The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – The Times, August 2007
May 9, 2008
A lightish week
A lightish week, this week – which should please those critics who complain that we frequently produce TOO MUCH stuff.
Here’s a tip: it is not mandatory to read the copy all at one sitting. It will still be there, if you want to come back to it.
To get the furniture out of the way…
We had a few reports that the TAX GUIDE we introduced last week was both interesting and useful.
It’s over there in Contents on the left. Unless you already know everything there is to know about income tax, check it out. If you need a printable copy email Barry Kernon (who compiled it and whose email address is in the text) or ask us (address top right) and we’ll forward one to you.
You can still join the Ranters Lottery Syndicate (it has earned a few pence, mainly from EuroMillions, since it started). You can check it out at:
…and pick five numbers which, if you’re lucky, could produce you the aforementioned thousand smackers. If you’re unlucky, it has cost you nothing, anyway, so it’s better than buying a lottery ticket from Tesco.
You can play this three times, without joining the Syndicate – BUT, we hear that it might produce a batch of automatic mailing from the back office, encouraging you to join it. And that, you can either read or delete.
Ian Skidmore’s book, Forgive Us Our Press Passes – literally (no exaggeration) described as ‘hilarious’ by EVERY press reviewer – is still being discounted with a promise of next-day delivery by amazon, who have it in stock, at
Liz Hodgkinson’s tale last week about the masterful way Eric Leggett handled an interview with Christina Onassis has prompted two follow-ups. (This is what these stories, in an ideal world, are supposed to do.)
Jeff Blyth writes from New York about the day Christina sat on his lap while Onassis showed off his organ.
Peter Reece, so impressed by Eric’s professionalism, suggests coining a word for the technique, and suggests calling it ‘a Legget’.
Well, we already have Pilgerism and doing a Fisk, so why not.
Peter also claims that he previously invented Beatlemania. He won’t get very far with that – nearly everybody who covered the group in the early sixties (this correspondent included) always claimed that distinction for themselves.
Only Letter this week – a lot of blank columnar space there, open for filling, chaps. So we have rejigged the layout. It is from Allan Glenwright, prompted by Colin Dunne ’s reminiscence two weeks ago about the poetic sub-editor Basil Bunting, but actually referring to Charlie Fiske.
It isn’t only us that do the prompting.
Jilly Cooperhad a letter in The Times this week asking for a better deal for snappers:
Sir, I would like to start a campaign for bigger and more appropriate bylines for photographers. That was a beautiful piece of writing by Rachel Campbell-Johnston in which she compared a photograph of Frank Lampard, after he scored a penalty for Chelsea, to a great Renaissance painting (times2, May 2). The photograph captured all the anguish on Lampard’s face over the recent death of his mother and also the tenderness of his two team mates.
The only thing wrong with this exquisite marriage of copy and photograph was that the name of the photographer (Matt Dunham) was hidden like a tiny, tiny centipede on the top right of the picture. Equally, when the same photograph was praised in the Radio 4 Today programme, no one mentioned the photographer at all. Over and over again photographers get minuscule bylines or no byline at all. And I feel they should get equal billing to writers, because their contribution is just as important.
Sometime Ranter Peter Kinsley told us he’d been thinking along those very lines for some time, only Jilly beat him to it.
He thundered back:
Sir, I agree with Jilly Cooper (letter 7 May) that photographers’ by-lines are ridiculously small. One can scarcely read the names of these dedicated men and woman. It is not so long ago that photographers were not allowed to become members of the Press Club in London, Indeed just before the wedding of Princess Margaret a titled lady who was the subject of Press attention asked Anthony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), snacking at the buffet, who he was, and said: ‘In my house, photographers eat in the kitchen’). She was not invited to the wedding.
There are photographers who risk their lives at war, and when they return and are sent on a Royal job, they are referred to insultingly as ‘papparazzi’. I was a journalist in Rome when the word was invented: it meant young hooligans who used a Rolleiflex and flash to annoy the stars, but not one of them could have been employed in a newspaper or magazine.
They cut the last par, about paps.
Peter (who was Hickey at the time of Margaret’s wedding, and when Anthony Armstrong Jones was employed by Edward Pickering at the Express, and known to the hacks as Surgical Boot of the Beast) also left one word out of his letter which appeared yesterday (Thursday): the titled lady actually said: ‘In my house photographers and coachmen eat in the kitchen.’
Yes, people did say ‘coachmen’ in those days for chauffeurs.
