I cannot think of any book on our joyous trade, including mine, which describes the fun, the fascination, as well as this one does. The laughter and the tears, the frustrations and the occasional triumphs are all lovingly recalled. Waterhouse, Mulchrone and now Dunne form a trinity of writers to be envied, emulated but never eclipsed. That they are all extremely amiable people is an added bonus that dilutes the envy. – Ian Skidmore on Man Bites Talking Dog

Issue # 137

March 5, 2010

This week

Next month sees the publication of the book that many readers had suggested we publish, some had called for and some had even begged for. Colin Dunne’s Man Bites Talking Dog – a collection of his articles that appeared on this website – will be out, appropriately, on April 1.

And the book-launch – to which all Ranters with a tenner in their pockets are of course cordially invited – will be at the Harrow in Whitefriars Street from 12.30pm. Mr Dunne may even consent to sign copies, for those who bring one or buy one at the launch.

Otherwise it is available for pre-order, now (by clicking on the title), on-line from amazon-UK and elsewhere. It’ll be interesting, says Revel Barker, to see how many readers who asked for it actually buy it.

Like most of us, Colin started on a small weekly in a different time and a different world. Harold Heys returned to that world and found they were still using type carved out of wood for the larger founts. Some had been lost to woodworm. Tempo Heavy 72pt L had just been lost, so they used an upturned figure 7. Different world? I’ll say.

Geoffrey Mather slipped away from that world temporarily to work under shot and shell for King (George VI, not Cecil) and country… only to learn that he was now in danger – of being lapsed from the NUJ (oh yes; bean counters were not confined to management) for failing to keep up his subs.

Phil Harrison remembers some loony decrees of management, though – and recalls how they were dealt with by the lads.

And to end on a sad and serious note, Geoffrey Goodman pays tribute to his old friend Michael Foot who died this week having edited Tribune and the Evening Standard in his youth and who was the great exception to the rule that journalists and politicians couldn’t be trusted.

#

Daft, I call it

By Revel Barker

Part way through his book, Colin Dunne recalls a commissioning editor telling his chum John Sandilands that his copy was so good it read even better on the second time of reading, to which the contributor perhaps predictably replied: ‘Couldn’t you have read it for the second time, first?’

We know the feeling. Desk men who read a piece for a second time always think they’ve read it somewhere before, so it must be old. Standing up to a second read-through means that the copy is exceptionally good.

And here’s the thing. I read each piece of Colin Dunne’s Ranters copy as it came in, typically once a week; I re-read it as I subbed it for the page; then I read it again as part of the whole site before putting the edition to bed (such diligence, I know; and no doubt a surprise for those underemployed readers who play spot-the-typo with this website every week). Early this year I read all Colin’s offerings again, before suggesting to him that we collate the majority of them for a book; then I re-subbed the articles we had chosen together; I read them again when making up the pages for the book, and finally at proofreading stage.

Then I re-read the whole damn thing when it arrived hot off the press.

Guess what? The words were as fresh at the end of that process – and as funny – as they had been on the first time of reading. There aren’t many writers about whom you could say that.

Elsewhere he says he could never understand how our hero Vincent Mulchrone, using the same 26 letters as the rest of us, could compose words that glowed. Colin didn’t need to understand it; it came naturally to him, too. And after they worked against each other Vince sent him a note demanding: ‘How dare you write a better piece than me?’

He says that when he was being considered for a move from news to features on the Daily Mirror in Manchester, I was his competition for the vacancy, generously adding that the news desk wanted to keep me, but was prepared to lose him because they preferred the hard news that I wrote to the froth that he produced. In those days I would write the occasional feature, partly for the better space (and bigger by-line) but in truth it was no contest.

I would write the jolly; Col would write the daft. Nobody could touch him on that. And the Mirror had virtually cornered the market on daft stories. A reputation built on interviews with talking dogs was not seen as a drawback on the world’s best-selling newspaper. Colin doesn’t mention it (although Cudlipp does and quotes the entire piece in Publish And Be Damned!) but the great Noel Whitcomb had secured a job on the paper, years earlier, on the basis of an interview with a dog.

So Colin was typically self-deprecating about his ability with ‘real’ stories. And yet I remember having to follow up his stuff when I was a Mirror district man and he was writing Eldon’s Gossip, the diary on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.

And, yes, some of them were daft. He and a gallery owning mate, Scott Dobson, thought it would be fun to create an exhibition of people’s doodles and talked Ted Short, then deputy leader of the Labour Party and a local MP, into collecting doodles from people attending one of Harold Wilson’s cabinet meetings. It was going well until Short heard that the Tories were planning to submit the doodles for psychoanalysis and publish the findings…

Front Page stuff all round. And when Wilson accused the Tories of having doodled away 14 years, everybody knew what he meant. Thanks to young Dunne.

When he discovered Basil Bunting, lost to sight but being hailed as the World’s Greatest Living Poet, working away quietly at the end of the subs’ table at the Chronicle – the tale was here in Ranters, and it’s in the book – it went everywhere in the heavies, including the colour supplements. It changed Bunting’s life, securing him jobs at two universities which wanted him to work only on poetry, and sod the city pages.

This is Dunne on Bunting: A shabby, baggy figure, with NHS pebble-specs barely visible through an explosion of greying hair, bushy eyebrows and overgrown moustache, so he looked like a Morris Minor bursting through a hedge.

All this was before Colin fetched up at the Mirror where, clearly, he had a ball but moaned constantly that they didn’t use enough of his stuff. He complained to Mike Molloy, the editor, that he never knew what to write when filling in a form that asked for his occupation. So he started freelancing on the side. He flipped over to the Sun – more happy times (until Kelvin arrived) – then to the Daily Record, then to freelancing full time.

He couldn’t be stopped. YOU magazine (more fun, brilliant employers), Good Housekeeping, Radio Times… He even created his own magazine.

And he didn’t stop in retirement. Scribble, scribble, scribble. Between rounds of golf he wrote rounds of gold (sorry, that started as a typo, but…) for this website.

We can all be grateful for that. And we can now read the stuff in his book.

Buy it.

Man Bites Talking Dog by Colin Dunne, published on April 1 by Revel Barker at £9.99 and available on-line for order now from amazon-uk or Waterstones; in the US from amazon; or worldwide with free delivery from Book Depository.

#

Woodentops

By Harold Heys

I often wonder how many of today’s dwindling number of newspaper hacks ever experienced the ‘muck-and-bullets’ atmosphere of the old-fashioned weekly papers that you could find in most towns. Not many, I suspect.

In recent years it’s been mainly university and then a life glued to a computer screen or a telephone. The big wide world out there is a faraway place for many of ’em. They’ve probably never experienced hairy-arsed comps, those intimidating characters from the depths of the Neolithic age, or the thunder of presses. Spike? Glue pot? Ash tray?

Local newspapers offices – what remain of them – these days are clean, crisp and rather tidy. There’s an air of quiet contemplation in which most folk keep their heads down and click away. For the old hacks who used to enjoy the screaming sessions in a fog of fag smoke and the lunchtime and evening piss-ups it must be soul destroying. I’ve been out of it for a few years. I was 16 when I started as a junior reporter and enjoyed nearly every minute of the next 44 years. I walked out without a backward glance.

I was in my mid-40s before I actually worked on one of the little weeklies, taking over as editor of my local paper after the nationals had pulled out of Manchester. But I well remember the good old days when I used to pop into the local papers’ offices and help ’em out for a fiver a throw. We had two local papers in Darwen back in the 60s and for a few weeks I found myself covering the area as district man for the Evening Telegraph and, due to a combination of unforeseen circumstances, writing virtually every line in both weekly papers at the same time.

The old Darwen News was Dickensian. It was owned by a couple of Lino ops, Fred and Jack, and was filled most weeks with garbage, enlivened by the occasional local story or feature. Fred and Jack pedalled two old Lino machines separated by a third which slowly crumbled. Each time something broke or snapped or simply dropped off one of the working machines Fred or Jack would just lean over, unscrew a replacement – and carry on tinkling away.

The rest of their machinery had probably survived from the Industrial Revolution. The proofing press was surmounted by an enormous bronze eagle. You stuck your galley under its backside, hit the Go button and dropped to the floor quickly as the eagle whooshed and soared and came down with an almighty crash. The battered machine that actually printed the papers was a flat-bed job (the sort Caxton used) and, as you can imagine, it took ages to knock off around 4,000 copies.

Just about the only thing the Darwen News had going for it was the proximity of the New Inn, just across the road. Any-excuse-for-a-pint was the theme and winters were a Godsend to the handful of workers. The bogs used to freeze up regularly. And the nearest were, yes, across the road in the New Inn. So, a five-minute dash, a quick pee – and a pint, for appearance’s sake – and back to work. As you can imagine, as the day wore on more frequent trips were necessary and by late afternoon not much work was being done.

The first time I popped in to help out, I remember, it was just starting to lash it down. And the old building – certainly the knackered roof – couldn’t take it. Someone blew a whistle and there was a mad scramble for, perhaps, 15 seconds. Buckets, pots and pans and an old tin bath were placed strategically at key points. Then came the rain, through the holes in the roof and straight into the assembled receptacles. Barely a drop was missed. A magnificent operation.

Photos were always a problem. Occasionally someone would proffer a print of the mayor or a local captain of industry, or a presentation and the old ‘cliché’ machine (it made a flat metal plate studded with raised dots so that… oh forget it, children) would be dusted down. But mainly we had to root around in a tatty cardboard box of old ‘stock’ plates, bent and scratched, to find something to illustrate a story. Anything. Action Images it wasn’t.

There was a bit of a panic one evening when I popped in to draw up some pages for them. I never bothered to actually draw pages on make-up pads, it was simply a case of glancing through a sheaf of proofs and using a piece of chalk to scrawl straight on to the stone (a flat metal table on which type and picture blocks were assembled before… oh, don’t worry, children). Three col pic there, big head ’cross five and five, double col under the shoulder, stock head of Alderman Yates here, and so on.

The panic? One night nobody could find any chalk. Deadline loomed. ‘Hang on,’ said Arnold. He picked up a big lump hammer and took a couple of swipes at the wall. Whitewashed plaster flew everywhere. He picked up a piece triumphantly and handed it over to me.

‘Right lads, Three-deck double col head here and here, leg the crash story round, mayor’s pic in the middle…’

Writing headlines was rather more difficult than it is today. Some of the bigger mono founts – Americans call it ‘font’ and we have fallen for it – weren’t complete so you could have only one letter ‘e’ for instance in the battered 60pt Helvetica. The ‘thick’ – Tempo Heavy italics – didn’t have a 72pt capital L – a problem I solved by suggesting they use a No 7 upside down.

The splash had a count of about ten in a delicate wooden, yes, wooden, caps fount over three inches deep (we couldn’t use the K or the X – woodworm). The last thing was the splash head. ‘Oh, just make it ATROCIOUS,’ I told ’em as I slid off to the New Inn. ‘Dog’s dick on the end if you’ve room.’ It was late at night when I went round to see how it had gone. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something odd about the splash. The tale seemed to read ok and the pic was the right way up. But…

It was the following day before I’d sobered up and I clocked the problem as soon I picked up a copy: ATTROCIOUS. In heavy type, a sort of med. cond. Gothic, a good three inches deep; at least 250 pt. Aaaarrrggg!

It must be the biggest and most prominent spelling mistake in the history of local newspapers.

Unless you know better…

#

For valour…

By Geoffrey Mather

I was sorting out some old files and came across a crumpled envelope that had lurked there for, oh, a normal lifetime or two. It was from a branch official of the National Union of Journalists to me.

This official honed in on me like a rocket. I was sweating it out in Middle East Land Forces at the urgent request of my new employer, the monarch of the time, George VI. And I would bet a million medals that my old colleague's approach could never happen these days. The mood of those times died for ever.

‘I was surprised,’ the NUJ treasurer wrote, ‘to hear that you had joined the Forces. Somehow I had always thought of you in the same category as myself – one who was missing all the fun.’

Fun…? Fun? Hornets and guns and bread crunchy with dead insects? Heat rashes, unruly populations, bombs where you least expected them, dark shadows in strange doorways, and no reasonable beer? The choice of words would be absolutely typical of the era. It was fun, chaps. Sometimes the fun killed you; ah well, wizard show, toodle pip old boy. Bought it.

Another drift of thought... to the Charge of the Light Brigade. I suppose they said things like: ‘Grand, that, sir. Like to do it again if you don't mind. Dog enjoyed it. Pity we lost so many chaps. Good cause.’

Different times, you see. So very, very different. Different concepts all round. No rights of the individual decided in Europe by politicians with enormous salaries and expenses. Not a lot of health and safety. No aerodromes and long coffin processions with a fellow at the front carrying an umbrella and wearing a top hat. No drips of death on TV, or letters of condolence from the Prime Minister, but a deluge of death in local newspapers plus a note from the commanding officer, a sort of mass toodle-pip.

