Gentlemen Ranters

We have moved...

2007-08-24T01:16:00.000+02:00

...to www.gentlemenranters.com

with immediate effect.
Please join us there.
And bookmark the site for future reference.
This site may still be used as an index, while we index the new site.
We look forward to meeting you at the new place.
best wishes -
the editors

The stuff that legends are made on

2007-08-17T01:18:00.000+02:00

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There’s a story (probably apocryphal – and we try hard to avoid those because the true ones are often difficult enough to believe) – of a professor of journalism calling a newspaper and telling them he had photographic evidence that Elvis Presley was alive.

A team was immediately despatched to his home and he handed them a photograph of himself, taken in his study.

So how was this ‘photographic evidence’ that The King was not dead?

‘Oh’, said the professor, ‘Mr Presley took the photo...’

And he turned up, Mr Presley, often in burger bars in America, more frequently than George Best turned up at Old Trafford - although not as frequently as he (Mr Best) turned up at Tramp.

Two of our guys were on the case following his (Mr Presley’s) reported death which occurred, or not, 30 years ago this week. PAUL BANNISTER was on coffin duty and reports on the tricks his snapper mates got up to, and JOE MULLINS was on the follow-up, getting Elvis himself to explain the sightings.
Both of them somehow missed the Weekly World News exclusive (see Issue 4 for that newspaper’s winning ways) interview with him.

What would the legendary John Junor have made of it all? I think we should be told. It’s a fair guess, going by the account related by his grandson, the Daily Telegraph’s literary editor SAM LEITH, that Beaverbrook would have said: ‘Do you know why I don’t believe all this? It’s because Mr Presley is bloody dead.’ And the same with silly season stories about Lord Lucan, Cornish sharks and giant dogs and cats.

A legendary news editor – it’s a remarkably flexible adjective – was Bob Blake. When he retired from the desk Bob’s colleagues on the Daily Express had a book of his sayings printed. It ran to 208 pages, and its publication is recalled as a fond memory by STANLEY BLENKINSOP, another er, legendary figure who succeeded him.

And IAN SKIDMORE gets fired by legendary news agency boss Jimmy Lovelock.

But we start all this with a Rant, because that is what we do, with REVEL BARKER on the expensive lack of logic in firing Old Farts – some of them legends in their own lunchtime – in the name of cost-cutting.

And we close with a short about a reader who claimed in a phone call to legendary news editor Dan Ferrari that he could go back in time (as if that is something that we aren’t all doing, all the time, on this site).

Sam Leith reminds us, off-screen, that Peter McKay once proposed forming an early version of Gentlemen Ranters, a ‘JJ Dining Club’ (while JJ was still alive), to swap stories about him – ‘the only criterion for membership being that you weren’t the man himself...’

See also: Letters, Links, and The Spike
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Cut costs, sack hacks

2007-08-17T01:00:00.000+02:00

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By Revel Barker
Our American cousins are currently going through the sort of cost-cutting experience that we endured a quarter of a century ago, and they, more noisily than we did – but with no more apparent effect – are kicking up about it.

Cost-cutting in bean-counting-speak means job-cutting, mainly of older and more experienced (and therefore usually more expensive) staff; if you want to increase profits you look at where the money is haemorrhaging and the easy answer is to identify editorial as the culprit. The green-eyed accountant looks at the high wages, the lavish expenses, the cost of air fares to places that he couldn’t afford even on a once in a lifetime holiday, the level of entertaining… and the number of journalists who seem to spend most of their shifts either sitting around idly or – worse – decamping to the pub.

If that’s your yardstick, cutting costs is simple.

Editorial spend rarely relates directly to profit. If circulation increases, the circulation department gets the credit; if advertising income goes up, the space salesmen get the plaudits. If either of these revenue streams reduces, they all blame a poor ‘editorial product’.

We can’t argue that we were overmanned. We had writers who never wrote a word, because they were bone idle, and subs who were never asked to sub a story because they weren’t up to the task.

It was a problem by no means restricted to editorial, though. If all the inkies rostered for a shift had actually turned up on any one night, there wouldn’t have been standing room for them, which is why some comps were officially working a 26-week year (at least one of them did only 22 weeks, because it took in holiday time).

But all eyes turned naturally towards editorial where the inkies protested to management that there was something called ‘evening dress allowance’, which they believed meant a special payment for working after dark.

The first pronouncement of Clive Thornton when he arrived as chairman was that the Daily Mirror had more journalists in Holborn than the Sun employed world-wide. In fact the paper had more journalists in Manchester than the Sun had worldwide, and there were so many subs in Withy Grove on some nights that if one of them went to the lavatory he would return to find that somebody had nicked his chair.

But in those days the Sun and the Mirror were – this was our excuse – different papers. One had a deadline around lunchtime each day and the other had editions running through most of the night; at the weekend or on night matches there were different editions for almost every first division football club area (not altogether a brilliant scheme, if readers in Liverpool couldn’t get a full account of what was happening in Manchester, or Leeds didn’t know what was happening in Sunderland, before meeting them at Wembley).

I remember one night when the Sunday Mirror did 35 different changes, which may not have been a record.

So Thornton asked for, and got, non-automatic replacement and Maxwell demanded the same deal.

Montgomery had a totally different idea; he seemed to enjoy sacking people anyway, believing that two 20-year-olds on ₤20grand each were obviously twice as useful as one guy of 40+ on 40grand-plus.

But there’s a reason for paying old farts more than tyros. And perhaps there’s no better proof than the Daily Mirror’s cock-up over the faked pictures of ‘British soldiers torturing prisoners in Iraq’.

When the paper announced its scoop by putting the photos on TV, Eddie Rawlinson did a screen grab at home and – before the paper even hit the streets – was telling his email cronies that he suspected there was a rabbit off, somewhere.

Eddie had been on the streets of Belfast and elsewhere and he knew what soldiers were supposed to look like.

The lacing on a soldier’s boots was WRONG, he said. The rifle held by one of them was the WRONG type.
The vehicle in the picture was the WRONG vehicle for Iraq.
The fastening on a soldier’s webbing was WRONG.
The trousers, at the ankle, were WRONG. The flow of urination (the soldiers were supposed to be peeing on the prisoner) was WRONG.

If Eddie had still been running a picture desk those photos would never have got across it.

The editor, Piers Morgan, would not have been fired. The paper – once the most highly rated and respected by soldiery of all ranks – would not have been brought into shocking disrepute.

But in the old-fart clear-out schedule, people like Eddie had been too expensive to keep. How do you put a value on experience? Does it matter that you have a newsroom staffed almost entirely by people who have never actually seen a soldier in uniform? How much are proprietors prepared to pay out in legal costs, rather than paying far less money in salaries to people who can save the company bacon?

And wherever the Mirror went, the rest of Fleet Street inevitably followed. It had been the same with pay deals; the Mirror always went in first, and upped the money, and the others all made their claims on the back of that, with no other justification or negotiating tactic than that the Mirror had got it.

So when the Mirror reduced staff, everybody else did the same.

Before Maxwell, a typical cost-cutting exercise asked on-the-road reporters to forgo the second round of vintage port and of Havana cigars at the end of lunch.

The point that they missed upstairs, however, was that the apparently indulgent lifestyle meant that reporters (this would apply to about half of them, I’d guess) would actually go out of the office and make and meet contacts – and would spend the money, and often come back with stories that were several hundred times cheaper than those that were bought-in, and rewritten by their colleagues who just pocketed the same level of exes and never ventured further from the newsroom than the office pub.

Dan Ferrari, in contemplative mood, once told me that if each of the hundred or so on-the-road men (this was early 70s) ‘went out of the office and spent their expenses and returned with only two exclusives each - every year - they would be far more use than sitting at their desks rewriting PA, and we would have a better paper.’

Far better to have a deserted newsroom, with staff out on the road, than have a roomful of people hanging about in case a Boeing crashed on Buckingham Palace.

But in the States, when a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis this month, the local paper sent 75 reporters, writers and photographers off the editorial floor and out to cover it. This was a paper that had reduced its editorial staff by – coincidentally – 75 earlier in the year, and everybody had moaned about it.

Whether the people who were standing idly by were any good, or had any experience in covering instant news, is difficult to judge from this distance.

But I somehow suspect that there won’t be too much sympathy among London editors for the tribulations currently being experienced by their opposite numbers across the pond.
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Pictures: Edward Rawlinson

Coffin fit

2007-08-17T00:52:00.000+02:00

By Paul Bannister
Vince Eckersley was one of the Leigh Boys when we both attended De La Salle College, Pendleton, a fact unearthed at 5,000 feet on a desert mesa.

It wasn’t that Vince was in the habit of holding high-level converzationes, just that we were on a two-week muleback assignment together on the Baja peninsula of Mexico. We were seeking cave paintings of ancient flying saucers, a not-atypical National Enquirer venture.

To the background accompaniment of our three muleteers’ gastric rumblings (they’d eaten freeze-dried beef bourguignon too enthusiastically) we found we’d attended the same grammar school, a few years apart.

It was a small surprise that explained much. The contingent at DLS who travelled daily from Leigh was noted for its lawlessness, cunning and skilful interpretation of rules. All that made an admirable grounding for a photographer.

Vince had worked for Tillotsons’ Leigh Journal and Bolton Evening News before graduating to the Manchester offices of the nationals, but his taste for safari clothes and SCUBA diving (not indulged at the same time) led him to Florida and the Enquirer.

There, he and such as Scotsman Jimmy Sutherland (later Star photo editor) were among the handful of larcenous staff snappers who bought and sold their less-guileful American cousins week after week, smiling as they did it.

This is an homage to their breed, a modest account of just one episode. I’m proud to have worked with such as Vince, and Jimmy, and Jim Selby and Jeff Joffe, and … but not that Illinois idiot who gave the Guatemalan cop his driving licence…

After Elvis Presley died, the Enquirer had a stampede of approaches from his nearest and dearest, offering Last Photographs of the singer in his coffin.

The Enquirer ran one on the cover and sold more than seven million copies, which wasn’t a bad return for the $20,000 it paid to the family member – one of the people we called the Memphis Mafia - for the negative.
A couple of enterprising Enquirer employees later tried to lift that negative to print Elvis-in-a-box T-shirts. They were caught in a sting operation by the stork-like editor and a couple of fat cops. The story went that the editor unfolded out of a motel closet screeching ‘Aha! You rogues!’ and scared them half to death.

The publisher wanted another profitable Elvis cover, and hit on the idea of having a pic of the grieving widow, Priscilla, kneeling in prayer by the grave in Graceland.

Vince was given the job of getting that unsanctioned shot, for which Priscilla was to be paid.

The wily ex-Leigh Boy kitted himself out with a priest’s shiny black suit and dog collar, hollowed out a fat Missal and inserted a baby Rollei camera. Who’d question a priest in prayer?

Vince hung around some Holiday Inn in Memphis for a week, as Priscilla’s feet chilled so much that she never did that shoot.

Meanwhile, word came from Madrid. Bing Crosby had died and his body was being shipped to California for burial.

Eckers was told: Scramble. Get yourself to Los Angeles and get a picture of Bing in his box.

Observers at dusk a day later might have seen a portly priest busy with a pocket knife. He was removing a diamond-shaped pane of glass from the window of St Paul’s, Westwood, just at a place where a long lens might be inserted to get a fine view of the nave.

The next morning, the service was held early, to deter crowds, and that portly priest could now be seen at the back of the church, kneeling and murmuring over his Missal.

‘I looked up, and a big black-bearded priest was striding towards me with the light of battle in his eyes,’ Eckersley recalled. ‘I lowered my head, then cautiously looked again. It was Enquirer reporter Frank Zahour.’

Zahour was the only reporter inside the church, thanks to the ‘funeral director.’

That, in sober suit, was the late Gerry Hunt, another Enquirer reporter, (and ex-Daily Mail, Manchester) who was at the door, diligently keeping the media in its place outside while graciously accepting Kathryn Crosby’s thanks for his work.

Any indignant metro daily writer who protested at being excluded soon realised from Gerry’s demeanour that he’d best stay out. Gerry was noted for his short fuse and Pearl Harbour attacks at the office pub, and his air of menace wasn’t faked.

The service ended, and as Zahour exited, one of the humble excluded asked him for the name of the officiating priest. ‘Father Ellwood Kieser,’ said Zahour, who then spelled it, adding: ‘But, my son…’ (pause while the obedient hack waited, pen poised) ‘Check it. Check it!’

At Holy Cross Cemetery, the Enquirer team were back in mufti and the reporter who’d asked Zahour for the priest’s name did a mouth-breather’s double take.

‘A miracle, my son, a miracle,’ said Zahour, waving his fingers in blessing.
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Former Daily Mail reporter Paul Bannister is shamelessly exploiting the Ranters blog in hopes of finding a publisher for his new memoir, from which this is an extract.

The King: 'I'm still visiting earth..'

2007-08-17T00:45:00.000+02:00

By Joe Mullins
Yesterday (August 16) was the 30th anniversary of Elvis’s death and most people can remember where they were when they heard the news that day in 1977. I was on the Pennines looking up towards Holme Moss. But I’m more likely to think about the last time I spoke to him, which was 12 years later.

We – me and the King, that is - were in a Sheraton hotel room in Toronto. Why Toronto? It was the home of Ian Currie, the man who wrote You Cannot Die. Ian’s dead now though.

Along with Presley’s stepbrother, Billy Stanley, I flew to Canada to set up a séance.

At the time Currie was the world’s top researcher into life after death. He wrote his book after studying a century’s writing about reincarnation and contact with the dead. He was a university lecturer and it was a scholarly work.

Currie and Elizabeth Paddon, a local medium, crossed the great divide and seemed to speak to the dead long before the current crop of TV seers made a mint doing it. They were serious and sincere in what they did. I was a tabloid reporter.

Billy Stanley, then 36, was there to blow them out of the water – or authenticate whatever they channeled.

His mom Dee married Elvis’s dad Vernon after Mrs Presley died. Billy and his two brothers, David and Rick, lived at Graceland and Elvis treated them as both friends and flunkies, often taking them on tours. Billy is a sweet and simple guy who clearly loved his big brother.

Before the séance, Billy told me that he had one big secret and a few smaller ones that only Elvis would know – would the King come across with the details?

As Ian Currie sets the scene by recalling Elvis’s death, English-born Elizabeth slips into a trance and tries to contact his spirit.

Suddenly he’s through. It’s Elvis on the line. Billy scowls skeptically. Me too. But then Elvis hooks him.

Elizabeth relays a question from the King. ‘Do you still have my shirt, the one you cried into?’

It turns out that just before Elvis died, he gave Billy a white shirt that he often wore. Billy kept it as a souvenir. He came across it a few years after Elvis’ death.

‘I had the shirt in my lap,’ he said. ‘I started crying and my tears dropped onto it. I never told a soul about the shirt or weeping. Elvis must be among us.’

I ask Elvis why people keep reporting that they’ve seen him. He says through Elizabeth that he’s responsible for the sightings that occur outside hardware stores in Alabama, supermarkets in Nebraska and truck stops in Tennessee.

‘I’m still visiting earth,’ he says. ‘There are things I’ve been trying to do. I always wanted to bring love to people and I left without achieving that.’

He admits that he sometimes tries to approach people and that’s why so many fans think he’s still alive. It seems the fallen star is in a limbo brought on by his rock n roll lifestyle.

‘I want to move on,’ he says, ‘Mama and Daddy are waiting. My brother too.’ [His twin Jesse was born dead.]

It isn’t his voice, of course, just words coming from Elizabeth to Currie, who repeats them.

The King goes on to reveal more information to Billy, like some of the shenanigans they got up to on the road. He also knows that Billy is working on a book and says he’s nervous about what it might reveal.

‘Just do your work with love,’ he tells Billy. Ian and Elizabeth close the séance by sending my thanks. Elvis says, ‘Joe, remember the music.’ What it means, I don’t know.

Afterwards Billy says he believes Elvis came through with information that nobody else could have known – ‘It sent chills down my spine almost too much to bear,’ he says. He’s shaking slightly and there are tears glistening in his eyes.

What about the big secret? No, Elvis didn’t deliver there. Billy wanted an apology from the King. It seems hound dog Elvis shagged the love of Billy’s life – and the younger brother wanted to hear him say, ‘I’m sorry, I was wrong to take your girl.’

He’s sad that Elvis didn’t understand what the brotherly betrayal meant to him. ‘Maybe he thought that she didn’t love me,’ he says, trying to make excuses.

In the bar later, I wonder why people have a need to believe in some afterlife. Instead of taking the piss, I play Don’t be Cruel on the jukebox. Maybe that’s what Elvis meant. The girls crowd around Billy when they hear he’s Elvis’s stepbrother. The Presley magic still works. As the night draws on, a hooker with an angel face comes on to him.

Ian gives the $1,000 fee I paid HIM for running the séance to Billy so he can be Elvis for the night. I learn later that Billy pays over the cash to the hooker just to talk because he still has the girl that Elvis seduced on his mind. ‘I told her all about Elvis,’ he explains to me the next morning. ‘We talked for hours.’

