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• 05 Nov 2009 08:26

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

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• 30 Oct 2009 01:53

  sentimental, hard-headed, thin-skinned, thick-skinned, tender, tough, wise, foolish, genial, wayward, amiable, cantankerous, merciful, proud and humble. – Cassandra, describing the editorial staff of the Daily Mirror in 1953 Issue #119 October 30, 2009 We celebrate the publication this weekend of a new edition of the book recognised everywhere as the all-time-great work on newspapers and journalism –Publish And Be Damned! by Hugh Cudlipp It is in stock and can be ordered from amazon with free delivery by clicking here. And also from , in-store or on-line, or ordered from any decent bookshop. It is available in the USA from Barnes and Noble, or from amazon-US The book contains 24 illustrations and has 43 chapters (see Contents column on the right). Revel Barker says the book occupies a prime position in newspaper and social history, as well as a permanent place in journalists’ conversation – even among those who haven’t read it. But has it (to coin a cliché) stood the test of time? In his introduction to the new edition, Geoffrey Goodman says that more than half a century on it is still ‘200-plus per cent relevant’ to journalists and journalism and should be a must-read for all media schools. Tony Delano, now a professor of journalism, says the book contains ‘indelible reminders’ of ‘that crucial, insightful, skilled Cudlippian blend of entertainment and instruction’. He also recounts the bizarre way in which Cudlipp got a job on the , the first time round. Cassandra described the tempest, the typhoon, that was ‘the business called the ’ in 1953. His verdict: ‘This book sparkles and flashes like a welder's arc. If has everything. Even the damned impudence to include disrespectful and distressing tales in the worst possible taste about myself.’ Liz Hodgkinson considers The Man Who Had Power Over Women. meets the man himself and finds that as a pair, they’re well-suited. Go by the book By Revel Barker Whenever two or three of us are gathered together there is one book that will almost inevitably be mentioned. And, if not the book, at least its title: Hugh Cudlipp’s Publish And Be Damned! will somehow find its way into the conversation. Even by people (the majority, these days) who haven’t read it. If the Fourth Estate had a coat of arms – crossed quills for journalism, an open book to represent printing, and maybe a bottle and glass thrown in somewhere – those words would be its motto, written on a curling scroll beneath it. Perhaps even in Latin: EDE SED VAE TIBIPublish, but woe to you! (There was no concept of hell or damnation in Ancient Rome). In fact they didn’t originate from a journalist but from a soldier; the first recorded use of the phrase was as the response of the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) to a discarded mistress who threatened to circulate the love letters he had sent her.Writing about Lord Northcliffe (publisher) and Harry Guy Bartholomew (editor and editorial director), Cudlipp said: News to Northcliffe was a commodity no true journalist could possibly think of ignoring, whatever its source and however it was come by. If it fulfilled the one and only condition, truth, the journalist’s duty was to publish it whatever the pleasure, pain, satisfaction or annoyance it might induce.Bartholomew held similar views. A man of few words, he expressed the creed succinctly: ‘Publish and be damned’.This was the only occasion on which he quoted the Duke of Wellington. Or any other duke. Cudlipp needed to look no further for a title for his book – written mainly, he says, while he was employed by the – which was subtitled The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror. It became an instant success. Published in September 1953 it required a second run of printing before the month was out. This was not surprising; the public could hardly miss it. For a start, the (then) eleven million readers of the were smacked full in the face by a whole-page review from Cassandra on publication day. It was also advertised in the paper, and it should be remembered that in those days the readers seemed actually to love their daily paper; it was part of their lives; it was like family. Other newspapers – notably the ‘heavies’ – and news magazines also reviewed the book. Like the it was difficult to ignore. Not only did it promise to take readers ‘behind the scenes of the newspaper that shocked conventional ’, it revealed the inside story of the wartime government’s threat to suppress the , plus what happened when Winston Churchill sued for libel. There were pen-portraits of famous people: lord northcliffe: How the greatest figure who ever strode down Fleet Street launched the and lost £100,000. The genius who found Napoleon's hat too small for him – and died insane. the first lord rothermere: ‘In finance a titan to reckon with and fear. In other spheres his touch was less certain. For misjudgment marred his activities, and occasionally he scaled the peak of folly. Ruthlessness alone was not enough.’ harry guy bartholomew: ‘Brilliant, truculent, mercurial. He was the incandescent flame: his executives were moths who flew at a respectful distance, singed their wings, or burned to death according to the talents, cowardice, or courage with which nature had endowed them.’ lord beaverbrook: ‘For two decades he has preached the gospel of Empire with all the fervour and ferocity his battery of indoctrinated leader-writers can command. But the campaign failed, and he confessed his failure to his readers.’ winston churchill: ‘It has given me much pain,’ he wrote, ‘to see that newspapers with whom I have had such friendly relations, and from whom I have received in the past valuable support, should pursue such a line. It is because of our past relations that I write thus plainly.’ the duke of windsor: ‘His erroneous account [of the abdication crisis] can only be attributed to naivety, to a defective memory, or to a curious sense of ingratitude to the few British newspapers which did demand a fair hearing for a King in torment.’ william randolph hearst: ‘He was not the rich uncle. He was the impecunious nephew.’ herbert morrison: In 1942 he accused the of ‘scurrilous misrepresentations, distorted and exaggerated statements, and irresponsible generalisations.’ In 1945 he praised the Mirror's ‘fine work’. Not to mention Cassandra, Noel Whitcomb, Philip Zec, Godfrey Winn, Sylvester Bolam, Audrey Whiting, Donald Zec and Jane, Garth, Buck Ryan, Useless Eustace and the Flutters. Sales of the book received an unexpected – but, at least for the defendants in the High Court, unwelcome – boost six years later when Gilbert Beyfus QC waved his copy of Publish And Be Damned! at the jury when Liberace sued the and Cassandra for libel. ‘Oh that my enemy would publish a book,’ said Beyfus. He said he thought ‘somebody had once said that’. And he was right, sort of, for he was slightly misquoting the Book of Job (chapter 31, verse 35). Beyfus continued: ‘Well, any prayer to that effect has been abundantly answered in this case.’ Cassandra had said in cross-examination that it would be ‘quite wrong’ to describe the Mirror as a ‘sensational’ newspaper. But the barrister had about 30 references marked for him in Publish And Be Damned! – mainly claiming with pride that the paper was sensational –and he reeled them off. What he missed – suggesting that perhaps he read the highlighted paragraphs but didn’t actually read the book – was that there was even a chapter entitled ‘Sensationalism’. Connor, as both a contributor and a reviewer, must have been aware of that. Perhaps he had forgotten. Beyfus asked Connor: ‘Do you think it would be wrong to call you a violent and vitriolic writer?’ And Connor told him: ‘It would indeed.’ Back to the book And there was a letter sent in 1941 to Churchill, then Prime Minister, from Cecil H King, a Mirror director who by the time of the trial had become chairman. King had written: ‘Cassandra is a hard-hitting journalist with a vitriolic style.’ It was left to Cudlipp, when his turn came to give evidence, to explain that Cassandra was allowed to write – vividly – about anything he liked (or didn’t like) and that sensationalism didn’t actually mean what Beyfus said it meant: publishing anything at all calculated to increase circulation. He preferred the definition of Silvester Bolam (a former editor who had gone to jail for what had been described as sensational journalism). This was also quoted in the book: Sensationalism does not mean distorting the truth. It means the vivid and dramatic presentation of events so as to give them a forceful impact on the mind of the reader. It means big headlines, vigorous writing, simplification into familiar everyday language, and the wide use of illustration by cartoon and photograph. The trial cost the £35,000 – about half a million pounds in modern terms. But Cudlipp’s verdict was that it had been money well spent – and not simply because world-wide coverage of the trial had increased sales of his book. Beyfus never actually mentioned the title in court, but everybody knew what book he was talking about. The newspaper emerged from court briefly poorer financially but with its reputation for sensational (vivid and vigorous, forthright, strongly opinioned) journalism intact and its already world-beating circulation continuing to increase. And they’d had fun fighting, even if the witness box experience of the Mirror team had been at times frustrating, and some of the argument seemingly perverse. And the readers shared in the fun. And, as the book explained, more than anything, the people at the Mirror had fun and supplied fun inside a spectacularly caring and campaigning newspaper, sometimes against seemingly insurmountable opposition. It was what they did best. Revel Barker spent 27 years – from reporter to managing editor – with the Mirror group of newspapers. He wrote and now publishes books about newspapers and journalism. The Cudlipp classic By Geoffrey Goodman There are moments, nowadays, when I fantasise about what would happen if by some ultra-super supernatural force it might be possible to re-instate Hugh Cudlipp onto the 9th floor of the old building in Holborn Circus. Of course one huge snag is that the building no longer exists; true to the times we live in it is now the headquarters of supermarket emperors J Sainsbury plc. The old Mirror castle was razed to the ground to be rebuilt for Sainsbury’s. ‘Symbolic, my boy,’ I feel sure Cudlipp would adjudicate were he still around to update his superb classic on old Fleet Street – which , in my view, remains one of the finest books ever written on our capricious trade and which is now finally republished. Along with this ‘Symbolic, my boy’ gruffly-edged Cudlippian retort would come a huge guffaw of laughter as he began to lay out the dummy for his 21st century Daily Mirror. Journalism always meant fun as much as anything else for Hugh Cudlipp. OK then, fantasy. The conventional wisdom would have us believe that Cudlipp’s popular journalistic genius has had its day. That we now live in a different era, a different ethos of popular culture and, to be sure, an almost entirely different mantra of journalistic values. I am far from persuaded. Especially after re-reading this remarkable book which first fascinated me more than fifty years ago as a young reporter on the News Chronicle. The book is strictly about what its sub-title says: the astonishing story of the Daily Mirror. But of course it is far more than the history of a single national newspaper. It is as much concerned with the social, political and cultural development of a nation and its people from early in the 20th century [the Mirror was launched on November 2 1903], through two world wars, poverty , wealth, power, mass unemployment of the twenties and thirties plus the rise of Hitler and European fascism. Across this canvas of history Cudlipp’s book describes the power struggle of newspaper moguls from Northcliffe onwards as this single newspaper, the began to emerge from a mish-mash of experiment and failure climbing to astonishing success as an international journalistic phenomenon. In the fourth Cudlipp Memorial Lecture at the London Press Club, circa 2001, I described Hugh Cudlipp as the greatest popular journalist of 20th century British journalism; I do not withdraw a single word of that. Yet Cudlipp himself would have brushed it aside – not from modesty, which was not one of his chosen virtues – but because he was selflessly objective about the Mirror’s origins and success. The paper was founded by the visionary Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, as a daily paper for ‘gentlewomen’. It was then almost sunk by his brother Harold, the first Lord Rothermere, who disregarded its potential while he concentrated on building the financial power of the group which then owned the . Finally the group sold out and the paper was rescued by Harry Guy Bartholomew – ‘Bart’ – who prompted the title of the book with a quote borrowed from the Duke of Wellington. Cudlipp describes Bartholomew as ‘brilliant, truculent, mercurial’ with an exceptional instinct for understanding ‘the pulse of the masses’. Cudlipp always insisted that the foundation of the Mirror’s success came from Bart, who was a Northcliffe protégé. Maybe. But it was Cudlipp himself who picked it up from a cantankerous, fractious and failing Bart to turn the Mirror into the ‘biggest daily sale on earth’. All this, and far more, is contained in this extraordinary classic on the Fleet Street we recognised. Far more of what? Brilliant profiles on Beaverbrook, Cecil Harmsworth King, Bill [Cassandra] Connor, as well as the Rothermere family: a riveting account of how the was twice almost banned by Churchill’s war-time Government for its insolent criticism of the great war leader’s style in conducting his war-time Government. Winston objected to Cassandra’s column and the carpingly critical editorials written by Richard Jennings. Despite the paper’s fundamental support for Churchill’s own war leadership qualities the Mirror constantly challenged the early military strategy. Then came a second threat to stop the paper – this time via Herbert Morrison [Home Secretary in Churchill’s war cabinet and a former Mirror contributor]. In March 1942 Philip Zec, the paper’s famed cartoonist, produced a cartoon which is still argued over between politicians and journalists: it showed a torpedoed sailor adrift on a raft in a black, angry ocean with this caption; ‘The Price of Petrol has been increased by One Penny [official]’. It was Zec’s – and the paper’s – response to stories of a wartime black market in petrol. The cartoon raised thunderous protest from Government – ‘treasonable propaganda’ some called it – though it won glowing support from many Mirror readers. Zec and the Mirror had accurately tested the popular pulse, always its supreme secret until recent years. The whole account as told in this book, including wartime correspondence between Churchill and the paper, remains riveting history. And these are but epic snatches from a dramatic, colourful and uniquely historic journey. So how much is relevant to modern journalism? There are, of course, some inescapable time-induced flaws in the book: but frankly these are minor compared with its overall commanding relevance to anyone entering, or who is already in, contemporary journalism. Without hesitation I reckon Cudlipp’s book rates around 200-plus per cent relevance – not least his descriptions of what makes great newspaper journalism tick. They alone should be MUST texts for all media schools and their professorial experts as they emerge from web sites. It is a pleasure for me to see Publish And Be Damned! re-issued as a paperback after too many years out of print. Geoffrey Goodman is a former industrial editor, columnist and assistant editor of the . He previously reported for the Daily Herald, the Odhams , and was founding editor of the British Journalism Review, where he remains the emeritus chairman and where a version of this critique originally appeared. He was awarded the CBE in 1998 for his services to journalism and is the author of From Bevan to Blair (2003), a memoir of 50 years of political reporting. Cudlipp in the mirror By Anthony Delano The tale of how Hugh Cudlipp came to join the Daily Mirror, the paper with which his name is inseparably linked, gives a heady whiff of the way things were in the turbulent 1930s, when popular journalism was being recalibrated. The seriously strange features editor Basil Nicholson advertised in the Telegraph for a ‘bright assistant features editor with ideas, able to take charge’. Cudlipp, 25, and spinning his wheels at the Sunday Chronicle, applied and during the interview asked about the ‘take charge’ part. ‘Can you start today?’ Nicholson asked. ‘Otherwise I might be fired before you get here.’ It was actually six months before Nicholson went and the equally weird editorial director Guy Bartholomew gave Cudlipp the job. Only then did the reason behind Nicholson’s departure emerge. He had persistently refused to tone down the playfully sensational headlines that Cudlipp had been slipping into the paper, letting the editor and directors who hated them think they were his own work. Take the job, Nicholson urged Cudlipp. ‘Or everything we’ve done will be wasted.’ Nicholson, who had come into journalism from advertising, inspired Cudlipp to think about some of the questions that regularly came up in their 2am decompression sessions in the Gargoyle Club. Newspapers, Nicholson, insisted, did not know their business. Did newspapers really care what their customers wanted to read? What was the use of bothering readers about an obscure revolution in Bolivia if they were kept awake at night by indigestion? Cudlipp set out to assemble a team that knew how to produce the brief and punchy articles and the colourful stunts he sensed that the customers did want. Behind the barking and the tinsel was a closely reasoned scheme. The plan which these young men evolved was simply this – to get under the readers’ skin and to stay there. They were all, in their way, lay psychologists. Most of them had come from working-class or middle-class families in the provinces; they really knew and had personally experienced the aspirations and setbacks, the joys and the heartaches of the millions of ordinary people whom they set out to entertain and instruct. The down-to-earth feature pages became more and more like a letter home to the family, and that was their secret. There were, of course, a few women around, too – eventually. The ineffable Marje Proops of course, and Felicity Green, whom Cudlipp was perspicacious enough to make the first female director of any national newspaper. I can’t say – as more than one of my old colleagues is able to – that Publish And Be Damned! made me decide to be a journalist. I was one already when I came across it. But the Cudlipp blend of showmanship and political pamphleteering was irresistibly persuasive. It did make me decide to be a certain kind of journalist; to see that my work could have a populist as well as a popular function. It led me to the Daily Mirror When I re-read the book a few years ago it seemed to me that it had not really held up; that newer generations of journalists would find it dated and tedious. I’ve changed my mind, however, in the light of the sweeping tabloidisation of virtually all our media. What is now put forward as ‘tabloid values’ often reflects the worst use of the techniques; hardly ever that crucial, insightful, skilled Cudlippian blend of ‘entertainment and instruction’, of which there are indelible reminders here. Additionally – as Geoffrey Goodman picked up on in a new Introduction – this is more that ‘the astonishing story of the Daily Mirror’. It is an impressive testament of social history, a prismatic peek into the lives of ordinary people not only in the Cudlipp years, which petered out in the 1970s, but from the birth of the paper back in 1903. It has to be remembered that while Cudlipp and his boardroom patron Cecil King did indeed guide the Mirror to the giddying circulation peak of 5million a day in 1964, they were standing on the shoulders of an earlier giant. When the egregious genius Bartholomew joined the paper in 1904 its circulation was 25,000. By 1951, when Cudlipp succeeded Bart as editorial director, it was already 4.3million. Cudlipp’s view of King here is shamelessly sycophantic, something he must have recalled with a wince years later, when he helped organise his mentor’s defenestration and took his place as chairman. He was less gushing but generous to Bart – whose job he had earlier succeeded to – considering what he had to thank him for. Considering also that Cudlipp shared little of the Mirror’s epic wartime role of which Bart was the mastermind, although he got quite close to the action himself as a soldier, producing the army’s own newspaper, Union Jack Contrary to widespread impression, Cudlipp was never editor of the Mirror but, under King, effectivelyeditor in chief of all the group’s publications, a title he refused to use because he thought it too American. He had been editor of the Sunday Pictorial before the war, taking that paper’s circulation from 1million to 4million. Nevertheless, the rampaging, irreverent, monstrously successful Mirror of the 1950s and 1960s was his in content and spirit. Geoffrey is also right to draw attention to the close-up accounts of the clashes between the Mirror and the government, including that other great journalist Winston Churchill, who would like to have seen the paper suppressed. Mirror had the last word there. It campaigned against the Conservative party in the crucial 1945 ‘khaki’ election, insisting that despite his achievements in the war Churchill was not the right man to shape post-war Britain. It was estimated that but for the campaign the Labour Party would have been at least 100 parliamentary seats short of victory. It was the Mirror wot won it. Tony Delano enjoyed a lengthy career as a foreign correspondent before turning to academic life and writing a PhD thesis, The Formation of the British Journalist 1900-2000. He is now a visiting professor at the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts London, a frequent contributor to BBC History Magazine and the author of several books, including Slip-Up: how the found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard Lost Him. Another book about Fleet Street, , was published by Revel Barker last month. Orphans of the storm By Cassandra Sept 7, 1953 I have been in the middle of a typhoon for eighteen years. It roars. It howls and the rain comes in horizontal spears. The surrounding scenery rolls up in a ball and disappears down the street. The gale shrieks, the sky goes black in the face, there is the crash of falling masonry and the barometer sways on the quivering wall pointing with tipsy scorn to ‘Set Fair’. The only time in nearly two decades of this that I ever got a bit of peace and quiet was with the Army in World War Two. The bangs were more gentlemanly. Then it all started again. The tiles peeled off the roof upwards, the windows were blown in and once again it wasn’t necessary to lock the front door. It was lodged in what remained of the upper branches of the old elm tree next door. The name of this unending hurricane, this non-stop cyclone, is a tempest of a business called the Daily Mirror It first blew up exactly half a century ago – in 1903. It went down like a flat tyre immediately. The circulation of the Daily Mirror on the first day was 265,217 copies. The figure after three months was a horrible, thin, dispiriting drizzle of only 24,000 puzzled readers. What happened afterwards, in half a century of trouble, fame, ill-fame, fortune, misfortune, good luck, bad luck, fair weather and foul weather, has been charted by one of the most violent orphans of the storm. His name is Hugh Cudlipp. And he has written a book about it all which is called Publish And Be Damned! If you, who have paid three-halfpence to read the Daily Mirror, want to see the stitching behind the seams, then it is all here for you in this book. The first issues of the Daily Mirror were designed by gentlewomen for gentlewomen. It was soon found that there were plenty of gentlewomen to run it, but not enough gentlewomen to read it. So the gentlewomen who ran it for the gentlewomen who didn’t read it had to go. To Hamilton Fyfe fell the horrible task of getting rid of these well-bred, cultured girls. ‘They begged to be allowed to stay.’ he recalled. ‘They left little presents on my desk. They waylaid me tearfully in corridors. It was a horrid experience, like drowning kittens. The Mirror stumbled, ran, galloped, dawdled, cantered, and finally trotted into the middle nineteen thirties. The trot slowed up into a stroll, and the circulation fluttered feebly down and around the 750,000 mark. From then on the lash was laid across the beast, and a strange, mercurial, violent, talented character named Harry Guy Bartholomew took charge: ‘The outcome of most of the operations of this thickset, sawn-off shotgun of a man,’ records Cudlipp, ‘was resounding success. The paper which had only 25,000 readers when he joined it in 1904 was selling 4,350,000, the highest daily circulation in the world, when he retired in 1951.’ How this was done was by an invincible and sometimes largely uncontrolled combination of impudence that merged into courage, damned cheek, honest anger, irreverence, red-hot discourtesy and the age-old practice of putting the banana skin of criticism in front of the bishop of pomposity. The readers devoured the Mirror. The Mirror in turn devoured its staff – including its editors. Few of these distinguished gentlemen willingly retired to the gentle slippered arts of stamp collecting, bridge or the placid delights of the suburban greenhouse. Some of them were fired – just like many of the ordinary people who read the paper. Only faster. And more furiously. The sack, disillusionment, wounded astonishment and even imprisonment were the lot of those who rode this bucking nag. Hugh Cudlipp himself, who has written this immensely candid account of the Daily Mirror, was himself briskly and brusquely fired. He was as startled as the rest. Although he has returned to the storm-racked fold, it is probable that, like the man who was due to be hanged (as Dr. Johnson observed) the experience cleared his mind wonderfully. The frankness about the fifty years of fury and fun that is the life of the Daily Mirror is part of the great value of the book for in its long chronicle of wonderful escapades and battles, both good and bad, lost and won, there is no humbug in the blistering, and often self-critical tale. The candour rubs off the paint and pride not only of the public whose follies and feats it describes, but also of the people who produce the paper. The book sparkles and flashes like a welder’s arc. It has everything, even the damned impudence to include disrespectful and distressing tales in the worst possible taste about myself. ‘Cassandra’, says the uninhibited author, ‘is the guest who is seldom invited twice.’ There is the staggering inside story of how Winston Churchill, aided by his temporary bedfellow, Herbert Morrison, came within an ace of shutting the whole paper down in the early years of the war. There is also reference to one of the most remarkable and fastest inside loops of journalism and politics ever accomplished. It ended up with Bartholomew and Morrison sitting inside the same cockpit of the same aeroplane in which the one was jauntily flying and the other desperately trying to shoot down only a year earlier. A grotesque aerial honeymoon if ever there was one. Mr Churchill, in private letters now published for the first time, tells how he considered that the Mirror was trying to ‘set class against class’ and attempting to ‘rock the boat’ at a time of national peril. You can read them and you can judge for yourself who was right and wrong – for this chronicle is no tendentious tale. You can read about anything from prancing politicians to how Jane helped to win the war. Round Up ,the US paper in the Far East, under the heading ‘Jane Gives All,’ commented: ‘Well, sirs, you can go home now. Right smack out of the blue and with no one even threatening her, Jane peeled a week ago. The British 36th Division immediately gained six miles and the British attacked in the Arakan. Maybe we Americans ought to have Jane, too.’ A rather pompous lady by the name of Margaret Miller once remarked to Carlyle: ‘I accept the universe.’ To which the crabby old sage retorted: ‘By God, madam, you’d better.’ I accept the Daily Mirror. I’d better. For one thing I take their money. For another I know the Daily Mirror universe very well indeed. In Publish And Be Damned! you will see this frenzied firmament at close quarters. Do I like it? I do. Do I dislike it? I do. Do I admire it? I do. Do I despise it? I do. It is scintillating and clodhoppitty. It is sensible and silly. It is kind and cruel. It is warm-blooded, cold hearted, resolute, undetermined, shrewd, stupid, gentle and rough. I have seen it do things that in our compassion would do credit to a saint. But I have also heard it speak when a flash of silence would have improved our conversation. It is all these things at one and the same time for a very simple reason. It is produced by people who are sentimental, hard-headed, thin-skinned, thick-skinned, tender, tough, wise, foolish, genial, wayward, amiable, cantankerous, merciful, proud and humble. Just like you are. Just like all people are – a wonderful, ludicrous mixture of virtues and vices that must set the Creator laughing at His children. This scintillating, self-critical book shows how close we are to our readers. No better. No worse. If you do not like us you do not like them – all eleven million who read us every day. AND IF YOU DO NOT LIKE ELEVEN MILLION PEOPLE YOU DO NOT LIKE THE HUMAN RACE. We do and if you challenge us of being guilty of liking ourselves – including our faults – then that’s true too. This book tells why. Women’s champion By Liz Hodgkinson There are certain newspaper men around whom there clings an ineffable, unfading glamour. Harold Evans is one and Hugh Cudlipp was certainly another. Both of these men were physically small, from unremarkable working-class backgrounds yet with such big personalities and unshakeable self-confidence in themselves that between them they changed the face of national journalism, at either end of the market. Evans will always be remembered as editor of the and Hugh Cudlipp as the editorial director of the Daily Mirror, so at the same time as Evans is going round the country promoting his latest book, it is a real pleasure to welcome the reissue of Cudlipp’s classic, Publish and BeDamned!, first issued in 1953. This book tells the explosive story of the first 50 years of the Daily Mirror, charting its shaky, uncertain start as a daily paper for gentlewomen to its gradual evolution into the highest circulation and most popular paper of its time, embedding itself in the nation’s consciousness. In its heyday, the Mirror pioneered just about every aspect of popular journalism we now take for granted: strip cartoons, big-name outspoken columnists, readers’ letters, huge headlines, clever puns, the need for a daily dose of fun, plus tough issues simplified and explained for the masses, and sympathetic features on subjects close to readers’ hearts, such as marriage, adultery and childbirth, low pay, cruelty to animals and the need for decent housing. It also, unlike other newspapers of the time, never forgot the potential readership value of half the country’s population: women. In many ways, Cudlipp was a man ahead of his time, a visionary who foresaw the emergence of the working classes as a powerful political force, and also acknowledged the growing emancipation of women as people in their own right. Women getting the vote, Cudlipp reckoned, was liable to change everything. He wrote about the 1920s: ‘A new relationship was evolving between the sexes but Rothermere (owner of the rival Daily Mail) did not notice it.’ Yet for all that he saw himself as a champion of women, and promoted female journalists such as Audrey Whiting and Marje Proops, Cudlipp’s views on what he saw as the fairer sex now come across as old-fashioned, patronising and sexist. And although Jean Rook described him as ‘the sexiest man I have ever known, who ever made a woman draw heavy breath’ and reckoned he had a voice ‘like a Welsh harp’ Cudlipp never saw women as equals. He may have championed the female cause up to a point, but he never missed an opportunity to sneer at them in print. He had a good old laugh at the naivety and innocence of the early female journalists employed on the paper when it was aimed at gentlewomen. Two famous actors got married and the copy, written by a woman, read: ‘the usual performance took place in the evening.’ Cudlipp is too mealy-mouthed to write the actual heading which appeared over the daily despatch about French affairs; he merely states that it was quickly changed to ‘Yesterday in Paris.’ Obviously the unacceptable heading chosen by the women journalists was ‘French Letter’. Also included is the now legendary comment by Hamilton Fyfe, the man who succeeded launch editor Mary Howarth after the gentlewoman’s paper turned into a miserable failure. Fyfe said that when he sacked all the women, it was a horrid experience, ‘like drowning kittens’ as they waylaid him tearfully in corridors, begged to be allowed to stay and left little presents on his desk. Then Cudlipp draws attention to his paper’s take on a ‘section of citizens’ much neglected by newspapers of the time: working girls, ‘hundreds of thousands of them, toiling over typewriters and ledgers and reading in many cases nothing more enlightening than Peg’s Paper. How were they persuaded to become readers of a live daily newspaper?’ The way to get these ‘girls’ going, was to mount an attack on their working conditions and the fact they earned much less for the same job than men. Yes, but according to Cudlipp, they first needed to hear a few ‘home truths’: You do most things in an office rather less efficiently than men. Deny it if you will but it is true. Take a simple thing like filing and indexing. You would not think that men could do this job better than you? Well, they can. Quite a lot better. Their minds are more orderly. They move more quickly. Ask the people who install and instruct on the use of these filing systems. They plump for men every time. Then even a thing like being a telephonist. Men again. In newspaper offices, where time is short, there are men on the switchboards. They are quicker – more effective. But – and here is the whole point – YOU COST LESS. You do things a shade worse, but you do them for a whole lot less. ‘No newspaper,’ opined Cudlipp, ‘had addressed itself to large sections of the community in quite this manner before.’ Well – one would hope not! But against this it must be remembered that equal pay did not exist in those days in any job or profession. It was considered part of the natural order that women should be paid less than men, even for the same job, as Felicity Green was to discover when she was appointed to the board of Mirror Group Newspapers as its first woman, in the 1970s. She received £14,000 – admittedly a very handsome salary in those days, but when Mike Molloy was appointed to the board at about the same time, he was paid twice as much, simply because he was male. Although Cudlipp may come across as quaintly chauvinistic when reading this book 56 years after its first publication, at least he recognised that women had to be wooed – and even sometimes insulted – as readers, but never ignored. At least, I have to say before my blood boils over at his condescension, we have to be grateful for that. Liz Hodgkinson is author of , also published by Revel Barker Publishing, at £9.99. The man in the blue velvet suit Hugh Cudlipp had invited everyone who’d worked on a special Shock Issue up to his ninth-floor palace for congratulatory drinks. This was deeply worrying. For a start, no-one was more important than Hugh Cudlipp – he wasn’t God, that’s true, but he had given God a couple of subbing shifts on The People. What’s more, office legend insisted that on these meet-the-lads occasions, someone always caught Cudlipp’s eye, and that someone was soon emptying his desk. What caught his eye was anything out of the usual which was why my colleagues were grinning. They’d received their invitations as soon as they’d arrived in the morning so they’d had all day to ensure that they presented a picture of bland conformity Sensible haircuts, dark suits, smart shirts, silk ties, shining shoes. Similarly, the men were immaculately coiffed and sober suited. You simply couldn’t fault them. On the other hand This was in my ageing hippy period. Certainly I was an arresting sight. My hair at that time touched my shoulder-blades. My suit was a sort of electric blue colour, with wide lapels and flared trousers. It was velvet. No tie, but a huge collar that flopped like bunny’s ears. Dark glasses completed the look which was of Little Lord Fauntleroy posing as a drug dealer. ‘Well, old man,’ said Sid Williams, in his kindliest tone. ‘Cudlipp likes to have a victim – good of you to volunteer.’ Sid often suspected there was a conspiracy afoot from which he was excluded. It was clear on this occasion that if there was a conspiracy here, he was on the inside and I was on the outside. This appeared to be causing him no distress. Paula James, another soft-hearted sweetie, looked at her watch. ‘Got to go,’ she snapped. ‘We mustn’t be a minute late. You know what darling little Hughie is like – we don’t want to attract attention, do we?’ Williams, James, Evans, Hughes, Gomery, Sear, Hellicar, Walker, the whole damn lot of them swept me up and headed for the lift. I’d done human interest, but this was the first time I’d done human sacrifice. There wasn’t a lot of cover on the ninth-floor but I did the best I could, retreating between a tallish filing cabinet and a tropical plant, as far as I could from our noble leader. Cudlipp had a lovely time delivering one of his bitter-witty speeches, taking the mickey out of Murdoch (‘this amateur Ned Kelly’) and the (‘a burnt-out case’), and praising to the skies this assembly of astonishing talent. The pix, the layout, the writing, the headlines, all in the finest traditions of the Mirror at its best. Boy, was he proud of us all. With people like this, the Mirror had nothing to fear. Not a damn thing. Then – oh God – he began to move around among his talented, and in one case terrified, team. He stopped here and there. A word with Walker. A bit of a letch with Evans. Coming nearer and nearer. I was just wondering what jobs were open to a man with the Attlee gene (which, as distinct the Churchill gene which allows you to drink all day, means that after a couple of glasses you start speaking in Pitman’s) when I looked up and there he was, right in front of me. I tried to slide further behind the filing cabinet. Too late. He’d spotted me. What was worse, he’d spotted the suit. His hand came out and touched it. He took the lapel between finger and thumb. ‘Velvet?’ he inquired, his sharp eyes driving into mine and quite possibly six inches out of the back of my head. ‘Mmmmm,’ I gulped, trying to avoid confirmation or denial. Was there time, I wondered, to sink two g-and-t’s quickly and reply to him in fluent Pitman’s? Could I have three and die of alcoholic poisoning before he fired me? He stepped back. ‘Blue velvet.’ It was barely audible. It didn’t need to be. He was talking to himself. He was talking to himself to see if he liked what he was saying. ‘Blue velvet,’ he repeated, slightly more loudly. ‘Yes, I rather like that.’ He cocked his head on one side. What he really liked was the sound of himself saying it. ‘Yes, I think that’s good. No, it’s great. No it isn’t, it’s absolutely bloody marvellous.’ The more he said it, the more he liked it. He wasn’t some old stick-in-the-mud afraid of new styles and fashions. Not a bit of it. Scared of change? Not me, sunshine. Then he turned to address his editorial team. He did so at a volume pitch that would’ve been sufficient to address the entire British Army assembled on Salisbury Plain. ‘That’s what newspapers need,’ he thundered, in his rasping voice. ‘A bit of fun, a bit of colour, a bit of bloody daring – that’s what newspapers are all about.’ He ran his eyes over the astonished throng. With contempt he looked at the neat partings and the blade-sharp creases in the trousers. ‘What we don’t want,’ he said, dropping his voice to a low growl, ‘is little grey men in their little grey suits with their little grey minds.’ The little grey men shifted about uncertainly and wondered what to do. Start a fist-fight perhaps? Unzip their trousers? It was too late. Bloody daring had passed them by. ‘People who’re like that – people who wouldn’t know excitement if it bit them on the leg – shouldn’t be in journalism. I don’t want them on my newspapers. I want to see them behind the counter in the bloody bank where they belong. What I want is people with guts and courage who don’t give a damn what anyone thinks. That’s what we need in Fleet Street.’ He turned back to me. ‘Tell my secretary where you got it. I want two.’ It was a quiet ride down in the lift. I couldn’t seem to catch anyone’s eyes. They were all looking down, closely examining their brilliantly polished toes. I did tell Cudlipp’s secretary. She wrote it down too. ‘Lord John, Carnaby Street ,’ she repeated. Then I reverted to my heads-down policy, and avoided speaking to anyone who was more important than myself. This eliminated nine-tenths of the people in the building. I saw him occasionally over the next few years. Not once was he wearing flyaway lapels and flares. And this stunning bit of luck didn’t advance my career one jot. Cudlipp was never once heard to shout: ‘Bring me my man in blue velvet.’ Not once. But it did earn me the respect of Sid Williams. It proved that he was right all along. Clearly there was a conspiracy afoot, and equally clearly I was in on it. ‘Just one thing, old man,’ he used to whisper to me, when we met in the corridor. ‘Who told you that he liked velvet? You can trust me.’ A longer version of this article was originally published on the GentlemenRanters site as How To Be A Toady. What the papers said.. Cudlipp’s book was widely reviewed in the week following its publication in 1953. Here’s a selection: The Observer: With its sensationalist approach, its chunks of sex, its comic strips and stripping comics, the Daily Mirror expresses the mood of the early fifties The book is constructed like a series of spasms. Mr Cudlipp writes in Daily Mirror style. He beats the big drum but takes you round behind the scenes to watch the bearded lady shave. Other entertaining items include full accounts of the rows with the Cabinet during the war, when the. Home Secretary, Mr Herbert Morrison, whose dialogue is phonetically transcribed, threatened to close the paper down, and a visit to the Editor, the late Silvester Bolam, in Brixton Prison for contempt of court in connection with the Haigh case. : A highly entertaining book, full of the Mirror qualities of liveliness and audacity The Mirror is an acquired taste and too often leaves a bad one behind. So does strong drink, which also a great many people seem to like. The Spectator: Having backed the wrong horse in the abdication crisis, the Mirror then picked a winner with its anti-appeasement line. This brought clashes with The Times. Geraldine House accused Printing House Square of having a fifth column, of pursuing a policy 'that has put heart into every reader who has the Fascist and anti-democratic cause at heart.' : ...worth the study of the followers of any type or standards of journalism. Truth: A reckless, devil-may-care, damn-my-friends-and-blast-my-enemies book, that explodes verbally. The development of the Mirror into the paper it has become - sliding uneasily from politics to pornography - has changed irrevocably the whole future of British journalism for the worse. CONTENTS Foreword: Brought to book, by Revel Barker Introduction: The Cudlipp classic, by Geoffrey Goodman stop press: 1. can a woman hatch eggs? ‘Cock-a-doodle-do’ – The Mirror tackles the problem of Higher Production – Elephant Sees editor, drops dead – The Colorado beetle racket – How to assassinate your readers’ pets and blow up their houses 2. northcliffe drops abrick The gentlewomen of England disappoint Alfred Harmsworth – How to make consommé aux nids d’hirondelles and lose £100,000 – ‘Somad a frolic...’ – Sacking the women was ‘like drowning kittens’ 3. when the Mirrorwas born Life was grim... gay... passionate – Mr Arkas Sapt has a bright idea - then hides himself in a railway cloakroom – The romance of ‘The Two Tumpties’ 4. the hurrying years A shock for an erring mistress – The first Flying Saucers – A scoop at the Royal deathbed – Hannen Swaffer hears a secret in a pub – Bernard Shaw says ‘ Worth a shilling’ 5. rothermere – financier 1,210,354readers for £100,000 – Why the Evening Mirror did not appear – Rothermere’s ace of spades – How to build financial empires – The public offer £40,000,000 – His provincial Waterloo – Armistice with the Berrys 6. rothermere – journalist The frugalities of a millionaire – ‘Squandermania’- and anti-Socialism – Lord ‘Wibbly-Wob’s’ truce with Fleet Street’s other Wicked Uncle – Baldwin the Great and Baldwin the Incompetent – Was the Mirror guilty? 7. youcan’t shoot the proprietor A study in decline – Gentility and reaction – How to ruin a newspaper – The decade when Fleet Street went mad – ‘Give ’ema grand piano’ 8. the bart revolution The metamorphosis of a practical man – How a genius grows up – Breaking the record from ParisCalais– The ‘Bart Legend’ – The invention that brought him fame – Rothermere sells his controlling shares 9. bartholomew the boss The man who walked alone – Fleet Street’s enfant terrible – ‘He won’t like that!’ – Informal dress for Abdication night – The cult of secrecy – A hush-hush paper for the submariners – The rebirth of Reveille– ‘Publish and be damned!’ 10. shocking ’em and socking ’em The birth of the sledge-hammer headline –2,000readers besiege a cruel man’s house – Candour about the Birthday Honours List – A rector’s son becomes a tabloid editor – One soft answer from the short-tempered Suffern 11. jane gives all! Pip, Squeak and Wilfred pioneer for Jane and Garth – Churchill’s gaffe – Secrets of the Mirror strips – How the cartoonists work – Man, 35,artisan class, wants body like Garth’s 12. ain’t love gland? Brief and punchy, barbed and bright – ‘Bossy wife gets husband’s goat -he wants a vamp at 40’ – Basil D Nicholson passes by – ‘Knock, knock. Who’s there? It’s the younger generation ...’ – The ideas that made Britain sit up and Fleet Street take notice 13. the abdication: should a newspaper tell? The Duke of Windsor gets his facts wrong – Beaverbrook acts for the King in Fleet Street – How the Mirror broke the conspiracy of silence – The first picture of Mrs Simpson – editor Thomas attacks the ‘niminy-piminy press’ 14. the new crusaders The conscience of a popular newspaper – What the Mirror said about appeasement and The Times – Applause for Mr Churchill – ‘Seven Souls in Search of Sanctuary’ 15. the fabulous godfrey winn The stock-in-trade of a successful young man –250,000honeyed words in twelve months – How to make friends with women and influence editors – Winn at work – What he saw in Rio makes his readers blush 16. clean and clever The unpopularity of success – The Express scents battle and the swoons – Lord Kemsley’s tut-tut campaign boosts the Mirror – What happened to Barbara Ann Scott’s briefs – The tale of a bull 17. behold – the reader! The customers under a microscope – Their sex, age and income – Their fads and fancies – Do women read politics? – The mother who studies ‘Live Letters’ while feeding baby 18. the man hitler changed He didn’t like noise – then made the loudest – The curious transformation of Richard Jennings – Exposing the ‘upper-crust riff-raff’ who loved a pale spy – The Mirror Munich 19. what makes cassandra clang Clues for psychiatrists – The fugitive from advertising – TNT meets forked lightning – Why he distrusts underdogs – The tale of a night out with Godfrey Winn 20. enter sir winston Voice of the People – ‘Aren’t we a very old team?’ – Churchill’s misconceptions –Jennings and Cassandra go to war – The anti-Chamberlain crusade 21. the mirror iswarned Churchill and ‘the hammerblow of circumstance’ – The end of the Churchill-Mirror honeymoon – Cassandra fights the British Army – Heated exchanges at No. 10Downing Street – Secrets from a diary 22. letters from downing street Churchill accuses Cassandra of malevolence – ‘Some hatred might be kept for the enemy’ – How I would conduct a Fifth Column movement-by the Premier – Winston recalls ‘our past friendly relations’ and talks of vitriol throwing 23. seconds out – final round! How Bartholomew answered the threat – Cassandra makes new enemies and crosses swords with Mr Morrison – Speeches Churchill had forgotten 24. a man on a bicycle A piece of cardboard makes history – Philip Zee, and the crisis that came to a man with a conscience – Patriotic -or subversive? – The facts about the petrol cartoon 25. summons to westminster Why the Generals saw red –Whitehall’s quest for hidden hands and evil motives – Churchill demands action and Morrison delivers a message – Our ’Erb and the editor – A verdict ten years after 26. silence – or suppression The Cabinet selects its weapon – Five men speak out for freedom – Crime, punishment and the words that were missing from the evidence – Blackening the record 27. alarm and despondency Black ties – for a funeral – The Express weeps – The Telegraph comforts the suppressors – What the public thought – Cassandra tries harder than ever to please 28. in the stocks Thumb-screws for the Mirror – Heat in the Commons, ice in the Lords – Strip-tease – and political principles – ‘Damned disgusting’, says APH – A shock for Mr Morrison – Benevolent mastiff nips ill-bred cur –Cassandra is warned of ‘a sticky end’ 29. a fishing story What happened when Churchill took time off in Quebec – A journey to La Lac de Neige in seventeen cars and nine Army trucks – The 20-inch trout and the secret the Premier did not know 30. hitler bombs the Mirror The Cabinet orders the Press to ‘print on’ – 50lb base of landmine lands on office roof – Fifteen fires surround the Mirror on Incendiary Night – How the newspapers carried on in the war and never missed a single day’s issue 31. vd day Another ‘shocking’ campaign – The curious story of the Government advertisement which Fleet Street censored – More lively controversies – Captain Henry Longhurst MP makes a public fool of himself 32. death – for a headline How two war correspondents lost their lives – Healy escapes from -to be bombed in – Adventures of David Walker – the man the Gestapo ‘moved on’, the Serbs wanted to shoot, and the Italians imprisoned 33. forward with the people                 The Mirror becomes a power the land – How the war educated the masses – ‘Victory -then reconstruction’ – Labour forewarned to prepare for power – Challenging the Express and dwarfing the Herald 34. how powerful isthe press? Lord Beaverbrook concedes a failure – Do newspapers form or control mass opinion? – Campaigns that flopped – When the reader knows best – The Russians, the Press, and the Public – ‘Funny people, the British’ 35. vote for him! What did the Mirror say in 1945? – The story of two newspapers and an historic election – The Express - by Mr Attlee – The Mirror - by Mr Morrison – Stunts versus subtleties – How to conduct a successful campaign 36. why the Mirrorwas right A ‘decisive influence’ in the election –Express misinterprets the mood of the electorate – Who made the Mirror turn Left? – The facts Churchill forgot -and the advice he rejected –1945 vindicates a newspaper’s policy 37. talking dogs, falsies, and quins Good fortune comes to Mr Whitcomb – A Nightie at the Opera – The chivalrous Aga Khan – Love-starved wives and roving husbands – How much padding and how much girl? – ‘The note of gentle madness’ 38. sensationalism ‘Nothing to beat a good meaty crime’, said Mr Jones – Cecil Thomas advocates revealing all – Bolam promises to be ‘sensational to the best of our ability’ – Economics for the millions – An editor goes to Brixton Gaol 39. Mirror versus Express Behind the scenes in the battle for the World’s Greatest Sale– Factors that worried the Express – Five rounds of a heavyweight contest – The paper Bartholomew did not read – Why the Mirror’s sale suddenly leapt up one million 40. churchill sues for libel Which way would the Mirror jump in the new election? – Brickbats for Attlee over Labour’s failures – The campaigns of 1950 1951 – Can a strip-cartoon canvass votes? – ‘Whose finger on the trigger?’ 41. live letters, alive o! The girl who loved a strangler – The things that worry Mirror readers – Wrong bed, wrong husband – How a newspaper makes friends -and keeps them – Why the Archbishop said ‘Thank you’ and the war bride cried ‘Halt’ 42. who owns the Mirror Lord Camrose, Lord Beaverbrook and The Enigma – Rumours about a syndicate – The financial facts – Rothermere and Cowley exchange letters – The deal of 1947 – How many stockholders? 43. younger men The end of The Bart Legend – A nephew of Northcliffe takes command – The Bartholomew-Cecil King collaboration – When a genius erupts – The paper’s policy – Character of the new chairman