Amid it all, my NUJ correspondent, occupying the office of branch Hon. Treasurer, saw a looming problem for both of us. ‘I shall confidently expect you to send me to sleep or off my mind at some future cricket match with 'When I was in the Army’... Then, he bit the real bullet:

‘Well, dear friend, I am too lazy ever to do anything without at least a purpose and I now come to it. Your departure came upon me unawares and I find that contributions are owing for July, August and September. Perhaps you could make arrangements to let me have same at your earliest opportunity and certainly before the end of hostilities.’

That is my case. Would any of that be acceptable these days? No, your worships. If those days were these days, there would be bizarre headlines referring to ‘our lads’ facing death day and night. Incoming post would be full of invective aimed at the Prime Minister from insensitive civilians wallowing in the comforts of regular Spam and a banana every couple of years.

I served three years and 161 days – no, no; don't get up – most of it abroad, while this adder-upper with a sharp pencil, an official position, and a passion for figures, guarded his tiny till in the comfort and safety of his home. And he accuses me of stealing ‘fun’ to add to the insult.

I find that I have much in common with the old soldier in Larkrise to Candleforth. There he was, with a wooden peg leg he made himself, wearing an old red uniform – red so as not to show the blood – spluttering, drinking ale, and falling and adjusting his eye patch.

It's the way I felt I might end up when I was exposed to the full rigours of the National Union of Journalists through one of its fiscal militants.

The NUJ official? Ah, a form of comeuppance. I heard that the doctor who examined him for the forces, and rejected him, reflected that he had the smallest chest and cleanest feet of anyone he had ever met.

In truth, he wasn't a bad chap, you know. Harmless enough. A bit eccentric. To be absolutely honest, I rather liked him. I hope he was not too bored to miss a remarkable branch union meeting where, post-war, a couple of members were involved in that tin-hat talk he affected to dislike:

‘Once,’ said the first, ‘I had to put out targets in an area where fighter pilots could practice shooting them to bits. I was still there when a Spitfire came in fast and low before the chosen time and began to fire. Never been so scared in all my life. Bullets spurting all round me.’

The fellow next to him asked precisely when and where it happened, and once that was answered to his satisfaction, he said: ‘I'm sorry – it was me. I was the pilot.’

I can't remember whether I paid the subs. If the union takes up the matter at this late stage, I warn them now – I shall limp, wear an eye patch, and my two medals (neither for valour, alas), and claim enormous amounts of compensation – no win, no fee – for hurt feelings.

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

#

Driven up the wall

By Phil Harrison

They were wild and woolly days in the 1960s at The Friend in Bloemfontein. The Friend was one of the South African Argus group’s two morning papers. Its sports sub editor, Wally Waldeck, was a wild man. He was an amateur pilot who had lost his licence a few years earlier for flying dangerously low while trying to impress his girlfriend.

Wally liked to paste newspaper and magazine cuttings on the subs’ room wall and to decorate other parts of the room with newspaper aphorisms such as: YOU’VE GOT A GOOD HEADING. NOW REWRITE THE STORY TO FIT.

As the subs’ room was used only during newspaper production time — late afternoon and night — the manager of The Friend, Terence Trigger, had a daily 10 o’clock tea meeting there with his executives.

Trigger decided that the wall decorations were not befitting a room where executives gathered, no matter what the scruffy journalists thought. So he ordered that the walls be stripped and repainted. A corkboard was affixed to the wall and was, according to a managerial memorandum, to be used for cuttings or notices.

Wally was not happy with this. After our nightly one-hour visit to the pub between editions, he went to the print room and brought back a tray full of printer’s ink. He took his shoes and socks off and stepped into the tray. We held his arms and supported him while he ‘walked’ up the wall, across the ceiling and down the opposite wall.

The result was wonderful. Huge black footprints marked a trail across the newly painted brilliant white walls and ceilings.

The next day, Trigger walked into the room, saw the result of Wally’s footwork, and dropped his cup.

It took Wally two days to scrub the wall and ceiling clean and repaint them, and seven weeks to get the ink off his feet.

Wally was always a good problem-solver. At one stage, the editor, Robbie Robertson, banned sub-editors from drinking while on duty. The edict came after a group of us spent most of the day on a familiarisation visit to the goldfields and their many pubs at Welkom, the circulation area of The Friend’s first edition. We returned full of good cheer and bonhomie ready to start work for the evening and carrying a few snooker balls we had appropriated from a pub we had visited on the way home. It was after a boisterous game of desktop snooker using em-rules for cues had resulted in two smashed windows that the drinking ban was imposed. The chief sub was deputed to enforce the ban

Wally, however, had a solution. He would take up a weekly collection, buy bottles of a local white wine called Leiberstein (2/6 a bottle then) and secrete them in various files in the cuttings library after the librarian had left for the day. During the evening, a note would be passed around the subs’ table saying, for example, ‘Look under forestry’. At various times during the evening, when the thirst took hold, a quick trip to the library to check or research something alleviated the problem.

The ban was rescinded soon afterwards.

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.

#

Footie

By Geoffrey Goodman

To describe the legacy of Michael Foot, whether as a politician, a biographer, an historian, but probably most of all as an outstanding journalist and writer is effectively to chronicle the tapestry of 20th century British radicalism.

No other political figure quite matches this remarkable son of Plymouth – not even his own great hero, Aneurin Bevan. For while Nye was without question, one of a rare handful of truly outstanding politicians of the last century, even he did not combine exceptional oratory with a capacity to write in even finer style.

That was the uniqueness of Michael Foot. His legacy contains not only a life of radical courage and political integrity of unusual quality and stamina: it also ranges alongside an even greater reputation as an illustrious writer. He did not write fiction in the manner of another of his heroes, Benjamin Disraeli; yet the range and bravura of Michael Foot’s literary output has been breathtaking and hardly rivalled.

Foot was a kind of renaissance litterateur with scarcely a trace of its often accompanying characteristics of the dilettante. He was always the master of the brilliant phrase with an ability to recall, even into his nineties, a remote phrase from some corner of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Swift and Heine.

He seemed effortlessly to produce these references whether on the floor of the House of Commons or in casual private conversation. And he could invariably evoke all the qualities and values of those masters as he thrust them forward adding his own gloss. For proof that this is not mere hyperbole open his marvellous book dedicated as a vindication of Byron, The Politics of Paradise published in 1988, shortly before Michael decided to stand down from Parliament.

Of course he did not become Prime Minister. The long years in Parliament from 1945 through to 1992, with a gap of five years between 1955 and 1960 when he returned to inherit Bevan's seat in Ebbw Vale, were remarkable enough in their own right. For years whenever he rose from the back benches the House of Commons would rapidly fill: his campaigning radicalism, the humour and his matchless facility to choose historic parallels hardly ever failed to transfix that most critical of all public audiences – a crowded Commons. MPs would queue to scramble back into the chamber when Foot was speaking.

Michael could have been in earlier Labour Governments – he refused ministerial posts in the Wilson governments of 1964 and 1966 before finally accepting cabinet rank in Wilson’s 1974 Government. And when he became deputy leader to Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in 1976 his influence within Cabinet and certainly within the Labour Party in the country injected a particular new significance into the normally nominal role of deputy Prime Minister.

Jill Foot, who died in 1999, famously once observed that her husband ‘is not really cut out for political intrigue’. His heart, she added, ‘is really in newspapers and writing’ . There was, and remains, great truth in what Jill said. Michael, above all, was the supreme journalist and recognised as such across the party political spectrum and across Fleet Steet – his natural habitat.

But he was also one of the great parliamentarians. He could be mercilessly scalding when he was attacking and rebuking the absurdities of policies whether against the Tory foe or the banalities, as he perceived them, of his own political colleagues.

The thrust of Foot’s honesty cut through all intrigue and political corruption.

Sometimes that has made him an uncomfortable ally even within his own ranks. But there can be no finer legacy offered by this special nonagenarian than that he would never flinch from the truth even if, oft times, it might pain his closest friends.

That is what he did when in 1957 he criticised his greatest political ally and hero, Nye Bevan, for refusing to go along with unilateral nuclear disarmament.. It was an exceptional act of personal and moral courage – the very mark of his legacy.

Geoffrey Goodman worked for the News Chronicle, Daily Herald, Odhams Sun and the Guardian before becoming industrial editor, columnist and assistant editor of the Daily Mirror. His book, From Bevan To Blair – Fifty years reporting from the political front line, revisited, revised and updated will be republished in summer by Revel Barker.

###

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

Issue# 138

March 12, 2010

This Week

Let's start by getting the terminology right. First, Wayzgoose (origin obscure) always falls on Maundy Thursday and is the traditional day off work for daily newspaper people because - in our day - there were no papers on Good Friday.

Second: old hacks celebrate it because (a) it's as good an excuse as any for a piss-up and (b) it's worth saving because it's such a lovely word.

Third: Liz Hodgkinson suggested that it would be a good day for all those freelance contributors who are vexed by their commissioning editors to make themselves unavailable for the day - and a fairly gentle first reminder that they think they deserve respect (and decent remuneration).

But - fourth - that isn't a strike. Freelances by definition can't go on strike because they are their own employers; they can, however, be unavailable for work and if they are all unavailable at the same time, the message may get across.

And, fifth, Wayzgoose falls this year on April 1, All Fools' Day, which is the date chosen to launch Colin Dunne's book, Man Bites Talking Dog. So any freelances looking for an excuse for not answering the phone can explain that they were in Fleet Street... at a fellow freelance's book launch. Job done.

Liz Hodgkinson follows up the need for such industrial inaction with detailed examples that will surprise old-timers and should shame the current practitioners of the inky trade. Bow your heads, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, New Statesman, Esquire and Time Out. Liz's call has also been taken up by freelances all over the place, including here (1), here (2), and here (3)

Terry Fletcher, former editor of The Dalesman, delves into Colin's aforementioned book.

Mike Gallemore promises to remember some Wayzgoose experiences in time for next week's edition but this week he's reminiscing about his first job, as a freelance.

(You see how there's a little theme developing here? It has to stop.)

Harold Heys remembers the delights of working with two subs who never spoke to each other.

And Mark Dayrecalls the time when a loony management - unlike this website, which turns back the clock - decided to turn the clock forward.

#

Ranters of the world... unite?

By Liz Hodgkinson

My Ranters piece on the ever-shrinking freelance fees has produced an impassioned response from many aggrieved writers who have witnessed the gradual disappearance of their income.

And it's getting worse as ever more publications plead poverty and give any old excuse as to why they can't pay a living wage or, indeed, any wage at all. Just this week, I read that Time Out wants an ‘enthusiastic graduate' for a three-month internship. Office experience is essential, as is a ‘sound knowledge of London's retail landscape'. The full-time job is unpaid.

How many enthusiastic graduates will rush to apply, I wonder?

Now that ever more former staffers are being forced into freelance activity through redundancies and swingeing job cuts, we cannot just sit back and let the accountants decimate our fees.

So here's what we do. We know that unilateral action will get nowhere, and only collective action will produce results. So why don't we all lay down tools on April 1, Maundy Thursday, and instead, congregate in the Harrow pub in Fleet Street where, coincidentally, Colin Dunne's book launch is being held?

In the olden days, Maundy Thursday was traditionally a journalist's day off as there was no paper on Good Friday. Murdoch and Maxwell changed all that, as indeed they did with working for Christmas Day.

Here's what my son Tom had to say in an email when he read my piece on Ranters:

I contacted the freelance organiser at the NUJ and he said that he has tried and failed to get a strike going.

I suggested to him that we think about a one-day ‘strike' which is perhaps combined with an afternoon in a Fleet Street boozer, and I said that you and your gang of old hacks would be up for it.

Tom lists the reasons - which will be familiar to all freelances these days - for downing tools in protest:

Here are a few common grumbles:

Tumbling rates. The Telegraph, for example, now pays just £250 per thousand words. This means low quality features and low quality news,both of which will depend ever more heavily on press releases. And poor freelancers.

Payment according to click. There is a horrifying new trend where bloggers' fees depend on how many readers their piece attracts, which quite clearly means that they will tend to write sensational bits of opinion which go heavy on key phrases like ‘David Cameron'. The medium will profoundly influence the message.

A startling lack of courtesy from commissioning editors. My own example: I wrote a 1,600 word piece for the Telegraph Review section and filed it five weeks ago. Since then I have heard not a peep despite four emails chasing up.

Late payment.

Commissioning a certain amount of words, printing a cut-down version and then paying only for the reduced version. This trick was played on me by the New Statesman.