Elvis has been gone 30 years now and the sightings in rural America seem to have stopped. Maybe he couldn’t get out of Canada.
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Letters to the editor

2007-08-17T00:25:00.000+02:00

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In what old Mirror colleagues insist on referring to as my ‘less than glorious’ period of editorship of the Daily Mirror I was ‘required’ to farewell a large number of journalists: some of them Big Names, some of them Good Operators, some of them eminently losable.
Anne Robinson (Misfired, by Brian Bass, last week) fell into a couple of those categories, as did Paul Foot and Alastair Campbell.
My recollection of Annie’s departure, however, does not coincide with the claims she made when interviewed on TV by Piers Morgan.
Bulimia? A big, fat porky, if you ask me. Annie wanted a pay rise which I was loath to grant, given that she already out-earned the editor and the Mirror Group was in receivership.
We conducted a gentlewomanly negotiation but my resolve was irrevocably firmed when a little bird on Mahogany Row told me that ‘certain employees’ were paid an extra salary, kept secret from the editor, from Bob Maxwell’s purse (or, as we soon discovered, from the pension fund!).
Princess Diana was never mentioned. Neither I nor, as far as I know, anybody, ever took irate calls from the Palace.
The only bulimic activity that occurred was mine when I puked at the thought of staff making a mint while the Mirror followed Maxwell to the seabed. – David Banks
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I enjoyed your rants last week – none more than Eddy Rawlinson’s tale (Pubs and publishing) of the Motoring Gazette. I recall those happy days of the late fifties when we were colleagues at the Daily Express and he would talk with great enthusiasm about publishing a motoring freebie – and I would be invited to make an investment.
These were the days before give-away newspapers took off and I had my doubts as I saw a couple of printers go bust in the forties when they tried to compete against local paid-for publications, such as those owned by the Westminster Press and Kemsley’s.
I eventually moved to Newcastle and Eddy took over the pub so neither (?) of us became millionaires.
The story of Bill Rowntree and Knox Johnston (Gentlemen, that reminds me, Revel Barker, July 27) also reminded me of a story told to me by Harry Benson during his early days as the Express staff photographer in New York.
He got a call from the London picture desk one morning: ‘Get a plane down to Chile, you should be in time to get Francis Chichester coming round the Horn…’
But London would do that: ‘Well it’s only a couple of inches on my map, old boy!’ - Gordon Amory
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Does anybody remember a young sub on the back bench of the Manchester Evening News in the mid 1950s - a guy who even in those days we realised was going places?
I ask because he asked me to take pictures for what was to be his first book. It was about Ken Stanley, a renowned table tennis player in those days.
I would love to find out whether the book was ever published, and if so how it sold.
He left the MEN for the Northern Echo then I heard he went to London. Harry something. Welsh-sounding surname.
Anybody heard what became of him and if he is still around he could let me know by writing to Gentlemen Ranters? - Eddy Rawlinson
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Remembering Tony Wilson
I see the late Tony Wilson is hailed as Mr Manchester by the Sunday Times. He was an even worse TV presenter than that master of self indulgence, Bob Greaves, who had been a fine reporter. I once heard Wilson begin an interview with an author by saying ‘Of course, I haven’t read your book...’
Of course?
I do not know what Granada did to its presenters. There were those two newspaper brothers (Daily Sketch and free lance), nice Jewish guys whose names I forget whose heads were turned by working for Granada. Even Smithies, a man of extraordinary talents as a photographer, singer and crossword compiler, had delusions of grandeur.
He told a priest to whom I introduced him that Bernstein hired him to revamp Granada and never made a decision without first consulting him.
But Wilson Mr Manchester? Not Lowry, Howard Spring, Walter Greenwood, or that whole school of Manchester writers? Not Barbirolli, Charles Halle?
Not Lord James the educationalist and former High Master of Manchester Grammar; not Gerald Illes or indeed the Founder of Belle Vue, John Dalton, Alan Turnig who virtually invented the computer, Chaim Weizmann who won World War One with the invention of artificial nitrate and was given a new kingdom, Israel as a prize.
Not the Guardian’s own C P Scott or Neville Cardus, not Harry Evans. Not stars like Robert Donat, Alan Bates, Pat Kirkwood.
Not those lovely gangsters who started the Manchester night club scene and kept the London bosses at bay – in one case tying one naked in a tree with his face pointing south?
Not the little man , double barrelled name with a Smith in it somewhere (another name that escapes me) who gave us the Unnamed Theatre and a host of other amateur companies that were better than the professionals ?
Not the man who first brought London shows by people like Novello, Coward; and shows like West Side story?
The guy, Paddy ------ (yet another whose surname I forget) who started wonderful jazz clubs, superb chefs like Roland Genty and a score of others and pastry cooks like the genius in Sinclair’s whose chicken pies used entire farm yards. Whitney Rowlands, George Harrop, Strangler Lewis, Bob Blake, Albert Clarke Storey, Ronnie Jeans, Frankie Charmain…
Wilson was not to be mentioned in the same breath. His contribution? - A record label and a night club? Both went bust.
If he was responsible for turning Manchester of the 40s and fifties with its orchestras and little theatres, wonderful pubs, talk-fests and out of town premieres, regular visits by all the musical greats, Basie, Brubeck, etc and jazz clubs into the puffs paradise it has become he should be rotting in hell. – Ian Skidmore
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My best memory of Tony Wilson was in a pub in Holyhead where all the scribes had gathered covering a story about the arrest of a former RAF pilot for spying. Wilson left the company with his crew but then dashed back into the pub where he breathlessly announced: ‘I forgot my handbag.’
Howls of laughter all round. – Harry Pugh
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The wit and wisdom of Bob Blake

2007-08-16T23:59:00.000+02:00

By Stanley Blenkinsop
In the wordy world of newspapers a unique volume, printed 25 years ago, still takes pride of place on the bookshelves of former Expressmen and women throughout the world. Its title: The Best of Blake.
The 208 pages, now well thumbed and dog-eared, are devoted to the words of Robert Blake.
Now 89, Bob is a Member of the Order of the British Empire for ‘services to journalism’, holder of the British Empire Medal for WWII service, and a retired Daily Express man who in 35 years filled every position on the news desk.
In that time news desk secretary Jean Kershaw kept a verbatim – and secret – note of the lugubrious Robert’s remarks to staff.

A few examples:

‘…Bottle washing. That’s what you university graduates have got to do here. And I’ll certainly see that you get a few dirty bottles to wash. Especially you women graduates.’

To a reporter who had gone into town for lunch: ‘So what would I have done if Martin Bormann [once wrongly ‘discovered alive’ in the Brazilian jungle by the Daily Express] came to the front lodge and asked to see a reporter - give him a taxi chit and send him down to the Danish Food Centre to find you?’

Commenting on pictures of a young Princess Anne leaving a London night club at 2 am: ‘No, well, I don’t hold with it, do I? If my taxes are going to be squandered I don’t want them squandered in swinging Soho clubs, do I? I want them squandered on pomp and panoply….I mean that’s what we pay for, isn’t it?’

Questioning a reporter on her expenses claim: ‘I’m told that you didn’t go to that fire in Bradford but did it on the phone… or to Sheffield for the three drowned children… and the nearest you got to Liverpool for that court case was the Crown and bloody Kettle. Please try again.’

To a reporter claiming ‘breakfast for friendly dustman’: ‘Are you asking me to believe that you went up to this chap in the middle of his round at 7 am and said: “Hello, friendly dustman, come and have bacon and eggs with me?”….’

To reporter regularly claiming afternoon tea allowance: ‘No wonder we can never get hold of you from four o’clock – you’re always eating bloody crumpets and drinking pots of China tea.’

On facial hair: ‘I always think people with beards have something to hide; and I always think people with moustaches have something to hide too.’

To new reporter sent from London: ‘You do realise that you're surplus to my requirements. I didn’t ask for you. You were foisted on me...’

‘Judging by the number of expenses claims about tanker crashes on the M6 I reckon we're getting pretty close to a national petrol shortage.’

‘I have no objection to women on newspapers, I think women on newspapers can be a good thing for us. Just so long as they are on other newspapers.’

On eventually raising a district man and being asked to hold on: ‘No, that’s all right… If I can wait five hours for a call from you, five minutes more isn’t going to make much differences, is it?’

On not hearing from a Belfast staffer till early afternoon: ‘We thought you’d been kidnapped.’

To mark Blake’s 1982 retirement, picture editor John Knill had the secret collection of quotes printed. They were illustrated with cartoons drawn specially by the legendary Giles, Bill Caldwell, political cartoonist of the Sun, and Tom Dobney, deputy art editor of the Express.

The Best of Blake went to the then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Lord Carver, who had been Bob’s tank commander in the WWII North African desert campaign. Bob was his tank driver in the Battle of Alamein of which Churchill wrote: ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory - after Alamein we never had a defeat.’

His Lordship wrote back to Ancoats: ‘I have never laughed more in my life. The Giles cartoon of Rommel and Bob was first rate.’

Another copy was sent to the Burgomaster of Düsseldorf, son of the Afrika Korps leader Erwin Rommel. Although Bob had fought long and hard against the forces of the Desert Fox, he held him in the highest personal regard and a framed picture of the field marshal was among Bob’s retirement gifts.

Young Rommel, fluent in English, replied to the Express: ‘Very funny - father would have been delighted by the cartoon in which he appeared with Herr Blake.’

And more fragments from the BoB…

After hearing that a man due for arrest in a major crime had gone on a fortnight’s holiday: ‘Yes, well I expect they’re giving him an opportunity to shoot himself. After all, an inquest’s a hell of a lot cheaper than a trial.’

‘There is no cure for a hangover…’

To reporter complaining of a shilling cut in his expenses claim: ‘Ah well, we do have to wield the axe somewhere.’

‘When I was a boy we threw pennies to the veterans of the Great War who begged in the streets of London. My father told me that on a clear day you could also see the queues of starving miners in South Wales. He advised me not to be a war hero or a miner.’

‘Yes, I went to King’s School at Canterbury – England’s oldest public school. I got there because my father said we were an Anglican family. It wasn’t true - if we’d been anything we’d have been Congregational. So I said I thought religion must be pretty cheap if you could change it just to go to school, and he laughed.’

And after going to a ‘forward planning’ meeting only to find the room deserted: ‘What’s become of the think tank then? It’s like a sort of journalistic Marie Celeste in there. And there’s still a cigarette burning…’
FINALLY a footnote – too late to make the book - from Bob in a letter to The Times about the Iraq war in 2003:
‘When I was in the Army I worked briefly as a reporter on the four-page Iraq Times run by the British military public relations unit in Baghdad in 1943.
Three pages were in English, the fourth in local Arabic. As none of us could read Arabic, the back page was produced by an Iraqi sub editor
Production was stopped one day by a man from the British Embassy who pointed out that the headline on the back page report read: ‘Death to Churchill – British go home!’
# Picture research by John Knill
Stanley Blenkinsop was northern news editor of the Daily Express from 1969 till he took early retirement at 54 in 1986 to study at Manchester University. He graduated in 1989 with a BA Honours in modern history and politics.

In the line of fire

2007-08-16T23:56:00.000+02:00

By Ian Skidmore
News agencies, weekly papers, evening papers, trade magazines, national dailies and Sundays, Kemsley Newspapers, J P Taylors Colour Printers, The Black Watch (RHR) – twice, which I think may be a record – one school and two clubs…

I have been sacked by experts.

My shortest period of employment was a day and a half, working for Jimmy Lovelock, proprietor of Stockport News Service, owner of the only fornicatorium in Cheshire and the only man to organise an abortion on the National Health, when abortions were not even legal.

Editor of a weekly newspaper in his early twenties, he had been crippled with polio as a child, but nevertheless became a mountaineer, a pot-holer and a member of the expedition that climbed Nuptse, Everest’s smaller sister.

A remarkable man.

Jimmy introduced me to the staff, which took up most of the first day.

The staff was an odd little chap called Mickey. First of all we had to find him, and that was never easy. A year after his arrival no-one knew Mickey’s surname and I don’t think anyone ever found out where he lived.

He was invariably respectful and called Jimmy ‘Master’.

Mickey had a single purpose in life: to discover how millionaires made their first thousand pounds. Their memoirs, said Mickey who had read them all, always included the phrase, ‘with my first thousand pounds I bought…’ but never explained where the thousand pounds came from.

He suspected they had nicked it; but, scorning that as being too easy, he tried dealing. He only really mastered the art of acquiring. Disposal escaped him. To Jimmy’s puzzled chagrin he used the agency’s office as his warehouse. There were racks of clothes of improbable sizes, a job lot of stringless violins picked up for a song, inevitably tuneless, twenty gross of heavily tinselled cards wishing A Happy Xmas for 1948, which he bought in 1951, and other less saleable items.

You could never find a pen there, or even a typewriter; but anyone in need of a stringless violin was easily accommodated.

Next he tried gambling, a curious reversal. Disposing was child’s play. Acquiring he never quite mastered.

He had one suit that he wore to the office, except on the days when he wore a mackintosh, in the hope that ‘Master’ would not notice he wore only a shirt, tie and underpants beneath, having pawned the suit. The gartered socks were a give away.

By the time I arrived Jimmy had taken to paying him by the day.

The second day there I got an out-of-town job; I was after all the only member of staff who could be relied on to turn up in a suit. Wilmslow Magistrates court, which in those days could be reached from Stockport by train, was hardly outer space but Mickey anxiously took me for a couple of pints to stiffen the sinews. One pint led to another and by the time I got on the train I was exhausted, fell into a deep sleep and woke up in Crewe. I had seen enough Hollywood newspaper films to know what to do. I rang Stockport on a transfer charge call and asked Jimmy to wire me my fare back to the office.

I was touched that he went further. He drove all the way to Crewe to collect me. I see now that it gave him a greater opportunity for an in-depth character assessment, but at the time I thought it a charming gesture.

We were nearing Stockport when he ended his assessment.

‘Skiddy,’ he said. ‘We have two options. Either I employ you or we stay friends.’ Again I was very touched, it was my friendship he valued.

He generously paid me for a day and a half but despite the joint urgings of Mickey and myself refused to add the one and a half hours holiday money to which we felt I was entitled. After nearly sixty years the debt remains unpaid, though I have over the years mentioned it many times, even sent bills to his retirement home in Spain. He always cops me a deaf ’un.

In the fullness of time he came to work for me, doing shifts when I ran the night desk on the Sunday Pictorial. I tried to have my holiday pay docked from his shift money, but the linage department was obdurate. No amende honorable, not even when he made a fortune doing night shifts for six nationals outside a vicarage in Cheshire, in case the Vicar of Woodford sneaked back in the night.

In fairness he did bring me a kukri back from Nepal when he climbed Nuptse and I treasure it to this day.

I was especially touched because he was very cross. Picture editor George Harrop and I had sent him a telegram as soon as the news broke of his successful attempt. ‘Is there froth on the top?’ it read, rather cleverly we thought.

We didn’t know that it would take the Sherpa who delivered it three days to climb the mountain.

Mickey? No idea. The last time we met we were having lunch with Lord (Tony) Moynihan when his wife’s tits fell out and somehow, in the excitement of that, I never got round to finding out whether Mickey made his first thousand, but I was pleased to see he was not wearing his raincoat.
#

It wouldn’t be summer without sighting Lucan

2007-08-16T23:47:00.000+02:00

By Sam Leith
Many years ago my late grandfather John Junor – a newspaperman, in his day, of considerable clout – found himself in possession of one of the scoops of his career. He was editing the Sunday Express, when one of his reporters announced that they had been offered the clearest shots yet of the Loch Ness Monster.

It was about this time of year. A pair of lads had been walking by the loch with their Box Brownie, when there she was: Nessie, her majestic plesiosaur neck arching gracefully from the still, silvery waters of the loch. They had the presence of mind, just, to snatch a picture. She was blurry, but she was unmistakably the beast. The camera had not been tampered with.

JJ cleared the front page and prepared to make history. The presses were all but rolling, the Champagne all but open, and the eye of the Sunday Times all but wiped. JJ telephoned his proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, to trumpet his achievement. He finished his excited monologue, and waited for the congratulations to come. There was a pause.

‘Mr Junor,’ said the Beaver. ‘You must not print this story.’

The Junor jaw dropped. A chill took up residence in his spine. Ping! A single hair on his head turned grey.

‘Pull the story, Mr Junor,’ he repeated.

‘But, but–but-but-’ my late grandfather riposted.

‘Mr Junor. The photograph is a fake.’

‘But-but?’

‘I know, Mr Junor, that the photograph is a fake,’ continued the thumb-sized Canadian megalomaniac. ‘And do you know how I know? Because, Mr Junor, there is no bloody Loch Ness Monster. Good evening.’

The front page was killed. And the following day, the young men turned out to have been students on rag week.

This story springs annually to mind as I open my morning newspaper in the August sunshine to read about the discovery of a bearded Lord Lucan playing canasta or selling handmade ethnic trinkets in some distant province of the empire; a great white shark being sighted off Cornwall; or a plague of wasps the size of frogs, frogs the size of dogs, or dogs the size of horses.

Would its like take place now? Would Rupert Murdoch ever demand a story be withdrawn from the Sun on the grounds of a conviction that it was, though harmless, untrue? You’d have to wonder.

Would it even matter? When, halfway through the day, it emerged that the ‘Lord Lucan’ the Evening Standard had found was 10 years younger and five inches shorter than the one who disappeared in the 1970s, the newspaper relegated the story from the front page to page three. The implication was that the paper thought these facts may have made it less likely that their man was the missing earl, but didn’t kill the possibility altogether. (My colleague Christopher Howse this week murmured: ‘You know you’re getting older when Lord Lucan starts to look younger.’)

That reminds me, incidentally, of a heavenly cock-up on a Sunday red-top a few years ago. A paparazzo had taken a photograph that was splashed on the front under the headline ‘Who’s The Mystery Blonde With Rod Stewart?’ Then, too late to pull the story altogether, someone noticed that the man in the photo wasn’t Rod Stewart at all. The following morning, readers were invited to wonder: ‘Who’s The Mystery Blonde with the Mystery Blond?’ Genius.

When a television company transposes two pieces of footage in the editing process to make the Queen look grumpy, there are calls for mass seppuku among its executives. Yet when a newspaper finds its umpteenth Lord Lucan, or insists that Jaws is prowling off Padstow, the reaction is no more than a shrug of the shoulders.

I think there’s something slightly subtler than hypocrisy or simple bad faith at work. The reason that there’s no outrage is that nobody is fooling anybody. Do the editors who assemble these confections really believe for a nanosecond these stories are true? I doubt it. Nor do their readers. We are collaborating in a ritual of belief, or at least of the possibility of belief. This newspaper, too, added to the gaiety of nations by reporting the brouhaha surrounding the ‘discovery’ of Lord Lucan.

Something in us enjoys pretending to believe. ‘Silly season’ stories are the comical manifestation of an essentially benevolent instinct: the same instinct that keeps us searching the faces of the customers in the chip shop for Elvis, that keeps many in the Anglican Communion going to church, and that keeps us looking, in Portugal, for a child missing now for 100 days.

This year, I think, I shall be taking a late summer break in my grandfather’s honour, on the banks of Loch Ness. I’ll bring my camera.
#
Sam Leith is Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph
[This article first appeared in the Daily Telegraph]

Time travel

2007-08-16T23:40:00.000+02:00

It [Time travel] is an intriguing prospect worthy of an H G Wells novel: but, of course, it must be complete rubbish. – Daily Telegraph leader, Aug 9

The Daily Telegraph may dismiss the theory of time travel but the Daily Mirror, when I worked on it, was always prepared to keep an open mind on the subject.

