while the canny Scots all joined corps and learnt a trade. In my unit all the Scots came from . None much more than five feet high. If you were any taller in Glasgow, you got posted to Edinburgh Because I was still fastening my greatcoat on the street, I was pounced on by the Town Patrol of burly corporals for being improperly dressed. A minute Glaswegian ran up to one of the corporals and smacked him in the mouth for being impertinent to ‘a Highlander’ (from , as it happened). In consequence, we were all charged with assault, taken off the draft to Palestine and sent to Germany My charge – ‘that he did assault six regimental policemen’ – preceded me to my new unit where I was summoned by the CO. He said: ‘I am a very bewildered officer; you don’t look violent to me.’ I didn’t. Indeed in the kilt I looked like an undernourished reading lamp. I explained what happened, but he said there was nothing he could do about it. It was a court martial offence and he would have to remand me. ‘But’ he said, ‘a word of advice: ‘plead guilty. Otherwise they will have to adjourn the court and you will have wasted the officers’ morning. They will have to bring the witnesses over from the and they will be very cross with you. Plead guilty and your Prisoner’s Friend will explain the situation.’ I did. He didn’t. And I spent the next 56 days in 3 Military Corrective Establishment at Bielefeld When I was released and posted to Bad Oenhausen I decided to desert. On my way to the Bahnhof to get a train to the Hook of Holland I was pounced on by the garrison RSM, a Scots Guard called Graham. He was very rude to me, suggesting that if I didn’t smarten myself up he would take the red hackle out of my bonnet, stick it up my arse and have me clucking like a Rhode Island Red. I was very glad when he dismissed me. To my horror I saw him again five minutes later in the next street. Rather than face him I dodged into the first door I could open. As it happens it was the office of Army PR. A CSM, Paddy Seaman, asked me what I wanted. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked him if he had any jobs going. I thought I might sweep the floor or make some tea. He said: ‘Have you any experience of newspapers?’ I thought, that’s a funny question – because, as a matter of fact, I had: I had been a printer’s apprentice at Allied Newspapers at Withy Grove. I said I had worked on the Manchester Evening Chronicle and Paddy said: ‘Blimey, we haven’t had a newspaper reporter before. Come in and see Kenneth.’ Kenneth, it turned out, was the CO. At the time I didn’t know officers had first names, so I was a little surprised. I was even more surprised when I met Major Kenneth Harvey. He was a touch fey. I later learnt he had transferred to the Royal Armoured Corps because the black beret brought out the blue of his eyes. What with one thing and another I was very relieved when he asked me to sit down. All I remember of the interview was the bit where he said ‘Here’s a chit. Go to the QM and draw your three stripes.’ ‘Stripes?’ ‘You will join as a sergeant, of course’ ‘A sergeant?’ He bridled and his little shoulders shivered. ‘You cannot expect to be an officer straight away,’ he said. That afternoon with not the slightest idea what I was doing I was on my way to cover the Berlin Airlift. Still the biggest story I have ever covered on my own. But the army always did the unexpected. Some months later when I was Returned To Unit because of persistent drunkenness, another Guards RSM – Irish this time and called Kenny – thought PR was short for provost and appointed me Provost Sgt of HQ 7th Armoured Division. So if your child wants a career in journalism, tell him to try unbuttoning his overcoat in Thetford. ·         In addition to being one of the original contributors to , Ian Skidmore tends his own blog here His hilarious autobiography, Forgive Us Our Press Passes, was the first book published by Ranters, for Ranters. Bring back fun By Ken Ashton An Independent profiler, writing on the appointment of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as Tory communications director, said Coulson - unlike many media figures - had gone to ‘an ordinary school’. Wow! And now I read that Simon Barnes, chief sports writer, is to be given an honorary doctorate by his old university and, while reporting it, comments on the fact that many journalists worked their way through the ranks, eschewing media courses. Ah, the dreaded media courses. When I was 62, I was enrolled at a local comprehensive school to teach journalism and media. After being roped in to help design their course material, since the head of department knew nothing about journalism, I was appointed a teacher, but paid as a technician, because I didn't have the relevant qualifications. The students, bless them, were happiest designing cannabis posters on their Apples or filming each other. They didn't read newspapers because ‘you can’t believe them’ and they were not interested in public affairs, because ‘Dad pays the rates and the tax.’ All of which reminds us of our own golden days as, straight from school or national service, we went into the hallowed trade of journalism. And here I am, at 75, mentoring would-be journalists in foreign climes. And many of them are not just good, they are brilliant. Like the guy who sent me an article yesterday and said he was having problems, being a Nigerian in Spain and finding doors closed to him. Or the woman in Sierra Leone who tells me she is sorry her work is late, but she can use her laptop only when the generator is free. We, who gaze at journalism through our rosy Specsavers glasses, see the good old days as the best. Were they? Well, the training was. Editors like Alf Glynn (who often would look out of his window in the office and think he could see Red Indians, covered in blood, coming up the High Street – and then carry on editing), who sent me back once on a five-mile bike ride to gather a first name I'd forgotten to ask for. I’d already been out pedalling all day doing district calls, but not many people in those days had a phone. I covered Harold Wilson’s constituency on a bike and one of my rare car trips was accompanying him in his chauffeured car on election night and being despatched in the rain to buy fish and chips for three... ‘Put ’em on your exes, lad. Tell your boss they were for Harold.’ News editors like Gordon Bennett, at Warrington, who would make trainees stand to attention and sing misspelled words. Try ‘accommodation’ to the tune of Little Brown Jug. Thank the Lord we didn't have mobiles in those days. How would we have stayed out of the reach of news editors who never would have believed we couldn't find phone kiosks that worked? I once missed almost a whole day's play at Chesterfield between Lancashire and Derbyshire because my car had broken down on the moors. I cobbled something from the radio and Manchester Evening News, but was unaware there had been a public address call for me to contact the office. Bob Findlay was not best pleased. Today's media students and university qualified ‘journalists’ have never experienced the trauma of door-knocking the bereaved, milling with strikers, using the stubs of cheque books as note books, à la Arfon Roberts, RIP. When I tell some students of journalism how to write an intro, they will argue with me. This is the guy who once rewrote the intro of a column by Peter Wilson, The Man They Can’t Gag. He came all the way to from to chastise me - then took me out to lunch. I have no quarrel with the trendy journalists who now have their shoulders clapped for mixing fact with opinion when reporting, or the Top Shop models who pose while they shout the evening news at me (... the girls Sir Trevor McDonald called docklands hookers on News Knight). But I hanker for the days of yore - was it all of 50-odd years ago? - when we seemed to have more fun doing the job. Maybe abolish media studies and bring back the fun? Now there's a thought. ·        Ken Ashton worked on theSt Helens Reporter, Yorkshire Evening News at Doncaster, Lancashire Evening Post, Liverpool Echo, MirrorSketch Upstick job arsewards, stop By Revel Barker I mentioned to some of the lads in an email the other day that while covering the Italian invasion of Abyssinia for the Daily Mail in 1935, Evelyn Waugh – out there with Bill ‘Scoop’ Deedes – received a cable from his editor: 200 words upblown nurse Cable charges were assessed in those days on a price per key-stroke, including spaces. Waugh, after an exhaustive investigation, determined that rumours of a certain English nurse having been killed in an Italian air raid – or, indeed, of any nurse being blown up – were in fact bogus. He cabled back: nurse unupblown This prompted what these days is called a thread, a string of messages, among a small emailing forum. Alastair McQueen somehow (because he must have been at school at the time) remembered that the ’s Noel Barber had been shot in Buda, or maybe in Pest, and Sefton Delmer received a cable from the demanding: barber shot why you unshot. This reminded me of a story, I think originally told to me by George Gordon, of an exchange between the ’s foreign desk and its man in the Congo: why unnews query - unnews here stop unnews there unjob here stop - upstickjob arsewards stop rude letter follows stop It was certainly George who told me about a reporter who had enjoyed the hospitality of a Congolese girl and, on departing, had given her five Embassy cigarette coupons, saying ‘Use these to buy yourself a better hut.’ But I digress: that story has nothing to do with cables and telexes. Michael Christiansen, when editing the , loved sending them and had his own clever cable signature, xsen. When John Knight was on a job in Johannesburg he received a cable – pro  mirrorman knight joburg hyatt – from the boss saying: saliswards soonest regds xsen stop And he replied: mydearchriscommaimaginemyastonishmentwhenonansweringthedoormysuiteatthehyattiencounteredaduskyhouseboybearingasilverplatterandonityourtotallyindecipherablemessagestop theweatherherebythewaydelightfulandthehotelisdecidedlygrandstop thisisreallythesortofplaceweshouldthinkaboutbringingthegirlsforaholidaycommaespeciallyduringourwintercommawhentheclimateherecomma  I  have  it  on  the  best  authority  comma  is  suitably  temperate  and  the  scenery  at  all  times  of  year  is  perfectly  stunning  stop the  story  on  which  you  sent  me  has  failed  to  stand  up  comma  so  I  intend  to  spend  a  few  days  getting  my  bearings  and  if  nothing  presents  itself  I  may  take  a  trip  to  salisbury  later  and  have  a  look  round  there  stop hoping  that  this  finds  you  as  it  leaves  me  stop best  regards  stop john  stop pee  ess  colon  incidentally  comma  if  your  message  was  in  any  way  important  comma  please  do  not  hesitate  to  telephone  me  stop open  bracket  collect  close  bracket  endit It was of course the ‘(Collect)’ that did it. John says he thinks the telex charge was half-a-crown per key-stroke at the time, and with the single word Collect at the end he had made his cable reverse-charge. Thereafter XSEN took to using the telephone. ·        Revel Barker’s book, Crying All The Way To The Bank: Liberace v The Daily Mirror & Cassandra, is the most recent book published in the Ranters classic collection. # The day I met the national lads As soon as we heard the noise all five of us, in the reporters’ room at the top of the Craven Herald building, stopped work. Coming up the narrow back stairs was what sounded like a team of overweight removal men shifting several large pianos. There was an awful lot of puffing, cursing and bumping around. Mr Waterhouse, the deputy editor and most other things too, looked at his watch. Ten to three. In the fifties, in our small market town, closing time was 2.30. Chapel-goer though he was, even Mr Waterhouse knew what that meant. Two-hour drive from Manchester. Two hours in the Hole-in-the-Wall back bar. ‘That’ll be the national lads,’ he said. A minute later they exploded into our room. The Express. Mail. . All the way from Manchester. My first glimpse of real reporters, right here in the offices of the Craven Herald and West Yorkshire Pioneer, over a shop in the Yorkshire Dales. And what a head-spinning shock it was. Pink-faced from climbing the stairs, shiny-eyed from pints, swathed in sufficient sheepskin to stage One Man and His Dog, they rode in on a tidal wave of chat and charm. Perched on desk edges, flopped into bentwood chairs, they lit cigarettes, they joked, they swore, they laughed. If you had to find a collective noun, it would be a swagger of national lads. For all his multi-tasking as deputy editor, chief sub, chief reporter, music and theatre critic, for all his 110wpm shorthand, Mr Waterhouse, in his darned cardigan, looked faded against their blazing glamour. They were fun on the hoof and, at 16, I knew, there and then, I wanted to be one of them. What’s more, it was my story that had brought them from exotic Manchester (a place I had heard talk of, without being sure where it was). A man