Journalism is the only human activity where the orgasm comes at the beginning. – Vincent Mulchrone.
May 23, 2008
The grape and the grain
By Revel Barker
Thirty years ago, just after leukaemia had got him at the ridiculously unfair age of 54, the Daily Mail published a book of (some of) Vincent Mulchrone’s best work. It can’t have been an easy task to choose the contents.
At the time, in an age that was almost certainly witnessing British – and therefore the world’s – journalism at its best, Mulchrone stood as the supreme practitioner.
Today we republish the book.
The Best of Vincent Mulchrone – A lifetime of wit and observation of the folly and splendour of his fellow humans by the Daily Mail’s finest reporter – is on sale at amazon uk or from any decent bookshop, now.
At the suggestion of his sons, Martin, Paddy and Michael, and with the ready consent of the Mail (as copyright holders) royalties will be donated to Leukaemia Research at Great Ormond Street.
It’s a book that should be on the shelves of every reader of this website.
And if you have children or grandchildren even remotely connected with our black art, you should buy it for them, because it should be on their bookshelves, too.
Anybody who is interested in the history of the sixties and seventies (you know… if you can remember it, you weren’t there) should want to read it for the unique Mulchrone take on events like the Eichmann trial, the deaths of Churchill and Pandit Nehru, Francis Chichester’s return home, Willie Hamilton and the royals, insights into the lives of Charlie Chaplin, Maurice Chevalier, Mother Teresa and even the real Mademoiselle from Armentieres.
Plus that unforgettable intro on the morning of the 1966 World Cup.
Not many journalists have penned a paragraph that became a classic joke, that was repeated (and still is) by stand-up comics as if it were their own – and that is still resurrected by back-benches every time England plays Germany as if it were a suddenly inspired and original thought.
But Mulchrone did.
Vincent Mulchrone couldn’t take a train home (as his son Paddy remembers – below) without it turning into an unreal event; he couldn’t even produce children without this most natural act turning into A Story.
That happened, so he told me, like this.
When Vincent proposed to Louie (Marie-Louise Katrina Bogues), on Bangor Pier in Ulster, she told him the tragic news that she would be unable to bear him children because of a crushed fallopian tube following a riding accident in which she was crushed beneath a horse.
Vincent said that wasn’t a problem – it was she that he loved – and they married anyway. A few years later they returned to Holywood, Co. Down for Christmas and on Christmas eve, 1954, her dad Paddy Bogues, a pawnbroker and JP, asked gently what was happening about grandchildren.
Vincent told him: ‘We’re trying… but no luck yet.’
Father-in-law said: ‘Come with me, son, and I’ll show you the way babies are made!’
He took him out for a couple of pints of the black stuff, then sent Vincent and Louie upstairs with a bottle of Moet and a bottle of Bushmills Black Label.
Vincent half-protested that this was contrary to the best medical advice, but on the other hand he was never one to refuse a drink….
On September 23rd, 1955, Martin was born in London and the couple returned to Northern Ireland that Christmas to show off the newborn child.
Paddy said proudly: ‘Didn’t I tell you, Vincent…?’
And Vincent said: ‘Aye. Great joke. It caused a lot of amusement in Fleet Street.’
On Christmas eve, Paddy Bogues took him out again for a couple of pints then produced another two bottles of precisely the same labels as the previous year and packed the young couple upstairs.
And on September 23rd, 1956, baby Patrick was born – in Belfast, where Louie had gone because Vincent was in Israel on a job.
And they say never mix the grape with the grain…
They didn’t go to Ireland for Christmas after that.
As Vincent explained to his father-in-law: ‘A joke’s a joke, Paddy, but bollocks to the complete pantomime.’
The third son, Mike was born in July, 1960, and if you really want the details the conception can probably be traced back to the fond return of a long distance reporter from a royal tour at a time when they lasted fully two or three months.
But it may explain why Vincent thereafter took to drinking his Moet in the mornings – in the comparative safety of the downstairs Harrow or, when delayed by intro-writing activities, an hour or so later in El V.
