Failed at becoming a journalist? No one fails at being a journalist! Have you seen who gets in on this gig? Children, freaks, idiots, perjurers, wenchers, preternatural fornicators, slaves to the opium pipe. Tony Parsons. Shoot a baboon, get into fist-fights at the press awards, make up stories wholesale – no one cares. – Caitlin Moran, The Times

Issue # 141

April 9, 2010

This Week

Before we broke up for the hols, we encountered a problem. It was the sort of predicament they don’t have in today’s Fleet Street.

In an attempt to solve it – you’ll quickly notice – we have slightly changed the format. This is an experiment, but if it works, we’ll probably stick with it. Basically it just means that you can no longer scroll down this page to read everything. You'll need to click on the links, then click at the bottom to come back to this page.

The situation is explained in the editor’s letter and, although we know that journalists don’t usually bother much about ‘management problems’, you may be doing yourselves a favour, in the long term, by reading it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Stan Solomons has found an old cuttings book and meandered off down Memory Lane – with shock results for the medical profession.

Alan Whittaker recalls an encounter (it was in a pub) with Peter Earle and Rupert Davies, the star of Maigret.

Garth Gibbs takes up painting and creates a masterwork, worth thousands. (And, feature editors please note, it’s an easy one to copy for a quiet day…)

Harold Heys finds himself trying to keep abreast of Eve Pollard at an office lunch.

And Jeremy Chapman reports the death last Sunday of his editor and friend, Graham Taylor.

But enough about the past. What of the future? You thought the computer was your friend because it made life easier (and did away with most of the inkies)? It’s after your job, as this link – uncovered by Neil Marr’s computer while he wasn’t looking, clearly shows.

#

Editor’s Letter

Just before Easter the website went down.

The problem (and it meant that we were off-line until we sorted it out in the time-honoured way – by throwing money at it) was that we had TOO MANY READERS.

Not since the Daily Mirror passed the five million mark and realised that to produce more copies would cost more in cash payments to the inkies, and therefore would mean running on lower profits, has journalism encountered such a dilemma.

OK. If you want to be pedantic, our glitch was that we had too many readers coming on-line, all at the same time. It slowed down access. And eventually it slowed to a standstill. Suddenly, nobody could get on board.

We could bore you with the statistics and you probably wouldn’t be particularly impressed. In the past 12 months we’ve had 2.9million visitors to this website. It seems a lot to us but we’re aware that some sites have that number, or more, every day.

On the other hand, we are currently averaging around 10,000 visitors a day (up to 40,000 on some Fridays) – but, sadly, we have no idea, and can’t even imagine, who they might be.

We have several hundred who are known to us. They are the people who have ‘registered’, along the way, most of them by clicking on to the link in the box at the top right of this page.

They are the people who get a note, early every Friday, informing them that the site has been updated.

If the overloading (or over-downloading) continues, we may need to institute a system by which those readers get a password-related link every week, so they’ll be the only people who can then access the site.

For this reason, if you are enjoying reading the weekly offerings, and want to continue reading them - and if you don't already receive these mailings - it will be in your interest to log on in that box, send a simple short message, and remain within the system.

It is, of course, highly encouraging to have so many readers. And it’s good for our contributors to know that their stuff is being widely read… by somebody.

But otherwise there is no advantage for us in having so big a casual readership that it threatens the system for the regulars.

The site is free, and hopefully it will remain free to read. But fewer than one per cent of the readers contribute to it in any form.

If you want to keep it going, you could help by putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and writing a piece.

Consider that as your subscription. But, first, log on so we know who you are.

#

Memory Lane, Huddersfield

By Stan Solomons

Trawling back through the make belief land of drop intros, curvaceous brunettes and talking dogs, I fondly remember some of those wonderfully talented artists who contributed to my pension fund and made indelible footprints on my fading memory.

Will I ever forget the soft, velvet tones of film star James Mason who on his visits to his home town, Huddersfield, shunned the attentions of Fleet Street and instead took a shine to us and kindly telephoned our agency to invite us round to do story and pix for which we found a ready market in the Daily Express Hickey and other pseudo-society columns. The pic of me with Mason snapped by the late Brian Worsnop is among my prized possessions (sad maybe) but when I show it to visitors enables me to crack the old gag, ‘Who’s that with Stan?’

And in my mind’s eye I can still see world famous concert pianist Artur Rubinstein in 1975, towards the end of his career, desperately massaging and stretching his claw-like fingers ravaged by arthritis as we spoke shortly before he performed a Beethoven and Chopin recital at the Huddersfield Town Hall.

Suave, dapper conductor Malcolm Sergeant, a charming gentleman right down to the fingertips which held his baton also made a deep impression when I interviewed him many years ago. And actress Julie Christie’s warm smile as we shook hands during a visit she made to the North of England stayed with me for a long time.

I was also full of admiration for Charlie Chester, at one time Britain’s highest paid comic, when he played the lead in a panto in Halifax back in the 1950s with his arm in plaster after breaking it in an accident. When I spoke to him in his digs I couldn’t pluck up the courage to tell him how a few years earlier I had pinched nearly all the gags he had told in his West End show and passed them off as my own at a school concert.

But of all the people I have met I suppose none of them can compare with a tiny Yorkshire housewife who might easily have been burned as a witch had she been born two hundred years earlier. It’s not often that a freelance gets the chance to breaking a story of earth shattering importance, but I came agonisingly close.

It seemed at one stage that she had proved that the juice from a humble orange could not only grow hair but more importantly cure cancer. I was on the brink of revealing all when… but more of that later. First let me take you back to the time, more than fifty years ago, when I first met the amazing Mrs Kathleen West, this short, dumpy little woman with a round face, a warm smile and with centre- parted hair tied in a bun at the back, a modern day Mother Shipton.

She had walked into the Huddersfield office of the Bradford Telegraph and Argus and told a reporter she could tell a pregnant woman the sex of her unborn child provided the mother-to-be told her where she felt the baby kicking during the ‘quickening period’ which, if I remember rightly, was around four and a half months. Bet most of you didn’t know that.

If the baby kicked on the left hand side it was a boy and on the right hand side a girl. Or it may have been the other way round.

They were the days long before scans which would reveal the sex of the baby. And when the reporter checked with her GP he confirmed that so far she had been right in all nine cases she had forecast.

After the story appeared we followed it up for the nationals with her attempt to make it ten out of ten. When the baby was born she’d got it wrong but claimed that the mother who she thought was a friend had deliberately given her the wrong info on where the baby was kicking. Anyway, that was the end of that story.

Fast forward a few years to the 1970s.when Mrs West, who it turned out had been studying biology for years, got in touch with me again. She and her friend Mrs Hazel Johnson had been carrying out experiments for some years on finding a cure for male baldness using members of Mrs West’s family and friends as guinea pigs. It involved rubbing a solution into the skin, but none of them knew the nature of the active ingredient.

That included me when I agreed to have the treatment in the hope of regaining the curly locks I had lost many years ago. Having a hair-raising experience took on a whole new meaning as once a week, despite the jibes and piss-taking of my colleagues in the agency, I allowed Mrs West to rub a colourless solution she poured from a bottle into my scalp.

It was not until some time later when the two women revealed their secret to the world that Mrs West told me that she should have rubbed the solution into my back where there was a large expanse of exposed skin, but used the scalp because that was what I would expect her to do. I never suspected that the solution was in fact orange juice, the smell of which she had somehow disguised with some harmless additive.

Whether or not it was wishful thinking I have no doubt that I achieved some hair growth over a period of several months. The two women claimed that it was the ascorbic acid in Vitamin C in the orange juice which produced hair growth when applied directly to the skin and into the blood stream.

Eventually – I can’t remember the time span – the two women decided to go public when they realised they were not going to make a fortune by marketing their product. After eight local balding men had taken part in a six month test with varying results, the two women arranged a public meeting in Dewsbury Town Hall to explain their methods. Later, as a result of the publicity, the Outspan organisation contacted the women and organised controlled experiments with six volunteers over a period of 26 weeks in London.

I attended some of those sessions and I can tell you that the results in some of the cases were quite astonishing. I remember David Morgan, a currency dealer in London’s foreign exchange telling me, ‘Six months previously when we started the test I was thinning quite a lot on top and I also had a bald spot on the side.

‘I didn’t suddenly have shoulder length hair overnight, but the growth has been remarkable.’

And Ian Hunt, an accountant, was equally delighted. ‘I not only got a lot more hair on my head but a lot more on my shoulders and the small of my back, but I’m not worried about that,’ he said.

I saw before and after pictures and the new growth of hair was astonishing.

It all seemed very simple. As Mrs Johnson explained ascorbic acid is not readily available in chemist shops because it does not have a very long shelf life. ‘So we looked around for the easiest, safest and cheapest method for growing hair,’ she told me. ‘The one most readily available to the man in the street was, of course, oranges.’

Mrs Johnson, who claimed that her husband had started losing his hair fifteen years earlier and used orange juice and now had a healthy mane, explained, ‘Squeeze the juice from half an orange twice a week, filter it through muslin or a coffee filter paper. Warm the skin on your back to open the pores and then rub the solution into the back between the area of the neck and waist. After half an hour remove the sticky substance left on the skin.’

I tried to get newspapers interested without much success and Outspan who were delighted with the results of their six month tests issued a press release which also did not raise too many eyebrows. I remember a piece in the Guardian in which they quoted one sceptic who asked, ‘If this works, why aren’t oranges hairy?’

And Outspan’s rivals Jaffa jumped in with: ‘Jaffa oranges are for eating and enjoying – whatever Outspan ones might be for.’

I’m afraid the two women became rather disillusioned and the story died a death.

For some years Mrs West had insisted to me that if you can cure baldness you can cure or prevent cancer because the ascorbic acid applied directly into the skin in the form of orange juice enhanced both the body’s inner and outer defences. Both these were stimulated in the presence of ascorbic acid.

In 1983 Mrs Johnson issued a pamphlet explaining the theory and at the same time attacking the medical profession for their ‘hide-bound’ attitude to cancer, often unnecessarily subjecting cancer sufferers to prolonged, debilitating and frerquently painful treatments, coupled with loss of hair, in the hope of a cure.

In the pamphlet Mrs Johnson claimed she and Mrs West had cured Hazel’s father of cancer. He had been sent home from hospital five years earlier after being told there was no hope of a cure and the family had treated him two or three times a week with small amounts of orange juice and he was now as alert and well as the average 74 year-old.

But I told Mrs Johnson that we needed actual proof, someone with cancer who was being treated with orange juice. Soon afterwards the chance came. Her husband who helped her run a confectionery shop in Dewsbury developed cancer in his shoulder.

Bravely he decided to let his wife treat him with orange juice while we monitored his progress.

I was shown X-rays taken of his shoulder at different stages which showed the cancer was gradually reducing. The stage had almost arrived when we would be ready to reveal all to the world.

But then Mr Johnson died. Not from cancer but from diabetes. Don’t ask me why but no-one knew he was a diabetic and unknown to his wife he had been eating large amounts of sweets and chocolates. It seems incredible but it happened – and with his death went the end of what would have been a great story. Plus of course recognition for the amazing Mrs West, who died some years ago, and her friend Mrs Johnson who later emigrated to Australia.

Several times since then I have known friends and relatives who have suffered and died from cancer and have been tempted to recommend the orange juice treatment, but never had the courage to do so.

And often I have asked myself the 64,000 dollar question: If I had cancer and had been told there was no hope of a cure would I ask my wife to rub orange juice into my back?. I think the answer is Yes. After all what would I have to lose?

#

A match for Maigret

By Alan Whittaker

A blizzard throttled Fleet Street and the early evening pub trade was suffering as regulars tried to hail taxis in a frantic rush to get to the railheads.

The mass exodus was so severe that Peter Earle and I were the only purchasing occupants of the ‘top of the tip’ bar – upstairs in the Tipperary. Not the most luxurious cocktail lounge in western Europe but it had provided a safe haven for News of the World foot soldiers since the days when it was Mooney’s Irish bar. It was an invisibly signposted No Go area for executives in the dreamy days before Ned Kelly blustered his way into Bouverie Street.

A heaped coal fire threw a cushion of comfort as snow flakes thickened on the draughty windows.

Footsteps on the staircase indicated the laboured approach of a third patron. The snow-flecked intruder was encased in a checked overcoat, every fibre shouting Savile Row. The face was half hidden by a brown wide-brimmed hat; the sort of headgear favoured by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Lord Baden Powell, or people who needed to be recognised as thespians. He hung it on a convenient hook, stared around the room and ordered a whisky. This guy was an actor. He had made his entrance.

I recognised him as Rupert Davies who played the pipe smoking detective Maigret in the television series based on Simenon’s novels. Every episode opened with Maigret in the shadows striking a match and lighting his pipe.

‘I think I know that face,’ mused Peter.

‘Everyone knows that face; it’s Maigret,’ I said

‘By Jove you are correct.’ Peter Earle actually used such phrases, alongside ‘Gadzooks, Great Scot, My dear fellow, and Let there be no murmuring‘. In another century he would have been a leading light in the Pickwick Club. Once, in less conciliatory mode, he addressed an Old Bailey judge sitting in the precincts of the Wig and Pen thus: ‘You are a six-foot supercilious streak of shit.’

Peter also possessed a prodigious memory and could recall, years after the events, precise background details of stories and enquiries in which he had been involved.

He approached the bar on a replenishment foray and greeted the lone figure in full florid flow. ‘It’s a pleasant surprise to see you in our humble hostelry Mr Davies. Pray tell me what brings you to this sadly deserted watering hole?’

