I think we felt that the revived Cassandra column wasn’t quite making the waves we were hoping it would. I think it appealed to a Mirror public that doesn’t really exist any more – all the letters we got were from old people. – Daily Mirror

Issue # 133

5 February 2010

This Week

In his haste to return to the desk following this year’s Cudlipp Lecture, the Ranters editor neglected to mention this snippet from the function.

Thanking the speaker (Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger) Lady Cudlipp said that she was grateful for his decision to change the paper’s format to Berliner. ‘As you probably know, Hugh bequeathed me a parrot and the parrot has a cage… so now at last I have a reason for buying your paper.’

The London College of Communications laid on a post-lecture dinner for the speaker, Lady Cudlipp and the winner of the Cudlipp Young Journalist Award. Mr Rusbridger didn’t turn up. Anywhere else it would have made a diary par.

So, to this week. Lady Ranter Liz Hodgkinson has touched a few raw nerves with her rants (see past issues) about the way that commissioning editors and other desk-bound execs treat on-the-road contributors. There’s another response today from freelance David Baird that will probably shock old-timers who believed in dealing with contributors with respect and showing appreciation for their input.

Then we have two pieces from Down Under, which is always a pleasure (not least as a sign that this site is being read, even devoured, at the other end of the globe). Norm Lipson relates how he made it from Cadet – as they call them – to Real Reporter, and Geoff Walker describes his late start (he was 50, so there’s hope for us all) as a hack.

Edward Playfair remembers the Glory Days (as most of us do). ‘For all the romance of Fleet Street, this is a seedy place. Machine-room men having knee-tremblers with canteen women in the alleys behind Tudor Street, in broad daylight and full view of anyone glancing out of a window.’ Surely not.

Meanwhile, Andy Leatham has written to the editor saying it’s a pity that old hands get together these days only at funerals. After seeing off reporter Clive Hadfield last week, he and a bunch of like minds discussed whether they needed such an excuse. So now the ex-Sunday People staffman is hoping to put that right by organising an ‘It’s Not a Funeral’ bash.

‘At the moment, it’s nothing more than an idea. It has been mentioned before but at Clive’s funeral I got the impression there was a real appetite for a piss-up that wasn’t a wake,’ writes Andy. ‘I don’t yet have any ideas of dates or locations, other than it should be in a proper pub with proper beer. ‘We might even descend unannounced on a poor unsuspecting landlord and drink him out of house and home – just like used to happen when there were enough of us on the road in the north to form a pack. ‘Right now I just need an indication of the level of support there would be for a thrash, probably in Manchester later this year.’

If you’re interested, e-mail Leatham at: andrew@vpoint.org.uk

And we finish with another Liz Hodgkinson rant – this time on lazy intros. Media teachers, if they were in the game before moving to the groves of Academe, should know about this. It’s all part of the Ranters School of Journalism service.

Oh, and – late news – yesterday was apparently Liberace Day (I didn’t know, either).

You remember the guy who sued the Daily Mirror and Cassandra, claiming they’d suggested he might be gay? He was the highest paid entertainer in the world, in the days of Elvis and The Beatles.

But gay…? Who could possibly have thought it? Anyway the story, if you haven’t heard it, is told in Crying All The Way To The Bank, by Revel Barker.

‘A truly sensational read’ – Editor of Ranters.

#

Where’s the cheque, mate?

By David Baird

Liz Hodgkinson is all too right in her rant about the failure of editors to have the courtesy to respond, even if it’s only to say ‘No’.

It should be mandatory for editors to swap places once a year with a freelance, just for a few days, in order to remind them what life is like at the other end of the line. Many staffers have no appreciation of the difficulties of freelancing, or for that matter of reporting (memories of their own experience blurred by the years and long liquid lunches).

They sit at their cosy desks, attended by hot-and-cold-running secretaries, issuing edicts, bawling out subs… Meanwhile, the freelance pays his own heating and lighting bills and doubles as salesman-secretary-accountant-business manager. Researching and writing a story can seem almost incidental.

Better than working for a living? Here are a few incidents that spring to mind:

Replies to story ideas? Forget it. What are you, a trouble-maker? I’m still waiting for responses from The Guardian (circa 2002), Daily Telegraph (2003), Tintwistle Observer (1990) etc etc.

A leading magazine called to advise me that the editorial staff was about to strike for better pay. Could they count on my support by withholding copy?

‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘Your demands do of course include better fees for your far-flung correspondents?’

Answer came there none.

A charming girl called to say her new publication wanted to use a picture of mine. No problem. It would be on its way immediately. And the fee?

‘Oh, there’s no fee. We’ve over-run our budget so we can’t actually pay anything.’

If you supply such material as photos or documents, don’t expect to have them returned. In this respect, the Express once agreeably surprised me. They actually returned some colour transparencies – and only 10 years after they had been urgently rushed to the features department.

Maybe the answer is to get out of day-to-day journalism and into books, surely a much more gentlemanly field. You’re kidding. Poor folk are so overwhelmed with work that a ‘Not interested’ reply arrives months later or never.

As for paying for work done… Against my better judgment I signed a ridiculously one-sided contract with a large American publisher. It threatened me with heavy penalties if copy was not supplied on time. But, when it came to pay day, there was only silence. Months of angry letters and costly phone calls to New York (usual reply ‘He’s out’ or ‘She’s left the staff’) ensued.

But UK publishers are no better. One ‘lost’ a number of pictures supplied, only for them later to turn up on the cover and inside one of their guidebooks, with no acknowledgment.

Right now I’m haggling with a Spanish publisher who says he can’t pay me royalties earned in 2008 because of ‘cash-flow difficulties’. Not even ‘a cheque in the post’.

Cash flow? Now there are words to conjure with. Like most freelances I am willing to go with the flow. But when is it going to start?

Meanwhile, a few places are still available in the El Bairdo survival course for errant editors. Classes will be held in email etiquette, how to live without expenses, how to handle bolshie freelances and how to control over-exuberant egos. There will be no breaks for tea or liquid lunches. Fees will be paid IN ADVANCE.

#

The big fight promotion

By Norman Lipson

Sydney, Australia, 1968. The Daily Telegraph is the biggest selling newspaper in the city… a tabloid with strict rules of writing. No passive voice! The lead par no longer than 25 words! All other pars no longer than 20 words!

Break any of these rules and the subs would have you drawn and quartered (pardon the passive voice) in public.

These rules were unbreakable on the Tele, a newspaper owned by the most powerful and influential man in the in the nation, Sir Frank Packer (Sir Frank sold the Telegraph to Rupert Murdoch in 1975).

Another one of the unbreakable rules of the era related to shorthand. Every cadet had to attend regular classes in Pitman’s Shorthand. The shorthand teacher was a frumpy, middle-aged spinster who wore frumpy dresses and Doc Martin-type shoes, had greying hair tied in a bun and had a true ‘school ma’m’ attitude to us cadets.

Miss Kyrsop liked some of us and detested others. I was one of those in the ‘detested’ category and I fully understand why. As a recent escapee from an undistinguished high school career and frequent recipient of corporal punishment known as ‘the cane’, I always had an adverse reaction to disciplinarians such as the prickly Miss Kyrsop.

On the odd occasions when I graced her shorthand concentration camps I made it quite clear through body language that I was there purely on sufferance. I would have much preferred to have been poked in the eye with a sharp stick (again excuse the passive voice).

She also made it quite clear that she tolerated my presence only in order to humiliate me in front of my colleagues and gloat when I would inevitably flunk my final shorthand examination at the end of my three-year cadetship… resulting in my sacking. She could not wait for the day.

‘Your end is nigh,’ Miss Kyrsop would often bark at me through gritted teeth.

‘Such is life,’ I would reply, pinching notorious Aussie bushranger Ned Kelly’s famous last words just prior to his hanging in 1880. There’s not much point being a folk hero if it leads to your demise… I reckon Ned would agree. Professionally, I was heading in the same direction as the bushranger fabled for wearing a tin helmet and being played by Mick Jagger in the movie bearing his name.

For me, there would be no movie. No one would be playing Norm Lipson.

Anyhow, here I was with six months remaining until the expiration of my cadetship and I still had not finished the theory part of my shorthand studies, while most of my fellow cadets had already attained the mandatory speed of 120 words per minute.

I was already on the steps of the gallows! As the old adage goes: ‘A man should never resign himself to fate because the resignation might be accepted’.

But resign myself I did as I could not think of anything else to do. Thank goodness I did rely on it, because on this occasion, fate turned out to be my best mate.

It was a Wednesday night that I and several of my colleagues attended a boxing tournament at a local club attended by about a thousand aficionados, spivs, hoons and illegal bookmakers.

Big money was always wagered on these events and when the referee of the main fight controversially awarded the fight to the rank outsider (much to the bookies’ delight) a brawl erupted inside and outside the ring. The referee was hit over the head by a loser wielding a foldaway metal chair and it seemed just about the entire audience began throwing punches, chairs, bottles and anything else they could get their hands on… such was the magnitude of the referee’s decision and the financial repercussions.

As I stood hard up against the back wall trying desperately to avoid a loose punch or flying debris, I looked at my watch. Eleven thirty. Bloody beauty! I’ve got time to make the first edition.

As fate would have it, there was a pay phone next to me and I had enough coins in my pocket to make the call to the copytakers. I did just that and dictated the story as it was happening before my very eyes and just as police emergency squads and ambulances were arriving to quell the melee and treat the injured.

It was a real buzz when that story saw the light of day on the front page of the next edition of the Daily Telegraph. I felt well satisfied, but little did I know how this would affect the rest of my life.

The following Saturday morning, I was sleeping off a big night out (I was still living with my parents at the time) when the telephone rang, rousing me out of my coma.

‘I’d like to speak to Mr Lipson,’ said an elderly woman’s voice.

‘No, he’s not home. He’s at work,’ I rasped, thinking the lady was after my dad. No one had ever called me Mister.

‘Sorry, I am after Norm Lipson,’ she replied, realising my misunderstanding.

‘Yeah, you’ve got him,’ was my witty retort.

It turned out that the elderly woman on the other end of the line was none other than Miss Faircloth, secretary to the most powerful and feared man in the land… Sir Frank Packer.

‘Mr Lipson,’ his gruff voiced boomed through the earpiece as I cowered at the other end imagining Armageddon.

‘Yes,’ I replied meekly (which was out of character for a person known as Stormy Normie).

It seemed the editor had told Sir Frank of the young cadet journalist who had shown the initiative to phone through the ‘riot story’ as it was in progress… and Sir Frank was impressed.

‘There’ll be a nice surprise for you next week,’ the boss foreshadowed.

I thanked him profusely, waited for him to hang up on me and then floated through the rest of the weekend wondering what was in store.

To my delight, Sir Frank had decided that I was to be graded as a fully fledged reporter. My cadetship had ended without ever having to pass shorthand. It was a middle finger salute to the crusty old maiden, Miss Kyrsop.

Had this not have happened, I have no idea how in the bloody hell I would have occupied myself over the next four decades.

It just goes to prove another old adage. ‘Fate and self-help share equally in shaping our destiny’.

#

The gent from The Times

By Geoff Walker

I began my career in journalism at age 50 when, almost by accident, I started writing for the Port Stephens Examiner, the Tilligerry Times, the Karuah Valley News and the Newcastle Herald. For 15 years I wrote short news stories, features and a by-lined column – about 3,000 pieces in all, with no training, no computers and no-one telling me what to write. I took my own pictures with an ancient Yashica camera I bought at a garage sale for $5.

My favourite was my local paper – the Tilligerry Times, circ 7,000, published monthly to serve the people living in the fishing villages of the Tilligerry Peninsula. You’ll find it between Raymond Terrace and Bulahdelah (rhymes with Sheila) on the New South Wales north coast.

We had a problem with juvenile crime. There was virtually no policing so a local bloke called Don Barrett called a public meeting where he suggested we ‘buy a cop.’ I wrote the story and it immediately went national. The city dailies picked it up, the television news magazine show A Current Affair rocked into town and Don didn’t get to work for three days as he fielded endless phone calls from talk-back radio stations.