Home time for Vincent Mulchrone was a moveable feast. Less moveable... more feast.
It mostly involved a swiftish one at the back ’Arrer, a bus across Waterloo Bridge, a tincture at The Drum on the railway station concourse and a 40-minute rattle to the West Byfleet Hotel, from where he would ring the sainted Louie to join him for a G&T.
(She was not averse to sticking three bairns in dressing gowns in the back of the car to effect the pick-up... even if it DID involve us sitting there for half an hour while thirsts were properly slaked.)
This particular Friday was different. ‘You WILL be home at 7.30pm and you WILL be sober...’ she barked in her best Belfast brogue. The Poinsots from Paris were visiting, she was cooking and he was entertaining... an equation concentrated by the fact that he had the lingo and she didn’t. The Poinsots had no English.
He left the office a happy man... happier still to report from Waterloo that not only was he sober and without drink, but the Portsmouth-bound 6.48 had no buffet car. He’d be in at 7.30 and ready to join battle with les Frogs.
Less than a mile out of Waterloo and the train shudders to a halt. Mulchrone sits there. No drink. And now no fags. There’s clearly a problem somewhere on the line, but what to do in an age long before mobile phones?
Not surprisingly, another train heading in the opposite direction pulls up and halts alongside.
Not just any train – it is the express from Portsmouth. Not just any carriage, either – it’s the buffet car.
And right opposite Mulchrone’s door window, the opaque, slide-apart quarterlight behind the buffet counter.
The reporter’s challenge: adapt and overcome. Vincent dropped the door window, hammered on the window opposite and inquired of the buffet car attendant if he had any non-tipped Senior Service on board.
‘Certainly sir,’ was the reply. And then the fateful words: ’Will there be anything else…?’
Well, says Mulchrone, since you’re there, and we’re going nowhere, a large scotch would be nice. He inquired of his fellow passengers in first class. It was drinks all round, for a solid 40 minutes.
When he finally tumbled off the train at West Byfleet, a fizzing Louie exclaimed: ‘You HAVE been to the pub!’
And as the train without a buffet car pulled out of the station, he started to reply: ‘No dear, I haven’t. It’s just that...’
They always say old reporters remember where they were when JFK was shot and when Elvis died. I was walking along Royal Avenue in Belfast when news broke about JFK and I was in Birmingham with ‘Big’ Alan Cochrane of the Daily Express covering race riots in Ladywood when Elvis died.
And I can still remember vividly where I was the first time I met the legend that was Vincent Mulchrone.
I was back in Belfast for the Mirror covering the Ulster Workers Council strike in 1974 when The Great Man appeared, accompanied by another legend – the great Ted Scallan, Belfast bureau chief of the Daily Mail.
Both had breakfasted well in their accustomed manner and we stood near Belfast shipyard awaiting the general secretary of the TUC, Vic Feather, who had said he would lead the workers back to work and break the cycle of intimidation.
As we waited Ted introduced me to Vinnie and then a ‘wee man’, one of Ted’s thousands of contacts in Belfast, edged up to us and said: ‘Don’t go no further, Ted, or ye’ll finish up in the Royal. Stay back, for the minute they set off they’re goin’ t’be ambushed and I don’t want to see you and your mates hit.’
And with that he was off to join the ambushers.
‘Good contact with good advice, Ted,’ said Vincent.
‘He’s a UVF gunman from East Belfast,’ said Ted.
As the three of us hung back Vic Feather said: ‘Right, gentlemen, we’re off.’
And with that Ted and I – both Belfast boys – exchanged knowing glances and Ted gently took Vincent’s arm and held him back.
‘That’s close enough, Vincent, old friend,’ said Ted. ‘If there was stone-throwing in the Olympics some of these boys would win gold.’
The photographers, who could sniff things on the wind, sensed something was up and had moved off to a likely vantage point. As usual they were correct.
Within minutes the marchers, including Vic Feather, were greeted with a hail of stones and bottles and the march back to work ended there and then.