This story struck a chord at Ranter House where we recall somebody (Ian Mather?) telling a tale about going to interview a marchioness who arranged to see him over lunch, after instructing her butler that the snapper – who she’d learnt would be arriving on a motorbike – should eat in the kitchen with the staff.
As he decanted the claret the butler asked: ‘Should I, M’lady, offer the same wine to Lord Snowdon, downstairs?’
Small panic from her ladyship, who hadn’t realised she was entertaining a titled monkey.
‘Give Lord Snowdon my apologies and invite him up here to join us,’ she said.
The butler disappeared and returned and – one would like to believe with a well-hidden feeling of joy – told his employer:
‘Lord Snowdon asks me to thank you for the kind invitation, but says that he is totally content with the arrangements… and with your permission will join you in the drawing room for coffee at which stage he will effect your likeness.’
Two remaining pieces, written (so far as we know) totally unprompted: Cathy Couzens remembers how her appearance on television news prompted her dad to spill spaghetti all over the floor.
And Colin Dunne writes about some angry fellows from north of Hadrian’s Wall.
So far as we know it was Hannen Swaffer who first complained about the growing number of disruptive visitors from over the border.
‘I tried to deter them,’ he said.
‘I put down bowls of poisoned porridge at Kings Cross station.
‘But the blighters foiled me.
‘They came in via St Pancras, instead, because the fare was a half-penny cheaper.’
The account by Liz Hodgkinson of the attempt by my old colleague Eric Leggett to interview Christina Onassis on a flight to Bermuda brings back memories of an earlier encounter with Onassis’ daughter.
It was many years earlier. As shipping correspondent, at the time, for the Daily Mail I had a slight acquaintanceship with the Greek shipping tycoon, In fact I once flew to Saudi Arabia with him in his private jet at the time when he was seeking an exclusive oil deal with the Saudis – a deal that like Eric’s attempted interview came to naught.
But back to Christina.
Shortly afterwards when we met in Monte Carlo Onassis invited me for a lunch-time drink aboard his yacht Christina. (He must have been lonely for company that day – which he was quite often, surprisingly – but that’s another story) Anyway I am sitting at the bar on board the Christina, on one of those bar-stools reportedly upholstered with whales’ foreskins, when a nurse walked in holding the hand of a toddler…
…who came over to me – and climbed on my lap. She was followed into the bar by Onassis. ‘Ah, you’ve met my daughter, Tina’ he said..’It’s her birthday today.’ I am not sure exactly how old she was, five or six maybe… possibly younger.
Onassis proudly announced the fact – and then called for a steward to bring in his birthday present for her. It was one oft those old fashioned organ grinder’s instruments, with a wind-up handle which in those days were still sometimes seen on the streets of London.
Onassis propped it up and started turning the handle – while his daughter, still sitting on my lap, cooed in delight at the music. The only thing missing was an organ grinder’s monkey.
It was an odd scene, one I often recalled, and recounted to old chums, as Christina grew up, got married and divorced four times, had headline-making affairs – and then when her father died became one of the richest young women in the world. And of course became chubbier and chubbier over the years.
A far cry from the toddler who sat on my lap in the bar that day.
That is my memory of Christina after whom, of course, Onassis named his famous yacht… which had started its sea life as a WW2 Canadian naval vessel, a frigate called HMS Stormont, and which Onassis bought for a bargain $34,000 and converted at a cost of more than $4 million into a luxury yacht with marble swimming pool, helicopter pad, more than a dozen state- rooms and of course the famous whaleskin bar-stools.
I stand to be corrected, but I think it was Indira Ghandi who identified there are just two kinds of people in the world; those who do the work, and those who take the credit. She wisely suggested it is better to be in the first lot – there is far less competition.
It was with this in mind I thought it appropriate to thank Liz Hodgkinson for reminding me of a festering little niggle I have about word recognition and one in particular.
You see, I happen to think I may be the person who coined the word Beatlemania and probably wouldn’t have given the matter another thought if it wasn’t for the fact that so many others have claimed it was theirs.
I say invented, although I am totally prepared to concede that it may well have been my freelance colleague, Bob Wrack of Salford and South Lancs News Service, who actually came up with it.
We were searching for a descriptive word while hiding behind a very burly copper who was as perplexed and intimidated as the pair of us as to why hundreds of otherwise normal looking teenage girls should be shrieking and screaming at four mop haired lads from Liverpool who appeared at the Apollo, Manchester in 1962.
What I do recall with certainty is that I was probably the first person to give a voice to the word. I ‘phoned the copy Bob and I cobbled together to every Manchester office of the nationals, and as this event was the nearest thing we had ever witnessed to a city-centre riot, I’m sure the word Beatlemania was published.