I remember when a reader phoned to say he had invented a time machine that could take anyone back or forward in time.

News editor Dan Ferrari said that was wonderful, and that he would love to see it.

The inventor asked when he should come to the office to discuss his invention and Ferrari told him: ‘Come in and see me - yesterday.’
– Revel Barker
#

Dempster Memorial - ticket only

2007-08-14T13:51:00.000+02:00

A memorial service to celebrate the life of the Daily Mail diarist Nigel Dempster will be held at St Bride's church on October 17.
Attendance will be by ticket only, and applications should be made in writing (by September 2) to the head of corporate affairs at Associated Newspapers, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT. - Daily Mail
#

World exclusive – then fired, TV viewers told

2007-08-10T00:20:00.000+02:00

...
We start again with a Rant. BRIAN BASS, former features editor of the Daily Mirror, watched Anne Robinson telling the paper’s ex-editor Piers Morgan on TV this week how she was ‘effectively’ fired after revealing to the world the secret of Princess Diana’s problem with bulimia.

Her very own world scoop – she had spotted it, and got James Whitaker to stand it up - apparently brought the wrath of the Palace down on the Mirror and she was forced out, she says.

It may have helped justify the programme’s title, You Can’t Fire Me, I’m Famous – but, says Basso, that’s the not way he remembers it.

SOME OTHER CORRECTIONS:
One of the great advantages of an on-line publication like this that we never enjoyed in real life is the ability to make corrections – in original copy.
Thus we have been able to adjust the date of the first appearance of Andy Capp in the Daily Mirror to August 1957 (we’d had it as 1958); and the News Chronicle cutting of Roy Spicer’s review of West Side Story turned up in a shoe box, so it has been amended. His actual intro was:
‘Slick, sparkling, spectacular, and with some of the most brilliant dancing seen on the English stage, this colourful musical drama has a weakness - its songs. It has no songs to hum or remember.’
You can, should you be so minded, check the revised copy by clicking on Andy Capp or Roy Spicer in the Archive in Column 1.
They now both have the appearance of having been right all along.

Back to the current edition and JOHN GARTON recalls one reporter’s seemingly endless quest – on exes - to find Paradise on earth.
Why are we not surprised that there were jobs like that, when we were working?
It was of course the mad, Mafia-related Generoso Pope who inspired that one. We also have two more loony publishers this week: JOHN IZBICKI recalls being sent to Paris where part of his job was to baby-sit the wife of Lord Kemsley, and EDDIE RAWLINSON recounts his own short stint as a press baron and publican.
Eddie is effectively the godfather of this site, or perhaps a foundling father. He would stagger home around midnight from his local (known as The Clog, because regulars had objected to a name-change that would have had them going into The Queens by the back passage) and file an email rant to a select few old friends. His rants became the basis of Gentlemen Ranters long before it was taken up by a larger (now averaging 200 a day – thank you all for spreading the word) readership. So now he’s gone from Clog to Blog.
And the Westminster Hotel in Rhyl baked a cake for IAN SKIDMORE to celebrate his appointment as night news editor, half-way through coverage of the Mummy in the Cupboard Murders.
Encouraging news, when some of us remember pub landlords who trousered thousands of our fivers and bought up parts of Norfolk without ever buying a round. ‘I’m selling drinks, not giving them away,’ said Bill Pearce when his meanness was remarked upon at the bar of The Stab.
Elsewhere KEN ASHTON recalls the days when he was winningly fleet of foot but snapper ALBERT COOPER protests that he couldn’t keep pace with a winning racehorse (carrying the camera bag was his handicap, apparently), and picture editor ALUN JOHN books a rabbit into business class to gain asylum from Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya.
All human –and some furry – life is here.
As are some new and hopefully interesting LINKS, new LETTERS and a new section called The Spike for items that don’t otherwise have a natural home.
Find them all by scrolling down or clicking on the Archive references and by-lines at top left.
Comments and letters (and contributions) please, to ranterseditor@gmail.com

STOP PRESS
As we go to, er press, we learn that regular contributor IAN SKIDMORE is about to have his 26th book, Kyffin, published in time for Christmas.
This is the ‘unpublished’ work referred to in his letter this week, commenting on our story about the Queen Mum in last week’s posting.
#

Misfired

2007-08-10T00:15:00.000+02:00

By Brian Bass
Could it be that the years of non-drinking have started to wipe clean the memory banks of winking Anne Robinson?

She appeared on Piers Morgan’s BBC 1 chat show on Tuesday claiming she had been sacked from the Mirror - after dire representations from the Palace - because she dared to break the story, on the one night she was editing the paper, of Princess Di’s bulimia.

We old hacks who were there at the time, and have not let non-drinking befuddle our brains, remember no such event.

We do remember, however, the Sunday when Annie was editing (she was never, as she claimed on TV, ‘number 3’ at the Mirror – Richard Stott and Terry Lancaster were both higher in the pecking order), and against all back bench advice she insisted on splashing on a story about how Persil wrecked your washing machine. Persil were not amused and proved the story to have been blown out of all context.

Nor did she then disappear to television as the programme insisted, but continued for some years to write her weekly Mirror column. She later decamped briefly for The Sun and even later The Daily Telegraph before becoming the world-wide star of TV that we all now love.

Considering the whole basis of the programme was bollocks, it doesn’t say a great deal for the investigative talents of Piers, either.
#

Paradise found...

2007-08-10T00:11:00.000+02:00

By John Garton
If you’ve been reading Ranters regularly, you’ve already enjoyed several tales of the larger-than-life Generoso Pope, founder of the American supermarket tabloids and boss of the National Enquirer.

I was a late Brit arrival on the American tabloids in Florida and as news editor of the National Examiner I inherited an ex-Enquirer reporter, John Harris, a soft-spoken Carolina mountain man who always brought me a jar of his family’s lethal ‘Carolina Moon’ concoction whenever he returned from his annual jaunt to his relatives up in the backwoods.

John was modest man and not one to boast of any past achievements. But he had a reputation for one particular assignment and he eventually told me the whole amazing story.

At the height of the Enquirer’s success John was hired by one of its editors from his news beat in Cincinatti for a special job. It was one of Pope’s brainwave ideas that his editors and reporters were expected to make a reality.

This one was a doozy. Pope wanted to find Paradise. The Enquirer would reveal this nirvana to its adoring readers.

John was fully briefed for his monumental task. Pope’s editors compiled a long list of exotic places round the world that they thought were likely to match Pope’s idea of paradise... Madeira, Hawaii, Bora Bora, the Seychelles, Fiji, Bali and many more.

After a lot of planning John was dispatched on his round-the-world quest, pockets full of Pope plastic and cash.

Arriving at each port of call, John inspected it carefully, spoke to local experts and eventually filed his piece to the anxiously awaiting Pope executives in Lantana, the Enquirer’s base in south Florida. The big guns examined it, pulled it apart, put it back together again and made their judgment that this place was or wasn’t paradise. They’d then pass it to the boss or they’d spike it.

Whatever happened, it was a long drawn-out process that caused the editors and Pope a lot of heartache and several editors’ heads rolled when they didn’t toe Pope’s line.

Meanwhile, the intrepid Harris pressed on. The journey took many months, hours of writing, editing, Pope rages and lots more besides. Every time Pope was presented with a Shangri-la candidate he declined it and Harris was urged on to yet another stunning destination. John, of course, was having the time of his life.

Eventually he reached some heavenly Pacific island and Harris thought he’d cracked it. No doubt about it...this was Paradise. He meticulously composed his magic words. The Lantana editors received them and their excitement mounted. They went through the copy over and over again and agreed that this was The One. They confidently strode off to Pope’s office and presented the big man with the precious copy, declaring:

‘This is it, Gene.’

Pope sat back to read while the editors waited anxiously, praying that this was the end of it all and the boss would be delighted.

He finished reading and agreed that yes, this was it, run it. Huge sighs of relief and smiles and the editors retreated from the inner sanctum.

As they were leaving Pope called after them: ‘By the way, how did we get Harris’ copy?’

‘By phone,’ they chorused.

‘What?’ said Pope, ‘By phone? Kill it. Ain’t no phones in paradise...’

End of story. Harris was summoned home. Not one word of his worldwide odyssey was ever printed in the Enquirer.
#
Former Daily Mirror journalist and publicity man John Garton eventually left the US tabloids, ‘went straight’ on a Florida daily and is now happily retired in his own paradise in St Augustine, Florida.

Race issues

2007-08-10T00:06:00.000+02:00

By Ken Ashton
It’s a small world, as we like to say when we are stuck for an intro.
Graeme Huston, editor in chief of a group of newspapers in South Yorkshire, emailed to say he’d spotted our rants and picked up – well-spotted! – the fact that Skidmore and I had once graced (should that be dis-graced?) the fair town of Doncaster and requested from each of us some memories.
Mine were sporting and Skidmore and I could be read reliving the good old days in the Doncaster Free Press last weekend (August 3).
Inspired by that, I delved again with this gem, which has links to sport and newspapers, with a toast to an old editor and Peter Keeling, who splashed my success in the Manchester Evening News and caused me some embarrassment…
The night Dad and I were arrested had all the elements of pure farce. We go back to the 1950s, when I was running like the wind as an amateur athlete in Lancashire and a budding journalist. Dad, who had been a marathon man in his own young days, was my trainer, bag man, adviser and masseur.
In those golden days of real amateurism, there were athletics meetings all over the country, organised by businesses, councils, even the police. One of the biggest on the running calendar was Manchester City Police Sports, staged at the old White City stadium.
In that glorious summer, I had been winning everything I entered and, as a result, was down for the 100 and 220 yards – long before metres – in this prestigious event. But on this occasion, there was a snag. This was a Wednesday evening meeting and I was working as sports editor on the Manchester City News and the event clashed with press night.
I did the unforgivable. I left my running gear in a left luggage locker at Manchester’s Piccadilly station, complained of stomach ache around mid-afternoon, was allowed to go early, grabbed a sandwich and met Dad at the White City gates.
Four hours later, I had won both events and was on the way home from Manchester to St Helens by train. We didn’t own a car. Dad, a carpenter by trade, had his bag of tools, I had my bag of running gear and a guilty conscience to go with the euphoria of winning.
One prize was a tea-trolley, the other a canteen of cutlery. I also had prizes team-mates had won and wished to exchange, as they were ‘doubles’. I’d volunteered to take them back to the prize secretary the following day. So I was loaded with goods…
We left the last train at St Helens Shaw Street station and started the thee-mile walk home. Now the way home was via a road known as Croppers Hill – and it was steep. As I puffed and dragged aching legs up the hill, Dad’s tool bag on the bottom shelf of the tea-trolley with a watch and clock – my friends’ prizes - and my running kit on the top, a policeman the size of a Welsh prop forward stepped out of an alleyway.
‘’Ello, ’ello, ’ello. What’s all this then?’ I let go of the trolley, which ran down the hill, scattering Dad’s tools, goodies and cutlery in its wake. We were on hands and knees picking up cutlery and sorting out hammers, chisels and saws by streetlight, the policeman standing hands on hips and handcuffs at the ready. Dad was spluttering explanations and I was trembling with fright.
And, of course, when the bobby asked where we had got the cutlery and what we were doing with tools, my explanation that I’d won them – and at a police force sports event – was met with raucous laughter. We had a laughing policeman.
They also laughed at the cop shop, before phoning Manchester police to confirm the story. We got home around 2.30am and were back on the Manchester train the following morning at 8.0am.
I shuffled into work, was greeted with sympathy because I still didn’t look well and, red-faced, said I felt somewhat better. I did…until the Manchester Evening News hit the office around mid-day.
There, on the back page, was a photograph of yours truly winning the 100 yards in style. Complete with glowing write-up from my friend Peter Keeling. Ernie McCormack’s voice boomed my name… He let me off with a caution and I never missed another press night.
A week later and we are at our local track for St Helens Police Sports and I’m down to run the 100 and 220. The 100 was a runaway for my old mate Sammy Clemson, but the 220 was a doddle for me. I may have started as back marker, but I scuttled through the heats and semi-final and nicked the final by a stride at the tape.
I strolled up later to collect first prize, a luxurious rose-coloured eiderdown, something my mother had had her eye on as she inspected the prizes. The burly guy handing it over gave me one of those looks, as recognition dawned. ‘Go straight home with that,’ he grinned.
This prize steward was the copper who’d stepped out of the alley on that tea-trolley night.
Joe Humpreys, Mirror rugby league writer, was at that meeting. A week later, the Mirror offered me a sports subbing job… I hit Withy Grove running.
#

Give ’em two 10x8s and they want a mile

2007-08-10T00:02:00.000+02:00

By Albert Cooper
What is it that makes sports editors think photographers are super-human?

When I joined the Sun as northern sports photographer in 1965, one of my first horse racing assignments was to photograph the start of the flat season, the Lincolnshire handicap, at Doncaster Racecourse.

I stood by the winning post and photographed the winners of the first two races. Then walked the mile back to the start to capture the required ‘start of the first flat classic’.

I was very pleased with they way things had gone, and rushed off to do my Sterling Moss driving bit, to get the film back to the Manchester office as quickly as possible in a 1100cc Ford Popular – as photographers did, in those days.

Back in the Oxford Road office, I took the results of my labour to the sports desk, and proudly laid my prints, one by one, in front of the sports editor. A good sharp picture of the winning horse passing the post, in the first race, and a similar one of the winner of the second.

Then my masterpiece, my photograph of the start with the horses as they leapt forward to take their place under the traditional back page headline, ‘They’re off!’

No compliments, just dismay on the face of the sports editor, as he said, ‘Templegate had the treble today. Where’s the photograph of the winner passing the post to win the third race?’

To which I replied: ‘I couldn't keep up with it! Carrying the camera kept slowing me down…’
#

Letters

2007-08-09T23:51:00.000+02:00

Richard Stott
Understandably, there have been quite a few email criticisms of the Daily Telegraph Richard Stott obit. ‘Mean-spirited’ and ‘snidey’ are two of the descriptions that come to mind. It was also inaccurate.
To describe Richard as Maxwell’s protégé was an insult. And Maxwell did NOT appoint Richard to the editorship of the Sunday People - Tony Miles did that, on January 14th, 1984.
Maxwell didn’t arrive at the Mirror until six months later and I remember a leader written by Richard during that time, signalling his opposition to the looming Maxwell takeover. Hardly the action of a man waiting to welcome his patron!
Fortunately, all the other obit writers recognised the real Richard Stott and the true nature of the stormy Stott-Maxwell relationship. But there are people out there who read only the Daily Telegraph and two of them are my friends. When they commented on that obit the day after its publication I guided them to the Gentleman Ranters version.
Playing a small part in putting the record straight made me feel just a little better. - Allan Davies
[See LINKS for other Stott obituaries]
+
Talking of Obits (Richard Stott, July 30), anybody recall that Cudlipp got Aneurin Bevan to write a 3,000 word obit on Churchill for the Daily Mirror?
Bevan died first.
The Mirror, with the most convoluted piece of reasoning you ever saw or heard about, printed the Churchill obit on Bevan’s demise as part of his own obit.
From memory the strap said something like ‘How great the man was is shown here in his appraisal of Churchill’s life, a man whose politics he hated but whose ability he admired.’ – John Edwards
+
Your stories of the Queen Mum (The Queen and I, Revel Barker, last issue) reminded me that my greatest failure - apart from booze - as a reporter was that I failed to stand up a story told me by Sir Kyffin Williams RA.
He claimed that the QM was the daughter of a Welsh servant by the Earl of Strathmore. Kyffin, who was a bit of a snob, knew more about aristocratic scandals than Dempster had dreamed about. When I wrote his – as yet unpublished - biography I checked some of the more alarming ones out and found they were true.
The only printed reference I have seen was in Kitty Kelley’s book, Royalty, but there were all sorts of interesting clues. We all know of the mystery that surrounds her birthplace and her christening and how the Earl was fined for not registering it. Less widely known was the nickname the Windsors gave her. It was ‘Cookie’ and she was incandescent when they gave the name to one of their dogs.
In one of his diaries James Lees Milne recalls a conversation he overheard between them when the Queen told the Queen Mother, ‘The difference between us is that I was born royal.’
When I interviewed Lees Milne I taxed him about it but he said he had no memory of writing it.
I was consoled and flattered that in the last days of his life he found time to mention me kindly in what proved to be his posthumous diary.
Revel claims to be one of the two pressmen to whom the QM spoke.
Inadvertently she spoke to many more. I remember a story when I was on the Mirror and the Royal Yacht was cruising round the Highlands. For some reason the ship to shore radio from Britannia was on the same wavelength as the trawler fleet. The trawlermen - of all people - complained at the bad language the QM used when talking on the line.
The Daily Record listened in to a man, I with admiration.
I do not seek to denigrate her. I have loved her since I covered a royal visit to Manchester in the very early fifties and noticed how as she walked along a line of waiting dignitaries she always gave a quick glance at the photographers to make sure they were all in position.
…Unlike the Duke of Edinburgh who has rightly been called the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus. I had the temerity to ask him at Oulton Park during a polo game what he had scored.
‘Who is fucking counting?’ he replied.
Tommy Lyons, whom heaven preserve, said ‘If the c**t is going to talk to you like that, don’t tell him that a dog has just pissed in his hat.’
Tommy rarely took photographs as a matter of principle; but I recall the Express had one of the luckless Prince with dog piss rolling down his face.
May I say how flattered I am to find myself in such august ranting company. - Ian Skidmore
#