Don felt a bit out of his depth and asked me to help. The Sydney Daily Telegraph was in town and wanted to stooge a picture. Could I organise a rent-a-crowd outside the (unused) police station for a photo shoot at 2pm? Sure. A quick phone-around got me a group of ‘concerned citizens’ to do the job. I decided to turn up to see what was going on.

I just made it in time. I had been opening oysters and was running late, so I didn’t have time to change from my gum boots, overalls and a beanie. I arrived in my ancient Suzuki Sierra just as the diminutive Telegraph snapper was framing his shot.

I decided to have some fun. I pulled up beside him and got out of the car with my Yashica slung over my shoulder. I’m big – 6ft tall and 18 stone - and I towered over the little bloke from the big smoke. I grabbed his shoulder with my left hand, sank my thumb in so that he winced, and fixed him with my cold, steely stare. ‘Who the f--- are you?’ I demanded. He seemed scared and replied in a surprised, faltering voice: ‘I… I… I’m from the Telegraph!’ He thought his emphasis on his paper’s name would impress me. I grabbed his right hand and shook it: ‘Geoff Walker … from The Times.’

For a moment he looked stunned. His head fell forward, he covered his eyes and shook his head in disbelief. He lowered his huge expensive camera so I seized the moment. I stepped in front of him saying ‘Mate, I dunno about you, but I’ve got a deadline.’ I asked my rent-a-crowd to wave their fists and look angry and stole his photo, snapping off three or four frames.

The Tele man was still in a daze. I put my hand on his shoulder and consoled him. ‘Mate, you’re probably a bit confused. I don’t work for that Pommy rag. I work for the most read paper between the boat ramp and the garbage dump – the Tilligerry Times.’

Then I got in my car and left him gasping in a cloud of fumes. Another scoop for The Times.

#

The gravy train

By Edward Playfair

I’d last seen Peter Roberts chief subbing the Northern Echo in downtown Darlington. And here he was chief subbing the Daily Mail – on my first night. This really was going to be the Street of Adventure with serious topspin.

Back in the north east Peter as chief sub would rough taste the copy, then fine taste it. Choose the pictures and crop them. Draw the pages. Hand out the stories. Revise them and the headlines when they came back. Whack ’em off to those toffs in the composing room (You remember them – they were the people who said: ‘I always wanted to be a journalist but I couldn’t afford the cut in wages.’ How we laughed.

But wait a minute – Peter was always cool but this is incredible. There’s an old boy there doing the rough tasting for him. He comes in at midday and goes home spot on six. Bert is fine copytasting – and there is none finer.

And what’s this? Peter gives the stories a quick read when they come back and then hands them to miserable old Ken to revise!

There’s more. When Peter decides who’s going to sub what, he writes the operative’s name on top of the story, shouts ‘Copy!’ and a flunky appears from nowhere, brings round the story and puts it smoothly in front of you with an almost regimental ‘Thank you, sir’. How do they know my name? It’s only my first day.

I suppose you could shout ‘Boy’ when you’d subbed the story and have it carried back to the chief sub’s in-tray but somehow that seems to take away that personal sense of service which Fleet Street has always nurtured, so I’ll walk it over myself.

The make-ups appear on Peter’s desk hand-tooled by the art desk. They’d been drawn by Leslie Sellers, some stories placed, pix all cropped and copied for the sub to write a caption.

This is truly wonderland…

What’s happening here? Marky the splash sub has put down his pen and sat up. He’s reading a book. His splash story has become a short so that’s all the work he’ll do tonight.

Frank the deep-downtable sub is also deep into a book. When he goes home they’ll find under his basket the pile of shorts he couldn’t be bothered to sub. In later years he’ll convince a particularly gullible chief sub that he must go home at 8.30 to catch the last train. For some reason he doesn’t mention that he’s on a main line, a Tube line and an all-night bus route and has three cars.

Across the table a gentleman with a green ink pen is making marks on proofs. I don’t know why he toils as ‘proof revise sub’. When his marks get upstairs they are automatically thrown away by the stone sub or even the comp.

Not to worry. His mind is really on his toy shop and the stock he needs to get in for Christmas. That’s his real job – not this little operation on the side of an evening. A bit like all the comps and lino-men upstairs popping in after they’ve finished being taxi drivers and publicans for the day.

The hum of selfless toil is broken by the rickety sound of a trolley advancing towards us, manoeuvred by someone who looks like Julie Walters’ inspiration for Mrs Overall. It’s Vicky, taking orders for supper – brought to your desk, sir, and eaten at your desk, sir.

The trick, I learn, is to get your grub before Vicky’s grubby thumb goes in the gravy. Speed and purposeful thought are essential but not always enough. I was a misguided example and quaint inspiration to all new subs when I ordered a Vicky special on my second night as well. But not my third or ever again.

For all the romance of Fleet Street, this is a seedy place. Machine-room men having knee-tremblers with canteen women in the alleys behind Tudor Street, in broad daylight and full view of anyone glancing out of a window.

We troop out to the pub mid-evening and again after work, where The Harrow is still open well after midnight and the people you said goodnight to at six are still there, touching up the barmaids, rheumy-eyed and too canned even to speak.

Someone moans to landlord Alan Dove about his prices. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘this place is always stuffed full with people complaining about the prices.’

Perhaps over to Auntie’s, then, where your glass is filled to the brim with slops. ‘I’ll have a fresh pint, please,’ I say. ‘Wossamatter? That’s overspill. Fresh overspill.’ Into the Mucky for a five o’clock ‘conference quickie’ while the editor torments his execs. We’re out for 20 minutes and five pints. Subbing after that is a real achievement.

When the paper comes in we devour our stories, try to understand why dead-hand Ken the revise oik has wrecked another beautiful pay-off while he oiled up to the back bench – he wasn’t named Brown for nothing.

Then we amble through the rest of the paper. What is in the mind of these features subs? Every day there’s a new whim or fancy. At the moment it’s Demis Roussos, who’s high in the hit parade but features subs don’t believe even a Greek is called Demis so they always call him Denis.

In years to come they also don’t believe there can be a film just called Once Were Warriors so they always change it to They Once Were Warriors. Curious.

So I sit there with my mouth open at the wonder of not just seeing Vincent Mulchrone but discovering at first hand what an excellent and professional chap he is. Ian Wooldridge, too. Both stray on to the news pages and I have to rewrite their intros because we need 12 words not 120. They are both so charming and both say the same: ‘That’s fine but could I ask you to keep my last par – that’s what I put all the work into.’

Every afternoon in those overstaffed Sixties there was a scramble for seats. You got on the subs’ table if you were lucky but it wasn’t unusual to be dumped among those reporter chappies who were always on the phone to the speaking clock. Bit of a one-way conversation, but at least they looked busy.

One sub eased the seating shortage by coming in as a 3.30 man and going home as a three o’clocker. Good old Irv – always selflessly putting other people first.

And you weren’t always even guaranteed a story, whatever time you came in. Once a night wasn’t unusual. But you could admire the architecture, particularly the glass cubicle in the middle of the newsroom where Dempster toiled – and stuck all his fan mail on the windows facing out.

The one from Max Bygraves was everyone’s favourite. For some reason Dempster had suggested that our Maxie was not the greatest person the world had ever known and was duly put right by the great showman, who knew much, much better, of course, because he’d told himself so.

His letter contained the filthiest, most disgusting appraisal of our Nigel’s personal habits, opinions and abilities. And most of it wasn’t even true.

Some of us were dumped on the Greville diary desk, cradle of such stars-to-be as Ross Benson and James Whitaker. His rosy complexion and fruity booming voice seemed to inhabit every corner of the newsroom. ‘And who’s your mother married to? Sorry? Oh – your father.’ Collapse of stout party.

‘Thank you so much,’ purrs James into the phone. ‘Wonderful. Thank you so much. Keep in touch – so lovely to talk to you.’ Puts phone down.

‘Bastard! Wouldn’t say a bloody word!’

There were idols but many of them fell. The green ink man and the lazy splash sub lost their sinecures and went in the Night of the Long White Envelopes. So did Leslie Sellers.

A few years later I went to work with him and had to dive out of the office one afternoon to drop some pages off at Victoria. I left at 4.30 and incredibly was back at our office off The Strand at five o’clock.

On my desk was a note from Leslie: ‘5.30 – couldn’t wait for you any longer. See you tomorrow.’

Summed it all up, really.

#

Getting started

By Liz Hodgkinson

The ever-growing army of both gentlemen and lady ranters is constantly complaining about the general lowering of standards in all aspects of journalism.

And usually with good reason.

This week, my rant is about lazy intros. In my day we were taught, if not bludgeoned and constantly beaten about the head, about the supreme importance of the intro.

An intro, we were told, was the most vital aspect of any journalistic story, the addictive come-on that would lead you in, encapsulate the tone of the piece and generally excite the reader to finish the feature. We were, after all, in the entertainment business and if the readers were not entertained, why would they buy a publication?

Part of the accepted wisdom of the times was that you should NEVER kick off a story with a quote. Not only was this considered the supreme laziness, it made layout difficult, especially when there was a big drop cap. Plus, stories starting with quotes are hard to read and do not encourage you to persevere.

Today, when reading a newspaper or magazine, I sometimes amuse myself – or more accurately, make myself angry – by counting up all the intros that start with quotes and think to myself: how did they let this clumsy intro get into the paper? As any fule no, journalists begin stories with quotes when they simply can’t think of any other way to start. It’s the get-out clause, the last resort, and they should not be allowed to get away with it.

Of course, in the olden days, clever intros were not always the individual work of the writer. Most publications had armies of talented subs back at base camp who could often come up with just the right catchy sentence that had evaded the reporter.

Nowadays, nearly all the subs have gone and managements are trying to get rid of the few that are left, arguing that we can all be our own subs. But we can’t. Sometimes, with the best will in the world, a punchy intro just won’t come and the story needs another, fresh eye on it.

Sub-editors were, after all, employed for a very good reason: to knock a story into shape and maximise its impact. Their demise has led to lack of care about the intro so that now it can be as lazy, clichéd or wordy as one likes and it still goes straight into the paper.

My son Will, an established writer contributing to many national publications, says that nobody ever taught him about intros and nobody has ever pointed out the importance of a good intro to him. And I suspect it’s the same with most young journalists of today – not that Will is all that young any more.

Managements and proprietors should care about intros, as the more startling, dramatic and original they are, the more likely the reader is to be excited. Many intros these days are so dull, so coma-inducing that there is little incentive to carry on reading. So, gradually, it stands to reason, readers will stop buying the publication.

As examples, look at these three intros written in the 1970s:

1. The 5 foot 6 inch frame of Dustin Hoffman is scarcely the ideal location for a Homeric struggle. His head is moulded on heroic lines with its wide brow and noble nose, but thereafter he is constructed like a comedian: his arms and legs are short and tense and his posture perky as though he is permanently preparing to deliver a funny routine.

2. A list of instructions came with the horse, how to adjust his dress, hook him on to the caravan and so forth, and this was very comforting until you realised that the horse, of course, wouldn't have read them, thus halving their value in times of stress.

3. Queen Victoria bought the Fiji Islands from their native chieftain for a trifling sum in 1874 and she could scarcely have added a nicer trinket to her splendid collection of mountains and deserts, lakes and rivers, palm and pine. Today, with the old monarch’s attic practically empty and the remnants going cheap down the Portobello Road, Fiji remains almost intact as a marvellous heirloom for anyone who still sees the Union Jack as more than a motif on a carrier bag.

And now these, written in 2010:

“For as far back as I can remember I’ve wanted to be a doctor. That’s the main reason I want to go to university,” says Miriam Rose, 17, a student at Barnet College in North London.

And this:

“You can see my father in her smile, not me,” laughs Princess Natalia Strozzi in Relais Santa Croce, an 18th century palazzo hotel in the heart of Florence

What’s the difference? The first ones are writerly, pacey, imaginative, original and invite you to read on. The second two are dull, static and make you yawn with boredom. Did anybody ask the writer: who’s Princess Natalia Whatsit? Who cares whether Miriam Rose, 17, wants to be a doctor? What’s the interest to the reader of either of these intros? And they are taken from leading publications, not parish newsletters.