Next time I met him was a couple of years later when I was doing a Saturday night shift on the Sunday Mirror in Manchester. There was a very posh Indian wedding taking place in the Piccadilly Hotel to which the editor had been invited.
As it was a Saturday night he was unable to attend, but promised the exceedingly rich parents of the young couple that the Sunday Mirror would cover the event and carry a story and pictures.
All the Sunday Mirror staffmen – and girls – had contrived to vanish and I got lumbered with it. Off I went and was made most welcome – but there simply wasn’t a bloody short in it, let alone the page lead the editor had made clear he wanted.
For an hour I sat wracking my brains in the bar of the Piccadilly when who should walk in but Vincent and his wife, Louie.
We had a drink, and another drink, and another drink and a chat as I told him my predicament.
‘Tell me about the story,’ he said. ‘Another drink will help.’
And then from his inside pocket he produced one of his famous envelopes and began to write.
‘Here’s what I would do for an intro,’ he said.
And there it was. Simple but brilliant and I can remember every single word of it still.
It started: ‘It was the wedding where everything that glittered really was gold.’
The rest of the story fell into place and off I went to file. The Mulchrones had gone in to dinner by the time I left the phone box and I strolled gently back in the direction of the office via the Swan With Two Necks.
Mike Gagie, moonlighting as night news editor, was there and greeted me with: ‘Here he is – the conquering fucking hero. The editor is on cloud nine with your copy and has told the back bench it is to go in word for word and untouched. He knows he’s on free curry for life after this.
‘I really didn’t know how you’d find anything to write about.’
And then I told him the truth.
‘It was Vinnie Mulchrone who wrote the intro and guided me towards the rest of it.’
‘Well say fuck all about that,’ said Gagie. ‘He’s so happy upstairs you’re going to be paid for a double and he won’t give a damn about your exes.’
After a few more we trooped back upstairs and the editor was there. Handshakes all round and invites to his office for more drink. Neil Mackay was there, too, and said to me: ‘Careful, he’s so impressed he’s going to offer you a job.’
I fled back to the news desk, grabbed Gagie, and took him back as my protector. Some bloody protector – he made straight for the bottle of Gordons and began to demolish it with gusto.
As the editor took me aside he said: ‘I think you should come round here and work for us…’
But before he could get any further I told him that Vince had written the intro and pointed the way.
He didn’t believe me. He honestly thought I was joking.
Years later I was on the Mirror news desk in London – after the Maxwell blitzkrieg on the North – and interviewing reporters for a job in Manchester.
Into the newsroom for interview walked the ghost of Vincent Mulchrone – his son Paddy, who had inherited more from his old man than just the gift of the craic. We immediately left for the Bleeding Heart and cracked a couple of bottles of champagne in memory of The Legend.
Here's a memory of Vincent. I was working in the London office of the Yorkshire Evening Post when Churchill died and spent many hours door stepping his home waiting for the old chap to die.
I then had to cover his lying-in-state which usually meant trying to find Yorkshire folk in the long queues. Vincent soon became the leader of the entire Fleet Street and provincial hack pack.
It was a role that came naturally to him: he had, after all, been a patrol leader in the Scouts in his youth in Morley, in the West Riding – a fact that I may have forgotten to file, at the time.
We would gather at opening time, for heart starters, in that now-vanished pub opposite the Houses of Parliament. Then we'd return at lunchtime, have grub and more drink, and watch the crowds for a spell in the afternoon.
We paused only to file.
On the last day of the lying-in-state, we gathered as usual. Then at lunchtime we all met up for the final stretch. Vincent drew himself up, glanced at his watch, and came out with the memorable instruction that has stayed with me for more than 40 years:
‘Right lads,’ he said. ‘Once more round Winston -- then we're off on the piss.’
Newspapermen don’t come much better than Vincent Mulchrone, a friend since weekly paper days. The last time we met before his too early death, I had been hired by the Brewers’ Society to argue the case for Sunday opening of pubs in Wales. A cause close to my heart.