The intruder’s face betrayed the uneasy apprehension of a man suddenly accosted by a lunatic waving a glass.

‘I’ve spent half an hour trying to flag down a taxi,‘ he explained, cautiously sidling away, glass in hand. ‘It’s this damn weather, everybody wants a cab. I saw the light of this place and decided to pop in for a quick drink and to thaw out.’ He suddenly smiled and peered intently at Peter. ‘Have we met before?’

‘Indeed we have,’ replied Earle. ‘As a scribe I wrote a piece about you for the sadly deceased journal known as the Empire News.’

‘Of course, of course.’ The smile became a relaxed beam. ‘I remember because it was the first time I’d had my name in a national newspaper. It must be the best part of 20 years ago.’

Earle’s extraordinary memory took over. ‘Twenty five years and two months,’ he assured him. He turned and addressed the barman. ‘Replenishment for my friend.’

‘That’s very kind of you. A small whisky please,’ said Maigret.

‘Nonsense and fiddlesticks. I insist you have a large one, I have never been known to purchase anything smaller.’

The invitation to join us by the fire was readily accepted. Off came the luxurious overcoat to join the hat on the hook. Another round was ordered.

The fire was beguiling and the conversation flowed in tandem with the Scotch.

No one ever accused Peter Earle of being a slow drinker and Maigret was no shrinker.

The barman renewed the bottle on the optic.

The discussion was wide ranging. The subtleties of Speyside and Islay malts were analysed, the Maigret TV series dissected, the influence of the feudal system on Tudor Britain and the chances of Accrington Stanley making a comeback were also among the items discussed.

One of Peter’s ambitions – sadly never fulfilled – was to occupy the Chair of Bosomology at either Oxford or Cambridge and when he broached the subject he found a receptive listener in Maigret. Quite clearly the great sleuth had made his own studies and was keen to provide the usual statistics relating to the superstructures of various actresses he had encountered in the course of his investigations.

Two hours later the blizzard abated. The faint hearted had scurried to the railheads and were either home or homeward bound. From the window taxis could be seen, or as Earle pointed out: ‘The electric metered cabs have reappeared in numbers to ply their trade.’

It was time to go. Warm handshakes and the sight of Maigret manoeuvring himself into an uncooperative overcoat. The QE2 attempting to dock in a Force 10 gale. At Fleetwood.

Finally the wide-brimmed hat. No longer pulled half way down the forehead. Set at a tilting, jaunty angle. More Bud Flanagan than Bogart.

Once attired the actor gave a slight bow.

Fortified by the best part of a bottle of Scotch and having absorbed two hours of animated conversation he addressed us in Earlesque mode.

‘This has been an illuminating experience and one I will remember on those grey days when the Fates conspire to depress us.

‘I have enjoyed your company enormously,’ he continued, edging towards the door at the head of the staircase. He paused and turned to Earle before delivering his exit line.

‘I just hope to Christ it’s another 25 years and two months before we meet again.’

Alan Whittaker was a News of the World staffman for thirty-seven years as reporter, columnist, features writer, tv critic etc. Previously on the Darwen News, and the Blackburn-based Northern Daily Telegraph now the Lancashire Telegraph.

#

But is it art?

By Garth Gibbs

Art Buchwald, the American columnist, was pacing up and down Fifth Avenue one day many years back, glancing at his watch every now and then and, like many husbands, wondering when his wife would emerge from the shops.

When she eventually did, she handed him five carrier bags to look after while she trotted off to check out some jewellery in Tiffany’s.

Hanging around a street in Manhattan with bags from five top stores – Macy’s, Saks, Barneys, Bloomingdales and Berdorf & Goodman – wasn’t smart so Buchwald sauntered over to Lexington Avenue and popped into an art gallery. He carefully left the bags in a corner and slowly sauntered around the place, checking out the state of the art.

When he returned a little while later to pick up the bags he was delighted. The gallery, it turned out, was holding an exhibition and Buchwald’s bags had been awarded first prize. He was handed a cheque for $10,000.

Let’s assume the story’s true. Could this sort of thing happen in London?

Of course, it did and it could happen again.

Some of the works of modern art bought by the national galleries (funded by the taxpayer) may have fooled the aficionados but haven’t fooled the punters.

Remember the Tate’s acquisition of a Pile of Bricks by Carl Andrew (officially known as Equivalent VIII) which was bought for £6,000 in 1972?

Or Mark Wallinger’s work? He bought a racehorse and designated it ART by simply calling it A Real Work of Art.

Then there was Damien Hirst’s pickled sheep. Away From the Flock (its official title) consisted of a lamb suspended in formaldehyde in a glass case.

The work of Laos-born Vong Phaophanit, who was short-listed for the Turner Prize for his Neon Rice Field, consisting of seven tons of rice, so infuriated the punters that a young woman threw flowers into it as it went on display at the Tate.

Vong Phaophanit didn’t win the Turner Prize. The winner turned out to be Rachel Whiteread – whose cast of a derelict house was labelled Disaster in Plaster. The house was later demolished by Tower Hamlets.

Then, of course, there was Martin Creed. He showed us he was pretty switched on when he gave us Lights Going off and on in an Empty Room.

Art, according to Tate guidelines, ‘treats everyday reality in a recognisable manner’.

So anyone can be an artist?

Yes, sir. Even I.

All I needed for a start was inspiration. So I thumbed through the works of Manet, Monet, Chagall and Tretchikov, but eventually I found what I was looking for while making a call from a BT telephone box.

Call girls. Or rather, call girls’ calling cards.

I bought a piece of plywood, painted it, sanded it, mounted the cards on it and then framed it with a border. It was all very tasteful, naturally. Well, most of it was. I put a picture of a telephone box in the middle, a phone card in the top right hand corner, a packet of condoms on the left for emergency use only and added some oil paint squiggles for good measure.

The work was entitled Marking Man’s Progress to the Second Millennium.

I wrapped up my work of art and sauntered over to Sotheby’s in Bond Street.

They were charming.

‘Mister Brown will be with you in a moment, sir,’ said a receptionist.

Mr Brown turned out to be Benjamin Brown, deputy director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s. He was busy right now, explaining to a chap from Italy that the prints the man had found in a vault in Sienna were not the works of Botticelli, not even by the wildest stretch of imagination.

Next he spoke to another art lover from Italy – in fluent Italian – before it was my turn.

Mr Brown came over. I took a deep breath. I gave him my name and said: ‘I would like your opinion on a work of art. It is by a famous artist. I myself have not been told who the artist is but an expert like yourself will probably recognise the signature in every brush stroke. I want to find out what it is worth.’

Mr Brown didn’t throw me out on my ear. He waved his hands. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to examine the brush strokes. Do you know who I think this is by? This is by Sarah Grieve Stewart.

‘Sarah Grieve Stewart does work very similar to this. But she always signs her name.’

I explained that the signature had been left off deliberately to get unprejudiced comments.

Said Mr Brown (again): ‘I really think this is the work of Sarah Grieve Stewart, an American artist who lives in London. She does this sort of thing and I think she is great fun. I think she is not necessarily a great artist, but she is pretty good.’

Me: ‘So who would exhibit this?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So it is just a fun piece?’

‘Oh, no, Sarah Grieve Stewart would consider herself a serious artist.’

‘So what is it worth?’

‘That would depend whose signature goes on the work of art,’ said Mr Brown, adding, after a pause, ‘for a pointer though, Sarah’s work sells for thousands.’

Wow! Cheered up, I bounced along to Lots Gallery in Chelsea and unveiled my work with an air of panache.

Mr Nicholas Carter, picture valuer at the gallery, looked at it with the pleasure you would think he might reserve for a newly-discovered work by Leonardo da Vinci, or, at least, Turner.

I started my routine about recognising signatures in brush strokes and the work being a comment on the 21st century, but he waved me to keep quiet and said: ‘Gosh! This is excellent!’

A couple of people who had wandered into the gallery rushed over for a peep and an elderly lady burst into giggles. ‘I say, isn’t that naughty – but wonderful at the same time.’

‘Steady girl,’ said her equally elderly friend.

Mr Carter peered at it again. ‘What fun! I would like to know whose work it is… but anyway, I am sure someone in the West End would buy it.’

‘Who do you suggest,’ I asked. ‘An art dealer or a gallery perhaps?’

‘Someone who doesn’t mind taking a risk in the avant garde,’ he said. ‘What I would do would be to take it around to Cork Street and Albermarle Street and even Duke Street and talk to them there.’

As I turned to leave I asked: ‘What would you say it was worth?’

Artists, I was told, value their own work and then everything depends on the market and who likes it.

‘Sotheby’s said it could be worth thousands. What do you think?’

‘Try it.’

The Eaton Gallery in Duke Street was my next call.

The boss, Mr Douglas George, squinted at the work, waved me to silence when I launched into my spiel and said: ‘A friend of mine collects these cards. He has about three hundred of them, all different. He believes they are going to be very valuable one day.’

He added as an afterthought: ‘He’s Australian, needless to say.’

Would the Eaton Gallery hang the work?

No, but not for any other reason than that all the art displayed in their gallery is more than 100 years old. The telephone numbers on my work proved that though the game the girls are engaged in is by now means new, the cards were.

I worked my way through the Burlington Arcade to Browse and Darby and had my first disappointment.

A girl at the reception desk spotted the condom packet and looked as though a nasty smell had suddenly settled on her top lip.

‘I’m afraid we wouldn’t exhibit that,’ she sniffed.

But across the road at a gallery claiming to deal with the likes of Dubuffet, Nicholson, Matisse, Hoffman, Magritte and Picabia, I ran into Mr Lindsay Tuckett, who described himself as an art connoisseur.

‘I think you have hit the jackpot with that, ol’ man. Haven’t you heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘That there is a massive campaign to rid all telephone boxes of these cards.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes really. Spoilsports. The Metropolitan Police, the rotary clubs and groups of Women Opposed to Bloody Everything have demanded their withdrawal.’

Mr Tuckett advised me to exhibit my work at the Tate to boost its price.

‘Will the Tate accept it?’

‘Are you kidding?’

The Tate, it turned out, was busy organising a Bonnard exhibition and didn’t have much time. A receptionist looked at my work briefly, said yes, it looked all right, but I needed to send in slides.

I made one more trip, down the road from Harrods to the Bunch of Grapes, on my way to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

As I sat down and ordered a pint of lager a guy wearing a Chelsea scarf said inquisitively, ‘What you got there, mate?’

‘A very valuable work of art.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘Sure.’

Silence.

‘Gee, mate, this is a load of crap if you don’t mind me saying so.’ Another pause. ‘But can I borrow your pen. If you’ve no objections I’d like to take down a few of these phone numbers…’

#

Twin peaks

By Harold Heys

Drinks with the boss! Ooh, Er! Colin Dunne’s recollection* of an encounter with Hugh Cudlipp brought back a distant memory of lunch with Eve Pollard and David Montgomery and a few Sunday People execs at the Midland in Manchester.

It was never my scene. Keep your head down. Tick. Keep it shut. Tick. Don’t get pissed. Mmm. It was an approach that usually seemed to work.

But now and then there would be someone to edge you into the firing line. And you were On Your Own.

It hadn’t got off to an auspicious start. I’d barely got through the door when Montgomery swerved past a couple of chairs, brushed the table at an angle and came at me out of the sun which was streaming through the tall windows. ‘I believe you know my wife?’ he said.

Under different circumstances it could all have been a bit tricky but this was cool. Yes, I knew the delightful Sue who had been working for the Mirror Group house magazine. I used to feed her stuff from Manchester. All very innocuous.

It got a bit more heavy. We sat down and my timing, for once, was out. I grabbed a last glass from the bar and turned round to find that the only remaining seat was directly across the narrow table from the imposing Pollard protrusions.

My contribution to the discussion was limited, as I recall. Until the conversation drifted round to what we all thought of the paper. She was assistant editor at the time. Red alert! I was musing over some suitable adjectives for when my turn came … exciting, vigorous, dynamic and so on while trying to wear my expression of studied concern. The one usually reserved for the final furlong of a horse race as my nag starts a steady back-pedal.

I was suddenly awakened from my reverie. Sports editor John Maddock was saying something about one of his staff having some criticism to make. I looked up and eight or nine pairs of eyes were looking directly at me. The faint smiles were a mix of false concern, feigned interest, mild amusement – and stifled smirks. Maddo, the bastard, could hardly contain himself.

I took all this in at a glance. Eve was leaning slightly forward – oh, please don’t do that Eve – and smiling as she told me huskily: ‘Go on, Harold. Give it to me.’

What’s that about hearing a pin drop? The liveried waiters behind the bar could have been juggling jeroboams and no one would have noticed.

Right, children. Get out of that. Do you wimp out – ‘Oh, no… no Eve. Not at all. Oh, dear me no’ – as you vainly try to recall exciting, vigorous and dynamic? ’ Or do you attempt the oil-on-troubled-waters approach? ‘Well, it’s just that perhaps, well, the horoscope could be a little bigger. Apart from that…’

I have to say that neither of these brilliant ideas came to me. Or I would have used them.

Instead, realising that my job was sailing quickly down Peter Street and into the Irwell, I decided there was nothing to lose with an immediate attack.

‘Give it to me,’ she’d said. I stood up, looked Eve straight in the eye, half unzipped my fly and, pointing to the table, asked casually: ‘What? Right here? Now?’