Wikipedia says differently: Andi Lothian, a former Scottish music promoter, claims that he coined the term in 1963, although an early printed use of the word is in The Daily Mirror 2nd November 1963 in a news story about the previous day's Beatles concert in Cheltenham.
It’s pretty much the same story with the word numpty, which according to the Urban Dictionary first surfaced on the terraces of west of Scotland football grounds to describe someone who (sometimes unwittingly) by speech or action demonstrates a lack of knowledge or misconception of a particular subject or situation to the amusement of others.
But it was in fact my son Angus – Highland Scot incidentally – and his friends in Manchester who adopted the word a good ten years ago and determined by their conversational efforts in the city’s night spots and student bars that it should be brought into colloquial English usage.
Through diligent research they even claim numpty is not Scottish at all, but a corruption of an Urdu word which means pretty much the same.
Which brings me back to Liz, and her tribute last week to Eric Leggett and his high-flying interview with Christina Onassis.
Leggett is such a fine and solid word, and should henceforth be used to describe an extraordinary, imaginative, but fictitious narrative, based on the smallest possible grain of truth.
It will sit quite nicely between the apocryphal story and the urban myth.
So when ‘a leggett’ comes in to common usage and its meaning added to the Oxford English Dictionary, I hope you will all recall where you heard it first.
Colin Dunne's piece, week before last, mentioned Charlie Fiske who did the diary on the Evening Chronicle.
Charles - always immaculate and a likeable fellow – sometimes partook of a glass or two. Once met him at a reception at Tyne Tees Television where he had been taking notes for several hours.
Being concerned for his safety at the end I offered to drive him home but he couldn't remember the address.
He almost met his match in (how can I put it?... accepting hospitality, I suppose) John Smart, the Daily Herald reporter, once seen staggering down the steps of the Royal Station Hotel after a product launch with a bag of coal under each arm.
There were times during my Fleet Street career when my rather Conservative parents in Mid Wales were not sure that their daughter was in the sort of profession of which they should be proud. This incident was one of my better ones.
My gentleman chemist dad was sitting in his best chair in Crickhowell watching the early evening news. Mum had just brought him a tray. He could not sit at the kitchen table to eat his tea because he had suffered a stroke that affected his left arm.
Happily tucking into his spaghetti supper he suddenly realized that his younger daughter, the infamous Cathy Couzens, was on television… and it was not a good moment.
D.EX photographer Harry Dempster and I had gone to Paddington Station to meet the West Country train.
Harry bet me 10 quid that I would not do something unexpected.
Bad move – but hell, 10 quid is 10 quid.
Marion Thorpe got half way down the step from the train when I ran up the platform and said clearly: ‘Did you know your husband was a homosexual Mrs Thorpe?’…
She leant back, well, recoiled is the best word and swung her hefty handbag hitting me straight across the head. Thinking back I should be bloody glad it wasn’t the violin case.
It blazed across the evening news…and I have no idea whether we got a picture or not. Can’t remember, it must have been the head wound!
The TV cameras certainly got it all. I reckon Harry told them I was going to do it.
Dad saw it, shouted for Mum and the spaghetti went all over the floor.
Mum was mad with Dad and Dad was indignant at me for being rude.
Ah well. Mrs Thorpe never answered the question but it was worth a drink and a tenner from Harry.
I made it up to Dad by taking them back stage at a Liberace concert and the sweet old Hollywood ‘auntie’ let Mum try on his fur coats and rings.
Has anyone seen Kent Gavin lately? Has he still got that lovely smile? Even, smooth, white, a bit wolfish perhaps but a charmer’s smile all right. That could’ve been mine. After all, we both went to the same man for Smile Replacement Therapy, in – oddly enough - the Mirror’sLondon pub, the Stab.
Actually, I wasn’t aware I was even being considered for Smile Replacement. I thought I was buying a gin-and-tonic for Lesley Hall and a pint for myself. As I wiggled my way through the crowd to the bar, the man next to me said I’d spilled his pint.
I said sorry but I didn’t think I had, he said I was a liar, and quite suddenly the evening seemed to be swerving off into dangerous territory.
I took a good look at him and immediately noticed something unusual: he wasn’t particularly tall, but he was wide. Very wide. Frankly, he must have come through the door sideways. And, even more unusual, he was deep. From his shirt buttons to his shoulder-blades was about four-foot. I’ve had smaller wardrobes.
In addition to that, his shirt sleeves were full of arm. I’m not used to that. I can get both arms and a leg into one of my shirt sleeves.