Simply not paying. Esquire took eighteen months to pay me for a piece, and only then after the NUJ got heavy with them.

Extra low payments for blogs. The Guardian offered me £85 for a five hundred word opinion piece (for their Comment is Cheap section). This sticks in the craw a little when you consider that the site is completely plastered in advertising and also that Guardian MD Carolyn McCall takes home over a million quid a year.

We need to stand up and protest against this new shoddy treatment, and a strike is the way to do it. Freelances also need to meet up and talk. The computer has separated us; hence the meeting in the pub.

It's time to fight back, and the best way to do that is to sit in the pub all afternoon, combining protest and merriment in time-honoured fashion.

Solidarity!

Ranters reader Bob Dow had this to say:

Loved your piece on Gentlemen Ranters (always my first port of call on a Friday) and totally agree with you about the way good, hard working, honest freelances are being treated.

I was a staff man up here in Scotland for 30-years until I was dumped a year ago during a Daily Record cull. Since then I have found it astonishing the crappy rates that newspapers pay freelances and the unbelievable attitude and lack of respect towards us.

If you want to build up a head of steam on this then I am willing to lead the kilted hordes over Hadrian's Wall...

Right, then. See you there, including the kilted hordes!

By the way, my other son Will told me about a successful freelance outcome at Mojo, a music magazine to which he contributes and which runs almost entirely on freelance contributions. Mojo, owned by the huge German conglomerate Bauer, had written round to all their contributors saying that not only were they buying all rights, but if an interviewee took legal action over any piece, the individual writer would be culpable.

This resulted in all the Mojo contributors getting together and refusing to write a single further word for the publication until they backed down - which they instantly did.

We know that very small, struggling publications cannot afford to pay writers much, or even anything, sometimes. That's how it has always been with small magazines and how it always will be. But large multinational organisations, which are the ones we are talking about, are an entirely different matter.

They CAN pay but they WON'T pay - unless we make 'em!

Freelance journalist Liz Hodgkinson is the author of Ladies Of The Street, published by Revel Barker at £9.99

#

Mr Dale's diary

By Terry Fletcher

Like spent salmon returning from the deep ocean, world-weary hacks are supposed to yearn to end their days editing the weekly paper where it all began. So perhaps I should have been a little more wary when Colin Dunne turned up in my office bearing a lunch invitation.

In fact, Colin had already driven past the door of his own launch pad at the Craven Herald and Pioneer in Skipton's High Street to reach us. At that time I did not realise that mine was the job he truly coveted; editing The Dalesman, a small pocket magazine that gives the Bible a run for its money as Holy Writ across the Broad Acres.

Despite the Tykes' legendary ‘care' with brass we still managed to persuade enough of them to buy it each month to make it the country's biggest selling regional mag. And, to be fair to Colin, it is a job to kill, if not actually to die, for.

Combined with editing its sister magazine, Cumbria, it demanded a glorious monthly progress through the Yorkshire Dales, North York Moors and Lake District national parks. Over and over again. Envious colleagues regularly reminded me I had the best job in journalism.

Not surprisingly, it's a vacancy that does not come up too often and I, a refugee from rough trade journalism, who down the years had variously freelanced masquerading as ‘Howley of Barnsley' and run the Yorkshire Post news operation, was only the fourth incumbent in more than 60 years. Colin had finally lost patience waiting for me to give it up but, being the all-round decent chap he is, had decided that rather than push me under a passing tractor he'd start his own version in the deep south, which he called Downs Country.

He'd turned up hoping for some tips on the publishing side - obviously the writing was already taken care of - though he ignored my key piece of advice: Don't Do It! Regular Ranters have already learnt of the six fun-filled if financially less-than-rewarding years he had creating and wrestling with the title as it steadfastly refused to leave home and pay its own way.

I'm still not sure what he got from our encounter. I know I got a long hilarious lunch and a foretaste of the many tales that have enlivened almost every edition of Ranters and have now been gathered together into a book.

Man Bites Talking Dog charts Colin's rise from the Raving Herald (what other way was there to go but up?) via a string of publications as varied as the Leamington Spa Courier, the Newcastle Chron, the Mirror and YOU magazine to his forlorn foray into life as a press baron.

Some join our trade to save the world. Colin admits he just wanted to lose his virginity and simultaneously escape the clutches of the Skipton Building Society, the other employment choice in this small market town. To this end the Herald offered not only a life free of double entry bookkeeping but the irresistible allure of a key to the office. It was intended to allow keen young reporters to put in some unpaid overtime.

Colin's heart was set on a rather different kind of night work. In those days, he says, before trainee reporters could afford a place of their own or even a car, an apprentice Lothario with access to an empty warm dry office had the fifties equivalent of a penthouse flat and an Aston Martin at his disposal in the seduction stakes.

What he also got, though he did not realise it at the time, was a first class preparation for his future career. Skipton, for all its other charms - mediaeval castle, Gateway to the Dales, Best High Street in England (official) - is not the newsiest of towns. The area is so quiet that until a few months ago the Herald itself acknowledged this almost total lack of incident by stolidly devoting its whole front page to adverts. A former editor once defended the design by admitting that in a close knit town like Skipton the ads were the only bit of the content the readers did not already know about. As for the rest, the Herald's job was merely to confirm what they had already heard.

It may not have set a young reporter's adrenalin racing but it proved the perfect training for a career in which Colin admits he has never actually covered a serious news story. Instead his life has embraced the daft ones, the barmy tales; the ones that, whether serious papers like it or not, people talk about in the pub. Like a lost budgie given its own BR train home and, yes, Corky the Talking Dog of Drighlington Crossroads.

But when it also leads to fame setting British lawn mower racing records and untold gastronomy accompanying a Barnsley black pudding magnate to France, it does not seem a bad life. Throw in interviewing Brigitte Bardot and mingling with affectionate Icelandic ladies while covering the world's most cerebral pantomime - Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky's cold war chess match - and who could ask for more? Certainly not Colin as he ambles self-deprecatingly and sometimes bemusedly down the bits of Memory Lane the post-match booze ups have not entirely erased and accompanied by a cast that Damon Runyan would have been proud to have invented.

He might have claimed his career spanned the glory days of British journalism but Colin prefers to consider it one of the silliest times in one of the silliest industries, when newsrooms were packed with characters, mostly disreputable, and journalists didn't have jobs, they had fun. And Man Bites Talking Dog mounts a pretty overwhelming case.

Whichever version you choose, whether you're a misty-eyed hack or a gimlet-eyed bean-counter, this compilation thoroughly deserves its downloading from cyber space into the real world and, like all the best yarns, his stories deserve re-telling. If you were there, buy it to remind yourself of the good times but, more importantly, if you weren't, buy it to see what you missed. Between the chuckles, the guffaws and the belly laughs you'll find most of the important stuff they'll never teach you on your Media Studies Course.

Man Bites Talking Dog by Colin Dunne, will be published on April 1 by Revel Barker at £9.99 and is available on-line for order now from amazon-uk or Waterstones; in the US from amazon; or worldwide with free delivery from Book Depository.

Terry Fletcher ran Howley's News Agency in Barnsley before going on to be assistant editor (news) of the Yorkshire Post and editor-in-chief of Dalesman Publishing and Country Publications.

#

Tale of the tape

By Mike Gallemore

Harold Heys' reminiscences of his weekly paper days (Ranters, last week) reminded me of my first job in journalism, working for the far from renowned Stewart and Hartley news agency in Manchester in the early sixties.

Bert Stewart gave me the job because he'd had a call from my Dad asking him not to give me the job. I'd gone through with him all the interviews I'd managed to arrange - Stockport Express, Buxton Advertiser etc - and he'd promptly rung them all and ‘advised' them not to take me on.

He'd been a boy wonder ‘journalist' from the outset, while I'd been a boy waster, concentrating my efforts on playing football, rugby, cricket, tennis...

When I left Manchester Central Grammar School I'd worked as an interviewer and general dogsbody for a nationwide rheumatism survey, which was fun.

When I went for the interview at Stewart and Hartley's Dickensian-style one-room penthouse office on Mould Street, off Cross Street, behind the original Manchester Evening News office and the Thatched House pub, it took around ten minutes and I started work immediately. One of the terms and conditions was that I had to attend Stockport County home matches. Bert was a director.

Bert was a friendly, cuddly, happy soul who was a joy to be with. Gerry Hartley was a different proposition altogether. To say he was a penny-pincher was an understatement. He insisted that only he could open the mail each morning. Not even Bert was allowed to open it. Gerry would examine each envelope with a magnifying glass and any stamp that wasn't properly franked, he'd remove with a steaming kettle and a pair of tweezers for further use.

His money-saving schemes were legendary. One of the reporters came in one morning and asked everyone to remind him to go to Lewis's to get a Red Indian outfit for his young son's birthday - it was a simple life in those days.

Quick as a flash Gerry had the solution. ‘No need for that. I made a Red Indian head-dress for my son a few years ago. It's easy. Here's what you do: Take some of this corrugated cardboard (he'd hoarded, having gleaned them from packages that had come in the post), get a few handfuls of feathers (opening the window and grabbing some of the filthy pigeon feathers off the outside window ledge), stick the feathers into the corrugated cardboard like this...and there you have it. No need to spend money buying one. If you want to make it really special, you can paint it.'

Gerry was also a master in ‘recycling' bus tickets, which meant he did most of his travelling by double-decker.

Working at S&H, who had a retainer for most of the newspapers and agencies to cover every single court in Manchester from Rent Tribunals to Assize Courts, was both an education and a lot of fun. I was thrown in at the deep end from day one and nearly drowned on a number of occasions.

One of my most spectacular blunders occurred when I came into the office early one morning en route to the law courts. Unusually, the phone was ringing. On answering an American accent said: ‘This is AP. Willie Pastrano is fighting in Manchester tomorrow night and we need the tale of the tape this morning.' Then put the phone down.

I had a look in my morning copy of the Mirror and read that Pastrano was defending his WBC and WBA World Championship of the World titles, fighting Terry Downes at Belle Vue's King's Hall the following night. I made a list of likely hotels where he might be staying and hit the jackpot first time - the Midland.

I rang the hotel and they put me through to Pastrano's room. His trainer Angelo Dundee (who went on the train Mohammed Ali) came to the phone. I explained I needed the ‘tale of the tape' for AP and he said, ‘come right on over.'

I wasn't a boxing fan and I had no idea what the ‘tale of the tape' was. I'll figure it out, I thought. I knocked on Dundee's bedroom door. As the door opened cigarette smoke seeped out, framing the biggest black guy I had ever seen. I timidly announced who I was and a voice from inside the room shouted: ‘Show him in.'

A bunch of guys were sitting round a table in a fog of smoke playing poker. I'd never smoked in my life so I was struggling to breathe. I'd believed the myth that smoking stunted your growth. At 5ft 3in I couldn't take the chance.

The only guy who didn't look like a boxer, or ex-boxer, who, I figured was Angelo Dundee, ushered me over and a chair was produced for me to sit behind him. I was spellbound by the whole scene. I was still soaking it all in and watching how Dundee was playing his hand when he started speaking, without taking his eyes off his cards. ‘Height six feet, biceps 14, expanded 16; chest 38, expanded 42.....'

He continued for about five minutes and stopped speaking. The guy who had shown me in took the chair from beneath me and opened the door for me to leave.

So there I was, standing in the hotel corridor, wondering what to do next. It suddenly dawned on me what the ‘tale of the tape' meant. I knocked bravely on the door. The giant opened the door and shouted, ‘What!' ‘Could I please speak to Mr. Dundee please?' I asked.

Immediately the voice from inside commanded: ‘Bring him in.' The chair was positioned again behind Angelo Dundee and I boldly explained: ‘When I was watching you play your hand I thought you should have stacked your six of clubs. I was so enthralled in the game, I wasn't listening to your tale of the tape.'

This brought laughter from around the table, including from Angelo, who turned round and looked at me and said: ‘OK, let's take it slowly for you... biceps... chest.... see you at the fight tomorrow night.'

I got back to the office and jubilantly telephoned the tale of tape over to AP. Gerry was in the office by this time checking the mail. ‘Where've you been, you should be at the courts.' I explained, casually, where I'd been, to which Gerry said: ‘Hope you walked there.'

I went to Belle Vue the following night and watched from a ringside seat as Pastrano beat Downes in the 11th round then I interviewed both Dundee and Pastrano after the fight.

They were great days. Two years later I joined the Mirror. They were even greater days. A number of well-known Manchester journalists started their careers at Stewart and Hartleys, including Peter Stringer, Hugh Ash and Stan Mellor.

#

The odd couple

By Harold Heys

Next time you get into an argument over whose turn it is to get the brews in, spare a thought for Shipton and Hoy of the Daily Mail. That's just how their feud started. Their 15-year silent feud.