Of course, as usual, the decline of the intro is all to do with lack of money, not lack of talent. The money has gone out of journalism, or at least, nobody wants to put any money into it, with the result that it is no longer taken seriously. And one of the prime casualties is the intro. It takes time, money, effort and application to get an intro right and, these days, nobody can be bothered. One reason that Dan Brown novels are such bestsellers is because of the first lines of each chapter: however much you may consider it’s all complete rubbish, the first lines are so addictive that you can’t help reading on.

That’s how journalism intros used to be – and should be still.

Liz Hodgkinson is the author of Ladies Of The Street, the story of the contribution made by women to the success of the newspaper industry. Published by Revel Barker at £9.99. In stock and with free UK delivery from amazon by clicking on the link.

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

Issue #134

12 February, 2010

This Week

More tips for aspiring hacks (and reminiscences for old hands) as Keith McDowall recalls what he learnt second-hand from Stan Bonnet’s dad. Basically it was to get off yer arse, out from behind the desk, and meet the people. Oh dear… that might involve incurring exes, though. Or possibly even going to a pub.

Another tip is to get yourself a gimmick. That’s what young Geoffrey Mather was told. That way, you’ll always be remembered out there.

Phil Harrison has a double-barrelled chunk of memory from the old days on the Evening Standard (you remember it – used to be a hugely successful paid-for, in London).

Garth Gibbs remembers when he met Nelson Mandela, got involved with local politics and received an early morning visit from the boys from BOSS.

And Harold Heys explains why Edgar Wallace is uniquely honoured with a plaque in his honour at the foot of Fleet Street.

#

Get out from behind the desk

By Keith McDowall

When I joined the Daily Mail in 1955 it was just a couple of weeks after Stanley Bonnet, who had been around a bit longer than me – and it showed – though we had both come up from a local paper grounding.

Stanley had taken the precaution to bring in with him a good story about arms busting which gave him a run of page one stories – with bylines – in his first few days. I was dependent on what the news desk tossed to me. I kicked myself because I was not short of sources in south London. It just had not occurred to me but it was a lesson I never forgot... always take something along in your pocket. Especially to a new job.

The other thought Stanley left with me came out one night as we chatted on a quiet night shift. Apparently when he started on a local, somewhere out in the Heathrow area, I seem to recall, Stanley was quizzed by his father when he got home on his first day.

‘Oh I rang so-and-so. And then I made a call to that number…’

The second night, Bonnet Senior was again keen to hear of his son's progress. But again it appeared young Stanley had stayed all day in the office. And a similar report came on the third day.

‘Listen son,’ said Stanley's father, who was what was known then as a commercial traveller. (Today they give them upmarket title of ‘representative’.) ‘I don't know anything abut journalism but I do know about selling.

‘I seldom landed an order on the phone. When times are tough the only way is to get off your backside and go and make a personal call. You may not make the order first time but after a while they will take to you, maybe admire your persistence, or take a shine to you.

‘To me, that's how to get an order and I reckon it can't be all that different in newspapers.’

Once a contact was made it was all right to ring, he advised. But press the flesh first. Get to know the client. Judge his moods. Chat up his family. Stroke the dog…

It was a practice I realised I had always myself followed on the South London Press though maybe I had not thought it through. Anyway Stanley's father's dictum also stayed with me for the rest of my career.

I never ever rang anybody if I could make a personal visit. I always tried to use it as an industrial correspondent on the Daily Mail when the confidence of contacts was vital. Later in Whitehall, in charge of Government PR departments – going to see a civil servant personally instead of relying on the written missive, frequently paid off. An official became a friend rather than a signature on an wordy brief – he then usually told you a lot more background. And the meat of it.

It came back to me when I arrived as the new chief information officer at the Board of Trade where there were no fewer than ninety under secretaries – major general rank – and I was sinking under the paper.

But I kept noticing one name – Robert Fell – on the minutes piling in to my in-tray. I could have phoned. But instead I went and found his office and introduced myself as the new chief information officer.

‘Come in,’ said Bob Fell ‘I've been waiting for you for twelve years.’

Why had I come? I explained that I kept seeing his name and some others and needed to understand how this giant Board of Trade operated.

‘Don't worry about all those names. There are only twelve officials in this place that make it tick and we all keep in touch with each other. We copy in each other on the papers that matter. We meet here on Friday lunch times to plan our next move. You are invited.’

He was right. For example, Bob was determined the National Exhibition Centre would be built in Birmingham – not in London as had been mooted. The successful NEC is just one of the successes of the Fell group.

I would never have known about it – or been so well informed – if I had relied on the phone, It was the personal call that did the trick.

#

Gimme a gimmick

By Geoffrey Mather

Flamboyance was a word I knew about but could only spell at the time. I came across it in the flesh one night in a friend’s house. I had been invited to meet someone he knew, named Cedric. A big shot. A journalistic whiz-kid. It was raining and I arrived with an umbrella. I was introduced to his wife.

‘Is that your gimmick?’ she said, looking down. I looked down myself in some panic dreading to see the object she had observed. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Your umbrella,’ she said. ‘Oh that. No,’ I replied. ‘It’s raining.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You always need a gimmick. I thought that was yours. People remember you that way. Cedric’s gimmick is a tin box. In it is a tray. Beneath the tray is menthol. Above it are cigarettes. He makes his own menthol cigarettes. They might forget a name at a party but they always remember the gimmick.’

The glittering career of Cedric unfolded like wondrous petals. He had held a high position in Fleet Street. He owned a group of newspapers somewhere far away and on one masthead it said, ‘As read by 100,000 people.’

My mind newly sharpened by his wife, I immediately thought: That’s all very well. But who can count readers? And what is the actual circulation? Five thousand? Twenty thousand?’ I was learning. My eyes were getting closer together.

Cedric took up tycoonery in a big way, and had been offered a huge editorial position in America which, I heard, he lost only because he asked for a transfer fee to cover his income tax expenses.

But not before hob-nobbing with one of the biggest names in American publishing. (You will note that I am being careful with identities. Red-hot stuff, this.)

He scattered English jokes around New York and I assume that it was his latest gimmick.

‘There was this American tycoon, visiting England. He went into a pub and asked for a typical English joke. ‘Well,’ said a drinker, ‘I haven’t got a joke but I have a conundrum.’

‘Yea,’ said the Yank. ‘That sounds about right. What’s a conundrum?’

‘Well,’ said the drinker, ‘it’s a sort of puzzle. There was this girl at a crossroads. Up one road is coming a cyclist. And up another a motorist. And up another, a fellow on a horse. Which of these got the lass?’

‘I dunno,’ said the Yank. ‘Which one did?’

‘Fellow on the horse,’ said the drinker.

‘Why so?’ asked the Yank.

‘Because the horsmanewer.’

‘Yea, Yea,’ said the Yank. ‘Great. A conundrum, eh? I’ll tell that to the guys back home.’

So in New York, he called a board meeting. ‘Listen up, you guys,’ he said. ‘As you know I’ve just come back from li’l old England and I want to tell you a conundrum. ‘It’s a sort of joke, something they have there to make people laugh.

‘There’s this dame at an intersection, and up one highway comes a bicyclist, and up another an automobilist, and up another an equestrian. Which of these guys got the moll?’

Well, they said, they didn’t know, but they would dearly like to know because he was, after all, chairman.

‘The equestrian’’ he said.

‘Why the equestrian?’ They asked.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘for some peculiar reason the answer’s crap.’

After listening intently to Cedric’s joke, the American tycoon said, ‘You know - that could happen.’

Anyway, as we know, Cedric did not get his transfer fee and amid regrets all round he resumed his ballooning career in li’l old England.

One day my friend said, ‘Cedric’s coming up. Wants a day out in the country. Good for a slap-up lunch. Ribble Valley. You coming?’

Was I coming? My word! I would have given up my sub’s spike for ever for the privilege.

So Cedric arrived, in a Rolls, parked it nicely, observed his once-familiar surroundings, and said, ‘My word – that’s not the old tripe shop?’

It was indeed – a poky place with high stools, smelling of strong vinegar, and loaded with the white honeycomb a sheep would sadly recognise as a stomach.

‘Good Lord above!’ said Cedric, rolling his eyes behind the expensive glasses. ‘Fancy that. Still going.’ My mind was set on the slap-up country meal, but the old tripe shop is where I ended up. On a high stool. Feet off the oilcloth. Still wearing the trilby. And I loathed tripe.

Cedric went back to the Rolls to extract from a tin box in the boot the petty cash from his Southern enterprises to pay the modest bill.

I don’t know what happened to him after that. The smell of menthol cigarettes drifted out of my consciousness. I keep looking at pictures of Obama in Washington thinking that Cedric might appear behind him for one of those global pronouncements. No go.

As for the advice: I failed even though I benefited from his further aid.

The great man said I should always live in an area where everyone else was rich. I was earning a pound a week at the time.

‘You see,’ he said, rather like Delia in full flow, ‘what you do is – you have Sunday lunch parties. A few drinks and snacks. And they’ll all come because it’s just a stroll and no driving involved. And the rule is – never try to borrow a small amount. You wouldn’t get it. You would be ostracised. You ask for a large amount. They understand large amounts, the larger the better, so they listen and come up with the cheque. And that’s how you make your way in the world.’

Somehow I was not ready for Cedric. I just didn’t have the flair. And when Joe Hyman, then chairman of Viyella, told me I was worth three times as much as I thought I was worth, it still didn’t amount to much.

I don’t know where Cedric is now. He would be sad to know that I never reached Bankers’ Avenue to give Sunday lunches.

I am, however – since menthol cigarettes are a bit old hat – thinking of taking up conundrums. Something might stick.

Former Daily Express features editor and columnist Geoffrey Mather ploughs his own blog, Perspectives, at http://www.northtrek.plus.com/

#

One for the pot

By Philip Harrison

The London Evening Standard had a unique way of getting edited copy from the sub-editors’ room to the typesetting department in 1964. In all the papers I had worked for, the copy was either taken by hand by a copyboy from the subs’ baskets to the typesetters or was put into a carrier and sent by chute.

The Standard’s editorial department was on the floor directly above the composing room. A hole about the size of a dinner plate with a diameter-hinged cover had been cut into a desk near the subs’ table. Directly beneath was the ‘cage’, where the print room foreman stood to distribute copy page by page to the Linotype operators to set into metal. Chains hanging from the floor above around the circumference of the cylinder which led from the hole in the editorial room ensured that when copy was dropped from the floor above, it landed on his desk and did not flutter to the floor.

Enter a new copyboy, a cockney lad who was keen to show that he could work quickly, as befitted a newspaper with nine editions a day. Arfur’s first job was to make the tea for the subs. When he had shown he could do that satisfactorily, he would be elevated to high things, such as getting sandwiches for the staff. Arfur had made one pot of tea and the subs were thirsting for more.

‘Make us another pot,’ yelled the chief sub. Sharp-eyed Arfur had seen other copyboys going to a desk, lifting the hinged swinging lid and dropping paper down the hole. So Arfur picked up the teapot half full of cold dregs, went to the copy chute, and poured the contents down the chute, on to the desk of the foreman, drenching him with cold tea and tea leaves.

It was the first time I had seen a spontaneous walkout of all printing-room staff. It took nearly an hour of pleading by the editor to persuade them that it was not deliberate and to go back to work. By then, a whole edition had been lost.

So Arfur’s working day started and ended in a few hours. I wonder what he is doing now.

…

I was sub-editing on the Standard features desk in 1965 when the chief feature sub tossed me Randolph Churchill’s weekly column to sub.

‘Just put the printer’s marks on it and write the heading,’ he said. ‘We don’t edit Randolph.’

Churchill, unlike his father, was not a prose stylist. Much of his column was turgid and the Standard ran it mainly because of his name. The editor, Charles Wintour, was a great believer in ‘name’ writers. The trouble was, he would not let their output be edited, which resulted in a lot of the Standard being almost unreadable.

I waded through Randolph’s column and encountered a paragraph so dense and devoid of meaning that I said to the chief sub: ‘There’s a bit here which is pretty obscure.’

‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘why don’t you give Randolph a ring and ask him about it?’ He gave me the number. I dialled. Got his butler. Was put through.

‘Yes?’ barked Churchill.