Would I allow myself to be intimidated by this? You bet I would. I apologised again and offered to buy him a drink. He gave me a look in which I could discern contempt, scorn and hatred, but no discernible fear.
He jerked his thumb towards the back-door. ‘Outside,’ he grunted.
He pushed through the crowd towards the door. I followed, wondering how it could be that he had a neck thicker than my chest. It didn’t look like a forgiving sort of neck.
Does anyone remember Bernie? Small, with dark hair and a dodgy eye, Bernie was a friendly, easy-going bloke who liked hacks. More importantly, he was also the Grand Imperial Wizard, or some similar title, of all the print unions. Even more important than that, he knew the man with the sleeve full of arm, who was a Natsopa minion, and Bernie knew full well what he was up to. He hated hacks and loved belting them.
He asked what was going on. Sleeveful Man told him he was taking me outside to place my head in a position where I could get a clear interior view of my large colon and possibly as far as my appendix. Bernie bollocked him, sent him home, and bought Lesley and me a large drink.
The following night, so I heard, Sleeveful staged the same scene with Gavin and, no doubt frustrated by his previous failure, gave him a fearful whack in the gob.
Now we come to the cheering bit.
Kent, if I remember rightly, pursued him through the court, had a magnificent set of choppers inserted at terrifying expense – terrifying, that is, for his assailant. He had to pay for them, and for lots of other things.
Given the sort of scoundrels who worked in Fleet Street, given the amount of booze which they assimilated each day, and given intensity of rivals, it’s amazing that the murder and maiming rate wasn’t much higher.
The reason, I suppose, is that it was mostly hack-on-hack, men who were not noted for their fine physical toning or long hours in the gym. And usually, by the time they came to exchanging blows, most of them could barely find the strength to stub out their fags.
A copper once told me that when called to a Fleet Street fracas he walked slowly, confident in the knowledge that within two minutes all combatants would be lying on the floor exhausted and gasping, and quite possibly asleep
This was certainly true of two of our most celebrated bruisers, Frank Howitt and Fergus Cashin. By 8pm, which was about the time they began to turn belligerent, neither of them would have lasted three rounds with Marje Proops.
I’d like to tell you about two of the best Fleet Street fighters but I’m afraid it’s just not possible. They are both still alive, and over the years I have heard both of them use a sentence which I cannot bear to repeat, but which involves the words off, head, and rip. My present physical arrangement – head firmly attached to top of shoulders – is one I would like to keep going a little longer.
Oh go on then. But we shall have to identify them only with the names Mac and Jock.
Yes, they are both Scottish. Funny that, isn’t it? And yes, odd you should mention it, but they did both take the occasional glass to keep out of the cold – which is unusual for a Scot, I believe. And they both in the past done some seriously good reporting and writing.
The first time I met Mac was when my Mirror features colleague Jill Evans asked me to go with her to meet her friend Sandy Fawkes. At that time, tabloid women hacks were a sort of merger between Ladies Who Lunch and Ladies Who Raunch. In the back room of El Vino, Sandy marched in with her new writer chappie, Mac. It was 7pm. They showed every sign of having been toasting their new friendship since about 7am.
I wouldn’t say they were rat-arsed but they were certainly mouse-bottomed.
Sandy had a black eye the size of an ostrich egg - presumably she'd leaned over her upright Remington while pressing the carriage return key. That happened a lot in the days of old technology. Anyway, no other explanation was forthcoming.
Mac growled. She sobbed. We made a nervous foursome.
As more of the Scottish Fuddling Fluid went down, Mac turned his gaze on me. It was a a bleary, red-rimmed and somewhat less than affectionate gaze. Minutes went by. The gaze never flickered. I felt I knew where this was going, and sure enough, it came.
‘You lookin’ for trouble, pal?’
I flicked through all the possible replies to this. None seemed to help. He repeated his question, and held up a hand the size of a gravel-dredger. I was sure I could see brain under the nails. At this point I remembered that he had the reputation of raising pub-fighting to near professional standard.
I raised my right hand and moved it in front of his face. If his hand was designed for head-ripping, mine was made for plucking lyres, embroidery, and the less robust areas of flower-arranging. ‘Before you start any trouble, Mac,’ I said, ‘just take a look at that hand.’
He looked. He squinted. He looked again. He slowly shook his head. He sat quietly for the rest of the evening. A couple of times when he seemed in danger of coming to life, I held up my bony paw and repeated: ‘Look at that hand.’ Whatever it all meant was well beyond him and he slumped in silence.