who had sent his prize budgerigar to a show in Keighley had complained when British Rail failed to return it on time. So they’d put on a special train from Keighley to Skipton, just to bring his budgie back. It got only three or four paragraphs in the Herald, but the national lads had picked it up. Mr Waterhouse shook his head. He couldn’t understand their interest. ‘There’s no story, lads,’ he told them. ‘Now if it was 20 or 30 people who’d been stranded, then yes – that’d be a story. But a budgie? Never in this world ’ They exchanged glances. With a shake of his head, Mr Waterhouse said they could take me over to the Carla Beck Milk Bar to talk about it. Until then, I’d been pretty much satisfied with my career in journalism. To understand that you have to know what it was like working for the Craven Herald in the fifties. I cannot improve on the succinct definition provided by the editor, John Mitchell, when television’s Man Alive team made a programme contrasting the Herald with a modern weekly in, I think, Bedford. It was not a kind comparison. Bedford had new technology. We had Charlie Ayrton, the printer, holding up a piece of ink-stained string to indicate ‘copy required’. They had a photographer in a sport car. Our photographer, Fred, was also a printer who had to change out of his overalls before picking up his plate camera. Bedford had designers sketching out a front page. We had a front page full of adverts. With a final piece of boot-inserting, they’d put it straight to John Mitchell in his office. Weren’t we miles behind the times with ads on the front page? John smiled benignly. ‘Oh, that’s what you’re getting at,’ he said, completely undisturbed. ‘You see, you don’t know what it’s like round here. In Bedford they’ve got all their best news on the front page. Round here, we don’t have news. Inside the paper, we confirm what people already know – who won the whist drive and the football. The only news is what’s on at the Odeon next week, and that’s on the front page.’ He was right. But it did mean that life for a young reporter was, well, something short of tearaway. I typed out wedding reports by the score (I still don’t know what tulle is). I reported on the North Rib rugby team. I sat through hours of parish councils where they discussed the siting of litter-bins and the problem with dog mess. I scoured the yellowing files for items for Fifty Years Ago Today. For civilisation to endure, justice must be seen to be done, so I unfailingly recorded the fines on careless drivers, the most serious crime we had on our patch. My week peaked at around 4.30 on a Wednesday afternoon when Miss A Walmsley (we only ever did initials) came in, hotfoot from the latest meeting of the Ladies’ Happy Hour. She would dictate to me. It didn’t vary a lot. Mrs L Tupman (president) always presided. Miss A Walmsley (secretary) would read the minutes. There would be a speaker (‘In the Master’s Footsteps: my trip to Palestine’) or perhaps a competition for putting the most objects in a matchbox. A lovely warm-hearted woman, Miss Walmsley (doesn’t look right without the A, does it?) took a motherly interest in me. So too, she assured me, did Mrs L Tupman (president). ‘Mrs Tupman thinks you’ll go far.’ Well, it was more encouragement than I ever got off Maurice Wigglesworth. Among the tea-ringed desks, the ripped lino, the curling files and the jammed Underwoods, the office style was a bit Baden-Powell: hard work, clean living. This came from Mr Waterhouse, who set clear moral standards. In our photographs of prize-winning bulls at agricultural shows, a little discreet trimming ensured they did not look too, well bullish. That was sex taken care of. Drinking and swearing played no part in our office life, although Mr Waterhouse did offer his own vocabulary of near-swear words when provoked – ‘we don’t want any bally nonsense.’ In real extremes, he could be driven to use the name of a local railway town. ‘Well, I’ll go to H– Hellifield Junction! ’ he’d say. Then, triumphant, he’d beam around the room: ‘You thought I was going to say it, didn’t you?’ This, he told me many times, was the best journalistic training in the world. It was certainly the best training for working on the Craven Herald. They took on a trainee about every two years. Not so many before me had been indentured and unpaid, and before that they had themselves even paid for the honour, like articled clerks. Now, Mr Waterhouse said with some pride, they had moved with the times, and the junior reporter now was paid. It was true. At 16 I was paid five shillings a week. That’s a quarter of a £ which I dare say is around 25 pence. At 17, it doubled to ten shillings a week, 50 new pence. After that, at 18, you moved on to the union rate which was slightly over £2, and by the time you were 20, the company could no longer bear this staggering financial burden. You were encouraged to seek your fortune in the wider world down south. Or Leeds, as we called it. To my young eyes, the reporters from the Express, the and the shone like diamonds in a dustbin. Bouncing with bonhomie, they whisked me straight past the Carla Beck Milk Bar and on to the Hole-in-the-Wall back bar where, they said, earlier research had suggested a look-in later on. ‘This young feller’s celebrating his 18th birthday,’ said the . ‘Give him a glass of mild.’ We sat down. I told them all about my budgie story. The Express gave me a half-of-mild. The gave me a Senior Service, untipped. The told me a joke. They were rude, they were risky, they were reckless – they were everything I’d ever dreamed of. Somewhere at the back of my mind I had always suspected that journalism must have a little more to offer than the Ladies’ Happy Hour, and here it was. Perhaps this was the future Mrs Tupman had foreseen for me. If you can forgive the intemperate language, it was bally brilliant. It was half-a-century ago, but I can still almost remember the three real reporters. The , I’m pretty sure, was Don Turner who later opened their Dublin office. The – I think – was Alan Cooper who later ran a freelance agency in Huddersfield. The Express man is, I’m afraid, lost. My budgie story made page leads all round. It confirmed all Mr Waterhouse’s worst suspicions. ‘These national lads,’ he said, ‘I don’t think they’re properly trained these days – they don’t know a bally story when they see one.’ I agreed. He was absolutely right. Right that is for the Craven Herald and West Yorkshire Pioneer. But I had just had a glimpse of a world beyond.

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• 12 Jun 2009 16:23

  Can you put the word ‘scoop’ in the subject field of your email. Send it to DominicP@pressgazette.co.uk

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• 11 Jun 2009 21:42

  Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. –The Times. Issue #99June 12, 2009 Ton-up! Congratulations. When you clicked, just now, to access this site you became the TWO MILLIONTH person to log on in the last 12 months (we have now been publishing for exactly 23 months). More precisely, you became something like the 2,070,000th, because that is the number of visits we now average per year, but it’s near enough. Next Friday, DV, we will be 100 issues old. And they said it wouldn’t last. So next week we will publish requests. Let us know what your favourite pieces have been in the last 100 issues, and we’ll try to find and reprint them. Yes reprinting and republishing appears to have become a major element of Ranters. Nothing wrong with that. The old stories were always the best. They just don’t make them like that any more. There’s an opportunity, below, to remind the current generation about some of the old Front Pagers of yesterday. Thanks to the readers who spotted last week’s deliberate mistake (see Letters, over there on the right) and reported in. And to the reader who spotted one that wasn’t one. We like to include at least one error, or even an Errol, in every edition, and it’s always a pleasure to hear about them. No: honest. It’s the only way we have of knowing that there’s anybody out there reading this stuff. The errors are likely to continue until we find a competent sub. That’s not intended as an oxymoron. As for any accidental errors and misspellings that creep in well, as we used to say at school, nobody’s prefect. Happily, we are in good company on the cock-up front. The mighty amazon, the world’s biggest river of books, may have discovered too late that it had made too generous an offer on the latest Ranters volume, (see, if you missed it, Ranters last week). They had made it available, for pre-order, at a 30% discount, plus free postage. Come publication day (Monday, this week) they possibly realised that they were flogging it at a loss. Well, we did express our amazement at the time when we passed on details of this outrageously big-hearted offer. Congratulations to all those readers who took them up on the deal while it lasted. They are currently saying that there might be a slight delay with fulfilment of those early orders, but stick with it. They are nice people at amazon, and they will keep their promise to their customers. Otherwise, you’ll be faced with the full price (still only £15.99 and a steal at that). But hopefully you’ll eventually agree it was worth waiting for Anyway, to this week’s offering, which is being edited at 35,000 feet somewhere above the Med. Matt Huber, one-time chief press officer for BP, writes about his experience with some of Fleet Street’s finest. Don Walker recalls fond memories of Ken Smiley who died last week, aged 89. Once described as Ireland's finest jazz trumpeter, he moved to London from the Belfast Telegraph and worked at one time in New York. All that, before he discovered Millionaire Bingo. Dominic Ponsford, editor of Press Gazette – in a timely reminder to everybody out there that the mag is still running – invites Ranters to suggest what were the best scoops of our generation. Colin Dunne gets to see his future. And it isn’t with the All human life A flack among the hacks By Matt Huber In the early 1970s, becoming an oil company spokesman – or ‘flack’ as one seasoned journalist labelled me on joining the BP press office – seemed akin to being posted to PearlHarbour in the summer of 1941. Because back then, like eternal serenity in Hawaii, oil was taken for granted. At around two dollars a barrel, the bulk price hadn’t gone up substantially since the war 30 years before. To the press, the oil industry meant periodic stories about petrol prices, or motor racing, or good-for-expenses mishaps such as the TorreyCanyon oil spill. North Sea oil industry was in its infancy, as indeed was the world of corporate public relations itself. Oil company PR chiefs tended to be urbane gents drawn from minor European aristocracy, military officers who’d had a Good War, or louche publicity managers to fashionable hotel groups. Their universal acceptance was that the best defence is a good lunch and they trained their subordinates accordingly. So I duly practised ‘How about lunch sometime?’ in the bathroom mirror and tried to understand the mechanistic relationship between crude oil and the price of petrol, should anyone outside the esoteric world of oil price bulletins be interested. Mostly they weren’t – until October 1973, the moment when the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur war, along with surging OPEC price militancy, changed the oil industry for ever. From that point, the British press focused relentlessly on the oil industry generally, on oil companies in particular and, it must be said, on BP especially, in view of the ‘British’ angle attaching to its name (over half the company’s shares at that time were held by the UK government). We press officers were suddenly in the middle – having to persuade a congenitally discreet company to open up about its operations on the one hand, on the other trying to help the press understand where and how Britain was getting its oil and, crucially, when the country would be rescued by the coming ‘bonanza’ of the North Sea. The trick was to keep one step ahead in terms of knowledge and information, to play one’s part in educating the public, through the media, about the hitherto little-known business of petroleum. Lunch may have come into it but I don’t remember any. During the hectic early days of the Yom Kippur War I took a call from Reuters’ newsdesk. They had photos from an Egyptian airfield proving that BP was involved in sending medical supplies to the Arab side. Crikey – that wouldn’t do anything for our lubricant sales in Tel Aviv. BP, they said, would have until six that evening to explain itself. We eventually got an embarrassed Reuters to admit that somebody had confused BP with the ‘BP’ for ‘British Pharmacopeia’ on British boxes of drugs bound for the front line. (I hold this false alarm as dear as the occasion the BP Pension Fund warned about some possible local media interest. The fund had invested in a new shopping centre in a Midlands city, the formal opening of which had been held that afternoon. The ribbon-cutting outside a new supermarket had been carried out by the city’s lady mayor, who’d proceeded to make a ceremonial tour of the store along with various local dignitaries including, I recall, the chief constable. On leaving the premises, the mayor had tripped and measured her length on the pavement, spilling from her voluminous coat packets of bacon and dried soup and sachets of shampoo; she’d taken the opportunity on the way round to do a little shoplifting. In the event we had no press calls and when I asked the pension fund why, they said: ‘Apparently she’s done it before, so the papers there don’t bother.’) Oil and energy journalism generally came of age in that period, as Heath announced the three-day week (famously leading one City gent to say he wasn’t going to work an extra day just for the government).  