Rabbit stew

2007-08-09T23:45:00.000+02:00

By Alun John
When Colonel Gaddafi broke off relations with the UK, all our diplomats had been recalled, together with their families. As with all expats, there was a lot of personal stuff to get home. One thing that couldn’t be brought home, however, was one family’s pet rabbit. It was going to be left behind to the mercies of the populace of the people’s republic of Libya.
‘We will rescue the rabbit,’ announced a confident Stewart Steven at the Mail on Sunday’s Tuesday conference.
The chosen rescuer was my old friend Keith Waldegrave. He was sent first to Paris to arrange a visa as we had no means of getting a Libyan visa in London, and then onward to Tripoli. He arrived safely, found the family and called with the news that the family members actually weren’t that bothered about the fate of the wretched rabbit after all. In fact, they were quite happy to leave it behind. This, of course, was not what Stewart wanted to hear – so I didn’t tell him.
Waldegrave was told to persuade the family and find a vet to provide the rabbit with the necessary papers and injections for travel. It also needed a flying case. Things went well and the rabbit was ready to fly by Friday.
Stewart was becoming more excited by the day. We had pictures of the rabbit in the garden of its Tripoli home and with the little girl that looked after it, and Waldegrave was booked on the Paris flight. Stewart was pacing the floor on Friday as take-off time neared. He went into deep conversation with John Butterworth on how best to display this latest exclusive gem.
Then I took a phone call and on a crackly line Waldegrave could be heard from Tripoli airport. Major problem. The airline was adamant the cage be placed in the hold. Keith was concerned that the rabbit, which had already been disturbed enough, would not survive the flight. I told him to insist the rabbit came into the cabin with him. No way, said the airline, it was cargo.
I told Keith to buy the rabbit a ticket and then it could fly on the seat next to him. Cellists did it all the time for their delicate instruments. A few moments pause and he reported the rabbit had successfully been bought a business class seat on the plane.
I also forgot to mention this slight hiccup to Stewart and he retreated to his office to busy himself with something else.
The flight went well. I don’t know what the rabbit was offered for lunch, but at least it didn’t actually become lunch. Keith carried it off in Paris, and then on another short hop (pardon me) to Gatwick, where the rabbit was placed in six weeks’ quarantine.
Stewart was delighted with the story. It made both the Front and the spread. We ran a competition to give the rabbit a new home and a new name and it made the paper once again. Following this, however, Stewart quite rightly lost interest – and threatened me with rabbit pie if I ever suggested a follow up on the anniversary of the flight.
The Mail on Sunday went from strength to strength and the circulation climbed. It was a great place to work, with exclusives thick on the ground and no lack of resources. However, I didn’t always make the best use of them.
Another week in charge, but this time things weren’t going well. Not much about and continuous pressure to produce. Stewart demanded to know on the Friday afternoon what I had in mind for page one and again, in a flash, I answered back with an instinctive idea. ‘The Princess of Wales will go into hospital to have her baby tonight’ I blurted out. Peals of laughter from the rest at the conference.
I came out of the meeting and called Lynne Hilton, a persistent girl photographer, and sent her to ‘doorstep’ St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, where the Princess was booked in. I finished the day, went home and waited. I got up in the morning and drove my usual route along the elevated section of the M40 in west London. Just as I got to the stretch where you can see the hospital, on cue came the news on the radio that the Princess had been safely delivered of a son in the night. ‘YES!’ I shouted and punched the air. Into the office and a warm glow at having made a good decision. In came the Back Bench and geared themselves up for a chance to be nice to the picture desk for a change. Everyone was positive, everything was fine.
Well, not everything.
I hadn’t actually spoken to Lynne yet. This was in the days well before mobile phones and I would have to wait to hear from her when she called in. She called. I answered. ‘What had it made?’ I asked. ‘What could you see? What did you get?’
‘Nothing,’ came the crushing reply. She had not seen the Princess arrive. She had been there all alone and simply could not be watching every possible entrance at once. Not her fault. Entirely mine. I should have backed my hunch fully and put more people on it. There would have been no problem putting six photographers there, but I just hadn’t backed my instinct. My mistake, pure and simple – and no excuses.
When the Back Bench heard this there was no holding them in their weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was the longest Saturday I have ever endured. Thereafter every time there was the slightest query about a picture it finished with: ‘If we haven’t missed this one as well!’ It was no consolation that all the other papers had missed it. That simply was not good enough.
Stewart, to his credit, later did offer a sympathetic word to me quietly in the corridor. I wouldn’t do that again though. If a story is worth covering, it’s worth covering properly.
#
After the Mail on Sunday Alun John became picture editor of The Independent, assistant editor of The European, and later managing director of Syndication International. He has been described by Private Eye as: ‘A fat, red faced Welshman ceaselessly gorging himself on an endless round of awards dinners and lunches.’
There’s more of his memories of Fleet Street in the Eighties at http://alunjohnascot.wordpress.com/

Mummy in cupboard, budgie in cage

2007-08-09T23:35:00.000+02:00

By Ian Skidmore
I hate sharing rooms. In PR, in the army, I shared a room with a chap who was called, not unfairly, ‘Filthy Sykes’. Admirable in many ways, he amassed a collection of single socks, all indescribably dirty, that would have had any decent incinerator retching with desire. They festooned every surface, door top, window frame and light fitting in the room and made cosy nests on most surfaces.
After the army, Sykes went to work for a newspaper in Canada and died, which is as near as life gets to an oxymoron.
My greatest regret, however, is the night I shared a room in the Westminster Hotel reporting on the ‘Mummy in the Cupboard Murders’ in Rhyl, with Terry Stringer.
I hasten to point out that Terry was the most fastidious of men, whose carefully matched and laundered socks were beyond reproach.
It was an unlucky room. I had it to myself before Stringer arrived and it was the scene of bitter humiliation.
From Rhyl I was sentenced to being Northern Night News Editor of the Mirror, an experience much worse than my earlier incarceration in an army prison.
The assembled reporters gave me a dinner and the management of the hotel were so pleased with us, they baked me a cake. Understandable - we had spent more behind the bar than they had taken in bookings, so far that season.
The cake was topped by a tasteful mummy, wrapped in embalming clothes in a marzipan coffin.
One day I hope to identify the guest who sold the story - ‘shocked hotel guests appalled by gruesome cake’ - to a Sunday paper.
During the dinner I sat next to a lady who had set up a slimming couch in one of the suites. When you lay face down on its moving panels, it gave erotic sensations of such intensity the late Tommy Cooper of the Daily Telegraph wanted to get engaged to it.
The lady asked if there was anything I regretted about leaving the road and I said, yes there was. I said everyone else came back from out of town jobs with tales of love making that would make your hair curl.
Me? Nowt.
She said well I will tell you what. After dinner go off to your bedroom and as soon as I can I will join you.
So I did. I bought a bottle of wine, I put on my silk dressing gown, scattered Old Spice about the room like May Blossom and waited.
She arrived.
I leapt into bed.
She followed.
Then she whispered in my ear. ‘You will have to hurry up. I am meeting (name deleted) at midnight.’
The last week on the road wore on. Terry Stringer was sent out to take over and we had to share rooms. Naturally I gave him most of the work and I spent my last days wandering about Rhyl hurling gold coins at stall holders, winning teddy bears, sticks of rock and on the last Sunday, a budgie.
In a plastic cage. .
I was sitting at a bar table in the Westminster chatting idly with the budgie when we were joined by Reg Jones of the Daily Mirror.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s an ostrich,’ I said with heavy irony.
‘No. The cage. It’s disgusting. The poor bird can hardly move. You want to get it a decent cage.’
‘Its Sunday, the pet shops are closed.’
‘Then find out the home address of one and get him to open his shop.’
So I did. It wasn’t easy. But I did.
‘Now are you satisfied,’ I said.
‘No’ he said. ‘It’s got nothing to play with. Budgies like little mirrors and see-saws and bells they can ring with their beaks’
‘It’s Sunday and I am not getting the poor bugger out again. He’ll be having his dinner.’
‘Use your initiative. Go to an amusement arcade and win them on one of those grab cranes.’
So I changed a fiver into low dimension coinage, went to the amusement arcade, found a grab crane that offered various novelties on a hillock of liquorice torpedoes, and set to work. Winning nothing but grabs full of liquorice torpedoes
I had amassed enough torpedoes to sink the German navy when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
I turned round and saw a man in a brown dust coat. At first I took him to be the Mayor of Blackpool. But it wasn’t a chain of office he had round his neck; it was a string of keys.
He questioned me abruptly and I explained I was trying to win some toys for my budgie.
Pushing me to one side, he opened a window in the machine and collected a variety of plastic toys, thrust them in my hand and said,
‘Now piss off and give these kids a chance.’
For the first time I noticed the queue of impatient children, clutching their pennies
That night in its palatial cage, surrounded by toys, the budgie passed a sleepless night.
I had to wake Stringer twice to complain that his snores were keeping my budgie awake and the next day I had to tell the desk to recall him. It was the only way the budgie could get a decent night’s sleep.
Two days after I got it home the budgie was eaten by the cat.
I think it was the cat. But, in those days, I had a very funny wife…
#
More Skidmore memories at:
http://skidmoresisland.blogspot.com/

The Spike

2007-08-09T23:30:00.000+02:00

nibs, snippets, odds and sods…

The power of the Press...?
The Times, November 28, 2006
Missionary position
Sir, Now that Mr Blair has expressed regret about Britain's involvement in the slave trade, is any nation going to apologise for eating our missionaries?
REVEL BARKER
Gozo, Malta GC
...
Now see:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=NBGJ100S5I4EJQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/08/16/wpapua116.xml
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Congratulations to young James Mellor who has been poached from the Sunday Telegraph newsdesk by Colin Myler to become news editor at the News of the World.
He follows in the footsteps of his father Phil Mellor, the legendary deskman at the Sunday Mirror – a man who’s been around so long some of his bylines are in Latin.
But has there been a mix-up at Wapping? Mellor senior has been telling chums: ‘Colin wanted me, but I’m too young!’ – Axegrinder, Press Gazette

When the Daily Express sent the dark presence of one Peter Baker - a powerful and fearsome name at the time – to Manchester office he was received in the news room by Geoff Brennand.
Who are you? – ‘I am Peter Baker, from London office.’
What are you doing here? – ‘I've come to organise things.’
Good. Then would you organise me a cup of tea? - GM
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William Randolph Hearst, always in search of sensational stories, once sent a telegram to a leading astronomer: ‘Is there life on Mars?’ it read. ‘Please cable 1000 words.’
The astronomer’s reply - ‘Nobody knows’ - repeated 500 times. - KA
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PERKY reporter Amy Jacobson, who worked for Chicago's NBC station WMAQ-TV and also does stories for Today, has been ‘let go’ by the windy city station after videotapes showed her in a bikini at the home of a woman whose mysterious disappearance she was covering. Tapes made by rival CBS station WBBM showed Jacobson at the backyard pool of Lisa Stebic, who vanished on April 30. She was with Stebic's estranged husband, Craig, whom police have questioned in the case. Neighbors told WBBM that Jacobson has visited the Stebic house ‘frequently’ since she began covering the story. - AB
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One of Cudlipp’s first jobs as a reporter on the Penarth News was to cover a performance of Handel’s Messiah by the local choir. Though he knew nothing about the Messiah he just managed to scrape together 2,000 learned words by diligent research in Grove’s Dictionary of Music. But his editor had asked for no fewer than 3,000 words. Cudlipp had an inspiration. Opening a new paragraph he wrote: ‘The names of the choir were…’ His editor was delighted. - KA
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Find more from The Spike, in the Archive

Memories of an Empire

2007-08-09T23:15:00.001+02:00

By John Izbicki
Shortly before I was sent to cover France for Kemsley Newspapers by Ian Fleming, then foreign editor of this powerful empire, one of its segments managed to lose a major libel action – all because the owner’s wife was sickened by the sight of a bull’s penis.
Lady Kemsley, with whom I was to become closely acquainted, was in the habit of visiting ‘her’ newspaper offices at 200 Grays Inn Road on Saturdays, when the Sundays – Sunday Times, Empire News and Sunday Graphic – were being busily put to bed. As she passed by the Graphic’s picture desk, her eyes pounced on that of a magnificent bull. ‘What is zees?’ she demanded, pointing at the bull’s superb protuberance.
‘It’s a prize bull, m’lady,’ the flunky at the desk informed her. ‘It won first prize at the Smithfield Show today, ma’am.’
‘And you intend zees to go into my newspepper? Jamais! Jamais!’ Lady K, who hailed from Mauritius and spoke with a thick French accent (her otherwise excellent French miraculously had distinct traces of an English accent) expressed her shock-horror at the prospect of such a picture finding its way into the pepper at all.
Her reaction was immediately transmitted to the editor, who was not to be ordered about by the proprietor’s silly wife. Instead of spiking the bull, he ordered it to be ‘slightly adjusted’. Out came the paintbrush and with a gentle stroke, the beast was, well, emasculated.
When on the following day the ‘prize bull’ made its appearance, the picture became a red rag to its owner. The farmer, who had been expecting thousands of pounds for his animal, sued – and won more than £40,000 – a fortune in the mid-Fifties.
Gomer Berry – the first Viscount Kemsley – who had built up his newspaper empire from scratch, was not a happy man but he loved his wife deeply and would not have a word said against her. Instead, he took her to Paris where he booked a suitable suite at the Ritz Hotel in the Place Vendôme – which is where I got to know her.
I shared an office with Stephen Coulter, who was the Sunday Times man in Paris while I looked after the rest of the Kemsley empire, ranging from the Sunday Graphic and the Sunday Empire News to the scores of provincials that served so many towns and cities throughout the UK. The office was immediately opposite the Ritz, which, to my misfortune, was found to be ‘handy’.
‘Ah, Izbicki, glad to find you in…’ one of my very first telephone calls greeted me. The gruff Welsh lilt continued: ‘Lord Kemsley here. Come over will you? You’re new so I’d better get to know you.’ He hung up, leaving me totally perplexed. I was young and at that time didn’t know whether to stand to attention (I had done my National Service just before starting in newspapers) or panic. Come over? Where’s ‘over’? I had no idea. Luckily, Steve came to the rescue and pointed out the Ritz. He thought the whole episode amusing and wished me luck.
Kemsley was an elderly highly imposing figure of a man. During my first brief interview, Edith Kemsley lounged on a sofa in the background and said nothing. My employer sat behind a small table, drinking tea. I was not invited to sit but received my instructions standing almost to attention.
‘Now listen,’ the Welsh lilt said. ‘Each morning when you get to the office, I want you to bring the day’s papers over here, addressed to Lady Kemsley, so she can read them. All right? That’s all the English daily papers, Telegraph, Times, Mail and so on – oh, even the Manchester Guardian. Right? Also some of the French papers – Figaro, Le Monde, France Soir etc. Then, before you leave the office in the evening I want you to telephone and ask Lady Kemsley if there’s anything she needs. Right? Good. Well, goodbye…’
I was somewhat dumbstruck but managed to think sufficiently to say: ‘Yes, Sir, thank you, Sir – but what if I happen to be away from the office?’
‘Away from the office?’ The Welsh lilt had taken on a kind of Lady Bracknell rasp.
‘Well, Sir, I am supposed to be reporting for the Group…’
‘Ah, yes, quite forgot. You’re quite right to mention it young man. Well, in that case, of course, you can’t phone from your office. But the papers. These you’ll have to make arrangements to have them delivered here to Lady Kemsley. Right? Good. Well, goodbye again.’ I was dismissed. But, just as I had reached the door, he called out: ‘Oh, Izbicki, one more thing. The bill for the papers. You’ll pay that and put it on your expenses. Right?’
Much later, Lady K became ill. During her travels, she had started to suffer from severe headaches. In Switzerland she was operated on and a nerve was severed. I never knew which particular nerve but it was obviously the wrong one, as the operation had left her face partially paralysed and still painful.
She used to call me over for a chat and a drink when I was not too busy and I found her a charming old woman. She would always offer me a dry martini (shaken, not stirred, as my boss’s character, James Bond, would have said). It was the only drink she knew. But she was clearly in pain and once asked me to find someone to help her.
‘Please, Monsieur Eesbeekee, please try to find this man for me,’ she said and handed me a slip of paper with a scribbled message: ‘Jean-Louis Bonsard – Magnetiseur’. It did not take me long to locate Monsieur Bonsard and to explain his task to him. He was only too delighted to come to the Ritz and help Her Ladyship regain her strength with his little magnet.
The visit turned into something akin to a Georges Feydeau farce. As Bonsard sat on Lady K’s bed, gently swinging his magnet from side to side across her face, her Austrian maid Riesa, stormed into the room. ‘M’lady, Professor Lévy has arrived for his appointment. He is in the next room.’
There was no way out for Monsieur Bonsard. But, being French and used to every possible embarrassment, he calmly put his magnet in his pocket, looked round the room and opened the door of an inbuilt wardrobe. He entered, waving Edith Kemsley a fond farewell, and closed the door. Professor Lévy, one of France’s most eminent neurologists, was able to enter and entertain Her Ladyship to his well known bedside manner for some 20 minutes, give her a piqûre, and depart. Monsieur Bonsard, sweating profusely, exited, stumbled back to Lady K’s bedside and, with a weak smile, resumed his magnetism.
I often felt sorry for Gomer, Lord Kemsley, for his wife (she was his second; his first, Mary Holmes, died in 1928) did not altogether treat him well or return his profound love. Often, when he entered the suite at the Ritz, she would pretend to be fast asleep and he would eventually leave the room on tiptoe as not to disturb her.
Once he was in London lunching with his great friend, Max Beaverbrook, owner of the Express group. Lord Beaverbrook told Gomer that he was anxious to get rid of his Bermuda villa. ‘I’ll buy it from you,’ said Gomer and took out his chequebook. ‘How much d’you want?’ I do not recall the price but one was rapidly agreed and after lunch both men drove to Max’s solicitor who drew up the relevant papers.
When Lord K returned to Paris and the Ritz, he gently awakened his wife. ‘Edith…Edith, my love,’ he said gently. ‘I have a little present for you.’ And he drew the Beaverbrook deeds from his pocket and handed them to her.
When they visited the villa for the first time, he immediately executed one vital change. He went to a carpenter and had a special board made. The name of the villa was altered to: Kemsley House.
Sad, for the many other Kemsley House signs around Britain were soon to be destroyed following the sale of Gomer’s empire to Roy Thomson in 1959.
But before that sale was completed and to show his gratitude for my help over the past three-plus years, Kemsley phoned me. ‘Ah, Izbicki. Come and join Lady Kemsley and me for lunch. Book us a table at Maxim’s – and ask them to give us one that’s private. You understand?’ Of course. Edith didn’t want people to see her looking the way she did. After all, she was born Edith de Plessis, one of the nobler families of Mauritius. She was a proud woman.
The lunch was a good one, even though everything I wanted to order I had to abandon. ‘Twenty-five minutes waiting for that dish,’ the waiter would whisper each time and I ended up with poulet à la crème, a course I could have eaten at any little bistro.
At the end of that enjoyable ‘thank you’ session, M’Lord turned to me and said: ‘You’ll take care of the bill, won’t you dear boy? If you’ve not got the cash, I’ll lend it to you. But I want this to go on your expenses…’
Ah, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
#
John Izbicki started in journalism at the Manchester Evening Chronicle as a graduate trainee on the day he was demobbed from National Service. He was sent to France for Kemsleys for three months but stayed three years. He later worked for the Daily Telegraph for 23 years -- three as deputy industrial correspondent, 17 as its education editor and three as head of its Paris office. He wrote a column on education for the Independent and still writes columns for Education Journal.