The most graphic way to illustrate the anomalies, it seemed to me, was to hire a coach and get my friend Robin Wills, the manager of the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester, to make a massive, extravagant picnic because Robin did extravagance better than anyone I knew, as befitted a tobacco company heir.
I would invite Fleet Street’s finest to join me in a tour of the Welsh border, visiting pubs. Pubs where you could get a drink in the snug, but not the lounge, the bar but not the dining room, and – in one case where the boundary between England and Wales ran through the centre of the pub – on the left hand side of the bar but not the right.
Mulchrone was first on my list.
Late in the afternoon we left the main party and settled down to have a comfortable drink in the Crown in Denbigh, which had never closed in living memory. It was there that Vince told me the story of the time he hired a man to wear a Flook suit at a seaside promotion by the Daily Mail.
Flook was a very popular furry bear, star of the paper’s cartoons page. Vince said he found a reluctant candidate at the town’s labour exchange.
‘A fiver,’ Vince wheedled, ‘just for a morning’s walk on the sands.’
‘Deck-chairs?’ the man asked suspiciously. ‘I couldn’t give out deck-chairs. It’s me back and I can’t stand heat.’
‘It’s not the bloody Sahara,’ Vince said. ‘And we’ll throw in a water bottle. All you’ve got to do is be nice to a few kids.’
The man’s eyes blazed with panic. ‘It’s not Father Christmas, is it? I couldn’t do Father Christmas; not again. I ’ad to do it three years ago. Horrible it was. I give out the wrong parcels and a little girl hit me wiv a bleeding train.’
‘It’s mid-summer,’ Vince told him. ‘You don’t have Father Christmas in summer.’
‘They had me in September that year,’ the man countered. ‘I wouldn’t have to give anything out, would I?’
‘Lollipops. In a tray,’ Vince told him quickly. ‘Round your neck. When you’ve given the last one out you’ve finished.’
‘They wouldn’t have to sit on my knees, would they? I couldn’t have kids sitting on my knee. They all have wet drawers, you know. It’s the excitement.’
But he was weakening. ‘How many lollipops?’
‘Fifty.’
He made up his mind. ‘OK!’ he said. ‘But not a word to this lot. I don’t want to lose me amchoor status. And no sitting on bleeding knees,’ he warned. ‘I ain’t ’aving a conviction for that. Definite.’
‘Flook has no knees.’
When they got to the Entertainments Shed on the prom and he saw the Flook outfit, the little man changed his mind. ‘I’m not getting into that bleedin’ thing,’ he said. ‘It’s horrible.’
He agreed when Vince doubled the fee but not even the lure of a third fiver, which Vince had to give him to put on the plastic head, would induce him to remove his cap.
The incessant electronic barking of Flook obviously unnerved him, Vince told me. With a sudden, desperate jerk, the little man tore himself away from the grips of a circulation man and, banging and dipping his plastic head, shot through the hut door and out into the Great World.
Colliding almost at once with a group of holiday-makers, he tumbled and rolled down the promenade steps to the beach where the weight of his head sent his feet shooting into the air. In a moment he was up and running, little gauntleted hands waving wildly as he struggled to unfasten the head. Zig-zagging across the beach, terrifying holiday-makers.
‘Look at him!’ a circulation man fumed. ‘He’s ruining the whole bloody thing, leaping about like that. He should be walking slowly, chatting up the children.’
From that day many readers of the Daily Mail were able to get instant obedience from their young by threatening them that Flook was coming. He emptied that beach faster than rain, or even a deck chair attendant. At first the children had been delighted. You could hear a concerted shout of ‘OOOOOH’ all over the front as a horde of children threw away the spades with which they had been burying their fathers and made for Flook. No doubt it was the lollipops that attracted them, for the trail of red toffee that charted his progress down the beach soon became a line of struggling, laughing children. But the mood changed dramatically when, brought to bay at last, the little man turned on his pursuers and started throwing lollipops at their heads.
‘It’s all wrong,’ said the man from the circulation department pettishly. ‘There should be only one lollipop to each child. That little girl has been hit twice.’