I introduced myself and said: ‘Sir, I am subbing your column for tomorrow’s paper and there is a passage in it which seems to me to be a little obscure.’

I could almost feel the rage coming through the earpiece.

‘To the obscure,’ snarled Churchill, ‘ALL things are obscure.’ And hung up. I carefully put the phone back on the receiver hoping no one had witnessed my humiliation.

Some hope. Suppressed sniggers turned to roars of laughter.

‘Just put the printer’s marks on it and write the heading,’ said the chief sub.

When Churchill died, BBC-TV had a tribute in which Michael Foot, the Labour MP and a former Standard leader writer, said: ‘Randolph was a loathsome person, but his one redeeming feature was that he was loathsome to rich and poor alike, to lords of the realm as well as restaurant waiters.’

Now retired, Phil Harrison started on the Telegraph in Brisbane, went to Hong Kong then to London for ABC and Fairfax. He worked for The Friend in Bloemfontein, and returned to London to sub on the Daily Sketch and Evening Standard before returning to Sydney (SMH, TV Times) and becoming press attaché in Stockholm, Washington and London.

#

Playing politics

By Garth Gibbs

I was in Johannesburg in 1990 when Rolihlahla (Nelson) Mandela was freed. But I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. Later, at a Miss World contest in Sun City, I had a better chance. But I blew it. He was chatting to Eric and Julia Morley and telling Eric that the 28 years he spent in prison on Robben Island had destroyed his ability to sleep late.

‘To this day I leap out of bed at six o’clock sharp,’ he said.

‘I get up at six every morning as well,’ said Eric.

Mandela raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘what prison were you in?’

It wasn’t the right time. And, alas, two meetings at the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square, weren’t right either.

I better start this at the beginning, in the summer of 1966 in Port Elizabeth to be exact. It was then that I ran into a girl called Christine Jane Emery, a pretty stunning natural blonde with brown eyes. She was twenty-ish, a former pupil of St Paul’s school in London, and the daughter of a City gentleman who had a huge say in the world’s copper. I only found that out much later.

Christine spoke fluent French as well as English and when she heard words in Afrikaans she said, ‘They’re talking in code’. She had a great sense of humour and was more concerned about the music charts than the political scene.

But that all changed when she read of a case in nearby Grahamstown.

A guy – needless to say he wasn’t white – was charged with attending a meeting that had been banned. The guy had proof that he was hundreds of miles away in Cape Town at the time but he was found guilty anyway. The magistrate said being in Cape Town was a technicality. Had he been in Grahamstown he would have attended the meeting.

Christine couldn’t believe it and neither could the Supreme Court which reversed the judgement.

But Christine suddenly became political. She started going to anti-government meetings and was very soon appointed secretary of the Defence and Aid Fund, which supplied cash for the defence of political prisoners.

I was working for the Evening Post, the fiercest anti-government newspaper in the country, and got used to her saying. ‘We’ve got a guest coming this weekend, but you’ve got to promise you won’t write about her.’

‘Who is the guest?’

‘No… you’ve got to give me your word first.’

‘Okay, I promise.’ The first ‘guest’ was the wife of the then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London who flew out hoping to meet some prisoners under house arrest. This was a very risky business. I nervously set up the meetings and got away with it.

I told Christine this could earn a five year jail term. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said vaguely. She didn’t have a clue.

Very soon, though, the Defence and Aid Fund became too successful. It had the dosh from foreign contributions to hire the top lawyers in the country and the top lawyers were getting too many non-white and white clients acquitted. These were good deeds, indeed, and in South Africa no good deeds went unpunished. The organisation was banned and BOSS – the Bureau Of State Security – moved in.

A week later a chap I had once met while fishing on the Cape St Francis coast telephoned me and said he wanted to meet for a beer. It was Friday afternoon and we met and he said very casually, ‘They are going to arrest Christine under 90 Days (legislation) on Monday.’

The next morning I flew with her to Johannesburg and put her on a British Airways jet to London.

Boss agents called at four o’clock on Monday morning. They didn’t knock on the door of the flat; they smashed it down. ‘Where is Christine?’ they said.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘her mother has taken ill and she had to fly home.’

I got a few looks that convinced me I should leave, too, and I did soon afterwards.

I got a job with Reuters in London for a while and was then asked by the Anglo American corporation to help start a newspaper on the Copperbelt in Zambia and train some African sub-editors.

Christine loved the country and lost no time in meeting anti-South African government groups and attending meeting after meeting. One day she complained: ‘You know I wasn’t paid for those last few weeks at the Defence and Aid Fund.’

‘You should write to Mr Vorster (the former Minister of Justice) and demand your money,’ I said.

She did and amazingly enough was sent a cheque drawn on the official government bank, the South African Reserve Bank.

That night she attended another meeting in Kitwe. But she opened her bag and the cheque fell out, on to the table. The others at the meeting looked at the cheque and then at her with their mouths open.

She was in tears when she got back. ‘They think I am a spy for BOSS,’ she said. They ostracised her from that moment on. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t budge. I guess they were scared too.

Christine found other interests and other friends but years later, before she became extremely ill, she said she often wondered if the African National Congress had been falsely told she was once a spy for the Afrikaner government.

‘I don’t really care,’ she said, ‘but I would hate Nelson Mandela thinking I wasn’t on his side.’ She died, without ever knowing the answer.

#

Plaque to the future

By Harold Heys

Edgar Wallace got a mention in passing in a recent piece here and I wondered how many Ranters knew much about him. Didn’t he write a lot of books years ago, er, um? And that’s probably about it.

Wallace was a printer’s assistant, milkman, soldier, medical orderly, poet, war correspondent, reporter, playwright, editor, columnist, thriller writer, tipster, racing enthusiast, scriptwriter and much more. But he would have been perfectly happy to be remembered by the simple appellation, Reporter.

There’s a bronze plaque in his honour where Fleet Street meets Ludgate Circus which describes him thus, beneath a profile portrait medallion. The inscription concludes: ‘Of his talents he gave lavishly to authorship – but to Fleet Street he gave his heart.’ The term ‘newspaperman’ hadn’t come into vogue when the memorial was positioned soon after his death in 1932 but it would have been equally fitting.

Edgar Wallace was given another one-word description by biographer Margaret Lane – ‘phenomenon’. You can’t argue with that. Anybody who can rattle off a 200-page mystery novel in a weekend deserves every accolade going. He might not have been the most successful journalist – he lost four editorships and attracted libel suits – but as a novelist he was supreme. One of his publishers reckoned that a quarter of every English-language book read in the late 20s was one of his creations. Many of them were made into films.

He knocked out about 170 and most were either his Sanders books, based in a fictitious West African country, or mystery novels. The Clue of the Twisted Candle, The Frightened Lady, The Green Archer and all the others. I don’t mind admitting that I’m a fan. As a youngster it was a natural progression from Enid Blyton to Edgar Wallace. I’ve probably read more than 50 and, ok, they nearly all rehash the damsel-in-distress storyline but for a book-to-fall-asleep-with they’re excellent.

Wallace was a man many elderly Ranters can probably associate with. He knew wealth and he new poverty; he knew wild elation and bitter anguish; he was an adventurer, a risk-taker, a gambler. He was given away as a baby and carried that awful burden with him all his life. He was hopeless with money and seemed to be always in debt. But he was charming and good company, He knew how to enjoy life and he certainly did just that, sweeping up friends and acquaintances along the way and taking them along for a bumpy yet exhilarating ride.

Exactly a hundred years ago, however, Edgar Wallace was down to his last coppers. Deeply depressed, he hadn’t worked – except for churning out the occasional short story – for nearly two years after being sacked by Alfred Harmsworth from his job as a reporter on the Daily Mail. His only refuge was the occasional foray to the Press Club and it was here in the early days of 1910 that things began to take a turn for the better.

But let’s go back some years. Edgar Wallace was born in Greenwich in 1875 and taken in by a poor family. He managed to break free from his grim surroundings and begin his long adventure, first as a soldier and a medical orderly in the Boer campaign before turning to writing about the conflict and the aftermath as editor of the Rand Daily Mail and for Reuters. He returned to England and joined the Daily Mail as a reporter, throwing himself into the job while maintaining a keen interest in the theatre which was in his blood. However, by late 1907 Harmsworth had got fed up with his often reckless approach and had decided that Edgar’s ‘graceful pen’ was a luxury his newspaper could do without.

The Press Club was a sanctuary. Having no newspaper office of his own, he haunted the place – when he could afford to get there – as others in his predicament had done and would continue to do. He was on his uppers. His watch had gone. His grey Ascot coat had gone; sold for 26 shillings. The bills at his home in Brockley mounted up, his wife Ivy was in despair and all he had was casual companionship at the Press Club. His brave persistence suddenly paid off with an introduction to a small publisher who passed him on to the fiction editor, a Mrs Thorne. She knew the publishing game and discussed technique and story ideas with a rather subdued Wallace, offering him advice and encouragement.

A few evenings later she hopped on to a bus in Fleet Street and headed off to London Bridge Station where she was catching a train. She took the first vacant seat and found herself sitting next to Wallace. They chatted and Wallace regaled her with some stories of his time as a reporter in West Africa. She told him: ‘Good heavens! You’ve everything there for some short stories.’ She missed her train – and others – he missed his meeting of the Congo Reform Association as they eagerly discussed ideas and characters. And the new career of Edgar Wallace, novelist, was under way.

His new confidence got him back into newspapers later that year on the ambitious Evening Times and later Edward Hulton appointed him as editor of Ideas and The Story Journal and he went on to write for several newspapers including daily articles in the Birmingham Post and he also took on confidential work for the War Office.

After the Great War Wallace’s career as a novelist really took off and he wrote dozens of mysteries and more tales of Sanders of the River. Very shrewdly his publishers moved into the American market and he was careful to include an occasional line from across the Atlantic; an American hero or villain; a loose connection to an American city, a mere mention of something, anything, transatlantic. Just enough to maintain the interest of his new legion of followers in the USA. Edgar Wallace was always proud of his literary ability although his style never came close to Raymond Chandler, for example. But then, Chandler – my hero –wrote only half-a-dozen novels.

In October, 1931, Wallace stood as the Liberal candidate for Blackpool and confidently expected to win the seat. It was his kind of town and his slogan ‘A showman for a showman’s town’ appealed to his sense of the dramatic.

But his political naivety let him down during the two-month campaign. He fielded most questions of policy with wit and good humour but money was tight in those days and his patter soon wore rather thin with the locals. When he met his Conservative opponent Captain CC Erskine-Bolst he had looked forward to ‘a clean and fair fight.’ Yeah, right.

He soon discovered that the sprawling constituency was not simply a boisterous, kiss-me-quick fairground. He confided to the members of Fleetwood Congregational Church: ‘I am a sinner.’ And he told them: ‘I go to race-courses and mix with coarse men who use coarse language.’ He confessed at the South Shore Congregational Church that he led ‘a worldly life, the life of a racing man and a man-about town.’ Warming to his brash-is-best theme he announced that he had ‘never given a bob to a church’ all his life. Oh, and he wanted to see casinos established in every popular resort along the coast.

Unsurprisingly, poor, naive Edgar, the world’s most successful novelist of the inter-war years, was hammered as a Conservative government was returned with a landslide. It was a severe blow to his pride and his health, never good as he seemed to live on cups of sweet tea. He packed his bags and set off almost at once for Hollywood where he had been invited by RKO Radio films. He spent several weeks working with Merian C Cooper on the script of King Kong but became ill with pneumonia and died there in February 1932.

A former chairman of the Press Club, he was buried in his club tie as the bells of Fleet Street tolled in his honour.

###

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

Do they sleep on news desks? Do they munch on dripping and toast? Do they trade jokes between mouthfuls of salted peanuts? Do they, heaven forbid, stumble back to the office, bellies swishing with Bass? – Peter Laud, ex Daily Mail

Issue # 135

February 19, 2010

This Week

You may not have heard of a glossy magazine called The Word. But, my word, you have now. And if you had seen it before, the current (March) edition comes with a new format and the front section alone (the whole is 114 pages) has 27 news stories, profiles and columns. You may have been put off, in the bookshop, because it’s primarily a music magazine, but the music is stuff you’ll have heard of. The cover pic is Bob Dylan. And the rest is described as ‘Entertainment for lively minds’. The inside back is a collection of fascinating facts about Popes… riveting stuff, and guaranteed ‘99% true’. Love that.