Pubs and Publishing

2007-08-09T23:06:00.000+02:00

By Edward Rawlinson
Many have sat back and thought how nice it would be to run their own pub, others have day-dreamed about going into publishing.
Without a thought of the pitfalls of running a pub or dreaming what it would be like to publish a paper I plunged into both at the same time: I went into a pub and established a small publishing business.
After moving from the editorial department into the publicity department of the Daily Express, Manchester, and becoming northern publicity manager I realised management certainly didn’t work like editorial. They had a different attitude to my previous way of life with the clock an important piece of office furniture and having a warm meal at home around 6.00pm was part of everyday life.
I should imagine it would have been a similar experience had I worked in some local council office.
After a second successful year in publicity, although suffering with a few scars to my back, I decided to take up an offer from the managing director of a brewery and be landlord of one of their better pubs. With a family to feed it needed some serious thought but the management job hadn't worked out and I wanted a move. My wife and three small children could still enjoy living in a similar tree-lined environment to the one they would have to leave.
I would then be able to plan what had always been my life long ambition, to go into print and publish a successful free motoring paper. In 1965 it would be a first as no publication was concentrating on people who were investing in a motor car for the first time.
There were the well established paid for and expensive glossy magazines but something was needed to advertise affordable wheels for the working man. A free paper distributed in petrol stations, car showrooms and of course my favourite distribution point, the pub.
I had already formulated my plans when at the Daily Express while coping with fashion shows, contents bills, grocer's exhibitions, advertising layouts and general promotions and a staff of eight. I said my farewell with a memorable send off, not by management, but from my old mates in editorial
When finally in the pub I soon realised that having to organise beer, wines and spirits, lunchtime catering, three full time staff with another fifteen part timers at the weekend and all the unseen extras I was dragging my feet.
The main plan of going into print was well behind schedule. After a year my free motoring weekly paper was launched and I remember the gathering with our printer, our advertising man - who was a retired motor trader and knew all the garage owners - the manager of the Odeon cinema who was to arrange circulation, and myself with four of the pub part time staff helping out in distribution. What a team.
Three thousand copies was our first print run and the distribution went well although I did find copies being used as wrapping paper in of all places the chip shop opposite my pub. The manager of the Odeon, our acting circulation manager, was the suspect as he had reneged on his promise to give out papers when the audience left his cinema. He had dropped off some copies into shops that were open after the cinema closed and it was an error of judgment he confessed later in a ‘after time’ editorial conference.
Our advertising manager (the ex-motor trader) was doing well through his contacts and I think it helped him by being a freemason. Business was booming, except the accounts and payment for advertising did not equal out.
The pub had a very good clientele, it was in a posh part of Rochdale and one of the customers was our bank manager. He sorted out the accounting side of the business by recruiting a retired employee from his bank and everything was then on a straight run. Money wasn’t rolling in but it started to trickle through the front door and we were in profit.
During the day my wife looked after running the catering side and we had a nanny for the three children, our daughter the youngest was eighteen months old. She had only just learned to go down stairs from our living quarters and with an open door being a big temptation she sneaked out and ran towards the busy main road.
When about to cross the road fortunately she was caught by a motorist when he saw her standing at the road side. Neither my wife nor the staff had any idea she was out until the driver returned with her to the pub. The culprit was a cleaner who had left the safety door wide open.
That was it. Following what could have been a fatal accident the pub was of no interest and with my wife becoming more worried about the safety of our children, despite having a nanny we decided to quit. One thing we learnt in those two years was you can’t run a pub and care for your children. Motoring Gazette was doing well and by quitting the pub we would have to look for some place in which to live so I decided to run the paper and work as a freelance photographer.
Ron Ashurst, an old friend, offered me work at the Daily Mirror and a customer who owned the Rochdale Advertiser came out of the blue and made a very good offer for Motoring Gazette. It had run for more than a year and as there was a house to buy his money would come in handy for me to ‘go private’ as they say in the pub trade. The money offered by the Daily Mirror to work for them as a freelance was far greater than I had expected. Of course I regret getting rid of Motoring Gazette and with many free motoring magazines about now, more glossy with much larger circulation figures, forty two years ago it was a first in its field .
Twenty years on I was then Picture Editor of the northern Daily Mirror and my son Peter had become a journalist. After three years working for a local paper he started a national freelance news agency we took over a successful print shop with further ideas of producing a free paper. The first edition was in its embryo stages when he asked me would I mind if he took a job offered to him on a motoring magazine. It was quite a shock as I was about to live again those earlier years and my ideas of becoming a mini press baron went out the door with the staff and printing machinery.
His move South worked out well and instead of collecting adverts from Bury, Rochdale, Bolton and Burnley and keeping northerners, now wearing their baseball caps back to front, informed about expensive wheels he is doing it worldwide.
Maybe I did the right thing by saying to hell with pubs and publishing.
I had only one memorable Front Page. Two girls who were regulars in the pub posed on the bonnet of my MG. One had dark hair and she was a beauty; the other, a blonde, had the most beautiful legs and I wasn't to know at the time she would go on to be a famous TV actress – landlady of her own pub in Coronation Street.

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Number 4

2007-08-03T04:09:00.000+02:00

In this mainly calendar-driven edition we fulfil our original brief by starting with a Rant, to welcome (or possibly not) the silly season.
Then, Paul Bannister explains, if English journalists want to be inventive they still have a long, long, way to go to catch up with what their former colleagues are doing in the US of A.
Elsewhere, we remember two birthdays: Joe Mullins on don’t-call-her-a-test-tube-baby Louise Brown and Revel Barker on the journalists’ all-time favourite, the Queen Mum.
Geoffrey Mather sits in front of an open fire while Ian Skidmore travels to Denmark and searches for sex, Paddy O’Gara pitches camp in Corporal Klinger’s beloved Toledo where he’s induced to talk about his experience with Princess Di and polo.
So, a bit of both sex and travel, this week.
Which is one way of describing the gist of the regular message imparted to Robert Maxwell by Mirror editor RICHARD STOTT, whose obit is our final posting in this mixed week…
We also list some (hopefully) interesting or useful LINKS, accessible via the Archive. If you have others you feel are worth including and sharing, please let us know.
Find the articles by scrolling down or clicking on the by-lines at top left.
Please bookmark the site among your Favourites, so you can go back to it, without losing the link.
Comments and letters (and contributions) please, to ranterseditor@gmail.com
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Bombed out of their minds

2007-08-03T04:04:00.000+02:00

By Revel Barker
It’s summer (on the calendar, if not at the Met Office) and as Parliament and the courts go into the long holidays newspapers perforce have to lower the definition of news, in order to fill all those potentially embarrassing gaps between the adverts.

One method, considered rather radical on some newspapers, is to ask reporters to think up and contribute ideas for stories.

The best that the Daily Mirror news desk could come up with recently was: ‘I know – let’s see how easy it would be for a terrorist to plant a bomb on a train.’

OK. Let’s get my declaration of interest out of the way from the start. For more than a quarter of a century the three English and two Scottish titles of the Mirror Group funded my lifestyle, either individually (at various times the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People) or collectively – those three plus the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail – and it would have been more lavish if it were not for the losses incurred by the Sporting Life.

Now for my declaration as a journalist, former NUJ convenor and sometime editorial panjandrum: if anybody had come to me and made that suggestion, I would have sent him – or had him sent - home, with instructions to stop at his GP’s surgery on the way.

If I’d heard that a news editor had taken up the idea, I would have made the same recommendation about him to his editor, his boss: that the deskman follows the reporter on the way out and for an immediate medical examination.

If you bend over backwards – and it would need to be beyond the horizontal – to look at the newspapermen’s point of view, you may accept that they were not actually going to plant a bomb, but merely a ‘device’ that could have been one.

If you listen to the paper’s defence for its action it goes like this: They were testing security in a time of heightened terrorist alert, therefore it was ‘a legitimate and justified journalistic exercise.’

Journalists, after all, have a God-given right to ensure that the people responsible for our security are doing their job efficiently.

And up to a point, Lord Copper, that last bit is true.

But you might think that, fully understanding that the security services are currently more than over-extended in uncovering and prosecuting real terrorists, to add to their burden with a time-wasting stunt was the height of irresponsibility. Not to say stupidity.

And if it works, what’s the message exactly?

It is exactly this: ‘Hey Ahmed – your idea of driving a jeep into the entrance of Glasgow Airport to blow it up and kill lots of people didn’t work… have you thought about just putting a bomb on a train, maybe one going through the Channel Tunnel?’

There are millions of separate passenger journeys on the trains every day. Most people carry some form of luggage. Last time I travelled by rail there was no personal or baggage checking – nor would it be practical for there to be any. Imagine the chaos it would cause.

So to get a device that’s not a bomb onto a train doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, to me. [This may now be a forgotten art, but district photographers used to put packages on trains every night – by the simple process of handing them to the guard. There were never any checks, although once when I sent an envelope containing prize-winning leeks and onions to the news desk, marked NEWS URGENT, the guard apparently complained about the smell.]

But suppose that the Mirror ‘device’ had been planted, and then discovered. The train would have been stopped, creating an unimaginable backlog of railway traffic extended across about half the county. Police would have cordoned off the rolling stock and closed adjoining roads, the army called in to secure the area, bomb disposal people summoned to make the device safe, the anti-terrorism and security services alerted, the Cabinet office would have been informed, people living in the area would have been evacuated from their homes...

This, clearly, is what the sometime world’s biggest and best daily newspaper nowadays thinks is campaigning journalism.

There must be an award for it.

But now here’s the good news.

Railway staff at Stonebridge Park depot (towards the end of the Bakerloo line in north west London, where Chunnel freight is loaded) spotted the journalists – dressed as railway workers in high-visibility yellow jackets and hard hats - carrying their fake ‘bomb’ and called British Transport Police before the guys had even planted it.

And they were immediately arrested under the Terrorism Act.

They were held for 12 hours while their homes were searched and their personal computer and photographic files examined. The Mirror described the police reaction – which many sensible people might think was the least that should have been done – as ‘heavy handed’.

The ‘midnight raids’ on their homes were ‘at best disproportionate and at worst intimidation of the most sinister kind.’

Nothing, then, disproportionate, intimidating or sinister – presumably – about pretending to plant a bomb on a train.

Referring to the arrests, Gary Jones, the paper’s (ahem) head of news, said: ‘You have to ask in whose interests the police are acting, and why.’

Perhaps I can help him, there. They were acting in my interests.

If anybody who isn’t a legitimate railway worker dresses up, trespasses on the railway, and pretends to be one, it is greatly in my interest for him to be arrested.

If he is planting a bomb I want him banged up for life, preferably in Guantanamo Bay with only a copy of the Koran, in Arabic, as reading matter.

If he is pretending to plant a bomb, I want him locked up for pretending to plant one and for wasting police time, and for intentionally trying to scare travelling members of the public.

A quarter-page photo of the pair of them, looking like a pair of paedophiles caught in the headlamps, was overprinted with the message that ‘The disquieting experience of these two Mirror journalists raises hugely worrying questions.’

It certainly does; but not the ones the paper was asking.

The Mirror, scratting around for some form of legitimate grouse, said the arrest of the two – at least one of whom, photographer Roger Allen, is an old Fleet Street hand (Photographer of the Year and News Photographer of the Year) and ought to have more bloody sense – ‘raises questions over whether the authorities can be trusted with new powers under Gordon Brown’s 56-day detention proposals’ [for suspected terrorists].

Well, I’d say that the answer to that one is a resounding ‘Yes – they can be trusted’, for the simple reason that they could have been locked up 28 days (and at some future date for up to 56 days), but were allowed to go home after only 12 hours. The system therefore clearly works, and it is excellent news that they appear to have proved that there is little fear of the jailing of innocent people.

Even if these two were not actually ‘innocent’.

Now for a reality check, lads.

Security systems need checking regularly, and that’s the job not of journalists looking for an easy ‘Oh what a clever boy am I’ story, but of the police and security services.

It happens, and it happens often. And it often happens that they find flaws in the system.

What happens then? Well (you’ll have to trust me on this one) they do not always report the security lapses – because it totally pisses off the people who are responsible for them.

The staff with the awesome responsibility of performing checks at airports, for example, are not entitled to pick people out of a queue who they think look suspicious nor, incredible though it may seem, even to ask an Arab woman to show her face in order to check it against the photo on her passport. They have to be seen to be working without any visible sign of ‘discrimination’, which is why old ladies are siphoned off to one side while bearded mullahs who walk as if they might have something stuck under their thoub or dishdasha are allowed to pass through.

When a policeman manages, in a test, to get a gun through the screening and the security staff are called to account for it they therefore react angrily. Instead of deeply screening, say, one passenger in ten, they make a point of examining one in five – with the effect that the queue to get into departures stretches thrice round the terminal and out onto the taxi rank.

The Mirror has had its wrist slapped. It should have had its head whacked. And its Ed, too.

But at least it has proved that, on this one occasion at least, the railway staff was fully alert, the police reaction was prompt, and the Terrorism Act with its planned 56-day detention of suspects is nothing that the fully innocent need to fear.

The Mirror has done us all a service – like it used to – even if it was actually trying to put the fear of God into its few remaining readers: the evidence of its pathetically silly stunt is reassuring.

Now it should stop bloody whining and start looking for a proper story. Maybe the paper should let its journalists out on the street more. That’s where the stories are – not in tormented and sadly inventive minds on high-rise floors in Canary Wharf.
#
Got something to Rant about?
Send to ranterseditor@gmail.com

You couldn’t make it up

2007-08-03T04:00:00.000+02:00

By Paul Bannister
So it’s goodbye, Weekly World News, or is it?

The American Media publication was supposed to fold both its online and print editions on August 3rd but, for reasons which insiders say make no sense, management has now announced an August 27th demise for the print edition, while the online version of The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper is supposed to continue in cyberspace.

It’s on a credible/incredible par with everything else about the paper and its intriguing headlines. I’d also like to believe that the core of the planet Mars is composed of molten chocolate, as it reported.

The Wacky was begun in 1979 to utilise the National Enquirer’s unwanted printing presses at Pompano Beach and quickly reached cult status and a profitable million copies a week.

Everything about the Wacky seemed to have a sub plot, though.

Mike Irish - who, John Garton reminds me, was supposed to run the Mirror’s Ulster edition until the IRA blew up the colour printing plant in Belfast - was one of its editors. Mike’s real estate agent wife had an even more explosive claim to fame. She helped the 9/11 hijackers find a place to live in Delray Beach while they took flying lessons.

Photo editor and anthrax attack victim Bob Stevens did work for the Wacky after surviving a near-miss gunshot when his pal, former Manchester Evening News artist Jack Grimshaw, was demonstrating handgun safety. Jack lost his thumb and forefinger in the incident, Bob survived, only to become the victim of a still-unsolved murder.

Another creative Wacky editor was former Daily Record reporter Joe West, who gave up his brief career as a Glasgow copper for the news biz after a nasty after-dark incident involving a bucket full of human excrement and his foot.

But the vagaries of the Wacky’s staff only added to its charms.

Selby’s finest, ex Mail man Joe Mullins, now living the life of a lotus eater in Florida, notes: ‘The demise of WWN has been covered pretty well by the mainstream over here. There have been lists of favourite splashes (mine was Famed Psychic's Head Explodes, which they made into a T-shirt) and an interview with Rafe Klinger, who created the crazy columnist Ed Anger. Countless people thought Ed was real and agreed with everything he wrote.

‘We had a neighbour whose daughter Cindy was an aspiring model. One day her mother bragged that Cindy had clinched a photo feature in a world famous magazine but was puzzled by the subject matter... she had to swim through a pool with a big fish in her mouth and break the surface with it clasped in her teeth. The mother thought the magazine was National Geographic and was rightly proud. The mystery was solved when WWN came out with something like Fish Girl Catches Them In Her Teeth. Angry mom wanted to sue but they had signed a release that covered everything.’

And, the Wacky did offer in-depth coverage.

They explained, for example, why Moses wandered the Sinai for 40 years. He’d lost the map. Rabbi Zalman Schmotkin-Fisher of the Moses Studies Institute, the paper reported, said a parchment sealed in an urn found near the wreckage of an Egyptian chariot contained a map etched by the fiery finger of God. It plainly showed the way to the Promised Land and the journey shouldn’t have taken much more than a month, even for the Red Sea Pedestrians.

The good rabbi theorised that Moses dropped the thing as he rushed for the parted waters and stubbornly refused to ask God for directions. That ticked off the Creator so much He wouldn’t let the Israelites in when they eventually did find the Promised Land.

In the columns of the Wacky, we learnt of the Calcutta man who, while digging a water well, hit a gravity well instead. ‘A gyrating maelstrom of pure energy’ began to pull everything in the area into the ‘great maw’ of the ‘whirling abyss.’

As the roots of the tree the well-digger was clinging to began to leave the earth for the abyss, a huge boulder got there first and fortuitously blocked the hole, saving us all.

The Wacky team were diligent in their coverage of events closer to home, too. They reported that a skinny green alien had landed his dusty spacecraft at Woody’s Car Wash in Lake Worth, Florida and ordered ‘The works.’

A housewife found stuck in her dining room ceiling hadn’t quite ascended to heaven. She was a victim, the Wacky told us, of being taken up in a Half-Rapture.

A cannibal gourmand interviewed by the magazine’s intrepid journos said he didn’t favour eating Mexicans or Chinese as they were ‘too spicy.’ He wasn’t thrilled about munching on Germans, either. Too greasy.

