The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – The Times
I have reviewed a dozen books but the one which stands out most was the one I expected to enjoy the least. Hugh Cudlipp’s Published And Be Damned!, a republication from 1953, contains wise words for media moguls and politicians alike which are still relevant today. – Nigel Nelson, nominating his book of the year in Tribune.
Issue # 128
New Year, 2010
This Week
Is it just an age thing, or have we just lived through the fastest decade in history?
Is it only ten years since saddoes were telling us that the year 2000 would not actually be the start of the new millennium which, according to them, wouldn’t occur until 2001? I wouldn’t have minded much, but proof or their abject misery came when they failed to organise any parties for the following new year’s eve.
And again – remember? – the calendar turning from 1999 to 2000 was said by the nerds to be something for which no computer was prepared or capable of handling. The internet would crash, worldwide; aircraft, now totally computer-reliant, would fall out of the sky. British Airways (remember BA -- used to be the world's biggest airline, now the fourth in Europe?) was so concerned that its chairman insisted on his entire board being airborne at 00.01 on January 1, to prove their confidence in the system.
When all that crapola came to nought, the hairshirts turned their attention to global warming. These were presumably the descendants of those prats who, in the seventies, were threatening a global freeze by 2020 (the 20-20 vision, we called it then). The unemployable in pursuit of the unimaginable. And, just looking at the weather in the northern hemisphere over the past week… boy, didn’t the global warmongers pick the wrong side?
And weren’t the newspapers with their suddenly created in-house experts and with headline-hungry academics on tap just a little too eager to go along with all this doomsday nonsense?
But enough ranting.
If you want to read about the last ten years of change in the media, click here for a thoughtful (but obviously US-centric) piece from the Washington Post.
And if you want to read about the current sorry state of what we used fondly to call the Free Press and investigative journalism in Britain, read this in the Spectator Also check the link towards the end to the Wall Street Journal.
Otherwise, for your delectation and delight we have a story about our old hero, Vincent Mulchrone. There’s a lesson in it for any aspiring hack – when you can’t think of anything to write, when you’re desperate for an intro… check the pictures on the wall. That, according to Keith McDowell, is what Vince did, on those occasions when the muse deserted even him.
Norm Lipson remembers another newspaper legend, this one from the antipodes. Jim Oram was the man who didn’t goose the Queen of Denmark. Not many people (including Her Majesty) knew that.
There’s more advice for would-be hacks from the veteran freelance Stan Solomons. When you’ve absolutely nothing to write, invent something. No; we don’t mean invent facts or quotes, we mean invent a situation. When you’re a freelance, you largely live on your wits. It worked for Stan.
There’s even more (and welcome to the Ranters School of Journalism)… if a rival has a quote that you need, and offers to swap it for whatever you’ve got, find out what it is, before sharing your information. That’s the lesson John Kay, award-winning chief reporter of the Sun, learnt the hard way as a youth, from an old master. And, as always, we are happy to pass it on.
That’s enough for now, except to wish all Ranters – especially those among you who contribute – a happy new decade. And may your computers still be working after midnight.
If you’re still desperate for something to read (or eager to learn), buy a bloody book. The best ones are listed over there, in the column on the right. That’s the Ranters School of Journalism recommended reading list.
Vincent Mulchrone, as usual, was broke but he wanted to buy a car.
So when the Midland Bank unveiled its Personal Loan scheme tied in with the new Access credit card, it said it would loan any credit-worthy customer £500, a lot then, with remarkable little security.
I urged Vincent to go for one of these new Personal Loans.
‘They wouldn’t look at me – I’ve got an overdraft’ he said.
‘Wrong, Vincent – you’re just the sort of client this Access scheme wants.’
I urged him, as a ‘valuable’ Midland customer to seek an appointment with the manager of the Fleet Street branch and explain he needed cash to buy a car. We went through the script and I told Vincent not to be so modest, to explain he was, after all, the chief reporter of the Daily Mail and a man of some substance. I had to twist Vincent’s arm quite hard to abandon his customary modesty.
But half an hour later Vincent tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Got time for a quick one? he asked as he produced a rolled bundle of fivers from his trouser pocket. The bank had given him cash!
‘That’s for the car,’ I protested, but he steered me to the back bar of the Harrow and ordered the customary Moet & Chandon.
He didn’t spend it all and a few days later Vincent was the proud owner of a neat second-hand green Austin A40.
Vincent always had a sharp eye for colour and I felt it was that and the brilliant phrase that lifted his copy from the rest. He came to Scarborough when, as Industrial correspondent, I was covering the Labour Party conference. The late Hugh Gaitskell was to throw down the challenge to the left with his ‘fight, fight and fight again’ speech and risk splitting the party over the nuclear bomb issue.
Vincent’s task was to write a backgrounder while I concentrated on the political power struggle but Vincent sought my help.
‘Any chance,’ he asked, ’of having a look inside Gaitskell’s suite in the Royal Hotel?’
In today’s high security world it is hard to contemplate but in October 1959 not even a detective guarded the leader of the Opposition – let alone his room. I was on friendly terms with Tom Laughton – brother of actor Charles – who owned the Royal and was proud of his valuable collection of art. Every bedroom had its own oil or water colour. Laughton’s reception staff knew as the Daily Mail man I was a big spender so within a few minutes a spare key to Gaitskell’s room was quietly produced. Vincent and I went in to have a quick look.
I must admit there seemed nothing out of the ordinary in what was a comfortable suite and after a few notes by Vincent we were out again. But he had his angle. When the main feature page carried Vincent’s piece next day he used the title of the oil master on Gaitskell’s bedroom wall entitled ‘The Hedger and His Mate’. It led neatly into the hole the leader seemed to be digging for Labour, followed along by his deputy, mud besmirched Aneuran Bevan, seeking to calm the issue.
Vincent did that trick again when he came to Stormont in 1972 where I was then Director of Information for Willie Whitelaw after direct rule had been imposed on Northern Ireland.
‘I know, Vincent – you want to have a look around.’
‘How did you guess?’ he chuckled.
I whipped Vincent into the Cabinet Room and the ante-room as the master craftsman swiftly took in the scene. We were out in less than ten minutes and nobody had spotted us.
Sure enough Vincent had found another appropriate landscape – a very muddy farmland scene, I seem to recall. And he was right. We were months, indeed years, digging ourselves out of that mess. The very prediction Vincent gave the Daily Mail readers next morning.
But neither of us thought it would take thirty years…
The legendary and colourful Jim Oram had just turned 60 when he learnt that he was suffering bowel cancer. This news to one of Australia’s greatest ever news men, came as more of a shock to his army of mates than it did to the man himself… or so it seemed to me.
Jim knew that he had lived one hundred lifetimes filled with enormous joy and fun, high drama, constant hi-jinks and incredible friendships. This bold, brazen, brilliant journalist had just about done it all… and done it all in all possible states of sobriety and other indulgences.
When Jim was at home suffering from his cancer and slowly withering away, I was working as a producer at a Sydney radio station. Each afternoon, when I ended my shift, I would drop into Jim’s place for a couple of hours to chew the fat, reminisce, tell bawdy stories and simply laugh our heads off about some of the escapades of our lives.
The world of journalism was very familiar with the James Oram by-line and the man himself. There are many reasons for his fame and notoriety. He was a great journo who could work under all conditions – a wonderful wordsmith who would write some of the raciest tabloid titillaters, and also write the biography of the Pope. He was both famous and notorious for his deeds. In fact he was legendary for them, some outrageous and others so humorous that no sitcom script writer could possibly come up with such scenarios.
Sometimes the stories were exaggerated, but Jim couldn’t be bothered to rebut or deny them. But as the end neared when I was sitting in his small lounge room sharing a yarn or two Jim said, completely out of the blue: ‘I never goosed the Queen of Denmark.’
‘I never said you did, mate,’ I replied after a brief double-take. ‘What do you mean, you never goosed the Queen of Denmark?’ I asked, wondering whether it was the prescribed morphine he was taking.
The story Jim told went like this: It was Sydney in the late 70s or early 80s; the Queen of Denmark, now mother-in-law of Aussie born Princess Mary, was in town as the patron of an international charity and was to attend a gala dinner and fund-raiser at one of Sydney’s top hotels.
Jim had been assigned the task of covering this for the following day’s editions of the afternoon tabloid, the Daily Mirror. There were quite a few hours between receiving the assignment and that evening’s events so Jim enlisted his mate, actor Terence Cooper to help while them away.
Trouper Cooper, an Irishman who migrated to New Zealand and later North Queensland, was a very tall fellow and didn’t mind a bit fun himself. His philosophy on life was similar to Jim’s – have a go and have fun… or a lot of fun. Cooper had played a role in the James Bond movie Casino Royale and briefly hosted a Tonight Show on Sydney television in the 1970’s. He was mid to low range celebrity.
Anyway… as Jim told it, the pair met up at a city pub and all day they drank, sucked on fags and made general pests of themselves at several city establishments until, come the evening, both were as full as Bill Gates’ bank account – some might even say blithering.
This state was nothing new to either of them. Jim had written hundreds of stories under all sorts of battle conditions. Somehow, Jim could overcome what would be insurmountable obstacles to many journos and write cohesive, informative and entertaining copy, no matter how affected.
Well, by now it was time to get to the gala dinner and the Queen of Denmark. Like any good Aussie bloke, Jim could not just brush off his mate and drinking companion so he invited Cooper to come along to the function and hang out with the media. Cooper naturally accepted. After all, there was free piss, free tucker and they’d probably kick on later, maybe head up to Kings Cross.
There was no problem getting Cooper into the function. Jim was a well known and highly respected journalist and the organisers would never dare question him. So there they were, sipping on cocktails and tossing hors d’oeuvres down their gullets (they could have been double A batteries for all they knew) when suddenly there was a flurry and a buzz from organisers, followed by a fanfare to announce that the Queen and her entourage were about to make their grand entrance.
Her Majesty then walked slowly into the grand function room flanked by a line of guests and media, two-deep, all on their feet as she entered to polite applause. Jim was standing in the front line, closest to the Queen, when she passed his spot. The very tall Terence Cooper was standing directly behind Jim. Both were bleary eyed and swaying slightly, but in no danger of collapsing just yet.
As Her Majesty passed the spot Jim was occupying, Cooper leaned over the top of his drinking buddy and did the unimaginable – something that, in earlier times, would have led to his public execution. He gave the royal buttocks a light but determined touch-up and then quickly leaned back, feigning both ignorance and innocence.
Her Majesty turned in shock, a scowl on her face at such impudence and indignity. Immediately she was confronted by a swaying, bleary-eyed Oram. Courtiers and society maidens scolded and threatened him with expulsion, ex-communication and possibly execution too.
Years later Jim was very proud that he had worn the odium and never given up his mate Terence Cooper, who, in turn, never gave himself up.
Norm Lipson is a freelance writer, author and radio producer based in Sydney.
Inspiration. Now there’s a word that should inspire us all.
Staffmen working out of head offices didn’t need it. Without it many a freelance would have been struggling to make a living.
Now there’s a wealth of difference between making things up and creating situations which then happen and become true. For example, many years ago we had a friend who was allergic to just about every food you could name, but somehow she had discovered that her body was tolerant to venison and smoked salmon. Problem was she couldn’t afford them.
Inspiration. All you needed was an MP who with very little encouragement would put down a question in the House of Commons however improbable the outcome. We had such an MP representing one of the constituencies in our area. He was very sympathetic and he readily agreed to put down a written question in the house - - Would her Majesty’s Government consider making venison and smoked salmon available on the National Health Service for Mrs Mary Smith (that’s not her real name).
Of course nothing came of it – apart from a few page leads and pictures of Mary who is still around and has somehow managed to survive without the benefit of those culinary delights.
I suppose one of my proudest inspirations blossomed forth around thirty-five years ago as I was passing a jewellers window in Huddersfield with my wife Nancy. In the window I caught sight of a silver plated cup. Suddenly I had a flash of … something, I have no idea of what or how. Scientists are still trying to work out how nearly half the brain works. For want of a better name it was – inspiration.
What I asked myself if I got a woman to present this cup to her husband and name him the Champion Husband of the World. I turned to my wife and said, “I’ve just had a great idea”. I explained it to her and asked, “Who do we know who would fit the bill”. Within seconds we had the answer. Nancy was friendly with an attractive young woman with three kids whose husband was just too good to be true – helping out in the house with the cleaning and the cooking and ironing, looking after the kids and was terrific with neighbours’ children too.
I phoned them the same day and went round to see them and explained my idea – and they were all for it. I bought the cup for £10, dreamed up a a four line rhyme (which I can’t remember) and had it inscribed on the cup. Our snapper, the late Brain Worsnop took some nice pix of wife and hubby and the kids with the cup. You can imagine it didn’t take a great deal of writing and we were delighted when it made page leads all round with pix.
Now, you could say that I made up the whole thing. Not so. I created a situation which I made come true. To our doting wife, her beloved really was the world’s champion husband.
As a result of the publicity the couple were feted on television. Monty Modelin was then quite a big name on Tyne Tees TV and they became the “stars” of a series fronted by Monty which has been copied down the years by other TV companies where couples relate to the nation just how much they don’t know about one another’s preferences. So I suppose I can take some credit for that, though financially it didn’t do me a bit of good.
Our two lovebirds also appeared on a number of other television programmes and had a great time before they moved to the south coast where the husband got a job with the giant American corporation, IBM. And thereby hangs a tale. Many a good story has a follow up and this one was no exception, but it never saw the light of day. For the simple reason that I never wrote it.
I’m sure most of you can guess what happened. Our champion husband started having an affair with a woman at IBM and tumbled off his exalted perch. It was the end of the marriage – a great story with the certainty of a few more page leads. But this couple were our friends – in fact we were about to go on holiday with them when the wife rang to tell us the news that it was all over – and so the breakdown of their marriage remained a secret.
The couple were divorced and both remarried and the wife, who we still see two or three times a year when she visits family and friends in Huddersfield gave me a cracking follow up at the time. She told me that when you worked for IBM you were married to the company and that there had been a tremendous number of broken marriages among those who worked there. In fact – and this was a great line – she said IBM stood for I’ve Been Married.
She had spoken to a doctor or some other official at the company – after all these years the details escape me – who gave her the number of broken marriages among employees. I remember thinking at the time that it was an astonishing number but of course when I tried to put some meat on the bones and confirm the story the company, not unnaturally clammed up.
Even though all this happened thirty to forty years ago for all I know it may still be happening. So may be there’s still an exclusive or a few page leads going begging for some enterprising freelance. It will need a lot of digging – and maybe just a bit of inspiration.
To swap or not to swap, that is the question, to slightly bastardise the words of the great bard.
It is a subject that news editors and news desks know little about, but a dilemma every reporter who has ever been on the road has faced many times.
It’s like a game of chess combined with poker. The eternal question is: are you going to swap something for which you will get a bit of a dud in return?
It was the recent references to the late great Syd Foxcroft that brought the subject flooding back to me and my very first, and extremely painful, experience of a swap.
I had started on the NewcastleJournal in the 60s and there was a massive story with a strike at the Vickers Armstrong armaments factory in the Elswick Road that was even making the nationals.
I had established good relations with the senior shop steward, Jim Murray, who tipped me off about a key meeting at a pub near the HighLevelBridge starting at 6.00 pm. When I got there, no other reporters were about and after an hour Jim came down from an upstairs meeting room and gave me a statement that the strike was to go on.
I immediately left the pub to run the 500 yards to the Journal office to file my red-hot exclusive and crashed into none other than the great Syd Foxcroft himself who had obviously got a late steer about the meeting.
He clocked me, bade me stop and asked what I’d got.
The exchange, and I’ll never forget it, went as follows:
Me: ‘I’ve got a very good exclusive story, Mr Foxcroft.’
Foxy: ‘That may be so lad, but there are always two sides to a story.’
Me: ’What do you mean, Mr Foxcroft?’
Foxy: ‘You may have what the shop stewards are saying, but I’ve got the management line.’
Me, starting to panic: ‘What do we do now?’
Foxy: ‘We do lad, what’s called in the trade a swap. It’s easy. You give me what you’ve got, I give you what I’ve got, and everybody’s happy. And nobody’s any the wiser, especially our news desks.’
Me: ‘OK, Exactly how does it work?’
Foxy: ‘You empty your note-book to me and then I’ll do the same for you.’
Not even smelling a whiff of a rat, I duly gave him all my exclusive quotes and then asked him to do the same.
Foxy, and this moment is burned into my memory banks, opened his notebook and, without even the hint of a smirk, said: ‘Take this down, lad. Lieutenant-Commander R B Lakin, managing director of Vickers Armstrong Elswick works, said: I have absolutely no comment to make whatsoever.’
And he did it with such subtle finesse – I never even felt the dagger go in – and with such cheeky charm that I never held it against him.
It taught be me one of the biggest lessons of my entire reporting career. If you are going to do a swap, at least try and establish that you are going to get something at least as good in return.