But that’s not why we’re writing about it here. We’re writing about it because Paul Wilson has written in it about us. And we thought we’d share. ‘A maverick online imprint revives the long-lunch heyday of the tabloids,’ it says, referring to the Ranters books. (Not sure about the bank quote at the end, but nobody’s complaining: the piece has already created new readers for this website.)

The mag also has a piece about writing for newspapers, and if you’re too tight to rush out and buy a copy of The Word, we’ll share that one with you, next week.

Talking about the hey-days – if that’s what they were – Peter Laud recalls life on the Mail in Birmingham, and the other Mail in Manchester. These days he’s a farmer, on a small scale, he says – but he now lives in Tasmania (you can’t get much further away from Ken Donlan than that) and presumably size is all relative.

Still in Manchester (and there’ll be moans from those non-contributing idlers in the soft south about too much copy from Oop North), did anybody notice that the Guardian had flogged off its cash cow, the Manchester Evening News? Does anybody care? Should anybody care, if the Guardian doesn’t? We asked Bob Waterhouse to explain.

And finally, two deaths. Dick Francis, the Queen Mother’s jockey, then a journalist before becoming a best-selling author told a good tale (When her horse collapsed under him, the Queen Mum told him: ‘Oh well – that’s racing for you’), and enjoyed journalists' company even when he couldn’t get a word in, as Geoffrey Mather recounts.

While Alastair McQueen has fond and abiding memories of Trevor Hanna, the distinguished professional who was a friend, hero and mentor for scores of young reporters who sat at his feet and worked in his shadow on his home patch in Belfast.

#

Re-publish and be damned

By Paul Wilson

If the time approaches when obituary columns will mark the passing of the papers themselves, here's some news you may have missed. A corner of old Fleet Street is still alive, a place where lunches are free, drinks flow free and the lot of the tabloid hack is to expose corruption, champion the common man and decide whether the ‘twin assets’ gag works better in the third par or the fourth.

Surrounded by piles of yellowed clippings, and a thick contacts book, and knowing for damn sure that things aren't as good as they were in his day, is Revel Barker, 65-year-old ex-Daily Mirror man who, since 2007, has maintained the Gentleman Ranters website. Where once he and his peers held court in the watering holes of the Fourth Estate, they now recall their exploits in weekly blog postings.

In their fascinating world, reporters who uncover a movie star's secret wedding are welcomed into the ceremony as witnesses rather than ejected by a security guard's boot. The England midfielder (Bobby Charlton, as it happens) who broke his club's no-ale rule after the death of a teammate is allowed to sleep it off, in return for a bigger, better story. Meanwhile, says Barker, ‘I've been bitten by a poisonous snake, jumped from a burning plane and worked for Robert Maxwell.’

His latest venture had humble beginnings. ‘I was given a disk of old columns by the journalist and broadcaster Ian Skidmore,’ he explains, sitting among those clippings piles in sunny retirement on the Maltese island of Gozo. Barker put them online, engaged a band of old colleagues to chip in their stories and, by early 2008, his site was getting 5,000 readers a day. At which point he encouraged Skidmore to update his out-of-print 1983 memoir, Forgive Us Our Press Passes, to be published on demand. ‘That way the authors get more of the royalties.’

That book's success drove the rebirth of others, such as Publish And Be Damned, the early history of the Daily Mirror, often picked as a best-ever book of its kind, and Murray Sayle's equally acclaimed and previously unavailable novel A Crooked Sixpence. All-new works joined Barker's accidental micro-republishing enterprise, including his own Crying All The Way To The Bank, a funny and well-researched account of Liberace's I'm-not-gay-M'Lud 1959 libel trial. ‘Some of our stuff is like literature,’ he says proudly. All of it is richly entertaining.

Of the dozen books now on Barker's list, Joyce McKinney And The Case Of The Manacled Mormon by Anthony Delano has the inkiest fingers, a highly enjoyable tale of classic tabloid derring-do. In 1977, a 21-year-old Morman named Kirk Anderson had taken an overseas post in England to escape the attentions of an obsessive former beauty queen. Anderson was cheerfully spreading the good word for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Epsom when the former Miss Wyoming flew into Britain on a false passport and, with help, kidnapped the missionary, drove him from leafy Surrey to a cottage in Devon, shackled him to a bed for three days and had her wicked way with him after famously ‘tearing off his blue silk pyjamas’. Joyce McKinney's teary, bosomy denial in the dock turned her, under a string of two-inch headlines, into a proto-Katie Price.

You could not, as those who didn't have to are wont to point out, make it up.

What happens next is like Judd Apatow's version of an Ealing comedy: skipped bail, blackface, nuns outfits, secret bondage, more false passports and a promise, made on oath, ‘to ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose’. It certainly beats ‘Jordan: Pete Left Toilet Seat Up, Wet Towels On Bed’.
















Also on Barker's list, and equally gripping, is Slip-Up, Delano's retracing of how a team of Daily Express journalists ‘found’ the Osama of his day, Ronnie Biggs, in Rio de Janiero in 1974, and the subsequent botched attempt by Jack ‘Slipper Of The Yard’ Slipper to bring him back to Blighty. No less a Fleet Street authority than the late Keith Waterhouse thought it the best book about the workings of his trade ever written. In 1986, the BBC was due to broadcast a film version of Slip-Up, starring Larry - real father of George, and TV father of Gavin - Lamb as Biggs. Slipper threatened legal action for defamation; a version went out in 1988, Slipper sued, won, and the film was never shown again. ‘Someone told me it's been lost,’ says Barker ruefully. Pity. It would have made the ideal centrepiece of a Biggs Night In on BBC4.

The books, and the website, are, Barker points out, the best way he knows of keeping the stories alive, of preserving a fondly remembered period that will never return. If only those who have followed in his and his colleagues' footsteps would help the cause a little more directly. ‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘journalists never buy books. They ring up and ask for review copies. I'm just pleased that people are interested in what we do. We had such fun doing what we did, going out to find stories. Now, they sit in and rewrite them... and they wonder why people don't buy newspapers any more. I'd rather be a bank clerk these days.’

More information about all the Ranters books can be found in the website’s bookshop, by clicking here.

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Initial thoughts

By Peter Laud

It’s strange, not to say disturbing, how certain names remain firmly lodged in the memory. Alderman Garnett B Boughton, is one. He was Mayor of Birmingham in the early sixties and insisted that the capital B be used in every mention of his name in the Birmingham Evening Mail. Reporters were issued with regular reminders although strangely no one ever bothered to ask what the B stood for.

Alderman Eric E Mole was another. He followed Garnett B Boughton as mayor and again ordered that his name should appear as directed. It always did in the pages of the paper which, as a successful broadsheet, was known as the Birmingham Bible. Some days, particularly on Fridays, when the paper dripped with ads, it took almost as long to read.

Do newspapers these days pay the same kind of homage to civic leaders? Yes Sir, no Sir, three bags full Sir, your eminent worthiness? Somehow I doubt it and maybe they’re right to cast a more critical eye on the local council and what its mayor is up to.

In Birmingham back in the sixties the views of a succession of mayors were regarded as Holy Writ. Why the names of two mayors from half a century ago in a city on the other side of the world should remain in my memory is anybody’s guess. Why should I remember these two when far more relevant information (wedding anniversary, kids’ birthdays, phone number, credit card details, home address) often proves elusive? And what was the name of the CID chief in Birmingham in the early sixties? Why that’s easy. No need to phone a friend. Step forward Chief Supt Gerald Baumber, a human bulldozer who frightened the life out of me when I was delegated to call in and see him to check overnight crime fearing he might throw me in the clink too.

The Birmingham Mail was my first newspaper. Maybe that’s why these names and these people still figure in the memory. The Mail was housed in an office block built of stone on the corner of New St and Corporation St, right in the heart of the city and conveniently opposite the Midland Hotel, an up market establishment which along with pints of Bass had silver bowls of salted peanuts (free) on the bar. Some of us dined on nothing more than peanuts for weeks. Round the corner was The Windsor, slightly more down market, which specialised in poorly constructed cheese cobs guaranteed to fail when lifted to the lips. The Windsor was dark and pokey but at 10.30am offered a refuge and a half or two of mild for the Mail’s early man after three hours of duty which included morning calls, rewrites from The Birmingham Post, a weather report for the first edition and a couple of slices of toast with dripping or butter from the canteen.

Down the road at the far end of Corporation St was the rival Evening Despatch which was also owned by the Post & Mail, a feisty tabloid which by the early sixties was already doomed. In its dying days the executives were summoned for a crisis meeting to come up with a new slogan in a last ditch attempt to save the paper. One news desk staffer suggested: ‘The small paper for small minds,’ which effectively stalled his career forever.

More names dredged from the bank of memory: Adrian Berry, (of the Telegraph owning family) despatched to the provinces to learn the trade, who drove to work in a Jag while most made do with Minis and Morris 1000s. Fred Dineage, later to work up a successful career in television after leaving Birmingham for Eastmid News Agency in Doncaster. Fred and I slept together occasionally on the Mail news desk after too many Friday night drinks, to be woken at 6am by the security guard with the comment: ’Another good night, eh boys?’ A J McIlroy, one of the few Despatch reporters offered a lifeline by the Mail when the Despatch closed, who continued to work at a furious pace for his new paper. He was the most energetic, enthusiastic and diligent operative I ever came across – little wonder he went on to a long career with the Daily Telegraph.

The Mail’s photographers knew every short cut and every cafe. Out near the Longbridge works of Austin Morris (‘The largest car factory in Europe,’ said the sign on the gate in gold letters) was the Alpine Cafe where a bent-backed owner turned out a conveyor belt of hot sugared tea, toast and bacon sandwiches against a mural of snow capped peaks, lush green valleys and happy yodellers. It was almost as if the man serving a life sentence behind his counter had a secret desire to wind up in a place like that free of cooking smells. Each time we plonked our empty mugs on the counter to leave his parting words were always the same. ‘Mind how you go lads,’ he’d say, almost in the manner of a caring father farewelling his sons.

House fires, bus crashes, Littlewoods winners, industrial strikes, cats stuck up trees, dogs down drainpipes, golden weddings, holidays from hell, these and more were the Mail’s stock in trade, and I’d run from the train station to the office each morning in the hope of being allocated a good yarn. There was money to be made at the Mail too with the Day by Day gossip column paying a guinea for lead items. Amateur drama crits were worth ten shillings and sixpence for those lucky enough to get them. Strangely, reviews of pop concerts were never paid: the free tickets were supposed to be reward enough. I once dismissed a group of popsters with the observation::’Based on this performance this could be their last show.’ The group was the Beatles, then just starting out.

I had to leave the Mail to discover how good it was to work there. Manchester and more money beckoned and I spent a gloomy 18 months at the Daily Mail writing, it seemed, mainly for the spike beneath the searing gaze of Ken Donlan, the northern news editor.

The one saving grace of Manchester was the company of Brian MacArthur, now recently retired from The Daily Telegraph. MacArthur was good. While some reporters served predictably boring fare Macarthur was inventive, brave and full of surprises. I’m talking about his cooking although he was a decent scribbler too. On Sunday mornings the kitchen at 26 Tintern Avenue, West Didsbury, was his sole domain as he turned out roast beef and Yorkshire pud, boeuf stroganoffs, spicy curries and much more to the delight of his flatmates who included David Seymour and Chris Buckland.

In a trade with more than its fair share of ego maniacs and oddballs MacArthur was of a different stripe. He seemed to have a genuine concern for his colleagues. And when he left to work for the Daily Mail in London in his blue Mini he gave me a pair of his old Hush Puppies still with plenty of tread as parting gift. They were on my feet a few weeks later when I boarded a migrant ship bound for Perth in Western Australia and a new life under Murdoch.

Now the Birmingham Mail is a tabloid – just like the doomed Despatch was 50 years ago – and it’s abandoned its city headquarters for suburban Erdington. It has switched to overnight printing too trying to find a new role in a crowded morning market. And with these and other changes I wonder whether the reporters beavering away for what are referred to as multi platforms have as much fun as their predecessors.