Jim Shipton and Joe Hoy were ageing sub-editors on the Mail's northern racing desk in Manchester and they sat next to each other in perpetual silence. Wars, major disasters, moon walks, sporting triumphs and tragedies, Page Three birds. Nothing came anywhere near to sparking a conversation. They lived in their own little worlds in which the other didn't figure.

Phil Smith recalled: ‘They used to sit there like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, only a couple of feet apart, and in several years at the Mail (Phil was deputy sports editor until 1974) I don't think I ever heard them exchange a word. I think it was over one not buying the other a cup of tea off the tea trolley. It was funny to watch them when the trolley came round. They'd sit and wait until the other was well clear of it before venturing near. Day after day. Year after year.'

Daily Mail sports sub John Newman recalled that Shipton, who was apparently higher up the racing desk pecking order, had the job of handing out the racecards and when there were five he would put three of them in Joe's basket. If there were three he would give him two. When there was only one card Joe Hoy would get it. There were never any arguments because no words were ever exchanged. An occasional grunt was as good as it got.

Phil, long retired and now living in Spain, says: ‘They would give the chief sub a list of runners for each racecard and it was up to him to do the make-up and get the words subbed on the desk. I don't think either of them were ever deemed capable of subbing Robin Goodfellow or Northerner.

‘They very occasionally slipped notes to each other and sometimes one would ask anybody who happened to be passing to hand the other a curt verbal message along the lines of: “Tell 'im (over-the-shoulder jerk of thumb) I haven't got Sandown yet.” Of course, the rot should have been stopped at the outset but it never was and these two clowns turned it all into a bit of a circus. You could see the steam coming out of their ears at times with the sheer frustration of it all. Quite bizarre really.'

I'd always understood that in newspapers, after a blazing row, it was off to the pub where the aggro would be quickly forgotten. I've had some stormers over the years. I remember one boss calling me into his office and ordering me: ‘Shut that door!' I turned, took two rapid steps and hit the door halfway up with an excellent (if I say so myself) fly-kick. The whole room shook as it crashed into the frame and I landed, God knows how, smartly on two feet. ‘Jammy twat,' said the boss. We both cracked out laughing and that was that. Another boss was giving me a bollocking while I was trying to eat a banana and smoke a fag at the same time. I was trying to give him a gobful back but I almost choked to death over his desk and when I recovered we were both laughing.

Jim Shipton and Joe Hoy never saw life that way. And then came the day of Joe's retirement... He was heading off that evening into honourable retirement. But there was still no sign of a thaw.

John Newman remembers: ‘I was given the job of organising the collection and in the interests of perhaps letting bygones be bygones I approached Jim Shipton for a donation. To my surprise, he obliged - with a smile and a quid. But like all good feuds, it wasn't to be put to bed that easily.'

Everyone knew that this was going to be the last opportunity anyone would ever have of effecting any sort of rapprochement between the grizzled grafters. John was determined to get it sorted. And, after a fashion, he did. ‘Everybody's weighed in,' he told Joe late that afternoon. With a meaningful glance at Jim he added: ‘Everybody.'

It was the perfect moment for peace to finally break out. John waited, expectantly. A nervous office was stilled to mere whispers. Even the news editor stopped shouting.

Joe looked up, quickly grasping the point John was making about Jim's generous quid into the tub. Looking over to his old colleague with some warmth, he finally broke the glacial ice of some 15 years. ‘Thanks, Jim,' he said.

The moment might not have had the grandeur of the Cuban Missile Crisis which drew ‘Day the earth stood still' headlines, but it was close. The office waited. There was a breathless hush.

Jim Shipton, no doubt thinking that his old colleague was seeking an opportunity of having a final, smug dig; perhaps one last chance to take the piss, responded magnificently:

‘Fuck off, Joe.'

#

Precision timing

By Mark Day

Phil Harrison's recollections of loony management decrees (Ranters, last week) reminded me of the looniest of them all - Kroegertime.

In the early 1970s John Kroeger was promoted from his position as news editor of The News, Adelaide, to News Limited's head office in Sydney, where he became general manager of the Daily Mirror and The Australian.

He was in charge of everything from pencils to paper clips. He was blessed with a precise Germanic mind and cursed by a need to have everything in precise Germanic order.

He was constantly annoyed by the apparent inability of the journalists, subs and editors - as well as recalcitrant comps - to get the paper off the stone on time.

As in Britain, the Sydney Mirror was locked in a head-to-head battle with The Sun and an essential part of the mythology of the time was that the first paper to get on the stands at Wynyard Station in Sydney's CBD (Central Business District) would win the sales race on that day.

Kroeger believed if the subs could shift copy faster the presses would run on time and the Mirror would regularly be first to Wynyard.

When Kroeger learnt that all the clocks in the building were linked to a central chronometer a little light bulb lit up above his head.

It was pure genius. He would secretly advance the time on the clocks by ten minutes. The last copy time for the first edition was 9.30 am so, when the subs sent the last slips down the chute the annoying five or ten minutes late it would actually be 9.30 or slightly earlier and the edition would be on time.

...Except that reporters and subs would arrive at work on what we called the dawn patrol, glance at the clock, check their wrist watches and note that it was ten minutes fast. They were not concerned that their copy was ten minutes late by Kroegertime because their watches told them they were on time according to real time. The subs ignored the wall clocks in favour of their watches, and last copy continued to run late.

When the day was done, though, it was a different matter. Everybody left the office and headed for the pub according to Kroegertime. Well, for an extra ten minutes of drinking time you would, wouldn't you?

Kroegertime lasted three days. Soon afterwards John Kroeger left newspapers and set up a party hire company.

###

Must-reads

We're constantly being asked by media students and academics and old hacks to recommend books about newspapers and journalism… No; honest. Trust me, I'm a reporter. So while you're waiting for Mr Dunne's new book to come out, here's a dozen you could be looking at.

They are all described in full on the Ranters Bookshop.

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

#

Which brings me to where we are now – the most difficult period that journalists have experienced in decades. There are fewer freelance commissions around, rates have been cut, and companies won’t always pay up. Staffers have had to take on more work themselves because of cutbacks in commissioning, and many have been forced to go freelance due to redundancy. – Lesley Dobson, editor, Guild of Health Writers Newsletter

Issue #139

March 19, 2010

This Week

As the traditional hacks’ holiday fast approaches, Dr Syntax – Ranters’ pedant-in-residence – offers what he hopes is the definitive explanation of the origins of a Wayzgoose.

Then Mike Gallemore recalls some of the ways the day was celebrated in more recent years.

And Liz Hodgkinson updates reaction to her call for all freelance contributors to make a point of taking that day off – one day in a year, in the hope that if, once, commissioning editors can’t get hold of anybody to justify their own jobs, well, freelances just might be appreciated a little more than they currently are.

Retired freelance Stan Solomons sympathises and says the papers are still paying the same rates as they paid him – 14 years ago. It would be interesting to learn whether deskmen's salaries, paid regularly and promptly and coming with days off, holidays, sick pay and pensions, have moved much while they have been cheerfully pegging contribs payments.

And here’s a reminder…

Real Ranters are taking the day off. That’s Maundy Thursday, April 1, and those within reach of the place are heading to Fleet Street and to the Harrow pub (Whitefriars Street, nearest tube, Blackfriars) from 12.30 where Colin Dunne’s book, Man Bites Talking Dog, is being launched on a tidal wave of booze.

The book has a nice review by Geoffrey Mather on amazon-uk, and our other recent publication, A Place of Strangers by Geoffrey Seed has also been well reviewed by Ian Skidmore and others (who you can find on-line) who are generally kind enough to do that sort of thing.

But, back to the pub where, in true Ranters fashion, Alan Whittaker hears a tale that slightly stretches the credulity. He checks it out (we used to do that) with a reliable source. Did Graham Stanford really save Jimmy Cameron from being eaten by crocodiles?

Stanford, for the benefit of any who don’t remember him, had been a war correspondent for the Daily Mail behind Japanese lines with Wingate's Chindits. He was later fired from the News of the World after he approached editor Stafford Somerfield in a crowded restaurant and said ‘Look at you. Grossly overpaid, grossly under-talented, and grossly over weight.’

Which sounds like a good excuse for a drink.

#

Wild goose chase

By Dr Syntax

The first traceable reference to a Wayzgoose – which we celebrate on Maundy Thursday and we’ll come to that in a minute – was in 1683, almost exactly 200 years after the printing industry was founded in England. In those days it was called a Way-goose, but it was always a party for employees in the print.

Author Joseph Moxon explained in Mechanick Exercise that ‘these Waygooses [sic] are always kept at Bartholomew-tide [August 24]… the Master Printer gives them a Way-goose, that is, he makes them a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own house but, besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night…’ Mr Moxon does not mention geese, or even gooses, as such.

Its coinciding with St Bartholomew’s Day was solely because that was the time of the year when nights started to draw in. The employer now needed to provide candles for working and the date was celebrated as the end of summer, no more than that. Printers apparently have three patron saints – Augustine, Genesius and John Bosco. St Bart is the only one to provide an excuse for a party, but he doesn’t get into the running. The patron saint of journalists (I know you were about to ask) is Francis de Sales.

Why a master printer, who would obviously be the employer of the journeymen printers, would wish to celebrate the end of summer and presumably the additional expense of purchasing candles, is unknown.

What is known is that printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1456. If the staff of the Fust und Schöffer printshop in Mainz decided to celebrate the occasion by going out for a few Steins, that would surely have been the first printers’ party. But it seems unlikely that the date would have been fêted sufficiently famously to have caught on.

The connection with geese is even more obscure. In French, oie (pronounced wah) means goose, but goose-goose seems an unlikely origin as a name for a feast. Etymologists have attempted to link the word with wayse, wayze or wase, obsolete words for hay, especially stubble – hence a hay-fed goose which (if you accept the link) was presumably served up for a beanfeast. But geese do not typically come into their prime for eating as early as August.

Which brings us to bean-feast: again, it is traditionally an annual dinner given by an employer to his employees, possibly so-named because beans or a bean-goose were prominent in the meal. Bean-goose? That’s a grey goose (anser fabalis) that arrives in England in the autumn, named from a mark on its bill like a horse-bean. It is also reputed to be fond of newly sown beans. Beanfeast provides the root of the word beano, a jolly outing.

We don’t, however, celebrate Beangoose, and it doesn’t get us any closer to explaining Wayzgoose, a word that appeared only sporadically in dictionaries after Moxon first recorded its existence. It fell into disuse – as did St Bartholomew’s Day; Bart had, after all, no more than a walk-on part in the gospels as a disciple and there seems to be no logical reason for his having a London hospital and a splendid church (St Bartholomew the Great, no less) named in his honour.

Wayzgooses appear to have had their renaissance after the war, by which time August 24 was a normal working day, but Maundy Thursday – Holy Thursday in the Catholic church – was still enjoyed as a holiday for daily newspaper journalists and printers because there was no publishing on Good Friday (Good Friday, of course, was always worked by staff preparing newspapers for Easter Saturday).

It became a tradition to organise outings, day trips to the seaside or into the country on the Thursday while the rest of the nation’s workforce was otherwise occupied. And presumably somebody with an eye for history remembered that there was a readily available name for a print-industry beanfeast, so the date was simply switched and a new tradition created and appropriately named.

It appears to have been taken up with most enthusiasm north of the Trent – possibly because every day provided an excuse for a beano in Fleet Street.

Dr Syntax, who makes irregular calls at Ranters and runs a surgery in the column on the far left, was the anonymous prodnose of Worlds Press News in the 1960s. In an earlier life he was a stagecoach, operating mainly to Carlisle, starting at the Turks Head in Newcastle and running along the south bank of the Tyne as far as Corbridge.

#

Let’s have a gander

By Mike Gallemore

With Easter approaching, memories of past Wayzgoose outings come flooding back and a smile comes to my face. Until I looked it up I always thought the word had something to do with the way geese fly in a sort of delta formation when they go off on a trip for their hols.

Mind you, that bears no resemblance to a bunch of bleary-eyed journalists getting up at the time they would normally be going to bed, to board a charabanc and continue doing what they’d been doing most of the night and early morning.

I guess the only difference was that on this sacred day of the year when there were no papers on Good Friday, there was no obstacle, like work, standing in the way of some serious all-day and all-night supping.

My dear old Dad used to say, ‘Let’s wing it,’ whether he was talking about going for a drink or taking a chance. In his case, both usually applied. So I’ll stick with the flying geese theory.

We must all have stories to tell of comical Maundy Thursday jaunts but here’s a taste of days gone by to start the round:

At Withy Grove in the seventies a bunch of us used to celebrate with a trip to Southwell Races near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. It was pretty tame stuff compared to some of the epic adventures of some of our colleagues in earlier years.