Another foodie, a Mexican taco vendor amazingly discovered by the staff, was using a miniature alien flying saucer as a sombrero.

Sometimes the Wacky raised questions of a deeper, philosophical nature: ‘700 lbs of Oprah Winfrey! Where did it all go?’

Other exclusives deserved the splash. The Wacky revealed that survivors of the Titanic were still bobbing around the Atlantic, having survived since 1912 on the ship’s beer supply. They also reported that a tiny mermaid had been found inside a tin of tuna, and interviewed researchers who said the deer and the antelope had never, ever, played together.

The paper covered the romance of Saddam Hussein and secret dwarf Osama Bin Laden, and their adoption of a shaved ape baby, Robert, which they proudly displayed as their human child, and the magazine handed out practical advice, too. You could learn how to tell if your guardian angel is gay; or discover that the latest technology is a rotary mobile phone.

Through it all, the Wacky editors never blinked. The stories, they insisted, were not fake. They’d interviewed the talking toaster and the chicken that could do calculus…

‘It all depends on how you define fake,’ they explained.
I just hope they’re faking the paper’s demise, too.
#

The Petri Dish Kid

2007-08-03T03:54:00.000+02:00

By Joe Mullins
Reporter kills world’s first test tube baby. That’s the headline that flashes across my mind whenever I read anything about Louise Brown. She was 29 last week (on July 25) and my heart went in to overdrive when I saw it noted in a Today In History paragraph.
It almost happened on my watch. I would have been able to blame photographer Mickey Brennan too. But most of the shit would have landed on me.
As a reporter on the National Enquirer – owned by Gene Pope, godson of Mafioso Frank Costello, the real Godfather – I would now be inside some Florida concrete column for making such a screw-up. He was an ogre…‘but our ogre’, we used to say fondly. Not a man to let down though.
I was pleased to be given the job of looking after Louise and her parents, Lesley and John Brown, when the family was invited to Florida a few months after Louise’s birth. In April of that year (1978), I’d been part of an Enquirer team sent to Manchester to find the expectant mother, along with Paul Bannister and an American reporter called Eric Mishara. Paul and I were former Daily Mail men in the city with lots of friends and contacts there. Our team leaders, Bill Dick and Brian Hitchen, gave us instructions I’ve never forgotten. ‘Hit the bars, throw some money around, get your old mates drunk, pick up the scent.’
The scent? After a week or two of buying booze for half of Manchester we could barely pick up our backsides from the barstools.
It became clear that we were way behind. The Daily Mail team, including some of the guys drinking our beer, just about had it nailed.
The Enquirer cut its losses and started to negotiate for US rights if the Mail cracked it. I was pulled out and sent on to Stockholm to pester The Fonz, Henry Winkler, and his bride Stacey, on their honeymoon. (That’s another story.)
Back in Florida in July, I read the Mail’s scoop on Louise’s birth. Gene Pope bought the story from Associated and according to newsroom gossip at the time paid out all the Mail had spent and more.
As I’d almost given my liver for the story already, I thought it was only justice a few months later when my editor (former Mirror man Bernard Scott) told me the Browns were heading to Enquirer headquarters in Lantana and I’d be looking after them.
What could be easier? It was a top secret job, of course. Baby Louise’s first time on US soil. But the Mail exclusive had told of the joyous couple whose miracle baby had made their dreams come true. They were the salt of the earth.
‘I’m happy to tell you that anything you need will be here for you,’ I told John and Lesley as they came off the plane with little Louise at Miami airport. ‘After all, you’re the guests of America’s biggest newspaper, the National Enquirer.’
‘It’s crap,’ said Lesley. ‘I’ve read it. It’s a rag.’
John rolled his eyes. ‘No problem, Lesley,’ I said. ‘You’re here now. Welcome to sunny Florida.’
‘I don’t know how you can live here,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s too hot. It’s so sweaty.’
‘And this is Louise,’ I pressed on, smiling at the baby and gently tickling her.
‘Waah,’ said Louise. ‘Waah,’ screwing up her face.
‘Ooh, she doesn’t like YOU,’ said Lesley.
I put it all down to jet lag and drove the family 120 miles north to the suite I’d booked at a Sheraton. We were on Hutchinson Island with the warm Atlantic lapping beside us. The whoosh and hiss of the waves seemed so soothing. ‘I hope that bloody noise isn’t going to be on all night,’ said Lesley.
This could be a long ten days after all, I decided.
Because it was a big exclusive job, the Enquirer photo editor had decided to fly in Michael Brennan from New York. That was great by me. Mickey and I were old friends since our days on IPC’s original Sun.
He came down after I’d spent a day or two getting the Browns settled.
Now anybody who knows Mr Brennan soon understands that when it comes to taking pictures he is a very serious man. The face of a Botticelli cherub, someone once said, and the temper of a cobra.
‘Nobody said anything about snaps,’ said Lesley. ‘I hope he’s not going to be clicking away all day.’
Snaps indeed! Mr. Brennan is a former Photographer of the Year. His clicking away when Donald Campbell died on Coniston Water won plaudits worldwide.
Ever the peacemaker, I explained that he wanted to make a nice album for them to record their first visit to the United States. ‘Nobody said anything about snaps,’ she repeated. John Brown looked nervously to the heavens. Brennan glowered.
Lesley also made it clear that while she didn’t like being photographed, she positively hated the ‘test-tube baby’ term. After all it wasn’t actually a test tube but a Petri dish where Louise had her start. It was never spelled out but it seemed that Lesley was uncomfortable with the misconception (how appropriate) that a test tube had been stuck up her.
That’s a subbing problem, I decided. Not that the Enquirer, being American, had actual subs. In the States, subs are fat, greasy, overstuffed things you see in the sandwich shop. While in Britain, they’re…well, where was I?
Later in the bar, while the Browns had an afternoon sleep, Mickey and I discussed their bloody minded lack of cooperation. ‘Fuck me,’ he said, ‘you mean the greatest medical minds of the century combined to let these two reproduce?’
I decided that we had to give the Browns such a good time they could not fail to respond.
An illegal bonfire on the beach and a champagne barbecue. ‘Too smoky,’ said Lesley. ‘All this sand gets between my toes.’
A special dash to get rum raisin ice cream. ‘Nothing special,’ decided Lesley. ‘It’s just like ice cream with rum and raisins.’
Editor Scott’s pretty assistant Laura Doss babysat Louise each night while Mickey and I pushed the boat out for John and Lesley in the Sheraton bar.
‘He’s got another hangover,’ Lesley told me. ‘And it’s all your fault.’
But they gradually came round. I was always good with babies. My cheeks still flap in a high wind from being stretched by doing that thing where you put your finger in your mouth and make a pop as you pull it out. I’d stood behind photographers on every paper I’d worked for, getting kids to smile. I was stung by Lesley’s charge that Louise had taken a dislike to me. Of course I could win her over.
My popping eventually did the trick. And with Louise gurgling, even Lesley and John had to smile for Mickey’s camera. And of course there’s nobody better than him at doing his job.
From the beach, we headed up to Disneyworld for the standard Mickey Mouse and Goofy pictures…and I got one of those reporting chills.
Lesley and John wanted to go on the terrifying ride, Space Mountain, which meant queuing for an hour or more. I looked after Louise, cradling her on my knee.
‘Hey Joe, didn’t know you had a young ’un.’ I looked up to see Jim Leggatt, a freelance snapper, camera round his neck. Now Jimmy regularly worked for the Enquirer’s then major rival, the Star. He sat down next to me and I told him I was just looking after a friend’s baby while she was on the ride.
He had an exclusive on the world’s first test tube baby on a plate and didn’t realize it. When I told him the story a few months later, Jim said, ‘Dinna worry, boy. I wouldn’t have screwed you. We’re pals.’ You would have Jim…you would. And I, you. That’s our business.
But that scare paled alongside my panic the next day. As we idled our way back to Miami to wave the Browns goodbye, I took them shopping for souvenirs in one of the flashy malls. A few gifts. Cheap jeans. Florida T-shirts. A western poster in which they posed as cowgirl, cowboy - and cow baby, I guess.
And then an expensive lunch. I noticed as we ate and drank that Lesley kept Louise quiet by breaking bread from the rolls on the table, dipping it in soup and shoving it into her mouth.
As John tucked into a series of fancy shrimp cocktails, Louise got quieter and quieter. When I looked more closely at her, she was turning blue.
‘Oh shit,’ I yelled. ‘Louise is choking.’ The world’s first test tube baby, first of what is now more than one million, born to world acclaim after the ground-breaking work of doctors Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, was going bluer by the second, eyes rolling up into her precious skull. She was about to snuff it on my watch.
What’s more, Mr Pope would say it was all my fault. If the National Enquirer killed the world’s first test tube baby, it would be the lead news item coast to coast.
John and Lesley just sat, mouths agape. I ran round the table and tried to dig out a mass of food with my fingers. I couldn’t get it all. I spun her round and slapped on her back. It wasn’t working. Slap. Slap. Again and again. A sloppy mess of bread finally plopped out. Louise let out a mighty yell.
John Brown looked at me accusingly. ‘Fair put I off my prawns,’ he said in his Bristol accent.
I waved goodbye to John and Lesley at Miami departures and made a final pop for Louise. She gurgled happily.
Next year, when she’s 30, I’ll give This Day In History a miss. The flashbacks are getting too traumatic.
#
Joe Mullins was on the Daily Herald, The Sun (IPC) and the Daily Mail before heading to Florida, where he worked on the National Enquirer, Globe and the National Examiner. He’s now a freelance in Florida.

Life’s burning ambitions

2007-08-03T03:51:00.000+02:00

By Geoffrey Mather
An investigation is being carried out to establish how a fire started at a factory in east Lancashire. Fire crews from Hyndburn were called to tackle the blaze at the James Dewhurst mill in Altham, Accrington, shortly after noon. – BBC

Once upon a time, when the world was young, I was 16, working for an evening newspaper, and life was always Spring. So there I was, alone in the reporters’ room apart from another junior reporter even younger than me. The seniors had all gone out. We were in total charge.

The phone rang. A large mill was on fire a couple of miles away. I ordered my junior (!) into action. It was our great moment. Telling no-one, we hurried to the scene. Flames were pouring from the roof of the building in spectacular fashion. Were there people inside? The police did not seem to know. I sent my junior to the hospital to inquire about casualties and wait there. I stood my ground.

I was in heaven. Fire crews, tangled hoses, witnesses - it was all mine. This was better than Dante’s Inferno. My inferno. I made the most of it. There was a phone nearby and I poured my material into it.

After an hour a tram was trundling past and it decanted a small person smoking a pipe. He ambled slowly towards the diminishing flames and stood bemused. The opposition had arrived. It was a senior reporter from the rival paper. I had finished. He was just starting. I headed back to the office and grabbed a paper. There I was - my very first Page One lead. And I had not even told the chief reporter!

Such minor achievements are the whole of life at the time. In retrospect, worth no more than a passing smile.

I was to move on, and up. As a district reporter I came across a journalist named Joe Higgin. He rode a bicycle, lived alone, wore a frocked coat, and invariably had a hole in a sock. Someone who knocked on his door one night, when it was dark, sold him a bunch of geraniums culled from Joe’s own garden. He had enormous intelligence, but was wayward in his conclusions. He would not go to a lecture in town by one of the foremost authorities on Shakespeare because, he said, Shakespeare was dead. When I covered a cat being hauled from a railway parapet by a fireman - an event that had halted the town traffic - and it got a splendid show in the paper, he did nothing about it because - he said - he had three cats and nobody would care about them except him.

He was often to be seen standing by the town centre urinal, having argued - rightly - that anyone he wanted to see would end up there.

A colleague played Chopin whenever he saw a piano and we were forever looking for him when he was supposed to be covering some event or other. When he travelled to a different town for what we considered a big trial, his report was all written on toilet paper culled from a train lavatory on the way back. Another wore black leggings and lived on peanut butter. Yet another, on a works outing, saw ballet for the first time and within 30 seconds had ruined the show by uncontrollable and loud laughter at the sight of a male dancer in tights leaping about for what he considered to be no good reason.

When I moved on to national newspapers I did not, again, see such eccentricity. But I saw eccentricity of a different kind that would have made Joe Higgin and the ace reporter who took a tram look totally normal.

And so we progress through life, always being amazed by things that apparently sane men believe to be natural.

Here endeth that lesson. And as I advance in age, they are still coming...
#
More of Geoffrey Mather’s perspective on dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish and the gregarious can be found at www.northtrek.co.uk

Danish Blue

2007-08-03T03:47:00.000+02:00

By Ian Skidmore
I am a connoisseur of bad temper. My father was in a perpetual fury, which I put down to being in the trenches at the age of fifteen in the First World War. After the war he joined the police because, I firmly believe, of the opportunities it offered for hitting people.

In a siege in Manchester in the twenties he was shot in the head by an IRA man who later ran a Dublin dog track. In the family it was widely believed he was shot by his own inspector, worn out by my father’s incalcitrance.

Certainly, the inspector had been heard to shout: ‘Take that bloody gun off Skidmore before he kills us all.’

Parades disgusted him. Every year Manchester Police had a parade in a Fallowfield park.

The one year they allowed my father to take part he ruined the band’s first concert by shouting: ‘D’ye ken the Refrain from Smoking?’

Probably ill temper swims in our genes. Last year I discovered a cousin, the daughter of a brother of my grandfather, who none of the family knew about. We are not a close family. Except in disputes…

Every Hogmanay we went back to Edinburgh for a family party.

Every year my father would light a cigar to taunt my socialist uncle Tommy, who invented Scottish nationalism long before it became fashionable and was more Scottish than Harry Lauder. Probably because he was born in Newton le Willows, about which my father reminded him every year.

The youngest brother, who tried to pacify him, was himself turned into a pillar of fury when my father told him: ‘I didna see you at Paschendale.’

There was always a fight on the early evening. The women placidly moved their chairs to the walls of the room where they sat, nibbling shortcake and gossiping, while the six brothers rolled fighting at their feet. Fighting that is until 11.55 pm when my Auntie Jeannie would say: ‘D’ye no ken the time?’

The brothers would get up, dust themselves down. And we would all join hands and sing Auld Lang Syne.

My step father in law, another Scot, improbably called The Menzies of Pitfoggle, was a GP in the Fens. A luckless journalist who went to him for advice on a sexual problem was chased down the drive of the surgery by Pitfoggle, hurling obscenities and, for all I know, pillboxes and bottles.

Yet, compared with Maurice Thompson, a photographer I worked with on the Yorkshire Evening News in Doncaster, they were, every one of them, tiny beams of sunshine.

The first time we worked together I was immediately rebuked for getting into his Morris Minor with mud on my shoes. Nervously I lit a cigarette and he launched another tirade about ash disposal.

How we ever became friends I do not know, but it came as a shock to discover he liked me.

Certainly it was nothing he said.

So it was a surprise when years later he rang me and asked whether I fancied a day trip to Copenhagen.

I am not a traveller. When we lived on the Isle of Anglesey my wife claimed I needed Quells before I would cross the Menai Strait and it is quite true I suggested a holiday once in Beaumaris, a pretty town about five miles from our home in Llanfairpwllgwyngoghchewernynllantisilogogogch. I never did learn how to spell it, much less pronounce it. And one of the reasons I was loath to leave it was the dread of getting lost and being unable to tell a taxi driver where I wanted to go.

But in my own defence, I did offer to break the journey at Menai Bridge and the draught bass in the Bull in Beaumaris was ale that, to quote Beaumont and Fletcher ‘would make a cat speak.’ I digress.

Maurice had been hired to take photographs of an unusual PR stunt. British Ropes in Doncaster had been commissioned to make the huge ‘ropes’ from which a bridge was to be suspended over the Strait of Jutland. As a gesture of thanks, the workers who made the ropes were invited over for a day to see them, literally in post.

This happened in those earlier, happy days, before they invented holidays abroad. When holidays in Scarborough or Whitby were permissible but Blackpool or Morecambe were considered a bit on the showy side. No-one who valued his place in Yorkshire society would go to Bournemouth.

Denmark? It was Star Trek Country and everyone was very excited.

A busy day ended with a banquet in the Chinese Pagoda in the Tivoli Gardens. Maurice and I got there early in case there was a bar. There wasn’t, but we watched with interest as chefs patterned complicated devices in lump fish roe over the salads that stood by every plate. Clearly, they hoped the roe would be mistaken for caviar. It wasn’t.

The first diner to arrive called his mate. ‘Bloody hell, Harry. There’s caterpillar shit all over this lettuce.’

One by one, the British Ropers scraped rigorously at their leaves.

The man who had discovered this evidence of the filthy habits of foreigners also singled me out. ‘Tha’rt bloody journalist, ist tha?’

I admitted I was. ‘Nowt fresh to you then, this Abroad?’

Nowt, I lied.

‘Sithee,’ he said, leaning over. ‘Thi ’ave a lot of that sex stuff abroad, doan’t thi?’

Thi do, I said

‘Weer does it go on, then?’

I had no idea. I said near the railway station because that’s where it went on when I was doing national service in Germany, my only other experience of Abroad.

‘A’ll tell thee what,’ he said, ‘There’s three hours before t’plane. We’ll ‘ave a bit of a dander, just thee and me. Just to see, like.’ So we did.

The sex shops were a revelation to both of us. He was particularly exercised by loops of stiff hair, designed for putting on penis ends, to stimulate partners. ‘Dear, dear,’ he said, profoundly shocked, because he was at heart a God-fearing, respectable man.

He staggered off into the crowds. He was also a very tall man. I could keep track of him as he stumbled, horrified by the depravity and anxious to return to the safety of his world of darts and dog walking. A piece of totty detached herself from a wall and surged towards him like a determined trout.

I caught up in time to hear her proposition him and I saw the back of his neck deepen to vermillion.