I doubt they teach such tricks of the trade at journalism colleges or on university media courses.
Sun chief reporter since 1990, and twice Reporter of The Year in the UK Press Awards, John Kay joined the NewcastleJournal in 1965 and moved to Fleet Street in 1973. Last year, on reaching retirement age, he was asked to stay on for at least another two years in the same full-time role.
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On the shelf
Here’s the list of the 12 books brought to you by those sound folk who give you Ranters every week.
More details of all of them are available on our books site.
Forgive Us Our Press Passes
by Ian Skidmore
(An hilarious account of life as a staffman, desk man, freelance and broadcaster)
£9.99
The Best of Vincent
Mulchrone
(The master at work; by the man generally acknowledge to have been the best reporter of his generation)
£9.99
Cassandra At His Finest And Funniest
(The pick of columns crafted by one of the greatest wordsmiths of his time. Or since)
£9.99
Slip-Up:How Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard Lost Him
by Anthony Delano
(The wonderful story behind a famous scoop, with Fleet Street rivalry at its most intense)
£9.99
A Crooked Sixpence
by Murray Sayle
(A brilliant fact-based novel about life on a mass-circulation tabloid)
£9.99
Ladies Of The Street
by Liz Hodgkinson
(How ‘the weaker sex’ contributed to the glory that once was Fleet Street)
£9.99
The UpperPleasureGarden by Gordon M Williams
(A fact-based novel about life on a fairly seedy weekly, as a young reporter tries to make his mark on the game)
£9.99
Crying All The Way To The Bank (Liberace v the Daily Mirror and Cassandra)
by Revel Barker
(The world’s highest-paid entertainer takes on the biggest selling newspaper in the trial of the century)
£15.99
Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon
by Anthony Delano
(Another – factual – account of the bizarre story of a beauty queen who accused a missionary of rape)
£9.99
A Place of Strangers
by Geoffrey Seed
(A novel, loosely based on fact, about a reporter’s quest to find the truth about his family, while pursuing a story about the Holocaust)
£9.99
Publish and Be Damned! (The astonishing story of the Daily Mirror)
by Hugh Cudlipp
(The all-time classic read for journalists about how and why newspapers sell)
£12.99
The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite
by Maggie Hall
(Not much to do with reporting, except that it was researched and written by a former New York correspondent. A great gift, though, for Anglophiles)
£10.00
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The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – The Times
Issue #129
January 8, 2010
This Week
There was a two-way traffic of gossip in Fleet Street during the glory days, reports John Knight. Some folk hied down to the pub with tales from the office, while others returned to the office with tales from the pub. As John and fellow gossip writer Paul Callan remember, the maestro behind much of this orchestration was Geoffrey Van-Hay, who died on new year’s eve and was The Street’s favourite barman for years.
But not everybody is, or was, a Van-Hay.
What did you do, during the golden years of journalism? And who were you, anyway? Your grandchildren might like to know. Come to that, maybe your colleagues always wondered what you did for a living. They might like to read about you, after you’re gone, in Ranters. They might even try looking you up on Google. But will you be there? The editor invites you in. And if you don’t write it, chances are that nobody else will.
People snuff it. It’s mandatory. Jack Grimshaw did a head count and can’t understand how he’s survived.
Newspapers die too; some don’t even really get going. Harold Heys recalls the launch of a new daily that would have celebrated its coming of age last month, if it hadn’t been such a cock-up, almost from conception.
Something else that hasn’t lasted is common courtesy. When you write, or suggest writing – anything – for Ranters, the likelihood is that you’ll get a pretty quick response. It’s only good manners and it used to be normal in the old days. It was how we were brought up. Like much else, that basic decency appears to have largely gone as a new generation has taken control. The majority of newspapers and magazines rarely respond at all to story ideas or contributions, as Liz Hodgkinson, a freelance these days, points out. Is it too much effort to bang back a quick email saying Thanks but no thanks? Apparently in the majority of cases it is. Perhaps, Liz suggests, basic courtesy should be included as a module on media courses.
Hanging out with Geoffrey Van-Hay, barman to Fleet Street in its most thirsty days, was heady stuff. We were propping up the bar, of course, at his drinking and dining club, Scribes, when he turned to Carol Thatcher and asked: ‘I say old girl, do you think you could ask your mother to open our new club?’
‘I’ll try,’ replied Carol, one of his 2,000 journalist members. With a flick of his dazzling white cuffs, Van thrust a telephone into her hands (it was before the universal use of mobiles). She got through immediately to the Prime Minister, then the most powerful woman in the world with a huge Commons majority.
‘Will you do me a real favour and personally open a jolly club friends of mine are starting in Kensington?’ She listened to the instant answer and then hung up with a loving goodbye.
‘Well?’ stuttered Van.
‘Mum said yes.’
Trebles all round.
Van, 72, who died on New Year’s Eve, never missed his round. Or a trick. What a splendid friend for Fleet Street’s heroic drinking class: generous, witty, tough, dedicated to relentless hard work and also to having a magnificently good time. But he could turn nasty if provoked. Actually, not unlike the better end of the trade he served.
He was strutting his stuff with Carol Thatcher that evening at the Scribes he had successfully created in Carmelite Street with his business partner Gavin Hans Hamilton. Now the newspapers were moving out and they were moving on: to open Scribes West under the Daily Mail offices in Kensington. It helped Van and Gavin that Vere Rothermere and David English were backing the idea and Mail honcho Brian Vine and friend of the lads was also best friend of Mohamed Al-Fayed who happened to own the real estate in the royal borough. Van and Gavin were on a regal roll in their bar business and Margaret Thatcher was the glistening maraschino cherry on the intriguing media cake.
Van, the young chap originally from the Fleet Street electrical shop a few doors down from El Vino, had done well. His iconic London EC4 career started humbly when Christopher Mitchell, whose grandfather launched the El Vino wine shipping business, which now had five bars, talent spotted Van selling light bulbs and flex over the counter and decided to train him to manage his flagship El Vino up The Street.
‘He had charm, personality and a positive attitude,’ says Christopher, a City of London councillor for thirty-seven years. ‘I just knew. We taught him about wine. I made the right choice.’
So began Van’s stewardship of one of the most famous bars in the world. It was a pretty wild place. In Fleet Street’s glory days gossip was a two-way traffic; some people went down to the pub with tales from the office; other returned to their desks with stories from El Vino. Maurice Richardson, the Guardian arts critic who boasted about his boxing skills, almost knocked Christopher down when he was told to quieten his drunken behaviour. Whereupon Christopher and Van, both big men, threw him into the street and banned him for ever.
Swearing was frowned on. Fighting was absolutely out. The staff in black jackets and pinstriped trousers kept order. They had to for the endless parade of their hard drinking egomaniac customers.
Banning unruly customers had been the rule of the day for more than a century. Hugh Cudlipp and Cassandra got their marching orders for aggressive drunken behaviour and so did Vicky, the beserk-in-drink left wing cartoonist. But all three claimed that they had barred themselves because they didn’t like the snobbery in El Vino. Men had to wear suits and ties.
Van told the SundayMirror’s George Martin that his guest, a very black African editor, couldn’t be served because he had no tie. ‘Okay,’ said George. ‘But you tell him he can’t get a drink because he’s not wearing a tie!’
Women were banned altogether from standing at the bar but they could sit at the tables in the back and order drinks. They were originally barred from the bar in 1879 by Christopher’s grandfather because some wandered in plying their trade during the foggy days of vice-ridden Victorian London.
But in the totally changed modern times Christopher had not altered the custom. This infuriated libbers led by the splendid columnist Unity Hall who decided to have a mass stand-in at the bar to demonstrate the new sex equality laws. There was a soda siphon battle and Unity grabbed Van’s high starched collar while (knowing Unity I think it must have been jocularly) trying to strangle him.
Big 1970 headlines: The Battle of Fleet Street
All were feisty people and Van & Co eventually got the women out and locked the doors.
Two lower courts refused to back the rights of the wimmin although two High Court judges eventually upheld their rights and so the girls were legally allowed to crowd up to the bar if they chose. Not that they did that much, after they had made their point. Ho-hum.
There was a certain irony that the two judges who had found against El Vino were regular customers and sat where women always sat to be served in the back room.
The place was awash with drama and drink. When Bob Edwards was fired as editor of the Daily Express for the second time he went straight to El Vino for a glass of champagne. At the same time he heard the bells of St Bride’s, the journalists’ church, peeling out.
Remarking to Van that that was the first time he had ever heard them ring, he was told:’Oh yes. It’s such a hoot! Mr Lancaster has paid the verger to ring them because his editor…’
Red-faced Van’s voice suddenly trailed off but quickly recovered: ’The bells? Ringing? Oh, really, Mr Edwards, I hadn’t noticed…’
Had Van misread the plot? For Terry Lancaster, Express foreign editor, later claimed that the bells were tolling in mourning rather than celebration for Bob’s firing. When I went in that day tricky Terry was standing full throttle at the door with a crowd from the paper all holding their own bottle of champagne, spilling out into the street listening to the bells.
Certainly Bob went on to employ Terry in one of his later distinguished editorships. So I must buy the mourning angle. But the bells and bubbly was a good story for the rest of the day.
Sometimes there were important front-page stories to be elicited. VIPs were intrigued to be at the heart of Fleet Street with its hot gossip, cold rare roast beef and claret on the luncheon menu.
Excitedly they responded, especially leading politicians, with their confidences. Expenses were well spent in El Vino. And guests were eager to be there because they could also learn things from the journalists about what was really going on.
The badinage was endless.
‘No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in your newspaper,’ was often heard. Martin Amis polished up a phrase for his latest novel at the top of his voice: ’Having sex with (naming a female journalist who wasn’t there) was like trying to stuff a raw oyster into a parking meter slot.’
Patrick Mennem, the Mirror motoring editor, was told by Rupert Denny, the Daily Telegraph’s garrulous wine editor, that he was just off to Bordeaux. ‘Poor Doe,’ remarked Patrick.
Canadian journalist Bernard McElwaine, silenced a group of boastful Australian sports journalists who had intruded noisily into his hallowed bar: ‘Cricket? It’s just a yawn on a lawn.’
Douglas Howell and I were sitting in the back room when Derek Marks, uninvited, joined our table. ‘I hear you’ve been made associate editor of the Daily Express,’ said Douglas. ‘That’s because you’re the only person who will associate with the ghastly editor.’ Marks moved tables fast.
Saturday lunchtime was a perfect moment in El Vino. There were no lawyers. Van was dressed almost casually. For friends he would open some of the cellar’s oldest wines, most usually too old to drink. I recall amazing Saturdays of, say, a 1797 claret that would last for twenty seconds on the air with a faint bouquet. Sometimes there was a wine from the nineteenth century that we could actually taste.
On such a day, Alan Watkins, still the shrewdest political columnist, was correcting his proof when he had an inspired thought and inserted his much-copied derogatory phrase ‘the chattering classes’ into his copy and was so pleased he asked Van for another half bottle of champagne.
And on Saturday’s the phones by the doors rang only occasionally. ‘It’s for you,’ said Van to Revel Barker as we stood at the bar drinking. It was the news editor. ‘The editor’s furious that you’re not in the office and are drinking in El Vino, and he wants you back immediately. You’re in real trouble matey.’
Revel, had just filed a full news and analysis piece about the Falklands and was now on his way back to the War Office. ‘I think you’d better repeat that to the gentleman standing next to me,’ he said. ‘He’ll be fascinated.’ And he handed the phone over to Bob Edwards, the Sunday Mirror editor.
All inhuman life was at El Vino.
* Van’s funeral is at 2pm this Friday (Jan 8) at St Catherine’s, Merstham, Surrey (Junction 8 M25).
* A memorial service will be held later at St Bride’s with a reception at El Vino.
Van was as much part of Fleet Street as the Black Lubianka, the sturdy Telegraph building, Reuters, the plaque of Edgar Wallace, and pubs like the Mucky Duck, the Bell, the Cheese and even Mick’s Café (serving bacon sarnies to mop last night’s booze).
His death was a blow to the many hacks who both knew him and laughed with him. He became part of Fleet Street folklore as he presided over El Vino, dispensing good humour along with large G & Ts.
I first got to know him as a young reporter in the London office of the Yorkshire Evening Post – right opposite El Vino. (It was exactly 35 steps from my desk to the middle of the bar – a journey I was to take many times. Retracing those 35 steps was always somewhat hazardous as I staggered between the traffic. Van would often steer me across Fleet Street and right to my chair.)
He liked to wind you up, with a shout of ‘You! Out. You’re banned.’ It was just a joke – but not necessarily so with some of the barristers who clustered around the sandwich case. The irony was that he looked and dressed like a barrister – black jacket, waistcoat, and striped trousers – and his well-rounded vowels gave no indication that he was a lad from the Elephant and Castle.
To say that he worked hard behind the bar is an understatement – a fact that was not always appreciated by the Mitchell Brothers who owned El Vs. He dashed around, serving drinking with manic speed, and urging the staff (often dauntingly pretty girls) to look after the customers. You never had to wait long for a drink when Van was there.
There are many memories of him. On one occasion, he was the first line of defence when a monstrous legion of Fleet Street hackettes, led by Mary Kenny and Valerie Grove, invaded El Vino to establish their right to stand by the bar and be served.
Van barred their way, announcing that ‘Ladies would not be served today’ – a statement that only infuriated them. Inevitably, a fight broke out and poor Van was almost strangled when one of them dragged him around by the tie. (They all finally retreated after the late Willi Frischauer, another great Fleet Street character, threw jugs of water over them. The prospect of having their hair ruined was just too much to bear.)
Eventually Van left El V (which was never quite the same after his departure) and set up down Fleet Street in Scribes. Many of us, while not exactly deserting El Vino, followed him down there.
He was a sensitive, kindly man who would quickly mark an occasion by opening up the champagne in Scribes.
I recall the day my wife and I walked down to Scribes and asked Van if we could use the telephone. We had been trying for a baby and Mrs C wanted to phone our GP to find out whether her test results had arrived.
Upon learning that they were positive – the result was our daughter Jessica who would grow up to be one of the Mirror 3 AM girls – Van was almost as joyful as us. He threw an instant party, including everyone in the bar. It was typical of his generosity of spirit.
For one who was so hard-working, decent and generous, Van suffered terribly in recent years, with the amputation of both legs. He lost his lively and sweet wife, Chicky, three months ago.
It is said that news only really becomes news when it becomes personal. That can be said of Van – his loss is a shock and will be long in the healing.
Another reporter died last week. A good old pro, well known, covered wars and such, won awards for it.
But you won’t read about it here.
We don’t do death notices; we carry stories about people and events. And, here’s the thing, the guy who died wasn’t only famous, he was also popular. There were loads of chums whose company he enlightened with good humour and good tales.
And here’s the other thing.
When he snuffed it, those same old pals couldn’t be arsed to write anything for Ranters about him.
It could have been you who went, unrecorded, to the Great Newsroom – although you probably were not as well known, probably had fewer close pals, and probably received less recognition for your fine work.
That’s why we suggested, a few months ago, that Ranters readers draft their own obituaries (and ask somebody to tip us off, when the time comes).
It isn’t a joke. Nor is it egocentricity. It’s your final courtesy to all those idle tossers among your closest friends and colleagues to tell them that you’ve gone, and to remind the rest of us who you were and what you did. Ideally, with a tale or two included.
Because all your friends will want to read it (sadly, of course) – they just think that somebody else should write it.
And the other thing is that when it is published here, you’ll take the secret to the grave. Nobody else will know that you contributed to your own obit.
This isn’t even an original idea (what is?). Years ago the Daily Telegraph instructed its by-lined journalists to compose their own obits – if only because the subjects knew, better than anybody, what they did during their careers and what was important in their lives.
There can’t be many people reading this who didn’t have fairly interesting lives. ‘I bet you get around a bit, meet a lot of interesting people…’ is what civilians always said when they learnt how you earned your crust.
We don’t want the first chapter of your unfinished autobiography, but a few pars would be helpful. For people who don’t know what their lives are worth in copy, think of a maximum of around 800 words, which is about the length of a typical newspaper column. If it makes less, stop when it becomes boring. Don’t be modest; obits are not the place for modesty. If it’s good stuff, let it run a bit. If it needs cutting, it’ll be subbed sympathetically, and anyway you won’t mind, by the time it appears.
But it’s a serious suggestion.
We don’t want to lose you, but we think we ought to know.
So, fingers to keyboards, chaps. And if you can’t think of another piece to write for Ranters, make this the one you do write. And then you can rest assured (literally) that the facts will be right – or at least as you remember, or wish others to remember, them.
As an incentive (because we realise you need encouraging to write even about yourself) include your birth date and we’ll send you a copy of the Daily Mirror front page from the day you were born.