Vince said he admired the man’s aim: he could not see and was directed solely by sound. Under the circumstances Vince thought he put up a creditable performance. Even when the last lollipop was discharged the man in the Flook suit fought on, hurling pebbles and even rocks of a respectable size. When he finally put the children to flight and sent parents scuttling for the protection of the promenade wall, the little man stood for a moment whimpering, a lonely figure on a deserted beach.
He threw himself down on the sand, kicking at the air as he struggled to pull off his head which by now was dented badly. Finally, he scrambled to his feet, skidding in the wet sand at the sea’s edge. Soon he was paddling, if you could so describe his nervous leaps and surges, as the water washed first round his ankles, then his legs, his little furry thighs and finally his middle as he floated further out to sea.
The circulation man must have had a sticky few moments on the phone calling out a lifeboat to a man in a bearskin. When he came back he wore the air of a man who has known suffering. ‘They wanted to know, if they tow it in, do they get salvage money?’ he said.
About 12 years ago, I was living in a Chelsea street two doors away from Bob Geldof. Sharing the street with him was interesting. First, we were always worried that down-and-outs would follow him home in the belief that he must be heading for a hostel. Secondly, his wife was given to crashing her car into others in the street (including mine) when she was over-excited.
Then there was the embarrassment over their daughter. Paula announced that her new-born child was being named after the fruit or vegetable she most resembled. For years we called her Turnip. She didn’t look like a peach to us.
But the one good thing about having him there was that from time to time, usually when pots and pans began flying, I’d open the door and find a friendly pack of hacks and snappers on the pavement. This meant, naturally, that, since freelancing from home was a lonely business, I felt obliged to take them down to the Coopers Arms for a restorative.
Until then I hadn’t had much contact with the younger hacks, and this lot were mostly in their early twenties. They were always curious to know about life B43M (that’s ‘Before the 3 Ms - Murdoch, Maxwell and Montgomery’) and I was happy to tell them. Was there, one of them asked, any writer-reporter from that time who was outstanding?
Only one answer, of course. I told them, and looked at their blank faces. ‘Who’s Vincent Mulchrone?’
I was astonished. In my half-century of this nutty industry, I had never previously had to explain to anyone who Mulchrone was. The surname was quite enough. Everyone knew. Everyone knew because we all wished we were Vincent Mulchrone.
Typing out the parking fines from the morning court, standing outside the church at a funeral collecting names, asking golden wedding couples the secret of happiness, every young trainee dreamed of being Mulchrone. I once tried to graft his style on to my report of Addingham Parish Council: it wasn’t altogether a success.
Incredibly, he died 30 years ago. And for well over 20 years before that, at a time when newspapers were awash with talent, he was regarded as the best. Given that we were all working with the same 26 letters, I could never understand why what he wrote was so totally different – and inarguably superior – to the others. Reading some people was like wading through congealed porridge; with Mulchrone it was like ski-ing downhill. Some writers made you yawn; he made you smile. Some pieces just lay on the page, dead and dull. His glowed. All with the same 26 letters - I never understood it then, and I don’t understand it now.
Let me get this straight immediately – I only met him a handful of times, and I certainly didn’t know him well. He was a man with dozens of friends, many of whom will be wondering why I’m writing this. How about: I thought of it first? And that 30-year milestone must be worth something.
Oh yes, and also I have to correct a wicked lie he once wrote about me.
What I can certainly do is to speak for the effect he had on that generation – my generation – immediately behind his. We studied his pieces as we never studied for O-levels, trying to work out what he’d got and how we could get it. Even now I can quote several of his more famous intros. ‘Two rivers run silently through London tonight and one is made of people…’ for Churchill’s lying-in-state.
And ‘If the Germans beat us at our national game today, we can always console ourselves with the fact that we have twice beaten them at theirs,’ on the morning of the 1966 World Cup final. That’s hardly a boast on my part. Any journalist over 50 could do the same. That’s the measure of his influence.
At the Friday morning journalism class in Bradford Tech, we used to read this stuff, sigh, and get on with our shorthand. It seemed a world away.