‘D’yer mind,” he said. ‘It’s the wife’s birthday tomorrow.’
#
Ian Skidmore, journalist, author, sometime freelance and northern night news editor of the Daily Mirror, cultivates a blog patch in his garden at http://www.skidmoresisland.blogspot.com/

The Blade, and Di

2007-08-03T03:44:00.000+02:00

By Patrick O’Gara
My first evening in Toledo, Ohio, as a newly arrived Blade executive, was interesting. It was November 1989, dark, cold and wet.
The paper had found, at my asking, an apartment within walking distance of the office. As is often the case with old-established newspapers in the States, it was in the heart of Downtown.
My flat was in one of a smart row of terraced houses, with electric security gates for the garages, and gentrified to the nines, but the surrounding area was well down on its luck.
Still, it was all new to me, and after unpacking I set out to explore. On the corner of the next block, 40 yards from my door, was a bar. A small neon sign proclaimed The Dooville Lounge. I like bars. I went in.
In the dim light about twenty or so customers were scattered, some at the counter, others at tables. They were not yuppies. A loud jukebox played Welcom (sic) To The Jungle, a popular dirge of the day, whose significance escaped me at that point. Nobody paid me any obvious heed.
The barmaid was imposing and sturdily built, not unlike a Steelers linebacker, and clearly not to be fucked with. I asked for a gin and tonic.
‘You Briddish?’ she asked sternly.
Yes, no denying it.
‘You know Lady Di?’ she followed up. Well, not really, but I had met her once, I ventured modestly.
‘You met Lady Di! Where?’ barked the barmaid, who I would later know as Joyce.
I could not tell a lie. ‘At a polo match, as a matter of fact,’ I said, by now aware that the conversation was taking a surreal turn.
And it was true. While I worked for Hello! magazine, my royalty-besotted Spanish bosses had sponsored such a contest at Windsor Great Park, and Charles had played. Selected employees were afterwards introduced to the pair, who appeared at that time to be on cordial, even loving, terms.
‘Holy cow! Lissen,’ Joyce shouted to the patrons. ‘This Briddish guy met Lady Di at a fuckin’ polo game!’ Grinning muggers and hookers surged around, slapping my back, shaking my hand and re-filling my glass.
I now had instant chums in Toledo and bought no more drinks that night.
Amid the tumult, an alcoholically challenged patron misheard Joyce, and for a few delirious seconds was under the impression that England’s presumptive Queen and I had met at a poker game.
So, thanks to the People’s Princess my standing in T-Town where Jeeps are built, Art Tatum was born, and the transvestite guy in Mash was so keen to get home to, was assured from the get-go…
Now all I had to do was put out a newspaper every day, Sundays included, for the next fifteen years.
Piece of piss.
#

The Queen and I

2007-08-03T03:38:00.000+02:00

By Revel Barker
Tomorrow (August 4) would have been the Queen Mum’s birthday. World War I broke out on her 14th birthday. It’s the sort of information that only those closest to her are aware of, I suppose.

I was in France when she died and learnt about it from the morning paper, which referred to her on the Front as ‘la Queen Mum.’

Not la reine mere, or even la reine maman. Such was her popularity, even among the Anglophobe Froggies, that she was the Queen Mum, world-wide.

Long – oh, long - before Diana, she was everybody’s favourite royal.

We had a chat, once. Well, not much of a tête-à-tête, but we conversed. She was about to board a Royal Flight and the photographers stood respectfully at the foot of the aircraft steps waiting for her to start posing or waving. She beamed, and the shutters clicked. Then her face fell as she looked along the rank of artists-in-light and asked: ‘Where is Mr Wallace?’

Tony Wallace, the Daily Mail’s resident photographer at London Airport, was absent from the usual line-up.

In those days photographers knew their place. And it certainly did not include talking to their betters. They shuffled their feet a bit and re-checked the settings on their lenses, and shook their flash-battery packs, but none of them spoke. It fell to me, the token reporter in the company, the caption writer, to break the embarrassing silence.

‘He’s off sick, today, Ma’am,’ I said.

‘Oh dear. I am sorry to hear that. Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘No, Ma’am. I believe it’s just a cold.’

‘Then please,’ she asked me, ‘give him my best wishes for a speedy recovery.’

‘Certainly, Ma’am. I will do that.’

I thought our little banter was getting along swimmingly. I was tempted to tell her that I had recently been at Gibside, in County Durham, where she had spent a significant part of her childhood, and maybe to tell her that the colliery railway wagons still bore the name of her family, which had owned the Bowes Colliery.

She might be pleased to know that, I thought. Then I thought better of it. Maybe next time; it could keep.

After we had exchanged our waves, I hastened back to the press room in Terminal Two and performed my loyal duty, as I had promised my sovereign’s mother – in whose husband’s coronation, I could have told her if the conversation had really got going or the subject had come up, my father had been proud to march.

The message had its desired effect. Tony Wallace made an exceptionally speedy recovery. But first he asked me to phone the Mail picture desk and pretend I didn’t know his home number, and ask them to pass the message from the Queen Mum on to him.

Of course I was delighted to do that.

‘The Queen Mum, you say… She asked after Tony Wallace?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘As you probably know, she thinks the world of him. She was really upset to find he wasn’t there waiting for her this morning. She told me so, herself.’

‘The Queen Mum…’ said the Picture Editor. ‘Asking after Wallace. That is wonderful. Thanks awfully.’

But, as conversations go, it was not awfully significant, you no doubt reckon.

No? Oh really.

Listen. You will learn something.

When Tony Wallace returned to harness, miraculously cured, he bought me a drink and asked: ‘Do you know the last time the Queen Mum actually spoke to a reporter?’

Of course, I didn’t.

‘In 1923.’

1923… And then me.

‘She’d made a bit of a faux pas, you see,’ said Tony, ‘and vowed never to speak to a reporter again, about anything, for the rest of her life. She wasn’t even Queen then, of course, just Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon – and a descendant, as you know, of the Thane of Glamis.’

Thane of Glamis… I said yes I knew, but I’d forgotten.

‘She was talking to a reporter during a photo-session when she got engaged to the – then – Duke of York and she referred to him, just a slip of the tongue, I’m sure, as Bertie. Yes! Our future King George VI (although of course nobody knew that at the time)… Bertie! He was furious about what he considered to be lese-majesty – and she was upset that the reporter had dropped her in it, and not amended her quote more formally before publication.

‘So she spoke quite frequently to members of the public, but never to a reporter, after that.

‘All we’ve ever had out of her, since that day, was that smile. Her special smile…

‘But she spoke to you,’ said Tony. ‘…About me!’

So everything we have learnt about her, about her feelings, and even her quotes, we have got from third parties.

Hating her brother-in-law, briefly King Edward VIII, for not sticking to the job he was born into and marrying ‘that woman’, Wallis Simpson, and landing her sensitive, stammering husband with the crown he had never expected to wear, nor been prepared for.

As the last Empress of India (and indeed last empress of anywhere) she apparently believed that Mountbatten gave up India too early and that Britain de-colonised everywhere before the Commonwealth nations were able to cope.

Ringing below stairs and telling her staff: ‘When one of you old queens has a moment, this old queen would like a gin and tonic.’

Of Jimmy Carter: ‘That man was the only person, following the death of my beloved late husband, to have the effrontery to kiss me on the mouth.’

But none of that came from a reporter.

I know she spoke once to Hugh Cudlipp (but he doesn’t count as a reporter), at a Garden Party. She told him she was going to Balmoral that night and – sod security – said that after leaving Kings Cross the Royal Train always travelled only as far as Doncaster where it stayed overnight in the sidings. Whether this was so she could have a more comfortable night’s sleep, or so she could arrive at her destination in daylight for photos, was never satisfactorily established by Cudlipp, to my mind.

Anyway, he’d had a brainwave and sent Jimmy Wallace, the Mirror’s northern circulation boss, to Donny with a set of the first editions. Jimmy found the Royal Train and reached up to hammer on the door. It was opened by a (presumably surprised) lady-in-waiting, in a nightie.

Jimmy handed over the bundle of papers and told her they were for Her Majesty, with Mr Cudlipp’s compliments. She told him to wait.

When she returned she said: ‘Her Majesty has asked me to thank you, and to ask you to pass on her gratitude to Mr Cudlipp for his thoughtfulness. But she has also asked me to ask you – do you not have a copy of the Sporting Life?’

I wouldn’t have made a mistake like that.

But then, you see, our relationship was rather different.
#
Revel Barker’s own blog of people and places can be found at http://revelbarker.blogspot.com/

Letters to the editor

2007-08-03T03:23:00.000+02:00

ranterseditor@gmail.com

The Telegraph wavered on Stotty (Richard Stott, obit, this week). But only a little bit. Most of them - Revel's in particular - got Richard spot on. That was the man I knew, the one I was reading about.
Obits on journalists are extremely difficult.
How many times have you to been called after a death or when a leaving ceremony is close and asked for anecdotes on one of your best friends and can think of none? Plenty of times I'll bet. Or the ones that you do come up with are very weak and not entertaining.
A little creep from our business wrote a poisonous obit of one of our colleagues fairly recently.
He had obviously never met the guy. Knew everything tenth hand and, it seemed to many, went to his keyboard only for the money.
Journalists' obits are usually the most peppered with inaccuracies, resurrect false accounts of heroisim and genius and generally create a fantasy character out of a pretty ordinary bloke.
No names - but quite recently one of ours just well enough known to have obits in the nationals had an entirely new personality created for himself.
He was quite definitely turned into the greatest journalist of the twentieth century. The Mail, as good as said this.
If his name hadn't appeared in one or two of the pieces I personally would only just have recognised the guy (a close friend) they were writing about. Brian Hitchen and I agreed on this at the time.
That might be the definitive test of a good obit.
Would you know the person who had died if his name didn't appear anywhere and all you had was the text?
Beware putting too much faith in obits of our kind. Or anybody's for that matter.
My father kept a diary for 30 years.
When he died the obit in the West Wales Guardian said he had kept a dairy for 30 years. - John Edwards
+
You've really got something started here. Great stuff.
I worked on the Daily Mail in Scotland in the sixties and ended up on the Enquirer in Florida by way of Bermuda, Canada, Hong Kong etc.
We're now organizing the wake for the Weekly World News. It will be in the Banshee Room of Brogues Irish Pub in Lake Worth, Florida, Sunday September 2 at 3 pm. There will be food, drink, music and much tall tale telling. All hacks and partners welcome...
Looking forward to the next edition of Gentlemen Ranters... - Jim McCandlish
+
It was all (Richard Stott obit, this week) about real tabloid journalism, not bullshit about Big Brother tossers and celebrities that no-one has ever heard of.
And we had a lot of fun.
I think we all miss it. – Geoff Sutton
+
Revel Barker (Gentlemen, that reminds me, last week) brought to mind Francis Chichester sailing up the Thames to Greenwich in 1967. I happened to be spending some time in Wren's edifice, doing a Naval Staff Course before heading out to Singapore to take over 2 SBS from Paddy Ashdown, (but that's another story).
Chichester, in Gypsy Moth was on the last leg of his journey and the buzz was that he was up for a knighthood to recognise his attempt to sail around the globe single handed and non stop. (A noteworthy attempt, but no cigar). It further transpired that the deed was to be performed at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. I had assumed that being an undersized Royal Marine officer who looked like a sack of potatoes in uniform, I would be assigned to supervision of car parking, at a suitable distance.
To my discomfort, I discovered, at the last minute, that I was responsible for the gentlemen (and ladies) of the press. (Were they mad?)
The basic plan was that Chichester would dock alongside the College and would be escorted inside to be royally dubbed by HM, in private. The malcontents from the street of dreams were displeased by these arrangements which they voiced in their usual fashion. What they didn't know was that the plan had been changed, which I neglected to tell them until the old boy was taken to a podium outside for a public Knighting. In fairness, I did ensure that they all had front row seats. This was my first experience with those that wielded the mighty pen but certainly not my last. - Douggie Brand
+
Brendan Monks [Letters, last week] is correct re location, photographer and date. But wrong about the image; fairly typical of a picture editor, if I may say so, to mistake repetition for truth and reality.
This search came about because, years ago, on a subbing course, in one of our textbooks were the cropped and un-cropped versions side-by-side, to show how easy it is to make a picture tell a false story.
More detective work required. - John Blauth
+
Reading Paddy O'Gara's memory [In God’s Name, last week] about a Mirror chaplain, I recalled one of my favourite O'Gara stories. Talk in the Stab one day had turned to how aggressive smudger Peter ‘Pedro’ Stone could be, when roused. Paddy disagreed, saying that he always got on well with him. ‘But then,’ he said, ‘I once took a thorn out of his paw...’
By the way, I'm constantly amazed by Ranters’ memories of all those golden years. Apart from isolated moments, my mind’s a blur. It's like they said about the Sixties: If you remember them, you weren't there... - John Garton
---
#
For previous letters, please click on Letters - Past

Issue No 3 – July 27-30 – starts here.

2007-08-03T03:20:00.000+02:00

Posted August 3, 2007

LINKS

2007-08-03T03:11:00.000+02:00

News, Interest, Contributors, Newspapers…

NEWS

The TLS reviews Alastair Campbell's book - which you can buy cheaply by going to 'Books' or 'Campbell' in the Archive and clicking on the link in Campbell's Soup.
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C25336-2648759%2C00.html

Police have decided that the target of their wrath should be not people who want to undermine this country, but some journalists who want to expose them. Are they fit to protect us, asks Charles Moore [Daily Telegraph]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/08/11/do1101.xml

McKay's Hardcastle column dropped in Irish editions of the Daily Mail

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/greenslade/

Washington Post on Weekly World News: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/06/AR2007080601293.html?referrer=emailarticle

Montgomery watch: Mecom or Mekon
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=38400&c=1

INTEREST

Journalism as a career – wonderful 10-minute movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvBgaxUXrc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ejournalism%2Eco%2Euk%2Fnews%2Fstory3290%2Eshtml

Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

All our yesterdays (Annie Robinson, Mirror TV commercial)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdmSgcQp5t4

Richard Stott -
Stott Memorial - and message from daughter Emily: http://www.justgiving.com/stottie
Sunday Mirror (Tina Weaver, Dennis Ellam)
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/
Mary Riddell (The Observer):
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,2141757,00.html
The People (Nigel Nelson):
http://www.people.co.uk/news/tm_headline=frank-fearless-stotty&method=full&objectid=19572628&siteid=93463-name_page.html
MSN tribute (Geoff Sutton): http://news.uk.msn.com/Richard-Stott-Dies.aspx
Media Guardian tributes: http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2137959,00.html
The Times obit:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2169455.ece
The Independent obit (Bill Hagerty):
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2819559.ece
Alastair Campbell, Joe Haines (Daily Mirror):
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2007/07/30/richard-stott-a-tribute-by-alastair-campbell-89520-19544415/
Guardian Obit (Roy Greenslade): http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2137920,00.html
Press Gazette obit:
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=38375&c=1

Contributors’ websites and blogs:
Revel Barker: http://revelbarker.blogspot.com/
Alun John, website: http://alunjohnascot.wordpress.com/
and blog: http://alunjohn.wordpress.com/

Geoffrey Mather, website: http://www.northtrek.co.uk/
Paddy O’Gara: http://elcaminounreal.blogspot.com/
Ian Skidmore: http://www.skidmoresisland.blogspot.com/

Newspapers
Daily Mirror: http://www.mirror.co.uk/
The Guardian/Observer: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/
Daily/Sunday Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Press Gazette: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/
The Times/Sunday Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/
Sydney Morning Herald: http://www.smh.com.au/
Irish Independent: http://www.independent.ie/
Spectator: http://www.spectator.co.uk/
New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/
#

Richard Stott

2007-07-30T14:42:00.000+02:00

The Mirrorman Who Stood Up To Maxwell

Richard Stott, reporter and columnist, twice editor of the Daily Mirror, twice of the Sunday People, and once of Today.
1970: married Penelope Ann, younger daughter of Air Vice Marshal Sir Colin Scragg, KBE, CB, AFC & bar (d 1989). 2 daughters: Emily (b 1972) & Hannah (b 1975), 1 son: Christopher (b 1978).

By Revel Barker
Many people claimed it, but Richard Stott - who died this morning aged 63, after a year-long battle against pancreatic cancer - was the only man I knew who actually stood up to the bullying tactics of Robert Maxwell, megalomaniac proprietor and self-styled ‘publisher’ of the Daily Mirror group of newspapers. Some people occasionally talked him down, but Stott met him head on and often put him down.

It was perhaps fortunate, for both of them, that much of Stott’s ready wit and acerbic humour passed over the publisher’s head. But Maxwell immediately identified him as a ‘cheeky chappy’ and appeared to enjoy his company and, sometimes, even to take his advice on newspapers. Indeed, arguments between them often ended with a resigned concession from the publisher. ‘OK,’ he would say. ‘You are the editor.’

He was never heard to say that to any other person in that job. There was, on more than one occasion: ‘OK, you’re the editor – but I am right.’ And even, once, ‘Sorry, I was wrong.’

A former Reporter of the Year in the British Press Awards, and later Editor of the Year in the What the Papers Say Awards, Stott was appointed editor of The People in 1984, six months before Maxwell acquired the Mirror group. When Mike Molloy was promoted from editorship of the Daily Mirror to editor in chief, Stott was a fairly obvious successor and remained in the job until the end of 1989 by which time Maxwell was becoming visibly irritated by him and tired of his arguing that a newspaper could have only one editor.

The crunch came on Christmas Day when Stott was planning to splash on pictures of Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena lying dead after being sentenced and executed by a military court. Maxwell, fairly typically, wanted to lead the paper with an appeal to Mirror readers to donate cash for ‘poor Romanians’.

They fought angrily. Stott won the day. But on Boxing Day Maxwell offered Stott’s job to Roy Greenslade (managing editor of the Sunday Times), who had previously turned down the editorship of The People.

To save face all round, Maxwell told Stott he was accepting his suggestion of a management buy-out of the financially ailing People, and he returned to edit it, in anticipation of becoming his own ‘publisher’.

Stott would become chairman of the new company and they both somehow decided that I should be managing director; I was in Austria when that decision was made and Maxwell flew to Munich to offer me the job at a meeting that lasted half an hour and after which he flew back whence he had come.

But there were complications with separating the paper from the Mirror stable because the group as a whole was about to be floated, so Stott as editor and I as managing editor were given a year to prove that we were capable of both financing and running a newspaper successfully and independently (although Maxwell was planning to retain a minor shareholding, and keep the printing contract, at least in the initial years).