Here’s a matter of life and death (literally) that I would like to run by this august assembly …
What’s a reasonable total, an acceptable one, a figure that one can, uh, live with, without feeling like Typhoid Mary, when it comes to just how many of one’s journalistic acquaintances (i.e.: colleagues, or people met directly through one’s employment) have checked out prematurely and involuntarily?
Personally, I know of 13 from just the people I met 1973-83 through the National Enquirer in Florida (and Christ only knows how many more I’m not privy to – I’ve sorta been out of touch). Thirteen people prematurely dead during, or since, a single decade – it stuns me.
(There were also two suicides – not in the total, even though “involuntary” may still have applied, albeit in a very private, tortured definition of the word. One Enquirer employee, one ex-; both by gunshot.)
I turned 63 recently (which also stuns me – stuns the livin’ shit outta me, actually) and in a morbid moment started jotting down the names of people who split the scene early. Two of the 13 were in their 30s,one in his 40s, nine in their 50s, one his 60s. There were three women.
Some intriguing (or not) statistics: seven were dedicated boozers, five of the 13 (three of them boozers) indulged far more than recreationally in one or more interesting substances (the two in their 30s both OD’d on heroin), eight succumbed to cancer of one type or another. There were five Brits.
Unbelievably, considering the MADD factor – that’s not Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, but its root cause, Miles Annually Driven Drunk – there wasn’t one traffic fatality. Personally, I wrecked three cars in the decade, rolling one (Pontiac Trans-Am) and plunging another (Chevrolet Corvette) into a stand of trees at 50+ mph with two people in the single passenger seat (one of them a visiting New York journalist), missing every tree but ripping the right, front side off the fiberglass piece-of-crap car on a sturdy bush.
The MADD files contain one macabre instance of “everything is connected.” The only death of a friend from drunk driving involved a legendary toper at the Enquirer – but he wasn’t the fatality. His two-ton Cadillac and another vehicle met head-on at speed, the second vehicle then slamming into a thankfully unoccupied bench at a bus stop. Just who crossed the center line to cause the collision, the cops never determined.
My colleague, drunk as a skunk according to the police report, escaped with a broken ankle. Dead in the other car from broken necks were two people, who, along with the driver, had just left a neighborhood saloon. One of the two was a glorious young woman I and my room-mate Gerry Hunt (es Daily Mail Manchester, decd.) had known a lot less well than we’d have liked to. I checked out their vehicle at a local wrecker shop (bizarrely, right across the street from the Enquirer office). Nona’s high-heeled shoes were on the floor. There were two massive, bloody indentations in the dashboard. Neither had been wearing a seatbelt.
At the wake, Nona’s distraught mother was raising her in the casket, inviting people to embrace her. ‘Why’, the mother asked me, in tears. ‘Why?’ I had no answer. And left early.
I remember my old man, more years ago than I care to remember, occasionally mentioning people who’d died very shortly after retiring from the Manchester Daily Mail, where he was head printer. Maybe from the shock to the system. Maybe the lack of drink. Maybe overindulgence of such, thanks to all the unoccupied hours. Maybe done in by a spouse who couldn’t handle suddenly having them around 24/7. Who knows.
What I do know is that the reality of 13 premature deaths from one decade spooks me.
I may be a dead man walking.
Jack Grimshaw proofreads and writes for OC Weekly (www.ocweekly.com) in Orange County, Southern California.
Eddy Shah’s ‘dashing, new-style’ national daily newspaper The Post would now be celebrating its Coming of Age – if the venture hadn’t actually fallen on its backside after just five weeks.
Yes, it’s just 21 years since the Warrington-based national blasted off without much fanfare and flopped without much regret. Even from the tightly-knit crew of experienced hacks who had quite enjoyed the short, bumpy ride and the long, tiring hours.
The writing was quickly on the wall when we realised that Shah and his managers really didn’t have a clue. He’d launched Today three years earlier before selling it on and there seemed a chance that, with the experience behind him, The Post might just do well.
The illusion quickly faded when his MD, some woman, shut the canteen on Sunday telling the staff they weren’t needed ‘because we don’t publish a Sunday paper.’ Yeah, right.
A small crew had moved into the rather swish WarringtonAcademy – bright lighting, plush carpets and pot plants – several weeks before the launch, wrestling with the technicalities of the first national to use full-page make-up on networked Macs.
Hard work but a real challenge. Production editor Arthur Lamb’s enthusiasm spilled everywhere. He’d been sports editor on the DailyStar and was a great fan of ‘new technology’ as we called it in those days. So was I. When I pitched up Arthur gave me a ten-minute run-down and then I was showing others what it was all about. It might not last, I reckoned, but I was determined to learn all I could about full-page make-up and these stylish Macs. A mouse! A floppy disk! A different world.
A month before launch I was on holiday in the wilds of Venezuela with Adobe PageMaker manuals for light reading and I remember phoning Arthur from what was probably one of the only phones south of the Orinoco to chat about some technical problem. We were all that keen. Pity we were let down by poor management and technical difficulties.
I’ve been reminiscing with a handful of former hacks who were there. Perhaps not surprisingly few of them can remember much about it. Yes, it was a long time ago and No, it didn’t last long. And we’re all getting on a bit. Ed Barry, chief sports sub, told me: ‘It hardly seems to have registered, perhaps because we didn’t have any time off and worked ludicrously long hours. It all seems to have merged into one long, forgettable waste of time.’
Ed says he met Shah only once. ‘On launch night he poured me a glass of champagne and then spilled it all over my keyboard. I’m sure it was God’s warning but like the rest of the signs I ignored it.’ Mike Woods remembers bringing in some early copies that night for the subs and Shah trying to stop him because ‘we could sell them!’
Shah’s old mum was wandering around, like royalty at a WI bazaar. ‘What’s that?’ she asked Jeff McGowan, pointing to his mouse. He quietly switched on the shaver in his drawer and proceeded to give himself a ‘shave’ with the mouse. ‘Ooh, er!’ Most impressed, she was.
The first issue was dated Thursday, November 10, 1988 and was priced at 20p. The splash was an in-depth ‘news special’ about a six-year-old girl from Colne, Lancashire orphaned in a car crash near Blackpool. I’ve tried to track her down but without success. The front-page blurb promised ‘prizes galore’ in a ‘dashing new-style popular daily newspaper.’
The show had got on the road on August 1, 1988 with editor Lloyd Turner, deputy Paul Burnell, Arthur as production editor and Mike as chief sub. The following month more staff started to arrive. Neil Sowerby came on board as deputy chief sub, Jeff as back bench copy editor, Brian Whittle as news editor with Neil Mackay as his deputy. I think Charlie Rae was chief reporter while Bob Renton and Barry Williamson ran the picture desk. Steve Wolstencroft was sports editor and Dave Reynolds was his deputy. Brian Hancill and Diane Cook – Hancill and Gretel, of course – ran features, I seem to recall.
Who else was there? George Grammer, Alec Stuttard, Brian Caven, Drew Mackenzie, Steve Harding, Ray Ansbro, Gordon Watts, Richard Frost, Gerry Greenberg. I was flying the racing desk with racing editor Derek McGovern and helping to train new arrivals in my spare time. That’s a joke, by the way. No one had any spare time although I recall Steve and Brian managing to shift a few quick ‘uns up the road from time to time. They were probably among the small group who stayed on a bit in the nearby Chinese restaurant after the Christmas dinner. At least till Lloyd’s message threatening to sack the lot of ‘em if they didn’t get their arses back. That was a couple of days before the end and they probably still regret slinking back.
There was a London news-gathering operation run by Lloyd’s wife Jill who had a 19-year-old Rebekah Wade as her secretary. Says Ed: ‘She must be a millionairess now. Funny how that’s one thing all us ex-Posties have in common.’ Ed has always had a nice line in grumpy cynicism.
Mike Woods was scathing in his memories of Shah. ‘Despite his experience at Today he had no conception of national newspapers. He wasn’t a newspaperman. The journalists were a cracking team, but Shah’s vision was very parochial. We didn’t stand a chance.’
The advertising department was useless and early training wasn’t much better. ‘They sent a lass down from classified ads to teach us page make-up which had been pioneered at Shah’s weekly Messenger group. We sent her back and then Arthur and I went through the handbook page by page.’
Lloyd Turner wasn’t the inspiration he’d been when he was editing an exciting Daily Star. The Archer case hung around his neck like the proverbial albatross. Six weeks after Lord Archer walked off with a then record £500,000 in damages over the Monica Coughlin affair in July 1987 Turner was sacked by Lord Stevens. He’d been at the helm for seven years. It was little consolation to Jill that her husband was finally vindicated in 2001 when Archer was sent down for four years for four counts of perjury and perverting the course of justice. ‘Lloyd had been convinced he’d win. But he was left a broken man. His reputation was in tatters,’ she recalled. After the Post flop he took to farming and, after a brief spell at Today before it closed in 1995, returned to the open air life. He died in Jill’s arms after a heart attack the following year.
The Post was launched during the dying throes of the Daily Star’s move to London and many of those at Warrington were former staff. They could have gone south but were tempted to take the redundo and head west down the M62 to Sankey Street. Others were former Express men such as Gerry Greenberg who’d had nearly 20 years with Express Newspapers.
Most of The Post gang got fixed up soon after it closed, just before Christmas, 1988. But the front door of the Daily Star was shut firmly in the face of anyone who had been even loosely associated with the venture. How mean can you get? A gang from Zodiac Toys came knocking with the idea of buying it as a going concern but they knew even less about running a national newspaper.
I did some shifts on the Sport in Bradford and the Daily Express in Manchester; edited my local weekly and then joined Brian Caven to run a group of thriving Lancashire free papers. ‘Crazy’ had been chief subbing on ‘Charlie’ Chester Tonight.
Several of the lads went off shifting. Gerry, for example. ‘I would head for Glasgow on a Tuesday, do four days double shifting and writing features for the Sun and Screws, drive home on Friday evening; head down the M6 and M1 to Wapping on a Saturday, do a Screws double shift, spend the night at some seedy doss-house in Paddington, do a double shift for Dave Balmforth at the Sun on a Sunday and head back to Manchester, getting home early on Monday. Then it was back up to Glasgow on the Tuesday again. I did that for a couple of years and I have no idea how I survived without losing my marbles completely.’
I can’t imagine many of today’s young recruits putting themselves through that hell. Mind you, Gerry did sneak Mondays off, presumably to catch some kip.
Gerry is one of the game’s characters. A few years back, to the surprise of his many pals in journalism, he decided that in future he’d go by the name of Donna Gee and have a sex-change op. She has now almost finished a book which she’s going to call ‘Why is my dad not answering her phone.’ Gerrry, sorry, Donna was never stuck for a good headline. Now she is busily looking for a publisher while spending most of her time in Spain where she often sees my old mate, Manchester veteran and production supremo Phil Smith.
One of Donna’s memories of ThePost was hearing Lloyd Turner telling execs that the paper was ‘going from strength to strength’ just a couple of days before it folded. And another memory is that Shah got out – and quickly made many millions selling his weeklies to Reed Regional – shafting all his hard-working hacks for two grand each and more. The offer was a one-month pay-off for everyone; ‘take it or no one gets anything.’
Hacks are a philosophical bunch and most just wanted done with the thing. And anyway the pubs were open and we didn’t have to go back to work. At least not till reality set in.
But I was pleased that sports sub Dave Birtill actually caught up with Fast Eddy a few years later on the first tee at the Warrington Classic golf pro-am at Walton Hall. ‘Don’t I know you?’ asked Shah. ‘Yes’, said Dave. ‘I used to work for you – and you still owe me the thick end of two grand.’ Shah ‘simply grunted, hit his drive into the rough ... and never said another word all afternoon!’ That round must have been a bundle of fun.
Where are they now?
Arthur Lamb retired to Cheshire after several years at the Liverpool Post and Echo. Mike Woods is running the Express Newspapers operation at Broughton, just up the road from Warrington. Ray Ansbro and Ed Barry are at Broughton after a lengthy spell running People sport in London. Paul Burnell went back to Liverpool and in recent years has also been on the subbing staff at Broughton. Alec Stuttard still knocks in shifts there.
Brian Caven took early retirement from Newsquest and died from cancer 18 months ago. Steve Wolstencroft retired a couple of years ago as sport supremo on the Scottish Sun and Dave Reynolds was up there till recently. Eddy Shah turned to writing books and is now a property tycoon in Wiltshire. Donna Gee works for the web site Sportingo. Derek McGovern is the betting expert on the DailyMirror. Neil Sowerby left the Manchester Evening News in October and was planning to freelance. Richard Frost recently took early retirement from the MEN and is a freelance speedway writer and author.
Mike Torpey went back to the Liverpool Echo and he’s still there. Dave Birtill retired from the MEN in 2006 but continues to cover golf for them and has just written a book on the game in Lancashire. Drew Mackenzie has been on the Blackpool Gazette since The Post closed and till last season was covering soccer matches for Express newspapers. Steve Harding went shifting and is deputy chief sub on the Sport. Gordon Watts is working on The National in Abu Dhabi after some time on a Bermuda paper. Brian Hancill has been working for the Mirror group. Diane Cooke is on the MEN.
Brian Whittle ran Cavendish Press in Manchester and died at the bar of the Crown and Kettle, the old Express and Star pub, three years ago. Jeff McGowan was at the Sport for years. He’s retired and living near Stockport. Neil Mackay died a few years ago. He was news editor on the Sport. Bob Renton died this year and Bob Kemp, who worked on the pic desk, has also gone. Colleague Neil Partridge retired a few years ago after a spell on the Sport. Barry Williamson is running the picture desk at Broughton
Me? I’ve been retired for a few years, but I knock out features for Lancashire Magazine and teach English, voluntarily, to asylum seekers. Their English is improving steadily; their swearing is excellent.
Rebekah Wade? I wonder what she’s up to these days…
The recent experience of writer Karl Sabbagh, as reported by him in The Author, should give all self-employed hacks pause.
Sabbagh, a noted expert on Middle Eastern affairs, and half-Palestinian, wrote to features editors of eight national broadsheet newspapers, enclosing a piece he had written about the 40th anniversary of the Libyan revolution, including details of how he had helped to set up Libyan television in that year.
He thought that the story of a young soldier, who had deposed King Idris and set up his headquarters in the new television station, might be of interest, especially as that soldier’s name was Muammar Gaddafi. He also considered that a snail-mail approach might be novel enough these days for the editor in question actually to read the article, which would probably not happen with an email attachment.
We are always told that ‘I wuz there’ will help a story walk into the paper, so what was the enthusiastic response from all those august publications? Precisely nothing. Nil. Zilch. Only one, the Financial Times, even bothered to reply, with a one-line email saying ‘Unable to use it.’
OK, so those of us who scribble for a living usually know better than to send in a whole piece on spec. However, Sabbagh is by no means an unknown, he has his own Wikipedia entry, more than 1,200 mentions on Google, and he probably thought that his expertise gave the article a good chance of publication.
And yet his experience resonates with most freelance journalists these days. We are becoming surprised and shocked when we get any sort of response to an idea we may have the temerity to put up.
It seems to be standard practice these days not to acknowledge a freelance idea in any way, but to ignore it as if it was never received. In the olden days, at least you were told to piss off, in one of 50 ways editors had of telling you to get lost. And as Sabbagh discovered, this is not happening just to amateurs or wannabees, but to long-established professional writers who know when they have a good tale to tell.
With the collapse of the newspaper unions, the demise of secretaries and cutting staffing levels to the bone, it’s a miserable business being a freelance journalist these days. And that’s before they tell you the fee; usually half what you would have been paid 20 years ago – for all rights. And then if they do use outsiders, these are usually interns who are working for nothing anyway. Otherwise, it seems, all copy is written by staffers who don’t cost anything – or, at least, they don’t cost any extra.
And still newspapers can’t break even! Or, I wonder: could there be a connection between treating people badly and not breaking even? In the days when section editors invited you in to discuss ideas, or if they especially liked the sound of you, for coffee or lunch, newspapers had huge circulations and made loads of money for their owners. Now that they don’t pay anything, treat people without any courtesy or respect, and never reply to approaches by freelances, circulations are plunging ever downwards.
It’s as if everybody knows they are now cheapskate operations trying desperately, and failing, to make money from their websites, that people can no longer be bothered to buy these rags.
Now I know that it has never been easy being a freelance journalist. It has never been easy to make a living as a writer, full stop. That is nothing new, and those of us who have managed to scribble out a good income for ourselves over the years are very lucky indeed. What is new is the complete discourtesy with which many, if not most, newspaper and magazine offices operate.
They don’t want to see you, they don’t want new ideas and their fortresses have become completely impenetrable.
There are a few exceptions of course. Speaking from recent experience, I find that YOU magazine, part of the Mail on Sunday, is courteous and quick with its replies. But then I know the editor, Sue Peart, and she recognises my name. Rachel Johnson of The Lady is quick to respond but again, she knows my name. Boyd Tonkin at TheIndependent is also conscientious about responding. But see how I can name them individually, these exceptions that prove the rule?