Do they sleep on news desks? Do they munch on dripping and toast? Do they trade jokes between mouthfuls of salted peanuts? Do they, heaven forbid, stumble back to the office, bellies swishing with Bass?

Somehow I doubt it for these are difficult times and I have one piece of advice for them: Mind how you go lads.

#

Great Scott, the Guardian loses its MEN

By Robert Waterhouse

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Guardian Media Group's sale of the Manchester Evening News to Trinity Mirror is the lack of interest with which the news has been received.

Well, it wasn't news to those in the know. GMG has been casting around to find ways of financing its estimated £100,000 a day loss on Guardian News & Media, the Guardian/Observer subsidiary. The MEN, partly distributed free and a shadow of its once-mighty self, was becoming another loss-maker too. Since the Scott Trust, which controls GMG, is committed to supporting the Guardian ‘in perpetuity’ it was naturally looking anywhere for savings.

Yet the ironies abound. Let's begin with No 1 Scott Place, the MEN/Guardian home in Manchester, and still the group's registered office. The swish move there, a few years ago, was heralded as GMG's continued commitment to Manchester. Not so. Trinity will shunt the operation to slightly less swish accommodation near the Oldham printing press.

That press, yes. It's the one opened by none other than Capt Robert Maxwell to allow him to shut down Withy Grove. Along with northern editions of the Mirror, the press churns out Trinity's Liverpool papers, and the MEN among others. In fact, GMG had signed up to a long-term deal to print there: release from the £34.4m printing contract was, group chief executive Caroline McCall said, a major reason that the sale – worth just £7.4m in cash – made sense. She might have added that it also released the group from a whole wedge of redundancy payments it could otherwise have faced.

And Scott. The great CP of Scott Place (for the moment). Just how the Guardian currently reveres him was shown over Christmas on the Comment is Free section of the newspaper's website, which bears his grizzled effigy (‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’). Charles Prestwich decked out with an Xmas bobble cap.

It's well known that the Manchester Guardian, which had links with the Manchester Evening News dating back to 1868, finally bought the MEN in 1929 as a moneymaking safety net for the Guardian itself. The MEN had pride of place in the Cross Street offices, being the commercial anchor of the Manchester Guardian & Evening News Limited. Guardian staff (I was one in the 1960s) had to creep in through a side door near the newspaper loading bay.

Indeed, during the 1960s and the Guardian's bungled move to London (pushed through by the company's chairman, Laurence Scott, grandson of CP), MEN profits were keeping the Guardian afloat by around £1m a year. In perpetuity or no, the Scott Trust would have died along with the Guardian were it not for the MEN. The irony here, of course, is that London, which owed its life to Manchester, has now signed the death warrant.

Several years ago I asked Peter Preston, the Guardian editor responsible for completing the London move, whether it might not have been better for the Manchester Guardian to stay on its home patch where it had long enjoyed an international reputation and was quietly gaining circulation. He pointed to the poor state in 2003 of regional morning newspapers around the country. Quite. Yet the Liverpool Daily Post and the Liverpool Echo have now, in a sense, taken Manchester – a much stronger city commercially than Liverpool.

For obvious reasons, there was little love lost between the Guardian and the MEN. Under William Haley and Tom Henry, the MEN was a rumbustious organ competing aggressively for news scoops with the national dailies then published in Manchester. It bred the likes of Harry Evans, who worked his way up from the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter to become Henry's assistant editor, editor of the Northern Echo and into the history books.

Evans' graphic description in his recent autobiography, My Paper Chase, of life on Henry's MEN is as good an obituary as any: ‘Nothing before, and nothing I have experienced since, working for newspapers, radio, television and websites in London and New York and Washington, matches the speed demanded of everyone on the Evening News...Reporters and subs had to operate like a souped-up Internet news service, producing eight editions in six hours – more if big news broke – and without the crutch of desktop computers...At the MEN, we always liked to show Newspaper City (Manchester) how we could turn on a dime.’

Commercially it dominated the lucrative Manchester small ads market, eating up the Evening Chronicle in 1963 when the evening newspaper market started to contract.

There was little contact between the two sets of journalists. Compositors worked days or nights in separate composing rooms. On the plus side, MEN journalists negotiated national newspaper pay rates for themselves (a perk which disappeared when the Guardian all-but-left Manchester). MEN newsmen, often correctly, saw their Guardian opposites as unruly or incompetent. All the same, there was not a little envy at the Guardian's freedom of action and expression, symbolised by the whimsical Harry Whewell or the gloriously eccentric J R L Anderson, the man who in 1966 led a sailing expedition retracing Norse explorers who were said to have ventured from Greenland to the shores of North America four centuries before Columbus.

Brian Redhead typically reversed caricatures when he swapped being northern editor of the Guardian for editing the MEN after Tom Henry's retirement. But he was never really accepted there and drifted towards the BBC. It was claimed he spent more time at Broadcasting House in Oxford Road than in Cross Street. When the company moved to Deansgate in 1970 it was the MEN again which received the shop-front treatment. Guardian journalists slunk into a jerry-built office block (both have since been demolished). In 1976, with the end of Guardian live production, most left.

The MEN's commercial power in the region was such that, around 1980, an upstart called Patrick Quinn publishing a small weekly used car ads magazine called North West Automart in Warrington was told by the Manchester management either to sell up or be crushed. Sensibly, he sold – with an earn-out agreement as managing director which netted him large sums. Automart became Auto Trader; Quinn went on to open a series of regional editions which made millions for him and the group. The Auto Trader division became and remains GMG's most profitable subsidiary. Recently half was sold to Apax Partners for £673m, mainly to pay off Guardian and Observer debt.

Which brings us back to the question of the Scott Trust and perpetuity. The Guardian's current editor, Alan Rusbridger, has made a strong commitment not to impose pay walls for online access to guardian.co.uk. His belief is that editorial content will eventually pay off in commercial terms for the multifarious digital operations. But if the two newspapers continue to lose cash at the present rate (and a buyer for the Observer is nowhere in sight) the day may come when Auto Trader's second tranche is banked – and squandered. What price perpetuity?

A final irony. As GMG quits Manchester (it sold its 22 Greater Manchester weeklies along with the MEN as part of the deal) the North West media scene is looking surprisingly buoyant. Trinity's Sly Bailey has scented cost-cutting possibilities in ‘the perfect strategic fit’ of Merseyside and Manchester; Granada TV has problems but the BBC's massive relocation exercise to MediaCity, Salford Quays, is not far from opening. The digital future could be there.

Bob Waterhouse was a features sub and reporter with the Guardian in Manchester during the 1960s. He launched the Withington Reporter (1978) and North West Times (1988). He was also launch editor of North West Business Insider (1991) and the North West Enquirer (2006). His book about Manchester national newspaper history, The Other Fleet Street, was published in 2004.

#

The best listener I interviewed

By Geoffrey Mather

The news of Dick Francis's death in the Caymen Islands at the age of 89 did not so much sadden me as hit me straight in the mouth. Gobsmacked is the term these days, and vulgar though it is, I have to admit to it. I should have been writing about him at this time, filleting his racing and writing career as if it were a haddock. Alas, I was robbed.

In death the media paraded him in the ring of life like a prize horse: his pedigree, his weaknesses, his strengths, his novels – always riveting but not pretentious, or literary, or Booker Prize material, or any of those other things people invent.

‘The characterisation is thin; sometimes the technical aspects of the plot creak; a lot of it is downright improbable. But so what? The glorious, brilliant, unstoppable narrative drive made book after book utterly compelling,’ wrote Simon Barnes in The Times. Could have been me...

I have never read a Dick Francis novel, but from the description I thought, before that meeting long ago, that he might be a Catherine Cookson on horseback. No bad thing. She made a mint and he made two, since he was a jockey for the Queen Mother and made a name for riding, or rather not riding, a horse with splayed legs in a Grand National. At the time when it looked like winning, Devon Loch jumped a shadow and began to copy a rugby player winning a try – all belly-flop and slide.

Well, then, I met Dick Francis in London with high purpose and good intent. We had lunch at an hotel. In two hours of pleasant food and drink I was to dredge his very soul and present him, figuratively, naked, to the world. Not a secret left. Not an anecdote untold. A triumph of shrewdness and observation.

The nub of the matter is that Dick Francis spent the entire two hours nodding thoughtfully, not so much like a literary jockey but a rocking horse.

He was saying nothing amounting to more than monosyllables, and being introspective whenever prompted.

He, and I, did not stand a chance. We were both so overwhelmed by the whirlwind conversation of a third party – the uninvited gust, as it were – that we were rendered impotent.

That third party was an associate editor of the Daily Express in Manchester who, when I mentioned Francis in the first place, said, ‘I would like to meet him. Mind if I attend your lunch?’

So off we traipsed to London, where we met our guest, and the AE (associate editor) launched himself into a close and intimate examination of his own life, deeds, anecdotes and ambitions.

After three or four gins, he took the new glass and Dick Francis, sober, introverted, was enthralled – pinned back in his seat and hanging on to the reins for dear life as we galloped on a guided tour of the north-east, Jack Charlton, the sayings of Paddy Barclay (talented football writer from the Guardian of the time), private schooling in York, cricketers of the past 25 years in more or less chronological order, plus a run-down on classical drunks from a Fleet-street slowly vanishing into obscurity and sobriety.

For pudding we moved seamlessly on to Joan Armatrading and Ella Fitzgerald.

I don't know what Dick Francis thought of it all. He was the best listener I ever came across, reduced to a cardboard cut-out. I kept trying to get a word in, but was overwhelmed by the superior anecdotes of AE.

We were all firm friends in the end. Dick Francis remained unmasked and urbane. And virtually wordless. I remained agitated and wordless, wondering how I could justify the trip to London to some rapacious crow in a small office equipped with a free Biro and a lust for crossing out things in expenses as a means of justifying his own existence.

And AE? He was overjoyed by the experience. Ecstatic. Without any memory of having dominated the event through sheer talk-power. ‘Should get a good piece out of that,’ he said to me. ‘What a lovely chap, Dick. And so modest.’

I was too dazed and weary to reply.

‘By the way,’ said AE, ‘don't know about you, but I have always wondered what it would be like to have tea at the Ritz. Fancy it?’

There didn't seem much choice. The two of us had tea at the Ritz, trying not to drop crumbs while staring at expensive ladies done up like Christmas trees.

And you know what?

He hardly said a word.

#

Hanna, Belfast

By Alastair McQueen

Legendary Belfast freelance Trevor Hanna, one of the most colourful characters in Northern Ireland journalism has died at the age of 72 – but at least he didn’t die wondering.

A dapper man in a sober suit belied the tenacious reporter underneath who didn’t take prisoners or suffer fools gladly.

Hanna had an insatiable appetite for stories and an unquenchable thirst for fun.

And he feared no-one… from the rants and finger-pointing of the firebrand Ian Paisley to the hooded paramilitary thugs of the IRA and UDA and other organisations who tried to intimidate him. Hanna stood his ground and was quite willing to mix it verbally and, on the odd occasion, with his fists.

He loved being a reporter and he loved journalism and journalists, particularly being a father-figure to many young reporters, me included. Hanna was never afraid to ask the awkward question no matter how intimidating the circumstances.

By-lines, splashes, exclusives, exposing paramilitary gangsters were the stories which gave him the buzz followed by a good boozy dinner and a good argument into the wee small hours.

By the time The Troubles projected Northern Ireland on to the world stage Hanna already had an impressive pedigree. He began his journalistic career on the Belfast News Letter – the oldest English-language newspaper in the world – in 1954 as a junior reporter before progressing 300 yards up the street to the Belfast Telegraph.

There, under the gimlet-eye of veteran news editor Fred Gamble and the acclaimed editor John E (Jack) Sayers – one of the few survivors of the wartime sinking of HMS Hood – his talents blossomed.

As well as covering general news and showbiz he filled a series of specialist roles, local government corr, property corr, and shipbuilding and industrial correspondent in last great days of Belfast shipyard.

One of Trevor’s contemporaries in the Belfast Telegraph newsroom at the time was Graham McKenzie who recalled: ‘Trevor had a journalist's healthy habit of not being over-awed by authority figures.