A few years later, as new boy in features in the MirrorManchester office, I was off on my first foreign job. Albert Hirst, a butcher from Barnsley, was competing at the International Black Pudding Festival in a little town in Normandy, and I was taking him. What we hot-shot reporters called an exclusive, I think you’ll find.
As we flew down to Heathrow, he said he’d had a call from somebody on the Daily Mail who also wanted to be there. ‘Someone called Mulchrone,’ he said.
My heart leapt and sank simultaneously. It was rather like being invited to bowl at Len Hutton. I was overjoyed at the thought of meeting my hero. I was also terrified at the prospect of having to write the same piece.
He was waiting at the airside bar at 9am with a small row of bottles in front of him. He explained the line-up. Fernet Branca for his hangover, iced water to remove the taste of the Fernet Branca, and a half-bottle of champagne to get going. ‘You can’t start the engine without the diesel,’ he said. ‘Would you like a drink yourselves?’
I was half-hoping that he’d be supercilious and patronising. Instead, he was charming and self-deprecating, and Albert Hirst and myself were utterly disarmed. And we hadn’t even had a drink.
As we drove up into Normandy with me at the wheel, at Mulchrone’s suggestion we stopped here and there, and there and here, to sample a local product – Calvados. Every establishment made its own and it was necessary, he said, to try them out. It soon became clear that he was one of those charismatic men who can light up a room. He chattered and chuckled and charmed (in fluent French, of course, the swine), and in every bar they almost wept when he left.
When we got to Mortagne-au-Perche, the market town was packed with black pud makers and black pud aficionados. As we fought our way to the bar of the one small hotel, Albert was hanging on to a plastic bag inscribed ‘Albert Hirst, High-Class Family Butcher’ which he’d carefully carried all the way there. He asked Mulchrone for some whispered advice before plonking it on the bar and opening it to reveal the biggest pork pie in the history of such things. ‘Ern petty caddo from Barnsley, England,’ he rumbled in his Yorkshire baritone. It went down a storm, as indeed did his pork pie.
The next morning we strolled through the huge tents with tables laden with puddings both black and white, and quite possibly striped. They’d come in from all over France, but from Belgium, Germany and Italy too. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. So thrilled were they with this British invasion (it was a long time ago) that they made Mulchrone and myself judges for one table of 25 black puddings. To clear our palate after each one, we were given a glass of Muscadet.
We emerged from the tent not knowing much about black puddings, but as very fine judges of Muscadet. Or, at least, that’s what Mulchrone wrote in his piece. After all this time, I think I can safely nick it.
That night we had a stroll around town and several more glasses of Muscadet and Calvados. Towards midnight, I remember we were comparing our favourite intros. He said he had a weakness for Police With Tracker Dogs. I said I preferred Schoolchildren Turned Detective For a Day. He countered with Angry Housewives Yesterday. Yes, I think I can safely say he passed on to me the secrets of his trade.
The next morning we retired to our respective rooms to write. It didn’t so much flow as coagulate. How can you write anything when the man who is the best is doing the same thing yards away? I had managed to scrape a few paragraphs together when there was a tap at the door.
It was Mulchrone. He was holding out his copy. ‘I’ve finished,’ he said. ‘Would it help you to have a look at it?’ I thought of trying to explain that not only did I not want to see it, but I didn’t want to be in the same hotel as him when he was writing, or indeed in the same country. So I just said no thanks.
The two pieces appeared. His was... well, Mulchrone. Mine wasn’t. That’s all you need to know.
To my personal delight and professional dismay, he kept on popping up after that. But he was always great fun. In the Grand Hotel in Parknasilla, Co Kerry, where scores of pressmen had flocked to see the newly-retired General de Gaulle, Mulchrone was doing the colour piece. At nine one morning, I saw him pick up the telephone in the bar and call Donald Seaman, the Express writer, who was of same vintage.
‘Get down here, Don,’ he snapped, with some urgency. ‘There’s something pretty dramatic happening.’ A minute later, Seaman tumbled down the staircase still fastening his shirt and demanding to know what was happening. Mulchrone, indicated an open bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket on the bar, with two glasses. ‘That’s pretty dramatic, isn’t it?’