Most of the others have probably never heard of me and I suspect it’s the same with Karl Sabbagh. He is just too old, too much of a yesterday’s man for them to bother with him. He can be safely ignored, even if he does have a unique, historically important story to relate. Celebrities, whether they can write or not, always get totally reverential treatment even though they don’t always deliver or if they do, have very little to say. But never mind, the belief is that a ‘name’ will shift copies.
But God is not mocked, nor are the readers fooled.
What can we do? Some of the kids now on media courses will inevitably end up as editors, either of sections or supplements, or of whole publications. Could it not be taught on these courses that an email putting up an idea deserves a response – at least initially?
Do any Ranters have any suggestions as to how we can make editors sit up and take notice?
###
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Brought to book
Here’s the list of the 12 books brought to you by those sound folk who give you Ranters every week, in case you missed it last week.
More details of all of them are available on our books site.
Forgive Us Our Press Passes
by Ian Skidmore
(An hilarious account of life as a staffman, desk man, freelance and broadcaster)
£9.99
The Best of Vincent
Mulchrone
(The master at work; by the man generally acknowledge to have been the best reporter of his generation)
£9.99
Cassandra At His Finest And Funniest
(The pick of columns crafted by one of the greatest wordsmiths of his time. Or since)
£9.99
Slip-Up:How Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard Lost Him
by Anthony Delano
(The wonderful story behind a famous scoop, with Fleet Street rivalry at its most intense)
£9.99
A Crooked Sixpence
by Murray Sayle
(A brilliant fact-based novel about life on a mass-circulation tabloid)
£9.99
Ladies Of The Street
by Liz Hodgkinson
(How ‘the weaker sex’ contributed to the glory that once was Fleet Street)
£9.99
The UpperPleasureGarden by Gordon M Williams
(A fact-based novel about life on a fairly seedy weekly, as a young reporter tries to make his mark on the game)
£9.99
Crying All The Way To The Bank (Liberace v the Daily Mirror and Cassandra)
by Revel Barker
(The world’s highest-paid entertainer takes on the biggest selling newspaper in the trial of the century)
£15.99
Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon
by Anthony Delano
(Another – factual – account of the bizarre story of a beauty queen who accused a missionary of rape)
£9.99
A Place of Strangers
by Geoffrey Seed
(A novel, loosely based on fact, about a reporter’s quest to find the truth about his family, while pursuing a story about the Holocaust)
£9.99
Publish and Be Damned! (The astonishing story of the Daily Mirror)
by Hugh Cudlipp
(The all-time classic read for journalists about how and why newspapers sell)
£12.99
The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite
by Maggie Hall
(Not much to do with reporting, except that it was researched and written by a former New York correspondent. A great gift, though, for Anglophiles)
£10.00
#
The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – The Times
Issue # 130
January 15, 2010
This Week
The Mirror group always seemed to have more than its fair share of reporters and photographers being thrown into foreign jails for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but – until last week – you had to go back to the Second World War to find any of them killed in action. Reporter Bernard Gray hitched a lift on a submarine from Malta to tell the story of the island’s heroic battle for survival but the submarine never reached port. And Ian Fyfe volunteered to fly in a glider attack on D-Day against a heavy battery on the coast of France and was never heard of again.
So Rupert Hamer’s death, and his colleague Phil Coburn’s dreadful injury, was real news from Afghanistan. Instead of reporting it, they became the story. Hamer, dead at 39, was a father of three. Coburn is 43 and has lost a leg. They made the headlines for the best part of a day. But that’s the transient nature of news. Run it until something better comes in, then what’s next? Revel Barker asks whether it’s all worth it, and whether anybody – whether they’re running the paper or reading it – really gives a toss.
Deaths of popes, of course, run for much longer. Tony Delano, Our Man With The Stories Behind The Scoops, chronicles some of his days in the dolce vita of the fifties, when Pius XII was awaiting his call to head office. A good long read, this, designed for those of you hemmed in by the wintry weather.
Snowed in, Edward Playfair takes the opportunity to catch up on his reading with a new copy of The Upper Pleasure Garden by Gordon M Williams. It takes him back… Yes, that’s the name of the game, chaps.
And freelance hackette and author Liz Hodgkinson, fresh from her rant last week about the lack of manners in modern media, rants on again – this time about the dearth of by-lines. (Here’s a clue: subs and commissioning editors don’t care about by-lines… because subs and commissioning editors don’t get by-lines. So they have no understanding of the value of them.)
And the editor, in the column on the right, has a mini-rant about the Daily Telegraph which, he always thought, was such a polite and gentlemanly paper…
When you come back from a war zone your colleagues will welcome you back in the pub and ask what it was like, but the truth is that they don’t want to know. A sound-bite will usually suffice. Up to your neck in mud and bullets, deprived of sleep for a fortnight at a time, constantly under fire, that’s about as much as they can take. Maybe a quick, very quick, story of some squaddie heroism, or of some subaltern’s stupidity. And a brief no… I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing there, either.
But wait, you haven’t heard about the really hilarious thing that some secretary said to the editor while you were away. You need to catch up on all the office goss.
So you don’t tell them about how quickly you learnt to keep your correspondent’s credentials visible on your chest at all times, because the first time you reached inside your jacket for them a dozen soldiers clicked back the bolts on their small-arms…
Or that when you slithered backwards on your belly in retreat from an ambush, everybody covering for the next man in line, you were expected to take your turn with the weapon; or that, if embedded with the US Marines and approached by anybody under six feet tall you were supposed to shoot the bugger.
They’re far more interested in how much you made on your exes, during what they describe as your ‘trip’
And you, scanning the filed papers after a few weeks away, are wondering why most of the wonderful, colourful, news-packed copy that you filed never made the paper anyway. When you checked in after filing (having waited two days to get a line to the office) and they said your copy was brilliant and fantastic and they loved it… whatever happened to that one?
It takes a death – like the tragic killing of Sunday Mirror defence correspondent Rupert Hamer, and the gruesome injury like that inflicted on his colleague, photographer Phil Coburn, in Afghanistan last week – to bring it all home.
How close to home it actually comes, though, is a different matter. They were both victims (along with a US marine) of a roadside IED.
So… let’s ask everybody else in the office what an IED is. My money says they haven’t got the foggiest idea. That’s how much they care.
While you’re at it, show the office-bound journos a map of the world and ask them to point to Afghanistan (without reading the small print). See what I mean?
Why do we (or did we) do it? It was bloody crazy. It was only the wish to be covering things that mattered, when the alternative – in the days of which I write – was to write about Joan Collins buying a new frock and then Princess Di having a haircut, then Posh Spice doing… whatever it was that she did, to make her famous. What we did was important, in terms of news, but there were no celebrities involved (this was before Ross Kemp) so it wasn’t deemed particularly ‘interesting’.
It didn’t sell a single extra copy of the paper.
I remember an editor, faced with copy from one of the most astonishing events from the whole Viet Nam escapade, consigning it to the spike with the comment that it was all ‘half a world away’. Never mind that his reporter had looked death in the eye to get the story, and would never get a better one.
At the height of the troubles in Ulster, the Mirror had the bright idea to send all reporters over for a couple of weeks to understand what it was about, and to learn what the guys on the ground were living with. It was a big story that the world was watching and it was astonishing to discover how many reporters just didn’t want to know about a war being fought on British streets, and found excuses to be somewhere else when their turn came round.
A few who went were threatened, beaten up, shot at, some even briefly kidnapped. None of them was killed, but a few came close. And wives rang the office to threaten nervous breakdowns if their husbands were sent across the water.
At the end of the day there are a few grateful readers who believe that you are getting the truth out of a war zone in spite of official propaganda, and there are those who – whatever you report – will say you are there only to disseminate more government lies, so probably aren’t going to read your copy anyway.
Was it ever worth it for a story?
Rupert Hamer thought it was and he knew the risk. This was his fifth tour to Afghanistan.
His widow and his three kids may have a different view.
Revel Barker is a former Sunday Mirror defence correspondent.
There is always a story that doesn’t see print. Rome was a terrific place for a newspaper correspondent in the 1950s, an exotic dateline yet to be depreciated by package tourism. As the first and last fuelling stop on the pre-jet routes to London from Africa and the Middle East there was a steady throughput of interview targets. Everyday coverage oscillated between the rival newspoles of Cinecittà, Mussolini’s dilapidated Hollywood-on-the-Tiber, and the Vatican, where stern old Pope Pius XII was spending his final days making sure Roman Catholics had miserable sex lives.
In the summer of 1958 there seemed little doubt that after twenty years of thundering against birth control, mixed marriages and sensual jollity of any kind the old curmudgeon was going to his reward. He was at his summer palace in Castelgandolfo, just outside the city, fading fast.
Pius’s death was shaping up as the biggest story in Italy since World War Two, a gaudy ecclesiastical saga of purple mourning, white smoke and conspiracy that would run for weeks: End Of An Era. Christian World Mourns. Crowned Heads Bow in Grief. Momentous Funeral. Suspense Over Successor. Most of the conspiracy, at least to begin with, was generated in the foreign press club as the resident correspondents worked out how they might outwit the high-powered ‘specials’ who would undoubtedly be flying in to cream off the best of the action.
When Federico Fellini wanted to film the tumultuous press conference scene in La Dolce Vita it never occurred to him to use actors. He simply trawled the Via Veneto for a few of the feral photographers (for whom he coined the label paparazzi) and the bar of the Associazione della Stampa Estera in Italia, to use its full style, for a journotrash horde, myself embedded in it, to yell questions at Anita Ekberg. Central Casting could not have done better.
Quite a lot of Mussolini’s ideas lingered on through the 1950s. The national image of Fascist Italy had required frequent grooming before the war. Mussolini, an old journo himself, reckoned that he was more likely to get a good press abroad if the task of foreign correspondents reporting about the country was made as easy as possible. Spoiled by privileges and facilities, the foreigners would be less inclined to pry or be critical.
The Stampa Estera was still doing business on much the same basis a decade or so after the war. Once accredited and provided with the important-looking embossed tessera to flash a correspondent had it made. No difficulty in getting a permesso di soggiorno, respectful treatment from traffic police and minor functionaries, a 70% discount on the railways (which mostly ran on time). There were still impressive facilities at the original address, 45 via della Mercede, where the marbled salone was large enough to keep huddles of rival conspirators among the polyglot members well separated. From telephone cabinets on the mezzanine calls to anywhere in Italy were free. A teleprinter brought in ANSA the national news agency, the library took all the useful magazines and newspapers, uscieri in flapping black gowns accepted cables and telegrams, took messages, distributed mail. The ushers also, as they had from the beginning, reported much of what they saw and everything they heard to the Ministry of the Interior.
Some members of the Stampa had stayed in Rome throughout the war. Miss Berg for instance (she was never called anything else), a Swede in her later years whose father had been his neutral country’s diplomatic envoy to the Holy See. She still filed for a Stockholm paper but her main interest was long distance walking. Dressed as for a Strindberg play in ankle-length skirts and wide-brimmed hat (straw most of the year, felt for the brusque Roman winter) she would choose a destination and – making use of her Stampa discount – take a train to a point within about twenty miles of it and finish her journey on foot. She spoke most European languages, which came in handy on her more distant excursions (‘...and then I remembered a few words of Albanian...’). Her Vatican sources were unequalled. No one in the Stampa would believe anything they were told by the Vatican press office until it had been confirmed by Miss Berg. If she said the Pope was dying – and she did – he was as good as through the Pearly Gates.
The doorstepping of Castelgondolfo went on for about a week. Reporters and photographers shuttling back and forth from the Stampa Estera were after two things: the first word that the old boy had actually popped his satin slippers and the Deathbed Picture. The picture was the big prize. Nearly every newspaper on earth would put it on page one. Competition was feverish, especially on the part of major operators like the international wire services. A beat of even a few minutes on the time of death was the kind of thing they lived for.
Getting out the news, mundanities such as deadlines, meant nothing, however, to papal functionaries whose talent for obstruction, procrastination and evasion had been refined over centuries. So, knowing that the Vatican bureaucrats would work to their own timetable, every correspondent worth his tessera had a deal going with someone who had access to the castello to get out some kind of a sign when Pius actually expired.
By their nature, these arrangements lacked co-ordination. A signal that to one correspondent may have meant ‘he’s gone’ to another might mean ‘he’s going to make it through the night and you can go home’. As midnight neared, the facade of the castello would burst into action like a mechanical town clock: closed shutters were swung back, open ones slammed shut. Curtains were pulled halfway across some windows from the right; others from the left. Figures popped up, waved handkerchiefs and disappeared. Lights flicked on and off. Miss Berg’s telephone rang late into the night.
The challenge of the last picture was something Vatican minions had refused totally to discuss while the pope was still breathing. Most of the interested parties expected they would have to negotiate for a general picture opportunity or a ‘pool’ – shots taken by one or two photographers for general distribution. But of course what every photographer – and every publication or agency – wanted, was for the picture to be theirs exclusively. In Rome, where it was demonstrated daily that everyone had a price, this was by no means out of the question.
As it became apparent that Pius was confusing the dynamics of the story by taking so long to die, worrying rumours began to circulate around the Stampa Estera. Most of the deals that had been made with those inside Castelgandolfo were at a fairly low and readily corruptible level: maids, chauffeurs and gardeners. But it was whispered that United Press International, then a vigorous and competitive news agency, had a standing arrangement at the highest level.
That could only mean one of two connections: Sister Pasqualina, the shadowy German nun who had been Pius’s housekeeper for years, or Professore Riccardo Galeazzo-Lisi. Even if Pasqualina had been ready to smuggle in a photographer for some appropriate reward (she was said to be passionately fond of canaries) it would have been difficult to put a proposition to her. She rarely left the pope’s quarters; no one even knew what she looked like.
Galeazzo-Lisi was something else: a man about town with a prosperous practice in the most fashionable part of Rome. Pius had met him thirty years earlier when he was still Cardinal Eugenio Paccelli and in need of a pair of spectacles. For although Galeazzo-Lisi had since become the pope’s personal physician and director of the Vatican’s health services (as well as an honorary member of the Pontifical Academy of Science – hence professore) he was not a distinguished physician or a surgeon but an oculist, licensed to perform only limited medical services.
No matter. Pius’s confidence in Galeazzo-Lisi remained unshaken even after the professore had been caught referring patients to a notorious Neapolitan faith healer; even after he had tried to convince a conference at the Sorbonne that cancer would respond beneficially to treatment by royal jelly (the French surgeons stalked out of the room). Only on his eye-doctor’s advice would the pope accept treatment or more appropriate medical advice – as in the case of a bout of near-terminal hiccups some years earlier. Galeazzo-Lisi, it was murmured in the Stampa Estera, had agreed to take a picture of Pius as soon as possible after he died and hand it over to Danny Gilmore, the UPI bureau chief, in exchange for $5,000.
Pius finally pushed off in the middle of the night, a useless time in terms of scoopery for most of the northern hemisphere. All the Castelgandolfo signals failed and even a Crazy Cops chase after the plain van taking the body back to the Vatican proved fruitless in terms of copy. But at least the drama moved on a stage. Italians love funerals even more than weddings and lines of ostentatious mourners had already formed across the vast Bernini piazza outside St Peter’s Basilica, waiting in the oven heat of summer to get inside for a look at Pius as he lay in state.
Distinguished emissaries of all nations and faiths began flying in from every point of the compass, sharing first class compartments with star columnists and commentators. Wheeling and squealing began over locations in St Peter’s during the upcoming week of rites. These were red-hot tickets. Supposedly, the media at large were to be allowed an initial well-marshalled tour, after which they were to be kept out until the actual funeral. Even then they would be corralled well away from the dignitaries.
Some media celebs were unruffled by such a prospect. Bob Considine, doyen of American syndicated columnists, merely plunked his typewriter down in front of the Stampa’s television set, and ordered the first of many drinks. He never went anywhere near the Vatican or St Peter’s but back home they loved his off-screen rewrite so much that he won a Pulitzer Prize.
Others, however, yearned to get close. Two New YorkDaily News photographers toting Speed Graphics, huge police-beat quarter-plate cameras of a kind not used in Europe for years, had a clear assignment: a shot of everyone from the New York diocese who was entitled to wear a dog collar with dead pope in background.
On the morning of the first viewing day Galeazzo-Lisi called a press conference at the Circolo Stampa, the home team equivalent of the Stampa Estera for Italian journalists. Presuming that he would deliver nothing beyond yet another account of the final moments – which had already been amply culled from various insiders – most of the fly-ins left the occasion to resident correspondents, thereby missing an event Fellini would have savoured.
Galeazzo-Lisi, a dapper little man in gold-rimmed glasses, took his seat before the roomful of reporters and announced that he was a man with a mission. It might appear, he said, in effect, that in recent years his time and talent had been devoted entirely to keeping the late Holy Father alive. But he had also been preparing for this sad moment. His audience would be acquainted, he flatteringly supposed, with the traditional practice of embalming bodies to avert putrefaction. Internal organs were removed and the corpse injected with chemicals. Such a procedure would normally be considered an indispensable preliminary for the ceremonies about to begin in which Pius, magnificently robed and mitred, was to be the centre of attention for nearly a week before being entombed in the crypt of St. Peter’s.