After the economic gloom of the remainder of the 1970s, North Sea oil did ride to the rescue. By then, troops of journalists – general reporters as well as oil correspondents – had been flown out to the North Sea and, in BP’s case, enjoying a double exploration bonanza, to the new oilfields of Alaska (where in pursuance of the public’s right to know, John Jones of the battled John Kay of the Sun over an Anchorage bar pool table). By then Britain’s media had the specialist writers that the critical subject of oil and energy warranted – Adrian Hamilton and Ray Dafter at the Financial Times; Roger Vielvoye and Peter Hill at the Times; Roly Gribben at the ; Peter Hillmore at the Guardian (which in its enthusiasm of the period for punning christened Ireland ‘the Emerald Oil’). And north of the border, Frank Frazer of the Scotsman and Dick Mutch of the Aberdeen Press & Journal That was the heavy end of the business; the tabloids too wanted to feature Britain’s ‘Black Gold’. It fell to the venerable motoring correspondent Pat Mennem aboard a pitching, Scotch-glass wobbling observation ship out in sea area Forties, memorably to call North Sea oil ‘a panacea for all Britain’s economic ills’. Colin Dunne was in there somewhere, but that possibly is another story. The fact is that the spotlight switched on that autumn of 1973 and directed onto oil companies like BP, including into this particular flack’s shaving mirror, has never gone off.  Nothing beyond our Ken By Donald Walker On one memorable Thursday evening Ken Smiley saved my sanity. Of course, he had no idea he was providing such a palliative service – as far as he was concerned, he had just turned up for a shift. In the late 1970s the was still in the days of paper (lots of it) and pencil.  It seems as far off now as when Britannia ruled the waves in wooden ships, but my scars are still as vivid as ever: sometimes, when rain’s on the way, they itch. There was no hiding the work that had to be done behind glassy screens and a series of hits on silicone– there the stuff sat right in front of you: hard copy that was unrelenting and vast forests of other paper. Schemes, copies of schemes, sketches, artwork, schedule sheets, notes from editors and writers and, of course, copy, copy and more copy from all and for all and sundry: Manchester, the lawyer, the editor, the deputy editor, the features editor, the deputy... and so on down a never-ending spiral. Great waves of it crashed in front of me like a Cornish surfers’ paradise – and, let’s be clear, the sea was angry that day, my friends, and I was without a surfboard. Thursdays were hell day in Features. It was the day the overnight copy was prepared for the Saturday edition and that meant television  I’ll say it again: TELEVISION! The great god TV. Newspapers had long ago given up trying to ignore or malign the beast and had joined the great viewing public with abandon. We even checked the TV listings on the desk in those days and then there were previews, star interviews, your views, and even late-night reviews.  Reviews of the night’s televiewing actually kept the Features late sub out of the pub as he had to supervise deadlined stuff from writers like Mary Malone, Ken Estaugh and the great Bill Marshall among many others. That Thursday, I had been thrown hugger-mugger into the foaming crucible when I turned up for work.  I had rejoined Features as deputy chief sub on the previous Monday and it may be seen  as a bit spiteful to throw the new boy into this insanity without a torch, a gun and a big hat... but, hey, if you can’t take a joke... Paddy O’Gara slid up to my desk looking for trouble, or perhaps something to sketch out before he went back to the Stab and nearly tripped over. ‘What the hell’s all this?’ he said looking down at his feet. Copy.  Piles of it. There was so much stuff that I had dumped wads of it on the floor. I had no idea what to do with it all. Worse, I was beginning to suspect that I was going to have to sub it myself. The intelligent, reasonably sober staff were all heavily preoccupied with the edition. I appeared to have the services of but one casual whom I didn’t like the look of at all. He wasn’t actually drooling but his eyes had certainly gone and he was mumbling to himself. I found myself hoping to corner some of the edition staff before they left but they were up to my little game. If I showed even the faintest interest in them, they’d growl; ‘I’ve finished my fucking shift.’  Translate as: ‘I’m going to get pissed.’ It was getting late. No schemes were done. Desperately, I picked up a TV writer’s copy and started reading. It was by Patricia Smiley. That was when I decided the only way out was to go insane.  I saw myself being led away gibbering by strong but kindly nurses with colleagues nodding sympathetically at my departure. Then someone said: ‘Ah, here’s the cavalry.’ Around the corner came three bright-eyed beings who made straight for me. Nick Kent, Geoff Stimson and the late, great Ken Smiley. They’d just finished a double on Reveille ‘Errrr? Wha’...?’ I said eloquently. ‘Right, let’s get this crap shifted,’ said Nick. ‘Yew must be the new boi,’ said Ken, not cracking a smile. ‘Give me some o’ that shite.’ And so the ending to a nightmare. Soon I had schemes in hand, well-subbed copy to revise and even the original casual showed signs of life and was top and tailing TV letters. Ken was a suited, moustachioed little sergeant-major of a man who didn’t suffer fools gladly. He had a strong head for drink, a built-in bullshit-detector and far too cynical a view of the newspaper business to let it get him down or to make him too euphoric about putting his nut above the parapet. I knew he had had a poor experience of being an executive for the African publishing wing and had returned wiser but not wealthier for the experience. But, being Ken, he was happy to do casual shifts on Reveille or anywhere else as long as he could play jazz, golf and have a glass in a bar surrounded by hacks. He was a leading figure in the group I had a great deal of respect for: veterans who would work hard, drink hard and had no divo-like qualms about subbing the stars or getting the bingo page into shape. The other members of the team who saved me that Thursday (and many other Thursdays), Nick and Geoff, went on to greater things but Ken, demonstrating his willingness to put in a day’s hard shovelling, moved only as far as the promotions department and eventually became the bingo numbers maestro.  As far as I was concerned, getting an intelligent life-form to provide this service was worth five supersubs. There was far more to it than met the eye – the damn things had to be checked, re-checked and as safe as possible. Get a number wrong and you’d be climbing over irate readers to get to your desk the next day. Ken ‘retired’ in the late 1980s to continue providing the same regular service from home in Eastbourne  ‘Don, this is the life,’ he told me over the phone, ‘playing golf, sunshine and a good drink. What else is there?’ Well, there was jazz in all its forms. He and I attended one of Count Basie’s last appearances at the Festival Hall. A superb evening that also featured Oscar Petersen. I remember Ken and I stood in the Hole In The Wall pub after the concert sipping pints in a daze at the brilliance of the stars who had pierced the night. Ken was a good trumpet player and gigged with the Fleet Street band around Drury Lane and various parties. He and I were admirers of Harry James, especially the early radio work with the great Jimmy Durante. ‘I was once persuaded to play my horn in the office,’ Ken told me. ‘I was going to a gig in the evening and I’d brought the trumpet; it was spotted by someone who said: ‘Give us a tune then, Ken.’ ‘I just pulled it out and gave them 32 bars of something, perhaps a blues, I can’t remember. D’you know, the place went quiet when I played and at the end everyone burst into applause. It was madness, Don, wonderful madness!’ Well, as Pat Doncaster wrote on Louis Armstrong’s death, there’s a new boy in Heaven today, and I expect the choir invisible is getting one hell of a kick out of his riffs. Hold the front page By Dominic Ponsford What were the best British journalism scoops ever? For the July edition of Press Gazette we are attempting to draw up a list of 50 of the best British journalism scoops of all time - with a focus being on the modern era. The ’s recent expenses revelations may well figure in our final list. Other early nominations have included The Times scoop over the conquest of Everest and John Simpson’s report on the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon This will be the first in a series of new top 50s and top 100s we are planning over the next few months which are intended to celebrate the best of British journalism in these difficult economic times. We want to highlight the great stories which remind us why we became journalists in the first place. If you would like to nominate your favourite scoops please: List up to five stories in order of preference - with any background detail you can remember, such as the year, the journalist involved, why it was such a good story. Include your name and title. Can you put the word ‘scoop’ in the subject field of your email. If you could reply to this within the next day or so that would be great. The deadline to get your nomination in is the end of this week. Press Gazette will award points to each scoop according to the votes cast and announce the winners in the July edition of the magazine. # Stars in their eyes By Colin Dunne Around the mid-seventies in Fleet Street – and here I mean the state-of-mind as well as the geographical location – there was one question that was on everybody’s lips. ‘So what are you then?’ After the briefest of initial courtesies, this was the first question to put to a stranger. When I moved down to , it happened to me, and I was lost for an answer. I tried several. ‘Yorkshire’ I tried, to smirks of pity. ‘A reporter’ raised only mutters of ‘That’s your opinion.’  And when I tried a fuller response – ‘A passable off-spin bowler and useful middle-order batsman’ – it was clear to everyone, even me, that whatever this language was, I didn’t speak it. The correct answer was Capricorn, or Libra, or Pisces, or any of those other star signs. I don’t know what it was like among normal people, because at that time I didn’t know any normal people, but among the fringe fashion of media folk, astrology took up about 90pc of their conversation. Journalists who were fully qualified cynics and sceptics, people who had been known to question the existence of Rupert Murdoch, let alone God, subscribed unwaveringly to this weird new religion. Anyone with an eye for irony would appreciate a situation where hacks who actually tried quite hard – well, hardish – to resist the temptation to jazz up the quotes and spruce up the facts actually chose to believe the only section of the paper that was total prefabricated bunkum. I say everyone, but that isn’t quite true. All the women journalists believed it, of course, but their grip on reality was always a bit shaky. Designers, sipping their cab sauv, certainly did. Gays kept their astrology charts alongside the picture of Judy Garland in their bags. Anyone connected with any form of show-business, from pop to Corrie, could tell you the star signs of every member of the Grateful Dead or Albert Tatlock (who soon afterwards joined the Dead: whether he was Grateful or not, I couldn’t say). And for anyone else who wished to be seen as in touch with the mood of the moment, it was pretty much imperative. That only left about half-a-dozen unreconstituted old newsmen, many of them openly heterosexual (or at least up to the fourth pint), forming a sullen knot in the corner of the Stab to talk about the eternal verities: football and women with big tits. They spoke in the raw accents of Tyneside and BelfastGlasgow long before it had become fashionable: these days they’d be television presenters. At six o’clock, when the hacks had sufficiently recovered from lunch, they flowed from their offices and into the bars, where they would breathlessly compare their astrological characters. ‘Oh, you’re a typical Libra, you’re a real tart ’  Or ‘Normally I don’t get on with Aquarians but somehow you’re different.’ It was a pain in the Aries, I can tell you. And if Patric Walker, the astrologist, should choose to come and move among us, as he sometimes did, then it was like a visit from the gods. He only had to walk through into a room packed with Ebbetts and Hopkirks and Fawkes to set off a chain of orgasms rattling round the room like minor earth tremors. ‘I’ve been so depressed, darling, is it because Juno’s in the ascendant?’ Women loved him.  He loved them (although, you understand, not in that way), and would fearlessly advise them on the type of eye-liner he personally favoured. He was a clever chap. One night in Angelo’s – we had to go fairly early while we could still pronounce Albemarle Street – someone cunningly placed me, a known unbeliever, across the table from Patric so I would get the full blast of his considerable charm. He immediately established common ground. He was from Yorkshire too. Whitby.  At the age of 16, he’d declared to his GP that he was homosexual.  Still making notes from the last patient, and without even looking up, the doctor replied: ‘You can’t be – it’s against the law.’ It was Yorkshire for heaven’s sake – what other sort of response did he expect?  But, no matter, it was enough to persuade Patric to move to . In the course of the journey, the k fell off the end of his name, thus preparing him for the world of glamour. Indeed, he shared an apartment with an ancient but distinguished theatrical couple, Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge in Mayfair.  At one time he was stepping out with a young American actor.  ‘Richard Chamberlain – and whatever became of him, darlings?’ Patric would demand. Everyone knew that Chamberlain later became television’s Dr Kildare. One evening he came to the Stab with a young Russian ballet dancer he had chanced upon. Against all the odds, the man was straight. He pushed him through the door straight into the middle of Paula James, Jill Evans and Lesley Ebbets. ‘One for you girls,’ he said, trying gamely to mask his disappointment. This evening in Angelo’s could only end one way. ‘So,’ he asked, as he faced me across the table, ‘what are you?’ With some diplomacy, I told him that much as I admired the way he had made a highly successful career out of astrology, and while I did not for one moment question his qualifications or his sincerity, and although I could see that half of London society hung on his every horoscopic word, without wishing to cause any offence, and with all respect, I would rather not answer his question because I knew it was, without exception, a load of old tosh.  He smiled. Patted my hand. Sipped his wine. And said: ‘Oh I know, I know.  You see, you’re just like me. We Scorpios are such dreadful sceptics, aren’t we?’ For a moment there, I felt like a Stradivarius – one that had just been played by a maestro. My dropped jaw may have given me away. Afterwards, talking to the woman writer who’d invited me, I was obliged to concede that since my birthday did fall mid-November, he was certainly a very good guesser. ‘Guess?’ she said. ‘He rang me last night to ask when your birthday was. He always does.’ He knew everyone, was wonderfully amusing company, and a pretty nifty businessman. He became astrologer to the world, or something very similar, made lots of dosh from his astrological tosh, and went to live on Mykonos. He did not go there, so far as I know, to support the local rugby team. There were quite a number of flamboyant gays in newspapers.  Jack Tinker, the Mail theatre critic, could assemble an audience of fans within seconds. Gays brought wit and glitter to Fleet Street bars that were not always overstocked with either. Two of the nicest blokes in Fleet Street were gays who insisted on posing as straight.  If they happened to meet in the same bar, they’d stand at opposite ends. They lived near each other, but no matter how scarce taxis were, they never shared.  We never knew why they were so nervous about it. Surely they can’t have worried what we thought. The general level of morality was about that of Gomorrah on pay-day, and most hacks couldn’t care if you had sexual intercourse with field voles. Several probably did.   Every day was party day, and there were plenty of heterosexuals who still practised their strange antique skills to join in. We moved around in tribes. In the early evening, the decanted into the Stab, the Express into the Bell, the Telegraph into the King and Keys, the Sun into the Tipperary, and the Mail into the Witness Box and the Harrow. Round about 7 30pm, raiding parties would be formed which would then conduct forays into enemy territory. There were few more unnerving sights than a team of Sun commandos, led by fearless Fergus Cashin, bursting into the Mail pub, or Jim Allen spearheading a Telegraph attack on the Bell.  When the ’s John Penrose made a daring one-man incursion into the King and Keys, he toppled while entangled in the footrest and broke his leg. Did he fall or was he pushed? Only Tony Conyers would know. It was a moveable feast. By the time you got to clubs like Vagabonds or Scribes, the swirling eddies of hacks had mingled and merged, invariably ending with one of life’s two most significant collisions: a fight or sex, and sometimes it wasn’t easy to tell the difference. Even then, gender equality was firmly established. For every Scottish sports writer looking for a fight, there was also a lady hack scouring the bars for a take-away night-mate. Who was that statuesque blonde who used to reward her pick-ups with a steak supper? And some didn’t even insist on a bed. There was a tall, moonie-eyed young hackette in the Stab who only required an escort as far as the office garage and a back-seat. At least you could be back in the bar before your beer had gone flat. Party time meant party tricks. Don Walker, feature writer, could recite a cheeky-chappie rhyme called It’s a Funny Old World That We live In – But the World’s Not Entirely to Blame that he’d stolen from Roy Harris and John Garton, features sub, could dampen his own eyes, if no-one else’s with: I Live in Trafalgar Square – Four Lions to Guard Me. The most popular performance was Jill Evans who would stand up, fingers locked, swaying like a little girl at the school concert party, and sing in a terrible cracked soprano voice Vio-late me in the vio-let time In the vilest possible way. Rape me and ravish me, cruelly savage me, I will never say Nay. Though I may scream for mercy, ignore every breath. All I require is a fate worse than death. So vio-late me in the vio-let time In the vilest way that you know. Where she got the song, we did not know.  Some said it was an old Beatrice Lilly number.  It certainly wasn’t from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. All in all, it was a seductive way of life in every sense of the word. Days slipped by. Then weeks, months, years, and with them dozens of careers, not to mention livers and marriages. Just a little more work, say one job a month, and I might have stayed. But I had neither the stamina nor the conscience for a full-time career in hedonism. I suppose my grousing and grumbling must have reached such a pitch that it was detected on the higher floors of Holborn, and Sydney Jacobson, a director who later became lordly, called me in. A good-hearted man, he was genuinely concerned. He’d heard I was unhappy. He’d spoken to Bob Edwards on the Sunday Mirror.  Would I be happy on a smaller team perhaps? Well, I would, except for one thing. The Sunday Mirror already had a Colin.  And Colin Wills was one of those journalists who could do anything from hard news to funny features and do them brilliantly. I didn’t want to be in the same county as Colin Wills, let alone the same office. In the downstairs restaurant of the Peter Evans bar, over an Arnold Bennett Omelette (or was it an H. G. Wells hot-dog), a slim, dark-eyed lovely with long hair propositioned me. Anthea Disney, features editor of the Mail, offered me a job there. I was sorely tempted because the Mail, then as now, was the writers’ paper. But, as she explained it, it wouldn’t be so very different. On the , you wrote very little, and some of it was used. On the Mail, you wrote lots and lots, and very little of it was used.  It didn’t seem much of an improvement. I could always leave. Walk out on the Mirror? The idea was beyond imagination. Lots of money, no work, fun galore, why would anyone clamour to escape from paradise? At that time I knew only one man who had voluntarily done so.  Don Coolican had walked out of paradise, but then walked straight into heaven, or, as it was more formally known, the .  Even so, I knew that I couldn’t carry on doing nothing for the rest of my life, which, at this rate, would be about a fortnight. I went over to the Stab.  I drank three pints of bitter. I went to see Mike Molloy, the editor. I told him I was leaving. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it in writing,’ he said, in a way that suggested he’d had this conversation before. It took some writing, that letter.  Not so much because my resolve was wavering more because it was so long since I’d written anything I couldn’t remember where I’d put my quill. The popular view was that I had lost my mind. Why on earth would anyone wish to slip away from the warm embrace of  Big Momma Mirror? It made me enemies too. Somehow my leaving was taken as a criticism of those who stayed, which was not the intention at all. Molloy was miffed, for which I was sorry, because he was a fine editor and a good bloke.  Of course, it made not the slightest difference to the Mirror.  My place on the ramparts was taken by Bryan Rimmer who, without a second’s hesitation, took on all my many responsibilities and duties, with complete success. Thanks to Bryan, no bar staff had to face redundancy and the typewriter maintained its monastic silence. The next week, I woke up to a day with no work. As usual.  But this time there was no salary and no expenses and I had to use my own telephone for calls to Australia.  It was a bit like being orphaned.  ‘Typically Scorpio,’ said my fellow Yorkshireman. I’d done it.  I’d left.  All the years I’d spent trekking around Britain to get here and now I’d walked out. Me and the Mirror, over.  And I remembered what Matt Coady had told me on the day I moved down from Manchester.  ‘In newspapers, Colin, nothing ever lasts.’ Including, apparently, me. LETTERS Uphill Gardner From John Garton: Good one [Ranters, last week]. I’ll buy it soon. BUT...you might want to change Errol Gardner to Erroll Garner. From Joe Mullins: A brilliant taster...just one thing, the jazz pianist is Garner, not Gardner. Thanks to you both. It was corrected after the Transatlantic edition. – Ed. From Stuart White: I’d take issue with one part of the blurb on the Liberace book (Gentlemen Ranters5th June) And that’s the line referring to the Liberace phenomenon occurring ‘when...the Beatles were at the height of their fame.’  Elvis yes, The Beatles no. The Beatles were not even a band in 1956 when Liberace visited Britain, or a professional one in 1959 when the trial took place.  They made their first record, Love me Do in 1962...and might only have been considered to be ‘at the height of their fame’ in about 1964.  Whatever competition Liberace had in Elvis - he didn’t have The Beatles to contend with. Yes, but the copy (read it again) actually refers to ‘three decades’. Starting with the libel (1956), or the trial (1959), they would be the 50s, 60s, and 70s. During this period The Beatles and Elvis were at the height of their popularity. Not much doubt about that, I suspect. According to the Guinness Book of Records, during those three decades Liberace was the world’s highest-paid entertainer. It surprised me. – Ed. From Paddy O’Gara: When I read the [June 29] rant from John Dodd on why is Keith Waterhouse not a knight, it reminded me of some thing Francis Bacon once said. Someone – maybe Jeff Bernard, I can’t recall – asked him if he would accept a knighthood, if offered. ‘Oh, no, dear. Far too aging.’ said Francis. And was true to his word. From Sue Bullivant: It was my privilege to witness Charles Lyte perform the egg trick [Ranters, June 29], the only time I ever saw it done.  It was a Christmas lunch in the Bottlescrue, about 1989. Alan Shillum was there, I think.  My heart stands still even now at the thought of the tension while waiting for the shoe bit (I think there was a bit with a shoe?  And a glass?)  I didn’t know Charles very well but he was a charming gent – the only blot on his reputation is that I happen to know Jean Baddeley really liked him.

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• 11 Jun 2009 10:10

  – an accomplished pianist who numbered Erroll Garner among his close friends – tested to ensure that it was in tune, and they reported to features editor Colin Reed that they had chosen the ideal spot and he should send a photographer there to meet them. To ensure exclusivity for their story, they didn’t tell the pub management what they were planning.