Eve was a good sport, as I’d expected. Or at least, as I’d hoped. And a tricky moment passed off with laughs all round. Phew! Newspapers! Dontcha love ’em?

*Colin Dunne’s Cudlipp encounter appears in his new book, Man Bites Talking Dog, which is out now and available from from amazon-uk or Waterstones; in the US from amazon; or worldwide with free delivery from Book Depository.

#

Death of Life man

By Jeremy Chapman

Graham Taylor, editor of The Sporting Life at one of the most difficult times in its history – when owner Robert Maxwell was waging war on the print unions –died on Sunday. He was 80.

The 13 troubled months of his command, in 1985-86, gave him little chance of proving whether he was a good editor, but he was too 'nice' and not ruthless enough for the time.

For one week during his tenure a tabloid emergency edition of the Life was assembled and printed elsewhere. And for a time the London-based newspaper moved out of the Mirror building and into Alexander House in Farringdon Road.

Graham, a one-paper man who joined the Life at 16 in 1946, was appointed successor to long-serving Ossie Fletcher in March 1985, when Maxwell interrupted Ossie's retirement party to announce: ‘Brother Taylor will be your new editor.’ Graham said he was ‘gobsmacked and had no idea’.

On being replaced in April 1986, Graham said his overriding emotion was one of relief, saying: ‘I was on the paper for 40 years and enjoyed them all apart from the last one.’

Everybody liked him, apparently even Maxwell, who, in a rare show of generosity, let him keep his company car for £1.

Before his short spell at the helm, Graham was a talented second-in-command. He made his way up the ranks after starting on the sports desk and he later produced a widely read football pools page in which he was never afraid to criticise bookmakers when they deserved it. He won their respect that way.

Underrated as a writer, his thought-provoking reports on the annual Tote lunch were required reading and, after becoming the newspaper's number three, it was a natural progression to deputy editor on the retirement of Alec Hayward.

He finished his Life career at the age of only 56 and never sought to return to journalism. He was happy in later life as a do-it-yourself addict, making extensions to his home in Coulsdon, Surrey.

One of the people he helped was John McCririck in his days as an award-winning investigative journalist. 'Big Mac' often used to have trouble writing intros but Graham would always come up with a good one and get the piece started.

I also have reason to be grateful to him because, immediately on becoming editor, he made me his deputy. Even if he had chosen someone else, he would always have been a special, loveable, approachable colleague with a great gift for friendship.

A great family man, Graham leaves wife Norma, two sons, David and Jonathan, and daughter Jane. No funeral details are yet available.

###

The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – The Times

Issue # 142

16 April, 2010

This Week

Where to start? That’s always been the problem.

We were debating tabloid intros in the Stab once, after I had been moaning that I couldn't get anything into the paper about the Cold War unless I could work in a connection to Coronation Street.

Somebody said the perfect Sunday newspaper intro needed religion, royalty, sex and mystery, and came up with "Jesus,” said the Queen, “I'm pregnant. Whodunnit?"

Somebody else asked why he hadn't worked a corgi into the plot for animal lovers. Another said it would work better if the Queen was talking to Joan Collins, or at least Elsie Tanner.

Then Derek Dodd (Doric Dead), Sunday Mirror northern editor who was on a visit, walked in and I told him of the conversation and said that he must be an expert... so what would be the perfect Sunday Mirror intro?

He thought for a long, long time. Sipped his pint. Thought some more. Then said: ‘About 17 words.’

Geoffrey Matherknew the problem. Still does. And he still ponders on the subject.

Desmond Zwardidn’t worry overmuch about intros, and just phoned off the top of his head, or straight out of his notebook.

Don Walker rarely phoned copy at all. In Mirror features the phone calls were mainly incoming. And usually wrong numbers.

Click on the name and, fingers crossed, you’ll find the contributors. Otherwise, click on their names in the column on the LEFT.

<#

What’s the intro?

By Geoffrey Mather

Intros – now there’s a challenge, and a sure cause of wretchedness, and nausea and deep, deep depression. People have had trouble writing intros since... oh, at least since Job. How does the Book of Job begin?

‘There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.’

Which chief sub is going to accept it? There’s no action, no drama, no atmosphere, nothing. Yet you get to paragraph seven and there it is, all you need, all you ever hoped for: the real nitty – ‘And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.’

What is the chief sub to say to that? I can only imagine – ‘Hey, laddie, yes, YOU. Here you have God and Satan having a chat after Satan has taken a wander down Kensington High-street for all we know – not that they’d notice in Kensington. That’s an exclusive if ever I heard one, and you are on about Job being bloody upright in your intro? Buck up your ideas, laddie, or you’ll be walking up and down in it with Satan.’

A man who can write a book in a month can spend the first week on the intro. Journalists whose names are writ large in the great byline cosmos have spent much of their lives surrounded by crumpled sheets of copy paper, every one of them empty apart from half a dozen words.

You can feel the pain. Here, a contemporary example culled at random from the BBC website: ‘A tongue-tied Jeremy Paxman is about as rare as a unicorn from Manchester that supports Chelsea, yet this week’s Odd Box features just that. Paxman, not the unicorn.’

That might be the greatest intro you ever saw, but it is definitely, absolutely, not for me.

In 1620, the first permanent settlement was made at Plymouth, Massachusetts, by the Pilgrim Fathers arriving aboard Mayflower. William Bradford described it and from his intro I would suggest that he had given up the task by the time he began. It was too much for him. He was a broken man, blundering on in torment. It was a moment in history that might have employed a hundred Pilgers and a million sheets of copy paper plus a Remington typewriter for a week or more, but Bill was pole-axed by it.

‘About ten o clocke,’ he began, ‘we came into a deepe Valley, full of brush, wood-gaile and long grasse, through which wee found little paths or tracts, and there we saw a Deere, and found Springs of fresh Water, of which we were hartily glad, and sat us downe and drunke our first New England Water, with as much delight as ever was drunke drinke in all our lives.’

‘Drunke drinke?’ The Sun chief sub might have yelled past the three cigarette stubs adhering to what was left of his lips. ‘You been at the tincture, mate?’

A magazine long ago had a contest to find out how various big-byline writers would record the arrival of God on earth and ready for interview. Hannen Swaffer was a big name of the time with ego to match, heavy with inside knowledge, cigarette ash all down his bib to prove his journalistic qualifications. The best entry concerned him.

His intro was supposedly, ‘So I said to God...’

James Thurber recalled a student contributing to a college magazine who was told to jazz up his intros because the ones he regularly submitted were too tame. As I recall 30 years or so on from reading it, he began, ‘What is the cause of the sores on the tops of all the horses this year?’ My heart bleeds for him, even at this late stage.

Intro-writing produces a form of hysteria not known to the medical profession. Writers, reporters, suffer instant nausea, and the only cure is to reach the second paragraph, the equivalent of stepping ashore from a sinking ship.

The perfect story was said to require a strong intro, a good middle, and a strong end. I have no idea who thought up that one, unless it was a mischief-maker aiming at reducing strong men to tears.

Somebody else along the line thought: ‘No. I have a solution.’ And in came a vogue for the delayed drop. As in this example:

As Arthur Heckington walked along a road near his home yesterday nothing was on his mind beyond thoughts of a holiday.

He was due to go to Cleethorpes for a week.

But a stone coping fell from a three-storey building in Leeds and killed him.

The third-paragraph intro was prominent for some time, particularly in the Sundays. The Sunday Express danced at the sight of it, for the deadly first paragraph had been thwarted.

The thousand-word writers tended to have a technique. They set tranquil scenes before dissecting huge issues. Here is James Cameron, of the News Chronicle, in Israel:

Just now among the flowering groves the air is adrift with the pale scent of orange blossom; the place smells like a wedding. It is beautiful, for those who like their irony by the ton. That is the frontier. One long jumping nerve between Israel and the Arabs – 700 miles of anxiety, bitterness, frustration, anger and by now, very nearly despair.

A nice solution, that, because it suggests competence (‘I’m good with the words, eh? – just look!’) and omnipotence is implied by association. Omnipotence from a mortal man in a suit can be awesome. A Time magazine writer describing nothing more exciting than villagers in, I think from memory, Spain: ‘The dusts of isolation had settled on their lives and obscured their purpose.’

I had a small book once that recorded Time intros and I loaned it to someone who inconveniently died. It is years ago and his widow survives, yet I daren’t ask her whether she ever came across it. In it was a 1950s intro so memorable that I still recall it with confidence:

The old man puffed into sight like a venerable battlewagon steaming up over the horizon. First a smudge of smoke, then the long cigar, then the familiar, stoop-shouldered hulk that a generation had come to know as the silhouette of greatness. Prime Minister Winston Churchill scowled as he emerged from the Queen Mary...

(No purpose in repeating Mulchrone’s twin-rivers intro to Churchill’s lying in state because we all know it, all admire it.*)

Hilde Marchant was in pretty good shape when war began in September, 1939 – ‘It was not until Friday morning, September lst, that I really took the sharp, agonised breath of war. That day it began in a slum in London...’

And John Pilger was being Pilger with the veterans’ march on Washington DC in 1971:

“The truth is out! Mickey Mouse is dead! The good guys are really the bad guys in disguise!” The speaker is William Wyman from New York City. He is nineteen and has no legs. He sits in a wheelchair on the steps of the United States Congress in the midst of a crowd of 300,000, the greatest demonstration America has ever seen.

I always thought The Day of the Triffids had one of the most striking intros – ‘When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.’ The whole, very successful, book hung on that intro. In retrospect, of course, it could equally have described any journalist after a bad night at the King and Keys.

Arthur Christiansen was one of the best-remembered editors of the Daily Express and his perfect intro, laid down in one of his bulletins, read:

Mr. Roland Beaumont was sitting beside the fire last night, recovering from flu, when he heard a radio announcement that he had been awarded the Britannia Trophy for the best air performance of 1952.

It appeared in the style book. Alas, the man’s name was not Beaumont, but Beamont. Not so perfect after all.

There are some stories that should begin and end at the intro; otherwise there is no room for the reader’s imagination.

My perfect example of that was in a short:

Firemen were tackling a blaze when a pig bit through the hose.

It was enough. I wanted it to end there. But of course, a sub editor of the time probably ruined it. Where did the pig come from? Did it just stroll up from nowhere and start chomping away? And the fireman – what did he say when his mighty hose turned from torrent to trickle before his careworn and smoke-laden eyes?

I had a nightmare about intros. In it, there was this ordinary-looking street of terraced houses, and fire broke out in one. Six people were inside, four of them children, and they were trapped. As the fire brigade arrived, their engine hit a police car and overturned. Two policemen died. At No 14, a thief had been surprised by a householder. They fought and the thief was killed. At No 16, a woman, alone in the house, went into labour. There was a suicide at No 18.

I was, in this dream, the sub-editor required to assemble the facts from eight sources and write an intro. I warn you: don’t have nightmares like that. They can be the death of you before dawn reveals your sweated brow.

That particular night of fantasy was brought about by a chief sub-editor who grew tetchy because I took too long in subbing a story for him. ‘Give it to me,’ he said, and began to write. The story was about a ship that had gone down somewhere off South Africa. He wrote his intro very quickly and magically transferred the tragedy to somewhere off Greenland. I did not argue with him as I stood by his side. I assumed at the time that chief sub editors had the right to move ships if they considered it typographically necessary.

Nowadays, some of the better writers have learnt from the Jack Kerouacs and Hunter S Thompsons to let the stream of consciousness serve.

Kerouak, intro to Lonesome Traveller: ‘Less begin with the sight of me with collar huddled up close to neck and tied around with a handkerchief to keep it tight and snug, as I go trudging across the bleak, dark warehouse lots of the ever lovin San Pedro waterfront...’

Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ‘72 (and note the pastoral link with Cameron):

Outside my new front door the street is full of leaves. My lawn slopes down to the pavement, the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it. Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop. In the driveway, my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage...

Second paragraph:

When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life – all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace...

A quick dip reveals these:

Simon Barnes in The Times – ‘God, I hate politics. Besides, we don’t have politics in Suffolk Coastal. We have John Gummer.’

Caitlin Moran, same newspaper – ‘Of course I’m not going to be late to interview Gordon Brown. Don’t be ridiculous. He’s the Prime Minister, for goodness sake. I’m going to leave the house at 11.30 am.’

Keith Waterhouse in 2009 – ‘You’ve heard of the Nanny State? Yes you have – you’re living in it. But there’s more to come, as soon as you’ve eaten your greens. The Granny State is on its way.’

The intro lives and mutates but remains, for ever, and for most, a problem. And while it lives a million journalists suffer.

In the beginning was the word...

But which word, for God’s sake?

* All right, all right – if you insist. Mulchrone describing the lying in state of Sir Winston:

Two rivers run silently through London tonight, and one is made of people. Dark and quiet as the night-time Thames itself, it flows through Westminster Hall, eddying about the foot of the rock called Churchill.

Geoffrey Mather, former Daily Express features editor and columnist, runs his own website at www.northtrek.co.uk

#

Scoop and scooped

By Desmond Zwar

Every desk in the Daily Mail newsroom was suddenly deserted, with sub-editors, reporters and photographers jammed around a Foreign Room teleprinter clacking furiously.

A sub dashing back to his desk said an astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, had been launched into space by the Russians. The news-desk phones had gone mad. Reporters in Mail offices around the world were being ordered into action. ‘Interview scientists and leaders’, the foreign editor was shouting over the phone to Moscow. ‘Get the background on Gagarin.’