However, he, Galeazzo-Lisi, had long since decided that such crude and intrusive treatment would be entirely unsuitable for the illustrious personage under discussion. He had, therefore, devoted years of study to one of the central mysteries of Christian belief: how Jesus had been able to spend three days in the tomb and reappear in such great shape.
His research, which included secret visits to the Holy Land, had convinced him that Christ’s body had been preserved by the effect of particular herbs and other plants in which the people of that time buried their dead. He had, therefore, arranged that Pius, instead of being eviscerated, would be garnished with a combination of greenery identical to that which had surrounded the body of Christ and which had just been flown in from Palestine. The only modern variant of this hallowed process would be to encase Pius and the plants in a clear plastic bag. Thus, the natural process of decay would be delayed for the time necessary for the rites and rituals to come.
All the reporters were aware of Galeazzo-Lisi’s unusual status. At that point, had Fellini been directing, he might have panned around to show their expressions: incredulous, if not open-mouthed. The camera might also have lingered on the man from UPI trying anxiously to catch Galeazzo-Lisi’s eye. No one really knew what to make of the extraordinary pronouncements they had heard; the stories that subsequently appeared were written in a tone of mild bafflement. Still, there was no outright scorn. The Vatican and the Church were taken seriously in Rome in those days – even if religious belief might be a different matter.
So, when the great bronze doors of the Basilica were opened and the first outsiders shuffled in, there was Pius laid out on top of a tall catafalque erected in the middle of the nave, swathed in some kind of Clingfilm. A papal gendarme in nineteenth century uniform stood at each corner and Swiss Guards in their kit from an earlier era kept the lines moving. Members of religious orders had tickets for the first day, general public the second, minor celebrities the last. Then there was to be a day’s break so that the furniture could be rearranged for the actual funeral rites before the high altar.
One of the Daily News photographers picked up on it first. Leverage by the powerful New York diocese got them credentials that allowed them in and out of St Peter’s as they pleased. On Day One the News men bagged a perfect position from which to frame their various hometown dignitaries as they paused on a marked spot and faced the Speed Graphics, Pius in clear focus behind them.
On Day Two there was a papal gendarme in the way. ‘Those guys are standing further out from the body than yesterday’, one News man reported in the Stampa bar. By Day Three the sentries were positioned closer to the nearest door than to the plastic-wrapped corpse. Barriers that at first had allowed the faithful to come almost to the foot of the catafalque had been moved halfway down the nave. The News passed on the latest: ‘He’s turned kinda purple.’
Miss Berg, of course, also had some magic pass to the basilica. She came back to the Stampa Estera still pale from her experience. Several Brazilian nuns had actually fainted in the presence of the speedily decaying corpse. There was talk, she said, of witchcraft.
Manifestly, the professore’s bold experiment had failed. Perhaps the greenery had been picked out of season. Perhaps it just didn’t travel. The funeral was brought forward by a day, much to the inconvenience of many of the dignitaries who had worked up a busy programme of lunching and dining each other.
Next morning, St Peter’s was filled with a mist of incense. The audience was kept so far back that they could hardly see the holy remains lying isolated in a pool of tinted spotlight. The service had barely begun before men in overalls swarmed from a trapdoor in the floor and bundled the cloudy plastic-wrapped package out of sight.
Within days a dozen major magazines around the world splashed on the same amazing story: the deathbed diary of the pope’s physician, Professore Riccardo Galeazzo-Lisi. Accompanying the account were pictures of Pius in extremis or well past it. The package was at least £100,000-worth. Danny Gilmore was found at the Stampa Estera bar, drinking Peroni and running a moody connoisseur’s eye over spread upon spread of pictures that ought to have built on a triumphant UPI world exclusive. It had been one of those new automatic cameras, he said, a Canon. All Galeazzo-Lisi had to do was point it and press the button. He accepted commiserations from his colleagues graciously. ‘One thing really bugs me though,’ said Gilmore ‘He won’t even give the goddamn camera back.’
Anthony Delano is author of Slip-Up: How Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard lost him – the story behind the Scoop, and Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon. Both published by Revel Barker at £9.99 and available on-line or on order from any decent bookshop.
What’s this? A novel about journalists who talk like us? Where they always seem to be drunk (well, it is fiction). Where you get a story on the front and stabbed in the back all at the same time?
I didn’t realise that Gordon Williams was on the same weekly paper as me – it just seems like it, reading his glorious book The Upper Pleasure Garden).
It’s more than 50 years ago but all my memories came tumbling back as seedy star reporter ‘Ming’ Menzies views newspaper life through the bottom of a beer glass darkly.
It is so wonderfully familiar: On my weekly I actually followed up one of those urban myths about the granny dying on holiday. But life on the Hamport Recorder all seems a bit well-paid from my experience.
On my weekly I wrote the splash for eight successive weeks – all for £3 a week. And when I left a fortnight after the end of my three-year apprenticeship I was told I was being extremely ungrateful for not giving something back to the paper that trained me. Huh!
One evening I got five night jobs – as well as my shorthand class. One involved cycling miles to tap politely on the district chief reporter’s next-door neighbour to get a story out of some tittle-tattle they’d swapped over the garden fence.
Our (very few) senior reporters – the paper’s policy was get ’em young and cheap – were just as cynical but a lot more caring than those littering the town around the Upper Pleasure Garden.
We had the good fortune to employ a young chap manfully carrying more GCEs than previously known to medical science. But as many of us, Gordon Williams included, have found, degrees and A-grades don’t always add up to Journalist Superstar.
Our brainbox was clearly suffering from writer’s block of Salinger proportions as he twisted and turned in agony over his typewriter. Senior reporter Stan asked solicitously: ‘What’s the matter, old chap – can’t think of an intro?’
‘It’s not that,’ said our hero. ‘I can’t think of a catchline.’
Stan was our hero. Superb reporter. Heroic boozer. Ace raconteur. Serial recruiter of wives. He eventually left us and went to some paper in Surrey where he was sacked for pinching the lady mayoress’s bottom at the civic ball.
He loved women and, like Ming at the Upper Pleasure Garden, learned to appreciate them for all sorts of reasons.
I had a wonderful introduction to a woman’s touch when I was sent along with gorgeous redhead reporter Gill to the house where a boy of 16 had hanged himself. Tricky – I was 16, too.
Getting his old mum to talk was going to be a problem but Gill suddenly pointed to a vase of flowers and said: ‘Did you make that arrangement? It’s exquisite.’
After that inspired piece of psyche, talking wasn’t the problem. Getting away was.
On our weekly, getting brilliant quotes from the afflicted, the innocent and the gullible were key parts of the game. The tricks Ming used to get his stories must have astounded those uninitiated ‘civilians’ in the outside world when Gordon Williams’ superbly vivid inside view was first published in 1970.
We used them all thanks to the expert tuition of old Fleet Street hacks like Stan. But unlike Ming, our lives were geared totally to linage.
Our head office chief reporter and linage king Roy was at constant war with the local freelance, Dickie. When I told Roy that Dickie had orders from all the nationals on a story we were covering together, his response was immediate: ‘Tell him you won’t be bothering, then go round the corner and ring PA. That’ll fix him.’
I didn’t, of course. I told Dickie. We had staff jobs but old Dickie had to survive on his wits.
I met them both again last year and all that was forgotten. Indeed, they talked only of the joys of babysitting each other’s kids...
One day early in my career we heard that a woman in a lonely farmhouse had been held hostage by a gunman. He’d fled but she was still inside. She obviously needed the attentions of a caring young reporter with an ear just aching to be bent.
It was 1960 so the Mirror sent two. The Express sent two. The Mail sent one and the Sketch said: ‘Keep an eye on it for us, will you, old boy.’
They kindly deputed me to go the house first – ‘She’ll trust the local paper, old lad, then you can get us in’ – but sadly she didn’t and unleashed the dog on me. I reached the gate first with the Alsatian a close second as I leaped over.
No talk? Hey, we’ve got Fleet Street’s finest here, squire. ‘Okay,’ said the bloke from the Express. ‘This is what she said...’ My naive look of astonishment amused them. ‘There’s six of us. If we all say she said it, how can she deny it?’
She didn’t need to. Before anyone could start inventing quotes worthy of the NationalEnquirer the police announced she’d made it all up and was going off to hospital. Mental variety.
Sometimes it was hard paddling in the shallows of the linage pool and the nationals had to be encouraged to bite more.
After one particularly poor month there was only one remedy: Invent the story that’s so good everyone will use it and thank us in the only way those cash-happy old boys on the newsdesk know how.
Linage impresario Roy thought he had the answer: Toffee-nosed officers pampered at a nearby RAF base were without the valet services of their bolshie batmen because they’d walked out over pay and conditions. Good quotes. As good as only invented ones can be.
And a Canadian photographer on our rival weekly nobly volunteered to ring the various newsdesks and pretend to be one of the outraged officers. Couldn’t fail.
Couldn’t work, either. Nobody believed it. Nobody bit. Except one: The Telegraph. They liked the story so much they didn’t come back with a single question and printed the whole story word for word. And paid for it. There’s gratitude.
Mind you, it all became a bit too familiar over the years. A Yorkshire freelance of my acquaintance used to construct the ‘perfect story’ almost like a play then find the ‘actors’ to star in it.
His best was the family who wanted damages after their Alphabet Spaghetti spelled out a four-letter word. I think it must have been something like MUGS. Nowadays the last par would have been that they’d been offered counselling.
Just reading about the drinking bouts by the layabouts on Gordon Williams’ Recorder gave me a thirst. The landlords – and landladies, of course – who kept us refreshed were closer than our parents.
When Dickie the freelance offered me a job I didn’t ask my father for advice, I went to the manager at the office pub (‘Don’t do it - finish your indentures’).
There was nearly a nasty moment at another boozer when my 17th birthday approached. Clearly a celebration was in order but if I said I was 18 it meant I’d been drinking there since I was 17 – and of course I hadn’t. I’d been drinking there since I was 16. So on my 17th birthday I duly became 19. Luckily I was large for my age.
We took our jobs seriously but with humour, cynicism and the absolute joy of doing a job we loved, whatever the hours and however badly it was paid. But not everybody did. Because I hated football I was naturally made football correspondent, following the town team up and down the Home Counties to join both local supporters in appraising the game.
The chief reporter of our rival weekly was a football fanatic. Once I had the temerity to suggest our team had played well when in fact he was able to inform me fully and frankly that they had played appallingly badly.
How pathetic to be given a bollocking by the opposition over some two-bob bunch of Saturday afternoon nobodies. ‘In future when you want to know how a game went you ask me, right?’
That chief reporter took everything seriously. Right until he suffered such apoplexy over something and nothing that it killed him. Aged 40.
Me, I went subbing. And that’s the only thing I find strange in Gordon Williams’ book, his dislike of subs and disdain for the miracles we performed. Who wants to doorstep in the rain at midnight when you can be safe indoors in the warm with lots of power and the joyous knowledge that everything you do will go in the paper?
Gordon Williams has revealed that the background for The Upper Pleasure Garden came from his newspaper career in Bournemouth, cradle of that other journalistic giant, David English. He says the former Daily Mail editor was ‘the most ruthless journalist I ever met’.
Thanks to the fantastic grounding my weekly gave me I was on the Mail aged 23, just seven years after my career began, via The Northern Echo, the NewcastleJournal and Evening Post at Hemel.
And not long after I arrived on the Mail we got a new editor called David English. He really was the editor everyone respected: We all said without a hint of sycophancy that he really did write better headlines, stories, captions than their second best exponent.
He discovered strengths we didn’t know we had. And saw through us, too.
We news subs foolishly held a secret pay survey and in the first I was doing well. Next year not so well. So I quit in a paddy and got a job on the Sun. David was on holiday and when he came back took me into his office, sat me on the sofa, put his arm round my shoulder and said: ‘You’re quitting in a fit of pique, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, David.’
‘Now what’s the Sun going to pay you? We’ll match it. And we won’t say anything about it ever again.’
‘No, David. Thank you, David.’
Then I discovered my salary hadn’t fallen at all. In fact I was almost at the top of the tree, thanks to service and merit rises I’d forgotten about.
The Alphabet Spaghetti in my head spelled out a four-letter word that described me very well.
Later we took delivery of a deeply-gifted reporter called Jedwards from the Daily Mirror – one of those deals, don’t y’know, where the salary doesn’t matter – all the wheeling and dealing is done on what exes he’s going to get. Crikey!
Soon after he arrived the Mirror tried to get Jedwards back and he was sore tempted.
‘But you’re on a 12-month contract here,’ said David. ‘We wouldn’t want you to break it.’
‘Well, I think I will,’ says Jedwards. ‘More money, guaranteed shows, best stories.’
‘But we don’t want you to break your contract. And we’ll keep you to it.’
‘Okay,’ says Jedwards. ‘But I won’t write a bloody thing for the whole 12 months.’
‘That’s right,’ says David. ‘And let’s see who remembers you then!’
‘Oh – er, actually, David, I’ve just had an idea for a bit of a story...’
Ah, such memories, all spurred by Gordon Williams – in reading The Upper Pleasure Garden, the pleasure was all mine.
Now I must return to my retirement hobby subbing a county magazine. What’s this: ‘The place is now so popular that cues form round the block.’
I’ll quietly correct it. I wouldn’t want our star writer to suffer as we did all those years ago when the editor drew our imperfections to the attention of the entire newsroom. Loudly.
It certainly stopped us queuing up to do it again.
For most journalists, whether staff or freelance, their by-line is their showcase, their shop window. It is how you get work, and how you get known. It is also the means by which you survive, writes Liz Hodgkinson.
But now, along with all the other bad things happening in the inky trade, by-lines are, on some publications at least, in danger of disappearing altogether.
In the very early days of newspapers, by-lines were extremely rare. It was more usual for stories to be headed ‘By our own correspondent’ or ‘By a staff writer.’ Many women’s magazines also used house names or pseudonyms for their writers.
All this changed as journalism gradually stopped being a secretive, anonymous profession and became something to boast about, to be proud of. Big by-lines, picture by-lines, became the journalist’s equivalent of actors having their name in lights. And the big money went with them.
Now, it seems, it’s changing back to anonymity – and nobody but me, it appears, noticing or, more to the point, objecting.
For several years now, an increasing amount of women’s magazines have got away with putting the writer’s by-line up the side of the page, in such tiny point size you need a magnifying glass to read it. The fad started with homes and interiors magazines, and then spread to weekly magazines and tabloid Sunday supplements. The magazine Take A Break, one of the highest-circulation weeklies, is a particular offender for grudging its writers any kind of by-line at all, and you will search hard to find a decent-size credit line in once-great magazines such as Woman and Woman’s Own.
And now, the Guardian G2 section has followed suit, and shrunk the size of its writers’ by-lines along with shrinking the fees. The two things go together. Nobody values journalists any more, so they can be paid peanuts for the privilege of not having their work properly acknowledged.
The BBC, which has a whole host of magazines, goes even further. Not content with paying their staff and freelance writers hardly anything, they credit television presenters with the story, rather than the poor bugger who actually wrote it. This happened to me when I wrote something for BBC Good Homes – after, I may say, they approached me as a potential contributor. When I was sent a copy of the magazine and saw a presenter’s name and picture on my story, instead of my own, I angrily protested, only to be told it was ‘policy’. Not long after that, the magazine ceased publication.
While on the subject, I was also approached by a new homes magazine, Inside Out, to be a contributor. When I asked about a fee, answer came there none. I said, ‘Do you honestly expect me to write for a Murdoch magazine for nothing?’ Again, the curse of Liz operated and the magazine came out for only about three issues before disappearing into the dust.
If you query this practice (or, more accurately, malpractice), you will usually be told that the tiny by-line is a matter of ‘design’ and it’s all down to the art editor. Bollocks. Nonsense. It’s yet another way in which the jobbing journalist is no longer valued, and has no means of protection, no way of insisting on any kind of decent treatment. No wonder all the kids on media studies courses want to be columnists. They see the huge by-lines of a favoured few – very few – like Polly Toynbee and Allison Pearson, and this encourages them to read the copy, and imagine they could do the same. A by-line draws the reader in, even if that name means nothing – at first. It’s how you get known in the first place.
I am a particular champion of the decent-sized by-line because it’s how I got my first job in Fleet Street. I had, as a freelance, written a piece for the Sunday Mirror and although I was then a struggling unknown, it carried a big by-line, my first in a national newspaper. Within a week of that piece appearing, I was offered a staff job at the Sunday People. Such a thing would never have happened unless the by-line had caught the attention of somebody in a position to offer me a job.