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• 23 Oct 2009 12:58

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

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• 19 Oct 2009 18:28

  Keep up to date with Ranters If you are not already on our mailing list, and would like to be reminded when the site is updated, please send your name and email address to rantersreaders@gmail.com We do not send any other emails and do not share the address list with anybody.

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• 16 Oct 2009 12:46

  ‘When you say Glory Days,’ he asked, innocently, ‘do you mean the days when they used your stuff?’ – faces a tricky question Issue #117 October 16, 2009 A random survey of readers showed that only one person in ten who have visited this site has actually clicked across to the (it’s over there in the column on the left). So, to encourage the rest of you to take a peek at the list of classic titles on our list, this week – for one week only – we are offering readers THREE FREE BOOKS of their choice. See column on the right. This week we publish yet another title, a brand new novel by former Geoffrey Seed (he later defected to World In ActionPanorama) and the ‘hero’ of his book just happens to be a former newspaperman who left The Street for TV. There, one suspects, and hopes, the similarities mainly end. This guy attempts an investigation into his own life, with remarkable and far-reaching results, brilliantly told. Geoff’s book is reviewed here by Martha Linden Press Association reporter. Talking of books, as we occasionally do – even if we don’t read them or buy them – our recent republication of Tony Delano’s exposé of the Case of the Manacled Mormon (see two issues back) prompted Chris Buckland to return to the town that gave Joy to the world. Back to work, with the question – who corrects the correctors of copy? Our erstwhile diarist Al Vino has been reading the and the Guardian, with worrying results from both. Are there no classics graduates on the these days? No linguists (or subs who know what job they are in) any more on the Guradian? Geoffrey Mather meanders down Memory Lane and pities all those graduates who were deprived of the learning like what we had. continues his life’s saga and reckons that, if he had to do it all over again, he’d do it all over Creative writing By Geoffrey Seed Those that can, write the copy Those that can’t, write a novel about it. So it was with A Place of Strangers, a work of fiction forced on me after chasing shadows on the most tantalising of tip-offs. It began over supper with a retired diplomat who’d done past favours for Israeli intelligence. He said a contact once told him how he’d hunted down several old Nazis in the 1950s and ‘arranged’ what appeared to be suicides or accidental deaths. I swear I heard the northern Daily Mail’s late, great, night news editor, Jimmy Lewthwaite, whispering in my freelance ear: ‘Good story if true, old man. Copy in basket by four o’clock.’ The diplomat introduced me to a second individual he believed could help. We met at his house – a Georgian mansion, all wisteria and Wilton, set in chocolate box English countryside. Its urbane millionaire owner sat beneath oil paintings of race horses, smiling over steepled fingers as I pitched. Yes, he knew the first man. Yes, there may just be a grain of truth in what I’d heard. No, he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – confirm anything else. But stay for dinner anyway. No matter how many overseas journeys I later made or ex-spooks, Holocaust survivors or Nazi relatives I talked to, no legally viable corroboration came my way. I did, of course, interview the diplomat’s original source. He hadn’t long to live but, seriously ill though he was, he had no need of a confessor. There was still a fearsome toughness within him, as with all the partisans I encountered who’d escaped the ghettoes to fight with the Red Army against the hated Nazis. Some information he offered up seemed at odds with the historical record. This shook my confidence though I couldn’t ever be sure that it wasn’t his deliberate dissembling. If what he’d admitted to the diplomat was true, this frail but flint-hard man had got away with murder. He wasn’t about to roll over for me. However, when we talked about one particular ‘suicide’, his remarks included slightly more detail and were delivered with such quiet intensity it was tempting to think he might actually have been present when it took place. Then he clammed up, saying ‘You’ll not draw me inch by inch into telling you anything I couldn’t have made up.’ There was never the remotest chance of him going on camera for me or being quoted in a newspaper piece. Some acts of revenge were carried out by Jewish survivors immediately after the war and I made a small contribution to a documentary about this. But frustratingly, I’d not had the wit to dig out what might have been an even more telling piece of secret history and those who allegedly knew about it have since gone to their graves. So I’ve compromised – top-spun my research, stitched it into other bits of whimsy from a journeyman’s life to make it a love story and called it literary fiction. But, no I will not be naming any of the real people I met along the way. Sorry. A Place of Strangers by Geoffrey Seed is published by Revel Barker and available from Waterstones and all the usual sources at £9.99, or possibly less. The marked deck By Martha Linden ‘Hacks always play with a marked deck. They also hide cards up their sleeves, then deal from the bottom. It's what cops do too,’ Geoffrey Seed observes in his thriller, A Place of Strangers Francis McCall, a foot-in-the-door investigative television journalist, is bent on solving the mystery of his past and that of his adoptive parents. His journey leads him from rural Shropshire to London, Germany, Canada and Israel in a fast-paced novel deftly weaving evocative scenes from the Second World War and its aftermath, with the present (the 1980s at the time of the miners' strike). The novel deals with themes of espionage, adultery, loss, decay and the horrors and moral dilemmas of war in a racy, readable style. Seed has a keen visual sense, unsurprisingly for a television reporter, and there are striking images throughout the novel with film playing a pivotal role in McCall's search. Seed portrays the vulnerability, frailty and at times desolation of the reporter on the road, the addictive nature of the profession and the at times ‘callousness’ of the journalist in full flight. At one point, McCall is warned by his exasperated MI5 spy girlfriend against continuing his investigation – in pursuit, as she puts it, of another ‘Golden Turd of Cracow’ for his mantelpiece– at the expense of his personal life. Seed also excels in portraying the small humiliations and rebuffs faced by the investigative reporter. In a powerful scene at the beginning of the book, as Margaret Thatcher prepares to broadcast to the nation in the studio in the aftermath of the 1984 Brighton bomb, McCall attempts to chat up one of her Special Branch protection squad and is told to ‘piss off’. Seed's thriller is made all the more interesting by his own past, first as a young Daily Mail journalist in Northern Ireland who was a first hand witness to many of the worst atrocities of the Troubles. Later he became one of the leading investigative television reporters of his generation, risking prosecution under the Official Secrets Act with his Channel 4 film, MI5's Official Secrets, first broadcast on Channel 4 in 1985. The film, banned from transmission for two weeks by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, spilled the beans for the first time on MI5's covert spying on domestic targets such as trade unionists and the CND. It was broadcast only after the Government let it be known that there would be no prosecution. Seed's characters reflect these preoccupations with a theme of espionage and McCall's girlfriend, the daughter of a miner, spying on the strikers. Seed likes to add the odd throwaway allusion to all of this. I particular enjoyed the warning, by McCall's adoptive father, Francis Wrenn, an old Foreign Office spy: ‘Steer clear of the Official Secrets Act if you can and all those silly buggers in bowler hats who go round snooping.’ In search of Joy By Chris Buckland The windscreen wipers clunked rapidly from side to side, barely having any impression on the torrents of rain washing through the night. Then, as Bates Motel came into view, thunder cracked and lightening lit up the empty car-parking spaces outside every single room. I was on my own. All that was missing was the heart-thumping music of Psycho as I entered the reception where a strange young man moved out of the half-light and nervously checked me in. I did not have a shower that night. This was my first visit to Avery County, North Carolina, for thirty one years. The County where there are 100 churches for 14,000 people and where the Rednecks roam. The county that was home to Joyce McKinney, she who manacled Mormons for a hobby. I had spent weeks in these Blue Ridge Mountains when the story was hogging the national headlines. And it was the reprint of Tony Delano's splendid history of the saga that encouraged me to go back in time. Of course, the motel was not called Bates. It was the Pineola Inn, and looked much better in the dry daylight. But no other facts have been changed to protect the story. Nothing much seemed to have changed in AveryCounty either in the three decades since the based journos like myself had descended on the unsuspecting hill people. As I drove through the city of Blowing Rock just a score of miles from the McKinney home I couldn't help thinking that this was where Joyce must have learnt her tricks. Though she wasn't exactly Rock Hudson's type. And then into Newland, the county capital, where I would solve a mystery that has haunted me since those days when Jimmy Carter ruled in the White House and my old paper, the , was king in Britain I turned up to see my old chum Bertie Cantrell, now a sprightly 73 year old but still editor of a local paper, the Avery Post. (Typical of America, she fell out with the owner of the sheet she used to edit, The Avery Journal, and simply upped and founded her own rival publication.) It was Bertie who introduced me to Sheriff James D Braswell back in 1978. He was a mine of information on young McKinney. And he was also keen on showing me his new jail. There was a single cell in a wooden building. ‘Just look, Chris.’ and pressed a button that caused the barred door to slide open. He invited me in. Introduced me to a callow youth sitting in the corner. Pressed the button again to close the door. And went for lunch. So I was stuck with the youth who I assumed was being banged up for a few hours to teach him a lesson for speeding. Or, at worst, being drunk and disorderly. I assumed wrong. We chatted nervously. Or rather, I did. All I could get out of the hill-billy kid with the blank eyes was ‘I've been a bad, bad boy.’ And surely he'd be out after paying a ten dollar fine? ‘Nope, I'm goin’ to the chair.’ His last words before he sunk into silence. When the Sheriff returned he was full of fun. He knew he'd dine out for years on the limey locked in his cell. But he wouldn't tell me what the lad I'd just spent the last 45 minutes alone with had done. Last month I found out. Jimmy Rupard, 17, had taken a .22 rifle and shot the grandmother he lived with in her kitchen. Dead. When his Grandpa came home, little Jimmy shot him too. Dead. First with the .22. Then, just to make sure, with a high powered rifle bullet in the head. I'd been locked alone in a cell with a homicidal maniac while Sheriff James D Braswell had been eating his chicken and grits. Clearly feeling guilty, he later gave me a bottle of moonshine he had raided from an illicit still. As moonshine and sunshine were equally welcome to me in those days, I made no further enquiries. But now I know well, the late Sheriff should have given me a crate of the stuff. Mr Rupard, incidentally, did not get fried. He served only three years after a higher court ruled a mistrial as he had been charged as an adult, rather than a juvenile. He still visits the town where because he didn't like the school they had sent him to he murdered his grandparents. More updates: Miss McKinney is not seen in town much these days, although she occasionally visits her parents who have moved out of the large white house on Highway 19 and into a smaller pad close by. Our heroine is now in California, cloning dogs. No change there, then. Joyce McKinney and The Case of the Manacled Mormon is available from and Waterstones or the Book Depository in the And here’s a review from the site in : Anthony Delano brings 60 years of high-voltage journalistic experience to his books on stories that fired the imagination of newspaper readers, worldwide. In Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon, he has again struck gold. His research, and attention to detail, is faultless. Any journalists who were involved in the Joyce McKinney story will nod their heads in approval of Delano's meticulous investigation into what really happened when McKinney manacled a Mormon to her bed. And any journalists who were not involved will for ever wish they had been. A superb read. One of our subs is missing By Al Vino Murphy’s first law of journalism is that if you try to be clever while correcting and commenting on somebody’s faulty copy, you are pretty certain to drop a bollock yourself. It must be hell, therefore, being what these days is called a Readers Editor. (we’re only guessing) doesn’t have one. Which is why its travel page can tell readers that the ancient city of Troy (scene of that siege, involving a horse) is ‘in today’s Iran’. And that’s the best argument we know for supporting the idea that, if you’re employing graduates, you should get some with degrees in history, geography, the classics in fact anything other than journalism (which anyway was always best taught, and learnt, on the job – and which is where the better media lecturers learnt it for themselves). Anyway, the Guardian has a readers’ editor. Being the Guardian, they opted for a lawyer, rather than for a journalist, of course. She had great fun recently pointing out that omitting to attach a tilde (that’s that squiggly thing in the Spanish alphabet) above a letter meant that a reporter’s unsubbed line of copy saying that ‘The Golden Girls is being remade in Spanish as Los Anos Dorados’  translated into The Golden Anuses. The word should have been Años, she commented, with ‘hilarity’, when a reader who teaches Spanish pointed out the mistake. ‘While journalists and subeditors are not expected to be multilingual,’ the readers’ editor added, ‘they should put the right accents on names in all languages, where possible.’ Mmm. Journalists AND subeditors, eh? Do we assume from that distinction that the readers’ editor (a) doesn’t know what trade subs are in and (b) doesn’t actually get subbed herself? Or does the Guardian employ subs who think they’re somehow different from journalists? Answers on a postcard. Happily, she was able to correct her own copy, on the Internet at least, a day later. You can read her style rules on accents, now amended, here didn’t bother to correct its Trojan geography, even after it was pointed out. Marvels of modern technology? Marvels of modern bloody subbing, more like. Another fine mess, Stanley By Geoffrey Mather There are severely deprived people in this world – people who went to OxfordCambridgeWinchester, Harrow, Eton. Becoming a journalist after that bad start is a difficult business. They have to make the leap from quiet learning and cake in the dorm to bedlam and duplicity virtually overnight. They are the last dogs out of the traps. ‘Let me put it this way’ – as one news editor in Manchester said in a well-publicised remark to a newly arrived, unsullied, sober, highly educated, oh-God-what-have-I-come-to, up-from-the-Smoke, well-I'll-just-have-a-small-one-if-I-must, new reporter – ‘have you ever reported a fire?’ Answer: No, of course not. Nor a court. Nor an inquest. Nor a road accident. Nor a rural auction mart with shearling gimmers, twinters, ram lambs and lonk tups in need of sorting. Nor had the accused witnessed the animal cunning, treachery and tenacity of the pack on the trail of a big story. That's the very gritty nitty of the job. And the lust for success is like flu – it hits when you least expect it, turns your legs to jelly, and can knock you over. I played back-street cricket with a lad named Kenneth Barnes who, sadly, lacked the proper guidance. He wasted his life. Not once so far as I know had he considered being One Of Us, a junior reporter. He left us quietly and struggled along unsighted. He went to OxfordUniversity and became something in one of the government ministries where he was made Sir Kenneth Barnes with a CB and a KCB. The knighthood was some kind of compensation for the sad obscurity of his post, and inability to progress, I imagine. Not a single by-line in an entire lifetime: what a shameful waste of a brilliant mind. The rest of our team were so sorry for his failure to grab his early career opportunities as we had done. You will have noted that the newly-deceased chef, Keith Floyd, began working life as a junior reporter, which, I imagine, kitted him out perfectly for stardom: irreverent tongue, brash awareness, loud, gutsy sense of humour, taste for good wine while actually working, nightmare hangovers. Early journalism can do all that for a boy on the way up. Becoming a TV chef is just a slight change of direction: in the worst scenario, where you lack real journalistic flair, you merely exchange writing tripe for slicing it. I do, I admit, have some very, very slight secret envy of the Oxbridge lot. A smidgeon. The merest trace. A midge's. All right, then, quite a bit. OK, OK, a lot. Enough to make me sad occasionally Let us pass swiftly on before that nasty little hurdle sinks in and causes confusion. Some of them might, just might, envy me my bits of gritty nitty. For a start they missed the local reporter who, given the chore of recording the town's events of 50 years earlier, slammed the file shut at the conclusion of his year and said, ‘Thank God, that's the job finished.’ It was gently pointed out to him that however long he lived and slaved, and grew peevish and a small black moustache, there would always be a Fifty Years Ago waiting for him in the brittle, yellowing pages. ‘Accrington launch survival fight,’ said a recent BBC headline and I thought for a moment that the old town had given up, sold the silver, headed for Blackburn eight miles away, clacking away in its little clogs. Not so. It was about football, not the town. And I am glad about that because once, Accrington, the town, belonged to me, JR/PR (junior reporter/proof reader), aged 16 or thereabouts – and Mrs Sinkinson, give or take one or two more who were there at the time. We were, in military terms, ‘embedded’ in the nicest possible way. Mrs Sinkinson was sister of the proprietors of the Accrington Observer and every week she wrote a column called Ladies' Chain. Nothing to do with tying herself to railings: it was just considered an appropriate title. She never visited the office so I visited her – the reporter seldom trusted to report. I cycled up the long hill to her home once a week. There, panting like a new-born pup – me, that is – she confronted me on her doorstep, and never once invited me in. She placed the golden despatch in my hand and I went back to the office, feeling no less important than Reuters. Her despatch, in the little black case that swung from my saddle, was secure. Without me, Accrington would have lost its links to the charms and graces of its leading local ladies. Mrs Sinkinson never said much. ‘Nice’ was her usual response to my arrival. ‘Nice day’ was a speech that exhausted her. But eventually she presented me with a well-thumbed book about journalism in and smiled, in a wintry kind of way, before closing her door. I read it almost immediately, then read it again for good luck. It was a sort of unemotional bonding, a passing of the baton of life, this unusual gesture. I still remember a snippet from it: If with the lamp of truth you lookto see things plain and clear,first you must dam the beaver brookand drain the rother mere. Not very nice to Lord B, my future employer, was it? For him I mean. I rather liked it. Mrs Sinkinson was, in the memory, tall, slender, shadowed and faceless, a Victorian figurine, Beatrix Potter without the Herdwicks. I would like to have asked one of the proprietors – Mr Richard Crossley, actually, rather than Mr Robert – about her but never dared. He and I were always wrestling to preserve his wretchedly rumbling and domineering stomach, and there were days when the stomach was beating us both. He was a martyr to stomach was Mr Richard. The only mercy in his important life was that he hadn't been born a cow, with four. I was never out of Boots on his behalf. I don't suppose the Bodleian would be able to solve that. The proof reader, Guy Cunliffe, tussled with the professional part of Mr Richard. ‘Mr Richard,’ he said, ‘this advert in the earpiece at the top of page one – it could give us a bit of trouble.’ Mr Richard examined it carefully, then said, ‘Why?’ ‘Well,’ said Guy, ‘the advertiser's name is Robert Saul and he has used only the initial, R.’ ‘What's wrong with that?’ said Mr Richard. ‘R. Saul,’ said Guy summoning all the courage he could muster in Mr Richard's previously unsullied office. I am not, at this point, sure what Mr Richard's verdict was. Perhaps he decided that if he did not see a fault, his readers were incapable of seeing one. In any case, he probably realised that he was the one who would have to tell Mr Saul that his shortened name was an abomination in the eyes of decent Accringtonians, Guy Cunliffe, almost certainly Mrs Sinkinson, and, however reluctantly, his good self – not easy when the advert pulled in regular cash. I recall another conversation between Guy and Mr Richard. It involved a cartoon of a flock of birds in an advert. One of the humans passing beneath them was quoted as saying, ‘Out of all these people it had to choose me.’ Mr Richard, in his innocence, could not get it through his head at all. To him, it was a pastoral scene with a human being grateful in a quasi-religious sort of way for the close proximity of these lovely airborne creatures. But suddenly, with an awful expression, truth dawned and he said, ‘You mean one crapped on him? We can't have that.’ Trivial stuff, you might say in the face of that noisy nonsense despatched from Tokyo, or , where the late-comers, the university lot, often ended in the course of their journalistic careers. Trivial? Trivial? My word, it was Ypres, Dunkirk and the Boer War in our little nook down a side street. You see now, perhaps, why I am sensitive to news from Accrington? While Mr Richard and Mrs Sinkinson were still abed on Tuesday mornings I was in the machine room of the Observer selling the new edition to newsagents who were a bit testy at 6.30am. They smelled of Thwaites's bitter, and gnashed their gums at life's minor ills, their heads monotonously clothed in the same kind of cap: worn slightly to one side, left or right depending on individual choice, damp, and uniformly drab. No ties of course, just granddad shirts. They reminded me of the agricultural show livestock – ‘Long-faced tipplers with not more than four broad teeth.’ There were always a few Observer spoils in the bin and I took them home as a perk of the trade. If I had a tiny by-line after working the week-end – Rex being my proper signature for sporting events, the well-read among you will no doubt recall – I could see it six times at once if I laid out the papers on the floor. I could then sense an attentive audience. It was, in my eyes, Power. Not so much as Mr Richard's power, but real, tangible, displayed-on-the-carpet publish-and-be-damned power. I got a bit bored sometimes. I covered a Sunday church gathering of council chairmen and officials at Church Kirk, Church, and wrote, ‘At this point, the chairman of the council turned to a fellow chairman, and since there is some doubt about the propriety of what was said, the Rev R H Steven is believed to have offered up a prayer for their souls.’ The editor – who drank 40 cups of tea day, 36 made by me, four by his wife – was delighted. I had practically to wrestle him to the bare boards of the readers' office to convince him that I was joking. Many mature women in those days finished a little above the ankle and appeared again in the area of the neck. Anything that might have caused emotion in men was buried beneath this black and uncharted railway tunnel of cloth. There was not supposed to be anything noteworthy between opposite ends of them apart from corsets. In the circumstances, I am surprised the human race continued at all. ‘I fancy an early night, dear’ ‘Right, darling. You nip off to bed then. I'll just disrobe in the spare room and be with you in four hours.’ Frank Randle, the Lancashire comedian, had a caravan at Accrington, close by the Hippodrome. He was against fellow performers appearing with teeth. His teeth were in his pocket (a trait adopted by John Barbirolli as he conducted the Halle) and he produced them only for the final curtain. They allowed him to talk pseudo-posh to show that he wasn't as daft as he looked. Randle joke: ‘Church bells are nice’ ‘What?’ ‘Church bells – nice’ ‘Eh?’ ‘I SAID T'CHURCH BELLS ARE NICE’ ‘Oh it's no good. Can't hear thi for them bloody bells.’ ‘And what do you want to be when you grow up?’ asked a teacher of the boy Amos Wade. ‘Please miss,’ he said, ‘Mur of Accrington.’ And you know, he was. When I left Accrington for Blackburn, where the resident lady journalist composed Doris Chats With You Over the Teacups, Mr Richard was not convinced that I could write their language. Blackburn was slightly west of Tokyo in many Accrington eyes, and although it had a nice Booth's emporium, it was marred by city slickness and made over-confident by having its own cathedral. ‘Are you sure you are ready for the big time?’ Ready? Ready, willing and able. While the future Sir Kenneth Barnes was trudging away with economics, philosophy and whatever came his featureless way at Oxford, I was soaring in clear career-choice skies with those defecating birds. Or I thought I was. The ladies' circles would miss my vivid four-line descriptions of their affairs, I imagined. But I swapped 12s6d a week for £1 willy and nilly. I would learn; I would spread; I would not necessarily get my suit at Burton's any more. My mother would no longer choose it. I would leave the bike at home; I would become a theatre critic in Blackburn's noted cultural life, and one of the very best table tennis players at the police station (basement). And lo! It came to pass. Now you see why my spreading roots have left a little cluster of twitching tendrils in Accrington And why the headline about Accrington survival gave me a start. It was Accrington Stanley again: they needed £308,000 for the Inland Revenue, otherwise it would be good luck and goodbye to them. Had to be serious. Bury were thinking of a bucket collection to help. If anybody runs into Sir Kenneth, give the poor soul the news. Features creatures in paradise It was one of those dream jobs: a few days in the West Indies and a cracking story. But you know how it is. You start thinking about the air fare and the huge hotel bill and all those daiquiris, and you know that there’s no room for slip-ups here. Yours has got to be the best piece. That was just going through my mind when, in the hotel reception – I hadn’t even reached my room – I saw the very last thing you want to see under these circumstances. Bill Greaves. Don’t get me wrong. Fine fellow, Bill. Excellent company, amusing chap, likes a glass. But he’s one of that small group of hacks who’s a fine reporter and a lovely writer. You could send him into the coal cellar wearing a blindfold and dark glasses and he’d come out with a superb colour piece. When it comes to writing, I don’t even want to be in the same country as Bill, let alone on the same island. This was Jamaica, where the Antiques Road Show was paying a visit. Frankly, it would have cheered me enormously to know that Bill was safely snuggling up to a pint in the Old Bell. But he wasn’t. He was here for the Radio Times. I was there for mag. It certainly was a great story. Why the BBC had decided to go to a country where there are no antiques, there are no antique shops and no-one even knows what the word means was never satisfactorily explained. The one thing you can be sure of is that Auntie Beeb certainly wouldn’t go halfway round the world just to give their guys a free jolly at the licence-payers’ expense. It certainly made for an interesting story. When the Beeb’s experts set up their stalls for giving valuations, the queue stretched two miles down the road. The first problem was that the Jamaicans interpreted antique to mean anything over about three-years old. And I mean anything. It looked like the left-overs from a church jumble sale. Pots, pans, kettles, hats, clothes, shoes, records, tables and chairs, more chipped than Chippendale. One man plonked down a pair of shabby trainers. ‘They’re old,’ he said, ‘but they don’t leak.’ Another said he’d like a valuation on this three-piece suite. ‘We can’t do home visits,’ said the expert. ‘No, man, I got it here,’ he replied, pointing to the furniture loaded in the back of a wagon. The expert was struggling to put a price on 1960s uncut moquette, but, anxious not to appear impolite, suggested it could be worth £100. The owner clapped in delight and held out his hand. ‘I take it, man,’ he said. They thought a valuation was an offer. Simon Bull, the watch expert, had certainly attracted a huge haul of timepieces. ‘I seem to have founded the JamaicanMuseum of Broken Fold-up Alarm Clocks,’ he said. It was a situation that called for a high level of diplomacy when Ian Pickford, the silver expert, was invited to value Captain Morgan’s Treasure – the Jamaican equivalent of the Crown Jewels – he encountered a tricky problem. As the Jamaican army stood guard over the heaps of silver, shining yellow in the hot sun, he shook his head. Captain Morgan, the buccaneer who was said to have seized the silver, had died well before the German silversmith who made it was born. Crisis time. With all eyes on him, Ian Pickford delivered a short but brilliant speech on the importance of the silver in their national history. ‘What’s the value, man?’ several of them called out. He never hesitated. ‘It’s priceless,’ he said, and their cheers swayed the coconuts in the trees. This was paradise for we features folk. We were knee-deep in snappy quotes and humorous happenings, even in the evening in the hotel. Henry Wyndham, then the show’s art expert, was leaning his six-foot-five frame against the bar to get down to my level to tell me about a conversation he’d had with one of the professional ladies in the hotel foyer. What they wore, which wasn’t much, was short, tight, and designed to display rather than cover. Henry had asked one the girls what she charged. One hundred dollars. ‘Is that US dollars or Euros?’ he asked. US, she said. ‘I am in the business of buying and selling,’ he said, ‘and that is a very serious over-valuation.’ I asked him if I could use the story. Thinking about possible embarrassment with wives and mothers, he asked me not to. Then, the next morning, he called me over to say that if I found it amusing, I could use it. He later became chairman of Sotheby’s, I believe. That evening, the High Commissioner had invited us all for dinner in the garden. We all buckled on our stiff shirts, wrestled with our hand-tied bows, and donned our travel-crumpled dinner jackets. By the light of lanterns, waiters dressed like 18th century bombardiers ferried in the wines and food and somewhere under the palm trees a small orchestra played. Henry Wyndham came in a blazer and – I’ll swear I’m not mistaken – jeans and trainers. He offered no apology or explanation. The effect was immediate. We all felt ludicrously over-dressed. Eton It never fails, does it? This was, as I guess you know by now, yet another episode in the glory days of the Mail on Sunday YOU magazine. I have noticed that when I slip into my memories, about 20 seconds later the room empties. I often wonder if there is some sort of connection. Indeed, my golfing friend Russell Twisk, former editor of Radio Times Reader’s Digest, once paused on the 14th at Petersfield after hitting a particularly fine chip shot up the hill to the green. ‘When you say Glory Days,’ he asked, innocently, ‘do you mean the days when they used your stuff?’ Why I play golf with a man capable of such demonic cruelty is quite beyond me. I was still writing for the other magazines as well. Indeed one of them asked me to write about two of my most distinguished colleagues, James Whitaker and Harry Arnold, then royal reporters for the and the It was a lovely piece to do. First, there was the contrast. James, never Jim, Harry, never Harold. With his tweed caps and sleeveless jackets, green wellies and country coats apparently fashioned from linoleum, the booming James was more royal than the royals. Son of a greengrocer, five-foot six, slick-haired and dapper, Harry was more the cocky corporal, the cheeky chappie. There was only one thing you needed to know about these two. Never stand between them and a story. You’d be trampled to death. The peak of their careers came when James traced Charles and the pregnant Diana to an island retreat in the Bahamas. By diligent probing, he found out where they sunbathed. After measuring the distance along the coastline, he then crossed to another island and measured out the same distance. At dawn the next morning, he fought his way through the jungle to the spot which would give him a clear view of the royal couple. Jagged thorns and thick foliage ripped at his designer shirt until, dripping blood, he stepped into a clearing. In the sweltering gloom of the jungle, there was just enough light to make out a figure sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette. ‘Morning James’, said Harry Arnold. ’One egg or two for breakfast?’ In the history of the tabloids, this was Stanley and Livingstone. They’d both found the right place, and sure enough Charles and Di came out on to the beach. So who won? ‘Harry wasn’t to know,’ said James, ‘but I’d got a charter plane waiting to take me to Nassau. We beat him by two editions. Poor Harry.’ ‘James didn’t realise’ said Harry, ‘but I found a wire machine on the island and we wired out stuff back. Beat him buy two editions. Poor James.’ They were, of course, both right. I’m not at all sure that it’s not the perfect Fleet Street story. In newspapers and magazines, there was a sense of an era coming to an end. The newspapers had moved to Docklands. Fleet Street was left to the bankers. In the Old Bell there was no Jim Davies or Harry Dempster, no Ed Vale or Tom Tullett in El Vino, no Charlie Catchpole or Roy Stockdill in the Wine Press. They’d all gone. Some to Docklands, some a little further. The trade-tested staff men, their substantial salaries bulked up by weekly injections of expenses, no longer packed the bars and restaurants. Instead, young men brought from the provinces on wages you wouldn’t pay to a Filipina cleaner nibbled egg sandwiches at their desks. One celebrity magazine paid what looked like recent school-leavers fifty quid a shot to do interviews, and then paid a real writer £200 to come in for a day and rewrite the lot. So they got 15 or 20 pieces for next to nothing. Entirely by luck, for the moment, I was okay. Three or four magazines had enough work to keep me ticking over nicely, although I couldn’t ignore the crash of falling circulations and the non-stop shrieks from the farewell parties. With money left over from a crashed marriage, I had bought a small weekend cottage in a village in West Sussex, which had been pointed out to me by John Dodd, former writer who as a freelance wrote for everyone from the Standard to the Observer. It was visiting the South Downs that gave me my next brilliant idea. In all these years in journalism, I’d never been an editor. I’d never been a publisher. I’d never hired writers and artists. I’d never dealt with advertising and circulation. This was my chance to experience them all. I would open my own magazine. I would show them how it’s done. I’d never been simultaneously on the edge of bankruptcy and a nervous breakdown either... Ah yes, that story in Jamaica with Bill Greaves. Who wrote the better piece? I’m afraid that question represents an intrusion into private grief. Push off. * * * * * * * Free Books * * * * * * * Listed below are the 12 books published by by, about, and for journalists. Learn more about each or every one of them by clicking on the author’s name in the Contents Column in the Bookshop Choose any THREE titles that you would like to receive FREE OF CHARGE (and also post-free in the ). Then go to the FREE BOOKS link in the contents column of the Bookshop and find out how you can order them. Whether it’s for your own reading enjoyment or as a gift for a chum, a partner, a colleague or an ex-colleague, this could solve your Christmas present problems at a stroke. Forgive Us Our Press Passes by Ian Skidmore £9.99 The Best of Vincent Mulchrone £9.99 Cassandra At His Finest And Funniest £9.99   Slip-Up: How Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard Lost Him by Anthony Delano £9.99 A Crooked Sixpence by Murray Sayle £9.99 Ladies Of The Street by Liz Hodgkinson £9.99 The UpperPleasureGarden by Gordon M Williams Crying All The Way To The Bank (Liberace v the Daily Mirror and Cassandra) by Revel Barker £15.99 Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon by Anthony Delano £9.99   by Maggie Hall £10.00 Publish and Be Damned! (The astonishing story of the Daily Mirror) by Hugh Cudlipp £12.99 To be published on November 2   A Place of Strangers by Geoffrey Seed (See this page) £9.99