‘Zwar!’ I hurried into the home newsroom. ‘We want a backgrounder London piece. Get up to the Soviet Embassy and find out what they’re doing. Are they celebrating? What’s going on? Get a talk with the ambassador.’ I raced to Kensington Palace Gardens, better known as ‘Millionaires’ Row’, the centre of foreign embassies. I found the high-walled Soviet Embassy already surrounded by milling reporters and photographers.

‘They’re not playing,’ a disgruntled Daily Mirror man told me. ‘They say Come back in the bloody morning.’ I pushed past him and made my way to a great oaken door, pressing the buzzer. The door took a while to creak open and a fair-haired man in blue suit and brown sandals glared at me. He didn’t even want to know who I was.

‘In ze morning ...’ And the door slammed closed. The mob waited, staring up at the sky as if expecting the spaceship Soyez 11 to appear above. Then Eddie Laxton, a burly, foot-in-the-door specialist who looked more like a boxer than an Express reporter, suggested we ‘doorstep’ somewhere more comfortable; like the nearest pub. To my amazement, as one, the pack departed, heading for Kensington High Street.

I was unsure. I had just joined the Daily Mail and I knew I wasn’t going to get the story in a pub. I went with them because it was obviously expected; but once they were gathered at the bar – I did what I later learnt to be unforgivable in the street-smart code of journalism – I broke ranks. I left them and headed for a bottle shop, an ‘off-licence’ as I found they were quaintly called.

I saw on the shelf a bottle of Stenochka vodka, labelled ‘Very Strong. 150 Proof’. I bought it and headed back up the leafy pathway to the embassy, rehearsing my speech and glancing about to see if there were other reporters around. Mercifully there were none. I walked through the embassy gates and knocked on the formidable brown door and waited, clutching the bottle wrapped in brown paper. The brown sandalled servant opened the door and before he could say, ‘in ze ...’ I launched into my prepared speech.

‘I am from Australia. I come here on behalf of the Australian people who are delighted to congratulate the glorious achievement of the cosmonaut Comrade Gagarin. I wish to ask Soviet Ambassador Soldatov if he will take this as a gift and toast Major Gagarin with the people of Australia.’ Then I drew breath.

Brown sandals peered suspiciously, first at me and then at the brown paper wrapping, slowly removing it from the bottle in case it was a bomb. ‘You vill vait,’ he said. And taking the bottle, closed the doors. Heart thumping, I looked around to see if by now any of my rivals were around. I stood on the step for what seemed like 10 minutes and the doors swung open. It was the stony-faced flunky.

‘Come!’ he beckoned. And I followed him into the Soviet Embassy, down a long corridor to a great room lit by a heavy chandelier. There stood the egg-bald Ambassador Soldatov I had often seen on television; beside him stood a waiter with my bottle on a tray and two small glasses that were already filled. Ambassador Soldatov then smiled, lifted his glass and motioned me to take the other. We drank. ‘To Comrade Gagarin!’ he said. ‘Comrade Gagarin!’ I said enthusiastically. He turned on his heel and left.

The Daily Mail now had its ‘London end’ to the story; I had an exclusive on the front page: ‘AMBASSADOR TOASTS ASTRONAUT’.

But I had become a marked man. The threat filtered through from the Daily Express night duty driver to our night driver, (the recognised backstairs communication between rival newspapers). I had erred by breaking ranks. The ‘heavy mob’ was upset. I was to be punished.

And they didn’t wait long to deliver.

One wet, miserable winter’s night I was told to get to a police station on the M1 motorway where a bus-load of young convicts had overpowered their guards and the driver delivering them to Birmingham. The prisoners had all escaped.

The Heavy Mob arrived in their duffle-coats and sheepskin jackets at the same time as I got there; and I heard mutterings of my recognition. The police were adamant: the guards had already left, and the bus-driver, whose coach stood in the mist-covered yard, was not going to talk to anybody. We might as well all go home.

Reporters and photographers climbed back into their cars and waited, staring through the fug of tobacco smoke and frosted windscreens at the ‘nick’. Every hour one of us went to the front counter and pleaded. We were told a statement would be issued by Scotland Yard Press Bureau next morning and really, we had better all go home to our beds because even the coach driver had been whisked away and his coach would remain where it was.

At 1am, after I had called my news desk for the fourth time saying there would be no interview, they told me to go home. I had just emerged from the phone box when one of the mob said, ‘We’re all calling it a day. They’re not going to play.’ And half a dozen cars drove off. I got into mine and headed back to London. Next morning I got all nine newspapers. To my dismay I saw, in six of them, quotes from the coach driver that he had been overpowered and had been in fear of his life. It had been a ‘dreadful experience.’

I was carpeted and told in no uncertain terms that my record had been smudged. The Daily Mail had been the only national newspaper without the quotes.

That night Alf, the night driver, taking me out on a job said, ‘They got you, didn’t they? The Mob didn’t talk to that coach fella. They got together and made up a quote. They all used it. Except you.’

#

Room 404

By Donald Walker

As if we didn't have enough to do, there were endless problems with the phones. Well, actually we didn't have enough to do, that was the real problem. There were some fifteen or twenty of us in the same room on the fourth floor of the Mirror building in Holborn.

All of us were skilled writers at the top of our game, or had been at the top of some game or other before a heady mixture of drink, the old ennui and raging expenses fever had shredded our nerves.

Now here we were in the 1970s dumped by unfeeling and soulless gods into room 404 to wait... for what? Nobody knew. We'd mostly been drafted into Daily Mirror editorial in better times when Cudlipp had had a bright idea called Mirrorscope.

This pull-out section, launched in the 60s, was supposed to be the Mirror 'going serious' in its attempt to 'educate' the public, to find its soul. A faint imitation of the far more erudite Sunday Times.

But then the unfeeling, soulless Murdoch had happened along, prised the Sun from Cudlipp's reluctant (huh!) fingers and shown that the public was more interested in locating its G-spot than some ephemeral inner avatar.

Come to think of it, it was phrases like 'ephemeral inner avatar' that got us here in the first place. Ephemeral inner avatars could get right to the back of the queue behind the Sun's brazen Essex girls, their tits and bingo...as the Mirror's rapidly dwindling circulation proved.

But at least we in the Colditz of room 404 had the distraction of the telephones. No longer needed for our in-depth reporting and profound, learned research, we could distract ourselves with darts, poker, lunchtime drinking – and the weirdness of Holborn's underwiring.

For some reason never fully or satisfactorily explained the telephone system in the old Mirror building in Holborn had become inextricably entwined and fused with all the other systems in the area, perhaps in the country.

The phones in room 404 would ring briefly and then stop. Pick up the receiver: silence. Or a distant, ghostly voice would say: 'Sheila?' or 'Hello, this is Pearl Insurance' or 'Is that Gamages?' Incoming? Outgoing? Who knew?

Worse, contacts (few) or angry wives (too many) or girlfriends (too few) would get through and say: 'Where have you been? I've been ringing you all day!' when the phone had been silent for hours.

The Bank of England was the much-sought-after target of many callers. They became quite apoplectic, as well they might, when told they had managed to get through to some distant outpost of Daily Mirror editorial and we couldn't help them with their fiduciary concerns.

'What the bloody hell is going on?' they would frequently and understandably ask. As if we had any idea. We didn't know what was going on in the editorial floor below us let alone in the grand, sweeping markets of hedge funds and gilts.

There was, of course, fun to be had, especially by the sharp-witted. Colin Dunne, often to be found in the taxing throes of teaching me poker, had the flexion to switch with ease from full houses and busted flushes to Spensely's Nuts And Bolts Manufacturers.

Let me explain.

If I received a call through the neurotic and weird world web of wires that was the Holborn telephone exchange asking for Spensely's Nuts And Bolts Manufacturers, I would politely say: 'Sorry, you have a wrong number' and replace the receiver. After lunch it might be: 'Oh, piss off!' or 'Do I sound like a nuts and bolts manufacturer, you prick?'

But Colin, thus accosted, would never turn aside. The conversation would proceed in the following fashion:

Well-meaning Caller: Is that Spensely's Nuts And Bolts Manufacturers, please?

Colin Dunne: Yes it is.

WMC: Can I speak to the stockroom?

CD: Speaking.

WMC: Oh. That was quick.

CD: Yes, we aim to give satisfaction with every nut and bolt.

WMC: Oh...Um, well, I'd like to order a hundred gross of number 9 nuts.

CD: No, we haven't got any.

WMC (really alarmed): You haven't got any!?

CD: Nope. Ran out yesterday.

WMC: Ran out?! But I been ordering number 9s from you for years.

CD: Yup. Demand has finally overtaken supply. How about number 15s?

WMC: 15s? I didn't know you did a 15!

CD: Brand new in today. Want some?

WMC (now very concerned): I shall have to speak to my gov'nor. We need them 9s urgently.

CD: How about 8s? Can do you hundredweight of 8s.

Baffled silence.

One day, when the wires were crossed beyond all recognition, I was forced to listen to a whole telephonic conversation between a husband and wife who were unaware of my presence. I kept rattling my phone buttons constantly but nothing would dislodge them or even make them aware of me.

Soon I stoppped pressing buttons and listened. The conversation was itself a primer in how not to get pissed at the station bar and explain yourself to the wife.

The conversation was between...let's call them Harry and Muriel. They were a couple in their late 50s; Harry was a piss artist and Muriel had heard every excuse known to housewifekind.

Harry had stayed too long at the bar in Waterloo Station but, carefully readied by his drunken mates, had his story down pat. He was set to deal with Muriel. This was in the days of IRA bomb threats and subsequent road and rail delays.

Muriel: Hello.

Harry (carefully sober): Hello, my darling.

Muriel: Who is this?

Harry (losing it a little): Who is...it's me, Harry, your husband!

Muriel (without emotion): Yes.

Harry (still manages to sound sober, or thinks he does): I'm afraid the train's been cancelled and I've been delayed. I'm still at Waterloo. The queue is terrible.

Muriel (even less emotion): Really. Why?

Harry (slurring very slightly): There's been a bomb threat.

Muriel: A bomb threat? What do you mean a bomb threat?

Now this was beyond the point Harry's training at Have Another One HQ had taken him. Despite vast experience in such domestic matters, his operations IMBYR (It Must Be Your Round) team had not anticipated direct, probing questions such as this. Mind you, as they could barely speak properly and had to close one eye to see the barman, this was not surprising.

Harry (totally losing it): W'd I mean? W'd I mean? You silly cow it's a bomb! Don' you know wh'd a fucking bomb is, you daft bint...Mus' I 'splain everyfuckingthin'?

Muriel (grimly): Goodbye.

When, many years later, we finally got to Canary Wharf, the telephone system worked perfectly. No crossed lines, no confusions, no desperate calls for a hundred gross of number 9 nuts. And the Stab was miles away. Life had lost something of its lustre.

###

The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – The Times

Issue # 143

23 April, 2010

This Week

Alan Whittaker’s tale this week involves the wonderful Vic Sims, with whom I shared an office for a while on the Sunday Mirror in the 70s. It’s the sort of experience that seemed to happen often in Victor’s life – stories were always going wrong, falling down… nothing to do with him (honest, guv) and he would delight in relating them in the Stab or El Vino, often with a mournful countenance but always with a twinkle in his eye.

Vic is no longer with us, which is a great pity if only because he would have been a wonderful contributor to this website. Other people have excellent stories too, of course, but in the main they can’t be arsed, or maybe are just too mean, to share them.

Anyway, Alan Whittaker’s piece – it’s really about crime reporter Ron Mount following up an exclusive tip – can be found by clicking on his name in this column, or in the column on the LEFT. If it jogs your memory with a similar tale, let’s hear it.

That’s how Ranters is supposed to work. And sometimes it does.

Geoffrey Mather’s piece on intro-writing last week prompted Roy Stockdill to recall a story about intros he remembers – and by total coincidence it also involves Mr Mount.

The same piece drove Ken Ashton to his filing system to dig out a piece he wrote for young journalists on the very subject (intros, not Ron Mount). Old hacks know all this, natch. But we have a lot of youngsters out there, these days, and more important we have readers who are trying to teach them how to write. So it comes to you (whether you need it or not) courtesy of the Ranters School of Journalism.

Happily, the system of jogging the old grey memory cells continues to work. Don Walkerwrote (also last week) about wrong numbers and crossed lines on the office telephone system. This reminded Anthony Peagam of working on Ford Times (the motor magazine). Incidentally, back in 1956 Cassandra had a MUSeum telephone number that was one digit different from Camden Goods Yard, and wrote brilliantly about the times when he got wrong numbers. Just goes to show, there’s nothing new…

It was an exchange of emails that prompted Bob Cameron to remember his first meeting with a media baron, and his first interview for a newspaper job. Everybody – obviously – has one of those. So why do they keep them to themselves?

Finally, in case you were wondering, Colin Dunne’s book, Man Bites Talking Dog, was in the top two per cent of sales at amazon uk this week. Are you the only Ranters’ reader who hasn’t bought a copy?

There are new reviews from Matt Huber, John Kay and Neville Stack.

###

Memoirs of a foxhunting man

By Alan Whittaker

Ron Mount took the call in the News Room around 10.30 on a rainy Saturday night. The caller introduced himself as ‘Foxy’ Fowler the escaped jailbird; the will o’the wisp criminal hunted by every police force in Britain. And he wanted to turn himself in. Mount cupped the receiver so that no one could eavesdrop. It was his lucky night.