In those days, the tiny by-line up the side of the paper hadn’t been invented. It’s now time to un-invent it and start giving journalists their proper due as writers. The magazines and newspapers have been allowed to get away with it for far too long.
– Liz Hodgkinson
Liz Hodgkinson is a freelance writer and author of Ladies of The Street (Revel Barker Publishing, £9.99).
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mini rant
Manners makyth man
By the editor
Talking – as we were last week – about obits and also about modern manners, did anybody clock the Daily Telegraph this week?
It lifted whole chunks from this website for its obit on Geoffrey Van-Hay, the demon barman of Fleet Street.
Without attribution, without credit, and without even fact-checking.
Worse, without payment to the freelance Ranters who contributed the copy to us.
We don’t mind, much (although the writers might) and at least we now know what the DT considers to be the ground rules if we ever want to lift its copy in the future.
But it would never have happened in the old days.
Time was, when one paper wanted to steal copy from another it at least had the grace to say so, or the good humour to apply a house by-line to the purloined paragraphs.
The Sun used to use By Jack Dawe.
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The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – The Times
Issue #131
22 January 2010
This Week
‘Change and decay, in all around I see,’ sang William Boot’s Uncle Theodore in Scoop. He should be alive this day, and see more of it.
You want a rant? I’ll give you a bloody rant.
A few days ago – now, actually, it’s more than a couple of weeks – I stumbled across a story and offered it to a national newspaper. It was a perfect pitch, in that I put it up directly to the most likely editor to use it and he responded instantly, saying that Wow, he didn’t know that, and ‘yes, please do send it.’
After that, zilch, nada, rien, nowt. When I sent the copy I put a line in the covering note asking him to let me know if he planned to use it. No response. After a week, I wrote again, saying that I knew it was boring and a chore for people to acknowledge receipt of copy, but if he didn’t want it I might offer it elsewhere. No response. I wrote again after two weeks…
Who are these bloody people who think they are entitled to operate without even the basic common courtesy? Too busy to send (or get somebody else to send) an email saying ‘thanks but no thanks’? Small wonder that the papers are full of shit. No surprise that circulations are plummeting.
Sorry. I am angry. Actually, more disappointed than angry. It has come to this. And that’s only my most recent and personal experience. Freelance writer and author Liz Hodgkinson reports that it is happening to almost everybody, all the time. Like Liz, I blame the parents. And I blame the editors for lack of direction about decency, where it is obviously needed. And I blame the editors for not having that courtesy themselves.
Who, though, is to blame for the dire standards of media – newspapers, broadcasting, PR, film – in all its forms? Having lost the best part of a night’s sleep by masochistically staying up to watch the Golden Globe awards (why do people do that?) Revel Barker blames the teachers.
His old pal James Mahoney reports from the chalk-face of Australian academia and he blames, probably, the concept of what’s mistakenly called ‘breaking news’ and the fact that nobody knows how to ask questions.
Sorry, but there’s no light at the end of the tunnel this week. We end with two obits. Jonathan Randall on Bill Tuohy and Neil Marr and Andy Leatham on Clive Hadfield.
Will the bad treatment and arrogant exploitation of freelance writers never end? After all, just about every publication is more or less completely dependent on outside contributors these days.
But you would not think so, from the cavalier way we are treated.
The other week I wrote about the deafening silence that often accompanies pitching an idea. But in many cases, that’s as nothing to what happens when you are asked, nay commissioned, to do a piece. It goes into the ether and you never hear from your commissioning editor again.
More often than not, no acknowledgement of any kind comes your way, not even an email saying something like: thank you for the piece, I’ll read it later and get back to you.
This lack of courtesy is by no means new, but whereas at one time it was an occasional rudeness, it is now rapidly becoming the norm. In my book Ladies of the Street, I quote the example of Katharine Whitehorn, a leading columnist on the Observer for three decades, and a household name. After she left the Observer she was asked to do a big piece on nursing. Now, anybody who has followed Whitehorn’s career will know that she sat on many nursing and hospital committees, and was something of an expert on the NHS.
So anything she wrote on the subject was likely to be well researched, well written, pacey and relevant to the readers.
Anyway, she duly wrote the piece and sent it in. Weeks of silence went by. When she eventually rang to say it would lose its topicality if it didn’t go in soon, she received the following justification from the features editor: ‘Really, Katharine, I’ve got 24 freelances telling me why their piece has to go in this week.’
Whitehorn received this crass response in 1997 and it rankled long enough for her to include it in her book Selective Memory, published in 2008. Most of us who have been struggling on as freelances since that time would never remember an isolated example, simply because this kind of treatment has become so common.
What do you do? It’s one thing for an editor to ignore your idea, but completely unforgivable for them to ignore an entire piece they have asked you to write. I can only pass on my strategies, learned of long and bitter experience.
If I hear back from an editor asking for the piece – and after I have picked myself up from the floor in shock at receiving a response at all – my next email would be to arrange the fee. However urgently they want it, they can’t have it until I have secured this vital piece of information. Then, if there is dead silence after I have sent in the piece – and I have also sent them a reminder – I contact another publication for whom this item might also be suitable, especially if the piece is topical, as indeed, most journalism is, by its nature.
So, you might ask, what if they both run it? So? So what? In my time, I have had an identical piece appearing in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express on the same day – and I am not the only journalist to whom this has happened. It is entirely their own fault. I have also had identical pieces appearing in different magazines, in every case where the editor sat on it and sat on it and sat on it, never contacted me and was deaf, dumb and blind to my entreaties.
I always hope that when this sort of thing happens, the section editor concerned gets the most extreme bollocking, as they richly deserve. Of course, if the offender is the head honcho, the actual editor, he (or she) is not going to bollock himself, but it may be a lesson to him to behave in future.
OK, you as the little person will not always win but you have to let them know you will not put up with being treated like dirt – in the politest possible way of course. If the worst comes to the worst, I write an aggrieved email asking if this is the way they would like to be treated themselves. I copy it to everybody who might have some influence, going as high up as I can.
That’ll larn ‘em! Well, sometimes …
But if they keep getting away with it, why should they mend their ways?
As ever, I blame the parents for the way this practice of non-acknowledgement has become standard. As a child, I was made to sit down and write thank-you letters to all the aunts and uncles who had sent me ten-bob book tokens for Christmas. The result was that it became ingrained in me to acknowledge letters, requests and later, emails.
In turn, I made my sons do the same. It was often a painful exercise, but it paid dividends. But apparently the practice of children being forced to write thank you letters has died out completely, according to a lengthy correspondence on the subject recently in The Guardian.
I just think that today’s commissioning editors never got into the habit of saying thank you as children, and they have taken this discourtesy into their professional, adult lives. But we must all protest, as loudly as we can, to end this disgraceful practice.
If I were teaching media in all its many forms – press, broadcasting, PR, film – which, thank the Lord, I am not, sir, I’d sit all my students down and make them watch this week’s coverage of the Golden Globes TV and movie awards.
As a lesson in how not to do it – any of it – it surely takes some beating.
Awards ceremonies, of which there seems to be an ever-increasing number, start with what’s known as the Red Carpet interviews.
Here’s the first tip: The interviewer should be a reporter who can distinguish a star from a mere celebrity and should have some questions ready to ask. It’s fine for it to be a girl, but it shouldn’t be an unknown actress who squeals into the microphone like a stuck pig whenever anybody says ‘George Clooney’.
They should know that it is not unusual to see rain in California in January, so it doesn’t need mentioning more than once.
Most women take longer than men to prepare for a black-tie gala function so asking who dressed faster is not a remotely interesting question – unless there’s a reason to suspect that there might be a surprising answer and, certainly, it doesn’t need asking more than once, on the off-chance.
It is not good reporting, and it is even worse as TV presenting, for the guy covering the event inside the hotel foyer to keep saying that the place is packed with famous people… especially if he failed to intercept any of them on the way in.
Importantly, somebody (and I nominate the people who are paid to teach them the trade) needs to tell would-be journalists that an actor without a script rates as an interviewee on about the same level as a talking dog.
Unless they are blessed, like David Niven, Peter Ustinov, or Trevor Howard were when I was doing star interviews, the very simple fact is that actors, by definition, have nothing to say unless somebody has given them the words to utter. In the absence of a script, it’s up to the reporter to lead them into saying something interesting.
Are you going on to a party after the awards ceremony is not a good example. Most people are doing that. But some have to get the red-eye back to New York at the end of the show, and it might be interesting, slightly, to learn why they have to do that; and yet the question was never asked.
When Chris Hutchins had the office next to mine and wrote the diary for the Sunday Mirror, he told me one of his techniques for getting tongue-tied actors to talk. He’d ask who was the most interesting or helpful person they’d met in their career; if that failed, he’d ask who was the most boring and least helpful. A former show-biz publicist, Chris never returned to the office short of copy.
Which brings us to film and PR.
Movie production companies employ banks of publicists.
Would it be asking too much for them to prepare all their stars, paid to turn up at events such as the Golden Globes to publicise the nominated movies, with a few words to use in the event that they are stopped and interviewed? We could call it a sound-bite.
And is it beyond the wit of the film PR – and in the extreme case maybe even a script-writer – to help the nominees with 40-seconds worth of thank-you speech?
This brings us to Ricky Gervais, about whom the least said the better. When Steve Martin hosted the Oscars he asked a newspaperman to help him with his script. Pity that Mr Gervais didn’t ask one, or ask anybody at all. As a result he emerged as a total plonker, even if the Daily Mirror, possibly writing against the clock, and probably well in advance, reported that he ‘stole the show’. Insofar as stole means removed anything that might have been remotely valuable, they were right.
And here’s the thing. We have a few thousand Ranters here, most of them under employed, who for a small fee could knock out a Red Carpet sound-bite or a 40-second thank-you speech in a matter of minutes.
Look, it’s hard trying to avoid being a grumpy, but the media isn’t helping.
Something has gone wrong as it seems all those lessons learnt as a cadet about writing news and avoiding clichés no longer apply.
Perhaps we could blame CNN. After all, they started the 24-hour news cycle. That brought the nonsense of ‘breaking news’. Now, everyone is in on the act, even outfits like the BBC and its Australian counterpart. The people who run both news rooms should know better because they were once exemplars of good news writing for television. Now, they’ve just Americanised and we’re all suffering.
Take the death of the Old Pope. First, there was the breaking news that he was critically ill. Fair enough. But when he actually died, the ‘breaking news’ that he had done so for the next dozen hours was a tad over the top. When does dead actually mean dead, as in a full stop to a life? One assumes that once death happens it doesn’t carry on, as in breaking news.
Mind you, ‘Pope dead’ makes a beaut headline for any news format, but that doesn’t happen often. Besides, the way they play around with computer-setting these days means the art of writing a headline to say it all as briefly as possible probably doesn’t matter. Another reason to be grumpy.
Once we had to write news as, well, news. Now they all seem to be commentators, paid lots of money to look good on the telly, the women mostly blonde and the blokes ruggedly handsome. They never actually seem to say much, especially those who spend their lives rushing to the latest ‘breaking news’ to give us their views on what’s what. They’ve all got sources in every world capital, of course, who tell them lots and not often very much.
None of them ever seem to ask real questions. Nor do they ever seem to follow-up on answers, but they are very good at leading questions. This is infecting journalism students. Each year at my university we have this exercise in which the journalism students interview the public relations students on a media release written by the latter. This is beginner television news interviewing. Some of the journalists seem to think the task is to be as rude and aggressive as possible – then get all sensitive when the young flaks answer their leading questions with a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ One indignant emerging hack (probably preparing for a career in television) wrote in a student feedback survey that the PR students appeared to have had media training. That news had been breaking for several weeks had the journos bothered to listen.
Still, I’ve turned the breaking news cliché to my own advantage. Whenever I want my PR students to take special note of a point, the dreaded PowerPoint slide apes the CNN dinkus for that purpose. (For those who have forgotten, a dinkus is ... oh, look it up.)
That brings me to clichés. As cadets we got a good old verbal bollocking by a really grumpy sub, usually in front of everyone in the news room, for using them. Mostly, it was quite pithy, like, ‘What’s this crap?’
These days, clichés are so clichéd that they’re customised for context. Business writing has its; politics a special set. Sport is the worst. A sports story wouldn’t be a sports story without a string of clichés. A golfer always has a ‘share of the lead’ or is ‘six shots off the pace.’ Footballers never miss a goal by hitting the crossbar; they always ‘strike the woodwork.’ How long since goals posts have been made of wood?
Try teaching PR students what news is and how to write a decent media release when they encounter that stuff in the very limited interaction they have with news beyond what their mobile phones will deliver.
Then there’s those annual stories about how much the Prime Minister spent on overseas travel, or the cost of maintaining his official residence (as if it is the only place in the joint that doesn’t need maintenance), and myriad others like that.
Once it seemed that an essential criterion for being a sub-editor was perpetual grumpiness. Maybe they were born with defective livers. Not so. It was a state of mind induced by years of having to transform passable copy into news, and yelling at cadets about clichés. Mostly they succeeded and we’re all the better for it. But just imagine how grumpy some of the old buggers would be faced with the 24-hour, 365-day breaking cliché cycle.
James Mahoney teaches public relations at the University of Canberra.
William Tuohy, a late-blooming American war correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize in Vietnam, then covered conflicts far and wide and in between enjoyed the good life in London, died on 31 December at the age of 83 after open heart surgery in Los Angeles.
His career coincided with the last great flowering of daily print journalism, especially foreign reporting, now increasingly sacrificed to keep skeletal newspapers alive in the electronic age.
The son of a Chicago judge, Tuohy joined the US Navy toward the end of the Second World War and then started out as a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle. As night city editor, he worked alongside Pierre Salinger, who later became President John F Kennedy's press secretary. Tuohy migrated to Newsweek in New York in 1959, covering the 1964 American presidential election campaign and in 1965 he volunteered for the Saigon bureau, his first foreign assignment.
His combat reporting for Newsweek won a magazine prize and caught the fancy of the Los Angeles Times, long a lacklustre provincial newspaper abruptly shocked into going first class by the challenge of a West Coast edition of the New York Times. That edition folded in 1964 after two years, but by that time the Los Angeles Times was seriously covering California's cutting edge culture, as well as global news.
Tuohy was 40 when he was hired in 1966 in Saigon, joining a recently assembled stable of veteran correspondents at the newspaper. That reflected the Los Angeles Times' reliance on experience where its rivals often took a chance on younger reporters out to make their reputations in war zones. To the envy of the competition, Los Angeles Times reporters were encouraged to fly first class and to write at length, with stories starting on the front page and then often continuing inside for entire pages.
In 1969 Tuohy won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in Vietnam, exemplifying the storytelling gift he displayed throughout a 29-year career at the newspaper. The award citation read: ‘few correspondents have seen and written more about Vietnam than William Tuohy.’ He became part of the ‘moveable village’ of American, British and European correspondents who over the next three decades covered major, mostly Third World, upheavals.
Tuohy moved from Vietnam to Beirut, covering Jordan's ‘Black September’ crackdown in 1970 on the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Amman, for which he won an Overseas Press Club award. He later served as bureau chief in Rome, London, Bonn and again in London at the end of his career in the 1990s. In London he first lived on Eaton Square, then in Knightsbridge. He was a frequent lunch guest at San Lorenzo on Beauchamp Place and enjoyed a night out at Annabel's. He was also an avid member of the Chelsea Arts Club and the Garrick.
As a journalist, Tuohy was blessed with good instincts. He was a quick study, capable of turning out highly readable copy within hours of landing in a country in crisis. He could dictate faultless copy without notes even after a late, very convivial evening. And he possessed that special journalist's gift: he was lucky.
As Rome bureau chief, at the outset of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, he rushed to the airport and registered his suitcase on the plane for Beirut. But on a last minute hunch, he bought another ticket and boarded the flight to Tel Aviv, taking only a carry-on bag and his typewriter in the Gucci case he'd had custom made. He'd guessed right. Israel allowed correspondents far greater access than the Arabs, even in its most challenging war to date.
Despite a gimp leg from a train crash in 1947, Tuohy epitomised the dashing Hollywood version of a foreign correspondent. Unlike most of his colleagues, who dressed like slobs in the field, Tuohy looked how most people thought a foreign correspondent ought to look: he was tall, handsome and always impeccably attired. His shock of white hair earned him the nickname, the ‘Silver Stallion’.
Tuohy also had a knack with the military of many nations. Ward Just, who covered the Vietnam War for the Washington Post before becoming a novelist, recalled that Tuohy ‘had the ability to put himself on a common footing with very senior military officers whose view of the press generally was suspicious - dangerous nihilists for whom the glass is eternally half empty. Bill inspired trust. 'Look,' he seemed to say, 'you and I, we've been around the block, we know the score. A fact given in confidence would be respected and while the fact might in due course find its way into print, its source would be nicely concealed.
‘It was not Bill Tuohy ingratiating himself with Colonel Squarejaw. It was Colonel Squarejaw ingratiating himself with Bill, finding at last a newspaper reporter who clearly understood how things worked.’