‘One day JES was crossing the Bel Tel newsroom and espying Trevor with a beard said: ‘Hanna, if you'd been in the Navy you’d have had to ask me “permission to grow, sah!”… Trevor, quick as a flash: “Ah well, that's always supposing you'd have had a higher rank than me, Mr Sayers!”…’

In those far-off days when pubs in Northern Ireland were closed on Sundays he and his wife Ann used to slip away to their caravan on the Co Down coast at weekends. One Sunday Trevor left Ann in the caravan making the Sunday lunch while he headed into Kilkeel to get the papers and have a pint or two in the Kilmorey Arms Hotel, the only place in the area where you could legally get a drink on a Sunday

On this occasion he found a Royal Naval vessel at the harbour and its officers enjoying the delights of the hotel bar. Trevor soon found himself in their company and in no time at all he was accepting an invitation to have a drink in the wardroom.

He drove down to the harbour, left his vehicle and the papers, keys in the ignition, and stepped aboard. A few drinks later, he thought he imagined that the land was moving. Of course, it wasn't. That would be silly. It was the ship that was moving. Not that Trevor minded too much at this stage – not until he ended up at Peel on the Isle of Man. Poor Ann was in a state. Lunch, of course, was ruined.

From The Belfast Telegraph he moved to the Daily Mail in Manchester and was, for a time, a district man in Liverpool before returning to Belfast as news editor of the News Letter.

He then joined the Daily Mirror’s newly established Northern Ireland news team on its opening of an editorial bureau and the first British full-colour publishing plant in Belfast. Syd Young was the bureau chief and the reporters were Trevor and his old Telegraph sparring partner and great buddy Eddie McIlwaine.

They had vied with each other for big by-lines and big shows ever since they met as juniors and on occasion were even seen wrestling each other on the floor of the office arguing over whose name should go first on a joint story or who should have the best story of the day. Hanna’s respect and affection for McIlwaine – which was reciprocated – was enduring.

He then joined the Ulster Unionist Party, where he organised its first press office and worked closely with successive prime ministers Terence O’Neill and James Chichester-Clark and as speechwriter to several other prominent politicians of the day.

But the world of Northern Ireland politics was no place for the rumbustious Hanna. Big stories were happening every day and he was missing out. He was missing the by-line buzz. He formed Ulsternews International and one of his old Daily Mail bosses, Ken Donlan, by now news editor of the Sun quickly snapped him up as his man in Belfast. The News of the World quickly followed, as did a host of others.

And as journalists from all over the world flew into Belfast to cover The Troubles Hanna was signed up as stringer for newspapers, magazines and broadcasters all over the world. He based himself at the centre of the action in the much-bombed Europa Hotel where, nightly, he held court – briefing, filing and entertaining.

Despite the impressive name of his agency he was known simply as: ‘Hanna, Belfast’.

He has also worked closely with well-known international writers and publishers and was commissioned by Leon Uris, as a consultant for his best-selling novel, Trinity, an historically-based fiction set in Ireland.

Trevor Hanna was one of the Big names from those golden days of Northern Ireland journalism and one of the last. A great pal, great company and a great reporter.

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Contributions

If you are planning (or thinking of planning) to write a piece for Ranters, there are a few guidelines for contributors on our Contribs page.

It would be considered a kindness if you’d read them…

#

Rival media are to blame for deferring to newspapers and sustaining their reputation for remaining the most influential medium. So radio and television constantly review newspapers, rolling 24-hour news channels at length and repeatedly, with newspaper journalists doing it; current affairs programmes discuss the content and views of newspapers, late-night phone-ins discuss issues they have read about in the press, print journalists appear on Newsnight, Question Time, Any Questions, anywhere a view is needed. – Newspaper Journalism, by Peter Cole and Tony Harcup

Issue # 136

February 26, 2010

This Week

First: a date for the diary. Wayzgoose (and we don’t need to explain it again, beyond the reminder that it’s Maundy Thursday, which was always a day off in The Print before Murdoch and Maxwell abolished Easter) falls this year on All Fools’ Day.

That’s as good an excuse as any for a Ranters get-together. So those who can will be meeting at lunchtime at the Harrow in Fleet Street (more precisely, it’s in Whitefriars Street, nearest tube: Temple). The Harrow, former Daily Mail boozer, is the one that had the wit to name a bar in honour of Vincent Mulchrone – and more importantly has had the grace to retain the name after all these years.

Peter Cole – former editor of the Sunday Correspondent, deputy editor and news editor of the Guardian, and Londoner's Diary editor on the Evening Standard – is now professor of journalism at Sheffield. He and lecturer Tony Harcup, who works with him and has written a couple of useful books on the trade, have a new one out with the all-encompassing title of Newspaper Journalism. Revel Barker enjoyed reading the book, but had a query about the back-page blurb.

Andrew Harrison, writing in The Word (the magazine we discovered last week, after it discovered Ranters) compares Fleet Street with America’s newsrooms. Is it ok to improve people’s quotes? And, by the way, what’s a gerund?

Edward Playfair asks why the great unwashed don’t trust newspapermen and it’s obviously a rhetorical question because he follows it by suggesting why they might not trust each other. Such larks. But does this sort of thing happen these days? What’s your betting?

On a serious note, Geoffrey Seed, who long ago defected from the Mail to the heady reaches of investigative TV journalism, and thence to writing a novel about a story that he couldn’t stand up sufficiently for broadcast or newsprint, explains why the world’s cleverest secret service behaves in the way it does, and occasionally hits the headlines.

On an even more serious note, Liz Hodgkinson continues in full rant mode and asks what the hell is happening to freelance fees. We know the answer to that – they are plummeting. So what to do. Industrial action may be the answer. Why doesn’t everybody just refuse to work for one day? Say Maundy Thursday… April First…? No freelance contributors available for a complete day. That’ll show ’em. IF, on just one day of the year, commissioning editors couldn’t get hold of any freelance contributors, it might make them appreciate them a lot more when they can.

#

Nothing to do with us

By Revel Barker

It has possibly (probably) become a cliché to describe any new publication about newspapers – as Newspaper Journalism by Peter Cole and Tony Harcup immodestly does for itself – as a ‘must-read for all students of journalism and the media’.

This is a book – and it’s £19.99 in paperback or £60 in hardback – about newspaper history, policy, politics and circulation… and what have those subjects got to do with journalism? Not, I would suggest, a lot.

For example, my old chum John Kay has been chief reporter of the Sun for donkey’s years; is he a better reporter for knowing that the paper’s roots were embedded in the trade union movement, or knowing when and on what terms it was acquired by Murdoch? I don’t think so. When the general election is announced, is Rupe likely to consult John about which party the paper should support? I don’t know but I suspect it’s unlikely.

The more you think about it – and this book, to be fair, got me thinking – the more you realise that the newspaper industry has got very little to do with journalism. Journalists supply the input, yes, but unless they are in the very top (say 1%) of the business, they have zero input about what goes in.

Journalists do not, as a rule, decide on policy or politics; circulation may have been a matter of pride in the old days, and may be a matter of concern about job security these days, but journalists (by which I mean thee and me) have sod all to do with it.

Journalists – sometimes, including the editor – have no say about marketing budgets or promotion and even insofar as sales may reflect the content, it isn’t usually up to the hacks and snappers to decide what goes into the TV commercials or onto the posters.

Journalists don’t decide that evening papers would be improved by printing them the previous night.

The politics of a paper matter even less.

A number of people – Keith Waterhouse, Brian Hitchen, Vincent Mulchrone, John Edwards, Paul Callan, come readily to mind – crossed cheerfully from the Mirror to the Mail or Express without a moment’s pause. Some (Waterhouse again, Colin Dunne, Ian Skidmore, Revel Barker) moved from Yorkshire Conservative Newspapers to the Daily Mirror without any apparent signs of embarrassment. Dunne wrote for the Mirror and Liz Hodgkinson for the People, and then both wrote for The Times; John Dodd wrote as cheerfully for the Sun as for the Observer…

And so it goes on. You can think of many more examples… Roy Greenslade (a professor of journalism ‘in his spare time’, according to the book) – flitted across the Mirror, Sun, Times, Mirror again (as editor), Guardian and Evening Standard. What’s politics or newspaper policy got to do with anything?

None of this detracts from the book, which is a good read and written, it should be said, with obvious affection for the job. It’s just the blurb, and the premise of it, that I am querying.

Of course it is the ambition of most writers of journalism books to see theirs added to the essential reading lists of media students. Nobody knows how many they total in the English speaking world, but there’ll easily be 100,000 at any time, with that number being refreshed every year.

And, yes: they probably should read it. What I am saying is that there’s a world of difference between must and should. They should read it if they are interested in the trade, but it won’t make any of them a better practitioner of it.

I’d venture to suggest, though, that Newspaper Journalism should be a must-read for academics in the newspaper field because they, at least, should know where they’re coming from; but their students could probably think of better ways of investing £60.

When reviewers have said kindly of some of our books that every media or journalism student should read a particular title, it usually means either that they’ll learn more about how to write and even how to get stories, or they’ll understand about the sheer joy that is (or was) involved in playing the game.

Everybody who wants to learn more about tabloid (popular, successful) journalism should read Publish And Be Damned!

But all those hacks out there who haven’t read it are no worse as reporters. They just know less than the ones who have.

I can’t see how reading four-year-old circulation statistics in a newly published book is going to make much difference to anybody. The single sales statistic that matters is that 40 years ago the Daily Mirror had 14.2million readers every day. A book that told you how to get back to that figure would surely be a must-read, and worth every penny of 60 quid.

Sixty quid for 200 pages… It has to be a misprint, hasn’t it?

Newspaper Journalism by Peter Cole and Tony Harcup is published by Sage Publications.

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Gerund-friendly journalism

By Andrew Harrison

As anyone reading this magazine [The Word] already knows, the fifth and final season of The Wire is The One About The Newspaper. As Baltimore’s Finest resort to increasingly desperate measures to bring down the drug baron Marlo Stanfield, sliding standards at the Police Department are mirrored at the Baltimore Sun. Shady city reporter Templeton begins to get creative with his material in a storyline apparently inspired by the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times. The trouble is, the Sun’s cheeseparing management love Templeton’s suspiciously perfect stories. Don’t look at his stuff too closely, they say.

It sells papers. It’s left to grizzled city editor Gus Haynes to lament the death of the Great American Newsman’s integrity.

I bought all of this. The decline of news journalism, the slick, careerist young reporters pushing aside an experienced old guard on their way to somewhere better… it all rang true. Except for one thing.

The gerund.

In one newsroom scene, Gus, a stickler for just about everything, berates Bad Reporter Templeton for starting three consecutive ’graphs with a gerund. A what, you say?

A gerund is a verb-based word ending in -ing that functions as a noun. ‘Reporting is expensive’, for instance, or ‘Saturday night’s all right for fighting’. But I only know this because I looked it up. Blame the shocking decline in standards of education, but previously I’d only encountered the gerund in the works of Nigel Molesworth (‘The gerund attacks some peaceful pronouns’).

Do American newsmen really talk like this? Perhaps they do. All I know, from my own limited experience of red-in-tooth-and-claw newsrooms, is that anyone who mentioned a gerund could expect a hail of abuse. The hacks I knew as a teaboy 25 years ago were less concerned with keeping a gerund out than with getting a round in. That’s not to say that they were unable to spot a rogue gerund when it raised its shaggy head. They just wouldn’t call it by name. They’d call your piece a ‘shower of shite’, ball it up and throw it back at you, and let you figure out your mistake on your own.

American newspaper folk consider themselves to be part of a profession, on a par with doctors and lawyers. They inhabit a world in which the appearance of adverts on the front page of the New York Times is akin to the Fall of Rome, ‘improving’ a quote is an unpardonable sin and gerunds matter.

To Her Majesty’s press, cleaning up quotes and making your peace with ugly commercial realities are all part of getting the job done. Their journalists are professors in waiting, ours are grubby hacks. This is why American newspapers are magnificent but just a little boring, and ours are tawdry, splashy and renowned the world over.

Gus would be appalled. He would also tell me not to start so many sentences with conjunctions. But it’s too late to stop that now.