For weeks, ever since his latest escape from HM’s somewhat careless custody, the baying hounds of Fleet Street had been on the trail of the Fox. He had been sighted in places as far apart as Maidstone and Newcastle. Now he was cold, hungry, broke and eager to give himself up and face the music. He wanted Mount to ferry him to Scotland Yard and in return he would give him a sensational Page One story. Before the caller hung up the words had begun to spin in Ron’s head. How the most wanted fugitive in Britain had surrendered to the News of the World at a secret rendezvous.

The rendezvous was to be in Woolworth’s doorway. At midnight.

Eagerly, Mount promised to be there on time. He was due to finish his stint at 11pm but this was too good an opportunity. No one in the office knew about the phone call. With a bit of luck he could get the splash in the last edition, scoop the Street, bask in his own brilliance and receive a coveted note of congratulations from the editor on Tuesday morning.

William John ‘Foxy’ Fowler was a bumbling small-time thief who had an unfortunate habit that severely hampered his chosen profession. He kept getting nicked. To counter this tendency he developed a gift for escaping from custody, a talent that regularly catapulted him into the headlines in the 1950s and 60s.

The audacity and frequency of his escapes, the subsequent searches and the mocking interest they aroused in pub discussions made this moronic nonentity a household name. He was a gift to cartoonists who gleefully portrayed a clueless constabulary outfoxed by a half-witted Houdini.

Once he fled in the fog from Dartmoor prison and the authorities were so keen to get him back before a scathing Fleet Street got a whiff of his latest trip they used foxhounds from the Mid-Devon hunt in a desperate but unsuccessful bid to track him. The ‘manhunt’ led to the Home Secretary ‘Rab’ Butler being rigorously questioned in the Commons. God knows what today’s Human Rights brigade would have to say about a frightened fugitive being hunted across a fog-shrouded moor by a pack of baying four-legged hounds

At just over six–foot Ron Mount was the blunt instrument used by the News of the World on enquiries where tact and charm were considered of minor importance and his size 12s bore the scuffs of many unwelcomed encounters with hurriedly slammed doors.

A colleague investigating a loan shark racket once introduced Mount to a young lady heavily involved in the inquiry. She was called Olive. Ron expressed an interest.

‘Stuffed or unstuffed?’ he asked.

It was still raining heavily at 11.45pm when he took up a strategic position in the darkened doorway of Woolworth’s in Islington. Apart from an occasional black cab the street was deserted. The rain bounced off the pavement and a frolicsome wind tugged at the striped tarpaulin canopies sheltering a group of sou-westered council engineers attending to some underground problem which involved the use of lanterns and shovels.

At midnight a match flared in a shop doorway on the other side of the road followed by the pinprick glow of a cigarette. Ron glanced at his watch, turned up the collar of his raincoat and strode across the puddled road.

A raincoated figure, face hidden from the street lights, puffed on a cigarette.

‘Mister Fowler?’ ventured Ron

‘No Ron, it’s Mr Sims.’

Mount struck a match. It was the Sunday Mirror’s Vic Sims. ‘I reckon we got the same call,’ sighed Vic. ‘We’ve been well and truly hoaxed.’

Suddenly the darkened doorway was filled by surly burly men armed with shovels which they waved menacingly. The gang of council workers had deserted the canopied hole in the road and formed a horse-shoe barrier around our heroes cutting off any escape route.

Their leader held up a lantern and surveyed the dispirited Fleet Streeters. Recognition dawned. ‘Hell’s bells it’s the bloody Press’ rasped a less-than-pleased DI from the Flying Squad. ‘This is a bloody pantomime.’ Turning to his band of ‘night workers’ he added. ‘Let’s just forget it and piss off.’ Vic and Ron stubbed out their cigarettes and decided to do the same.

When Ron surfaced on Tuesday there was a white envelope propped against his typewriter. But is wasn’t a note from the editor. This one read ‘A foreign sounding geezer phoned asking if he could arrange a meet at midnight tonight. He said his name was Bormann.’ Ron was not amused.

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Ordinary blokes

By Roy Stockdill

Geoffrey Mather's piece on intros reminded me of a couple of stories from the old News of the World – the broadsheet NoW, that is, with the lovely scroll-type masthead, long before it became a tabloid publicity sheet for bed-hopping actresses and models, druggie pop stars, fornicating footballers and Max Clifford.

Fleet Street old-timers will remember a near-legendary woman journalist called Nancy Spain, who was a household name in the 1950s and '60s.

Spain started her career as a sports reporter – highly unusual for a woman in those days – was a feature writer and columnist on the Daily Express, wrote a score of books, did many BBC radio broadcasts and was a star of TV panel games like Twenty Questions and Juke Box Jury.

Having gone to the posh girls' school, Roedean, she wore mannish clothes, joined in with the lads in boisterous singsongs in the pub, lived with a female magazine editor in the days when such liaisons were not exactly flaunted and was a friend of Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich.

In the early 1960s Nancy Spain was prised away from the Daily Express and crossed Fleet Street to Bouverie Street, having been hired to write a column for the NoW.

She began her very first Sunday column with what was surely a classic intro: ‘Mother always said I would end up in the News of the World.’

Can't say fairer than that, can you?

In those days the paper used to sponsor lots of curious and parochial events, among them a giant leek show in Durham. Spain, sent to write about it, included in her story: ‘Then in came a man with the biggest one I'd ever seen.’

Sadly, I never knew Nancy Spain, except by name, because I didn't join the paper as a reporter in Bouverie Street until 1967 and she had died three years earlier in a light aircraft crash on the Grand National course at Aintree while on her way to cover the race.

However, a News of the World stalwart with whom I worked for many years was Ron Mount, one of the old-style Fleet Street heavies and a classic foot-in-the-door man.

Mount, a tall, burly man from Romford, Essex, with short, crinkly, iron-grey hair, always dressed in a dark suit and many unwitting interviewees took him to be a copper – an impression Ron, naturally, did not go out of his way to dissuade them from.

A favourite question of his that he put to many villains and conmen, and which became virtually a catch-phrase among the other reporters, was: ‘What's your game then, noosh?’

He did many of the paper's major exposés and had a standard intro that he trotted out on a number of occasions. This went: ‘He's just an ordinary-looking sort of bloke.’ Mount, exposing some conman or other, would then go on to describe someone who was anything but ordinary.

I recall one memorable story which had begun with the aforementioned ‘ordinary-looking sort of bloke’ intro and then went on to relate how the hapless victim was wearing an outsized flat cap and munching on a giant cheese sandwich.

As the rest of us were having a good old laugh about the Mount intro in the Top of the Tipperary, the NoW reporters' pub, the late Bob Warren dreamed up what would have been a highly amusing stunt.

He suggested we should all sit at our desks in the newsroom wearing outsized flat caps and eating a giant cheese sandwich. When Ron Mount came in and demanded to know what was going on, there would be a chorus of ‘What's up, Ron? We're just ordinary blokes.’

Sadly, it never happened. Probably we all got drunk and forgot about it.

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Intros – the way in

By Ken Ashton

Dead. That was what the man was when police found him in an area way last night.

That was the introduction – intro – the great American humorist James Thurber used when he was working as a journalist on the New York Post after his editors had kept sending back his copy because his opening lines were dull.

Writers on newspapers and in magazines need to catch attention with their first words. A stale first sentence more or less suggests the rest of the article is going to be in the same mould.

Your intro will grab an editor first, your reader second. If it hooks the editor, you could sell the piece. In the media, millions of words from thousands of writers work their way through the system every day. You need to catch the editor’s attention with the first sentence, then retain it through the first paragraph.

The intro is the opening paragraph and is distinct from the headline – the heading would have been written by the design editor, who takes what he/she thinks is the strongest line in the article.

Avoid beginning with a name, date, number or place name.

The intro should always be tight, punchy and lure the reader into reading on. The intro is the ‘bait’ which hooks the reader-fish... and if it isn’t tasty, he’ll swim away to something else.

Length is important, too.

In a news story, the ideal should be as few words as needed, with a maximum of 25.

In a feature, you can extend that to provide colour.

The intro should be short, tight, crisp and contain a couple of magic words to make the reader feel he needs to know more. Never put a place, name or date in an intro – if the reader isn’t interested in that place, or gets the feeling it’s not brand-new, he’ll switch off and turn to the next story.

For example a murder report should never begin: Yesterday, Joe Smith was found dead in his flat, with head wounds. Instead: A 26-year old labourer has been found dead in his flat. No date, no name in line one. Police say Joe Smith had been beaten about the head with a blunt instrument.

Attribute information to someone. Examine national newspapers – you’ll find they drop the place name further down the story, maybe even four or five paragraphs, so you find where it is once you are hooked.

It’s a good idea to practise writing intros and rewriting published ones. Sometimes they are the journalist’s worst nightmare. Features are different. What sells them? Anecdotes. You can begin your feature with any kind of anecdotal line that makes the reader feel ‘I want to read this.’ Some of the best features intros come from writers who have a tale to tell.

Travel writing? Many ‘learning’ writers struggle with finding an opening to a travel article – probably because they’ve read too many travel brochures. For example... Cyprus, the ancient island with a mix of culture, set in the heart of the Mediterranean, is a favourite holiday...

This is the wrong way to begin. The reader, who probably knows vaguely where Cyprus is, needs an intro that hooks him and tempts him to read on.

As I strode out of the airport terminal, the taxi-driver winked and asked if I was travelling alone. I nodded and he flashed the nightclub cards…

A film review – If you are like me and love to curl up on the plush seats of the Odeon with a bag of popcorn, rather than be a couch potato at home in front of the TV, then The Spooky Alien is a film that will make you wish you were back home.

A general interest feature – Anyone who has stood in the supermarket checkout queue while the till girl fiddles with buttons and screams How much are these? will know the feeling…

The profile? A profile calls on many skills of the feature writer/journalist. The shape of the profile is quite basic – you begin with the intro that hooks the reader, just as you would an ordinary feature. It isn’t necessary, here, to use the name of the person, as that will probably be in either the headline or the standfirst – or even with a picture.

So, a sharp intro that links to the person and invites the reader to get into this. Example of the start of a profile of an 85- year-old musician –

He lowered himself into a chair, wheezing because of the emphysema, fiddled in his pocket, pulled out a mouthpiece and fixed it in the tenor sax. He closed his eyes and played the smoothest version of But Beautiful. ‘It blows well,’ he said.

Sports comment –

Liverpool at the moment are aptly very much like the Mersey Ferry. Not quite all at sea, but you don’t know whether they are coming or going…

Use words that say ‘I must be read, carry on.’ Vigorous words in news items, soft-sell words in features.

I reckon that most quality subediting desks I’ve worked on had a contest for the best first line of the evening. And many a time the cry has gone up from the table, Anyone got a good intro for this? It’s an art and one worth cultivating.

The top writers in the national media are worth studying for their opening paragraphs. They have it off to a fine art, years of practice making it seem easy.

But if you’re stuck for an intro – an advanced version of writer’s block – what do you do? The simple answer is to carry on writing. You’ll be amazed how many times you can write something with the first thought that comes into your head, then read it through and pluck out a strong first line. And with today’s technology, it’s a simple matter of cutting and pasting the new first line.

I recommend filling a notebook with snatches of intros, good and bad and your own versions. It’s a habit that will pay off.

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Fun with phones

By Anthony Peagam

Don Walker’s tales of the wonky telephones in Room 404 of the Mirror building brought to mind a lovely chap for whom I worked in the early 1960s and who had the wit to commission the likes of Alan Coren, Michael Parkinson, Maurice Wiggin, Simon Raven, Patrick Campbell, Kingsley Amis, Clement Freud, Peter Carvell, Nick Tomalin, Ron Bryden, Basil Boothroyd... and just about everyone in Fleet Street’s then motoring corps, even the anti-Ford Bill Boddy.

He was Bill Patten. Not a journalist but a Ford Motor Company manager who found himself responsible for external publications, notably the innovative monthly Ford Times.

Bill Patten’s boss was John Waddell – happily still with us, but then an ex-Fleet Streeter (said to have given half his name to ‘John London’ of the Evening News) recently engaged as Ford’s public relations manager. And John Waddell’s boss was the redoubtable Walter Hayes, even better known to Fleet Street and not long before appointed PR director of Ford of Britain. (In case you’re wondering, I edged into the picture, not much more than a kid, and thanks to Denis Hackett, because the newspapermen didn’t know how to put magazines together – or so they claimed.)

When I joined Ford (from the subs’ room at Woman’s Mirror) we all worked at the River Plant in Dagenham, in the original, grimy UK headquarters building alongside the production line: sheets of paper were spread over desks and chairs at lunchtime to catch a fall-out of airborne manufacturing debris not unlike Icelandic volcanic ash – you could write your name in it after half an hour. And there, too, the telephone system was a riot.

Bill Patten’s cleverness in attracting some of Britain’s best writers to take Henry’s shilling and contribute to Ford Times is not the only reason why he is remembered. He was also a devil with the phones. Many were the misrouted calls that he took with enthusiasm and authority. To the skipper of a tug, upstream of the Dagenham wharf, bringing a barge loaded with pig-iron to the Ford furnaces: ‘Rrrrright! Bring her in NOW!’ To a widget supplier’s enquiry, passed from extension to extension: ‘Yes, of course. Twenty tons of ’em, please – and fast!’

Best, perhaps, was Bill’s habit of politely answering ‘Women’s Medical’ before a caller could utter a word, leading to some of the weirdest and funniest exchanges I’ve ever heard.