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• 05 Jun 2009 06:25

  ‘Bizarre and hilarious Nothing shorter than a paperback could achieve a balanced report of the brilliance of the advocacy and summing-up.’ – Hugh Cudlipp in British Journalism Review ‘His [Gilbert BeyfusQC’s] cross-examinations and brilliant closing speech are the highlights of Revel Barker’s account and had me barking with laughter.’ – Michael Cross in Issue #98 June 5, 2009 No apologies (we don’t normally do apologies anyway) for concentrating this week on publication of the new book, Crying All The Way To The Bank. It will be published on Monday. In any case, we are travelling and airlines, in these price-cut days, no longer accept the laptop as a necessary tool when moving about. Like the handbag or the camera, if it doesn’t all fit into one piece of hand baggage it has to go into the hold. Then not only do you risk getting it nicked by the handlers, it costs an additional 15 quid a kilo Such is progress. But I digress. Back to the plot. On other pages The trial of the century Fleet Street’s finest The reporters Liberace on the Mirror pub-crawl The verdict Fifty years ago In her excellent foreword to Crying All The Way To The Bank – Liberace v the Daily Mirror and Cassandra, Vera Baird QC, the Solicitor-General, describes it as ‘the story of a fabulous historic court battle, from a different age.’ It was the age when lawyers and journalists cohabited in a London village that stretched from Gray’s Inn to the Temple and from the Law Courts to Ludgate Circus, and stood shoulder to shoulder in the aptly named Wig & Pen Club, or in El Vino when the whole area was known as Fleet Street – as distinct from nowadays when ‘Fleet Street’ refers only to the thoroughfare that bisects it. It was, importantly in this context, an age when homosexuality was illegal although not actually defined in law (it had to be created as a crime, solely in order to be decriminalised for consenting adults in private, with harsher penalties for public acts). It was the age when the highest paid entertainer in the world for three decades would be a piano-player called Liberace – and this was at the time when Elvis and The Beatles were at the height of their fame. It was an age when people who crossed the Atlantic did so by ship. It was, in fact, exactly 50 years ago. Television was still in its infancy and people relied for their news – and pictures – on the morning papers (and, in most big cities, on a choice between two evenings). The , largest daily sale in the western world, sold 4.5million and rising, with fierce competition from ‘the world’s greatest newspaper’, the Daily Express Bill Connor, writing his Cassandra column five days a week in the , was syndicated world-wide and was possibly the highest-paid journalist in The Street, These elements had all come together three years earlier when Liberace stepped off the Queen Mary in preparation for concerts in the provinces and Sunday Night at the London Palladium for ITV, and Connor was appalled by the attention this visit created, and sickened, he would say, by the pianist’s televised performances. His column the following morning is still counted as a classic – even if it isn’t remembered very accurately by many. The pull-quote in the box at the top was considered the most offensive: He is the summit of sex – the pinnacle of Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Everything that He, She and It can ever want. Liberace sued the paper and Cassandra on the basis that with those words they were clearly implying he was homosexual, which he vehemently denied, and Cassandra equally vehemently denied that he was making such an accusation. So much importance was attributed to the words in the box that the rest of the column was virtually overlooked. For most readers that was the more memorable bit: this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother-love But that was only part of it. It went on: He reeks with emetic language that can only make grown men long for a quiet corner, an aspidistra, a handkerchief and the old heave-ho. And then: Without doubt he is the biggest sentimental vomit of all time. Slobbering over his mother, winking at his brother, and counting the cash at every second, this superb piece of calculating candy-floss Just reading those words in a copy of the paper thoughtfully provided in her suite by the management of the Savoy Hotel seriously damaged his mother’s health, Liberace told the court. And when he appeared on stage at Sheffield a few days later he believed he heard a member of the audience shout something like ‘Go home, fairy!’ It was claimed that this must have been a consequence of reading the Cassandra column – although the evidence showed it was a bit unlikely because the only unruly element in the audience that night was composed of local students, and apparently nobody at Sheffield read the Photo: Gordon Amory The trial of the century Largely because of Liberace’s pre-booked schedule of TV and concert performances, it took nearly three years to get the case to court. Eventually – in June 1959 – he found time to fit in daytime appearances in the Royal Courts of Justice while playing at theatres, on Sunday Night at the London Palladium again, and at a Royal Command performance in the evenings. Liberace’s English solicitor was David Jacobs, ‘solicitor to the stars’, whose clients included Lord Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Zsa Zsa Gabor and later Brian Epstein and The Beatles. Jacobs (who drove a two-tone pink Bentley) had briefed the top libel man of the day, Gilbert Beyfus QC, who was assisted by Helenus ‘Buster’ Milmo, a former MI6 interrogator. and Cassandra were represented by Gerald Gardiner QC, who would later be a Labour Lord Chancellor, with Neville Faulks as his junior. Beyfus, 74 years old and suffering from terminal cancer, was looking at the last case of his exceptional career. He was deaf in one ear and had an apparently uncontrollable twitch in one eye, causing him to wink disconcertingly at witnesses. ‘It was,’ said Cassandra, ‘a real how’s-yer-father wink.’ When introduced to Beyfus one of Liberace’s team told Jacobs: ‘We wanted the best lawyer in London – not the oldest.’ But Beyfus was not known for nothing as The Old Fox. His cross-examination of Cassandra is considered by lawyers to be masterly, and has been compared with Edward Carson’s confrontation with Oscar Wilde – also on the basis of the imputing of homosexuality – in 1895 (when Beyfus was ten years old). The lawyer described Cassandra as ‘a literary assassin who dips his pen in vitriol, hired by this sensational newspaper to murder reputations and hand out sensational articles on which its circulation is built.’ ‘as vicious and violent a writer as has ever been in the profession of journalism in this city of .’ Small wonder, then, that the trial played every day for a week to a packed house. Mounted police were present to control the crowds – not only fans of Liberace and supporters of Cassandra, but also the legal groupies who followed every case in which Beyfus appeared – and cars collided in the Strand as their drivers rubber-necked to see the visiting players. Witnesses included the comedian Bob Monkhouse, actress Cicely Courtneidge, cabaret artistes Jimmy Thompson and Helene Cordet, and musicians George Melachrino and Mantovani. The ran it over three pages every day; the Daily Telegraph gave it six full broadsheet columns. ‘Even their resources of space will be strained,’ Hugh Cudlipp commented later in British Journalism Review, ‘if they propose to deal more generously with the Second Coming.’ Time magazine dubbed the trial The Liberace Show. It wasn’t only the biggest libel trial anybody had ever seen: it was the most expensive. It was also something of a learning curve for Fleet Street. Fleet Street’s finest In normal circumstances the only people who could be bothered to compare and contrast corresponding newspaper reports on a single story are fellow journalists and their bosses – and the bosses don’t care too much so long as no vital points are missed and the copy produces a good read. So the dozen or so reporters who flew out to Cherbourg to hitch a ride on the last leg of Liberace’s transatlantic voyage, to attend his press conference on board and sail back with him to the flower-strewn quay at Southampton, could never have imagined that their prose would be forensically dissected, paragraph by paragraph and sometimes word by word in the High Court. Liberace didn’t remember talking about his tax affairs on the ship. In fact he denied having done so because he said he didn’t know how much he paid. But everybody had a note that he had referred to pocketing only nine cents from every dollar he earned, so he eventually conceded that he must have mentioned it. So far, so good, and a point in Fleet Street’s favour. The problem then was why and when he’d said it. Stan Bonnett (then on the ) had him talking of the trials of earning a million dollars a year: ‘You see,’ he said, parting his lips around his milk white almost-too-perfect teeth, ‘I get only nine cents out of every dollar I make.’ Jack Frost, shipping correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, reported that Liberace had been talking about his suit: ‘It cost me $400, but to be able to pay that I have to earn $4,000. I earn about a million a year and could earn more if I tried harder; but I only manage to keep nine cents out of each dollar I earn.’ Charles Stuart Reid of the News Chronicle quoted the pianist as saying that he grossed from $10,000 to $60,000 a concert, adding: ‘Sounds a lot, I know, but how much do you think I keep from every dollar I earn? Not more than nine cents.’ Even in the days when most people had access to more than one daily paper, it probably passed unnoticed by the readers, and it surely wouldn’t have bothered even an editor very much because the facts were there, in the piece. And what did it matter, anyway, whether it came up in a discussion about his annual earnings, his clothes, or his fees for concerts? But it was fair game to Liberace’s QC because Cassandra had lifted the information from one of them (in fact it was from the Telegraph) to pad out the attack on his client. And the discrepancy exposed the journalists – potentially all of them – as unreliable and inaccurate in their reports. In short, not the sort of witnesses the jury could rely on. The lesson immediately learnt from this embarrassing experience was that thereafter, whenever they worked as a pack, reporters would gather before filing copy and agree what they were going to say had been said to them. Oh and be sure to include the PA man, because subs tended to follow the agency if there was any doubt, so that in the morning everybody’s facts would be the same, even if they were wrong. And sod the staff man. Not even Donald Zec escaped criticism. He’d been on the liner and had filed a line about somebody suggesting that Liberace pose for a photo between his brother and his mother so that he could be kissed on each cheek. Only it hadn’t happened. It was Mom who was invited to sit between Liberace and brother George, and be kissed from either side. A mistake that probably anybody could make, filing hurriedly over the ship-to-shore straight from the notebook on deadline (the copy was timed at 10.29pm), and the picture, in any case, showed the truth of the matter. But another inaccuracy. There was a lot of it flying around Court Number Four that week. Worse was a posed picture, said by a staff photographer to be a snatch, purporting to show tourists ‘gloating’ over the plight of prisoners working outside Dartmoor jail. It was in no way related to Liberace but Cassandra had written the caption about gloating. It was a total invention. The photographer was fired. But there was another example of inaccuracy Could you trust a columnist who believed anything he was told by a snapper? Zec came under more fire for a feature about visiting the star at his Hollywood home and finding it ‘a relief to see all his teeth were white, and not blacked alternately (like the pianos)’ because almost everything in the house, from ashtrays to bed headboard to the swimming pool was designed like a grand piano or a keyboard. When he described stubbing out his cigarette on F-sharp, he was referring to an ashtray, not to one of the two grand pianos in the house. He needed to explain that. Zec, typically, had written a gentle piss-take, but had ended kindly with the words: ‘I like him.’ When Gerald Gardiner read out the feature he was taken to task by Beyfus because he had missed out the last cross-head. Gardiner said ok, perhaps he should read them all: ‘The first is Now It’s Worse the second is The Smile Faded; the third is The End; the fourth is It’s Ghastly and the fifth is I Like Him.’ The Old Fox should have known better. The reporters Among the reporters called by the defence were Roy Perrett from the Manchester Guardian and Ken Tossell from the Daily Mirror northern office, who had both attended Liberace’s concert at Belle Vue. Alan Cassell, a Sheffield freelance, had covered the performance in the City Hall, as had George William Edwards, by this time working for Odhams (no connection in those days with the ) but at the time of the concert he’d covered it for the Sheffield Star. Daily Express man John Lambert had been at the press conference on the Queen Mary and denied that he was the sort of reporter who would quote people directly as saying anything to which they had merely answered ‘yes’. Peter Stephens said you could smell the scent on Liberace on the airport runway in Paris, and even in an airport dispensary. But could a man wearing deodorant be said to be wearing ‘scent’ ? Among all the journalists who gave evidence, two stood out as remarkable, for quite different reasons. Dail Betty Ambler, a freelance journalist and pulp-fiction novelist, had been commissioned by The People to write an in-depth series on Liberace during his 1956 English concert tour, and somehow also – within a few days of the issuing of the writ – had been asked to contribute an interview with Cassandra for Picture Post about ‘famous people and their cats’. Even the judge thought that was a remarkable coincidence especially after she told the court she had discussed the pending case at the Connor home and been told by him that they had no defence and would lose the case; and when another witness (Pat Doncaster of the Daily Mirror) said that he had actually heard Miss Ambler suggest to Liberace that he should sue. It did not help her credibility much when she said she could not remember whether her publisher had been sued for obscenity on the basis of one of her novels. By contrast reporter Murray Sayle – long before he became a celebrated and award-winner man – told the court how he had helped an unfortunate colleague and unexpectedly interviewed Liberace in ParisSayle had been a reporter on The People; the colleague – from a competing newspaper – had been on his way to the interview but was turned back at the airport because his passport had recently expired. Sayle volunteered to do the job for him, and telephoned a report back to the rival paper for him, then three years later found himself being criticised in court because the article appeared under a name other than his own, and because he had not protested about material being added to it in the rival office. He touched on this (to him) surreal experience in his acclaimed book about pop journalism, A Crooked Sixpence: it seemed to him that a man who opened his case by con­tending that a reporter’s by-line was a fraud on the public had departed far from the issue of truth or falsity and converted the hearing into a childish debate, with so many points for matter and so many for manner, pick your side out of the hat and to hell with the rules of argument ‘He doesn’t know much about newspapers, does he?’ he whispered to a colleague. ‘As much as you or I do,’ was the reply. Sayle explained afterwards that he had offered to help the guy from the rival paper because he ‘believed that what goes around, comes around.’ He said: ‘I’d like to think that, in similar circumstances, somebody would have done the same for me.’ Mmm Liberace on the Mirror pub-crawl During a visit to in July 1956, show-business writer Pat Doncaster had phoned Liberace about his planned visit to England and asked what he intended doing while he was there. (Yes even the lawyers thought it was a strange idea to trek all the way to California and then do an interview over the phone.) Liberace had told him that he hoped, among other things, to have the chance to see some old English pubs and Doncaster said the Daily Mirror would be happy to arrange that for him. On October 1, Doncaster sent a note round to the Savoy, reminding him about this: Some other newspapers, I fear, have a similar idea and I am therefore anxious to try to keep this exclusively to the Mirror – with your kind co-operation – because we have been planning this with some eagerness. I know that requests and calls on Mr Liberace must be overwhelming, but at the same time I would be grateful if we can discuss this feature as soon as possible. I can assure you that, if it is exclusive to us, it will be given the utmost prominence and display in the Daily Mirror - the paper with the greatest daily sale on earth. Miss Heppner [an agent] assured me on the phone today that ‘everything would be all right’. She asked me to ring her again ‘in a day or two’. Meantime, I would be pleased if you can give the matter your consideration and possibly suggest a tentative date. Best Wishes, Yours sincerely, Patrick Doncaster. And the job was set up. On October 6 two limos brought Liberace and his associates to a pub in the Borough, at the south end of LondonBridge It made a full-page feature – mainly due to the skill of Pat Doncaster and Tony Miles, the two Mirrormen assigned to it, but it hadn’t gone exactly as planned. Doncaster and Miles had driven (in those days you could do that) across the river to the south end of LondonBridge and to an area so seedy it would be rejected in future years as a potential location for the headquarters. They found a down-at-heel pub with a battered upright piano that Doncaster – an accomplished pianist who numbered Errol Gardner among his close friends – tested to ensure that it was in tune, and they reported to features editor Colin Reed that they had chosen the ideal spot and he should send a photographer there to meet them. To ensure exclusivity for their story, they didn’t tell the pub management what they were planning. Reed shared the information not only with the picture desk but also with his neighbours from Surrey who turned up in force to meet the American star. Never had the pub landlord had such a big sale of gins and tonics, with customers wearing blazers and cavalry twill trousers demanding a slice of lemon, and ice, in their drinks – and asking him where Liberace was. When the pianist and his entourage arrived, the minders took one look at the Hogarthian scene and beat a hasty retreat. They quickly relocated to The George, which at least had the distinction of being ’s only remaining galleried inn. In spite of the colourful story eventually woven around it, it was a quick in and out visit, lasting a matter of minutes – just long enough for Liberace to be photographed surrounded by loveable cockney characters. The question being asked in Fleet Street pubs when this came out in court was why, if Liberace was truthfully so upset about a story in the Daily Mirror, he was willing, ten days later, to go along with its journalists on a pub crawl. If he had been angry with the paper – if he seriously believed it had labelled him as a homosexual and damaged the health of his mother – he could have signalled this easily by offering the story to one of its rivals who, as Doncaster made clear in his letter, were vying for the same picture opportunity. Was it simply that he could not resist the chance of coverage in the paper with ‘the greatest daily sale on earth’? It was a question that hadn’t escaped the notice of the judge, Mr Justice Salmon, who told the jury: All I can tell you about damages is this. If a man is libelled he is entitled to some fair compensation from the jury for the libel. You have got to give him a sum which will show to the world that there is absolutely nothing in it. The defendants have said that of course, as far as the alleged imputation of homosexuality is concerned, it is rubbish; they did not intend it, never have, and do not for one moment suggest that it is true. If you come to consider damages you must not be niggardly – on the other hand you must not be extravagant. You have got to give this man, if you find in his favour, a sum which in your good judgment is fair and reasonable. The plaintiff says that this article caused him the greatest pain and shock and that, more especially, it upset him because it made his mother so ill that she nearly died and, indeed, ever since the article has been published and as a result of its publication the lady has been ill. You cannot give Mr Liberace any money because his mother is not well. The position in this respect you may think is somewhat curious. This gentleman, as I say, tells you that what really is affecting him almost more than anything about the article is the great injury to his mother’s health, the fact that it nearly killed her. Apparently the article was shown to the lady on September 26, the day on which it was published, and she was immediately struck down by illness as a result, and a physician was called. That is what you are told, and it is fair to say that there is not any evidence the other way. But on October 1st, about a week later, one of the Daily Mirror reporters who has been called before you, Mr Doncaster, wrote a letter to Mr Liberace’s manager, upon which Mr Liberace was consulted And Mr Liberace went with the Mirror. This is the paper which according to him he believed had accused him of being a homosexual and had struck his mother almost a death blow only a week before. I do not know what you think about it. He gives two excuses. He says, ‘Well, I promised to do this visit to the London public houses when I was in Hollywood, and I also find that people, although they may not like me at first, get to like me when they know me better.’ Ask yourself the question, if anyone had written something which you believed meant that you were a homosexual, and it had so upset your mother that she nearly died, would you within a week accept an invitation of this sort? Would you say, ‘I said I would, in Hollywood’, or would you say to them well, perhaps it is not for me to forecast what you might have said to them in those circumstances. The defendants say the excuse is nonsense. This is important on a question of damages, if the question ever arises, because the real reason for his going is to be found, so they say, in another paragraph in this letter, which reads thus: ‘I can assure you that, if it is exclusive to us, it will be given the utmost prominence and display in the Daily Mirror – the paper with the greatest daily sale on earth.’ They say, and it is for you to consider it, that such is Mr Liberace’s thirst for publicity that that is the thing which did the trick, and that he went because he wanted the publicity. Whatever his thirst for publicity is, say the defendants for your consideration, he cannot have been so terribly upset by that article as he would now have you believe, because, if he was, how on earth could he have gone? Well, there it is. It is a matter for you to consider. When and if it comes to a question of damages, you give him what in all the circumstances of the case you think would be fair to compensate him for this libel, if you think it is a libel. The verdict Privately, the judge thought that Liberace would lose his case. Beyfus thought he would win it. Gardiner was so lacking in confidence that he had recommended to Hugh Cudlipp that the defendants should settle, before the end. Well if you had been on the jury, would you have found in favour of Liberace or of Cassandra and the Mirror You’ll really need the book to consider all the evidence, as it was presented to the jury. ###         How to buy it   The recommended retail price for the book is £15.99 and it is available with free postage from amazon (click here). You can also order it on-line from Foyle’s and Blackwell’s, or in person from any decent bookseller. If you’re feeling really hard up you can even order it from your local library. In that case you’ll probably need to know that it is written by Revel Barker and the ISBN is 9780955823862. As regular readers know, we have other titles in our collection of old and new classic books about journalism. One of them is a collection of some of the best columns written by one of the defendants: Cassandra At His Finest And Funniest (with an introduction by Hugh Cudlipp). And only last week we published (more accurately, we re-published) Gordon Williams’ fine novel about life on a weekly paper, [See Roy Greenslade’s Media Guardian Blog.] At the end of last year we produced a new book by Liz Hodgkinson – Ladies Of The Street, about the part played by pioneering women journalists in making the great days as good as they were. (Click on the link to check whether you are in the index.) And there are more that will make excellent holiday reading; you can find out more by going to the Ranters’ books site:http://booksaboutjournalism.com/  Authors include Ian Skidmore, Vincent Mulchrone, Bill Connor (Cassandra), Anthony DelanoMurray Sayle

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• 28 May 2009 19:22