It was a lucky escape. Over the years, there were many reports of Mac’s fighting prowess, all authenticated. Yet somehow I always seemed to catch him on an off-day.
Years later, in the Peanut Parlour where the lads from the Sun gathered to toast Mr Murdoch, Mac lurched in early one evening, full of joy and bonhomie. On a stool at the bar, he was charm itself until he felt someone behind him. ‘Who’s leaning on me?’ he asked. His smile was still there but his voice had acquired a rough edge.
The leaner he was talking about was – I think – the Sun’s chief features sub at the time. And a more respectable and admirable a fellow you wouldn’t want to meet. Every evening he would call in for a modest pint and then speed home for – I imagined – a family evening singing hymns around the harmonium.
‘Does this bugger know who he’s upsetting?’ Mac asked those in front of him, nodding his head backwards. Slowly, he rose. Slowly, he put his glass down. Slowly he turned. ‘What’s your problem, cock?’ he asked. ‘Do you want first swing?’
Quite rightly, the exec panicked. Blindly, amateurishly, and without hope, he swung. His fist, still tired from subbing Charlie Catchpole’s copy, moved upwards in an arc and caught Mac flush on the chin. It was the punch all boxers dream about – the perfect uppercut.
Mac dropped and rolled across the floor. Eyes closed. Motionless. A clean knock-out.
Our man grabbed his briefcase and ran.
At the same time the following night in the same bar, Mac came in. Mac, who vaguely remembered me, asked me if I’d heard about some lucky bastard who’d caught him with a sucker punch the previous night and if I would point him out. ‘They call him Tony,’ I said, ‘and he’s down in the Bell.’ Seconds after he left, a shaking features exec, who’d been standing next to him, grabbed his briefcase and fled to Charing Cross.
But to be fair to him, Mac was the stuff of legends. So was Jock. You still hear the story of how he bought a knackered old white horse off a gypsy and took it up the steps into the cocktail bar of a smart hotel to test the advert: ‘You can take a White Horse anywhere.’
And when I once asked him if he knew Frank Howitt, adding that he was the Express reporter with a broken nose, Jock gave a quite smile. ‘I broke it for him,’ he said.
Apparently Frank had made a saucy comment to a woman who was with Jock in the Bell. The punch not only broke his nose but also deposited him in the fireplace at the far end of the bar.
Once, passing the open door of the Tipperary, he spotted Jerry Brown, then of the NoW, inside. Suddenly Jock remembered a grievance which had been bothering him. He shot through the door and broke his nose too.
There are ENT surgeons who would have been unemployed but for Jock.
When he gave up drinking, he became a model of restraint. Decent, kindly, tolerant to a fault. Raging Bull had become Playful Puppy. We all thought – and so did he – that the fires had damped down…
One morning, at he was leaving for work, there was trouble at home. The pipes sprung a leak, the plumber wouldn’t come, the car wouldn’t start… everything went wrong. He came in to Fleet Street on the underground and found himself sharing a small two-man seat with a young man. So obsessed was he with his misfortunes that he failed to note that his seat-sharer was a young muscle mountain, more ape than man. What wasn’t covered in hair was blue with tattoos. And Jock, by this time, was a 50-year-old man in suit and tie, who might well have been on his way to choir practice.
‘‘Ere,’ it said, ‘ you want all the fuckin’ seat, mate?’
‘Sorry’ murmured Jock, still immersed in his own problems.
As always, Muscles took the apology for fear. ‘Yeah, well, fuckin’ sorry ain’t gonna do it,’ he said, and rammed Jock up against the side of the train, then stood up and loomed over him, fists clenched. Fellow passengers clucked and squeaked and shuffled up the carriage.
It took Jock perhaps half-a-minute to adjust to this once-familiar situation. He straightened his jacket and stood up himself. Although almost a foot smaller and 30 years older than the other man, this was an age-old routine that was in his bones, drunk or sober. He raised his hand, one finger pointing directly at him. ‘Look pal,’ he said, ‘if you want to go to hospital, I’m the man to put you there.’
Suddenly, alarmingly, Muscles had a revelation. This little old Scots git had done this before. Many, many times. Probably there were NHS wards packed with people who’d annoyed him.
In a blur of blue tattoos, tangled hair and dried-up testosterone, he fled.
Later, when he told me the story, I said that perhaps it was just as well it ended like that, if this young thug was half his age and twice his size. Jock just gave me a pitying look.
‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ he said.
So can we put names to Jock and Mac? Please try: answers on a plain postcard to Gozo.
By Peter Reece
By Cathy Couzens
By Colin Dunne