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• 09 Oct 2009 11:54

  ‘Many’s the sorrowful hour you’ve had and many’s the crooked road you’ve travelled.’ She must have been with a touring company production of Macbeth. Or reading my exes. – Colin Dunne gets his fortune told Issue # 116 October 9, 2009 Another week, another book. And this one has nothing to do with newspapers or journalists – except that it is written by one. If you were wondering what had happened to Maggie Hall since she left the newsroom, the newsdesk and the New York bureau, and thinking she was last seen dancing in the Stab In The Back with a pint of ale balanced on her head, here’s the answer she’s had her head stuck in a jar of Marmite. Foreign readers may need to know that Marmite is, basically, a sandwich spread but, as Maggie reveals, it is much more than that. And it’s made from brewer’s waste. Aren’t we all ? provides the update. Last week we reported the quest by old hands to dig souvenirs of the paper out of the attic to auction and raise funds for a big reunion bash to mark the paper’s folding, 50 years ago in October next year. This jogged ’s memory about the Case Of The Missing Lowry Sketches. It’s a story in its own right – if there’s anybody out there who still recognises a news story when it’s thrust in front of their noses. And just one of the paintings would pay for a splendid lunch – for the next 50 years The same piece took Stan Blenkinsop back more than half a century, to the Cold War and the Polish border, where he was arrested for taking a photo of a road sign. He reckons that he was let out of the Soviet clink because the officer in charge was a News Chron reader. A week earlier (that would be September 25, and you can find it in the list on the left, if you’d missed it) Colin Dunne retaled how he had been robbed of an assignment that made millions for soon-to-be-best-selling-author Andrew Morton. And the mere mention of that name brought back memories for reporter Andy Leatham. That, incidentally, is how it’s supposed to work with Ranters – one story prompts another, just like it used to do in the pub. Is the cricket season over yet? Colin Henderson writes about how his paper’s team brought in a secret ringer who saved the day. However, the editor digs out an old picture from the files, revealing that their test-match-spoiler wasn’t the only ringer on the team. And Colin Dunne, still toiling relentlessly for YOU magazine, crosses several palms with silver and discovers that his future is all behind him. Girl from the black stuff When the paper she was working on folded – without warning, as they all do – Maggie Hall secured an interview with Bill Freeman, northern news editor of the Daily Mirror, with what must be the shortest job application on record: Dear Mr Freeman, Help! Help! Help! Yours sincerely. Maggie Hall (Yorkshire Evening News) She got the job. She and I had met before that when, as the youngest reporters on our competing newspapers, we’d gone to cover a rock concert in a former tram shed in Leeds. This was so long ago that The Beatles weren’t top of the bill – they were supporting Acker Bilk. We have remained mates since, even surviving the night when (for the first edition, at least) she got top by-line billing with a single-par rewrite of PA introducing my copy explaining how I’d persuaded Jeffrey Archer to resign as an MP. Yes; some things still rankle a bit, but the friendship was strong enough for me to overcome it. Sort of. Having made it to , and tiring of duplicating PA, she joined the news desk and then became Our Man in That’s where she met the ebullient Gary Humfelt, a computer engineer. Well, it’s not quite. Nothing’s ever that straightforward with Maggie. They met in China, where he was helping set up their airport technology and she was on the first organised tourist trip into the previously closed republic. Some of her story – including how she covered a Manchester United match and forgot to report the score – is told in Liz Hodgkinson’s excellent book, Ladies of The Street. But it doesn’t mention her love affair with Marmite. Wherever she’s been, from home in Cleckheaton (West Yorkshire) to the Dewsbury Reporter, the Lynn News and Advertiser (Kings Lynn) to the YENews, the , , and eventually WashingtonDC where she now lives and writes, the black stuff Gary christened Tar-in-a-jar has gone with her. And when her new husband slipped and wrecked his knee and Maggie found herself in the unlikely role of nursemaid, unable to string for the News of the WorldPeople magazine, she decided to write a book about it. It all involved intensive research and interviewing. No problem there. All the information she unearthed had the makings of a fun book. And one of her oldest chums had meanwhile become a publisher. End of story. What she’s created is the perfect bog-side book (the Americans would call it a bathroom book) for dipping into at random, packed with information you didn’t know – and didn’t even want to know – about Marmite. It is, in a word, a fun book. Remember? We used to do fun, when we were reporters. It is available now and is an ideal Christmas present for those strange people (and we know there are some, out there) who don’t want books about newspapers. Maggie and Gary, incidentally, keep up the fun. Although she’s lived in the more than 30 years, every summer finds them back in the UK at their second home in Whitby, North Yorks, hosting an Independence Day party on July 4. You can spot their place on the harbour – the Stars And Stripes flies above it. Many old hands turn up – Sid Young, Austin Wormleighton, Graham Snowden, Heather Miller among them – for the chicken wings and baked ham and find themselves singing My Country ’Tis Of Thee. Well, at least they know the tune. It’s the only day when Marmite doesn’t figure anywhere on the menu in the Hall-Humfelt household. Well, it isn’t an American staple yet. Maggie will be back in the UK later this month for an extensive tour promoting The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite – an anecdotal A to Z of tar-in-a-jar, and it's available from UK and from in the . And also in Canada from amazon And if you are one of those odd people who prefer books about newspapers and journalism, you’ll find plenty to choose from at the Ranters Bookshop Missing matchstick men The big reunion planned for next year (See , last week) to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the demise of the reminds me of an old story from way back then. It dates from my stint on the News ChronManchester before I joined the Daily Mail. That was in the early fifties. At the time we had a northern editor, new from London, called Ralph McCarthy. For some reason the cartoonist (Ronald Searle if I recall) was either sick or incapacitated. McCarthy (who later returned to London to be the last editor of the Star), was something of an art fan He wondered whether he could perhaps fill the space left by the absent cartoonist with the work of some contemporary painter. He had in mind the work of the noted Manchester artist L S Lowry. It would give the paper, he felt, a little uplift. And anyway make a change. London gave its ok – assuming Lowry agreed and wouldn't ask too much money. Lowry did agree – and offered to produce half a dozen drawings. I was assigned to go to his studio in Salford and collect them. I duly handed them over to McCarthy who ran them in the paper's northern edition over the next couple of weeks. They were scenes of everyday Salford life, such as crowds in the streets, people queuing for buses, children watching a Punch and Judy show. Did they sell papers? Were they enjoyed by northern readers? Hard to say. I only wish I had kept copies of the papers in which they ran. Flash forward a few months – some of us were drinking in our local on Cheetham Hill. The conversation got around to Lowry's drawings – ‘What happened to them?’ someone asked, looking at me ‘Where are they now?’ I said I didn't know The last I saw of them was when I handed them over to the editor, Perhaps he had them still. I offered to check the next day. ‘No’, he told me. ’Don't you have them? Perhaps the art editor has them,’ he ventured. No; not there. Nor with the chief sub. Nobody knew what happened to the Lowrys. Or at least, nobody would say. Perhaps they were returned to the artist? Possibly, but to ask and find they had not been returned might create a new problem, opening a new can of worms. Nobody ever said any more. No more questions. So there the mystery has remained for more than 50 years. Now if somebody did purloin – or to put it more gently ‘borrow’ – those Lowry drawings, and still has them, they would be worth, I would hazard, a lot of money today. Certainly, enough to pay for a whizz-bang of a reunion party. So Anybody know where they are? Get out and meet the readers By Stanley Blenkinsop As one of the few editorial survivors of the News Chronicle which suddenly folded on us I will always be particularly grateful I was then on the staff of that Liberal-minded million-copies-a-day paper (22 months in all at £25 a week). But for that it could have been a matter of life or death for me behind the Iron Curtain as you will see I had joined the paper as its Newcastle upon Tyne based north-east district man on the last day of December 1958. During September 1959 I went on the first ‘Cooks Tour’ to the Soviet Union – by luxury coach from London across Europe via Berlin and Warsaw to Moscow, Leningrad and then back via the Baltic aboard a somewhat Spartan Russian liner to London (three weeks in all). And, no, it wasn’t a newspaper freebie – I paid the full whack. As we went across the Polish-Soviet border at Brest-Litovsk there was strict security by the Russian border guards. There was also a giant hoarding showing the road onwards to Moscow – a most impressive placard explaining the route to the world capital of Communism. ‘Make a good souvenir picture,’ I thought and I pulled out my camera to record it. But as I clicked away two Russian solders brandishing their sub-machine guns suddenly swooped on me and hustled me into the border guard post. In a meticulous strip search they emptied all my pockets then strode out slamming the steel-studded dungeon door. Truly the Iron Curtain had fallen. After what seemed an age in the unlit and windowless room, the door suddenly clanged open and soldiers jostled me out to a spartan office dominated by a picture of Lenin. Beneath it sat an impeccably dressed middle-aged man in what looked like a Savile Row suit. On his desk lay some of my pocket possessions – Press card, diary, note book. In near-perfect English the man smiled and said: ‘So which British newspaper do you work for?’ ‘The News Chronicle,’ I replied His smile broadened still further, ‘Excellent – the best British newspaper of all. My favourite – I read it every day when I am staying at our London embassy. In fact I often get copies sent to Moscow in the diplomatic bag when I’m back in Mother Russia’. Proudly he explained that he was in the ‘Soviet department of foreign affairs’ and had just returned to Moscow after a three month posting in Britain. Then he rolled out the names of the News Chron’s best known journalists like James Cameron and Vernon Bartlett. Suddenly he stopped. ‘Apologies – we mustn’t keep you any longer – your friends on the coach are getting very worried by the delay.’ He accompanied me towards the bus, getting one of the border guards to carry my luggage which had been searched but carefully re-packed. As I boarded, he flicked back his jacket lapel. ‘Yes’ he said ‘This suit WAS made in Savile Row!’ And off we went to the world capital of Communism with the border guards waving their tommy guns in salute. But 50 years later I still wonder if the outcome would have been different had I not been working for a Liberal newspaper like the News Chronicle. Would I have been freed so easily had I been taking pictures of the Iron Curtain while working for the or the ? Incidentally, during the 27 years following the Brest-Litovsk incident and the News Chron closure a month later, I was a journalist on both of those ardent right-wing newspapers. All tied up By Andrew Leatham This may not be much comfort to Colin Dunne (, September 25), but I knew Andrew Morton when he had nowt. Tall, gangly, fresh-faced and wearing owl-eyes sized glasses, he arrived at the Sunday People in Manchester on attachment from the Mirror Group training scheme in Plymouth. A member of the Plymouth Brethren. We introduced him to the finer points of life in and around Deansgate – Sinclair’s Oyster Bar, the Old Grapes, Manchester Press Club and that wonderful institution The Golden Eagle, the little office on the fourth floor where beer tokens could be obtained in exchange for a piece of paper, signed by the editor, which promised you would repay out of next week’s exes. Once, in the cause of furthering his journalistic education, I had to take him to to confront BT with a story I had already bottomed about an issue that was costing them thousands of pounds a week. The story, which had been found by the People’s Newcastle snapper, the dapper Dennis Hutchinson, was about a single pay phone among a bank of about 10 at the Washington service area on the A1M which had developed a fault that meant you could ring China, any time of day or night, for as long as you wanted for just 10p. News of this had spread rapidly among the Chinese population, not just of the North East, but just about the entire country. On the night photographer Harold Holborn and I visited Washington, the car park was full and there was a queue of around 50 Chinese waiting to use the phone. We called it The Great Chinese Talk Away. Mr Morton, nice lad that he was, obviously didn’t have four million quid to rub together in those days and his open-necked shirt fell somewhat short of dapper Dennis’s sartorial standards. After a couple of pints, Dennis could contain himself no more and berated Mr M for not wearing a tie. ‘You can’t go round talking to people looking like that,’ he started. ‘It’s not that long ago when everybody had to wear a white shirt and a dark suit. Look at the state of you.’ And with that, he persuaded the barman to lend Mr M a tie. Off we went, me, Dennis and the Man Who Would Be a Millionaire, to BT’s North East headquarters in the city centre. Ushered into the presence of some engineering bigwig, we told him of the monstrous misuse of BT equipment we had fearlessly uncovered. While we spoke, he picked up the phone and issued some instructions. About 10 minutes later another engineering lesserwig came in and said simply: ‘We’ve fixed it.’ Apparently the fault was caused by some minor problem that was literally fixed at the flick of a switch. So we had our story, BT had its reputation intact and Mr Morton had learnt a valuable lesson in life. He left Newcastle with Dennis’s parting shot ringing in his ears: ‘Next time you come on my patch, wear a tie.’ Andrew left the People to join the fledgling Daily Star not long afterwards. I didn’t see him for a couple of years until I bumped into him coming out of a restaurant in Manchester’s Chinatown. And he was wearing a tie. Another People exposé By Colin Henderson In the sunshine of a summer day some 30 summers ago, a People cricket team prepares (see picture) for battle in the Weald of Kent. Instantly recognisable, back row left, is John du Pré (Dupers) making, at close on 60, his final appearance in the middle after decades as a club cricketer, and front right, with bat, umpire Nat Rothman. For about 15 years ‘Gentleman’ John, an assistant editor, subbed virtually all the People's major exposures. And with his clipped moustache, sleek black hair and immaculate French, through a Jersey upbringing, he appeared many times in a Paris glossy magazine in the sixties, complete with bowler, pinstripe suit and rolled-up umbrella, as a typical City gent-in-the-know and out and about in But John and cigar-smoking lawyer Nat, formerly the paper's deputy editor then leader writer, are not the main attractions in the photo, taken on Leigh (pronounced Lie), green near Tonbridge. Look closely at the cove in the blue cap in the back row and, to his left, People reporter Dan Wooding. As skipper of the team, which was taking on a side from the village, once a major cricket ball and cricket bat manufacturing centre, I was grateful when Dan showed up with a friend as we were, not unusually, not one, but two men short. ‘He's quite useful and very keen to play,’ said Dan. People batted first. Badly. But our ringer, Mr Blue Cap, coming in at No.7, tonked a breezy 70 to make the score reasonable. He arrowed the ball in over the stumps when we fielded. As our mainline attack floundered, I gave him the ball. In no time he had taken four wickets and our 10-man squad just got home. Later in the pub — the Bat and Ball, naturally — I went over with a pint to congratulate our classy match-winner who stood modestly in a corner, and asked which team he played for. Dan stepped forward. ‘Don't press him too much,’ he hissed. ‘I'm afraid he's got a bit of history.’ And so it proved. Dan revealed, later, that he had got to know his pal when working on the George Davis Is Innocent story. Mr Blue Cap was associated with everyone concerned in the campaign and had been involved with the group that dug up the Headingley pitch during the Test against the Aussies in 1975. With oil also poured over one end of the pitch, the match was abandoned. Naturally, his involvement in this act of desecration in support of the headline-grabbing East London mini-cab driver had not gone down well in the tasty London cricketing circuit in which he had been involved, and even now it was proving difficult for him to find teams to play for. Hence his acceptance of Dan's offer to turn out for the People It wasn't the sort of information that I wanted my village pals to hear. Besides producing cricket equipment, our picturesque green had staged the sport for more than 200 years, hosting Kent county teams. Only recently, Colin Cowdrey and Aussie star John Inverarity, who lived for a time in the village, had graced the ground, while Yorkshire's finest, Michael Parkinson, had been dismissed cheaply playing for a Granada XI (Lord Bernstein had a large gaff nearby). To let the village team know that anyone connected with such an abhorrent exercise as pitch-wrecking had trodden on their hallowed wicket would have got me blackballed. Dan and Mr Blue Cap's departure for home was a relief. It took me more than a decade to let rip in the same pub my yorker about the People's grievous crime. There were some mutterings among the committee members, but the situation was saved when one observed: ‘I never liked the People but I got it to read the Trueman column.’ Now if Fiery Fred had been playing for us that day.... Footnote 1: John du Pré, is still completing life's innings, in a care home in a Wiltshire abbey. Next to him in the back row are Chris Evenden, Colin Henderson and Mervyn Pamment, with, far right, the Leigh umpire. Front row from left: Roy Wright, Mike Slate, David Alford and Frank Thorne. Footnote 2: The George Davis campaign helped get Davis released — he had been banged up on weak evidence for a payroll attack in Essex in 1974. However, he was later jailed for two other armed robberies. One man went to prison for the Headingley incident. But, talking of ringers, here’s the Sunday Mirror first XI, playing at the Oval. And yes art desk guy Roy Wright was playing for both teams. Happily for him, the Sunday Mirror never turned out against the People SM team is: Vic Birkin, Peter Cook, Big Mal, Paul Donovan, Dave Ellis, Brian Checkley.Front: Graham Gadd, Keith Fisher, Russell Cox, Ringer Wright, Terry Saunders. Back to the future By Colin Dunne This life-story is taking longer to write than it did to live. Most of those who were here at the start, about 100,000 words ago, will have been driven by boredom to get the single ticket to Dignitas (or, for pensioners, the cheaper option at Beachy Head). Those who are still clinging to the wreckage may remember that, in those early days, I rather resented being sent to interview talking dogs and running in lawnmower races. This, I felt, was poor preparation for my career as one of those hotshot foreign corrs of the here-in-blazing-Beirut school. As it turned out, I was much more at home with dogs and lawnmowers than with war and pestilence. My only skill, and a pretty slender one at that, was for plaiting fog: writing stories with as few facts as possible; occasionally – in moments of true inspiration – with none at all. It took me a little while to settle to the idea that I was essentially a writer of candy-floss crap. When YOU, the Mail on Sunday colour magazine, came along, I whooped with delight. This was a magazine where they loved the off-beat, the quirky, the whacky and the slightly nutty, all of which were within my range of accomplishments. In fact, they were the total sum of my accomplishments. I had found my natural home. So, inevitably, one of the first things they did was to send me to . Editors and their assistants usually come up with the idea round about the fourth bottle over a languid Langan’s lunch, largely, I suspect, because they don’t believe there is such a place. So when writers and snappers come back with stories of smelly donkeys and clattering trams it’s as near as they wish to get to the real world. Since I was thought to speak the language, I was sent there several times. But since YOU mag was the best ideas factory I ever came across, it was with a brief of delightful brevity: Find the original Gypsy Rose Lee. Now anyone who has ever fooled around in the shallow end of our trade will know that the best ideas are both simple and silly. What you don’t want is an idea that comes with a list of people to interview and questions to ask them. As we all know, it’s much better just to go along and see what happens. Find Gypsy Rose Lee? You couldn’t get much simpler, could you? Or sillier. Practically the first thing I saw on the promenade was a sign outside a gypsy fortune-teller’s booth that yelled: ‘Read what Colin Dunne Wrote about Me in the Daily Mirror.’ That was from an earlier visit. What I had said about her was that when it came to second-sight, she was in serious need of bifocals, but somehow that bit seemed to have been omitted from the cutting. Where the soothsayers were spot on was that they saw a skinny Yorkshireman with a fat wallet heading their way, and soon it would be stripped bare. If you really want to get rid of your money quickly, this was on a par with playing poker with Sid Williams. Nowhere could I see Gypsy Rose Lee. On prom, they were all called Petulengro, which apparently is the Romany version of Smith, and they were all accustomed to dealing with the world’s leading glitterati. Outside their booths, beneath photos of famous faces, they assured Bruce Willis that he’d got a TV biggie coming up, that Liz Taylor had health problems, and Warren Beatty was restless. What’s more, these stars of that time hadn’t even had to extend their palms. These were free samples. For me, they weren’t quite so free. The crystal ball was £50 even then, and that was without broadband. A five got me a quick palm-reading and my future was laid before me. Money, success, health and happiness were heading my way in embarrassing profusion, so were grandchildren – nine at least – and I would be going over water. Not bad, eh? And that was long before we even knew about Ryanair. So far I’ve got only five grandchildren, but I’ve had a word with my kids about it and they’re going to try again. The gypsies predicted a long life with good health, which, as they said, was better than a long life with poor health. And better still than having perfect health when you’re dead. Would this be in the magazine, they wanted to know. Yes, I assured them; you can buy it at W H Petulengro’s. I continued the search at Epsom on Derby Day where the racecourse was lined with Lees: Harriet Lee, Maria Lee, Nancy Lees, Betsy Lee, and probably a Robert E, if you looked hard enough. According to their posters, they’d made some astonishing predictions. They’d told the former Prince of Wales that he’d be crowned but would never be king. They’d told John Lennon what fate awaited him. They’d told Grace Kelly she would be a princess. Of course since this was all after the event, it was predicting the future with hindsight, which certainly makes for greater accuracy. It was then I learnt the secret rallying call of the ancient Romanies. Wave a wallet in the air and they’re all around you in less time than it takes to bake a hedgehog. They all gazed into my eyes and said I was clearly a gen’l’man who was generous with money. Like their sisters in , they too had had all the stars in. ‘Like that Judith Chandler.’ Did she mean perhaps mean Raymond Chalmers, the well-known thriller TV presenter? But the best, the one who was real value for Rothermere money, was old Betsy, who crooned: ‘Many’s the sorrowful hour you’ve had and many’s the crooked road you’ve travelled.’ She must have been with a touring company production of Macbeth. Or reading my exes. As I was picking my way through the line of shining Mercedes behind the caravans, a shirtless man who was no bigger than a furniture van beckoned me over and said he earnestly hoped I wouldn’t be writing anything unfavourable about the fortune-tellers. As he said this, he ran a plastic comb through his chest hair, a surprisingly intimidating gesture. I looked around for Bradshaw, my fearless photographic companion, and saw he was moving away rather faster than the nag I’d backed in the 2.30. He’d seen the future and he didn’t think much of it. Whenever you hear those occupying lower ranks of journalism presume to rate their officer class, you must remember that there is an unseen influence at work here. It’s not so much about the intelligence, creativity and flair rating of the editors: it really comes down to whether or not they used my stuff. So when I say that Peter Stephens on the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle, the Freeman-Price team at the Mirror, or Larry Lamb and Nick Lloyd at the , were of the journo-genius class, you’ve got to allow for the fact that they put me in the paper day after day. If I rave less about the Molloy-Hagerty and Kelvin-Greenslade double-acts at the Mirror and Sun respectively, I am possibly influenced by the memory that they were able to survive for weeks without reading my by-line. Inexplicable, I know. Even so, when I say that the team which produced YOU magazine was the best I ever encountered in half-a-century of non-stop typing, you’ve got to bear in mind that they commissioned me almost every week, sentme on the sort of stories I dreamed about, and then kept stuffing fat cheques through my letterbox. That’s all true. Equally it’s true that newsagents reported their customers were stealing the magazine out of the Mail on Sunday and slipping it between the pages of the Sunday Times. So it wasn’t just my vanity. Well, not completely. With Nick Gordon and Felicity Hawkins running it, Jonathan Bouquet, John Koski and John Chenery doing the commissioning, YOU mag was simply the wittiest and most original editorial team I ever met. Their idea was that if it’s fun to write, it’s fun to read, which beats Honi Soit as a motto, hands down. Bradshaw didn’t always escape quite so easily. When we went to spend a little time with Katy Cropper in Wensleydale, he was left – okay, we were both left – in need of intensive care. Raucous, warm-hearted, riotously funny and startlingly pretty, Katy had won television’s One Man and His Dog and toured the country shows with her travelling circus of dogs, ducks, sheep and pony. When we found her in the Moorcock Inn at Garsdale Head, she picked up a large gin and warned both of us: ‘Don’t try to drink with me.’ With my three-drink capacity, I thought then I must careful. Bradshaw, always the macho smoothie, gave the forgiving smile of man who’s been around a bit (everywhere from El Vino to Vagabonds, not to mention the Florida bars of the Enquirer) but doesn’t like to boast. He certainly wasn’t unduly alarmed by ahem, a shepherdess. That was his first mistake. His second was promising to help her round up her animals for tomorrow’s show at 5.30am. I’d like to say that I’ll never forget that evening. The truth is that I can hardly remember any of it. There were gins. There were tonics. Large ones. Again and again. There was Katy tossing those black curls back as she belted out ‘Old Shep’. There were glasses of wine, well more like buckets really, in her cottage, once you’d fought your way through the letters, old bills, muddy wellies, silver cups, and designer clothes – this was a woman who had her hair cut by Toni and Guy in London or did it herself with sheep shears when at home. ‘Shut up you daft buggers,’ she shouted, as her dogs start barking. Then, another crisis: ‘Bloody ’ell, I’ve got to clip me sheep’s bottoms.’ Back in the pub, with her dog Trim sitting beside her, paw on bar, she declared she would never have children. ‘You haven’t seen what sheep go through,’ she said. Then she began to tell us, and Bradshaw and I begged her to sing Old Shep – yet again. In a dark Dales dawn the next morning, I was praying for death. Staggering with exhaustion, face a sick yellow, coughing piteously, Bradshaw, to his great credit, helped to round up her eight dogs, 19 ducks, five sheep (including a black one called Fergie and its lamb, Beatrice), and one pony in her truck and trailer. Bradshaw never did say whether he’d helped clip the sheep’s bottoms, and I never liked to ask. YOU mag liked what Felicity called ‘ripping yarns’, and there were few more ripping than the aristocratic German family who, threatened by the advancing Russians in 1945, buried the family silver in field near their mansion in Magdeburg and fled west. After the Wall came down, they went back to try to find it. With Bradshaw yet again, I went to Bremen where, our stringer had assured us, they were expecting us and would relate the whole story. They did. Unfortunately they related it in German. They were the only Germans I have ever met who spoke no English. When Bradshaw and I walked in, Herr Shroeder and his wife sat at the table, smiling, with an Anglo-German dictionary in front of them. It took all that day and most of the next to get the story: but it was good stuff. Herr Shroeder was about six when the war ended and he could remember helping to wrap the silver in newspapers and put the goodies in a huge chest before dragging it down the field to bury. He knew exactly where: right next to the wooden stables. Unfortunately, when they got there the stables had long gone. By chance, he managed to find an ancient parlour maid who could remember where the stables used to be. Sure enough, they unearthed dozens of huge silver cups and plates. YOU also liked fly-on-the-wall pieces, which I always enjoyed doing. Real reporters like being up at the front, asking questions and demanding answers. Delicate little features creatures like me are better employed lurking and skulking on the fringes, which is the way to do wall-fly pieces. At Al’s car auction in South London, I lurked while Al himself sat behind barred windows. Experience had taught him to keep a little distance between himself and any disappointed customers. Although he was merely a middleman who took the entrance fee and commission, he had ended up hospital with broken bones. There was the Austin Princess that was down at the front and had been levelled up by filling the boot with ready-mix concrete. The buyer had to get it out with a road drill. The auctioneer’s patter said it all. A battered Lada had lots of extras ‘pump-up tyres, see-through windows, opening doors.’ About once a fortnight, I’d be summoned to the Wodka restaurant just behind the office, where Koski, Bouquet, Houlihan and Chenery would suggest a final polish to the last piece, hand out the brief for the next one, wave up the red wine and the hunters’ stew, and – every once in a while – inflict a unilateral fee increase on me. It beat coal-face work. It worked because they all knew exactly what the magazine wanted. Each idea was carefully worked out, and they matched stories to writers with infinite care. With a dream set-up like this, it seemed to me impossible for any writer to fail That’s not quite true. Out of the scores of pieces I wrote over the years for them, only one failed to make it. I was paid for it, of course. Do you think anyone would notice if I tried to flog it again? Once a freelance You'll either love it or hate it! It's the non-newspaper gift for Christmas... Nothing to do with journalism - except that it is written by a former reporter, Maggie Hall, who was correspondent for the Daily Mirror. then a freelance in WashingtonDC Purely as a change from reading about newspapers and newspaper people, The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite makes the perfect gift for people who are interested in food - especially when it happens to be British and a bit quirky. A book for all tastes – literally. No matter where you stand on the big Marmite ‘love-hate’ debate, you will find something in it to your liking. As the title indicates, it contains a mish-mash of information - from serious to silly with lots in between - about the iconic British spread. From its beginnings as brewing industry yeast-waste to its use in the finest restaurants, this book reveals the grip Marmite has on palates - and minds - around the world. The tales it tells amount to a social history, covering more than 100 years. It is crammed with insights into how it all began, the old-time recipes, its place in medicine, its role in education and wars, its many unlikely uses (apart from eating it), and much more.   All of which add up to an amazing feat for a humble kitchen cupboard product.   But above all it’s a fun read about the zany world occupied by Marmite. The lovers of the spread will love the book. But they will also hate it - because of all the ammunition the ‘loathers’ will find within its pages to hurl at them.   Even those who have no interest in Marmite and know nothing about it will find something to grab them - and be converted... either one way or the other.