This piece appears in the current (March) issue of The Word.

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Best served cold

By Edward Playfair

What I don’t understand is why we proud massed ranks of Her Majesty’s Press are viewed with such disdain by those toffee-nosed toffs in Civvy Street. Why do they think we are such curious creatures? Why won’t they trust us?

Surely it can’t be incidents such as befell me when, as a seasoned, hard-nosed pro aged fully 16 years covering Herts Assizes, I was constantly buzzed by a youth who was always late, never had a court list, wanted a full note (mine) of the evidence so far and, now he was here, would I mind keeping an eye on things while he went out for a fag.

Well, anything to oblige a colleague.

So one Thursday lunchtime, as our deadlines loomed, the judge in full bell-bottomed wig and gaiters sailed forth from the courtroom for a refreshing glass of sherry, bottle of claret and schooner of port – a liquid lunch, just like us.

But no verdict in time for our papers. So I suggested to my little friend that he grabbed the judge before he vanished and asked him for a quick quote on which way he thought the case was going. Guilty or not guilty, m’lud? Give us a clue. Keep our readers in the picture.

Good idea, mate, he cried and strode off towards the man in the Father Christmas outfit. And he did get a couple of words out before a couple of m’lud’s heavies, who looked as if they should have been in the dock, took him out with an alacrity which wouldn’t have disgraced the men from Z Cars (a popular television drama of the time).

But d’you know what, he never troubled me again. Mainly because he felt jousting with journalism and journalists was not for him and quit. It was the right answer.

Mind you, we’ve all been stabbed in the back, even in the front, and not always by people as nice as me. So what a joy it was when that dish best served cold became almost an art form.

One night on behalf of a much-maligned friend I rang the ‘mark’, as I believe they are called in the con-artist fraternity, and convinced him I was representing Elvis, who wanted to be interviewed only by that world-famous reporter – only I can’t remember the famous reporter’s name, now, but he’ll know who he is.

All he had to do was sit by the phone, suitcase packed, wait for the call and grab the next plane to Memphis. Three days he sat there in the office, waiting for the call that never came, unaware he was the victim of a scam that wouldn’t have disgraced Hustle (a popular television drama of these times).

But he shouldn’t have upset my friend...

Of course we try to pass on to our children memories of these values and slights and the standards we struggle to maintain. And the Standard in my case was the London evening variety.

One of my sons, Oliver, found himself in hospital a few years back in the same ward as a firebrand Labour MP called Bernie Grant – warrior for the working class, oppressed, blackballed from birth, brother, blah blah.

Bawling Bernie treated staff and other patients as low-life fit only to serve his every whim, demanding room service every five minutes from the nurses, radio and mobile blasting out all night ... a real friend to the victims of this uncaring society in sickness and in health.

What a good story, I thought, so I put Ollie on to the Standard and they were all set to go until he bottled out, concerned for some inexplicable reason that I’d given it a little too much topspin.

But as the elegantly-named Gervaise Webb on the Standard newsdesk told him: ‘Look at it this way, Oliver: you’ve learned a very valuable lesson. Never trust a journalist – even if he’s your father…’

A message there for us all, I think.

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Death in Dubai

Grainy CCTV footage of an alleged Mossad hit team shortly before a Hamas commander was found murdered in Dubai lifts the cloak around the dagger of Middle East politics. Diplomatic fall out continues with Britain demanding to know from Israel why alleged assassins carried cloned UK passports.

By Geoffrey Seed

If watching Inspector Morse or Miss Marple teaches anything, it is that a plot’s most unlikely character is usually the one wot done the dirty deed. On this basis – and this alone – the murder of the alleged Palestinian terrorist, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was surely down to Mossad’s secret agents.

Thanks to CCTV, we all saw those knobbly-kneed blokes sweltering in tennis kit and dodgy wigs while acting like harmless extras from the Chislehurst Am Op Dram Soc but who were really assassins in disguise, according to the Dubai police.

What a pity the footage showing these ‘English tourists’ stalking their victim didn’t come with audio. That could’ve been a bit of a give-away.

‘I say Roger, there’s that bounder from Hamas.’

‘By jove, you’re right.’

‘Let’s debag him before tiffin.’

‘All right, old sport. Last one in the library’s a sissy.’

Despite all the faux political outrage over the alleged killers using cloned UK and European passports, those who trade and treat with Mossad in the real world know they do things differently in Israel. There is a reason for this – and there are many in London who are quietly glad and won’t make any fuss.

Mossad works out of nondescript headquarters in suburban Tel Aviv and is known as the ‘midrasha’ from a Hebrew root meaning ‘to study’ or ‘to investigate’.

As a hack, I met several Mossad people including its former head, Isser Harrel – the man who planned the audaciously brilliant kidnap and exfiltration of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to Israel where he famously stood trial in the name of the six million Jews he helped to murder in the Holocaust.

Harrel gave me information I later fictionalised in my novel, A Place of Strangers, which is partly about vengeance killings of ex-Nazis in the 1950s.

We also discussed terrorism and he was both fascinated and appalled by the conflict in Northern Ireland where I had worked for the Daily Mail and television. No matter how hard I tried to explain the politico-legal constraints in a liberal democracy, he simply couldn’t understand why, if the British army and security services knew the names and whereabouts of their IRA enemies, they simply didn’t assassinate them.

This was a wholly logical, justifiable and necessary tactic from his point of view – a position informed by Hitler’s attempts to eradicate the entire Jewish race and driven subsequently by those leaders in the Middle East who wished to take up where the Fuhrer was obliged to leave off.

Harrel’s ‘never again’ philosophy was necessarily that of his particular jungle – kill or be killed. But there is no doubt it remains Mossad’s imperative, as Mahmoud al-Mabhouh found to his cost after checking into the Al-Bustan Rutana hotel last month.

He was reportedly seeking arms from Iran to be shipped to his militant Islamic associates who run Gaza and oppose the very existence of Israel. Iran as a country is testing missile systems as it edges ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon, dirty or otherwise. Its fanatical leadership denies the Holocaust and makes public statements against Jews of which Joseph Goebbels would be proud. To deny this threat is to deny a lesson from history, according to many Jewish observers.

While this remains the case, there will be people in Britain and elsewhere who may be shocked at what happened in Dubai… but they should not surprised. The murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh isn’t the first in Mossad’s shadow war against Hamas and its backers – and it most certainly will not be the last.

Geoff Seed’s fact-based novel, A Place Of Strangers, is published by Revel Barker at £9.99. Read more about it on our Books Page, or find it on amazon by clicking on the title.

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Falling in The Street

By Liz Hodgkinson

Whatever is happening to freelance fees?

When I worked as woman’s editor at The Times in 1986 – during that terrible Wapping year – we paid freelance contributors £250 for a piece of about 600 words. The average rate for 1,000 words was £400.

Even in those days, it was not considered good money, but well – some people preferred to have their by-line in what was then considered the top people’s paper than in some other publications. And sometimes, a better-paying paper was not a suitable outlet for either the subject matter or the golden prose in which it would be written.

However, that was then. Nowadays, you might expect the fees to be at least double what they were a quarter of a century ago. After all, everything else has gone up.

But no, just the opposite has happened. It is hard and becoming harder, to get even those rates. A fee that seemed average or low in the 1980s has now become an impossible dream for an increasing number of hard-working journalists.

For example, a long-established and supposedly valued freelance contributor to the Telegraph tells me that over the past two years, his rates have halved, from £500 per 1000 to £250. And it’s not as if he has been specially singled out for ultra-low rates. This slashing has gone on across the board, and continues to go on.

Apart from a favoured few earning something like £250,000 a year, most of the Telegraph’s contributors have found their rates steadily declining over the past few years.

Not that this newspaper is alone. The Guardian, Times and Independent have also recently cut their rates – and they were never high in the first place. Twenty years ago I contributed a regular health column to the Guardian, for which I was paid £300 a time. It was difficult to write a good health article containing useful, original research and quotes for that amount, but I hear that they now pay only £200 for such a piece. It is actually impossible to write any kind of proper health feature for that kind of money, and the only way to be cost-effective is to rewrite PR handouts.

Some people may not mind churning out this sort of stuff but most of us like to get something original, something with a bit of an edge to it, into print.

It is true that ever since 1986, when the unions lost all their power, it has been difficult to make a decent living from journalism. Now, though, it seems, it’s downright impossible to make any kind of living at all.

What are these big organisations thinking of, paying peanuts? And more to the point, is there anything anybody can do, apart from just moaning?

In the olden days of course, concerted union action and collective bargaining kept rates reasonably high. Now, even on papers where a union exists or is tolerated, it has no powers whatever to improve rates or conditions for its members.

The present-day isolation of journalists is another factor in the ever-plummeting rates. When they gathered together in pubs, they could compare stories and press for – and often get – better rates. Bad pay thrives on the isolation of workers and these days journalists hardly ever meet each other. Why are homeworkers always paid so little? Simply because they can never band together, and in any case are terrified of losing even their tiny income if they dare to raise a voice in protest.

And individual action, such as the threat to withdraw one’s labour or to upstick the fee arsewise, will have no effect whatever. The section editor will just go elsewhere. After all, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of kids pouring out of media courses who are desperate enough to get their names into print for a pittance.

And not only kids. There are also flocks of elderly or retired journalists who would love to have a regular outlet on a widely-read paper, for little or no money.

No, the only effective way to improve rates is by is blanket strike action. If everybody simply refused to file copy on a particular day – say for a Saturday when all newspapers are particularly full of freelance articles – and continued to refuse until rates improved, the management would have no choice but to sit up and take notice.

If all outside contributors withheld their labour, no newspaper could possibly come out. Because although it might be possible to fill one or two empty slots at short notice, no editor could ever fill them all.

Some brave person would have to be responsible for organising all the others and encouraging them to see that while newspapers continue to get away with it, rates will inevitably plummet ever downwards. £250 will become £200, will become £150 and before long, even £100 per thousand will sound generous.

Unless something like this is done, journalism will soon turn into a vanity profession, where people just write for the privilege of seeing their names in the paper, not to earn a living. And when that day dawns journalism, as we Ranters understand it, will be dead for ever. Journalists should be strong, brave and outspoken, not meek little mice.

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More must-reads

Here’s the list of the 12 books brought to you by those sound folk who give you Ranters every week..

More details of all of them are available on our books site.

Forgive Us Our Press Passes

by Ian Skidmore

(An hilarious account of life as a staffman, desk man, freelance and broadcaster)

£9.99

The Best of Vincent

Mulchrone

(The master at work; by the man generally acknowledge to have been the best reporter of his generation)

£9.99

Cassandra At His Finest And Funniest

(The pick of columns crafted by one of the greatest wordsmiths of his time. Or since)

£9.99

Slip-Up: How Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard Lost Him

by Anthony Delano

(The wonderful story behind a famous scoop, with Fleet Street rivalry at its most intense)

£9.99

A Crooked Sixpence

by Murray Sayle

(A brilliant fact-based novel about life on a mass-circulation tabloid)

£9.99

Ladies Of The Street

by Liz Hodgkinson

(How ‘the weaker sex’ contributed to the glory that once was Fleet Street)

£9.99

The Upper Pleasure Garden

by Gordon M Williams

(A fact-based novel about life on a fairly seedy weekly, as a young reporter tries to make his mark on the game)

£9.99

Crying All The Way To The Bank (Liberace v the Daily Mirror and Cassandra)

by Revel Barker

(The world’s highest-paid entertainer takes on the biggest selling newspaper in the trial of the century)

£15.99

Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon

by Anthony Delano

(Another – factual – account of the bizarre story of a beauty queen who accused a missionary of rape)

£9.99

A Place of Strangers

by Geoffrey Seed

(A novel, loosely based on fact, about a reporter’s quest to find the truth about his family, while pursuing a story about the Holocaust)

£9.99

Publish and Be Damned! (The astonishing story of the Daily Mirror)

by Hugh Cudlipp

(The all-time classic read for journalists about how and why newspapers sell)

£12.99

The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite

by Maggie Hall

(Not much to do with reporting, except that it was researched and written by a former New York correspondent. A great gift, though, for Anglophiles)

£10.00

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