Bill Patten died young, probably not even 50. He took a stroll in the Hyde Park before lunch on the day that Ford introduced its latest big saloon to motoring journalists at the then-new London Hilton. And never came back to glad-hand the mojos.

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My first media baron

By Bob Cameron

It was the mid sixties and I wrote to 100 weekly newspapers the length and breadth of Britain begging for a job as a junior reporter. Not one replied. Maybe it had something to do with not being able to type, write shorthand, or having failed all my exams but one: O Level English. And even that was a bit dodgy.

I was 16 and I’d blown my entire Post Office savings on a ton of fourpenny stamps. I’d also dyed my fingers a permanent royal blue putting a leaking Parker pen to endless pages of almost top quality paper.

Okay, maybe I should have included a reply paid envelope with my grovelling applications.

But that would have meant having to find a further one pound, thirteen shillings and four pence for the stamps alone. It would also mean trying to borrow a hefty slice of dad’s take-home pay. No chance. He had nine hungry mouths to feed, not counting the whippet.

So I surrendered to the inevitable, and looked under clerical vacancies in the Nottingham Evening Post classifieds, even though I’d banned the rag for not writing back to me with a standard – never mind courteous – rejection. And there in the jobs vacant columns lay the golden path to my murky future

In four almost microscopic 9 point lines were the magical words: Vacancy – office junior. Apply in writing to J W Malkinson, Managing Director, Kirk Publishing Co Ltd, 13, Victoria Street, Nottingham. The company owned a small chain of weeklies, including the South Notts Echo, Beeston Gazette and Echo and Long Eaton Advertiser.

Apply in writing? And wait for another rejection that wouldn’t come. Not likely. Begging four copper pennies from my mum, I ran down the street, yanked open the phone box door, used a phone book for the first time, rammed the fourpence in and pressed button A when the beeps went.

The Great Man himself took my call. I stammered out my request for an interview and an ancient, phlegm soaked voice came rumbling and coughing back down the line. ‘That’s all very well, Mr Cameron [he called me Mr!], but the advertisement clearly states that ALL applications must be in writing. I need to know if you can spell, sonny, the last boy was bloody hopeless.’

And with that he hung up on me. (My first hang-up!) Suitably chastened I hurried home and wrote letter number 101 in my best handwriting and neurotically checked each word – and I mean every word - with my equally ink-stained old school dictionary.

Two days later I got a reply on that thin, toilet tissue type paper used by the very frugal back then, or those who still thought there was a war on. Just two short sentences summoned me to an interview at 9am sharp on Monday.

Elation swiftly changed to gloom – what do you wear for an interview? The only jacket I owned belonged to my school uniform, with its blue and gold braid piping and the St Bernadette coat-of-arms. And dad’s only suit was too big for me. Besides it was his 20-year-old demob clobber and wide lapels wouldn’t be in style again for another decade.

Then mum said: ‘I’ve almost finished knitting your new winter jumper. If me rheumatism clears up, I can have it ready by Sunday night.’ To this day I still think she was only half-joking.

Suddenly it was 8.30 Monday morning and already I was standing anxiously on the pavement outside the building, peering into the gloomy entrance and the curving sandstone flagged stairway leading to their offices on the third floor. Being pathetically superstitious I thought, it just would have to be number 13, wouldn’t it?

It began to rain and my shiny old school flannels were already creased enough. So I went bounding up the steps to the third floor where the polished oak door to the main office was still firmly shut and locked. But I could see a light shining through the bubbled glass that topped the panelling running the length of the hallway.

I knocked politely on the door and waited. The door swung open and staring down at me was a generously proportioned figure in a suit, mustard-coloured waistcoat and spotted bowtie, all topped by a mop of curly brown hair. He had a rosebud mouth which he pursed, while rocking back on his heels, and said: ‘Ah, you must be the next victim. Come in lad, come in.’

I sidled past him and saw another, well, generously proportioned figure, bending over to take his bicycle clips off. Mr Bowtie pointed at him and explained: ‘That’s Frank, ace court reporter. I’m Barney, Chief Reporter. That’s Chris, junior reporter (my first rival) and that is almost the entire editorial reporting team of this august head office.’ August? What was he talking about it? It was October.

Frank nodded morosely at me and sat down at a battered desk on which perched a giant, black metal Empire typewriter with glass sides. He sported a maroon cardigan under his old tweed jacket and was clearly under a bit of a cloud. I later discovered why.

Frank lived in a distant village and each day he cycled 20 miles to work and back, come hail, rain or shine. Sometimes this had an unfortunate impact on the state of his socks. A condition that became only too apparent to other denizens of the press box at the local magistrates’ court, when he eased off his shoes for comfort

Grown men, who’d seen action in Korea and some of Nottingham’s toughest pubs, had been known to faint at the aroma. Ripe wasn’t the word for it. Finally, unable to take the odour anymore – their shorthand was turning into gibberish – the court reporters complained to the magistrate’s clerk. In turn he rang Barney and asked him to have a quiet word with Frank.

Chris looked me up and down; he was very niftily dressed in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons and charcoal grey trousers that had a crease you could cut my throat with. Unlike Frank he was looking very confident. You can always spot a guy who’s going to the top.

He was taking note of my hair, still early Lennon and McCartney, and my mother’s pride and joy, the new knitted jumper. Banana yellow was the colour, with a curious chequer board effect in chocolate brown.

I think she had been planning to stitch noughts and crosses in some of the squares, but thankfully the rheumatism put paid to that little touch. ‘That jumper’s going to go down a treat with Mr Malkinson, is that,’ promised Chris. He just had to be a grammar school boy with at least 3 O-Levels.

Legs quaking, I was summoned into the inner sanctum of J W Malkinson, chairman, managing director and editor-in-chief of the group, a company he joined in 1913 before nicking off for a few years to fight the First World War.

He was my first media baron and nobody had tipped me off about his eccentric eye apparel. One that I couldn’t help but gawp at. He was using a strip of Sellotape to hold his left eye open.

I was to learn he changed the strip each day, attaching one end to the skin just below the lower lid, then running the other end, like a glinting, oblong tear onto the broken blue veins of his paper thin cheeks.

Through some unspoken Mafia-style silence none of us in the office ever raised the subject of the not-quite-invisible strip, so I never discovered what the problem was.

But a fondly autographed and framed 1930s photograph of the doe-eyed movie star, Dame Anna Neagle, which hung on the nicotine stained wall over his battered Chesterfield office sofa, made me suspect he’d winked at one actress too many.

In turn Mr Malkinson was equally taken aback by my canary yellow sweater and, twitching his good right eye, said: ‘If you’re going to work here that jumper will have to go.’ I stammered in craven agreement and he then asked: ‘Do you like your tea strong or weak?’ Thinking he was going to offer me a cuppa, I replied ‘weak.’

‘Good,’ he said. “So do I, and it must be on my desk by 8.50am sharp.’

That was fine by me; I had already agreed I’d be only too happy to sweep the floors.

Then he dropped his bombshell. ‘You’ve only got one O-Level,’ he accused. ‘Why did you waste so much time at school?’ Staring helplessly at him, I stammered, ‘I-I-I-I….’

Swooping on me like a rickety old owl, he growled: ‘I wasn’t asking for a Carmen Miranda impersonation. Still, you don’t have to be a bloody genius to be an office boy and you did get an O-Level in English, so can you start Wednesday. It’ll give you time to do something about that jumper.’

I’m not sure, I think I danced down the street, but I suspect I may have skipped. I was on my way. He was even going to pay me two pounds, five shillings a week.

Bob Cameron went on to work on the Willesden Mercury (London), Island Sun (Jersey), Hounslow Post (London), Sunday News (Belfast) and then as a Ten Pound Pom sailed to Sydney where he joined the Sun-Herald (Fairfax), eventually becoming deputy editor of New Idea (Murdoch) and editor-in-chief of Kerry Packer’s Woman’s Day and the Australian Women’s Weekly. He also created and launched a weekly magazine, Take 5, for Packer, his last media baron.

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Life on Mars at the typewriter

By Matt Huber

If you want one take on the recent state of British journalism and to laugh rather than cry, Colin Dunne's story of his life and times on the road, at lunch and at the typewriter is the book to buy.

He mirrors a working way of life that is now all but history.

Fleet Street was more than an address; it was an entire creative and, allegedly, commercial culture. It represented the might of journalism - national, regional and local, evening, daily and weekly – when newspapers first built up and then reflected the national mood; sold millions; changed attitudes; even toppled governments.

What today's reporters, anchored by cost controls and falling circulations to their desks, lunching on sarnies over the keyboard and downloading celeb copy from the internet, can only marvel at is that many Fleet Street reporters, writers, even editors of yesteryear got the job done at all, bearing in mind all the bars propped, glasses emptied and enduring fog of cigarette smoke.

From the Yorkshire dales via regional newspaper offices to the Fleet Street of the Daily Mirror and the Sun, Colin Dunne for decades lived through this time capsule of newspaper journalism while writing – humorously and always lightly – about the odd, peculiar, funny and the downright ordinary. Now he has turned his cuttings book into his own working life story. It's a cliché to say readers will laugh out loud and no newspaperman would ever reach for a cliché – so let this one highly entertained reader say it instead.

Man Bites Talking Dog could perhaps be called Life on Mars at the typewriter.

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By John Kay

This is simply one of the greatest books ever written about newspapers – and the men and women who produce them. It is also hilariously funny and crammed with witticisms and delicious anecdotes. As a writer, Colin Dunne is right up there with Evelyn Waugh , P G Wodehouse, and Tom Sharpe as a comic genius. Even 'civilians' – people with no newspaper connections – would find it a tremendous read.

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By Neville Stack

The newspaper industry will never be the same again. Thank goodness.

But for those of us who lived to tell the tale of those vintage times the memories tend to be tragic (divorce and early death) and/or a hoot.

Colin Dunne, one of the great names of journalism in the Lunatic Years, when even editors didn't get fired for being drunk in charge of a newspaper, has dusted off his keyboard to recall some of the highlights and low lifes. And some of the worthies and unworthies of our so-called profession.

Man Bites Talking Dog is hilarious, sometimes poignant. I was with him some of the time and I can testify that it happened more or less as he says. The book proves that truth is funnier than fiction.

In fact, you couldn't make it up.

Honest.

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The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street. – The Times

Issue # 144

30 April, 2010

This Week

As we swing into election mode here at Ranters, with our usual deadline-beating panache we launch a new book – From Bevan to Blair, Fifty Years of Reporting From the Political Front Line, by Geoffrey Goodman.

When it came to politics or industry, Geoffrey was the experts’ expert, to such an extent that Harold Wilson ‘borrowed’ him from the Daily Mirror to help explain to the public what was going on.

As Keith Waterhouse said: ‘What Geoffrey doesn’t know about politics didn’t happen.’

His reporting career spanned the second half of the last century – from Bevan to Blair – and thus his more precise area of expertise was, fairly obviously, the Labour Party and its renaissance as ‘New Labour’. Buy the book – the way things are looking it may be the last you hear of the Labour Party for some time.

But first, read Geoffrey Goodman’s own introduction to the book by clicking on his name here or in the Contents column over there, appropriately, on the far left.

The relationship between the Labour Party and the Mirror newspapers is generally considered to be set in stone, but it wasn’t always thus. Revel Barker has uncovered a dark period in the newspaper group’s history that, somehow, has escaped mention in the history books – including (or, especially) in the Mirror’s own versions of its history.

He (Barker) moves on to pick up the current Ranters theme on Intros, with what might be a winning formula for writing them, plus a few opening pars dredged from the back of his memory.

Then Tom Brown, a self-confessed intro-nut, takes over the baton. He reveals how he once nicked an intro from James Cagney, and got a herogram from Beaverbrook for another.

Away from all that, this week’s sad news is that Harry Conroy died on Saturday. You didn’t need to agree with Harry to appreciate his sincerity or his humour. Mike Gallemore clashed with Harry on many occasions, but remembers him fondly, nevertheless.

To end on a bright note, Colin Dunne returns to Ranters with recollections of fun times with a colleague who wrote for newspapers, used newspapers for his own ends, and even sued newspapers, but who basically was in the game for a laugh.

Weren’t we all, dear?
Enjoy clicking.

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Tomorrow’s fish and chips

By Geoffrey Goodman

Being a journalist is a kind of alternate for a job in an entire range of semi-skilled, perhaps even unskilled, trades. I am thinking especially of jobs such as the secret intelligence services – incidentally, a much over-rated occupation; a bookmaker (much under-rated), managing a casino, becoming a politician, which has increasingly developed into a job akin to running a casino; and to be sure, pretending to be an academic preferably one occupied with psychology or maybe still more appropriate, ‘modern communications’.

Any one of these trades, in my view, can be regarded as interchangeable with journalism. Come to think of it you could add a few more – being a beachcomber, a coastguard on a lighthouse overlooking a particularly rugged coastline or island or, if things became really difficult, a brothel keeper.

I am quite sure it would be easy to think of other alternates: or perhaps a permutation of various of these splendid categories rolled into one inglorious amalgam of chance, circumstance, fortune and probably ill-luck, much of which is always lurking around. So, briefly, I felt tempted to give this book a title of:

it’s only tomorrow’s fish and chips

It was a description given to me many years ago by a brilliantly perceptive colleague on the Daily Mirror (dear long-dead Len Jackson) who, during an outburst of outrage and frustration at the way my piece had been mishandled in the paper that day, reminded me: ‘Just remember, old chap’ he solemnly consoled, ‘it’ll all be forgotten in a couple of days when the paper is being used to wrap up six penn’orth of fish and chips. It’s only tomorrow’s fish and chips we are talking about…’ They were the days when almost all fish and chip shops used newspaper pages to wrap round their delectable cod and two-penn’orth of chips.