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• 02 Oct 2009 05:55

  ‘You don’t often see it around, but take my advice: if you do come across it, leap on it and lap it up.’ – the Pulpfiction website, describing Tony Delano’s second book on Fleet Street scoops Issue # 115 October 2, 2009 We moaned about the shortage (by which we meant the near-total lack) of obits and we have one this week from Ray Snoddy, one of the first guys to make a living out of writing – authoritatively – about this trade. What does the science editor of the Financial Times do with his copy when the bench spikes it? David Fishlock sent it instead to Erotic Review. Well, you would. That’s the sort of tale that doesn’t get told, unless a mate writes an obit. And, a bit late, but none the worse for that, Paddy O’Gara dredges from his fuddled memory a short about Waterhouse (see also Ranters, passim). The News Chronicle died almost half a century ago. Amazingly, its survivors still meet every year and are now planning a big thrash for the 50th anniversary lunch next year. When the paper folded the Newcastle staff was: Jimmy Dolan and Stanley Blenkinsop, photographer Alan Haughton and sports reporter George Taylor. Now ex-sub Tom Welsh wants to know: Anybody got any old Chron stuff in the attic? Comedian Les Dawson – not a journalist but a lovely writer – is being remembered by Louis Barfe. There must be loads of untold stories about Les, who never refused a chat. And Louis is looking for more of them, for a book. Is it too early to write the obit on this government? moves from the bright lights of the big city (last week) to the illuminations of Blackpool and relives some strange times at Labour party conferences. With odd memories of Lancaster Jeff Blyth pens an obituary to the United States. But it’s only the liner on whose maiden voyage he sailed 57 years ago, and which may now be doomed for the scrapyard. Joyce McKinney, last we heard, is still alive and well, but her life has been chronicled by Tony Delano. You know all about it, of course. But a reminder never hurt anybody, Revel Barker reckons. Way to go By Raymond Snoddy David Fishlock, science editor of the Financial Times for nearly 25 years, was staying in the Swan Hotel Southwold, Friday before last. He had a breakfast of smoked haddock and two poached eggs and then toddled across the road to a traditional butchers where he picked up two ham hocks, miles of sausages and pork pies to take home. He keeled over with a heart attack after stepping out of the hotel lift. He was 77. A qualified chemist, David was one of the most distinguished science writers of his generation and had the gift of being able to talk to Nobel prize winners and relate the importance of their discoveries in language that the average FT reader could understand. In fact his greatest achievement over more than 45 years of technical and scientific journalism was to act as an ‘interpreter’ between the worlds of academic and research science and those of business and investment. His books included The Business of Science, The Business of Biotechnology, The New Materials Man Modified, a review of the rapidly changing nature of medicine and technology. In retirement he founded and published, for more than 10 years, the monthly R & D Efficiency, a newsletter devoted to understanding how large multi-national corporations could best organise their research and development activities. It became almost an international private club for the world’s leading R & D executives. He was awarded honorary doctorates by both Salford and Bath universities. David Fishlock was perhaps best known for his understanding of, and support for, the nuclear industry in all its manifestations – from nuclear bombs to nuclear energy. He never wavered in his support despite the Three-MileIsland and Chernobyl accidents. In later years he was quietly pleased that nuclear energy was once again taking centre stage in the fight against man-made global warming – though naturally he was sceptical about the man-made part of that equation. David Fishlock was never shy about engaging environmental campaigners in public when he thought – as was often the case – that their arguments were based on poor science. He once caused consternation in Jordans in Buckinghamshire where he lived by writing an article in the FT arguing that he would be perfectly happy for nuclear waste to be stored in his village. He hadn’t bothered to consult his neighbours before offering the location. When animal rights protesters turned up at his home because he had shares in Huntingdon Life Sciences he turned a hosepipe on them – and immediately doubled his investment. As David Kynaston, author of the centenary history of the FT noted, David Fishlock had even ‘enthusiastically’ endorsed President Reagan’s Star Wars project though the paper itself decided the move would be more likely to re-ignite the arms race rather than render it obsolete. Despite his personal views he won a British Press Award in 1986 for his objective coverage of the Chernobyl disaster and was one of the first to reveal that there had been a massive explosion at the plant. David Jocelyn Fishlock was born in Bath on August 9 1932 and was educated at City of Bath Boys School and the Bristol College of Technology. After National Service in Hong Kong he spent seven years working for the Westinghouse Brake and Signal Co before becoming a technical journalist with McGraw Hill in . After five years working for New Scientist as technology editor he was recruited by the legendary FT editor Sir Gordon Newton to be science editor with the aim of expanding science coverage in a paper that was still emerging from its earlier rather narrow City origins. It was a role he fulfilled, accompanied by prodigious journalistic lunches of the old-fashioned variety, for successive editors until his retirement in 1991. One of the many paradoxes about the man despite his deep knowledge of hard science was his inability to master simple devices of the current age such as mobile phones, computers and e-mail. He insisted on writing in longhand, starting usually around 4am, and then had the work typed up, or entered into a computer. His troubles with the equipment caused difficulty a year ago when asked to write an obituary on a pioneer of the British nuclear industry for the Independent. How to get the copy across in time? With great glee he found out that the Press Association still maintained a copy-taker for emergencies such as those. David Fishlock was a larger-than-life character in every sense of the word – serious about science but passionate about everything from real ale to obscure Scottish distilleries, from traditional butchers and offal to scientific instruments and the history of chastity belts. He was irritated that the FT unaccountably declined his illustrated article on the chastity belt. No matter, the Erotic Review snapped it up and he happily listed his links with that organ in Who’s Who alongside his work as columnist for rather different publications, such as Nuclear Europe Worldscan and Chemistry World He was awarded the Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977 and made an OBE in 1983. He is survived by Mary, his wife of nearly 50 years, and his son Bill who publishes Business in East Anglia WATERHOUSE How far did you go? By Patrick O’Gara Reading all the tales about Keith brought this back. Hundreds of years ago (the Seventies, no doubt) and in a bar (absolutely no doubt), Keith, Jeff Bernard and myself formed a small and exclusive club called The Gonetoofar. The sole qualification for membership was to have been told by at least three women – preferably wives – ‘This time you have gone too far, you bastard.’ The last two words were optional. Jeff was nominated president by acclaim. I cannot recall whether we ever acquired any other members. If we did, and if any have survived (unlikely, to be sure) will they please make themselves known so work can proceed on a reunion before it is entirely too late. Cash in the attic? By Tom Welsh News Chronicle veterans planning to attend the annual get-together on October 15 (a lunch-time party at the Witness Box in Tudor Street ) have been set a challenge. The organiser, Betty Thomson (ex-Chron reporter and daughter of Francis Williams, editor of the Daily Herald), wants to collect funds towards a grand anniversary occasion next year to mark the 50th anniversary of the paper’s closure, and is asking for ‘anything that is Chronicle-orientated and worth selling’ – for a raffle. What a predicament that will be for the old gang! I have three cherished Chronicle objects. The first is my framed copy of the last issue on October 17, 1960, which has hung on my wall for 49 years and would be missed. Beside it, and the same size as the front page, hangs the framed original of a splendid cartoon by Ronald Searle entitled ‘Layman’s guide to the journalist’s anatomy’, showing a bedraggled figure complete with his notebook and with a ‘60 proof’ bottle projecting from his pocket. His ‘anatomy’ is itemised in detail – ‘coat for turning’, ‘eye for the news’, ‘forelock for touching’, and so on. I won it in the raffle at the ‘wake’ that marked the Chron’s closure all those years ago. How could I part with it now? But my most cherished Chronicle memento is neither of these, though the memories it brings back are far from happy. In fact they recall my two most traumatic experiences in The Street. My first night on the paper was, unfortunately, memorable for all involved. In 1959 I was subbing on the Oxford Mail when it was hit by a printers’ strike, so I was able to go to Bouverie Street for a three-night trial on the subs desk. Frank Saunders, chief sub, explained I had to write my name, Welsh, on the top folio of all my stuff. I had a busy evening. I was quite surprised at the number of stories I had to handle. It was my first visit to a national newspaper subs room, but as the evening drew on I sensed that something was going badly wrong. The back bench kept getting into a huddle. Finally Frank dashed down and said, ‘For Christ’s sake stop putting your name on the top of your copy. It’s all going in the galleys for the Welsh edition.’ We narrowly avoided missing the trains with the first edition that night. The incident was recalled even in the trauma of the Chronicle’s last night. Robin Findlay, who was chief subbing, had sent two completed pages away when head printer Harry East came in looking puzzled. Didn’t Robin know the paper wasn’t coming out that night? Harry had just sent the blocks for the cartoons to the , in which they would be appearing the following day. When finally the news sank in, I went to the composing room to say goodbye to the printers. Harry presented me with the rubber stamp that said simply ‘Welsh’, and which he had used to stamp all my first-night copy. He said it would be a reminder of another night he would prefer to forget. I still treasure it. (I suppose technically it still belongs to Mr Cadbury.) Much later that night, tired and emotional, I returned to the office with Peter Vlieland, another sub, to get my coat. In the Mucky Duck I had said the best memento would be the bust of Charles Dickens, the paper’s first editor, which stood on a pedestal prominently in the front hall. In the foyer a television team was interviewing the commissionaire, so while no one was looking (I’m not proud of this!), as Peter and I went up the stairs we lifted the bust off its pedestal and carried it up. The great man was surprisingly light. By the time we reached the first floor the idea had lost its appeal and we left him there. Later revellers, finding him, deposited him head downwards in a bucket in the men’s loo on the fifth floor, where he was found the following morning. (Sorry about that, Mr Dickens. I know it wasn’t your fault.) The had a neat cartoon illustrating the former editor’s plight. Now, that bust would really have been a memento worth raffling. Sed Les By Louis Barfe I am writing a biography of Les Dawson, celebrating his life and career. If any Ranters encountered him and are willing to share their memories of him with me, I'd be very pleased to hear from them. Going through the cuttings, he seems to have always had an excellent relationship with the press, but then he seems to have got on with absolutely everyone, which is wonderful for me, spending a year or more of my life following his trail. I have already interviewed many of his former writers and producers, but always have room for more memories of the man. My email address is jabberment@louisbarfe.com . Thanks, in advance. The Golden Mile with Uncle Joe Sawdust mouths, hangovers, clattering tongues, smiling deception, rampant egos ... ah, those wonderful political party conferences where ambitious people of all kinds and persuasions paraded their talents like tarts in a side street. Not BrightonBlackpool for me, of course. Where else? Political writers from Dahn Sarf were never really happy with Blackpool. Didn't go with the proper image. Not up their Shaftesbury Avenue at all, this Norf. I wasn't too sure about it myself at times, but loyalty, loyalty. You know what it is. You have to defend the territory of your birth and stop people noticing too much. Uncle Joe's Mint Balls, for example. To Sarfs, the name was hilarious. If you were out and about with the writers, you could conceal tins by standing in front of the display, but if you succeeded there, they always spotted the advert from the windows of their train returning to Euston, and another jokey column would be born. It usually followed the one drawing attention to the appalling state of food in this or that Blackpool establishment. That hurt. Well, twinged. Prime Ministers and Prime Ministers-in-waiting used the same suite at the Imperial Hotel and in advance of one or other of them, I went on a security patrol of my own – eating a mint ball of course – and stared at the precise place where they would put their feet in the bath, wearing the same shower cap. It somehow put life into perspective, this naked truth. The proper security lads gave everything the once-over, unscrewing the bath panels and so forth. But I found – exclusive! – a shoelace in a plant pot, buried two inches beneath the surface. It had plainly escaped their attention. A fuse of some sort? It looked harmless enough, but you never know. It could have been controlled by radio. Innocent until primed, creeping out of its pot, guided onto the floor at dead of night and edging itself towards the vulnerable neck of one of our Great Leaders, there to strangle him, or her, in sleep. I didn't tell anybody. I reasoned that if a prime minister was garrotted by the shoe lace, I had an exclusive. We all have to make a living. What's more, I put my Uncle Joe's wrapper in the plant pot, too. There was nowhere else suitable. When Sir Trevor Evans, industrial man for the , turned up, he introduced me, at different times, to two people: Harold Wilson and a Great Writer. Wilson kindly told me what the weather in Blackpool was like at the time (nasty), then exited to pay full attention to his pipe. Great Writer bored the hell out of me all night long. Literally all night. Evans knew what he was doing. He went to bed, leaving me with this endless gramophone of rasping sandpaper. Great Writer went through his life several times – ‘This hotel in the Middle East... Got talking to the owner... We chatted about people we knew... This (internationally known) name cropped up... How a man can contrive to defecate on the ceiling of his room...’ Was I hearing aright? On and on. Next morning, at breakfast, he walked right by my table and obviously didn't know me. The shoelace sprang to mind. If only I could find its controls and head it towards his neck I was sitting with a large group at a conference when Terry Lancaster, then a political writer, went by. He was following Bob Edwards (the People), his editor. ‘Hello!’ I called to Lancaster, and he carried on without expression, turning, and mouthing the word, ‘Later.’ I was a bit miffed. We knew each other well. The walk-by reminded me of another place, another time: our earlier incarnation together when I tried to nobble Fidel Castro. (I know you did not expect him to step in at this point so I will wait until you adjust your concentration... Ready?) It was all down to a Yates's wine lodge and what they called Australian Red All-ins. I tried one or two and think the slices of lemon might have been 'off.' At any rate, it occurred to me that I should talk to Havana It seemed entirely reasonable at that precise moment, and possibly only at that precise moment. The world was in torment because of tensions between Cuba and the US. The Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, was about to go to the United Nations. So I went to the library, and looked up Cuba. There it was, convenient to America. A mere inch away. And the lot only six inches away from my office. A doddle. I sent a telegram to Havana saying that I would appreciate a word with Fidel. Quietly, like. I was alarmed – the effect of the lemon had worn off – when I got a message back saying that the leader was on his way to and would I make contact there? This posed a serious problem. How was I to explain to the in my urgent need to talk to Fidel Castro in ? I decided to admit to the foreign editor that I had flipped. That foreign editor was, at the time, Terry Lancaster, the very Terry Lancaster who had whispered ‘Later’ in Blackpool. Well, he thought the matter over carefully indeed and with Solomon's wisdom concluded that if I left Castro alone, he would not interfere with Manchester United. Those were his very words. Deal done. Would that Cuba had been settled so simply. We had a reasonable relationship, you see, which is why I could not understand the whispered ‘later’. Mr Lancaster in his Express days had been despatched to to hide. He was in waiting for Higher Things. It was felt that he might reasonably sit next to me in Features, and supply what help he could. It wasn't much since he couldn't sub. He made up for it by talking. When the man in charge of 's Hickey phoned to complain that his work was being supplanted by Northern stuff in Manchester and threatened all kinds of dire consequences, not excluding excommunication, Lancaster was hopping about by my side sensing an enjoyable fight. Better still, fun. ‘Tell him to bugger off,’ he advised. ‘Tell him, tell him! We'll decide, here, not him. Tell him...’ Well it was all right saying ‘Tell him’ but I had a mortgage, a wife and three children and decided on caution. I advised the Hickey man that I was responsible to only to my editor so any complaints should be addressed to him. There was a brooding sense of unease for weeks. In the meantime, I had dinner with Lancaster and backed my car into a tree afterwards. A slice of lemon again, I suspect. I was a martyr to them. He was in another car and I heard shrieking laughter alerting anything within 500 yards of my dilemma. He had just eaten an abnormally large scampi. ‘Mine,’ he proudly announced to the restaurant in general, ‘has gout.’ Anyway, there we were in Blackpool, Great Writer, Lancaster, Bob Edwards, a prime minister, a stalking shoelace (maybe), plus, possibly, Norf-Sarf unease about Uncle Joe's mint balls. And what sparks all this rambling is that people making those very mint balls in all their commendable glory might be on the move. Large new premises, advanced technology and all that. On the cards, I gather. Uncle Joe's – wait for it, wait for it – are now being sold in Harrods and Harvey Nichols. Plus Where's the editor who said there was no north-south divide? I want him to have a crateful. Gratis. For without doubt, the divide that never existed in his mind alone has done a Berlin Wall: it is positively, absolutely crumbling in reality, and now, he could be right. Be so kind as to pass the Fisherman's Friends, would you? # The fast lady By Jeffrey Blyth The SS United States, once the world's fastest passenger liner, which for several years has been rusting away at a berth on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, is reportedly up for sale. So far, according to the Wall Street Journal, there have been no bids. Not too surprising. She bears little resemblance to the fast sleek ship that back in the fifties reigned over the Atlantic. News of the possible sale nevertheless took me back to her maiden voyage in the summer of 1952, which I covered as the shipping correspondent of the Daily Mail. On her maiden voyage the United States wrested the speed record for the Atlantic crossing from the Cunard Line's Queen Mary by making the trip from New York to Southampton at the staggering average speed of 35.6 knots, the equivalent of 41 miles an hour. She made the trip in three days, twelve hours and twelve minutes. I can still recall the fireworks, the flares and the blaring ships' horns as we sailed up the Solent into Southampton. On the way back she broke the westbound record too – ensuring her right to the prestigious Blue Riband of the Atlantic. At a celebratory luncheon aboard the linerthe day after in Southampton an executive of US Lines was about to light up a cigarette (remember this was the fifties) when an aidereminded himthat smoking was permitted at official eventsin the UK only after the Royal toast. Unabashed the American replied ‘Dammit, let's have the toast now.’ So we had the toast to the Queen between the soup and the fish.... What wasn't known – or reported – at the time was the fact the United States was capable of even greater speeds. On her sea trials it was said she came close to an unprecedented 50 miles an hour. Reason for the secrecy? Built at a cost of $58 million, she was designed not just to be a luxury liner, but in the event of another war to be the fastest – and safest – troop ship in the world. A role she never filled, of course. Her capability was never more obvious than on a subsequent voyage when she overtook the Queen Mary in mid Atlantic. Her first captain, John Anderson, jokingly radioed his counterpart on the Queen Mary ‘Greetings from the SS United States. Do you need a tow?’ To which the captain of the QM signalled back ‘No thanks, Maybe you have forgotten... proper ladies don't keep fast company.’ The United States still has a band of devoted fans. They take nostalgic trips out into the Delaware, just to touch the old ship’s hull. They all hope for some new life for the veteran liner, perhaps as a floating museum or a luxury waterfront hotel. It is unlikely however that anyone will put up enough to renovate her, scrape off the rust and send her to sea again. What they fear is that she will be sold to a scrap dealer and end up in some Far East breaker's yard – which is more than possible. The story behind the scoop By Revel Barker After the tremendous and deserved triumph of his first foray into Fleet Street scoop revelation, Tony Delano produced a repeat performance with similar success. The first (in case you’ve been on a desert island) was called Slip-Up: How Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard lost him. It was described by Keith Waterhouse as ‘Perhaps the best analysis of Fleet Street at work ever written’. The BBC made it into a film, and got Waterhouse to do the script. It was compared – favourably – with Scoop the obvious advantage being that Delano’s tale is all true. He followed this with Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon and in case your memory of the late 1970s doesn’t serve you well this was the running Page One saga of the American beauty queen who pursued one of those door-to-door missionaries to godless Surrey, kidnapped, handcuffed and held him prisoner and – allegedly (because she fled the country instead of appearing at the Old Bailey) – raped him. It was another of those classic capers where the pop papers fought, sometimes literally, for the story while the ‘heavies’ pretended to hold themselves aloof but were desperately scrabbling to keep pace, Delano’s forensic eye captured all the detail, yet again. In those days the thought it would be clever to produce ‘instant’ books in the immediate aftermath of big stories, to get out on the bookstalls while the story was still hot, still fresh in readers’ memories. Reporters worked fast, that much they knew, and the publishing team –  more used to handling comics – had the idea that a book could be turned round in a long weekend, although sometimes they’d be prepared to allow that work period to stretch to a full week. Delano, as the paper’s chief US correspondent, involved on the periphery of the reporting, was given the task of collating the story while it was still running but suddenly – when McKinney and her accomplice skipped bail and it was established that Scotland Yard was not particularly fussed about chasing round the world after her – his draft notes were urgently required to allow the mighty presses to roll. It certainly wasn’t the finished work that Delano had envisaged; re-reading it in preparation for the new revised edition, he confesses to being appalled at how ‘sloppy’ it actually was. Nevertheless, it was a great tale. Another great paper chase. And as he says, ‘it came across as a cheerfully diverting story, particularly in regard to the cut-and-thrust newspaper mischief in the heady spirit of the Fleet Street of those times.’ Reviewers described it as 'The ultimate tabloid story'... 'A fantastic read...' Nobody mentioned that they found it ‘sloppy’. The single print run quickly sold out and it immediately became a collector’s item, with copies being offered on the Internet earlier this year for more than $300. The website Pulpfiction said: 'You don't often see it around, but take my advice: if you do come across it, leap on it and lap it up.' The new version – edited, cleaned-up, new information added and updated and with news about the bizarre life of McKinney following her flight to freedom – is available again, now for less than a tenner. Reviewing the new edition for Ranters, Derek Jameson said he reckons the new version will be as big a sensation as the original. This is typical of Jamey’s big heartedness, for he was on the losing side of the battle for the story of the Manacled Mormon. He was editing the at the time and his team had tracked McKinney down and bought her up, against fairly desperate opposition from the Sun. But even as their scoop – about how McKinney saw herself as the totally chaste and cherubically innocent victim in this Fleet Street drama – was being hammered out on the lino machines, the Mirror presses in Holborn were preparing to produce the real story, about her bizarre life as a call girl in Los Angeles, performing ‘sex acts’ to fund her pursuit of unrequited love across the Atlantic. The real story of the real McKinney had been patiently unearthed by Mirror chief photographer Kent Gavin, during an assignment in California covering George Best. That’s why Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon can justifiably be claimed as a classic. They simply don’t make stories like that, these days. Or, they probably do but nobody seems to find them. And that’s why we refer to them as The Great Days of Fleet Street, I suppose. Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon is available from amazon, from Waterstones, and from Book Depository (with free delivery worldwide) in the UK. And from amazon or Barnes & Noble in the USA.