On one occasion about ten of us, including my Dad (who never saw a horse all day when he went racing), did about five pub stops before a ‘one for the swing of the door’ pint at the Saracen’s Head in Southwell prior to going almost straight to the bar at the course.

Ronnie set up camp in the racecourse bar and managed to sign up his own ‘bookie’s runner’ to go and place his bets. While the rest of us took a more scientific approach to our investments my Dad took a straw poll of his fellow drinkers in the bar and based on that advice and his own ‘intuition’ won five out of seven races – some of them at really long odds. The rest of us were showing a small profit so spirits were high all round.

We paid a return visit to the Saracen’s Head and somehow managed to stop Ronnie buying everyone in the pub a drink to celebrate his good fortune. Several pubs later we ended up in a pub in Baslow, Derbyshire, the Wheatsheaf, that had one of those pile-of-pennies columns on the bar.

There was a notice on the wall to say that Elsie Tanner (Coronation Street) was coming on Good Friday to push them over, which was the usual practice. We decided that my old man was more famous in the pub world than Elsie Tanner so I made a short speech to the three regulars in the pub announcing his considerable drinking accomplishments and after a short burst of applause he duly pushed the pile over.

As it crashed to the floor we made a quick exit. I've never dared go in that pub since, despite it being more than 30 years ago.

The year before that, about 20 of us had gone to Southwell Races but made the fatal decision of taking in a serious lunch after three or four pub stops and never got nearer to the course than a pub just outside Mansfield.

One infamous Wayzgoose was a trip to Llandudno organised by Fred Sherlock in the early sixties. He’d arranged an executive VIP coach from Withy Grove to Liverpool and then by a sort of mini cruise ship, the St Tudno, to Llandudno. Fred had arranged it as a barter deal with the whole excursion being a publicity trip to promote the coach company and the St.Tudno sailings. So it was touted by Fred as a free trip – free travel and free booze. Not surprisingly it was considerably over-subscribed and forty-odd funsters joined up.

The ‘ayzgoosers had run out of beer by the time they’d gone past St Helens on the East Lancs Road so they were in full flight when they reached dockside.

The captain of the ship made an impressive speech to the assembled bunch, saying how proud he was to welcome such distinguished ‘gentlemen of the press.’ He explained that the ship had a well-stocked bar and the drinks were on him.

His audience headed for the bar before he’d finished speaking and, predictably, stocks had dried up long before they disembarked on the pier at Llandudno.

The ‘gentlemen’ spread out in groups and created their own pub crawl of Llandudno but when it came to get them back on the ship in time for it to sail on the tide, they’d got their eye in for the duration.

Fred organised a Press Gang to gather them up but, in the event, less than half of the original number made it to the pier for the return sailing.

It was Easter Monday before some of the stragglers got back to base but the stories they told of their impromptu holiday weekend break in North Wales were hilarious.

Another Fred Sherlock-inspired adventure was a coach visit to a stately home in Derbyshire. They never made it to their destination but they cleaned out the contents of a number of pubs throughout the day. One such pub was the Bull 'ith Thorn on the Buxton-Ashbourne road. It’s one of the oldest pubs in England and had an amazing collection of ancient swords, helmets, breast plates, shields, lances and the like.

The boys decided to form sides, Roundheads v Cavaliers, to re-enact some of the skirmishes of the Civil War. Tables were cleared of drinks as mainly good-natured swordfights flowed out of the pub, into the car park and into the coach.

Fred was later presented with an inventory of all the lost property from the various pubs that had unwittingly welcomed their guests from Manchester. He spent the next few weeks walking round the office with a long list, asking who had possession of which piece of history.

My mother used to ask where the huge aspidistra had come from that had taken residence in our front room. But according to my Dad it wasn’t on Fred’s list.

Colin Dunne’s first paper, the Craven Herald, always had a Wayzgoose – always to Blackpool, or nearly to Blackpool. It was a real Maundy Thursday bash. Everybody went. Printers, reporters, subs – everyone.

The best-ever didn’t involve a lot of travelling. They set off for the seaside as usual with the aisle packed with crates and the moment they started one of the reporters said he knew a good pub in Gisburn (about 30 minutes away) where they could have an early sharpener – at 10 am. They did exactly that. In fact, the beer was so good, they had two or three.

They were about to set off for Blackpool when somebody pointed at that the lunch in Gisburn was excellent and they could go to Blackpool in the afternoon. So they did, and the next thing they noticed it was nearly five o'clock.

By then there was no point going to Blackpool, and anyway Gisburn was much more fun, so they stayed there until midnight. Everybody agreed it was the best trip they'd ever had, and they only went 20 miles.

In the 60s in the North East the nationals and local morning papers took the day off and then attended a dinner, organised by Sunderland freelance Ted Elkins, who talked Whitbread, the brewers, into sponsoring the annual North East Journalist of the Year Awards.

Whatever happened to the awards? Come to that, whatever became of Whitbreads?

#

What’s it worth?

By Liz Hodgkinson

And still they come – stories of ridiculously tiny fees being offered by big companies to established and valued professionals.

Here is one sent last week, from ace photographer Ian Bradshaw, now living in Pennyslvania. Bradders was contacted by his London agent in relation to a job for the Mail on Sunday’s YOU magazine. The job was in Pittsburgh, a round trip of more than 400 miles, and he worked out that petrol and other essential expenses would come to a minimum of $328.24. He takes up the story:

YOU magazine that you are doing tomorrow...'

YOU, $455 all in.'

Mail on Sunday is paying $126.16 for a day’s shoot and a 400-plus mile drive, equivalent to London to Edinburgh?'

And if you convert those dollars into sterling – $1 currently equals £0.65 – you will discover that the actual fee offered by the Mail on Sunday –a big, popular newspaper and generally considered one of the better payers – comes to just £82, according to my trusty currency converter. And that is less than an electrician’s apprentice would charge for a day’s work.

Can it be true? Apparently so. And this is not an isolated example, far from it.

Here’s another, from travel writer David Baird:

Anything is worth a try to help freelancers earn a crust. Even so, a one-day ‘strike’?

I can almost hear the fat cats chuckling in their boardrooms or over their expense-account lunches.

They know there is an abysmal lack of solidarity among hacks. That came home to me when, for a while, I was a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers. It's a useful institution with some good friends and fine journalists among its members. But, perhaps inevitably, it also attracts a number of shameless freeloaders who have no compunction in undermining their colleagues.

They call themselves travel writers but, in fact, are press trip junkies. They must have income from other sources as they take advantage of whatever travel freebies are available and in return churn out articles without requiring payment. In this situation, what hope do bona fide writers have of earning a decent living?

A decent living? Ho, ho, ho! Now based in Spain, I was recently offered the princely sum of 30 euros for a story by one of the freebie publications on the Costas. They were quite offended when I suggested that this was a bad joke. But then there are always a bunch of ‘freelances’ around who will accept any terms just to get their names in print — and editors who will take advantage.

And another, this time anonymous:

Meanwhile, as the word spreads, I keep being asked: but haven’t freelance contributors always been treated badly? What’s new?

Well, yes. Horrific stories of late payment, no payment or being completely ignored or shamelessly ripped off by editors and publishers probably go back 200 years or more. Any glamour business exploits eager hopefuls, and attracts shysters and charlatans, as well as the talented and the visionaries who genuinely want to make a difference.

It’s a murky old world with many traps for the unwary, and that is the name of the game. Plus, it has never been easy to forge a living in the essentially rough and tumble world of journalism, as those of us who have tried to survive in it know only too well.

But two aspects are new: one is that rates and fees are being systematically slashed, across the board, and for all comers including seasoned and valued professionals; and the other is the massive salaries now being paid to those at the top. Although publishing companies cite falling circulations and declining advertising revenue to justify their constant rate-cutting, the fact that so many editors and CEOs now earn over £1 million a year means that money is still being made somewhere.

The difference between the salaries of those at the top and the poor sods at entry level has never been greater.

We know that circulations are falling, so why is this? My own explanation is that there is now a serious mismatch between appearance and content. Thanks to computer technology, images are sharper, newspapers and magazines now look better than ever. Layouts are more eye-catching and publications appear colourful, professional, slick and inviting.

If you compare this with 1970s publications, you’ll see what I mean.

But peer a little closer and you realize it’s all cosmetic surgery. Because fees and staffing levels are being ruthlessly cut all the time, there is hardly anything worth reading. Ever more publications now try to secure free, or very cheap, content, with the result that we see exactly the same celebrity pictures and read exactly the same stories everywhere.

This downward trend will continue until publishing conglomerates understand two simple truths:

1. Publications that have to keep cutting costs don’t deserve to survive;
2. Blogging and online mouthing off by amateurs is NOT journalism. Real journalism takes talent, skill, perseverance, courage, guts, practice and passion. These are qualities that should be prized and encouraged, and they don’t come cheap.

Liz Hodgkinson is the author of Ladies Of The Street, the history of women’s role in the history of newspapers.

#

’Twas ever thus

By Stan Solomons

I know just how Liz Hodgkinson feels. The indignities she suffers – late payments, no payments, poor payments, deskmen ignoring calls – are the mirror images of my life as a freelance from the mid 1950s until 1996 when my business partner Alan Cooper and myself retired.

The kind of freelancing we engaged in – hard news, sport and pictures with exclusives thrown in along the way – is different from Liz’s labours, but the principle is the same.

Of course we all know how crazy it is that the newspaper industry is the only one in the world where the customer decides the payment, but that system has been entrenched for so long that it is impossible for it to be changed.

In our agency’s early days the Daily Mirror had the fairest system of payment. Every morning, for some years, the man in charge of accounts went to the news editor with all the editions and together they marked up the stories that had been contributed by freelances. The result was that when the payment came in there were rarely any omissions, though of course if we felt the payment for any given story was not enough we could go on to the news desk and moan.

Alan checked the accounts and I was the trouble shooter – chief moaner. One of the worst culprits was the Star. Every month when the accounts came in they had left out at least half the stories that had been used and Alan claimed the omissions from the accounts department. My job was to moan to the news editor about the poor payments made for the stories that were listed and invariably he would either increase the payments or, if his budget limit for that month had been reached, he would tell me to put in a claim for a bogus story and he would pay me X pounds the following month. That’s how things were done. I don’t know if it is still the case today.

I was one of the first freelances to do reports for radio on soccer matches. BBC Radio Sheffield, which was the first or one of the first to go down that road, decided to employ a local greengrocer (or some such) to do reports. The NUJ challenged the BBC, arguing that only accredited freelances could work for them, but lost the case in the courts and opened the door to a whole flood of bottle washers, cleaners, teachers and ex footballers (many of whom can’t put two words together) working, no doubt, for low rates.

One problem is that if a freelance moans the news desk, radio station or magazine will just give the work to someone else.

Unfortunately nothing seems to have changed since I packed up fourteen years ago. Accountants control the publications Liz works for and the news and picture desks are run by soul-less automatons who have to toe the line.

If you are the type of freelance who relies on sending out general news and sport and pictures you just have to accept the measly payments the nationals give you – and grin and bear it.

Of course if you deal in finding exclusives then that is a different matter. You still negotiate as was always the case and sell to the highest bidder.

When I retired in 1996 the Sun was paying £25 for a 250 word soccer report. What are they paying now? £25 for a 250 world report.

The Yorkshire Post was paying £25 for a 250 word report. What are they paying now? Yes, you’ve guessed it. Exactly the same.

Last season the Press Association was paying £30 for two 300-word reports on a Rugby League match, the second report to include quotes from both coaches. This season to everyone’s amazement they put the fee up to £50 for the same wordage. But it is still a crap payment.

Thank your lucky stars, Liz that you are not running a sports agency. But I hope you enjoy your day of rest when you make yourself unavailable to the news and features desks. If you can prick just one conscience you might feel your action has been worthwhile.

#

The writing elite

By Geoffrey Mather

I don't know how you define a Colin Dunne. He sits inside his latest book, Man Bites Talking Dog, displaying that mysterious and elusive ingredient found only in exceptional writers. It is a mixture of humour, observation and word-dexterity.

Thurber had it but no-one could analyse it. Patrick Campbell had it. The Algonquin crew in New York, led by Dorothy Parker, all had it as they met for lunch at that celebrated round table long ago.

And we now have a newish generation of writers displaying their own brand of it. Caitlin Moran and Daisy Waugh of The Times. Zoe Heller. But what is it? The obvious answer – talent. But what makes the talent exceptional?

If gunge-writers heavy with big words, long sentences, and adjectival suicide knew what it was they would be writing it. But they don't. So the few, with their heads above the clouds are the elite.