Sadly, in my nostalgia, I fear that this crude but workmanlike practice has faded from our clean-food culture. Fish and chips are no longer wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers, though, who knows, perhaps in some remote corner the heritage continues. So the title of this book has taken on fresh tokenism.

At any rate I am not sure why I ever imagined my range of skills, or lack of them, qualified me to become a newspaperman. Maybe it was pure romanticism. Perhaps I saw too many cheap films as a kid. More likely there was nothing better to do in the days when I was beginning to consider the forbidding prospect of a lifetime at work.

I well remember the retirement speech made by an old News Chronicle colleague, a great Parliamentary reporter of that paper (those were days when every national morning paper had its own reporter in the press gallery of the House of Commons) –E. Clepham Palmer (‘Cleph’). Upon receiving the beneficent retirement gesture from the Cadburys, who then owned the paper, Cleph observed in his dry, drawn-out East Anglian tones: ‘It’s been a wonderful life. It’s paid my mortgage, helped educate my children, kept me in food, drink, tobacco and clothing; assisted me to see something of the world at someone else’s expense and has provided me with a platform to address the nation at large… what other job would have provided me with such an opportunity? What other form of work could have given an unskilled labourer, which is what I am, such good fortune?’

Dear Cleph meant every word of that as he retreated to somewhere in his old native heath to enjoy the fruits of retirement from the Cocoa Press. He was not alone with such sentiments about the advantages of being in the newspaper trade. Ian Mackay was another labourer in that vineyard. The Great Bohunkus, as he was affectionately labelled by his chums, would frequently reflect on his good fortune. As a young boy in Wick he started working life at the age of 14 humping coal for a local merchant at two OLD pennies a day. He got up at six every morning to qualify in the grime trade before he dusted his hands and landed a job as a messenger boy for a local paper.

That was how Mackay started along the road to becoming one of the outstanding diarists and essayists to grace Fleet Street in the 20th century. He died, aged 54, still full of zest and brilliance, at the peak of his form, a pure Mozart of journalism, and still amazed at his good fortune at being able to spend his later life reading books and absorbing knowledge about the world, then writing about all this – subsidised, as he was fond of observing, by Mr Cadbury’s bars of milk chocolate.

It is not a bad way of avoiding work though, to be sure, some people have clearly discovered still better methods. Not that there was much money in the trade in those days – unlike modern media cash registers. Most of the best journalists of my time seemed to end up with a mere handful of loose change and large debts which they could scarcely understand, let alone pay off. All that has changed. The modern generation of media men and women is very well paid – at least by comparison – and some are among the more privileged earning groups in society. So they should be: the job is far more demanding than it ever was, as well as demanding far greater skills of invention.

So why this book? Why bother with yet another kind of memoir about a trade that has had its over-share of nostalgic inner-reflection? I have only one strong reason – I believe the picture I am presenting here is different. This story is a portrait of the century we have just left behind: a reflection of life for a working class, under-educated, certainly under-privileged boy who, through the depression years and the Second World War, somehow found a pathway into journalism and political life. The interweaving of life as a journalist and its contact with political power is a fascinating reflection of power throughout the ages. It always has been – though arguably more so, today, than ever. Northcliffe would be amazed if he returned to his old scene to witness how his own Citizen Kane role during the first two decades of the 20th century has been dwarfed by contemporary media moguls of power.

The book is also a testimony to a generation, my generation, the children born in the wake of the First World War. It is, of course, the experience through one eye: an eye that has seen an extraordinary transformation at every level across the spectrum of time. It encapsulates the story of an ordinary child of the century, born and reared in a north of England working class home of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. There were no privileges except those bestowed from the natural ferment of a home, encompassing a large family, which generated turbulent spirits that erupted naturally from the insecurity and uncertainties of immigrant life.

I count all this not as a disadvantage but as a privilege, a huge gain, since it contained the stimulus, the vibrance, the drive to establish roots and identity. It was a fight to survive from unpromising beginnings.

There are, of course, wider considerations that the book will try to reflect. I grew up in the slipstream of vast political and social upheaval, indeed of revolution. All over the world, following the 1914-18 Great War, there came an earthquake of change. The great melting pot of the 20th century was being moulded: socialism, communism, were being hailed as the ‘New Religion’. Fascism was breeding on the carcase of decaying ancient regimes.

When my father returned from the filth, death and destruction of the trenches across the channel and eventually emerged from a recovery unit in an Edinburgh hospital, he went in search of work. Work? Ah, that was another story. He always told me his story with considerable reluctance and a brevity that matched his modest outlook on life. He had emerged alive from the trenches – which surprised him: he had a few dreams and was a great Lloyd George fan; he wanted to believe that a new world was beckoning. Armed with those hopes, those dreams, he began looking for a job, found one briefly but then joined the long queue of broken dreamers. That was the crucible in which my earliest memories were formed. Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s was an outcrop of that time warp.

Yet it was more complex than that. In the immortal phraseology of Maxim Gorky those years were in fact ‘My university’. In that crucible all future life was shaped, unconsciously to be sure, but no less real. Feelings, passions, prides, prejudices, rights and wrongs, dreams and poetry – they all emptied into the crucible, shaping my ignorance as well as my knowledge. Such things are not open to choice, they simply happen. Like Everest they are there, dominating the landscape of one’s life.

For those people who grew up at the same time and yet remained outside that kind of ambience, which was essentially a zone of protest and revolt, the world clearly looked very different. Yet among my own contemporaries there were very few who were not involved, at one stage or another, in ‘trouble making’ – politically, socially, or just for the sheer hell of it to break the monotony of orthodoxy. And since we were not protected by wealth, or the kind of class background which, by definition, provided its own immunisation from reality, our options were limited – albeit no less attractive in a negative sort of way.

So I came to inherit the socialist dream as part of the accepted litany of any sensible life. Gradually the message grew more sophisticated, more complex, but also acquired a deeper logic. It was a kind of new, or different, divinity, offering idealised thoughts on the future of mankind and all that. It also provided an avenue of escape from the more conventional themes of organised mysticism and absurdities manifest in routine religious belief as practiced in church, synagogue or mosque.

Aneurin Bevan, whom I came to know so well in later years, once described socialism to me as a ‘natural biological development’. He believed that the specie would ultimately come to it in pursuit of its own self-interest rather than routed via pure idealism. Bevan saw this as the ‘civilising process’ – which, I still believe, is what drew so many of my generation to the concept. That indeed was our 20th century dream.

Even now it is impossible to predict how influential, or superfluous, that concept may prove to be in fashioning and moulding the illusions of this new 21st century. Darwin once observed that it is always easier to prophecy for a million years ahead than for the next fifty. Even so it is a reasonable assumption that many of the features of the new society that is now in embryo will, in fact, come to resemble many of the dreams that we, in our time, allowed to dominate much of our lives.

All this and newspapers too… well, it has been frequently claimed that journalism is the ‘first draft of history’: that somewhat presumptuous claim can be placed against my original and, I fear, more modest sceptical offering – Tomorrow’s fish and chips. And although it is not the title of this book I have a feeling at the far end of my mind that the truth might still fit, even if uneasily, somewhere between each.

Geoffrey Goodman worked on the News Chronicle, Manchester Guardian, Daily Herald and the Daily Mirror where he was industrial editor, assistant editor and columnist. He has worked in China, Soviet Russia and the USA and was founding editor of British Journalism Review.

His book, From Bevan to Blair – Fifty Years Reporting from the Political Fron Line, newly updated and expanded, is published by Revel Barker Publishing at £9.99.

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Wild about Harry

By Mike Gallemore

The world of journalism has lost one of its most respected characters and one of its few genuine socialists. Harry Conroy, former FoC of the Daily Record and general secretary of the NUJ, died in hospital in Glasgow last week. He was 67.

For years he had been Public Enemy No 1 to most national newspaper journalists due to his misguided (as we saw them) efforts to wrest power from the individual newspaper chapels and return it to the NUJ.

But to those who knew Harry well, he was a man of principle who went out of his way to help anyone he could. Although almost all Fleet Street chapel officials were diametrically opposed to Harry’s heartfelt beliefs we had all the time in the world for the guy himself. He had a crazy sense of humour and could see the funny side of most bizarre situations – and there were many.

Like when Harry rang the chairman’s office at Mirror Group in London on Friday, July 13, 1984, the day he’d bought a half-page ad in the Record explaining why they’d never allow themselves to be taken over by Maxwell.

Expecting to speak to Clive Thornton, Harry opened with: ‘Hey, Clive. Good news! I think I’ve found a way to keep the bastard out.’ Robert Maxwell’s unmistakable voice boomed back; ‘Is that you Scotch Harry? What’s the matter – don’t you read the papers? I own the fucking place.’ Then he invited him to come for a drink.

I think Harry knew from the very beginning that he was fighting a totally lost cause and that he was preaching to people who could never be converted to his way of thinking. Yet, despite that wall of opposition, Harry didn’t falter in his beliefs.

I can remember when we went on strike in Manchester, led by Mike Gagie and Harry King, in furtherance of our claim to have the right to negotiate our own house agreement. This was triggered by the news that the Mirror telephoto guys (SOGAT) had just received a house agreement increase, which gave them more than twice the average salary of the journalists.

The two Kens came up from Acorn House and threatened to throw us all out of the NUJ unless we returned to work immediately and dropped our claim. For me, that was the beginning of the end of the NUJ as a union for national newspaper journalists.

The power-base suddenly switched from the union to the chapels. The NUJ made no attempt to harness the strength of the chapels and inevitably, it became a war that the chapels couldn’t afford to lose and the NUJ couldn’t win.

Harry’s argument was that the little guy working on a provincial newspaper didn’t have the strength of the big Fleet Street chapels to be able to fight his corner. If he were to go on strike he would lose his job and the paper would still come out because the NGA and SOGAT would make sure it did.

Harry’s ideological beliefs were well founded but impractical. He believed that unless we worked closely with the NGA and gained their support the NUJ was powerless to stop the job. Which is why he suggested the two unions should amalgamate.

Ultimately, new technology settled the issue. I can remember being a delegate at the NUJ ADM in Buxton (only because it was on my doorstep and I was curious) and being the only speaker in the hall to talk against the resolution to get into bed with the NGA. I suggested the NUJ made it possible for the NGA to train to become page-make-up men. Afterwards Harry told me I wasn’t fit to be a member of the NUJ and that I was a voice in the wilderness and the only journalist at the ADM to hold those views. I made the point that the vast majority of journalists in the hall were not representative of national newspaper journalists.

Harry was a caring, thoughtful and understanding Gen Sec of the NUJ (1985-1990) but by then the union had lost its teeth – if it ever had any.

Harry didn’t support the initiatives of the Fleet Street chapels and failed to acknowledge the issues at stake. He was in a position to bring the various newspaper chapels together when Revel Barker, David Thompson and I put ourselves up as test cases to fight – and win – the battle at the City of London Tax Commissioners to stop our fixed allowances from being taxed.

He didn’t understand the issues at stake when he tried to prevent the Sun journalists from leaving Fleet Street for Wapping, still believing that journalists should consider the wellbeing of NGA members, who had never shown any consideration to journalists.

Harry was a believer. He was a fun guy who never gave up on his principles. But how he could stand up in front of an audience of national newspaper journalists, who opposed every word he was preaching, is beyond me. That takes great strength of character – and he was one of the strongest characters I’ve ever met.

Harry, born and bred in Pollok in the suburbs of South Glasgow got into journalism the old-fashioned way – as a copy boy on the Scottish Daily Express in 1962.

From there he joined the Daily Record mainly covering crime, switched to the Sunday Mail and went back again to the Record as finance editor. He was also held in high regard at the Record as an all-round reporter.

In recent years Harry wrote on business and finance for the Herald and the Evening Times in Glasgow. He was also editor of the Scottish Catholic Observer before setting up his own public relations consultancy, working mainly for charities.

Harry's funeral is at 10am today (Friday) at St Bride's Church, Cambuslang, and then Rutherglen Cemetery, Mill Street, Rutherglen, at 11.30am.

Mike Gallemore was FoC and convenor of the Daily Mirror Manchester chapels in the 70s and 80s and MGN NUJ convenor from 1984. He edited the Sporting Life from 1988 to 93 and is now MD and editor-in-chief of Worldwide Sporting Publications (www.wsp.global.com ).

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Blackshirt lifters

By Revel Barker

On the run up (or should that be run down?) to the general election, there’s never been any doubt where those two centurions of Fleet Street would position themselves – the immigrant-bashing Daily Mail, rabidly right-wing and pro Tory, and the Daily Mirror (perhaps a little less enthusiastically this time, since it worries about backing losers) totally behind Labour. ’Twas ever thus.

But was it?

Everybody knows that the Mail supported British fascists before the Second World War. And didn’t an editor of its old stablemate, the Daily Sketch, march with Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts? Yes and no; it did but he didn’t.

As for the pre-war Mirror – it stood virtually alone in Fleet Street and opposed fascism so violently during the thirties that its directors were on the hit-list in the event of a Nazi victory. Everybody knows that, too. Or do they?