Never was this gift more in evidence than when his Los Angeles colleague Joe Alex Morris Jr was killed covering the uprising that ensured the Islamic Revolution's takeover in Iran in February 1979. Tuohy was tasked with fetching his body. Tuohy and I, then a Washington Post correspondent, were aboard an executive jet chartered in Jordan which, after much anxious indecision by the Tehran control tower, became the first plane allowed to land at Tehran airport after the triumph of the revolution. My Islamic connections after a year covering Iran got the plane in, but it was Tuohy's authoritative manner which calmed the nervous Iranian soldiers surrounding the plane and allowed Morris's casket to be wedged into the jet for its lonely flight westward.
He wrote three books: Dangerous Company (1987), a memoir of his war correspondent days; The Bravest Man: The Story of Richard O'Kane and US Submariners in the Pacific War (2001); and America's Fighting Admirals: Winning the War at Sea in World War II (2007).
This obit appeared in The Independent, last weekend.
Clive Hadfield, who died on Monday night, lived and breathed journalism. To describe him as ‘tenacious’ doesn’t begin to embrace his enthusiasm for the job.
He began his career at the Stretford and Urmston Journal, part of the former Tillotson’s newspaper empire in Lancashire. I first met him when he joined me on the group’s Bolton Evening News.
At my suggestion he contacted legendary and ferocious Yorkshire freelance Tom Hopkinson and went over for ‘a chat’, which turned into several pints. The following day Tom rang me.
‘Andy,’ he began. ‘This lad, Clivey ... is he the sort of lad that'll be doing shifts in Manchester behind my back and in less than two years be buggering off to join the Mail?’
Before I got chance to answer, Tom added: ‘Because if he's not, I'm not going to give him a job.’
Clive did join Hoppy and he did bugger off to join the Daily Mail in Manchester. From there he joined the Sunday People and worked alongside two other chaps who’d made their start (on the very same day) on weekly papers owned by Tillotson, me and Neil Marr.
He became a key player on the northern Sunday People reporting team and one of the most popular journalists in Manchester, bursting with energy, humour, charm, and (often) Boddingtons bitter.
Afer a couple of years he was poached by the Sunday Mirror where he became northern news editor and remained there until the 1990s. Then he freelanced for a while, principally for the Mail on Sunday and later moved into PR.
Outside of journalism, his great passion was horse racing and holidays tended to coincide with the Ebor Meeting at York. He even wrote a book centred on racing but was unable to find a publisher.
Neil Marr writes:
Clive was also known as Amos ‘The Famous Six-Break’ Collier, after an impishly chosen false name on an hotel register during Yorkshire Ripperfest and his ineptitude on the snooker table.
He was generally known as Clivey – a tongue-in-cheek title bestowed by his hero, the late Tom Hopkinson, freelance of Clive’s own parish, by way of cheesy introduction to a hulking black bouncer at an out-of-control rave party in Leeds.
Two or three years younger than the rest of the reporting team on the Sunday People in Manchester back then (he was head-hunted by northern news editor Terry Lovell from the Daily Mail next door), he became the well-loved mascot of the newsroom; a gangly, youthful, twig of a young man in highly reputable suits, tasteful ties, over-sized specs, and who comported himself with the feline grace of the Pink Panther. You could almost hear the Henry Mancini theme music when he slid into a bar for ‘a taste’ or slinked back to his desk after ‘a task’.
But there was much, much more to Clive than the cartoon image he liked to put across. This I learnt during a year when we were both going through the breakup of long-time domestic relationships and coped well by sharing our idle hours and twin beds between his house in Headingley and my squalid lodgings above a pub in Wigan. He was a profound thinker, a carer, something of a poet, a man who wondered. He loved life and saw it as something to write home about.
Clive’s humour was as dry as Tetley bitter. I was driving down a seemingly deserted dual-carriageway in Nottinghamshire at crack of Sunday dawn once with Clive in the passenger seat and my late young brother Alec (a kid at the time – later Italy-based freelance) playing banjo in the back. We were too busy singing ‘We’re All Going to the Zoo Tomorrow’ to notice the lone car we’d suddenly raced up to. Bang! Both cars write-offs, but no injuries.
He extended his elegant hand to the elderly victims of the prang, helping them from what had obviously been a beloved, part-of-the-family Triumph Herald, and introduced himself in a voice that even pre-throat cancer was like a lump of coke stuck under the scullery door: ‘Clive Hadfield. Sunday People. And you are ...?’
‘We were taking our dear old car here to a new owner. Never a scratch. Wash-n-waxed every Sunday. Then this happens. We’re Mr and Mrs Glass.’
‘You must be shattered,’ Clive said sympathetically, pushing up his specs with a middle finger, Neddy Ramsey-style.
When I told a few fibs and managed to get a press card for his thug of a tomcat, Clive took it further and got the moggie a pass for Headingley cricket ground. He then, somehow, managed to swing me membership of a railway workers union and posted complaints about my sloppy work as a train guard on a notice board at the local railway club where he, Andy Leatham, Alwyn Thomas, the late Laurie Mansbridge, Val McDermid and I were made full members as a result and were entitled to cheap ale after hours.
When Clive first saw the now old-hat sign in a pub reading ‘Eight ’til Late’, he was so tickled that he turned it into a bumper sticker for his BMW. He called food ‘lumpy stuff’ and prophesied that it would never catch on.
He was a sharp writer and a devilishly keen reporter who would shamelessly take advantage of anything in his bag of tricks – with the strict exception of the fact that his Old Man was Commandant of the police training college. Dad was off limits. Even during the huge Ripper story, I don’t think Clive ever let his top rank, insider police connections be known to the desks. He could do the job without pulling in family favours, as his copy showed.
We often teamed on jobs and Clive’s soft or hard approach – both came naturally and were perfectly honest according to circumstances – were key to many a success.
All that was a while ago: Before he became northern news editor of the Sunday Mirror, before he started to get ill and make jokes about it, before he moved into PR and made even more jokes about that.
Clive had several rounds of surgery for throat cancer. I spoke to him once – a painful job for him to get the words out then with a hole where his Adam’s apple should be – and he told me that he’d given up Marlboro but had learned to swallow and was off to the pub.
Later, that bloody cancer got him in the lung and the brain and the spine. After his last round of operations last year, he deteriorated rapidly and died on Monday night, leaving a wife, Anne, and daughter, Elizabeth. He was fifty-two.
His funeral is on Tuesday, January 26 at St Luke's Church, Norland, near Halifax. Afterwards you can raise a glass to him at The Malthouse, Rishworth.
Seems so bloody unreal that I wrote a piece about Clive here at Ranters only a couple of months ago, wondering when he’d spot it and drop a line or make a call to replay the episode and take the piss.
I don’t think I realised just how much I missed him until Andy Leatham’s sad email broke the news of his death. For the past year, since we last spoke, I was always going to give Clivey a bell... tomorrow.
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We do not send any other emails and do not share the address list with anybody.
The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – The Times
Issue #132
January 22, 2010
This Week
A very mixed bag this week because Ranters is being edited on the hoof, or at least on the wing. It ain’t easy, driving a laptop at 39,000 feet on Easyjet, so it’s more or less a quick and fairly random pick from the drawer as the editor returns from London where Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, delivered the annual Cudlipp Lecture at the College of Communications.
You can read that, in full, on the Media Guardian website by clicking here.
Paul Bannister takes up where Liz Hodgkinson’s Rant (last week) left off, bemoaning the rank discourtesy – often descending into downright theft – shown by deskbound executives to freelance contributions.
Richard Burton describes the loneliness of the late-night sub, mostly hanging about the office waiting for famous people to die, inconveniently.
Maurice Neil, now lecturing in journalism in Belfast, recalls that exciting moment when the call came for a first move from the sticks to a major newspaper.
Dermod Hill muses on the fact the journalists must meet a lot of interesting people.
And Revel Barker wonders what became of all those spies who occupied editorial desks in the Daily Mirror office.
Liz Hodgkinson ranted, and rightly, about the shabby treatment we freelances too often receive from commissioning (and other) editors who simply ignore our communications.
It’s downright bloody rude. (An aside, to credit Mark Spence at Nuts, and Damien McSorley at Zoo, both decent, honest editors. I may, Screws-style, Name The Guilty Men later, however.)
What truly urinates me off is when my pitch is received with gleeful cries from, say, the New York bureau chief of, say, the Mail on Sunday, then, say she – if it were a she - asks for exclusive copy, say, about John McCain. I choose this as a near-hypothetical and highly typical example of what happens.
If it comes to it, I can point at most of the other nationals, too, so don’t get smug, especially you shits at the Express and all those Maxims in places like Prague and Beijing who pirated my stuff like Somalis on a picnic.
Back to the, say, MoS, where copy was hurriedly filed, the London editor ‘holds it over for a week’ then neither uses it nor pays for it. Not only does a perfectly good story vanish down a black hole, but it dies of old age, so I can’t move it elsewhere. Then the thief of my work ignores all my requests for recompense.
I’m 260 lbs, I still play rugby and I like violence. When I’m next in London I hope to discuss matters personally with a certain selectively-reclusive jackass and explain how stealing other people’s work is a Bad Thing. They used to call it Gunboat Diplomacy.
Rant The Next concerns the time when the editor of Britain’s most successful giveaway called to ask me to be in Los Angeles in a couple of days’ time. I gently explained it was 1,000 miles away and would cost the MSG a couple of grand for time and travel. Negative, soldier.
Because that editor had been kind in the past, I spent two unpaid days sorting out a surrogate to do the job, (two surrogates actually, after the first flaked at the last minute) and setting up matters with the studio and VIP movie industry interviewee.
In the post-cooperation afterglow I send the Most Successful Giveaway a flood of ideas, and they ordered and used a piece on the Israeli Mafia. Months pass. Can I get a payment out of them? See Liz H’s elegant rants for a clue.
I waste hours and some dollars on calls from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Wen, seeking recompense.
By return: not one email, not a single callback from the editor, features ed, editor’s secretary or even the bloody office cat. This despite having all their numbers, including the editor’s mobile and a plan of the scratching post.
Finally, I did get a swift, courteous and efficient response, from a non-editorial person. The company accountant, whom I tracked down and approached directly with an invoice, had it signed and paid in days.
From the editor, a once-accessible, friendly and cuddly-warm person with whom I had a seven-year professional relationship, only a blank silence. My tender heart was bruised and a good contact burned. My sour conclusion: Chesterfield and District Finishing School for Young Ladies failed with this pupil.
By and large, I find women’s magazine editors are the worst at responding. They’ll ask for ideas and I fall for it almost every time. I’ll dash off a couple of dozen, then a dozen more a week or two later, then another half dozen. Maybe a month after that, I’ll send the perfect lead for their magazine. Usually, I get one email, along the lines of ‘Not quite what we’re looking for at the moment, please send more,’ then it’s Trappist Time.
Oddly, a few months after those ideas go winging to London, similar and even the same stories start popping up in the pages of the very mags I queried. Maybe I was on the right track after all, or maybe something darker happened.
Conclusion: if you’re lucky enough to hawk an idea, get your pre-nup recorded somehow (even email’s OK), and know who actually makes out the payment forms. That editorial assistant is usually multiple times more efficient than the editor at actually getting you paid.
I could rant on, as I have more horror stories of payments up to two years and $20,000-plus in arrears, and you know who you are, you ginger little US tabloid cheat. You flat-out lied to me for a year that payments had been submitted. Only after you were booted did I find who was really to blame.
I have to go and lie down now, the spleen is splashing my boots.
#
Death watch on the dog-watch
By Richard Burton
It was September 1986, I was just starting a five-day run of late stops on Eddie Shah's Today when it became clear that Pat Phoenix may not make it through the night. As Elsie Tanner, she had been Coronation Street's leading sex bomb in her day and her battle with lung cancer had been all over the tabloids.
I was not long out of the provinces and a tad nervy about remaking a front page of a national, alone and in the early hours. Luckily, Peter Hiley was on the back bench that night, and as the office emptied, he hung around in his hat and coat to give me a heads-up.
It was all a bit fatherly. Peter had hired me as a copy boy 15 years earlier at the old Post-Echo in Hemel Hempstead and part of him probably still saw my best work as delivering up a well-stirred white with two. Anyway, he showed me what to do with the old splash, should I need to make room, where to run the turn on the new one and even scribbled a headline “Brave Pat loses fight” in two decks of Century Schoolbook.
Pat survived the night; and the next three, as I sat, alone with the late-duty reporter, watching the wires and a bit of TV and toying with a standfirst that had the words ‘newlywed’, ‘Tony Booth’ and ‘Bedside vigil’ in it.
On the fifth, as my cab arrived to mark the beginning of a long-weekend, I rang the print site to ask how late I could make a change (just in case). They said “it was now or never”. So, I got my coat and went home, cynically feeling cheated that death hadn't come on my watch.
Just as it hadn't a few months earlier when Ray Milland shuffled off just as the presses were grinding to a halt and he was too late to make the no-star final.
Years later, a more confident night chief sub on the Sunday Mirror watched as Chris Eubank caught Michael Watson with an uppercut that landed the hapless WBO challenger in a coma. As I dipped into a post-Stab curry at around midnight, night editor Mike Brown said: ‘Chances are, he’ll go tonight.’ and scribbled out “Big fight star dies” in 150 point in red felt tip over the splash before he went home.
It must be a Reading thing, I thought: all this bequeathing headlines. He'd been Hiley's chief sub at the Post in an earlier life. Come to think of it, it was Brown thing. For weeks, he’d dumped his ‘The Queen Mum dies’ splash on my lap as he’d made his way off with a tap of the nose and the words: ‘Just in case, old son,’ adding as he got to the left…. ‘but ring me first.’
Come 3am cut-off, Watson was still on life support and critical. Again, I was ringing a print site and asking what chance there was of making a slip in, say, half an hour, just in case. They said they could slow the run - but I’d have to sign off a few grand in production costs.
In the event it wouldn't have mattered, unbeknown to me, the comps in the basement had all buggered off on the dot at three.
Once again, death had cheated me. Just as it had was to do almost a year later when Leslie Crowther's Rolls turned over on the M5 near Cheltenham. He survived but I'd had the new front page, all wax and bromide, made up and lying on top of the Queen Mum on the desk beside me for the last hour.
The point is, if you want to make a name for yourself and justify your double-shift rate on the late stop, you need a seriously big death. Stories that need checking don't cut it. You don't have time for counter-claims or official sources, you just need a single fact; ideally where and when, a quick tribute and a crib from the obits basket to make the length.
Otherwise, it’s pretty dull from about 1am when the city final goes ‘till it’s time to weave your way through empty London streets and home for the dawn chorus. I’d end up settling down with a book on the sofa in Ann Robinson's office or watching something adult on a fledgling satellite channel with the post room lads.
All that's on your mind is; if it's big enough to lead the TV-am news when the suits wake up, you want it on their desk when they arrive.
I got my moment in November 1991. I was thumping a coffee machine when night news editor Tony Bushby came running up and said: ‘Freddie Mercury's dead.’
It was still only 1.30 and he’d died of aids too, which gave it more welly. Tony and his lads started getting pop stars out of bed for quotes and we nabbed a few pars of background from PA. We slipped at just after two and caught around 40,000 copies.
Not sure what happened to Phil Collins’ tribute. I seem to remember we caught him after a night out, he spoke in haste and he rang back to change his quote. Well, you don’t expect a call at that time, I guess.
Fast forward 12 years. I was editor of the Telegraph web site: all round-the-clock publishing and instant alerts. Deaths go live as they happen and late stops are just part of a rolling rota.
A voice came over the tannoy to say Michael Watson was on his way through CanaryWharf. He was walking the London Marathon a few hours a day in aid of the Brain and Spine Foundation, aided by a couple of minders and a bucket.
I watched from the 15th floor window as he crept towards the Reuters building. None of my young staff knew who he was.
He’d not only survived, he’d struggled back to his feet and was defiantly getting on with his life. I got into the lift, emptied the price of a decent round at Davy's into his bucket and gave him the warmest pat on the back.
Call me soft. But age does this.
Richard Burton left the editor’s chair at the Beds Journal in 1984 to come to Fleet Street with the launch of Today and went on to join the middle benches of the Sunday Mirror andthe Telegraph. Until 2006 he was editor of the Telegraph’s website. He is now managing editor of the Jewish Chronicle and a journalism trainer at WestminsterUniversity.
The polite woman on the phone said she was the editor’s secretary and would I like to come to an interview for a position as a sub editor at the Sunday News. I had no idea what a sub editor was and had never read the Sunday News but naturally said yes.
After spending most of 1978 at the Northern Constitution in Coleraine, where my weekly pay packet was less than it cost to fill the editor’s Jag and Peter Somersett was almost fired for drawing a hammer and sickle on his phone, I was keen to move on.