When Hereford’s football team did well in the FA Cup, I went to do a colour piece, only to find that he’d been there the day before. I’d just got as far as ‘Happiness is a town called Hereford today…’ when I realised what it was and hurled it away.
There weren’t many who could do that light-as-thistledown writing. The Mirror sent one of their more mature ladies, who was more foot-in-the-door than Scott Fitzgerald, to do a story about a brothel in Aberdeen. To everyone’s astonishment, she filed the most delightful piece, and graciously accepted all our congratulations. It wasn’t until I opened the Mail and saw Mulchrone’s piece that I realised where all the graceful phrases and clever insights had come from. I remembered that time in France when he’d offered his copy to me.
That’s not to say no-one else could turn in a good light piece. John Edwards could do a colour piece on a jumble sale just as well as on the end of the world. Liz Gill (then married to Danny McGrory) when she did the basement piece on The Times feature page was wonderfully funny. The sons of Mulchrone bobbed up all over the place. Alan Bennett, on the Express, had a lovely touch, and there was a man on the Guardian – Michael Parkin – who did their hanging-indent pieces, and did them beautifully. You won’t believe this but there was a young Mirror reporter in Newcastle who used to trot out sweetly crafted funny pieces that were up there with the best. He should’ve stayed with it. Revel Barker is a great by-line for a comic writer.
One year, when I took my kids down to West Cork for a holiday, I was driving slowly around the quay at a place called Crookhaven when a man jumped out waving in front of me. It was Mulchrone. He had a cottage there. He also had his supporters’ club. In the bar of the Crookhaven Inn sat Ken Donlan, Terry O’Connor, and Peter Donnelly, the Mail’s news editor, rugby writer and star sub. If David English had made it, we could’ve had a chapel meeting. Oh yes, and Vincent’s son Patrick was behind the bar. When we got up to his cottage, his wife Louie had already opened the champagne.
(If my memory’s right, Louie used to be a receptionist for a Dr Kennedy in Northern Ireland. He had a daughter called Philippa who went into journalism. Anyone know what became of her?)
So what about the wicked lie? Right. A couple of days after our French trip I got a typed letter on Daily Mail headed paper. He said what fun it had been and thanked me for doing the driving. Beneath, in his handwriting, was a PS: ‘How dare you write a better piece than me!’
Sadly, not even I could believe it. And believe me, I tried.
So let’s raise a glass to the master of them all. First of all, the Fernet Branca, then the water…
What a lovely tribute to Vincent Mulchrone by Colin Dunne. I too had been thinking about him recently around the time of my elder daughter’s 30th birthday. I was heavily pregnant with Holly when Louie rang me in Berlin, where I was living with my army officer husband, to say that Vincent had died. I was on the next plane home, wrapped in a voluminous coat and sucking in my stomach to disguise the lump – they wouldn’t let you fly in those days past about six months.
I knew Louie all of my life. She was as close as you can get to family without the blood tie and became Holly’s godmother. As Colin said, she was manager of my father’s one-man medical practice in Holywood, Co Down. She was clever and beautiful but couldn’t get a job – she told my father she’d get as far as telling potential employers she was a former pupil of the Convent of the Sacred Heart and that was it. She was a Catholic in a staunchly Protestant Northern Ireland in the fifties.
So Daddy gave her a job and she was the first person, apart from my mother, to give me a good clip around the ear for cheek. I remember running outraged to my mother screaming ‘Louie Bogues smacked me,’ and Mum giving me another clip for telling tales.
She married Vincent and went to live across the water but every Easter and summer we’d head south for the little fishing village of Crookhaven in West Cork where I’d sit in a corner of O’Sullivan’s pub and listen to Vincent’s tales of Fleet Street – how he had been on the last helicopter out of Saigon, or hobnobbing in the Bahamas with the Queen – and I would think ‘I want a life like that’. And indeed when the time came, Vincent sat with me at the kitchen table at their home in West Byfleet and helped me write my application form to the Mirror training scheme in Plymouth. I remember how one of his sentences ‘I intend and mean to be a journalist’ was picked up by my interviewer, Geoff Harris, who remarked how determined I sounded.
