Rantings

Another death in the Ranters family… Gordon Amory died in hospital at the weekend, following a short illness. Like Stanley Blenkinsop, his old colleague and closest friend for more than half a century, he’d been a founder (pre-launch) supporter and contributor to this website. There are tributes to him –

This Week So… what’s a journalist? The question was raised Down Under this week, Bruce Elder reports, with a politician purporting to act as one. What it’s not, as Richard Burton explains, is somebody who just understands IT (or what we once, in our excitement, called New Technology). Somebody who’d

This Week Two former Fleet Street editors, generations apart and even more distant in terms of manner and style, have written about a book we published last month. Roy Greenslade – obviously – was writing for his Media Guardian column. But Hannen Swaffer…? Swaffer was a devout spiritualist who claimed

This Week Following our fascination with the history of The Street (last week) we have two pieces from the archives. Coincidentally, they’re both from the News of the World (and, you might think, about time, too). Former librarian David Webb delved into the old files on a quiet night and

This Week Following our fascination with the history of The Street (last week) we have two pieces from the archives. Coincidentally, they’re both from the News of the World (and, you might think, about time, too). Former librarian David Webb delved into the old files on a quiet night and

Stanley Blenkinsop, 1931-2010 Below, Gordon Amory mourns the loss of a close colleague and a cherished friend for more than half a century. Revel Barker celebrates Stan the ‘perversely puritan’ gambling man, the military historian, English gentleman, inveterate letter-writer and self-styled cantankerous old bastard. Tony Brooks remembers his boss on

This Week ‘Lovely stuff today’… ‘Just what Ranters is all about!’… ‘Tip-top edition this week’… ‘These contributions took me back decades’… ‘Great pieces’… We don’t normally get much feedback at Ranter House so it’s a pleasant change to receive messages like that about the website last week – even if

This Week We passed our third anniversary as a website this week – a massive thank-you to all our loyal contributors – and celebrate the birthday with a string of stories about Harry Procter, one of the truly great reporters of distant memory. Almost needless to say, there’s a book

Vintage Bentley By Harry Nuttall David Baird’s amusing recollection of Bill Anderson getting a second bite at the wonderfully staged tale of trench vets sinking their pints in a hole in the road, reminded me of a pal of mine who got a dozen consecutive stories out of a pile

Through a glass, deeply By Cathy Couzens Who else remembers the handsome Sun reporter who moved house but forgot to tell his brain? He caught the train home as usual (we always wondered how that was accomplished) then got a cab to drop him off at the house. As usual,

All our yesterdays By Gordon Amory I didn’t know it then but I was socially advantaged to have worked for the Shields Evening News which must have been one of the smallest daily newspapers around at that time – and it had served the local community for a hundred years

This Week Justin Stares’ excellent debut novel (in fact it’s a lightly novelised biography), launched here on July 25, was being offered on the Internet this week at the somewhat astonishing price of £443.99. But you can buy it for a saving of £434 by clicking here or going to

World Cup or World War?   By Vincent Mulchrone IF THE GERMANS beat us at our national game today, we can always console ourselves with the fact that we have twice beaten them at theirs. And how’s that for narrow, nationalistic hedging from one who has never in his life

This Week Did anybody – I mean anybody apart from former Mail man Paul Bannister who now lives in Oregon – remember that last Sunday was a memorial day for the sainted Vincent Mulchrone and celebrate the fact? If you were a soccer fan, there was little else to celebrate

  The Dunleavy scoops By Philip Harrison I was working in Hong Kong on the South China Morning Post when Steve Dunleavy arrived in 1959. He was seeking new pastures after having worked on and been fired from three of the four Sydney dailies. Not, I hasten to add, for

To find the individual articles, please scroll down the page… This Week Did anybody – I mean anybody apart from former Mail man Paul Bannister who now lives in Oregon – remember that last Sunday was a memorial day for the sainted Vincent Mulchrone and celebrate the fact? If you

Prodnostication By Geoffrey Mather Name: Prodnose, a pedantic and interfering character in the humorous columns of J B Morton. The final column appeared on  November 29, 1975, and contained the headline ‘Lawnmower Used on Vet’s Whiskers’. I suppose Mr. Gabb was the first genuine Prodnose I ever met, though I

Six o’clock swill By Phil Harrison I have drunk in many journalists’ pubs in many countries over the past 55 years, but nothing has ever been like the six o’clock swill in Sydney during the mid-fifties. I was working in the Sydney office of the Brisbane Telegraph, housed in the

Dressing the part By Paul Callan Sartorially speaking, the Hacks Britannicus has long been a mixed bunch. There were always a few in the newsroom, mostly younger subs, who looked as though they had slept in their clothes (and probably had). They contrasted with the snappy dressers among the reporters

This Week Edition number 150… and they said it wouldn’t last. Nearly three million people have clicked on the site in the past 12 months – or, to be accurate, in the past year an unknown number of readers has clicked on the site nearly three million times, in total.

Got a grouse? By Alasdair Buchan I can’t now remember the name of the young reporter on the Glasgow Herald but he’s quite entitled to still bear a grouse about the wind-up he suffered on the 12th of August, 1968. How can I be so exact about the date? Because