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

Last year I revised and republished Publish And Be Damned!, Hugh Cudlipp’s classic history of the tabloid revolution and the first 50 years of the Daily Mirror (originally published in 1953) and there’s the memory of Harold Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, who had founded the paper and also owned the Daily Mail which, said Cudlipp, he –

…dedicated to many causes, some noble, some repellent… when he contrived to cajole the nation into accepting Hitler and his unholy clique as a group of energetic Right-wingers, his allegiance to the Germans was viewed in Britain with suspicion; his admiration for Oswald Mosley was received by the public at large with the contempt it deserved.

But a look at the files tells a slightly different story. Pull out the archived volume for 1934 and there, on January 20, is a photograph of a Mosleyite giving the fascist salute in a puff for the following day’s Sunday Pictorial (later to become the Sunday Mirror):

Give the Blackshirts a Helping Hand!

There was a pull-quote:

The patriotism and discipline of the Blackshirts set a practical example to the young men and women of Britain, who are being defrauded by Old Gang politicians of the share to which they are entitled in the control and organisation of their Country's affairs.

It was also written by Lord Rothermere. Ah yes, the cognoscenti will tell you. But in those days didn’t he own both the Mirror and the Mail…?

No; as a matter of fact, he didn’t. He had sold most of his Mirror shares in order to invest more in the Daily Mail and had finally handed over control of the papers in March 1931. So he was effectively a guest writer. The Daily Mirror not only promoted the article in the Sunday Pic, it reprinted it word for word the following Monday – along with addresses in seven major cities at which its readers could enrol in the Blackshirt movement, which was described as The Party of Youth…

Its leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, is only thirty-seven, and a man of proved courage and outstanding ability, well fitted by his gifts of personality and eloquence to marshal the vast but neglected energies of his own generation for an effort of national reconstruction similar to that which has imparted such vigour to Italy and Germany.

The idea that this new factor in our political life is linked with some foreign organization has no foundation whatsoever. The British Blackshirt Movement is one hundred per cent constitutional and national. Persuasion, not violence, will be its path to power. Blackshirts use force only in self-defence against the attacks of revolutionary Communism, which is the avowed enemy of the Crown and Constitution of this country.

Nor is there the slightest ground for believing that the Blackshirts are, or ever will be, antagonistic to such bodies as the Jews, the Trade Unions or the Freemasons. There is no parallel in this respect between other countries and our own.

Couldn’t that equally be interpreted as ‘admiration for Oswald Mosley’? And did the public receive it with contempt? We don’t know. If any Mirror readers reacted to this pro-fascist piece in any manner, they didn’t make it into print in the paper’s lively letters pages. Nevertheless, there was no more in similar vein in the daily paper, although the Pictorial followed through in April with a profile of Mosley: Britain's Political White Hope, ‘a powerful and challenging article’ by G Ward Price, its top special correspondent in the mid-thirties. And the Daily Mirror continued to cover Mosley’s activities, major speeches and rallies, generally reporting them neutrally, roughly one story a week throughout the rest of the year.

In the months following Rothermere’s Blackshirt propaganda, sales of the Daily Mirror had coincidentally reached what Cudlipp described as ‘the bottom of its circulation curve’ with daily sales around 700,000.

The following year Cudlipp and Bill Connor (Cassandra) joined the editorial team and the balance changed slightly. The Mirror supported Stanley Baldwin’s ‘National’ (predominantly Tory) government in the 1935 election and then took the anti-appeasement line. A year or so later Cassandra fetched up in Germany, covering Nuremberg rallies, visiting Berlin and Prague, poking sarcastic fun at Hitler and reporting on life under Nazi rule, which didn’t appeal to him.

Editorial director Harry Guy Bartholomew – the man largely credited with turning the Mirror from failure into the most successful paper of the first half-century – believed that supporting fascism was costing the opposition Daily Mail circulation. His paper threw itself firmly at the working class and sided with and promoted Churchill, instead. But it generally cut back on its political and foreign reporting and concentrated more on hearth and home. What was the use of bothering readers about an obscure revolution in Bolivia, features editor Basil Nicholson asked Cudlipp, if they were kept awake at night by indigestion?

Mixed with sensational crime coverage and the introduction of cartoons and pin-ups, it proved a winning formula. By the time war broke out and newspaper production was ‘pegged’ to conserve newsprint, the Mirror circulation had increased by nearly a million a day.

Cassandra, a former advertising copywriter, drew up a Hitler: Wanted – Dead Or Alive poster when war was declared and the paper became fervently patriotic, specifically pro-soldier. But when the Mirror criticised senior officers and the war cabinet later, Cudlipp wrote:

Churchill demanded an inquiry, and Government investigators examined the list of [Mirror] shareholders to ascertain whether Goebbels, or Himmler, or Hess, or even Hitler was among them.

Perhaps the war leader remembered the Mirror providing a platform for fascists.

As the world knows, the paper – its circulation doubled (to comfortably above 3million) when paper rationing ended – further antagonised Churchill by successfully backing Labour in 1945 with its ‘Vote for him’ (the returning ex-serviceman) campaign. The reaction of Tory Central Office was to advise its constituency officials not to buy the Daily Mirror, and to order the Daily Sketch, instead.

A Conservative cabinet minister told Cudlipp that the Mirror support was estimated to have gained 100 seats for Labour.

‘The Mirror is not and never has been a supporter of any government,’ it proclaimed. But... ‘we are of the Left, and so is the majority of the nation.’

Its future path was clear and the Blackshirt-supporting days were consigned to the dustbin of history.

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Revel Barker is a former Mirror Group reporter and managing editor who now publishes books about journalism.

Publish And Be Damned! by Hugh Cudlipp is published by Revel Barker at £12.99.

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The funny side of The Street

By Colin Dunne

Of all the responses that Kit Miller could inspire – and among these I include friendship, admiration, and riotous laughter – there was one that was never far away.

Alarm.

So when Kit said he was interested in renting the basement of my house in Chelsea, it produced a certain frisson of anxiety. Did he want a bed-sit in town perhaps?

‘No,’ he said, then flashed his film-star smile. ‘I was thinking more of storing stuff there.’

Alarm accelerated into panic.

Stuff? What sort of stuff? What would Kit Miller want to stockpile in my basement? The possibilities flared up. His collection of Page Three girls perhaps (he was aiming for a full set at the time)? Several tons of unwanted slimming pills? His cricket gear (he was near county standard)?

Or was there the faintest possibility it could be ‘stuff’ that is always described as having a street value, as opposed to a Boots vale?

This was, after all, Kit Miller.

For anyone who has never known the pleasure (considerable) or the terror (mild) of knowing Kit Miller, let me tell you that even in Old Fleet Street, where characters came outsize, he pushed the credibility barriers.

To be quite fair, let’s say first of all that he was a top-flight tabloid journo. Was? No doubt he still is. But although he’s living quietly (as far as I know) in Essex with wife and children, in my mind he belongs in the pre-Wapping days when newspapers could accommodate men like him. Now he’d give them a heart attack.

He was delightful too, liked by men, lusted after by women. Topping six-foot, fairish curly hair, bright blue eyes, a smile almost permanently in place, he was funny, clever, resourceful, charming, and very quick-witted. In the Sun feature room one morning, a messenger stuck his head round the door and called out: ‘Anyone ’ere interested in ’aving a Jack Russell terrier puppy?’ Kit paused at his typewriter. ‘No thanks, I’ve just had a pizza.’

Kit had this problem. Offered the choice between a rational, considered, sensible and responsible course of action, or a good laugh, he would always opt for the good laugh.

When Dick Parrack, the Sun managing editor, gave him a warning over coming in late, it wouldn’t have been too difficult to keep good time for a day or two. Instead, Kit then rolled in just in time for lunch and was inevitably paraded before the boss.

He had an explanation. Of course. Kit always had an explanation. He’d had an urgent medical appointment and to prove it he gave Dick the name of the doctor and the number. As Kit watched, Dick dialled the number and walked straight into the trap.

‘We never under any circumstances divulge the names of our patients,’ the doctor thundered. It was the Genital Disease Clinic at Bart’s.

‘Not my fault…’ protested Kit. Later, he told me that he thought it would be ungrateful to miss the opportunity to link the name Dick with genital diseases.

Kit achieved some sort of national fame when, as PR man for Peter Foster, the man who helped the Blairs with their property deals, he became a regular top-of-the-bill act on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life programme.

Foster come up with some slimming tea and Kit, in charge of the PR, obliged with a story that Sam Fox, a Page Three girl who had become a top celebrity, had lost half-a-stone with the tea.

Perhaps we should say at this point that Sam Fox had been Kit’s girl-friend for two years and was now, conveniently, going out with Foster. The Sun ran the story, the money poured in, and That’s Life featured Kit 21 times. Not always with admiration.

The People and the Mirror also ran stories about him. They paid him £148,000 in libel damages.

At that point, Maxwell drowned. Kit likes to think that he drowned himself rather than sign a cheque for Kit Miller. However, his two sons did.

It wasn’t much alongside the fortune that the sales of tea brought in. That went rather quickly on cars, gambling, drinking, jewellery, buying a racehorse, and the other necessities of life.

Oddly enough, the next venture – a slimming pill, for a change – featured the same cast of Foster, Sam and Kit. Again, Kit heeded an editorial plug.

Naturally, he headed straight for the first female editor in Fleet Street who was in her first week at the News of the World, Wendy Henry had been a street-wise freelance and was certainly not so gullible as Dick Parrack. Did she want a brilliant exclusive. Sam Fox, ‘may’ be pregnant. Wendy was offered the story along with a photograph of the nursery at Foster’s home as evidence.

The price? That the NoW would carry a story about an actor who had lost lots of weight with this new pill. Wendy went for it.

Living in Foster’s house at the time was Foster’s mother and sister who had, as it happened, a baby.

Kit took the photographer up to the house, which was empty. They found a ladder, climbed up to the window and there was a nursery complete with cot and cuddly toys. ‘What a stroke of luck,’ says Kit. Unless, of course, he had been up all night knitting cuddly toys – but don’t let’s think about that.

‘Sam in Shotgun Wedding’ was the headline. Near the back of the paper was half a page on the slimmed-down actor.

For the next couple of days, the slimming-pill office in Hammersmith was like Porke’s Drift. Fatties from all over Britain descended in an avalanche of lard, the police were called to sort it out, the NoW switchboard crashed, and the money just poured in. Kit had to hire 150 people in a ballroom to open the mail.

Here comes the bad luck. Sam Fox wasn’t pregnant after all. Wendy was… well, cross. Kit was distraught. No-one likes to see a story collapse.

On the other hand, he did have his share of the £2 million that had rolled in. So it wasn’t all bad news.

How did he do it? Well, Kit Miller is a persuasive man. When two American Express men found him in the Sun office – he hadn’t paid their bill, apparently – he took them out for a drink and pointed out that with his lifestyle his credit limit was ludicrous. They agreed.

They raised it to £10,000, which he had in cash within two hours. He flew to Hong Kong, stayed at the penthouse suite at The Mandarin, one of the world’s most famous hotels, with his own butler. He had a few suits made at Sam’s (as you do), had a few drinks, and flew home three days’ later – skint.

A scoundrel? Good heavens no, Kit was never a scoundrel. A bit of a scamp, possibly. A rascal, I think he’d go along with that. A little tinker, definitely. And he did occasionally get mixed up with people who were perhaps even more scampish.

Some pals were opening a club in South London. Sadly, their previous activities meant they couldn’t be directors, so Kit stepped in. The licence was granted. At the official opening, which Kit didn’t attend, there was a stabbing, which was sort of fatal.

Then – would you believe it? – another stroke of appalling luck. The next night the club was torched.

As a thank-you, his pals gave him a solid gold watch-strap which he noticed had a brown stain.

‘Don’t worry,’ they told him. ‘It’s only a bit of blood.’

Kit’s invincible charm carried him through it all. Although it did flinch a bit when he drove all the way from Essex to play cricket for a pub team pulled together by John Dodd (ex-Sun, later the Observer and the Spectator) in West Sussex. If I tell you I was playing, you will have some idea of the standard, which was approximately that of your local brownie troop.

Miller was a brilliant sportsman. He went out to bat and thrashed the bowling all over Sussex and parts of Hampshire. One bowler suffered particularly badly.

As we left the field, I asked Kit why on earth he’d come all that way to play joke cricket. ‘Tell the truth,’ he said, ‘I was hoping to get some work out of it.’

Just behind him, a voice said: ‘As far as I’m concerned, Miller, you’ll never work again.’ It was the commissioning editor whose bowling had been dispatched high over Portsmouth.

‘If I’d known,’ Miller protested, ‘I would’ve let you bowl me. If you could’ve got one straight, that is…’

These days he’s down in Essex with his kids aged from two to 16. He can reel off the projects he’s working on – two children’s books, trying to get finance for a gangster movie he’s written (‘no, I am not one of the characters’), a rom-com, pitching to studios, and trying to salvage a massive deal in Brazil.

He’s been ‘having meetings’ with a theatre director to discuss a play about his slimming deals. ‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘I’m trying to decide who should play me. I’m torn between Brad Pitt and Ronnie Corbett.’

He would also like to point out that he has never been convicted of anything more serious than a speeding offence.

Can this all be true? I’ve no idea, but – as always with Kit – I’m not sure it matters. It is, as Kit himself says, a good laugh, and you can’t ask for more than that.

In any case, it’s difficult to fix the truth with complete certainty when you’re dealing with a man who says his father was Gary Miller, who sprang to fame singing Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

I mean, that’s seriously unbelievable.

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