  If you’ve forgotten why you went into this silly, tacky, wonderful trade, Gordon Williams’ book will remind you. – Colin Dunne on The UpperPleasure Issue #97 May 29 2009 Letter from the editor: we offer a brilliant new (republished) novel for your summer entertainment. Colin Dunne reviews The Upper Pleasure Garden, by Gordon M Williams Phil Harrison heard reports of ‘gender issues’ in newsrooms, mostly related to drinkingand swearing. Thinking that couldn’t be right – not in Australia, anyway – he asked around There were probably gender issues at Woman’s Mirror too. But all was matey when the staff gathered for a reunion lunch last week, as Anthony Peagam reports. When Jeffrey Bernard appeared at Royal Ascot without a hat, somebody asked him: ‘But what will you raise, if you are introduced to the Queen?’ Well, said Jeff, there was always the question of his knighthood. John Dodd raises it now, on behalf of Jeff’s immortaliser, Keith Waterhouse. Maybe the reason Keith was never ennobled was because he nicked the Charles Lyte egg trick and presented it as his own. Paul Callan reveals the truth of it. And ventures where no reporter has trodden before, to the kitchen table of Mrs Florrie Capp. He mentioned it last week; it was an example of writing about nothing by interviewing a glass of red wine. happened to have the cutting in its archive Another Ranters, another book A double dose this week of Colin Dunne who reviews the latest addition to our list of classic books about journalism, written by journalists. Gordon Williams is a former writer who many of us might envy – not just because he had a happy career as a sports interviewer but because he wrote a novel in nine days and it became a best-seller and a movie. It was bought by Sam Pekinpah who turned it into the censor-challenging Straw Dogs, starring the delicious Susan George. Others of his books were taken up by Hollywood and then he co-wrote, with his pal Terry Venables, a successful TV series called Hazel This weekend’s new (re-) publication is about a young Scots reporter toiling on a south-coast weekly. A serial swordsman by night, in daylight he’s like an embryo Jimmy Nicholson – ‘spent more time on doorsteps than a milk-bottle’ – with a passion for the romance of the job and a talent for getting people to talk to him. His editor tells him he is ‘the cleverest dirt-digging dog-eared newshound rat I’ve ever known.’ Isn’t that something we’d all have liked to have been told? Perhaps some of us were. Anyway, Ranters who loved it in the early 70s (it was Gordon’s next book after Straw Dogs) recommended it for the collection. It was out-of-print. It isn’t now. The Upper Pleasure Garden is published this weekend at £9.99 and can be ordered with free delivery from amazon-uk by clicking on the title. Excellent summer reading, when summer comes. And, as you know, there are other books – published purely for your pleasure – at our Bookshop (click on it in the left hand column). My best anecdote – until I checked it You’ve probably heard the story about the writer Gordon Williams and his late-night telephone call from film director Sam Peckinpah. It went like this. Novel just published, no great reaction, Williams goes to bed in sombre mood. Awakened by phone call. ‘This is Sam Peckinpah here.’ What a joke. Tells caller to push off and smashes down phone. Rings again. ‘This really is Peckinpah here, Mr Williams.’ It actually is. Offers zillions for the film rights for his novel. But insists that the title, The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, must be changed. Says Williams: ‘At that price, you can call it Goody Bloody Two Shoes if you want.’ Book became Straw Dogs. Zillions in the bank. You’ve probably heard it because although I’ve never met Williams, I’ve been telling this story for nearly 40 years. It was told to me either by Jim Dalrymple (ex-IndieSunday Times mag writer), or by John Taylor (editor Tailor and Cutter, witty magazine columnist: no longer with us) in the French pub. Over the years, I’ve told a highly polished version in reporters’ pubs and even related it to writers’ groups as an example of how good fortune may sneak up on us. So you can imagine what a pleasure it was to talk to Gordon the other day on the telephone and to relate the story to him, just in case he’d forgotten. He was most amused. There was, he said, not a word of truth in it. He’d never actually spoken to Sam Peckinpah. With that brief response, he thoughtlessly destroyed my finest writers’ anecdote. The truth was that although they never met, there was a misunderstanding between Gordon and Peckinpah. When the film came out, the plug for his book was left until the last second. When Gordon Williams and his wife saw it in they were the only ones left in the cinema as everyone else fled to avoid the national anthem. His next book, although it attracted less attention, and no doubt less money. The Upper Pleasure Garden, published originally in 1970 and republished now by the ’ own Revel Barker Publishing, was based on his time working in local newspapers in Bournemouth How I’ve missed it all these years, I have no idea, because it is a great newspaper classic. Ming is a young Scottish reporter ripping his way through a south-coast English town with the delicacy of a grave-robber and the ethics of a pickpocket. You know him: the tabloid terror on the way up, unhampered by a conscience which he clearly had removed at birth. In other words, everything you’d want in a trainee hack. Leaving others to polish up their shorthand and cover council meetings, Ming the Merciless, as he’s known, specialises in tricking his way past closed doors and unlocking sealed lips. ‘It’s the Scottish accent,’ says his editor. ‘You sound honest.’ Shady local politics and big (ish) business, he dances through it all without putting a foot wrong and still has the energy for a sex-life conducted up against an oak tree in the PleasureGarden – and never was a park better named. This buttock-burner, as he calls it, has left his girl-friend with a bun in the oven – the seventies slang is spot-on – but he still manages to oblige his disgustingly obese landlady as she lollops on to his bed in her straining corsets. ‘It’s not exactly Antony and Cleopatra,’ he says, with uncharacteristic delicacy. Sex, booze, and stories pack every hour of his life. Ming’s end is frequently placed where it belongs – away; the stories tumble from his notebook, and this is all accomplished on a tidal wave of booze. Looking back, I did work with one or two young reporters who could run Ming a close second. However, if this isn’t exactly how it was for you in reality, it’s probably how it was in your dreams. Ming switches his affections from a civilian to a reporter with a declaration that comes close to poetry. He junked her because ‘she didn’t know about angles, intros, nut-fronts, single-column down-the-pagers, fiddling expenses, griping subs, good quotes and punchy phrases she didn’t know about Charlie Hands who was made news editor of the for a day and sent everyone off to the pubs where the interesting stories were she didn’t know about Sefton Delmer who heard the tramp-tramp-tramp of the jackboots she didn’t know Cassandra’s real name or that Arthur Christiansen replated the for the R101 disaster and became a star overnight ’ It’s a love story all right. But it’s not the girl he loves or even the buttock-burners or the pints: Ming’s love is newspapers. If you’ve forgotten why you went into this silly, tacky, wonderful trade, Gordon Williams’ book will remind you. And the roaring spirit of those days blazes through every line. He’s one of those talented writers who made the leap from newspapers to novels (over 20 of them, including being short-listed for a Booker) and television. But his journalistic CV is just as impressive: After Bournemouth, he shared an Earls Court flat with Ian Woolridge and Michael Clayton, who became editor of Horse and Hound. He wrote for John Bull, Men Only, Weekend, and was Acker Bilk’s press agent. He was once jabbed in the back by Cassandra and knew David English – ‘the most ruthless journalist I ever met.’ Like any decent old hack, he hates to knock a good story. I can, he promised me, go on telling my Peckinpah story and he won’t complain. Boyish behaviour From Philip Harrison Australian newspaper’s Media section last week had an item about a woman former journalist who is now a senior lecturer in Monash’s journalism program and is fascinated by ‘newsroom gender politics’. Apparently, during a 20-year print career, including stints with the Messenger newspaper group and The Mercury, Hobart, one news room in particular stood out as being ‘exceedingly oppressive’, she writes. ‘There were regular angry verbal outbursts between male journalists, often fuelled by alcohol, and an editor who strode through the newsroom swearing.’ I forwarded this to many of my former colleagues and below are some of the responses: ·        Thank heaven I didn’t have to live through that kind of experience. Instead sobriety was the watchword in the newsroom and editors were kind and nurturing. How do these delicate little flower petals get into the game in the first place? A retreat to academia seems to be a familiar career path. ·        Thank heavens that in the more refined environs of The Telegraph and Courier-Mail we were never exposed to such blatant exhibitions of misogyny from some -- and I stress only some – male members of the fourth estate. To suggest that a few might have returned alcohol-fuelled from a nearby hostelry, thereby leading to loud confrontations with fellow journalists, casts a slur on other more abstemious colleagues. In all my years in the professional surroundings of the reporters’ room or sub-editors’ desk, I can recall only one incident in which one person expressed himself in what might have been regarded as a rather forthright manner. As a rather large female member of the staff was passing through, he remarked sotto voce (blotto voce?), ‘Bet she farts like a draught-horse.’ This observation was taken by those around him as merely a jolly assessment of the physical characteristics of one of the fairer sex, and certainly not something to which anyone could take offence. ·        Even the ABC newsroom was like this before the New Zealand lesbians took over. ·        This precious woman is now lecturing in ‘journalism’. I have known a few of these types, male and female, who have been able to convince academia that they are stand-out examples of their trade and then prove to generations of newsroom-useless students that they were not. ·        I would forward this shocking report to all of my abstemious, saintly former journalistic colleagues – if I could remember any (including myself) who fit that mould. Journalism is not and never has been a job for folk of delicate sensibilities. Heaven help this delicate soul’s journalism students. The best women journalists I have known (including my mother and an aunt) could hack the pace and dish it out as well as any man. ·        God help the students at Monash. ·        ABC in Brisbane has solved that ghastly problem by feminizing their fleet of newsreaders. They are now down to one bloke and he probably has to hang his dick on a rack provided for the purpose outside the studio. Woman’s Mirror revisited By Anthony Peagam From time to time, birthday presents in the Cudlipp household were parrots. A single feathered friend soldiers on, 11 years after Hugh’s death. Its not-so-cheery morning greeting is: ‘Publish and be Damned!’ Absolutely true, according to Lady Cudlipp, who, as Jodi Hyland, was in the chair at Woman’s Mirror in the early 1960s, and who was one of a brace of the magazine’s editors present when former staffers gathered for an entertaining lunch reunion in Soho on 13 May. Kicked off on the pages of Gentlemen Ranters, the first-ever WM get-together drew 16 former colleagues to Topo Gigio’s in Brewer Street, former editors Lady Cudlipp and Joy Scully heading an impressively well preserved and mostly retired cast that included Shirley Flack and husband David Steen, Diana and Barry Norman, Katie Stewart, Geoff Key, Wendy James, and art men John Bigg, Bryn Havord, Don Gilburn, David Nathanson, Phil Ashcroft and Jeff Bodecott. Picture shows Katie Stewart sharing a tale with Lady Cudlipp Locating Woman’s Mirror colleagues last seen up to 45 years ago was a challenge but 27 old chums were run to earth, including several who, though unable to attend the first reunion are keen for there to be a repeat performance: among them, Andrew Duncan, Willa Beattie, Sally Adams, Francoise Trainau, Roy Hahner, and yet another former editor – Gary Thorne, now living in Spain. Greetings were also received from Felicity Green, Ray Nunn and David Shapley. Sadly, Les Walton and Ray Hyams were unwell on the day. And it was shocking to discover that, in addition to Ian Levack, former deputy editor Peter Reed and writer Norma Knox had died in the last couple of years. Woman’s Sunday Mirror – launched with a midnight party on the Thamesat Pangbourne on 30 January 1955 – was the inspiration of James Eilbeck, the legendarily eccentric features editor of the Daily Mirror (wonderfully recalled by Keith Waterhouse in Streets Ahead). Eilbeck was also WSM’s first editor, followed by Lee Howard, before relaunch as the weekly magazine Woman’s Mirror, when Jodi Hyland took over prior to marriage to Hugh Cudlipp, followed by Gary Thorne, Joy Scully and Margaret Laing before the title’s abrupt execution in 1967. Sales peaked at 1,179,000 in the first year of the weekly magazine, and were still nudging 860,000 at closure – today, a figure to weep for. Sir Keith of Clogthorpe? By John Dodd Writing journalists don’t get gongs. Editors do. Sir David English, Sir Larry Lamb, Sir Nick Lloyd, all, I suppose, for sucking up to prime ministers. Others get peerages for the same thing, but writers and reporters (James Cameron for example), columnists and their like, almost never. I have always found it an oddity that in a world where scribblers struggle to tell and explain realities of life the only writers who get knighthoods are those who make things up; they are called novelists, we are hacks. And even they, compared to actors, don’t do very well, either. Why isn’t John Le Carre Sir David Cornwell when the people who play roles of the characters he created (Sir Alec Guinness) get the glories? Why did old hams like Geilgud and Wolfitt get their shoulders tickled while (from the very same generation) Graham Greene received the other, the cold sort? Oh yes, of course, Bill Connor (Cassandra) got one but, well, wasn’t that Harold Wilson’s day and didn’t Labour owe the one? No; not one, several. How about Lord Cudlipp of Aldingbourne and the ludicrous ‘House of Lords’, the corridor at Holborn Circus that housed at least three peers, one of whom rejoiced in the name of Lord Ardwick ( nickname: Lord Softcock)? So how can this government conspire to allow the saintly Waterhouse to slip into the newspaper baling chute after 35 (or is it 40) years of writing a once, twice or thrice-a-week column without a ‘sir’ in front of his name? It might be that he, sticking to his working class roots, has already rejected such soundings. But no, that can’t be. No, no, just think of the mischief to be wrought – ’by Keith Waterhouse, KCB London (refused).’ The trouble with Waterhouse the columnist, perhaps, is that together with all the best he dared to find the world and our public servants comic. Politicians and their like don’t understand comedy. They are born to partiality. Some Labour MPs could tell you the difference between a socialist cloud and a Tory one. Columnists like Jon Akass, a man who made chain-smoking an art form and nearly burned Bouverie Street down at least three times, would never countenance that people of his trade were anything more than the jugglers and public bar spoon players of life. Auberon Waugh, who died at a mere sixty-something, would probably have sneered at the very thought of a title, or have invented one so absurd it would have ridiculed the very system and still continued to mock John Prescott by pledging his undying love for the shapely Pauline. Waterhouse’s most original character, Alderman Jeremiah Bulge of the Clogthorpe Ways and Means Committee, is from another world and perhaps his lampooning of shop girls Sharon and Tracy is now at least 40 years behind the times. Sharon and Tracey would be grannies now and, anyway, the British are quite proud of being stupid these days. There is no shame in it. Stupidity is cool. But that is hardly the point. It is the very fact that Waterhouse has been around longer than anybody. Linotype was little more than a teenager when he first breathed. In fact when he touched his first typewriter the term ‘teenage’ hadn’t been invented. Anyone below military service was an oik and had to watch his step. That was the world before and just after the war, the world that produced Billy Liar Waterhouse was in Fleet Street when the barmen at the Tipperary, like Mrs Thatcher’s grocer father, still wore long white aprons to protect their Teddy-Boy velveteen. Regional newspapers bulged out of Victorian hulks in city centres – not industrial estates – and pavements around town halls shook when the presses ran. He took over from ‘Cassandra’ in the when every newspaper office canteen was run by SOGAT or NATSOPA, or whatever the initials were, and survived those 30 years or more when the fate of print runs all over Fleet Street was decided not so much by public demand but by what a few chapel fathers sorted out, after they’d talked about their golf rounds and racing tips, over afternoon drinks in the Prescala Club just around the corner from St Bride’s. He was probably at his bibulous peak during that lovely louche world of the late 1970s to early ‘80s, of people going out for ‘earlies’ while the morning conferences were on, the afternoon huddles in ‘the French’ or the Coach and Horses and Muriel’s, all of which culminated in the celebrated Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell He adjusted to new technology by ignoring it and switching to the community of spirits – Ian Wooldridge, Nigel Dempster, Jeff Powell, John Edwards – at David English’s Keith Waterhouse deserves a knighthood not because he was the best newspaper columnist of our age but that he was the most consistent and enduring of several ages. He is a marathon man. It says, in my Googled researches into the honours system, that knighthoods should be awarded either for ‘pre-eminent contributions in any field of activity’ or for ‘sustained commitment’. I like ‘sustained commitment’. We all had it. Sod doing expenses, let's have another... # Which came first ? By Paul Callan In the course of the recent canonisation of Keith Waterhouse – all rather premature, as he is still with us – mention was made of his expertise with the egg trick. (This involves knocking an egg into a glass of water – all in the wrist, apparently). Since I am a firm believer in given credit where it is rightly due, I should point out that Our Keith nicked the whole performance from Charles Lyte, the 's cerebral former gardening correspondent (and descendant of the Rev Henry Lyte who wrote Abide With Me). He first demonstrated it in my sitting room, leaving yolk stains all over the carpet – a sight that did not appeal itself to Madame Callan. But, after much practice, Charles perfected the trick and was called up by Mike Molloy to demonstrate it in chairman Tony Miles's opulent suite at the Imperial Hotel, Blackpool It was the last night of the Labour Party Conference – these were the halycon days when the virtually owned the Labour Party – and we were all in party mood. Charles successfully performed the trick with great skill – and everyone applauded wildly. Except Keith. His eyes narrowed into slits of envy and he demanded immediate lessons from Charles. Being a decent cove, Charles obliged. After a few failures, Keith managed it and would later claim it to be his own. I, of course, knew that this would eventually happen – and pointed it out to Keith. But, of course, being me I rather went too far – and clonked an egg in the middle of Keith's head. Yoke matted his hair and ran down his face. He was not amused. Oh dear. Molloy grimaced and Tony Miles just shook his head. But there were more horrors to come. None of us realised that also present that evening was some leftie delegate who was due to speak the next morning in the final debate of the conference – which was about the Media. Instead of making a joke, he used it as an example of how inane the media had become. The entire incident went into the official record of the conference and became a part of Labour Party history. Much hell broke loose. I later tried to hide behind a pillar on Preston Station (where we changed for the train), but Molloy found me cowering there and delivered a bollocking. But he soon forgot and we drank our way back to Euston. But remember – it was a Charles Lyte's trick first. Keith merely nicked it, claimed it as his own, made it work, and included it in his play, Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell As for me, I've hated eggs ever since. # The woman behind Andy Capp (but only in case he falls down ) By Colin Dunne Forget Greta Garbo. Forget Howard Hughes. At last the Mirror brings you an exclusive interview with the most elusive personality of our time. Since 1956, Andy Capp has acquired a readership of more than 250,000,000 fans. And now, for the first time, answering questions about their life together and the major issues of the day – MRS FLORENCE CAPP. The front door slammed. Into the distance faded the tramp of boots, the whistling, and the companionable clink of a carrier bag full of empties. The back door opened. “You can come in now, pet – he’s gone.” Inside, the debris left in the wake of the great man himself. Three empty bottles of stout. A plate recently stripped of steak and kidney pie. A redundant betting slip. The trappings of greatness. And here also, in the back kitchen of that famous terraced-house, somewhere in North-East England, in full ceremonial regalia of full-length pinny and curlered hair in turban – Mrs Florence Capp, wife of Andy. “Yes, pet,” she says. “You’re right. I am the Woman Behind Andy Capp But only in case he falls down.” International fame has not touched their integrity. Flo and Andy live on exactly as before. For him, the club, the pub, the betting-shop, the snooker hall. For her, cups of tea with her neighbour Ruby, the bingo, and the full-time job of supporting her husband in his demanding role of the last of the male chauvinist pigs. How does she feel about topical subjects of the day? Tell me, Mrs Capp, what do you think about the president scandal? “I knew you’d ask that, hinny, but it were nowt to do with our Andy. He never goes in the President normally – he says you get a better pint down the Trades Club. “Anyway, the day he were in there, when he goes off to the netty, he marks his beer level in his pint with his billiard chalk as usual. “When he comes back, it’s down two inches. He came home with one tooth missing, but he had three of someone else’s in his toe-cap.” Hmmm. Ye-e-es. We do seem to live in a violent world, Mrs Capp? “You’re right there. Our Andy’s dead against it. At the match the other day, there was a feller who got right violent every time our Andy hit him. “He’s still pulling boot-studs out of his backside. Andy says you’ve got to stamp out violence.” Quite so, quite so. And how does the famous man feel about politics? “He’s Labour, but he never votes. Every time he’s going to, they promise full employment and it fair puts him off his pint.” Well, we all know Mr Capp is thought to be a layabout. Has he ever actually worked? Mrs Capp pointed to a clock on the mantelpiece. “See that? For 25 years with the same firm. They had a whip-round down the dole and gave it to him on the anniversary. “He’s like that, Andy. When he starts something he sticks to it.” Another topical question. How does Mrs Capp herself feel about Women’s Lib? “Are them the lasses what don’t wear brassieres? Well, I don’t wear one meself either. Not since 1953. “Andy used it once to carry the empties back to the pub and I never saw it again. I was always a C-cup you see. “But my friend Ruby wouldn’t be without hers. Says she’s nowhere else to put her purse for bingo. “Andy’s a good husband in many ways. He does his little jobs. Always opens his own bottles. Always collects his dole himself.” You can sense the deep trust that lies between them. Mrs Capp says she doesn’t even lock her handbag any more. Not since Andy took it down the club and raffled it. Doesn’t she feel, though, that she’s treated as a sex object? She frowned. “Sex? Object? Well, it wouldn’t object meself, speaking personally, but Andy’s got his snooker to think of and anything like that makes bridge tremble.” That is not the reason, however, why the Capps have remained childless. Andy, says his wife, refused to have children until the family allowance was raised to at least £15 a child. “He says he won’t subsidise no government,” she adds. “A canny lad like that, Andy.” How ever did they meet, this amazing couple? “Years and years ago, pet, when his cap were quite stiff and clean and new – what you might call his peak. “It were a quiet wedding. Well, until they tried to close the bar. “And it was what they call a touring honeymoon – the Fleece, the White Horse, the Trades. I thought we were never coming home.” Mrs Capp, surprisingly, agrees that he is a wife-beater. She says that is fair enough, since she is also a husband-beater. And the balance of power in the Capp household has shifted slowly over the years. She sighs a little as she explains: “He’s not as fit as he was. He always says he was winning on points for the first ten years but that I’ll drop him I the end.” There is really only one question left. Has Mrs Capp ever seen “ Andy without his cap? Never, pet, never. No-one has. He says he was born with it on. “I says gerraway. But he says yes; it had to be a Caesarean, otherwise he might have had it knocked off. That’s Andy – full of tricks.” From down the street, there sounds a distant burp and the slur of approaching boots. Flo smiles and puts out on the table the Band-Aid and the TCP ready for his two-fisted nightcap. Thank you, Mrs Capp. And try to pull your punches, won’t you? , August 20, 1974 Notices It is remotely possible that there will be no email alert next week for ’ next issue. It depends on Internet connections while on the hoof. The entire staff will be in Ireland (we miss the rain) and then in Fleet Street for a book launch. So please make a note in your diary to re-log next Friday morning at this address. Meanwhile, you probably want to know that pre-orders – at 30% discount – appear to be stacking up nicely at for the launch on Monday June 8, which is the 50th anniversary of the great Liberace v Daily Mirror and Cassandra trial. This is in no small way due to the kind reviews that have appeared elsewhere. reviewed it in Media Guardian; then praised it in his Guardian blog under Media Law. And the news editor of Law Society Gazette said it had him ‘barking with laughter’. If you’re one of those people unable to make up their own minds, click on the links to see what they thought. Otherwise, you can find it at amazon by clicking here And thanks.

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