Colin Dunne moved with modest distinction from life on a country weekly in the Yorkshire Dales to Fleet-street: a longish progression in which the raw tumult of daily journalism retreated before the massed ranks of accountants, computers, carpets and no-smoking signs. He writes in his book of ‘the glory days of journalism’. But that is the excuse. His chore. His reason for writing. The chore quickly transcends its reason as it soars with humour, observation, and a feel for language that is simple, direct, yet smooth and deceptively effortless.

I would be sorely depressed if his email name – dunnewriting – were true. He should be writing all the time. That is what he owes both us and his talent.

I ordered three copies of this one book and will probably read all of them.

Man Bites Talking Dog is published by Revel Barker and is available from amazon-uk or Waterstones; in the US from amazon; or worldwide with free delivery from Book Depository.

#

Anything to declare?

By Ian Skidmore

If you want a good read that embraces excitement and intrigue, poignancy and pathos, Geoffrey Seed's A Place of Strangers is for you.

The story of a man's quest for his true identity, it moves through time and from country to country at a pace that keeps the pages turning. The short chapters add a sense of urgency.

Part thriller, part 'spy-spiel', Seed's book is not so much a whodunit as a who didn't do it. All the characters have something to hide. Anything to declare? could be an alternative title.

McCall, the mixed-up and messed up man at the centre, has much appeal. Let's hope he finds a place in future novels.

Wherever the story roams it always returns to the mysterious house in the Shropshire countryside, the Place of Strangers. Beautifully written, in a concise style with lively dialogue, this is definitely one for the holiday box.

A Place of Strangers is published by Revel Barker and is available from amazon-uk, or Waterstones; and worldwide with a discount and free delivery from Book Depository.

#

It’s a croc, old man

By Alan Whittaker

Until the closure of the Empire News (was it really half a century ago?) and the arrival of Peter Earle at the News of the World as a self-styled ‘asylum seeker’ from Thomson House the undisputed conviviality champion in the Bouverie Street menagerie was Graham Stanford.

Once a feverishly active Daily Mail features writer and contemporary of Don Iddon, Ralph Izzard and Noel Barber, Graham found the Screws a benevolent rest home during the hours when the Falstaff pub was closed.

Invariably he sported a carnation buttonhole. Red or white. It was rumoured – unkindly perhaps – that he chose them to match his complexion.

He had selected a red one to go with his light grey suit, he assured me, the night he saved James Cameron from being eaten by a crocodile.

When I expressed mild interest he elaborated.

They were in Nigeria covering the 1968 civil strife known as the Biafra war and relaxing, he said, with large gins and tonics in a lakeside bar, one of those open-fronted bamboo huts with a raffia roof.

According to Stanford after half a dozen liveners Cameron decided he was uncomfortably hot and was going for a swim in the darkened lake. ‘I told him it was dangerous. There were crocodiles in the lake and in any case I knew he couldn’t swim.’

Cameron ignored him, stripped off completely and headed naked into the night in the direction of the lake. ‘Christ, I’d better save him,’ Stanford told the barman who was completely unconcerned. Placing his gin and tonic on the bar he dashed to the water’s edge and discovered Cameron up to his neck and flailing like a demented semaphore signaller in the water.

Without hesitation he plunged in and dragged the distinguished foreign correspondent to dry land and back to the bar. Because of the warmth of the evening Cameron was completely dry and climbed back into his clothes. Picking up his gin and tonic he demanded to know why Stanford was soaked, his grey suit a stained mess, and his carnation somewhat awry. ‘Because I’ve just saved you from being eaten by crocodiles or drowning,’ retorted Graham.

I was eager to hear James Cameron’s version when Graham and I encountered him in Fleet Street some years later. At first Cameron seemed reluctant to accompany us into the Bell pub but when I mentioned the incident in Biafra when he was saved from a crocodile he agreed. He listened attentively over a large Glenmorangie as I recounted Graham’s version and then turned with a sorrowful sigh to Stanford. In his writing and his broadcasts Cameron excelled in expressing cultured indignation. Shaking his head to indicate disbelief he intoned ‘Untrue’.

He drained his Scotch and stood up to go.

‘Untrue,’ he repeated, turning to me. ‘Graham was always dodgy on facts. I was on Scotch, I never drink gin.’

###

A majority of today’s national newspaper journalists – and, most particularly, their proprietors and managers – intensely dislike veterans’ memories of old Fleet Street. – Roy Greenslade, Media Guardian

Issue #140

March 26, 2010

Next Week

There will be NO Ranters edition next week. Regular readers will understand that it’s because the edition would fall on Good Friday and we don’t work on Maundy Thursday. Nope. All together, now.... It’s Wayzgoose.

We could also claim that we will be expressing solidarity with those freelance contributors who are fed up with the treatment, the lousy fees and the general lack of respect shown to them by commissioning editors, and who are taking Maundy Thursday off, as a day of fairly gentle protest.

We’ll all – in case you have been out on a story and missed the message – be in Fleet Street at the Harrow (Whitefriars Street) from around 12.30, for the launch of Colin Dunne’s collection of past Rants, Man Bites Talking Dog (see amazon, and Ranters, passim).

We will, however, be able to receive copy. The address is up there, top right.

Otherwise, next week will be an opportunity for readers to catch up with the Ranters Archive, or check out the Books Site – they’re both over there on the left, in the column nobody ever looks at.

This Week

All human life was there, according to the strapline in the days when Alan Hart was on the road. But, now that the papers write only about so-called celebrities, who is guarding the moral welfare of the nation?

It needed guarding when Jill Evans, flame-haired temptress of fourth floor features, was around. She was everybody’s favourite hackette, from Holborn to Hollywood. Suddenly, she’s around no longer, but Don Walker has fond memories.

Harry Edgington met George Smiley’s Karla, the KGB boss, and nearly had him arrested for murder when he visited London.

Andrew Trimbee came across the legendary Ralph Izzard, the Mail’s former chief foreign correspondent, when he launched the first English-language paper in the Gulf, then sat back to enjoy his stories.

And Roy Greenslade, back at his Media Guardian blog, considers Colin Dunne’s great book, Man Bites Talking Dog.

There’s enough going on there to keep you all occupied for a couple of weeks.

#

A tart with A Hart

By Alan Hart

As modern newspapers concentrate exclusively on celebrity exclusives, I cannot help but wonder who is looking after the moral welfare of the nation.

When I joined the News of the World Manchester office in 1971, our mighty organ took on the role of protecting its innocent readers from unimaginable perils.

Some of them were unaware, for example, of the presence of witches within their midst. So we set about telling them exactly who was carrying out this necromancy. Warnings were given about where sickening nude rituals were taking place. This enabled readers out walking their dogs to avoid stumbling into a coven.

Occasionally these shameless practitioners of the black arts would even pose for photographs after we had tricked them into believing that publicity would enhance their reputations.

One Manchester witch, I recall, caused problems when one of our reporters tried to book him into a hotel. His name was Ray Bogart. But after giving a young receptionist his surname, this devil-worshipper took great offence at being asked for his Christian name.

When the manager was called, and witch and reporter were asked to leave, Mr Bogart was able to turn the receptionist into tears.

He later took part in a spellbinding contest, Harry Potter style, with a Geordie witch. The terrible curses traded seemed to have no visible effect, but Mr Bogart explained that his spells had delayed actions. It was only a matter of time before his adversary would have to adjust to life on a lily pond.

Another service provided by the News of the World was to expose pornography. We named and shamed these ‘merchants of filth’ and told our readers exactly where not to go if they wanted to avoid this threat to our moral fibre.

I played a vital role in a crusade in 1972 aimed at stamping out vice. We were able to prove that despite the benefits of the post-war welfare state, women were providing sexual services to men in return for money.

We not only informed readers of the places to avoid, but also published photos of these ladies of the night (and day).

My brief was to visit northern cities exposing massage parlours where brazen hussies offered ‘extras’ for cash. I visited four parlours a day in each of ten cities.

This was a service that prevented innocent businessmen, away from home, from strolling inadvertently into The Pussy Galore Massage Parlour and expecting expert treatment for a back complaint, only to suffer the embarrassment of being offered sex.

I found myself going from parlour to parlour, with hair still damp and covered in baby oil.

One of the most frequent questions I am asked as an ex-News of the World reporter is what really happens when ‘our reporter then made an excuse and left.’

As a 26-year-old novice to this seedy underworld, I was advised by Trevor Kempson, a legendary investigative reporter based in London, on how to proceed. I carried a miniature tape recorder in my pocket. In those days, miniature recorders were slightly smaller than a house brick.

After switching the recorder on, I would wait for my masseuse to enter the massage room. I would be wearing a towel round my waist.

It may have surprised our readers to learn that all these health workers were young and pretty. The heat from the showers often caused them to undo extra buttons on their white medical coats. Sometimes this revealed the centre of a colourful bra or stocking tops. Sometimes both.

After being caressed in baby oil for a few minutes, the masseuse would invariably ask if I wanted any extras. I would ask what was on offer. I would then be given a price list which always started with hand relief, whatever that might mean. At the other end of the price range was ‘oral’ or ‘full’.

Occasionally I’d be told ‘Or anything else you fancy for the right price.’ My excuse, as instructed by Trevor and faithfully recorded, was ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise it was so expensive. I’ll have to come back when I’ve got more money.’

This worked wonderfully well until, one day, I attended a massage parlour above a garage in Balls End Road, Birkenhead. It was run by a stunning blonde called Caroline, who worked alone.

At the end of the massage the conversation followed its usual pattern with Caroline offering a range of services starting with hand relief for £5. I made my usual excuse, but Caroline responded by saying ‘OK. Three quid then.’ I again demurred and she said ‘Look Two quid. That’s my final offer.’

I continued to plead lack of funds and promised to come back on payday, when Caroline seized control of the situation. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘you can owe it me.’

Where was Trevor Kempson when I needed him? What followed is too shocking to publish on a family website. A minute or so later this tart with a heart said ‘There you go darling. Pay me an extra two quid next time you come.’

When I got back to my car I was in such a state of confusion that I deleted the part of the conversation which followed ‘I’ll have to come back when I’ve got more money.’

During the week after publication of the feature, Ollie Bachelor, the northern news editor, called me into his office. He had a huge grin on his face. ‘I’ve had a girl called Caroline on the phone. She reckons you owe her two quid.’

Alan Hart was a staff reporter for the News of the World, based in Manchester, from 1971 until 2000. He has taken time out from travel writing and is currently ghost-writing a book, provisionally titled Jack Duckworth And Me, by Coronation Street actor Bill Tarmey.

#

Good Evans

By Donald Walker

I know Jill Evans would approve of me writing this. In fact, I can almost feel her at my shoulder as I type. ‘Go on then, boy bach, do one of those clever sodding intros of yours.’

Jill, who died in Los Angeles this week in her late seventies, was among the delightful, indeed joyful, influences on my writing years at the Daily Mirror. She loved the partying, the entertaining, the drinking and what these days is called the networking that are necessary on a newspaper. Jill did it all with aplomb. She was even known to do a bit of writing.

And she was the centre if not the queen-pin of what some impolitely called the Mirror Coven alongside the redoubtable Paula James, the svelte Lesley Hall, the unsinkable Rita Grosvenor and the completely, breathtakingly unstoppable Sandy Fawkes.

(Sandy worked only briefly as staff for a Mirror project, but I once saw and heard her take on Keith Waterhouse in the corridor of Holborn’s fourth floor with both parties in full fuck-you throttle. So Sandy qualifies for the coven.)

It was indeed a brave man, sub, writer or self-important executive who, spotting Jill and Paula flashing elegant, black-clad thigh on their bar-stool roosts in the Stab or Vagabonds, would walk within firing range.

Paula would skin you alive with a barb (‘Oh, it’s little, Donnie, look everyone!’); Jill was gentler but far wittier. They were known throughout the office as the Kray Sisters.

Jillian Hazel Evans came from Aberdare in South Wales. She trained on the Merthyr Express and when she came to London worked a little as an actress (she was in a TV comedy series with Sid James) and made some commercials (she used to say she was the face that launched a thousand frozen chips).

She told me that she was a trained dancer and was expert in stage make-up. She loved to demonstrate the first by popping her foot up on the bar or on a filing cabinet beside you and demonstrating her flexibility in a dancer’s standing splits

As for her calling as a make-up artist, I found her one day focusing closely on her face in a hand mirror. She said quietly, ‘Don, look what he’s done now.’ and turned towards me to reveal a massive, achingly bruised shiner.

‘Christ, Jill!’ I said. ‘Who on earth’s done that?’

‘Good, eh? All in the deceptive art of make up, boy bach!’

She then took great delight in parading her ‘beaten’ face up and down editorial, bathing in the oohs and aahs. It reduced the endlessly shockable Pat Morphew to tears.