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• 24 Sep 2009 23:07

  He called it looning. We saw it as panache – and were thankful for it. – Bill Hagerty remembers his chum Keith Waterhouse     Issue # 114 September 25, 2009   Following the editor’s rant (September 11) about the lack of obits, prompted by the passing of Keith Waterhouse, we report the eulogy by Bill Hagerty from Keith’s funeral. Geoff Mather had followed up the rant (last week) with a belated obit to a former colleague, Brian Duff. Now he follows up his own follow-up, with Duff memories of visiting the big city with his snapper friend in tow. Back to reality, and Grey Cardigan, recently elevated to the leather swivel chair (but still blogging occasionally for Press Gazette), discovers some of the problems of being editor, one of which is forced attendance at local focus groups. What do the readers think of the Evening Beast? And what does the editor think of his readers? Even further back, and before some Ranters were born, some of Fleet Street’s finest were engaged in a foreign job. As Stan Blenkinsop reports, 65 years ago this week they were covering Arnhem So, Christiansen obviously admired Alan Wood, but how much do you (or did you) love your boss? Things are obviously a bit different at the Washington Post, says Michael Wolff in October’s Vanity Fair. We have his intro, and a link to the full piece. relates how he missed the opportunity to become a Fleet Street millionaire. Missing you already By Bill Hagerty Of all occasions such as this, where it is emphasised that those gathered are celebrating the life of a relative or friend, rather than mourning his or her passing, today must be the absolute exemplar. For while I am already missing a friendship of around 40 years, Keith’s was a spectacular life to celebrate. Not just because in his 80 years he wrote 16 novels, more plays than – as he might say – you could shake a stick of greasepaint at, plus other books, films, TV series and, of course, almost 40 years-worth of wonderful newspaper and magazine columns. That’s a formidable body of work, even if its creator thought it not enough – the last time I saw him he said he regretted not having written more. He was worried that he’d wasted so much time in pubs and what he described as looning about. Yet is was his particular brand of looning that, for family, friends and colleagues, often enhanced the tapestries of their lives by weaving into them vibrant, unpredicted colour. He called it looning. We saw it as panache – and were thankful for it. Some of the looning was chronicled in the widescreen coverage his death rightly attracted in the media, so I shall turn my back on that almost irresistible avenue of memory lane today. I am not going to recall the hilarious lunches and dinners, or the annual New Year’s Eve parties that he and I, and fellow men Mike Molloy and Paddy O’Gara, would once co-host, and where, one year – I have the photographic evidence – Keith spent most of a long night wearing a boater and with a balloon stuffed up his jumper. I shall not mention the night in the then Norbreck Hydro Hotel in Blackpool, when, requiring service the establishment seemed reluctant to provide at 3.30am, he telephoned the sleeping night manager and stridently observed that, as it was night, he should be downstairs managing. And I shan’t even venture into the cul-de-sac where lurks the egg trick, immortalised in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell but memorably performed in bars, pubs and clubs all over London and, I expect, anywhere in the world where a raw egg and a biscuit tin were readily available. That’s not looning. That’s art. Instead, I would like briefly to recall some of the work that made Keith celebrated as a novelist and playwright and one of the most influential journalists of the second half of the 20th century. He once told me that although Arnold Bennett was the writer he most admired, he hoped his place in literary history would be just behind J B Priestley – you could take Keith out of Yorkshire but you couldn’t take that competitiveness out of Keith. Personally I’d rate him streets ahead of Priestley as a novelist of quality – for Billy Liar, yes, but also for classics such as There Is A Happy LandMaggie Muggins. As for drama, although An Inspector Calls is a very special play, it doesn’t have an egg trick. And then there were Keith’s columns, far more enriching and funnier than Priestley’s essays and in volume an absolute torrent of journalism of the highest class. When, six years ago, the British Journalism Review invited its readership – practitioners and academics from the top end of the trade – to nominate who they believed to be Britain’s best living columnist, it came as no surprise when the name Waterhouse bobbed comfortably to the top. After a very jolly evening at which the award – a bottle of champagne, I think – was presented, Keith wrote a piece for the journal in which he nominated his own favourite columnists. Ranging from Bill Connor to H L Mencken, they all, he noted, displayed the odd eccentric tendency. Yes, the words pot, kettle and black spring to mind. Attributes required for columnists, he wrote, were Nicolas Tomalin’s oft-quoted ‘rat-like’ cunning, the ability to read documents upside down, and a stockpile of information, useless or otherwise, except – I quote – ‘nothing is useless to the columnist’. He proved that to me years before. One weekend we decamped to so that he could show off the best of the county to a Philistine southerner. In a particularly beautiful spot on the Moors, with a small waterfall cascading and trees preening themselves in the expectation of a landscape painter’s imminent arrival, I observed that the scene would be an ideal backdrop for a TV cigarette commercial. Nowt was said, but the following Monday morning I found an unnamed me lampooned mercilessly in a column headlined ‘The Piccadilly Kid’. Did I mind? Absolutely not – I frequently boast that I once starred in a Keith Waterhouse column. He would not, however, offer advice to aspiring columnists, writing: ‘It’s not up to me – it’s up to it. For once a columnist has taken control of his column, or thinks he has, it can be whatever it wishes to be, until its supposed controller is fired, expires or is poached.’ So there’s a lonely column joining us in missing a generous friend and stimulating companion today. Actually, in that same piece Keith did offer a morsel of advice: qualities that come in handy for columnists, he said, are to know everything and always to be right. Some of you will have heard him admiringly tell a story to prove this – how, in 1924, an historic Democratic Party convention in ran to 103 ballots, practically bringing the party to its knees. After 16 days H L Mencken filed to the Baltimore Sun a column that began: ‘Everything is still uncertain in this convention but one thing: John W Davis will never be nominated.’ With the column gone to press, Mencken then repaired to a bar – returning later only to find that Davis had indeed been nominated on the 103rd ballot. Back in the bar, he was heard to say: ‘I just hope those know-nothings down in Baltimore have had the nous to take out the word never.’ Keith had his failures, too, of course. Despite his unflinching efforts over the years, the aberrant apostrophe continues to breed. And another campaign, to remove the expression ‘pee’, meaning penny, from the language after decimal currency was introduced, is long forgotten by all except those of us whom it continues to irritate. But the successes – the books, plays and the columns, remain as testimony to a giant talent – one that has attracted, and will continue to do so, a stream of young wannabe Waterhouses to write and perhaps to enter journalism, the branch of his professional life I believe was most deeply rooted in his heart. We offer condolences to Sarah, Derek, Bob and Stella, benefactors of his talent and his love and his looning and all centre-stage admirers of Guys and Dolls, as you had to be if close to Keith. In his and my much squabbled-over selection of the 20 Best Stage Musicals of All Time, Frank Loesser’s interpretation of Damon Runyon was the undisputed number one, no matter how many times the list was revised. So thanks for the memories, Keith – of words and jokes, and eggs and excitement, of lunchtimes of laughter that seemed to last all day and into the night – which sometimes they had – and of Soho after hours, ‘when the street belongs to the cop and the janitor with the mop’. Those last words are Frank Loesser’s. but I’d like to finish with a couple of quotes from Runyon, a fine journalist himself, the first of which I’m sure Keith would have been pleased to have written: ‘The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet.’ The other is: ‘You can keep the things of bronze and stone, and give me one man to remember me just once a year.’ For us, and for all those whose lives were touched by his writing, or his looning, or both, Keith Waterhouse will be remembered a lot more frequently than that. Bill Hagerty is editor of British Journalism Review City lights decided that we are on terms of near-intimacy. ‘Dear Geoffrey,’ it wrote. ‘It may be time to put away your picnic baskets and hide your sunglasses, but that only means that there are more hours in the day to enjoy the finer things in life: the latest West End play, an interesting film or a fascinating exhibition and we have them all for you here in Culture+. The Times BFI London Film Festival, now in its fifty-fourth year, is starting next month and Culture+ members can win tickets to attend an exclusive preview screening of The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney.’ I am not clued up on entertainment these days, unless you count Boris Johnson, and on the face of it George Clooney staring at a goat would not be anything new to someone based, as I am, on the edge of a Lancashire field. So the relationship between provinces and capital is, I find, tenuous as ever. Dancing in their fountains is no longer for me. I have, of course, visited often in search of something to write about, always with good intent, often with embarrassing results. Having decided at my hotel which of the two cupboards I slept in and which I put my small belongings in – not always easy – I was free to be a Man about Town. Except that I was never quite sure what Men About Town do. It was all there, the city's thrusting heart, a square mile of powerful heat rising 20,000 feet into the air from massed radiators, music throbbing and probably other things, and I usually made my choice quite quickly – a drink at the hotel bar, followed by another. There were always Australians there asking about the location of the nearest genuine English pub. That choice easily took precedence over , Nelson's Column and their didgeridoo championships. I was their booked-in signpost to unconfined joy. I did once make it as far as Jeffrey Bernard's pub in Soho but he wasn't in. Nobody of any particular note was in: they were drinking, straight-faced, in a perpendicular position, always a sign of lack of character. I also visited the pub used by one of my favourite drinking actors, Ronald Fraser, and viewed the landlord he described. This sad looking little figure was seated beneath a large period oil painting which bore a reasonable facsimile of his own head. Bizarre. Ronald Fraser wasn't in either. But then, Ronald Fraser was bizarre. He once led me into a Soho basement for out-of-hours liquids and lined up at one end were actors from all the horror films I had ever seen. I was introduced to them as being ‘all right.’ Mr Duff, the photographer on these occasions, always tarted himself up in a clean shirt and inexpensive scent, and was off into the night in spite of what he claimed was exceedingly poor health. I wondered where he ended up. ‘Guy's or Bart's?’ I asked next morning when he was negotiating his full English breakfast with all the bartering instincts which so distanced himself from other diners in the Metropolis. Once, we reached Euston, and I was heading the half mile or so to our usual hotel on foot. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘it's all right for you. I have this camera bag to carry. We need a taxi.’ I thought that a bit odd. It was not like him to have a taxi to actually travel in; they were for expense sheets. Months later, he asked me to lift his bag, which was still worrying him. It was like trying to lift an elephant. So we took out all his stuff and found the base double-lined with the heavy lead blocks compositors melt down and use for type. ‘Bloody Jeff McGowan,’ he said. Jeff McGowan was high on his list of office jokers and had, he claimed, once built a fire round his feet in a phone box as he talked with the office. never seemed to go right for us. Joe Hyman was head of Viyella and biggest mover in the textile industry at the time and we went to see him at his headquarters. He had three different-coloured bell-pushes on his desk and used them to summon various secretaries. Brian Duff observed this for some time and then uttered his first words. ‘My Hyman – I like the red one best.’ At six o'clock the drinks came out and for us, at any rate, it was mayhem: large ones, served, I think, by the Red One. Beautiful. We didn't get hosts like him up North. Joe Hyman was saying that he rather fancied buying the Spectator. Or was it the New Statesman? ‘And what would you do with it?’ I asked. ‘Have a headline every week on the front page – 'Joe Hyman Says...’ I decided that this vision was not the best that had ever come out of the capital. It lacked the Northcliffe-Beaverbrook touch. It lacked any sort of touch. it was doom-laden, but I did not wish to give him the sulks in case it stopped the flow of drink. ‘Wonderful idea,’ I said. ‘My word, yes! Cheers.’ Newly inspired, I mentioned that I would like to buy the Guardian, and he thought that reasonable. ‘You are always worth three times what you think you are worth,’ he said. ‘It is idea that counts. Money always follows idea.’ I liked the advice. He said he went to for the week-end when he needed a charge of adrenalin. It did the trick. Grand. I fancied that, too, although I did not quite understand why, if New York was so full of adrenalin, half its population was driving taxis. No matter. A rapid calculation showed that I was worth, not the trivial amount I originally had in mind, but all of £1,100. Not quite enough, perhaps. I returned home with good intent but never actually made an offer for the Guardian (Much later when I met Joe Hyman again, he asked me what I had done about the Guardian. We were in the back of his Rolls and he had a TV aboard featuring its favourite programme, jagged lines. ‘Bought it,’ I said. ‘And what have you done with it?’ he asked. ‘Sacked the lot,’ I said. ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Quite right.’ I thought it best not to ask about the Spectator. Or the New Statesman.) When we tumbled down the flight of stairs at his office, he headed for the BBC where he was appearing on, I think, Panorama. We aimed for Harley Street , not to fulfil Mr Duff's most ardent wish – to be examined there, declared free from infection, and assured on the highest possible authority that he would live to be 150 – but to see Wilf Greatorex, who wrote Planemakers, a rather splendid TV series at the time. Brian Duff set up his equipment. I attempted to master various pitfalls of the English language, which had suddenly turned difficult –  ‘Yes, we left Viyella some time after sis (sic) o' clock, Wilf.’ Every time Mr Duff turned his back his camera flashed. He could not believe that it had taken on an identity of its own. It was plainly mocking him. As he rushed to tame it, he fell over his trailing leads and the flashing started all over again. It was like a barrage on the Western Front. Anyway, we did what we could with the result and went back North. God knows what happened at Panorama. I daren't ask. I next travelled South to see Derek Taylor, then press officer to The Beatles, I found that he had acquired a house whose garden path led straight onto a green at, I think, Wentworth golf course. So that was all right. He was an old friend anyway. Mission accomplished. We went to London next morning by train, which was crowded. All the toffs turned towards the city. Only two went in the opposite direction, to Apple HQ. Us. I felt quite raffish and began to think, tentatively, about a guitar. When I next went to Apple headquarters, by his invitation, I was all ready for the grand entrance. But strangely, an Express woman reporter was orphaned on the pavement. Quite morose, she was. ‘George,’ she said, ‘threw us out.’ Seems he had the strange idea that Fleet-street people called in just for drinks. We had a quick council of war and went in anyway. George Harrison was on a stair landing, looking grumpy. ‘Mornin' George,’ said Brian Duff brightly as we by-passed him swiftly. George looked bleak. They knew each other from days. Derek Taylor, unconcerned by all the fuss, was in his high-backed raffia seat, all welcoming. When I travelled South again to interview at some length a computer genius who was turning the world around at the time, I finished after three or four questions and said 'Thank you, must be off, very kind,' and Brian Duff stared in disbelief because he had not even finished unpacking his cameras. It was impossible to interview the man. He, too, looked pole-axed. When I had said, ‘How will computers transform our lives in the next five years?’ I hadn't any idea what an answer might be. I assumed he could carry me through with some soaring vision. But no. ‘Many advances will have been made,’ he decided, and stared woodenly back at me, mute. Now what can you do with that? I interviewed Maureen Lipman – and accompanied her to school to pick up a child. I was more than happy with the result. Bright woman. Talented husband. Good quotes. Until I discovered that she had been interviewed two days earlier by some London female from my own newspaper. I had to wait three months to get mine published. It was slipped in furtively to universal acclaim. Mine and the editor's. I got into a taxi at Euston with Sir Cyril Smith – then a Liberal MP big enough to use Big Ben as a wrist watch. The driver said, ‘Who's going to get us up this ramp?’ One of Cyril's legs was about my waist size, but he was a wow with the secretaries at the Commons. They loved him. He liked to get back to Rochdale on a Friday where he headed for the chip shop. That's the trouble with London, we agreed: No proper food. When I talked to Dick Taverne – a very bright QC and politician I thought might end as Prime Minister – he said, ‘I won't be a minute. Read this newspaper and see what they are saying about me. We'll discuss it later.’ And I found the newspaper was all in German, a foreign language which in my philosophy can remain so. Guten-bloody-tag, thought I as a slumped on his settee. Of course there were heady bits, too. London is like that. I made regular trips to cover the making of a film and a big black studio car called for me each morning at the hotel. I felt like a cabinet minister, and since I seemed to be sleeping in a cabinet the impression was strong. Always there were coaches at the door ready to ferry bucketloads of Americans around London. They were up to their gunnels in prunes for breakfast and liked to give their bowels an airing. What could you say of London then? Back-stabbing, wallet-nicking, smiling, fashionable, always on the go, 24-hour, jammed up, rumble-tumble London? I had lunch at the Caprice with Robb, the fashion artist, and a features editor and was offered a wild strawberry specially flown in from Algeria or somewhere like that to take its place on a huge plate of tiny goodies. As I was a native from foreign parts in need of missionary aid, the head waiter pointed it out to me for my personal delight. And Robb went off without paying the bill as he was intended to. I had dinner at Peter Stringfellow's club. Seemed an odd career move for a lad who sold Austin Reed ties in Sheffield, but it looked more profitable. A back-bench man had some sort of tizzy with his colleagues. He was taken out to a London restaurant and plied with the most expensive meal they could think of. He ate it quietly, saying not a word. They waited expectantly. Would the sun shine? Would his frown dissolve? Would there be the slightest glimmer of a smile on those pursed lips? The verdict came, I am told – ‘Nowt to what you can get at Dudley Hippodrome.’ So much for London cuisine. Walking in what I thought was dignified manner to return from London after one trip, I heard this great, bellowing voice dominating the Euston platform –  ‘Oh, effing hell! Look who it is!’ It was Rita Webb, a little squat woman with great personality, often seen in comedy shows on TV at the time. She continued to make good, resonant use of the sixth letter of the alphabet as she pursued Mr Duff and myself to our compartment. Where she remained. I have to be truthful, though it spoils the story: it was a pleasure. Rita Webb was not just a character actress, she was character, a national treasure. After one visit we returned to Piccadilly, , to be met by the only office transport available: official driver Ernest, in a van. We sat in the back, without seats, and Mr Duff was sometimes in a state of total elevation, like a Hindu guru, with his camera bag now relieved of its weights. Ernest drove at his maximum speed, hurling us round corners, and looking through his rear mirror with great joy and cackling with laughter as he saw the ricocheting mayhem in the back. So London? No. I'll keep the sunglasses on hold, and the picnic basket, and George Clooney can stare at goats as long as he likes. Come to think of it, you can keep Ernest the office driver, too. Geoff Mather nurtures his own weekly blogsite at www.northtrek.co.uk Focus all By Grey Cardigan I’d rather spend a day in John Prescott’s underpants than two hours in a ‘focus group’. These instruments of torture for any newspaper editor are forced upon us by a management seeking answers, but rarely result in anything constructive and can often be downright dangerous. The concept is simple. We pay a dozen punters (a mixture of regular readers, occasional readers and non-readers) £10 an hour to sit in a shitty Travelodge conference room, consuming warm white wine and soggy Hula Hoops, and ask them to tell us what they think of our newspaper. We then go away and implement their suggestions, sales soar, advertisers flock back, and it’s doubles all round in the boardroom. The reality is somewhat different. The first stumbling block is the make-up of the panel. We haven’t got the money to recruit a demographically accurate sample, so it’s a case of a couple of ads in the Evening Beast and a card in the local JobCentre. Anyone who manages to respond without using letters cut out from our pages then goes into a hat. The arbitrary dozen are then selected, as in six regular readers, four occasional readers and two non-readers. (I’ve never really understood why the non-readers are there. What on earth are they going to contribute? ‘I’m a scaffolder and I’d buy your newspaper if it carried pictures of Big Brother Sophie’s shirt potatoes ’) So what kind of people are going to respond to this glittering opportunity? Well there’s a grumpy old man who was once a proof-reader at a local printers, a single-issue pressure group nutter, a man from the local pigeon racing association, a BNP campaigner, a former copper who is probably a BNP campaigner and a few normals. Back in the day when we had a few bob, this exercise would have been carried out by professional market research experts in a specialist facility. You’d have sat behind a one-way glass window and listened to punters talking honestly and constructively about your newspaper. These days it’s just a bear pit. You’re out there, sat amongst them, and you’re not allowed to say that you’re the editor, even though you’re the only person in a suit and tie. With eyes that don’t swivel alarmingly. It really is a nightmare. The BNP are first in to bat. How dare the suede-loafer-wearing Leftie in charge of this rag write a leader just before the local elections accusing a perfectly legal political party of being a bunch of foam-flecked, fascist fuckwits? Surely there are laws against this kind of thing? Why hasn’t the editor been hauled before the courts for showing political bias? Next up is the single-issue nutter, who would obviously prefer to express herself through the medium of modern dance. Unfortunately, mere words will have to do. It’s Burma, you see. Why aren’t we carrying more coverage about what’s happening in Burma? Do we even have a Burma correspondent? I’m afraid not, love. We don’t even have a correspondent covering the town eight miles down the road, never mind the ructions in Rangoon The pigeon-racing bloke just wants one thing – more pigeon racing in the paper. So he’s asked what sort of thing he wants. Results, he says pigeon racing results. And where might we get these results? From the secretary of the local pigeon racing association. And who might that be? Well, it’s him, actually. He draws up the results of every pigeon race, emails them to all the contestants within minutes of the finish of the race, and would be quite content for us to publish them. I can contain myself no longer. If he’s already emailed all the members, what would be the point of printing, two or three days later, several inches of 6pt gibberish that has already been communicated to anyone remotely interested in it? He’s not happy at this outburst. His feathers are ruffled. And then it gets really bad. One of the normals kicks off. She’s late fifties, what would formerly have been working class before we were all gentrified, and a typical regional evening newspaper reader – the kind of profit-generating person we should have been nurturing for the past decade, rather than constantly shitting on. Why, she wants to know, have we closed our city centre office, where she used to drop in the occasional classified ad? Why have we moved all our reporters (!) out of town to an inaccessible industrial estate? Why have we stopped printing in the town and sacked all those local people who used to work for us? Why is there no live news in the Beast? Why was the stabbing in the High Street last Monday not reported until Wednesday’s paper? Is it true that we print overnight now? Why are there so many spelling mistakes? Why is there so little news? Why is there a three-quarter page advert on Page 3? What has happened to the court reports? And the council meetings? And why couldn’t we send a photographer to record her mum and dad’s diamond wedding anniversary? All the family were there – almost 50 of them. It’s just horrible. She’s so right on every point. If only I could lock her in a room with some of our many consultants until they saw sense. An hour after they’ve all gone, I’m still there, sitting in a soulless Travelodge function room weeping quietly into my warm white wine. This is what we have become. http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/ A duty too far By Stanley Blenkinsop It was one of the greatest despatches from the battlefront by a war correspondent. Sixty five years ago this week these words crackled over BBC short wave radio to 30,000 British and Polish troops encircled by much greater German forces around the ‘bridge too far’: If in the years to come you meet a man who says: ‘I fought at Arnhem’, take off your hat and buy him a drink, for his is the stuff of which ’s greatness was made. The message from war correspondent Alan Wood sent by morse code had been transcribed by the BBC so that it would boost the morale of the outnumbered ‘Red Devils’ who had arrived by parachute and glider – still the biggest ever wartime ‘drop’. As Wood’s words echoed across the slit trenches under a hail of German shells and bullets, the airborne forces tossed their red berets in the air, shouting to each other: ‘Get your hands in your pocket, it’s your bloody round!’ It was a massive boost to morale. Alan Wood, pictured here typing his copy, was an Australian, who had been a leader writer at the Fleet Street office.When WW2 broke out he volunteered as a war correspondent – one of two at Arnhem. Their reports were circulated to all British newspaper channels and radio stations. His final message to his editor – the legendary Arthur Christiansen – before Wood escaped by swimming across the Rhine was: ‘How about a rise now, Mr Christiansen?’ As ‘Chris’ later recalled; ‘When he got back I gave him a rise, a long holiday and then a four-day week. But he never recovered from the ordeal of Arnhem and years after the war he committed suicide. I salute the memory of this brave man who told no-one at the office of his troubles as he went his own lonely way.’ After his post-war failure to settle back at Fleet Street’s ‘BlackGlass’ Wood became press officer to the ill-fated East African ground nut scheme of the late1940s. But he his depression deepened – and bachelor Wood killed himself with a British army revolver he had smuggled back from Arnhem in 1944. Said Christiansen: ‘In my view war correspondents of WW2 were shabbily treated. Men like Alan Wood should have been knighted instead of being fobbed off with OBEs or MBEs. They served their country, as well as their newspapers.’ I have long been fascinated by the Battle of Arnhem. I first visited the area in 1948 – four years after the battle. The traditional British headstones had still not been installed in the military cemetery – the graves were marked by temporary crosses of white-painted steel strips At the time I was a 16 year old schoolboy who prided himself on his impersonations of Winston Churchill. To amuse my schoolmates I was doing one in an Arnhem café when an announcer from Hilversum radio sitting at a nearby table heard me. He invited me on to a Dutch news review that night where I broadcast my Winston act live to the Netherlands # Checks in the Post By Michael Wolff Everybody at The Washington Post—this really may be everybody, from janitors and pressmen to reporters and ad salespeople—loves their owners, the Graham family. They love them even when they are being fired by them (or being encouraged to take buyouts). They love them even if, arguably, they’ve devolved from heralded heights to mere ordinariness, if not haplessness. They love them even when they’re being embarrassed by them. Read on by clicking Who wants to be a millionaire? Where is Andrew Morton these days? Anyone know? Soaking up the Caribbean sun on the deck of his yacht somewhere, I suppose, or ski-ing down his own private mountain. I’ve heard it said that he won’t look at a woman these days unless she’s won three Oscars, is still under 22, and has been marinated in Dom Perignon. Even his NUJ card is in a Louis Vuitton crocodile-skin wallet. Makes you sick, doesn’t it? Makes me sick, I can tell you. That should have been mine, all mine. At least you’d think Morton would offer to split it with me, but no, I’ve not heard a word from him. As soon as the tears stop splashing on my keyboard, I’ll tell you about it. At the time, I was doing a piece for the Mail on Sunday YOU mag on William Bartholomew, the man who organised parties for those who live at the junction of society and show-biz. When Prince Charles wanted a party, he rang Will. So did Tina Turner, Diana Ross, and Prince Edward. I did too, but that’s a slightly different story. He was a lovely chap, a sort of 16-stone schoolboy with floppy hair and a shy smile. When I chanced to mention (chanced? Do you like that?) that in a few weeks time I was proposing to undergo a form of marriage myself, he asked who was doing the catering, and suggested a few big names. I pointed out that I couldn’t possibly afford them, to which he replied: ‘I’ll make it so you can.’ He did. People have been begging me to get married again ever since. Particularly the bride. At one of his parties, he’d posed as a waiter so he could take a glass of champagne to the beautiful young woman who later became his wife. That was Carolyn. She used to share a flat with the woman who later married the man who one day – if he should live long enough – will become king. She didn’t live long enough, of course. About this time, Carolyn and a handful of Diana’s other BFs decided to spill the beans over the royal marriage. Casting about for a suitable scribe, they picked out a chap who wrote about such nonsense for the Star. Why Andrew Morton? Although he certainly wasn’t One of Them, he did sound most of his aitches and occasionally gave his shoes a polish. So, no doubt to his astonishment, they did, and he found himself sitting on a Matterhorn of cash. Four million was mentioned. A few weeks after this story broke, I met Will in the King’s Road. When they decided to make Diana’s story public, didn’t my name cross his mind? ‘No,’ he reassured me. ‘I knew you wouldn’t want to be mixed up in that sort of gossipy trash.’ Ah. I thought of saying he’d be surprised how trashy I could get for four million, but the moment, and the money, had gone. Writing for magazine took you to some interesting places and interesting people. There was always a slightly harum-scarum air about the magazine right from the start. The first issue was due to have an exclusive about Princess Grace of Monaco, but she featured in a road accident that was an eerie prequel to Diana’s, and Julio Iglesias took over the cover. Since it was the magazine that carried the newspaper, the staff were sometimes a little short of respect. At one Christmas party, Stewart Steven took one look at the magazine team and asked: ‘Who the fuck are all these punks?’ A researcher then asked him who he was to which, with some irritation, he replied: ‘Just tell this bitch I’m the editor.’ ‘So you say,’ quipped a jovial commissioning editor. To his surprise, Jonathan Bouquet was still a jovial commissioning editor the next morning. So it was one of those offices where fun played a major part. For their first Christmas party, they presented an Oscar for the best-dressed woman to Bubbles Rothermere, blithely ignoring the soiled knee bandage. Since the magazine was created as a reaction to all those colour supplements with their profiles of unknown Romanian ballet-dancers, it wasn’t surprising that fun was also an essential ingredient in most of their pieces. Which made it all the more surprising when Nick Gordon, the brilliant if slightly capricious editor, told Bouquet that a piece I’d done was too bloody whimsical. Bouquet amputated all signs of whimsy. ‘This is a boring piece,’ Nick said, ‘tell Dunne to rewrite it.’ Bouquet resubmitted the original and the editor beamed with pleasure. ‘Brilliant,’ he said, ‘I knew you could get it out of him.’ But then, we all know about editors. What made this all the more remarkable was that, while there were a handful of sturdy vessels like mag, which were buoyantly bouncing in the waves, the rest of the fleet was in trouble. Those two bold captains, Murdoch and Maxwell, were prodding many of my fellow mariners down the plank and the rest were jumping overboard. This was not a happy time. Older chaps who were within reach of the pension were okay, but for the rest, hard times beckoned. Men who dated their dreams back to the days of fat pay-offs that would buy a small thatched pub somewhere west of Exeter, discovered it would cover a farewell piss-up in the Bell and a taxi home. And you can bet the cabbie offers you a fistful of blank bills when you can no longer use them. London suddenly acquired several dozen reluctant new freelances. Yet here we were, beavering away for a publication where cost was a vulgar incidental and excellence was the only criterion. This wasn’t the first golden age, or so I am assured by older writers like Andrew Duncan. (Older? Make that aged – and wizened). In the sixties, John Anstey’s Telegraph Magazine operated a similar open-handed policy. There was then a sort of aristocracy of writers: Andrew, Geoffrey Wansell, Bron Waugh, Pearson Phillips and Tim Heald were the benefactors at that time. The always described them as ‘leading writers’ so they formed a satirical club called Leading Writers of Great Britain and conned the Evening Standard diary into carrying a piece. These men are indestructible. In the Telegraph days, Phillips, between divorces, was said to be living in an E-type Jag outside the Savoy, which shows a certain amount of style. But since the ‘was said’ came from Andrew Duncan, it may simply be the creative mind at work. Anyway, Phillips emerged 20 years later to be a big name on . Even now, you can still find Wansell’s by-line in the Duncan’s in Radio Times, and Tim Heald’s on various books. I’m not at all sure they haven’t made more money than Andrew Morton. They’ve certainly made more than me, which is in itself very annoying. The story we freelances all tell and re-tell in dark days when hope flags is that of Gordon Burns. He was a great operator who, sadly, died a few weeks ago. When Associated started yet another magazine, this one was called Night and Day, which was about as long as it lasted, they asked him to write a piece for a generous £2,000. He turned it down. He was writing a book that he couldn’t leave. The commissioning editor came back after a few minutes to make it £3,000. His answer was the same. Eventually, when it reached £5,000, he gave in and did it. When times are hard, it’s good to remember Gordon. It’s also good to remember a time when editors were prepared to spend money to back their own judgment, confident they could produce a better publication than their rivals. Later, less sure-footed editors only competed to see who could pay the least and save the most. We freelances do not care for such people. Back to those days which were the closest I got to writer’s delight. I spent several nights trotting up and down Park Lane sampling dinners in the taller hotels. I was conducting a personal poll on who was the best after-dinner speaker, at the behest – I think – of John Koski. There are worse ways to spend an evening, and some of the speakers were excellent. Brian Johnston – Jonners, the ebullient cricket commentator – had an excellent story about a visit with his wife to Bangkok. While she went off to do some shopping, he fell into conversation with a pretty little thing in a doorway. Her price was £100. Jonners was aghast. He thought probably a fiver would be the local price. He met his wife for lunch and as they were walking back they passed the same girl. ‘See what you get for a fiver,’ she said. We all thought this was very funny. So, to my surprise, did Mrs Johnston. No wonder Jonners laughed so much when Botham couldn’t get his leg over. Peter Moloney, ex-teacher, ex-paratrooper, ex-Trappist monk, had some good lines about the Kerryman who broke both ankles trying to make coconut wine, the Welshman who took his car in for its first service and crashed into the pulpit, and the Scotsman who called the undertaker when his wife was ill because he didn’t like paying middlemen. Our only famous woman cricketer, Rachel Heyhoe Flint, told us some frisky female jokes. Women cricketers, she said, used coconut shells for protection when batting. ‘Two if you’re shy, three if you’re nervous.’ She’d heard a male commentator say that a Dutch woman hockey player had 47 caps. ‘That probably accounts for the way she’s walking ’ The funniest of all, however, was a young barrister who I found addressing a dinner for motor manufacturers. You wouldn’t have heard of Graham Davies then, and you probably haven’t now. He keeps away from television cameras which can kill your act dead in minutes. He had a way with hecklers. ‘Thank you, but when I do a ventriloquist act, I bring my own dummy.’ Or, even more dismissively, ‘See what happens when cousins marry?’ He went to a school where rugby and homosexuality were compulsory and where the bullies would beat you up and make you stand barefoot on the hot radiators ‘but that’s nuns for you.’ When I’d written it, Koski asked me to score them so we had a winner. Although he was the least known – perhaps because he was the least known – I picked Graham Davies. A couple of days after it appeared he rang me to say that his fee had just about doubled and his phone had never stopped ringing. He sent me a bottle of champagne and coached me through a father-of-the-bride speech I was dreading. ‘You can borrow some of my jokes’ he said. And I’ve just borrowed them again. The most surprising people turned out to be good fun. Instructed to accompany Sister Wendy to Rome for a preview of her television arts programme, my main concern was whether I could conduct a conversation which excluded drink and sex. I needn’t have worried. She seemed to know quite a lot about both. At lunch with photographer John Rogers and me, she walloped back a fair amount of wine without showing any signs of tearing off her wimple and dancing on the table. In – I think – the Galleria Borghese, she stood in front of a sculpture of the Rape of the Sabine Women which she then analysed in astonishing detail. She pointed out the men’s fingers sinking into the women’s flesh, and how one woman, even as she tried to flee, was looking back almost with yearning. For a consecrated virgin who lived a solitary life in the grounds of a Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, she seemed to have a more sensitive grasp of the reality of sex than, say, Kent Gavin. Yet was it a subject of which she knew nothing? She smiled and patted my hand. ‘I haven’t climbed Everest but I know quite a lot about it. I read books, you see.’ I drove her around the city and when we came to one of the bridges over the Tiber, I couldn’t resist a bit of showing-off. Dragged from the half-remembered but mostly-forgotten remains of my education, I quoted the opening lines from How Hadrian Kept the Bridge. Lars Porsena of Closium by the nine gods he swore,that the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more ’ She then ran through the next 30 verses, which served me right. On one of the seven hills, she pointed out to us how the city had remained much the same for 2,000 years. ‘Yeah,’ said Rogers, a London boy, rather begrudgingly, ‘but just think what it must’ve looked like when it was new.’ Sister Wendy looked puzzled. Back we went, back down into the city to find a delightful pavement restaurant near the bottom of the Spanish steps, where we ate and drank, and our consecrated virgin was the most entertaining company. Unlike poor old Andrew Morton. He was probably at home counting my money, the sick bastard.                         Flat season Retail sales are going to be ‘flat, at best’, says the boss of Tesco forecasting for the Christmas season. So, what to buy that is value for money? You could buy one (or more) of our books about journalism, written by journalists, for journalists. Or you can mooch around Tesco, flatly. So save yourself the effort and visit our books page