My wages doubled; there were expenses for doing nothing and a shining, new Ford Escort when you wanted to go out. Membership of the NUJ was compulsory, nobody cared if you didn’t shave for a week and there were no wedding captions.
The team I was privileged to join in 1978 was an eclectic bunch of eccentrics who enjoyed long, liquid lunches and flexible working arrangements that were the envy of their peers in the daily papers.
The newspaper, Northern Ireland’s first Sunday title, was a heady mix of sex, booze, rock ‘n’ roll, politics and hard news which sold around 90,000 copies each week and was a nice little earner for Bill Henderson’s Century Newspapers – publisher of the News Letter.
It broke the mould of Irish journalism - wordy and humourless reporting of heavyweight subjects – bringing a racy touch of humour, glamour and edgy reporting to newstands during one of the darkest periods in our history.
I was told to start as a reporter, was allowed to put my Debbie Harry Poster on the wall and felt at home right away.
We occupied one of the oldest parts of the News Letter building looking out on Talbot Street. Editor Pat Carville had his own office and rarely ventured out. News editor Jim Campbell had his own desk and rarely ventured in. Deputy news editor and crime correspondent Eddie Fleming sat at the corner of the reporters’ table and did his best to keep tabs on his team – Carmel McQuaid, Viv Hewitt, Ric Clark, Joan Boyd and me – through the fug of cigarette smoke.
Downstairs, in a small and windowless dungeon, was a pipe-smoking comedian who claimed to be sports editor Colin McAlpin and the ‘bloody’ subs, Des Ekin, Dave Culbert and Lorrae Thompson.
The News Letter advertising campaign featured the plummy tones of Donald Sinden. We had Jimmy Cricket, who came in to answer the phones one day, and a catchy jingle that went ‘super, super Sunday, super super Sunday, super, super Sunday News.’ Naturally we corrupted it to ‘super, super, sundry nudes.’
When I told people who I worked for they always wanted to know what Dear Abbey was like. She was a syndicated agony aunt somewhere in the United States, but received an enormous mail bag second only to Complaints Bureau which dealt with readers gripes such as: ‘My windies is broke because the UDA put them in.’
We used the News Letter pool for photography. Trevor Dickson, Bob Hamilton and Eddie Harvey were delighted to be given a Sunday News marking because it was often a wild goose chase which allowed for maximum pub time or involved glamorous women. Bob’s ‘wee toot’ was a vodka and Coke and Eddie was partial to a ‘biff and bit, ice, but no slice.’ His many regular haunts knew this to be a Smirnoff and bitter lemon without the fruit. I frequently returned from jobs unable to speak.
The next two years provided the best education a sheltered young man could wish for and the finest training for a career in journalism that money could not buy. A mere cub reporter, I was astonished to discover that I was allowed to work on my own ideas – no matter how off-the-wall – and that they made it into print.
I exposed the Army’s Spy-in-the-Sky, gave advance warning of Brazilian flu, drove a De Lorean and revealed the High Rise Roulette played by youngsters who jumped roof-to-roof at DivisTower blocks. I revealed the identity of the Boy Hero of the Fintona Bomb, the King of the Chicken Boxers – CB radio – and the Moon Alien King – the nation’s computer game champ. Page Three girl Jane Warner had a glint in her eye as she informed me she was Miss Rigid Tool 1979. My first front page lead was Petrol Will be a Pound a Gallon by Easter.
Cranks and pranks were commonplace. I interviewed people who had witnessed miracles, UFOs and the Loch Ness monster and dealt diplomatically with countless drunks who rang late on Saturday night looking for someone to settle a sporting question. It was wise to open your desk drawer with caution because you never knew what might have been placed there and I was the victim of an exploding cigarette on several occasions.
It all came to a head when someone knocked on the editor’s door and tossed him a realistic looking hand grenade.
My first love was music. I would have written for nothing but was actually paid extra for ‘Swingscene.’ I slated Van Morrison’s homecoming gig at Balmoral where he stood with his back to his fans and was delighted when The Undertones wrote to complain that I had ‘the brains of a newt.’ Rory Gallagher bought me a pint of stout at The Europa and I pissed in the Boyne with Phil Lynott at the first Slane. Paul Brady gave me a guitar lesson but I narrowly missed death when Rose Tattoo’s Angry Anderson ran amok with a microphone stand after downing a bottle Smirnoff Red. Motorhead’s Ace of Spades is still ringing in my ears, though I was on stage and behind the speakers. I was backstage with the Rolling Stones at St James Park in Newcastle upon Tyne and in the press box for Led Zeppelin’s farewell performance at Knebworth.
The love of music and pursuit of news often combined. I discovered that George ‘burn all Catholics’ Seawright had a sense of humour when I asked what he thought of Christy Moore’s latest hit, Delirium Tremens. It portrayed the loyalist firebrand saying the Rosary. We had much fun with Elton John the night he bounced on stage at the Ulster Hall and roared: ‘Good evening Dublin.’
It wasn’t all fun and games. On Saturdays we decamped to the vacant News Letter office, overlooking Donegall Street, and operated like a daily newspaper awaiting the inevitable murder or bomb blast that would make the front page lead.
Nobody forgets their first murder. He was an off-duty police officer, gunned-down in a butcher’s shop in Castle Street. I am haunted by the image of the crime scene after more than 30 years. We were first on the streets with news that the IRA had called off its hunger strike.
Our best headline was a collective effort. We huddled around the News Letter’s transistor radio one Saturday night – it was held together with sticky tape and string – awaiting the announcement of a new Secretary of State. Downtown said it was to be Humphrey Atkins. We looked at each other and asked: ‘Humphrey Who?’
The golden age was short. There was much office politics of which I was only vaguely aware and arrived one morning – late as usual – to be told by the editor that there was a minor crisis. Eddie Fleming was leaving to join the BBC and many of the senior staff jumped ship to Tony O’Reilly’s new, big budget, Sunday World. A futile strike in 1984 persuaded many remaining contributors to abandon ship and the launch of Sunday Life in colour in 1988 was the final nail in the coffin. The newspaper closed in 1993.
My favourite memory is a frosty Saturday when I was on the ‘night-town’ shift. I confessed to Ric Clark that I’d put another dent in the company car. He rolled his eyes and asked: ‘What did you hit?’
I said: ‘Your new Toyota Celicia.’
He took it remarkably well for a man known to throw hand grenades.
The article first appeared on Copyboys, a website for old farts of Northern Ireland journalism, set up by Graham McKenzie, formerly of the Belfast Telegraph, Daily Express and BBC and which is now edited by John Caruth, the former head of features on the Belfast Telegraph.
I now bite my lip to prevent myself from saying ‘I met that person once’ when somebody of note crops up in conversation or features in the news - albeit often the obituary pages these days - whom I once encountered as a journalist.
This is not for fear of becoming a bit of a bore, which is a real risk. But because journalists meet people in a different way from normal human beings. We go to the homes of the famous or notorious. We may invite them for a drink or a meal (not forgetting to keep a copy of the bill). We ask all manner of intrusive questions about their domestic harmony, or their financial probity, or their innermost hopes and aspirations.
But can we honestly say we know those people? I think not. Meeting a journalist is a kind of minuet. Both parties are watching their step. Often, the subject of the interview has a reason for being there which rarely has anything to do whether they think you are a nice person.
I am prone to these musings. But they were triggered again recently by a spate of repeated documentaries and docu-dramas on television over the Christmas period. I am thinking particularly of a clutch of ones about Gracie Fields, and another, shown earlier, about Hughie Green, now unmasked as the serial womaniser and ace heel who lurked beneath the unctuous, winking TV host and darling of the family audience.
Oh yes. I met them all once. Even several times. It is barely of historic interest now. Nothing is more spent than yesterday’s celebrity. But for the purpose of making my point, l will cite my encounters with Gracie Fields. She is not herself a key figure in this relation. Rather it is her house guest when I visited her in Capri circa 1970, Jess Yates. Jess was also accompanied there by his daughter Paula.
Jess also featured in the Hughie Green TV drama-doc. The two men apparently loathed each other with rare vehemence, and not without reason. Their stories are now fair game for tell-all television productions because they are safely deceased.
To me, at that time still in my 20s, my trip to Italy was one of those things that only seem to happen to those with jobs in journalism. One day you are tramping the street in the rain making notes in a soggy pad. Next day, at the whim of some editorial conference, you are on a flight to Naples, to connect with a helicopter service across one of the world’s most beautiful bays, en route to a jewel island set in the turquoise Tyrrhenian Sea, there to sip iced Cinzano in a luxurious hotel. It makes no sense. But we are not so daft as to fight it.
My brief was to fill, with the help of a photographer, four pages of a magazine, with a binge of nostalgia, profiling the great star of yesteryear and collecting her reminiscences triggered in part by an album of archive photographs dug up by a researcher in the picture department which I brought in my suitcase.
Of course, nothing is ever quite that simple. Our Gracie was a very fractious lady. As no-nonsense as the Lancashire accent she never lost even during her glory days in West End theatre then films. At one point during my visit, when the ambient noise of conversation between various guests in the house became too much for her, she stunned us all by throwing us out of the house. Out we had to go until she had regained composure.
Jess Yates, I think, privately felt that the appearance of a writer and photographer had queered his pitch. His public persona was even more unctuous and syrupy than that of Hughie Green. But set in his rotund face and dome like bald head were a pair of eyes that had something of the viper in them. I felt the vibes were not good.
He was there because he had persuaded Gracie to come out of retirement and sing on the programme he produced and presented for Yorkshire Television, Stars on Sunday, which enjoyed extraordinary success and huge viewing figures. The press, slightly maliciously, had dubbed him ‘The Bishop’.
I suspect he had brought along Paula, then a schoolgirl, because it would ease his path with Gracie and her husband Boris (the 2nd or 3rd Mr Fields, I am not sure which). Gracie had never been able to have children and without doubt Paula was the centre of attraction for everyone present by a large margin.
Paula almost never spoke. She had been attending school in Malta because of a chest ailment that made her health precarious. But she had a way of glowing with interest when you spoke to her, and her intelligence shone out like a beacon. A strange and fascinating individual. Boris, in particularly, simpered constantly.
I felt instinctively that for Paula, this over-supply of adult company must have been suffocating and perhaps accounted for the fact that, though clearly not shy, she spoke so rarely.
In all, I spent nearly two full days in their company, and listened while Jess ran through possible songs Gracie might sing on his show. Jess had overcome his displeasure at my presence to the extent that he allowed me to invite him and Paula for dinner at a restaurant, after which he had pardoned me sufficiently to borrow a large quantity of Lire from me to bridge a gap in his cash flow, that being the era before acceptance of credit cards was universal.
What is my point in recounting all this? Well, I duly caught the flight back to London. I wrote up my piece. I liked Gracie very much. She was down to earth. A real person. Her bursts of temper were a great boon because they rescued me from writing yet another length of standard mush on the legendary entertainer of the war years. Boris, of course, hated my piece and asked Gracie’s agent in London to make a complaint. But the agent knew the value of a four-page spread in a mass circulation magazine and told him to get back in his box.
But what of Jess? And what of Paula? Jess, it later turned out, had an affair with an actress which, when exposed by the tabloids, destroyed his career. Being called ‘The Bishop’ and running a quasi-religious programme was his downfall. The provocation for the papers was too big to resist.
Paula turned out to be not Jess’s daughter at all, but proved as the result of DNA testing to be the product of a liaison between Hughie Green and Jess’s novelist wife. All this was rehashed in the docu-dramas. Paula and Jess were no longer on speaking terms in later years. I next saw Paula via the headlines she had made by posing nude for a glamour magazine in the hallowed precincts of The Reform Club in Pall Mall.
As a slightly built young lady with a delicate constitution, Paula was not naturally endowed for nude pictures, and she later attempted to remedy this through surgical enhancement. She was hostess on a quirky TV breakfast show which she introduced from a bedstead. Her light brown hair was now peroxide blonde. She married into the hectic pop music scene, dabbled with drugs, and eventually died at a tragically early age from an inadvertent overdose.
Yes, ‘I met them once…’ Can I claim that I knew any of them, even in the slightest degree? Emphatically I cannot. No more than I knew any of the scores, perhaps hundreds, of prominent people I met while working as a journalist. So I will keep biting my lip. Meeting people and knowing them are two different things. The one should never be confused with the other.
The hairs on the back of a foreign correspondent’s neck have a life of their own. You probably wouldn’t be aware of them normally, but they stood to attention whenever you went through a checkpoint, whether it was in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, or approaching the iron curtain.
What, after all, were you doing there? Gathering information. Isn’t that what spies do? And aren’t all western journalists spies?
There’s a fine line to be drawn, somewhere. Suppose you are going to – pick a place at random – Lebanon; it may not be a bad idea to take a chap from the appropriate desk at the Foreign Office for lunch and find out the latest on what’s happening there, before you go. And if he reciprocates the hospitality on your return and asks about your experience on his patch, and you tell him what you saw and heard, does that amount to…?
Yes; it’s a very fine line.
I once, as a change from flying in or taking the train, took my car along the corridor to West Berlin. Because I was officially a defence correspondent and the MoD knew I was making the trip, the Military Police at the inner German frontier post at Helmstedt invited me to stop for lunch, gave me a card with a union jack on one side and words on the other saying that I was British and Britain did not recognise East Germany, so if stopped I would speak only to a Russian officer, and then I passed through the Soviet – rather than the GDR – checkpoint.
The MP major who entertained me said that I should not exceed the 100kph speed limit because I would be timed at either end. But if I didn’t turn up when expected at Checkpoint Alpha, near Marienborn, they’d send a helicopter along the corridor to search for me. And, incidentally, he’d consider it a kindness if, at the other end, I mentioned ‘any unusual or interesting troop movements’ that I saw along the route.
I asked what he meant by ‘unusual’ and he said that, well, any troop movement would be of interest.
That’s an example of the fine line. If I am going about my normal job and I see anything that anybody else along the autobahn could see and I talk about it later in a bar in Berlin, that’s one thing. If I make a point of giving the information to a British officer, that’s another.
But if I just write about it in the paper, it’s only journalism.
Shortly before Robert Maxwell’s death in 1991 there was a great furore because the Daily Mirror foreign editor was accused of passing information to Mossad. Maybe Maxwell had told him to tell the Israelis that one of their citizens was hawking details to the Mirror about his country’s nuclear capability. Everybody thought Nicholas Davies (not to be confused with Nick Davies of the Guardian) would have made an unlikely Mossad spy, not least because most of his colleagues didn’t believe anything he told them and he, to be fair, seemed to take this in good spirit.
Some conspiracy theorists claimed that Maxwell had been a Mossad agent; others said he was a KGB man. Nearer to the truth was that he was hopeless at keeping secrets and would tell anybody anything he thought would interest them. Presidents Reagan and Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev would take his calls, as would Chaim Herzog, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, and Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
Passing on information is what journalists do to earn a crust. And businessmen and politicians of course do it all the time, too. There’s a constant to-and fro. When George Brown was deputy Labour leader and wanted information about the ‘loony left’, he asked Chapman Pincher of the Express. Like you would. Who knows what goodies George offered the doyen of spy-writers by way of exchange?
Long before Maxwell arrived at the Mirror, the newspaper group actually had a real-life spy (some say there were at least two) on the payroll.
There was one guy who wasn’t required to write anything. There was not much unusual about that – one feature writer, name of Eric Wainwright, boasted that he hadn’t had a word in print for five years, going on for six. Eric appeared in the office regular as clockwork, once a month, only to compose his expenses. For his retirement party they had to bring somebody out of retirement just to introduce him to the features editor.
The other chap – I have just checked and he is still alive so it would probably be impolite to name him – appeared in the office even less frequently than Eric.
When the editor made enquires about what this employee was supposed to be doing for a living, he was directed straight to the chairman, Cecil King, who told him: ‘Don’t ask!’ But, when pressed, King said that ‘duty to country comes above all else’… and that was why he had put the man on the editorial payroll.
Discreet checks revealed that the ‘journalist’ in question was – at least, when last heard of – also on the books of the Secret Intelligence Service. Come to think of it, he never had a farewell party… perhaps he’s still on the staff.
Small wonder, then, that old reporters on the Mirror titles developed a habit of looking about them before exchanging confidences.
The head of the Special Branch in my time warned me about the National Front ‘cell’ on the printers’ floors of the Mirror building in Holborn. He said it was ‘only fair, because most of the commies in Fleet Street work for the Telegraph.’
Were there others?
I don’t know. They wouldn’t be very good at being agents if I did know. But I once walked unannounced into the office of a Sunday Mirror executive and found him cleaning a pistol at his desk, and then I discovered that he and another senior colleague regularly visited a gun club ‘to practise’ (although to practise what, I never found out). And a feature writer of my acquaintance kept a revolver in his desk drawer but as far as I know he never took it anywhere to practise using it.
What to make of it all?
The likely answer is, never tell anybody anything. We had a fair number of journalists who managed to live by that rule.
###
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