Her gift for mischief was lovingly celebrated by Colin Dunne, who captured her in these very columns:

She was probably the most glamorous woman in Fleet Street, where her principal gift, and indeed function, seemed to be to enchant men. At this she had no equal.

Copper-haired, small and slim, she could play outrageous Welsh tart (‘‘ere, you starin’ at my massive knockers?’) or sophisticated Belgravia lady (‘I always think the Looking Glass sounds so much smarter than the Mirror, don’t you?’).

Every time Jill walked past she left men sitting at their desks dazed and dreaming in a sort of sexual shell-shock.

They all tried. One very Senior Executive Indeed called her into his office where she was surprised – although I can’t think why – to find him red-faced, panting, and trousers agape. ‘It is a very nice one,’ she said, gently, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve just had luncheon.’

Another, in drunken despair, climbed up to her fifth-floor mansion flat in Highgate to present her with an engagement ring at midnight when she was already involved in an altogether more personal engagement in her bedroom.

When he arrived on the Mirror Paul Callan, who spent a lifetime combating celibacy wherever he found it, slunk up to her in the Stab and said: ‘They tell me I’m wasting my time trying to catch you.’ She patted him on the hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘there are lots of others who won’t be so difficult.’

Jill was far from disinclined to lean, shall we say, on her colleagues for editorial support. When she was given her own page, her face shining with delight, she said to me: ‘And I shall expect you to do your bit here, Donald. Lots of sparkly words.’

For reasons I have never quite understood, she insisted on taking me with her to interview Michael Crawford, then a raging success in the West End. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on Crawford’s face as we stepped into his dressing room. His eyes lit up as Jill, this exquisite, dazzling creature from the Mirror, appeared... and then his face fell as I followed owlishly in the wash of her perfume.

‘How lovely to see you...’ deep breath ‘both,’ he said, the last word dripping with theatre. Great actor, that boy.

She could not believe her luck when she was chosen to replace our man In Los Angeles. This was her dream; Hollywood was where the real Jill Evans lived.

I nodded knowingly when I read an excerpt from one of her pieces. It was about the tragic actress and Playmate Dorothy Stratten who was killed viciously by her former boyfriend.

Jill wrote that Dorothy haunted the high-rise Playboy offices located at 8560 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. ‘A secretary said she felt a slight breeze that carried the scent of roses with it when there were clearly no flowers around. Dorothy loved roses…’

Yes, that was Jill. She believed in all things occult and this perfumed wraith would have been right up her Celt street. She swore to me she had the art of psychometry, where a medium can touch an object and tell you about the owner’s personality and feelings.

Jill married (and divorced) early and produced two sons, Sim and Paul, both now journalists.

She was always telling me stories about every man she interviewed falling for her. Certainly, actors Anthony Valentine, Burt Reynolds and Michael Crawford all rang the office a number of times asking for her. Jill would refuse to answer, just lay back, raise one shapely ankle to the sky and blow out a plume of cigarette smoke, her face a study of mystical, feminine delight.

The later years in Los Angeles were not very happy. A new husband died tragically and she was involved in a bad car crash which had her hospitalised for her final years.

She had visited me in the office once or twice on her trips back to the Street but some of her delight in the very joy of living seemed to have faded. She was not the Jill Evans I once knew.

I will always think of her on a black velvet summer’s night in Fleet Street when she and I, along with Barbara, who she insisted was her sister (and may well have been for all I knew) came rolling up New Fetter Lane and into my tiny, shabby office Escort which was sitting at the kerb.

‘Ah,’ cried Jill. ‘here it is! Don’s fabulous Lotus Elan. Come on, Barbara, off we go up West. Drive on, boy bach. Put the Lotus through its paces.’

And off we went to endless adventures and laughter in the office rustbucket that was for ever, for me, a roaring Lotus Elan.

#

Coffee with Karla

By Harry Edgington

My meeting with Oleg Kalugin, an affable, ever-smiling character, with a round, podgy face, took place in the bland surroundings of the coffee shop at Moscow ’s Tsarist era Metropol Hotel.

More appropriate was its setting, between Red Square and the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka. For Kalugin had been head of foreign counter intelligence for the Soviet KGB, the role held in the John le Carré books by Karla, whom George Smiley called the Sandman because ‘he has a way of putting to sleep whoever gets too close to him.’ And we were there for Kalugin to tell me how he had set up the 1978 killing of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, the ‘umbrella’ murder on Waterloo Bridge.

This was 1993, and Kalugin, now a retired KGB General, had moved on in the world. He had walked out of the KGB, become an MP, and was by this time was an adviser to President Yeltsin.

I knew him from his days in parliament, and had contacted him when the Mail on Sunday, which I was representing in Moscow, called me to say they were trying to run down the story of Markov’s death, and could get nowhere with the Bulgarians in post Communist Sofia.

‘Sure, I know all about it,’ Kalugin told me confidently.

In the bland surroundings of the coffee shop, he spilled out his tale of murder and conspiracy:

He had been in his role of head of foreign counter intelligence when then Soviet general secretary Yuri Andropov sent for him.

Andropov told him that the Bulgarian leader Zhivkov was speechless with rage at the outpourings against him from dissident Markov on the BBC Bulgarian Service, and had asked the Soviet government to help get rid off him. At first Andropov tried to push it aside, but Vladimir Kryuvhkov (later the KGB head at the heart of the anti-Gorbachev coup) insisted they must help the Bulgarians ‘or they would think we were guilty of anti-socialist behaviour.’

So Kalugin was given the job of setting up the murder. ‘Andropov told me to set up the mechanism, but not to do the murder,’ said Kalugin. ‘He said we don’t do that sort of thing any more. Let them do their own dirty work.’

As blonde haired waitresses served us coffee, Kalugin related to me how he had gone to see the scientists at the KGB laboratory on Moscow ’s Garden Ring, and put the problem to them. They came up with a firing device, fitted into an umbrella, which could be used. They also made up capsules filled with ricin, the deadly poison made from rice. This way, the assassins would not have to wave guns around in the centre of London.

The device was delivered to the Bulgarians, who tested it by taking a prisoner under sentence of death into a prison yard and shooting him with it. Soon they were telling Moscow: this doesn’t work. The prisoner had survived. So Kalugin went back to the laboratory, and the scientists made up a capsule with a stronger dose of ricin. This time the Bulgarians tried it on a horse, and the horse died. They were satisfied.

The team of assassins followed Markov from the BBC World Service at the Strand to a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge , where he was waiting to ride home. He thought he had been jabbed by the umbrella – and died in hospital a few days later, with medics mystified about the cause of death.

They only realised what had happened when they heard about another Bulgarian dissident who had had a pellet fired at him from a similar device in a Paris street. This man had survived, and the pellet had been found.

When the doctors at the London hospital heard about this, they examined Markov’s body and discovered the pellet, and the ricin which killed him.

I asked Kalugin why he had so willingly been involved in this.

‘This was the Soviet Union , and when the General Secretary ordered you to do something, you said Jawohl, he said.

The story was carried across two pages in the Mail on Sunday with the headline ‘I organised the murder of Georgi Markov.’

It was a while later that I got another call from the news desk, asking me if I had a tape of the interview, which I had. They told me to copy it and send it to them. They didn’t tell me why, but I assumed that a libel case was in the offing.

I heard that Kalugin was going to London to be interviewed by the BBC, and about this time I had another call in Moscow, this time from Commander Byrd, who identified himself as head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad. He said they wanted me to make a statement about the interview, but I said I was not sure when I would be in London again.

I called up Kalugin and asked, ‘Is it OK for you to go to London when they know about your part in the Markov murder?’ He said there was no problem about it, because it had already been in his book.

I should have gone to see him.

So Kalugin flew into Heathrow Airport on a Saturday night, but did not even get into the terminal. He was met by Anti-Terrorist officers who took him straight to Paddington Green. He was sat down, and an officer played him the tape of his interview with me.

He denied any part in the killing, and said I had made the story up. The Russian embassy pitched in to get him freed on bail, but he spent a day and a night as a temporary guest of Her Majesty.

When he got out, he told the London based Moscow press what a liar I was. But the evidence of what he said was on the tape.

On Tuesday, Sue Reid, assistant editor on the Mail on Sunday, a dynamic lady who took a great interest in our Russian coverage and had been on holiday, turned up to find out what had been happening.

She said to me: ‘This is appalling. We’ve shopped one of our contacts.’ Then, ever the professional, she said, ‘And the arrest happened within edition time, and we didn’t have the story.’

The Moscow press was hammering away at the story, and Sue told me, ‘They are planning to charge him with conspiracy to murder.’

As it turned out, they did not. Kalugin was released, and scooted back to Moscow.

I remember a Russian doctor chum of mine saying to me, ‘It’s one thing to upset the KGB, Harry. But a General.’

It transpired that after the Kalugin interview was carried, Lord Bethel, an MEP and something of a Russian specialist, had started calling for Kalugin to be charged in connection with the murder, and he asked for this in a newspaper column. Of course, he would not have done this out of sheer jealousy over missing the story.

The storm in Moscow subsided, and a while later I met Kalugin at the bar of a CNN reception in the city. He was with one of his burly confederates, and pointed to me, ‘You bastard. You got me arrested.’ He thought I had set it all up. I explained what had happened and he asked me, ‘How did you feel when you knew I had been arrested?’ ‘I wanted to die,’ I said. He shook my hand, and, as far as he was concerned, that was the end of it.

It was some weeks later when I got a telephone call at home from Kalugin. He said he had been invited by the BBC to go to London to do the interview which had been forcibly delayed. He said he had to get his visa from the British embassy, and there were enormous crowds waiting there. He asked if I would take his paperwork in for him.

So I met him at the bus stop near the embassy – he was carrying one of the plastic carrier bags all Russians then seemed to tote around – and he handed me his passport and invite from the BBC. I went into the embassy and handed over the documents to one of the staff at the counter. He looked through them and I thought he was going to issue the visa immediately. But he disappeared for a couple of minutes, then came back to say, ‘You’ll need to come back next week.’

I went back out to tell Kalugin, and arranged to meet him in a week’s time to go to the embassy together.

Two days later I found a message on my answering machine at home. The speaker gave a London number and asked that I call a Mr Campbell.’ I telephoned the number and a woman answered. She said Mr Campbell was not there. I asked, ‘Who are you?’ She said, ‘The Anti-Terrorist Squad.’ So – Detective Chief Superintendant Campbell, new head of the squad.

That week I happened to see Kalugin at the bar of a pub in the centre of Moscow. I waved him over and told him about the call. He said, ‘I don’t think I’ll go to London again.’

An enduring mystery for me is why we agreed to hand over the interview tape. Scotland Yard could not have subpoenaed it because it was not in the UK.

Kalugin has since taken himself off to Washington , where he has been giving spy tours with one of his former CIA opponents, and lectures at a university.

I thought on this case when the horrific Polonium murder of Alexander Litvinenko took place in London , and pondered on Andropov’s assertion that the Russians had given up what are known as ‘wet jobs,’ a polite euphemism for murder.

The Putin administration in Moscow wants to throw Kalugin into jail for divulging state secrets. I understand that Kalugin is accepting no more offers of cups of coffee.

Harry Edgington was a reporter with the Daily Sketch in the days of Howard French. During his freelance years he worked in Los Angeles, and later as the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday correspondent in Moscow, then moved on to work for a publishing and PR company in Cyprus, and is currently freelancing in London.

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Living legend

By Andrew Trimbee

In the non-stop toil of producing my fledgling newspaper one of the key props was Ralph Izzard, with a lifetime’s experience of the world’s hot spots. As a rolling stone, he had somehow come to rest in Bahrain. The birth of the Gulf Mirror in 1971 was a heaven-sent opportunity to supplement his monthly pay cheques from the Financial Times and the news agency Agence France Presse.

During long, languid evenings in the courtyard of his old Persian house, under the stars, Ralph would yarn and I would listen. His own life story was like something out of a Boy’s Own adventure. You couldn’t have made it up. Ralph really was a living legend. He got into journalism by the back door, literally. After coming down from Cambridge with a degree in estate management – ‘never the slightest use to me’ - his father Percy, for years the gardening correspondent of the Daily Mail, managed to secure him a job as cleaner in the Berlin office; this was during the depression.

He graduated to reporting and soon became the office’s number two. For a young man, Berlin was a vibrant, decadent city in the early days of Nazi Germany. The social whirl of masked balls and parties was non-stop if you had the stamina. Ralph, slim and good-looking, proved to be a Lothario. An early conquest was Marianne Hoppe, the actress and classical lieder singer, later to become a household name in Europe, whose admirers included Adolf Hitler - he even invited her to dinner.