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• 18 Sep 2009 16:49

  There he is in vision, great, domineering nose, tiny mouth (‘Watch my mouth.’ ‘What mouth?’), full of inhibitions, spiky. ‘Do you think this is catarrh?’ he would ask, waving a handkerchief in front of my face. ‘No,’ I would reply. ‘I think it's probably something to do with the scaffolding in your left nostril.’ bike race was in motion – ‘Vive, ole,’ he was crying loudly, with precisely that pronunciation.

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• 17 Sep 2009 22:51

  ‘What else could I do?’ he asked afterwards. ‘They are all my mates. They had done a marvellous job, much as it hurt me to say so. What could I do but buy them all a drink?’ – Tony Delano on Derek Jameson’s reaction to being scooped, on the biggest story of the year. Issue #113 September 18, 2009 Geoffrey Mather reacts to last week’s Rant about the failure of journalists to bother about writing obits for their colleagues. And ends up writing a good one, albeit a bit late, for a much-missed workmate. Tony Delano’s second classic book on how Fleet Street achieved real scoops, about the intense rivalry, and the fun, relates the story of the beauty queen accused of raping her would-be boyfriend. Derek Jameson, who’s in the book on the wrong side of the scoop, is reminded that he was a graceful loser on that one. Those were the days, my friends when reporters turned up on the job so quickly that they were sometimes interviewed as suspects – as Robin Morgan remembers. A good reporter – at least, a good Australian reporter – says , didn’t ask questions of the news desk. He’d drive round to Buck House and ask his questions there. finally finds Freelance Heaven Obiter dictum By Geoffrey Mather If I said that Jean Rook, ‘first lady of Fleet-street’, took time out while working to irritate farm workers gathering their crops would you be surprised? Could it be that in this enterprise she was encouraged by a colleague of hers and mine who wore a bathroom tap on his head at political party conferences? Who possessed a two-foot fork to nick other people's food? We are not, I tell you in all truth, in Never-NeverLand. And I am reminded of Jean Rook because the editor has been ranting himself: he can not understand why people will not write obits for him. Why? I ask myself on his behalf. And the reason is that obits are usually lists of achievements, solemn, processional, like many a cortege, long on fact, short on image. People are not really like that. The man of God can be the sinner. The sage can act the fool. In the philosopher there might be an irrepressible child. That's my excuse and I am sticking to it. We pause here for solemn reflection. I am not even sure what an obituary is: A song of praise? The case for the defence in the hereafter? Dishonesty with good intent? I admired a deputy editor who, on his way to an editor's funeral. mulled over the characteristics of the deceased, and decided that he did not, on the whole, like the fellow. So he turned back and went home. I have written one or two obituaries and pulled back at the point where I was about to be over-honest. For example, I often worked with Brian Duff, chief photographer in Manchester, and if you said he was a generous man, you would be right and wrong at the same time. If you said he was a born artiste, similar. He was both generous and ungenerous, artiste and anti-artiste. An enigma So how do you label an enigma with surprising variations? I enjoyed my time with him. I enjoyed his painstaking and impressive work, but I have a feeling that I enjoyed his discomforts more. I did not mention those at the time I penned his obituary when he actually died He lived in Burnley – which he called the Venice of the North – and once had a tremendous row with his wife, Anne. The serving hatch was between them. It got slammed by both contestants a few times until it fell off, and he then said that was it, the end, total crisis point, no turning back, shame about the kids, split the assets down the middle, or perhaps, dear Lord, more in his favour, cut the cat in half, he was leaving home. Off he went. Shortly afterwards, he was back. ‘I thought you had left home,’ said Anne. ‘It's raining,’ he said. He fussed a great deal about his health. ‘How are all your consultants?’ I used to ask. I thought of him as the only human I knew who was ineligible for the National Health Service because he claimed to have no health whatsoever. When his wife was in bed suffering he volunteered to get her medicine. He went to the doctor's only to return with medicine for himself. ‘Where's mine?’ she asked. ‘Damn,’ he said, ‘I forgot yours.’ He turned up at parties in a knitted pullover reaching well below the knees. He had an expanding fork allowing him to take things from other people's plates at dinner Before mobile phones were invented, he had a black telephone of the ancient variety which he kept in a bag. It had its own curly line attached to nothing. He would pretend to answer calls in pubs, confusing all around. Enter, Jean Rook. When she was writing pages, not columns, for the Daily Express, he was her photographer. He would meet her at Piccadilly Station in Manchester and ferry her around in his car. She quickly learned the drill. If he saw a group of people grubbing about in a field and gathering some crop or other, he sounded his horn several times and they all unbent themselves wearily to see what it was all about. He waved at that point. They all waved back thinking they knew him. Then, of course, they had to go through the wearisome process of bending down again. Jean Rook liked that. More, it entranced her. It was a form of human torment she had never before witnessed. When she first saw it, she asked whether she could have a go with the horn next time and he generously agreed. If it was raining heavily he hooted at people huddled in bus shelters then stopped 20 yards further on. Usually one or two broke ranks believing they had found a friend. They hadn't. He waited until they were almost there, then drove off. I know, I know. I, too, have read about torment in the gulags. He had a piercing blue lamp in the roof of one car, and at night he would flash it at vehicles ahead of him. They invariably pulled into the side and stopped only to hear his manic laughter as he overtook them. Once, parked outside a county police headquarters, he was listening to police traffic on his expensive radio and a deputy chief constable peered in to see what was happening. ‘Good radio, that, Brian’ he said. ‘We are hoping to get some ourselves soon.’ The tap? Ah, yes. At political party conferences he wore the tap on his forehead for no particular reason. Good knock-about stuff. But in Jekyll and Hyde mode, he was also a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society after being an associate and he would fret for hours, days, about the right picture. He had more reflective umbrellas than a space station. In spite of his own eccentricities, he wanted the world to behave as he expected it to. Since his was a rather tidy vision, the world took no notice. That infuriated him. Big companies, shops, waiters and hotel managers were his normal fodder. He terrorised them. When he snagged a coat on something protruding in Woolworth's, he said to the manager, ‘This is an expensive coat.’ ‘I can see it is,’ said the manager. ‘I noticed it when you came in.’ ‘Right,’ said Brian Duff, ‘I expect you to pay for it. And I don't want it invisibly mended because you can see it.’ In cheap roadside cafes he had some exciting times. He bartered. ‘I would like egg and chips but no tomato. Can I have an extra egg to make up for the cost of the tomato?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because there are no two-eggs-with-chips in the pictures.’ ‘What pictures?’ ‘The pictures of the meals outside and on the walls.’ ‘You'd think,’ he said to me later, ‘that they would have given me the extra egg. Miserable buggers.’ If we stayed in hotels before interviews, he always got the best room because I do not remember him ever accepting the one first offered to him. He would complain about size, draughts, noise of dustbins, views from windows, alleyways, the funny look the maid gave him, the lavatory seat still being up, anything. Once, in a night club with a Manchester writer, a full bottle of whisky appeared at the table. They viewed it with distrust. They had, of course, heard of these practices: drink the whisky and you get a bill for, oh, £200 – that might be about right. But then they got a message from the club owner – ‘You are not drinking the gift I sent over.’ They drank it then in some haste. They would have drunk a small reservoir if it had been free. Brian, who was a first-class drummer, and who could have made a living at it, was made even bolder that night than he normally was. He asked the group playing whether he could have a go at the drums and explained his impeccable credentials. They agreed. What followed, according to the writer, was the most miserable time of his life. Brian Duff was plainly out of chunter with the music. Drum was beating time vigorously to a tune entirely foreign to the one being played. The whisky had worked. He had a serene look of total confidence in himself. Heaven and hell had collided in a most unlikely place and hell was plainly winning. Truth only dribbles out long after people's deaths when the total image has congealed into something tangible. Until then, it is something flimsy, borne on the wind. The pictures he took were invariably artistic; yet when we visited an art gallery in Verona, he was indifferent to anything he saw. It meant nothing to him. He was out at the other end before I had started. I often think of Brian Duff now for he was never less than entertaining. I can awaken at 2am and hear laughter. The vision has formed and congealed. Now, I think, I could write a proper obituary. But at this stage, who wants one? There he is in vision, great, domineering nose, tiny mouth (‘Watch my mouth.’ ‘What mouth?’), full of inhibitions, spiky. ‘Do you think this is catarrh?’ he would ask, waving a handkerchief in front of my face. ‘No,’ I would reply. ‘I think its probably something to do with the scaffolding in your left nostril.’ We are in the office, the two of us: ‘Why can't we charge reversing mileage? It doesn't show up on the clock.’ And in the street when the great Europe bike race was in motion – ‘Vive, ole,’ he was crying loudly, with precisely that pronunciation. A Hickey reporter who turned up for an appointment with a Stately Owner of a Stately Home introduced Brian Duff as ‘my photographer’. The result was pulverising. He felt two hands squeezing his neck and bearing him to the ground. Nobody, but nobody, could call him ‘my photographer.’ The Stately Man left immediately and the appointment was ended. One reporter at the said he was glad to be appointed because the first thing he saw on arriving from Liverpool was a figure flying over a desk to grab a colleague by the throat. The flying figure was Brian Duff, too. Mean? Of course he was. If you lunched with him and had a bottle of wine he could so engineer matters that he got two-thirds of it. His ploy was always to charge the glasses himself. Two big gulps, charge both glasses again. You might not even have touched yours in which case he would go through the motion of topping it up. I tried an experiment. One day, every time he drank from his glass, I drank an equivalent amount from mine. ‘Ee,’ he said when we had finished the bottle in three and a half minutes, ‘that went fast.’ Go to his home to drink, and he was the perfect host: always looking to see whether you needed more, always supplying more, almost pleading with you to have more. Jekyll and Duff. And so the final joke and the farewell. Not to me. Jean Rook. She was leaving for on an evening train and Brian Duff delivered her to her seat, putting her case on the rack, and kissing her fondly and ostentatiously on the cheek. ‘Lovely time,’ he said very loudly so that all the businessmen heard. ‘I hope nobody finds out.’ Geoffrey Mather’s own always readable website of rants and reminiscences can be accessed by clicking . The real McKinney By Derek Jameson It was a tabloid editor’s dream come true. Thirty years on and the pulse still quickens at the thought of Southern belle Joyce McKinney abducting her former lover, Mormon missionary Kirk Anderson, shackling him to a bed and Having Her Way with him. In a Dartmoor cottage, of all places. Joyce herself reckoned it was the Greatest Love Story Ever Told. Under arrest on kidnapping charges, she told Epsom magistrates that such was her love for Anderson, ‘I would have skied down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose.’ Released on bail, she made whoopee on Fleet Street expenses while frenzied picture editors plotted how to get a shot of her on skis, preferably naked. ‘No waayy,’ she said, ‘No way would Ah ever take off mah clothes before a camera. Ah am a religious person.’ Shortly before she was due in dock at the Old Bailey, she was taken to the pictures – Joan Collins in The Stud – in a Daily Express Roller and later escorted home to her lodgings. Then she disappeared. Mirror executive Anthony Delano, having given us the hilarious story of the bungled attempt to bring train robber Ronnie Biggs home from Brazil (Slip-Up, Revel Barker Publishing, £9.99), subsequently produced a blow-by-blow account of the McKinney saga under the title Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon It was a rush job, produced for Mirror Books in 1978, and in recent times has become a collector’s item selling for more than £100. Now Delano, who these days has given up daily deadlines for a university professor’s chair, has plugged gaps in the earlier book, tidied up the text and adjusted the title to Joyce McKinney and the Case of the ManacledMormon. He has also binned 16 pages of tacky pictures, which I rather missed, but the book still promises to be as big a sensation as the first version. The basic facts remain unaltered. In September 1977 Joy, as she liked to be called, and her faithful and supposedly platonic acolyte Keith May, were charged with kidnapping Anderson, a missionary dispatched from Utah presumably to escape the attentions of McKinney. He told police he was grabbed outside a Mormon church in Epsom, bundled into a car and driven to the rented cottage in Devon There he was held for three days, shackled to an iron bed. On the third night May appeared with chains, ropes and padlocks. Anderson was tied to the four corners of the bed and McKinney then forced him to take part in a sex session, claiming she wanted to conceive as she had miscarried his baby in America What makes Delano’s superbly told story unique is his detailed reporting of Fleet Street tabloids at work and the thinking of the two editors principally involved, Mike Molloy of the and yours truly, Derek Jameson of the Daily Express – notlong before that, Molloy’s friend and deputy at the Mirror. Delano is the man who knows all – at the time he was the Mirror’s chief correspondent in America The essence of the story was the way in which Joy managed to persuade the Express – so triumphant to have found her in hiding in Atlanta – that she was a God-fearing innocent whose only crime was her obsessive love for Kirk Anderson, while the Mirror’s parallel investigation discovered that this former beauty queen with the surgically enhanced breasts actually made her money as a massage parlour queen touting weird sexual services in Los Angeles. Peter Tory, then of the Hickey column, had escorted Joy to the movie premiere on the night before she did her vanishing act. His pride severely wounded, he subsequently found her hiding in Atlanta with Keith May. It seemed only fair to me that Tory should handle her exclusive story, for which I paid her the princely sum of £40,000. The highly experienced, ebullient Brian Vine and chief photographer Bill Lovelace were dispatched to assist Tory and the Express team hit the road, never staying Iong in the same place. Joy was afraid the FBI was after her; Tory and Vine were more worried about the competition. Delano writes: ‘Along the way Tory and Vine debriefed Joy, shaped and polished the story of her life before and after Kirk The series was to run for a full week. It was fragrant with innocence and maidenly pride. The Mormons had been beastly so had the British. It would have been impossible for her and Keith to get a fair trial because no one in could understand what she had felt for Kirk.’ Back at the Mirror, Molloy and his team – notably photographer Kent Gavin, who had acquired 300 sleazy photographs, and reporters Roger Beam, Frank Palmer and Jill Evans – were chuckling. They learnt from bookings for TV commercials that the Express was about to publish. That would let loose the bombshell. Molloy had been sitting on the sensational revelations for weeks, fearing to publish in case he was held to have influenced a jury. In the event, the CPS dropped all proceedings. Molloy unlocked his safe and handed out his layouts. ‘Only one headline on Page One,’ he instructed: The Real McKinney. It was the tabloid scoop of the decade, says Delano. The Express presses were still spilling out the anodyne version that Vine and Tory had concocted while a few hundred yards to the west vans were pulling away with bundles of papers that displayed Joy in all her nakedness. Hearing the news in a shabby hotel in Myrtle Beach, South Caroline, Joy went berserk. Tory recalled: ‘She rushed for the windows, clawing her way up the curtains. She was dressed in her nun’s habit. She looked like a giant bat.’ Eventually she was restrained, taken to hospital and sedated. Delano concludes: Jameson took it like a man. He made his way to the Mirror’s favourite pub, appropriately named the Stab in the Back, took in the riotous celebration going on there, and thrust both hands in the air. ‘I surrender!’ ‘What else could I do?’ he asked afterwards. ‘They are all my mates. They had done a marvellous job, much as it hurt me to say so. What could I do but buy them all a drink?’ Delano recounts a strange sequel to this tale of tabloid tears and laughter... Joy turned up in Seoul earlier this year with a scrap of the ear of her late pit-bull terrier, Booger. She later produced five puppies she said had been cloned by Korean scientists. Using the name Bernann McKinney, she denied she was Joyce – but the game was up when her picture made the papers. True to form, she disappeared again, leaving behind the five puppies – and a bill for £25,000. Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon is published by Revel Barker and is currently available from both amazonWaterstones on-line at a £2.00 (20%) discount. Me? I had an alibi By Robin Morgan A foul murder, a freebie, the old King’s late brother, a roulette wheel and Peggie Robinson amazing how memories can lump together after 50 years. Puzzled? Then let the denouement begin. T’was bright and early on a 1959 Monday morning and having beaten a late retreat from the arms of a particularly well-known local young lady of irreproachable reputation, I was occupying the toilet of the Barnsley Chronicle washing and brushing up before any of the other staff arrived. At 19 years old you didn’t feel the need to sleep while in bed. The toilet was a room with a view of the back yard of the council mortuary into which drove the borough’s chief constable – a retired colonel (weren’t they all, in those days?) with a reputation of not getting involved in the business end of his business. Unusual enough to merit an on-the-spot inquiry. The back doors of the mortuary were wide open. Less than 12 hours before, the irreproachable young lady and I had been in a local pub enjoying the entertaining efforts of a lady pianist before arms had become entwined. Yet there, on the slab, was the body of the said pianist. ‘Buggah Orf’, said the chief constable. Great help. But I buggered off to talk to Jack, the mortuary attendant, an ever-helpful soul, who muttered that the pianist had been strangled and left among dustbins close to her home. Off to the street where she lived and died. In those days coppers did not stand outside victims’ homes obstructing the free passage of hacks. Her husband, still befuddled by being told a couple of hours earlier that the music had gone out of his life, could not have been more helpful. (Note for trainee reporters: Bereaved families are always best spoken to before shock sets in.) Out he came with the life story of Lily Stephenson, along with the photo album and bags of pictures including half a dozen of her taken riding a camel while she was an ENSA pianist in the WesternDesert. (Further note to trainees: ENSA = wartime entertainment parties for the troops: Every Night, Something Awful). ‘Borrowed’ the lot – as you do with pictures of dearly departed. With my lord and master, the Chronicle, amply supplied with head and shoulders and the fearsome Peggie Robinson, the Daily Express representative-on-earth in South Yorkshire, by now not being seen by an even more irascible chief constable, was the first to hear of my haul and offered a deal. Done! A full page photo-spread in Lord Beaverbrook’s bible and the sobriquet ‘The Happy Pianist’ now firmly attached to the late Lily by the early Peggie left me smug and waiting for the promised cheque. Forward a couple of weeks. Scotland Yard had been called in. Always a big event in provincial murders and with Fabian of the Yard the then hit TV show, its superintendant arrived in town bathed in reflected glory. A week into his inquiries and over a pint or two in his hotel (Scotland Yard ’tecs were much more press-aware and helpful than local chief constables) I asked him, in all innocence, what made these ace cops special. As a demonstration of his superiority over PC Plod he launched into an interrogation that within minutes had me almost prepared to admit to the dastardly deed. His clincher was: ‘How come you were so soon on the scene? Where were you on the night of the murder? ‘Er in her pub.’ ‘And later ?’ With the prospect of my collar being felt it was time to produce an alibi: ‘Er I was shagging the daughter of ’ (and mentioned the name of one of the town’s most prominent citizens). His detective sergeant guffawed and obviously made a note of the ‘confession’ because a few days later he was emulating me in the arms of the same young lady. Irreproachable but certainly not unapproachable. Fast forward a couple of more weeks and an envelope bearing the good Lord’s Crusader logo arrived containing a cheque for fifty quid – two months wages by 1959 Chronicle standards. The same day, Chronicle editor Ronnie Yates called me into his office. As reward for my coverage of the murder he was giving me an Army-funded freebie – to the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, a local regiment stationed at Falingbostel, Germany ,which was to receive new colours from HRH the Duke of Gloucester, brother of the late King. Big deal – first trip abroad but I would, said Yates, require a dinner suit which I would have to buy myself. Generous, was Ronnie. With untold wealth to hand, buying a tailor-made suit was no problem and the left-overs would ‘fund’ the incidentals of the freebie which they did, thanks to HRH the Duke. After handling over the new colours, the regiment threw a party in the officers’ mess to which I and the Duke were invited naturally. The centrepiece of the evening was a roulette table that HRH set upon with gusto. Until then roulette had been something I thought was played only in Hollywood movies and my face must obviously have displayed my innocence to the Duke. ‘Do you play this game, m’boy?’ he asked. ‘Er, no sir,’ I replied with even more nervousness than I approached Scotland Yard grillings. ‘Then sit here and I shall show you,’ he said patting the chair his ADC obligingly vacated. ‘Mind you, you’ll never be rich playing this game I’m not!’ I can’t say he was a good tutor. The surplus of Peggie’s beneficence was rapidly separated from me. Incidentally, the murder was never solved but an itinerant Hungarian refugee, recently arrived after the uprising, was strongly suspected but never charged; his alibi was not as strong as mine. Poop scoop The Queen yesterday had to have three stitches inserted in her left hand after she tried to separate two Corgis fighting each other in the Palace. – The Times. I had just come on for the 11am to 7pm shift at the Mail and the news editor called me into the glass booth where he sat with his deputy; two assistants manned switch-boards, filtering out nutters like The Genuine Elect of God. ‘Zwar, grab a cab to the Palace. Find out what goes on with those horrible little dogs. How come they can bite Her Majesty?’ Over to the Palace? What does one do? Go up to one of the Coldstream Guards and ask to be let in? Knock on the iron gates? A good reporter, a good Australian reporter, did not ask questions. In the here-today, gone-tomorrow ruthlessness of Fleet Street, it was necessary to be noticed; to have an edge. Mine was never to ask questions when given orders. Jump? How high, Sir?... Phone Comrade Khrushchev?... I’m ringing him now. The reference library was there with the details, the phone numbers and how to go about it. The first edition of the Evening News which came out, incongruously, at 8 in the morning, had a picture of the Queen with four of her pet corgis on leashes (two of them, joined by one leash, were allegedly the villains. It was an educated guess because who was going to ring up and argue? The Queen, it said in the caption, ‘was recovering’. I found BuckinghamPalace in the A-D section of the phone book and dialled. Could one perhaps speak to the Press Secretary? One could, sniffed the operator and I was put through to Miss Anne Hawkins, Her Majesty’s assistant press secretary. Could one help, she enquired? I wondered if one could actually come around to the Palace and sort of, well, you know, have a word about the... er, dogs. ‘There would be no question,’ Miss Hawkins said frostily, ‘of speaking to the person in charge of the corgis who is, of course, the Queen herself.’ But, she went on, one could come around and have a background chat and park one’s car at the east entrance. She would alert the police on duty. It seemed too good to be true. I drove my Volkswagen to the gates, was saluted by a policeman seven feet tall and waved through. The appropriate door was opened by a gentleman in tight jacket, pantaloons and buckled shoes. In great ceremony he led me down a hallway lined with elephant tusks, shields, glass cases of silver trophies, and I was taken to a small room at the end of the corridor. Miss Hawkins’ tiny office held a tiny desk, two chairs, a mini hand-basin, a single-bar radiator and the lady herself, in pink twin-set and wearing two rows of pearls. Where would one care to begin? Well, I said, one wondered about the temper of the corgis. They were persistently in the news for biting policemen, palace sentries and the odd station-master when alighting from trains. Had there ever been an attack on a Royal before? ‘Oh, they are no less boisterous or mischievous than any others.’ ‘Well,’ I tried again, as Miss Hawkins glanced at a small clock on her desk, ‘who scolds them when they do wrong?’ ‘Oh, one cannot really go into that...’ Who trains them? ‘Oh,’ a smile at last. ‘They have been taught to do tricks. They sit up and beg for food. And they roll over on their backs.’ Yes, but who taught them to do that? A shake of her coiffured head. That question, again, was out of bounds. One was quite obviously not about to tell the world about the private lives of Her Majesty’s cantankerous little Welsh animals. ‘Perhaps if you would like to leave your questions I may be able to talk to the Queen?’ she volunteered, but not too convincingly. It was obviously a polite way of ending our fruitless little chat. Back along the passage with the aloof and wordless flunky I went; past the elephant tusks and African tribal masks. A fizzled assignment. Unless... I drove back to my flat and typed out a list of questions and then drove back again, saluted this time by the policeman, and handed the functionary my sheet of paper. Back to the office where I admitted I might well have failed to get a story. ‘Well at least you got in, old boy,’ said the surprised news editor. ‘I have never been there.’ Then two days later a phone call. Miss Hawkins had not only spoken to Her Majesty, but the Queen had, seemingly quite enthusiastically, answered my questions. One returned rather fast to the Palace. My first question: How and where were the dogs fed? – ‘The Queen, whenever she can’, said Miss Hawkins. ‘has the dogs’ food sent up in a dumb-waiter to the drawing-room at BuckinghamPalace, or Windsor, or Sandringham, at about five o’clock. It is retrieved by a footman who hands it to Her Majesty, who has donned rubber gloves. On the floor, on a table-cloth, stand their individual bowls, each with the dog’s name on it, into which Her Majesty mixes meat, vegetables, gravy and biscuits.’ (I marvelled at the scene of Her Majesty on her knees) ‘And when the corgis finish their meal, the Queen clears things up and returns the bowls to a tray. ‘She very much likes to look after them herself, and of course they go where she goes,’ said Miss Hawkins. ‘If you see her in the Palace’ (a little unlikely, I felt) ‘on her way upstairs to one of the state rooms, the chances are that there will be a corgi or two with her. They just wander about with her everywhere. If they happen to wander in when a photograph is being taken they are included.’ Miss Hawkins gave me a pencilled royal corgi family tree, explaining that Her Majesty was firmly in charge of breeding. Even when Tiny, a corgi, gave birth to seven puppies fathered by Princess Margaret’s dachshund, Pipkin, it was, she insisted, ‘a planned marriage’. Would one care to speak to the Queen’s kennels? Mrs Thelma Gray, of the Rozavel Kennels, at Pirbright, Surrey, had enjoyed a ‘By Appointment’ relationship with the palace for years, and the kennels-palace friendship probably still exists. Mrs Gray’s stud corgis had been mated with the Queen’s bitches on many occasions. The kennels had enjoyed its royal association going back to ‘Dookie’, the dog taken there for mating by the future King George VI in 1933. Mrs Gray said to me: ‘Her Majesty has done me the honour of discussing her dog-breeding plans with me, and on occasions I have suggested outstanding dogs owned by other owners as being the best choice of sires.’ On the delicate question of whether bride goes to groom, or vice versa, Mrs. Gray said, ‘The stud dog is always taken to visit Windsor.’ The particulars of the stud dogs chosen by the Queen had never been widely broadcast and were known only to a small circle of people, she firmly pointed out. ‘Therefore, such a stud dog’s fee is in no way altered by his having fathered a litter of puppies to a Royal corgi bitch; nor is the demand for his services in any way stimulated.’ And who house-trains the puppies? Her Majesty. If one of them does terrible things to a Palace Axminster, she rubs his nose in it. ‘The puppies are always house-trained by the Queen herself,’ said Mrs Gray. A royal scoop. It had to be YOU After having my first two pieces accepted by the best magazine in the land, I was desperately eager to ease my way into their cast of regular writers and not to put a foot, or even a toenail, wrong. So my heart sank when I heard his opening words on the telephone: ‘I’m afraid, young Dunne’ – one of Jonathan Bouquet’s favourite phrases as opposed to an accurate chronological assessment – ‘that we’re far from happy with your invoice.’ Panic. What was wrong with it? I’d charged £650, the same as the two earlier ones and, in point of fact, not overly generous. Yet just when I was trying to insinuate myself into their favours and their accounts system, I’d clearly upset a senior commissioning editor. ‘Not happy at all,’ he went on. ‘We’ve had a talk about here and we’ve decided to change it. I’m afraid you’re going to have to take £900. Is that acceptable?’ Hacks’ Heaven. After all these years, all those evenings and mornings, all those scruffy newsmen and elegant magazine ladies, all those on-the-day funnies and portraits of a town I’d only driven through, all those young men in a hurry and old men clinging to the wreckage, after all that I’d finally found a place where they jacked up your pay by 50pc Whether you liked it or not. Unilaterally. It’s the sort of tyranny I can live with. At that time, the late eighties, there were two sorts of writers in . Those who worked for YOU magazine. And those who wished they worked for YOU magazine. When I say it was the best mag in the country, I mean it was the one with the most space, the highest standards, and the fattest cheque book. Most freelances would settle for those three. Actually, most freelances would settle for just one. So not only was I through the door, but I was being bombarded with dosh. I knew then I was going to like it there. Can we take a small slice of history here? The launch of the Mail on Sunday in 1982 was one of the great Fleet Street cock-ups. It was saved by YOU magazine, which doubled the circulation immediately and let instant sunshine into the dull world of colour supplements. It was the creation of two men: Dennis Hackett (ex-editor of Queen, Nova, and Today) and John Leese, an old Associated hand. They were both admired and respected by journalists who don’t usually go in much for either admiration or respect. They thought that colour supps were pompous and boring, packed with what they called ‘Brazilian rain forest features’. Instead, Hackett and Leese returned to that old journalistic rule of telling stories through people. It was a runaway success. Some weeks it was 150 pages, advertisers fought to get into it and so did writers. It hit its peak when Nick Gordon, who was being groomed to succeed David English at the Mail, was given the editorship with Felicity Hawkins, who’d been one of Jim Dalrymple’s trainees at the Mirror Plymouth scheme, as deputy. What they wanted was ripping yarns and spiffing wheezes. They liked extraordinary people doing ordinary things (Mrs Thatcher making Sunday lunch) and ordinary people doing extraordinary things (mouse-racing in an Irish pub). There were rumours of a budget. Everyone ignored it. All that mattered was getting superb copy and stunning pictures. The cost was immaterial. A time of magic in our penny-pinched trade. It’s not often you get to read a paragraph like that, is it? Amazingly, for several years I was part of it. They were, of course, the best years of my life, and it came about, like most things in my life and quite possibly yours, by accident. With every other freelance trying to elbow his way to the front, how did you get on board? I decided to try to write a YOU piece. The story I picked was the 50th anniversary of The Dalesman, the delightful little magazine that I’d known all my life in Yorkshire. The story was that the pocket-sized mag outsold Country Life and was thought to have a quarter of a million readers throughout the world. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at it. Their most popular running photo-feature, their equivalent of Page 3, was one on Yorkshire Letterboxes, Surely it must make a fortune? The managing director, amused that anyone would ask such a silly question, simply replied: ‘Let’s say we make a living – now that’s a good Yorkshire expression, isn’t it?’ So you see, it was quirky piece. YOU liked quirky. I liked doing quirky. But what clinched it – and how about this for luck – was that it landed on Felicity Hawkins’ desk. Astonishingly, Felicity recognised my name from a piece I’d had in the Mirror (on taking a pet rock for a walk) when she was at school. She liked it. I was in. The smile stayed on my face for several years. For one thing, I found myself surrounded by my heroes. Val Hennessey, who persuaded Pavarotti to do an interview by giving him an encyclopaedia of pasta. John Sandilands, who when told by an editor that he enjoyed his copy more when reading it a second time, replied: ‘Can’t you read it a second time, first?’ He was so plagued by writers’ block that Felicity used to shout into his answersphone: ‘I know you’re there, John, come out from under the bed.’ Stan Gebler Davies, a wild Irish writer who would announce his arrival by saying: ‘I’m an alcoholic – have you any whisky in the house?’ Rod Tyler, ex-Mail and ex-NoW, would spend six weeks each year knocking off features from the five-star Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas. Angela Levin, ex- mag, did the celebrity interviews, Lee Wilson and Alasdair Riley did the light-touch pieces. Pearson Phillips, an elegant writer who did the grander stuff, had enjoyed an earlier Golden Age on the Telegraph magazine under John Anstey. Doug Thompson in LA could get any star, no matter how big. He and photographer Paul Harris once knocked on Glenn Close’s door in and persuaded her to do interview and photo-shoot – just like that. Tom Hibbert, a charmingly eccentric interviewer who I once saw playing cricket in his socks Then there was Dermot Purgavie in New York, who could do anything better than anyone else, with the possible exception of his old friend, John Sandilands. You wouldn’t find a more engaging bunch of oddities, some of them certifiable, outside The Priory. Come to think of it, if you’d carpeted YOU mag’s offices you could have closed The Priory down. As editor, Nick Gordon was brilliantly gifted and, I’m delighted to say, was never tempted to attempt the role of restraining influence. If anything, he led the charge. Sometimes the stories took wackiness right up to the border with lunatic. When the England rugby team had an impending game with Fiji, he sent Sandilands and photographer Phillip Dunn to the South Seas with a wax model of the head of Will Carling, the English captain. The photograph showed the head suspended over a cannibal-style cooking pot while locals in grass skirts danced around it. Good story? Oh yes. Good taste? I’ll get back to you on that. Nick’s one – or possibly major – weakness was African wildlife. With the power of popularity and circulation, YOU could get to anyone, from Nelson Mandela to Imelda Marcos. Once they set up an interview and pix with a particularly difficult Hollywood star (Warren Beatty perhaps) who agreed to do it only on the basis that he was the cover pic. At the last minute, Nick decided to substitute a photo of a baby gorilla together with a save-the-gorillas appeal. Felicity Hawkins was out of the office when she got the call to rush back. ‘The fucking monkey’s died ’ Lee Wilson was dressed up in a superman outfit and sent back to his home town to right any wrongs he could find. Sandilands went to the West Indies on a banana boat. Some poor sod was smuggled into Somalia in a tanker. With Patric Walker, also ex-Mirror, doing the stars column, every time it was promoted the circulation went up by another 100,000. Midas never had it this good. However difficult they were – and here I’m thinking about the team of three who were arrested in Wales when inquiring into coal-smuggling, or the snapper and writer who, on their way to New Zealand, had a fight before they reached Gatwick – all was forgiven if the copy and pix were of diamond quality. Ideally, to control and conduct this band of random talent you’d need someone with a chair and whip. Instead, they had the team of commissioning editors who wouldn’t have lasted half an hour on The Lady. Somehow, John Koski contrived to look perpetually worried, yet he was so quick-witted he could analyse a piece while you were reading the menu. The wine list took a little longer. He came via York papers and a marketing weekly. The name comes from Finland. Jonathan Bouquet, a man of elegance and style, had edited a glossy girly mag when he was about 20, which probably explained his smiling air of contentment. The name is Huguenot, which may explain his penchant for silk ties. Large, amiable, and deceptively innocent, Joe Houlihan was South London Irish: one of the few South London Irish who can speak passable Russian. Together with Aussie John Chenery, twice a week they would go off to Il Barbino, an Italian restaurant on Kensington Church Street , for a four-bottle lunch followed by grappa. By the end, the Finn, the Huguenot, the Mick and the Aussie, who were not after all starring in a rude joke, had invariably tidied up two or three features that needed attention and come up with another two or three workable ideas. Possibly this explained the reaction of Dee Nolan when she became editor. ‘You treat this place like a gentleman’s club,’ she said to Bouquet, as he drifted in around 3 45pm trailing expensive cigar smoke. ‘The funny thing is,’ Bouquet reported later, ‘that she said it as though it was a criticism.’ That was later. I worked for all of them during my time with the mag. Knowing what delicate little creatures we writers are, they liked to take the pain out of it. The commission came over the phone. Then came the DR with the package, which contained a full brief, copies of all the essential cuttings, air tickets (usually business class), a schedule of people, times and places, and a fat wodge of the local currency. I imagine they would’ve come round a sharpened your pencil if you’d asked. They liked writers. They liked to look after their writers, which is more than most writers’ wives can say. It was quite easy: in return all they wanted was excellence. With pieces of 2,000 or even up to 3,000 words, the story had to be spelt out clearly, the backing facts and quotes all in place, a summary of the history, full colour and description of places and people, and – oh yes – it had to be assembled and written with a clearly defined voice. Wry, detached, ironic, amusing, emotional even: but every piece had to be held together by the style of the writer, all the way through. Koski, Bouquet, Houlihan and Chenery could read and dissect copy as quickly as a milkman reads a housewife’s note. They were more like publishing editors than subs in that they were concerned with the shape of the piece and that everything was in the right place. A little less of this, a little more of that, perhaps move page seven up to page two, writers who thought they’d done their best found they could do better. It was very demanding. I knew a number of newspaper features men – all highly-regarded, one a Writer of the Year – who attempted it, and found they couldn’t do it. For those who could, there was the satisfaction of being in there with the best. And if the international quarter of Finn, Huguenot, Mick and Aussie liked it, from time to time they would impose a completely unsought fee increase on you. I never quite caught up Rod Tyler on his £2,000, but I wasn’t grumbling. It was the highest concentration of journalistic talent I’d ever seen in one office. Or, more commonly, one restaurant. Which was convenient, because when the business was done, there was really only one question white or red? It was never this good before. It was never this good again. BOOKS available from the Ranters Bookshop (see over on the left)

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