In Crookhaven I’d meet the friends who made their way to Vincent’s ‘little piece of paradise’ – Colin Reid, Ken Donlan, Phil Wrack, John Winnington-Ingram, Terry O’Conner. John and Terry bought cottages there. Then there were occasional visits from Rod and Maggie Tyler and a single guest appearance from Max Hastings.
Other luminaries from the London scene discovered Crookhaven around the same time, a famous architect called Alan Best, a restaurateur called Tom Benson who ran Parkes in Beauchamp Place where Princess Margaret or Mick Jagger would pop in for supper at the specially reserved ‘kitchen’ table. They’d bring their famous friends to Crook for a few days which is why you could be drinking and singing in O’Sullivan’s with Terence Stamp, Jean Shrimpton, Judy Geeson and the like along with the Flynns, the Murphys, the O’Driscolls and the ‘blow-ins’ like the Mulchrones and the Kennedys.
Everyone was expected to perform. If you couldn’t sing, you had to play the spoons or recite. Vincent’s party pieces included Little Nell and the Wild Colonial Boy. I would sing Mary of Dungloe.
Vincent and Daddy decided one year to revive the Crookhaven regatta so the teenagers were dispatched all over the county pinning home-made posters to lamp-posts proclaiming the financial rewards available to the winners of the rowing, sailing, swimming and even the greasy pole competitions.
Nobody thought about things like safety boats and when one poor child started taking in water, there was panic. ‘Get in there and save him,’ yelled Louie and I had just time to take off my gold watch, a 21st birthday present from my parents, before diving off the quayside into the harbour in my new black velvet jeans.
The poor lad was furious at being ‘saved’ by a girl – don’t think he’s forgiven me to this day. But when I emerged dripping wet, Ken Donlan, then news editor of the new Sun newspaper, came up to me and said: ‘If they don’t take you on at the Mirror, you come and see me.’
And when I did exactly that, Vincent was waiting in El Vino with a chilled bottle of Veuve Cliquot to celebrate.
Like Colin, I met him on a job once, the Flixborough Colliery disaster. I’d been sent to write colour and I dutifully filed a piece about a chap who kept peacocks and was worried about how the fumes would affect them. I knew I’d only get 10 pars in The Sun at the most and that Vincent would turn it into something special so I told him about the peacocks.
Back in the office the following day, KD came up to me, mouth twitching with a rare early morning smile, and said: ‘That was a nice intro you gave Vincent.’ You couldn’t hide anything from KD and I never tried.
When Vincent’s middle son Patrick was dithering about whether to become a journalist, because he was worried about the inevitable comparisons with his father, I had no hesitation about telling him to go for it. The Mulchrone name would get him through the door, I told him, but he wouldn’t last if he was no bloody good. Patrick is my second daughter Katy’s godfather and a fine journalist on the Mirror.
Those of us who knew Vincent well still miss him 30 years after his death.
He died far too young. One of my most treasured possessions is a silver money clip he carried around the world with him plus his last NUJ press card which Louie gave me. He so loved the job and I remember how he had the word ‘Reporter’ in his passport – you used to have to specify your job – he considered the word ‘Journalist’ far too pretentious.
Colin talked about the ‘two rivers’ intro. Another piece I loved was one he wrote when he turned 40, one of the collection that the Daily Mail published after his death – they should bring out a new edition. I can’t remember it word for word but he talked about how sometime in the second half of his life he was going to mend the wonky handle on the living room door. He never did of course.
My husband did it for him.
I had some great role models. But there was nobody like Vincent.
It mostly involved a swiftish one at the back ’Arrer, a bus across Waterloo Bridge, a tincture at The Drum on the railway station concourse and a 40-minute rattle to the West Byfleet Hotel, from where he would ring the sainted Louie to join him for a G&T. 