The young British journalist, now fluent in German, moved on and became engaged to the daughter of a Prussian general. The regular Sunday lunches were an ordeal. He was obliged to play war games with his future father-in-law, using models. ‘It was something I never got the hang of,’ he confessed to me. ‘I will never forget the old gentleman staring at me, aghast. “Vot, Herr Izzard, you are bringing up howitzers to destroy a bicycle platoon?”… ’

At Cambridge Ralph had become a keen amateur boxer. Indeed, he narrowly missed going into the ring with Oxford’s champion, Wilfred Thesiger, later a celebrated explorer famous for crossing the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia by camel with Bedu companions. Ralph just escaped being drawn against Thesiger, tall, gangling and decidedly weedy-looking. But he packed a terrific punch. His opponent, Cambridge’s best, barely lasted one round.

In his spare time Ralph would train in a local Berlin gym and was sometimes picked to spar with Max Schmeling, who achieved rock-star status in Germany after beating Joe Louis to win the world heavyweight title in 1930. ‘All the pros knew that when you sparred with amateurs you didn’t rough them up,’ he recalled to me. ‘But Max must have got out of bed on the wrong side. He started to knock me about. As I went to my corner I thought, I’m not putting up with this. When we came out again, I met him with a whirling bolo punch which I threw low, right into his crutch.’ The world champion sank to the canvas, his face contorted with pain. Ralph fussed over him. ‘My dear Max, I am so sorry, I do apologise.’

Ralph was off-duty and at a masked ball when one of the biggest stories broke. The head of his office, ‘an effete little gay’, lived in some splendour in a baroque apartment opposite the Reichstag. He was hosting a twee little dinner party when the phone rang. It was the London news desk wanting details of a reported fire at … the Reichstag. The desk was reassured that a fire simply wasn’t possible. But throughout the evening, from the soup course through to liqueurs, the calls from a frantic London news editor kept on coming, their man on the spot becoming increasingly irate.

With the last conversation, with news that fire engines from miles away were being called to Berlin, what was left of his composure deserted him. ‘You’ve ruined my evening,’ he stormed down the phone. ‘I shall now prove to you that this story is a complete fabrication.’ Theatrically, he strode to the heavy velvet curtains and wrenched them aside. He let out a shriek. Opposite him, the Reichstag blazed like a devil’s inferno, torched by the Nazis in an act of provocation blamed on the communists.

In those far-off days scrapes and worse were never far away. One evening Ralph and his new German fiancée planned to visit a weight-lifting competition in a Berlin stadium. This was a prestigious event; Ralph was in black tie and his fraulein in a little black dress. ‘There was a tradition that whenever a competitor advanced to the podium, a brass band would strike up his favourite tune,’ Ralph explained. As the leotard-clad contenders grunted and groaned, muscles bulging as they wrenched at the giant barbell, sweat pouring off them, the band would strike up with the audience in evening dress roaring them on. Slightly surreal.

But on this occasion what should have been a dignified and formal occasion descended into something worthy of the Keystone Cops. Ralph and fraulein never made it to their seats. They arrived late and the little job’s-worth clerk in the ticket box refused them entry. The discussion grew heated and ended in a tussle at the flight of stairs leading down into the bowels of the stadium. Blows were struck but the official was no match for a trained boxer and away he went, bowling down the stairs and crashing through the swing doors at the bottom.

‘There was a slight pause,’ Ralph recollected, ‘then the doors burst open again and a squad of security men poured out, rushing upwards to deal with me.’ Ralph took up a fighting stance and as the leading figure of the phalanx reached him, delivered a smashing uppercut. His target rocketed backwards, rolling down head over heels and scattering the rest of the posse like ninepins. At the bottom of the stairs they regrouped and charged back up. Force prevailed and Ralph was unceremoniously ejected. In the meantime, the bird had flown; his lady, wearying of this uncouth display, had made her departure.

He returned to England just before war broke out but his marriage to the Prussian general’s daughter had made him suspect. He finally succeeded in joining the Royal Navy, signing on at a tiny recruiting office far from the capital. He was made a torpedo gunner’s mate then posted as number two on a small gun added to the rear deck of a tanker. Back and forth they went, criss-crossing the Atlantic on the vital milk run of bringing in essential aviation fuel. ‘Ships were being torpedoed by U-boats ahead of us, abaft and abeam, but we never got hit,’ he told me during one of the many evening spent at his house, as he reminisced over his usual whisky and water.

‘I was reading the Hemingway best-seller For Whom The Bell Tolls in our cabin each night. My chief, the Torpedo Gunner, was a much tattooed man of advanced years who had never read a book in his life. He asked to borrow it and each night he would climb into his bunk, carefully pull on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, and slowly turn the pages. It took him weeks. When he finally closed the book, I asked what he thought.’ There was a long pause. Finally he delivered his critical view. ‘That must have been a helluvva fuck,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘to shift the deck.’

Ralph later joined the intelligence section - where he was to meet Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond - and given the rank of commander. With the war over, it was back to the Daily Mail. He covered the war in Korea, and then was posted to India, where he witnessed the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi in 1948.

But it was the Himalayas that led to him achieving international fame. He was despatched to follow the official expedition to Everest and doggedly toiled away up the foothills and lower slopes with just three sherpas, literally in the footsteps of the official expedition which numbered more than 300. The Times had bought up the rights to Colonel John Hunt’s attempt on the highest mountain in the world. His climbers, who included the New Zealander Edmund Hillary - who conquered the peak with Sherpa Tenzing - had been forbidden to speak to any other journalists.

But Ralph, now famous as the mountaineer in gym shoes, sent back scoop after scoop to London of the expedition’s progress, including an early snatched photograph of Hillary ‘taking a breather’, according to the caption. ‘He was actually having a pee in the snow,’ Ralph admitted. And when success was announced, in time for the 1953 coronation, Hillary’s determined face, all teeth, was carried in the Mail, again, a picture snatch. ‘It was displayed throughout the country,’ Ralph confessed, ‘but in fact he was telling the entire nation to fuck off - that’s what he said when he looked up and saw me with my camera.’

When the Chinese invaded Tibet, the Mail sent a favoured staffer, Noel Barber, to do a first-hand piece. To help him along the mountainous route to the rooftop of the world, they brought in Ralph, with his Himalayan experience. ‘We were 40 miles from the Tibetan city, Lhasa, and not even across the border, when Barber sat in the snow and refused to go another step. “They can fire me,” he said. “I can’t go on.” A group of Tibetan refugees came stumbling along the track, fleeing their homeland. I grabbed them and we interviewed them through an interpreter.’

Thus it was that the reluctant journalist made his name with a world scoop headlined ‘First Man Into Tibet’, with stories of burning buildings, bullets and bloodshed. ‘In fact, he never even crossed the border.’

After leaving the Mail Ralph, now a freelance, came to Bahrain and moved into his delightful Persian house with Charlie, his African grey parrot purchased on the dhow quay. Charlie was the inspiration for one of his more whimsical Gulf Mirror columns - and for my most risqué headline, ‘Confessions of a Feather-Plucker’. Its powers of mimicry were legendary, from the pop of a beer can opening to the clack-clack-clack of Ralph’s typewriter, and a dry smoker’s cough as he emerged from his bedroom in the morning.

Ralph’s annual leave during the first year of production of the Gulf Mirror came at a time when I had managed to change the office’s postal box, but I forgot to tell him. As each week passed with no sign of his weekly column, I grew increasingly concerned. I then had to make a quick trip to Kuwait as the guest of Rothman’s, the cigarette people who were taking part in a large exhibition. The British representatives knew how to entertain and that first night we all sat down to a sumptuous banquet at a leading hotel, where drink - whisky, I recall - was served discreetly at the side of the table from a teapot, Kuwait being officially ‘dry’. I awoke next morning with a splitting headache. As I tried to gather my thoughts, the phone on the bedside table rang. It was Ralph.

‘I’ve been in touch with the office and I gather you’re anxious to make contact,’ he began. As we spoke, two things were uppermost in my mind: the line was bad, his voice faint and this was a connection that easily be cut off; the other was a very urgent desire to urinate, after a night of over-indulgence. What to do. I knew that if I asked him to hang on while I dodged into the bathroom, he might think I had gone and hang up.

My eyes glanced on the tray of morning coffee that had just been delivered. Deliverance. As we spoke, I seized the small coffee pot and filled it, then the milk jug, then the sugar bowl and, finally, the coffee cup itself. With no sign of the torrent being staunched, I finally had to take the risk and left Ralph hanging on while I concluded the operation in the bathroom. Mercifully, he was still there when I emerged, and we were able to solve the riddle of the missing columns. Back in Bahrain, our old postal box was crammed with them.

Ralph’s journey back to Bahrain some weeks later included a moment of high drama. With the aircraft only 30 minutes out of Beirut, a fault was detected. Passengers were instructed to remove shoes and spectacles and lean forward in their seats, arms over heads, as the emergency landing went ahead. ‘I checked my pulse,’ Ralph said later. ‘To my surprise, it was perfectly normal. There was an overlarge Lebanese lady in the seat directly in front me. As we made our final approach, all I could think of was the prospect of being thrust into eternity via her enormous backside.’ In the event, the aircraft touched down without incident. Even for Ralph, it had been an anxious moment.

Andrew Trimbee, Halifax Courier, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, is the author of the recently-published The Inshallah Paper, the story of his launch of the Gulf’s first English language newspaper, which the News of the World described as ‘hugely entertaining’ and from which this is an edited extract.

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Was Fleet Street really a fun-filled village of philandering hacks living off expenses? Oh yes it was

By Roy Greenslade

A majority of today's national newspaper journalists – and, most particularly, their proprietors and managers – intensely dislike veterans' memories of old Fleet Street.

They cannot bear to hear stories of an overmanned, profitable and successful industry that appears to have been run entirely for the pleasure of underworked reporters and writers gathered daily and nightly – and, sometimes, over-nightly – in a string of public houses.

In fact, throughout the century, the young entrants to journalism have generally despised the tales told by ageing hacks about the good times in the past. I can understand that because I think I've lived through a succession of mythical golden ages.

Similarly, the old Fleet Streeters, now turning from their sixties into their seventies, refuse to accept that papers selling so few copies compared to the many millions of the 1960s have any virtues worth defending.

So, despite the young turks turning their backs on them, they like to remind each other of an era of uninhibited debauchery, funded by fictitious expenses and punctuated by occasional bouts of work.

Step forward Colin Dunne. There are few better than he to record the history of a lost world of the non-stop fun enjoyed by so many of us who, though we did not recognise it at the time, were truly blessed.

His new book Man Bites Talking Dog* is a romp through his own chaotic life from the Craven Herald and, via several regional dailies, to the Daily Mirror and The Sun and beyond into lucrative freelancing.

Every anecdote may not be strictly true. He gaily mixes the apocryphal with the factual, but I blushed as I read one reference to myself because, damn his memory, it was rather too close to the truth for comfort.

Indeed, Colin's memory is extraordinary. From half a century and more ago, he recalls hundreds of names and the odd incidents in which they figured. But it isn't so much the stories that carry one through the pages as his wonderfully witty style.

Colin was what we call a 'colour writer'. By his own admission he wouldn't know what to do with a news story if it sat up and begged. He was, instead, able to conjure 500 magical words about a talking corgi or a female molecatcher or the phenomenon of lawnmower racing.

‘I was cast as the candy-floss writer who would have a shot at any old rubbish,’ he writes, adding that it ‘was a fair summary of my talents.’

Comparing himself with foreign correspondents risking their lives to file stories of earth-shattering significance, he notes: ‘It wasn't so much the last helicopter out of Saigon for me, as the last bus out of Stockport.’

He is ever candid and self-deprecating. ‘I came into journalism because I wanted to make a difference,’ he writes. ‘The only difference I wished to make was more personal than global... The only poverty I wished to make into history was my own.’

His turns of phrase are memorable. On the drinking culture in Manchester's Withy Grove: ‘Go in any pub and you'd find people speaking fluent Pitman's.’ On Paul Callan, a Mirror man who now writes for the Daily Express: ‘He spent a lifetime combating celibacy wherever he found it.’ On how the ferocious Norman Baitey managed to become an editor: ‘Because there were no vacancies for guards at Auschwitz.’ On the Mirror's Canary Wharf office: ‘It had all the atmosphere of a Swiss euthanasia clinic.’

I don't expect many of the Wharf's young staff will identify with Colin's view of journalism: ‘It never occurred to me that you could call it a job. Other people did jobs. Journalists had fun. Then they went for a jar. Then they more fun.’

Rightly, Geoffrey Mather, in a review on the gentlemanranters website, writes that Colin has ‘a feel for language that is simple, direct, yet smooth and deceptively effortless.’ Quite so.

*Man Bites Talking Dog is published by Revel Barker on 1 April. And, no, it is not a Fool's Day spoof, though I'd guess that plenty of people will never believe it.

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