A further complication was that Maxwell prevaricated about putting a price on the title. Its real value was about ₤15million but it was shown in the flotation documents at ₤50million – despite the fact that nobody could remember when it had last made any net contribution to group profits.

Planning reached the stage where we had negotiated rents for new premises and established new deals for staff and services. But Stott made the mistake of holding and slightly increasing circulation against the trend and – through his brilliant presentations to major advertising agencies – bringing the title nominally into profit in that first year of independent editorial and budgetary control.

At that point, to nobody’s genuine surprise, Maxwell reneged on the deal and kept it within the group flotation plan.

Thus Stott’s ambition to become his own publisher – the People journalists didn’t think twice about it when I told them they could either remain in the employ of a big fat nasty bastard, or ‘cross the road’ and work for a little fat nasty bastard and a tall thin nasty one – came to nought.

His initial consolation prize was to be offered the editorship of the newly acquired New York Daily News, which he turned down. Asked by Maxwell what he wanted, Stott replied: ‘I think it’s pay-off time, now, Bob… unless you want me to return to the Daily Mirror as editor.’

And Maxwell offered him his old job back.

On November 5 1991, when Maxwell committed suicide on his yacht in the Atlantic it fell to Stott, as editor, both to manage the coverage and to man the bridge in Holborn; after hearing the news one Mirror director flew off to the Caribbean with his wife on a holiday they had won in a Mail on Sunday competition; deputy chairman Ernie Burrington went home to play bridge.

Stott led the paper with a big picture of his late boss and the headline ‘The Man Who Saved the Daily Mirror – by The Editor’. Fifteen inside pages were devoted to the one story. Then he walked outside the building to face hordes of newsmen.

Asked how Maxwell had sounded, last time the two of them had spoken, Stott replied: ‘He seemed very buoyant.’

He told me later that he regretted having said that. But he didn’t regret the Mirror headline, because he honestly believed that by sorting out the print unions, buying colour presses and introducing a ‘new technology’ system that actually worked, Maxwell had saved the papers from an otherwise inevitable slow death.

He didn’t change that opinion even when, a few days later, he had to lead the paper with ‘Millions Missing From the Mirror’, detailing how the publisher had stolen around ₤500 million from the company pension fund. And now Stott revealed how, when Maxwell’s wife and daughter had flown out to Spain, ostensibly to make arrangements about the body, they had immediately started shredding documents from Maxwell’s files on his luxury yacht.

It was a unique situation for any editor – investigating his own newspaper and exposing his own board of directors. When it was discovered that Maxwell’s head of security, a former chief superintendent with Scotland Yard’s serious crimes squad, had bugged some of the executive offices, Stott led the paper with a snatched picture of him and the headline: ‘This is the bugger!’

While much of it appeared good knockabout (and it is true to say that Stott was personally having great fun wreaking discomfort among the ineffectual executives who had clung to the publisher’s shirt-tails for the past seven years) it was serious stuff. Stott was by background an investigative reporter and by nature as tenacious as a bulldog.

His reporters followed the money, revealing the names and the detailed dealings of high-profile city firms that had handled deals for Maxwell, often with little or no regard for the sourcing of cash or even for the whereabouts of tangible assets.

He ignored pleas – and eventually direct instructions – from the board who told him that to run these stories was damaging to the company. Stott replied defiantly that it might be damaging to the directors, but that it was vital to the integrity of the newspaper, and pressed on.

He had originally gained the editor’s chair by being called from the People to Maxwell’s office to be told that the publisher was ‘minded’ to offer him the Daily Mirror job and would put him on a short list. In what was to be a typical reaction to Maxwell’s pomposity, Stott told him: ‘Bollocks. You are either offering me the job or you are not.’ Taken aback, Maxwell said that, in that case, he was offering him the job.

Instead of taking over immediately, Stott confidently spent a full month writing the terms for his employment, which in part laid out a revised editorial policy for the paper but essentially said that he would brook no interference from anybody. To his astonishment, Maxwell accepted the document and signed it without demur.

This did not of course mean that Maxwell didn’t attempt to inject his own ideas, but it meant that Stott could remind him of the deal, and rebuff him, even to the point of describing the publisher’s suggestions as stupid. Nobody else ever did that.

The basic problem for Maxwell was that he had no sense of humour and was never sure whether his editor was being funny, cheekily rude, or downright insulting. The fact was that when he spoke with him Stott was being earthily honest. He believed that he worked for the Daily Mirror, not for Maxwell, and would frequently tell him so.

After one blazing row about the most trivial of matters – how the rival papers were delivered to Maxwell’s front door by a messenger around midnight every night – Stott told him, from home: ‘You make this job a fucking misery, Bob.You can stick it.’ He slammed down the phone and when Maxwell called him back, Stott hung up the phone.

Next morning he was summoned to ‘pop up’ into the presence and asked ‘What are we going to do about this situation? You know… I always accept resignations.’

‘You are going to apologise for your behaviour,’ Stott told him. ‘And I, of course, will accept your apology. Then I expect you will open a bottle of Champagne.’

Maxwell thought for no more than a matter of seconds. He walked to his fridge and took out a bottle of Krug and opened it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was wrong.’

Stott’s humour could be dry, or it could be cutting. When first introduced to his prospective father in law, a high-ranking RAF officer, he had immediately asked him for his views on the Spitfire. Although he had flown Lancaster bombers, the Air Vice Marshal spoke in high praise of the fighter aircraft before being interrupted by Stott saying ‘Because I came here in one…’ and took him to the window to show him the little red Triumph sports car outside. ‘…It’s so much more sporty than the Herald, wouldn’t you agree?’

When meeting Peter Jay, former ambassador in Washington who had been recruited as Maxwell’s chief of staff and was experiencing marital difficulties, Stott asked him: ‘If it’s true that you are one of the brightest minds of our generation, why didn’t you wear a condom when you shagged the nanny?’

After Maxwell’s death the company was sold and Stott found himself working for another unworthy chairman, this time a man he had originally known as an exceptionally irritating sub editor. David Montgomery, who had failed as editor of the News of the World and Today, told Stott that his job was safe – and sacked him two days later.

Stott edited Today until it folded, then became a columnist on the News of the World and, after Montgomery’s demise in the Mirror Group, on the Sunday Mirror, where he remained until overtaken by fatal illness.

His five editorships – twice of both the Daily Mirror and the People, once of Today (Rupert Murdoch described him as one of the three best editors he had known) – amount to a Fleet Street record.

He told his Sunday Mirror readers in June that he had cancer and that he might be away from the column for some time. But he continued to work with Alastair Campbell, his abiding friend and colleague who had followed him from the Daily Mirror to Today, and for whom he was editing the famous diaries, latterly from a bed at the Royal Marsden.
Copyright © Revel Barker 2007
#
Mirror reporter Revel Barker was editorial adviser to Robert Maxwell from 1984 to 1991.

Contact us

2007-07-27T00:43:00.000+02:00

with comment, letters, contributions at
ranterseditor@gmail.com

Your starter for 10

2007-07-27T00:21:00.000+02:00

Do you hate it when somebody starts a story and somebody else says: ‘That reminds me’…?

Oh dear. Maybe you’ve stumbled onto the wrong site. Because that’s how (what passes for) editorial conference on Gentlemen Ranters actually works.

Anything can be a prompt. For KEN ASHTON, a piece in the paper about a new job for the News of the World’s editor starts a rant that somehow includes buying fish and chips on exes for Harold Wilson.

IAN SKIDMORE is ready to take offence when a parent asks how he started in the job – being improperly dressed can, apparently, be a start; and EDDY RAWLINSON explains why some become scribes, and some become snappers.

ALUN JOHN gets started on how a new newspaper – the Mail on Sunday – got started.

The Tour de ‘France’, starting in London, starts PAUL BANNISTER, who used to work for Cycling magazine (next door to Mick’s Café in the street of dreams) moaning that cycling is going downhill.

And PADDY O’GARA finds God (or, at least, one of His representatives) in the corridors of a newspaper office.

The Guardian reports the building of a statue in Hartlepool in memory of ANDY CAPP, which gets various contributors recalling tales of the greatest cartoon Englishman.

But we are kicking off this week with REVEL BARKER so that the others can tell their tales without interruption – because when these stories get going that bugger can even interrupt himself.

Find all these stories, plus some new Letters to the Editor (not all of them complimentary, PLUS the solution to our query about a photo of top-hatted toffs, from Brendan Monks) by scrolling down, or by clicking on the Archive link at top left.
ranterseditor@gmail.com

Gentlemen, that reminds me

2007-07-27T00:14:00.000+02:00

By Revel Barker
Peter Morris emailed from Chad this week (honestly: we have readers everywhere) to share a quote that might have been intended as a warning to both ranters and rantees.

Franklin Pierce Adams, famous New York columnist and a member of the Algonquin Round Table – a man who reputedly advanced the careers of both Dorothy Parker and James Thurber – once wrote: ‘Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.’

Is that true? Is that why childhood days always seemed to be sunny? Is it why we remember only the fun and forget the frustration of trying to get stories, and then searching for a working phone box, dictating to an uninterested copy-typist, fighting to get good stuff into the paper, and the constant anxiety of working against deadlines?

Thank God that nobody had yet invented what’s now known as ‘stress’, because if we’d been put wise to it I guess most of us would have been on permanent sick leave.

[Which reminds me… Think about that for a moment. We hammered away for years on old Remington Uprights. They were replaced by keyboards that responded to an almost feather-light touch; and only then did anybody come up with something called Repetitive Strain Injury, caused by typing. But I digress…]

I don’t pretend to have a clue how memory works. But I know how it jogs. It typically goes like this:

Somebody mentioned the name of photographer Bill Rowntree the other day, which started me reminiscing – from among many experiences with him - about Bill’s world scoop photo on the imminent return of Robin Knox-Johnston from his single-handed round-the-world voyage, and that got the old grey cells working about a silly story behind the scoop.

See what I mean? I was already mentally interrupting my own stories.

Well, not all of them were originally mine. Roy Spicer told me this one, so I believe it.

Nobody had sailed single handed, non-stop, 30,000 miles around the world before 1969. Francis Chichester had tried two years earlier with Gypsy Moth IV, and was famously knighted on his return, but he’d been forced to put into Australia for repairs.

So when the Sunday Mirror calculated that Knox-Johnston, on board Suhaili, must be getting close to home and to a place in history (in a challenge entirely organised by the Sunday Times) the picture desk decided to make contact, and Rowntree prepared to scoop the opposition by the simple ploy of finding out where he was and chartering an aircraft to fly over him and take pictures.

[‘Aerial pictures are easy,’ Johnny Robson used to say.’ ‘You just set the camera on infinity, point it and press the tit.’ But back to the story:]

Picture editor Allen Baird got on to the ship-to-shore operator and asked for a radio link with the yachtsman. After a while he was put through. ‘Hello Suhaili, Suhaili, Suhaili… This is the London Sunday Mirror calling. Are you receiving? Over.’

[He’d been in the forces. He knew how to do two-way radio on a maritime network. You have to call the ship’s name three times… Oh, sorry.]

Back came the reply: ‘Hello Sunday Mirror! This is Suhaili. Receiving you loud and clear. Over.’

Baird: ‘Could I speak to Mr Knox-Johnston, please…?’

This story was often lost on drinkers in the Stab In The Back who had already forgotten, even during the brief (if uninterrupted) telling, that the entire point of the tale, and of the voyage, was that it was single-handed.

But luckily Roy Spicer was a man of infinite patience, and of good yarns.

I recall there was even a fine journalistic postscript, missed at the time by most reporters covering the yacht’s arrival at Falmouth. The customs men dutifully went on board and asked: ‘Where you from – what was your last port of call?’ And they were told: ‘Falmouth.’

Mention of Roy always reminds me that before joining us he’d been northern theatre critic of the News Chronicle.

He once wrote a piece for them that began: ‘Slick, sparkling, spectacular, and with some of the most brilliant dancing seen on the English stage, this colourful musical drama has a weakness - its songs. It has no songs to hum or remember.’

And the headline, across two columns on the Front Page was: ‘A humdinger – without a tune to hum.’ So much for the European premiere of West Side Story, at Manchester Opera House.

Shortly afterwards they made him motoring editor.

When we shared an office in the Mirror Holborn building I’d often walk in singing Maria, or Tonight, or When You’re a Jet, America, or even Gee, Officer Krupke. And Roy, unphased by this intentionally irritating habit, would just shrug and say: ‘Sorry, but I still don’t think they're good songs.’

But that also reminds me of the time when Bob Edwards offered him the chief reporter’s job, and Roy said that if it meant a pay-rise, he’d take it, but only on condition that he didn’t ever have to speak to the news desk, and that his life-style would remain unchanged.

He didn’t want the job, you see.

In addition to motoring – which meant he got to drive a brand new car every week – he also organised the Great British Beer Competition which brewers competed for as if their careers depended on it, and had Roy constantly driving around in search of The Perfect Pint.

We called him our drink & drive correspondent.

Which reminds me that Patrick Mennem, Roy’s counterpart on the Daily Mirror, spent months warning readers about the impending threat of the breathalyser, then was arrested within 48 hours of its introduction, becoming the first person in that job to be banned from driving.

Pat, by the way, was in El Vino one lunchtime when the wine correspondent of the Telegraph announced: ‘I am going to Bordeaux tomorrow.’

Mennem – a man who always looked as if his face was about to explode in anger – told him: ‘One already feels sorry for poor old Doe, whoever he is. But it’ll be a blessed relief for the rest of us, in this place.’

And that stroll down Memory Lane, or at least down Chancery Lane to the Strasse, was all prompted by a bloke in darkest Kome [8º28’ 4.265”N; 16º43’19.058”E], 40 miles south-east of Moundou, reading our recollections in the middle of the night and remembering a quote from a guy on the New York Post who retired in 1941.
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Revel Barker’s own compilation of rant and reminiscence can be found at http://revelbarker.blogspot.com/

Button up your overcoat..

2007-07-27T00:06:00.000+02:00

By Ian Skidmore
I worry when people, usually mothers, ask me how I got my start in journalism. And not only because the question carries a sub text: ‘If a prat like you can do it, it will be a doddle for a bright child like mine.’

Mostly I hesitate, because everything that has happened to me in my career has stemmed from an embarrassing accident.

In this case going to prison. Only an army prison and I was guilty of nothing - but then they all say that, don’t they?

I suppose I could explain the issue by saying ‘It was because my greatcoat was unbuttoned, coming out of a pub in Thetford.’

We were a night away from a draft to Palestine and were celebrating in a last chance saloon called the Green Man.

I was a lance corporal in the Black Watch (RHR) who had somehow got mixed up with an RASC unit in the days when Englishmen dominated the Highland Division while the canny Scots all joined corps and learnt a trade.

In my unit all the Scots came from Glasgow. None much more than five feet high. If you were any taller in Glasgow, you got posted to Edinburgh.

Because I was still fastening my greatcoat on the street, I was pounced on by the Town Patrol of burly corporals for being improperly dressed.

A minute Glaswegian ran up to one of the corporals and smacked him in the mouth for being impertinent to ‘a Highlander’ (from Manchester, as it happened).

In consequence, we were all charged with assault, taken off the draft to Palestine and sent to Germany.

My charge – ‘in that he did assault six regimental policemen’ - preceded me to my new unit where I was summoned by the CO. He said: ‘I am a very bewildered officer; you don’t look violent to me.’

I didn’t. Indeed in the kilt I looked like an undernourished reading lamp and I have a photo to prove it.

I explained what happened, but he said there was nothing he could do about it. It was a court martial offence and he would have to remand me.

‘But’ he said, ‘a word of advice: ‘plead guilty. Otherwise they will have to adjourn the court and you will have wasted the officers’ morning. They will have to bring the witnesses over from the UK and they will be very cross with you. Plead guilty and your Prisoner’s Friend will explain the situation.’

I did. He didn’t. And I spent the next 56 days in 3 Military Corrective Establishment at Bielefeld.

When I was released and posted to Bad Oenhausen I decided to desert. On my way to the Bahnhof to get a train to the Hook of Holland I was pounced on by the garrison RSM, a Scots Guard called Graham.

He was very rude to me, suggesting that if I didn’t smarten myself up he would take the red hackle out of my bonnet, stick it up my arse and have me clucking like a Rhode Island Red.

I was very glad when he dismissed me.

To my horror I saw him again five minutes later in the next street. Rather than face him I dodged into the first door I could open. As it happens it was the office of Army PR.

A CSM, Paddy Seaman, asked me what I wanted. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked him if he had any jobs going. I thought I might sweep the floor or make some tea.

He said: ‘Have you any experience of newspapers?’

I thought, that’s a funny question - because, as a matter of fact, I had: I had been a printer’s apprentice at Allied Newspapers at Withy Grove.

I said I had worked on the Manchester Evening Chronicle and Paddy said: ‘Blimey, we haven’t had a newspaper reporter before. Come in and see Kenneth.’

Kenneth, it turned out, was the CO. At the time I didn’t know officers had first names, so I was a little surprised.

I was even more surprised when I met Major Kenneth Harvey. He was a touch fey. I later learnt he had transferred to the Royal Armoured Corps because the black beret brought out the blue of his eyes. What with one thing and another I was very relieved when he asked me to sit down.

All I remember of the interview was the bit where he said ‘Here’s a chit. Go to the QM and draw your three stripes.’

‘?????’

‘You will join as a sergeant, of course’

‘A SERGEANT?’

He bridled and his little shoulders shivered.

‘You cannot expect to be an officer straight away,’ he said.

That afternoon with not the slightest idea what I was doing I was on my way to cover the Berlin Airlift. Still the biggest story I have ever covered on my own.

But the army always did the unexpected. Some months later when I was Returned To Unit because of persistent drunkenness, another Guards RSM - Irish this time and called Kenny - thought PR was short for provost and appointed me Provost Sgt of HQ 7th Armoured Division.

So if your child wants a career in journalism, tell him to try unbuttoning his overcoat in Thetford.
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Journalist and author Ian Skidmore keep his own blog in his shed in the garden and at http://www.skidmoresisland.blogspot.com/

Birth of a national

2007-07-27T00:01:00.000+02:00

By Alun John
While the launch date of the Mail on Sunday drew closer and as we were assembling a staff for the big day, Mrs Thatcher was assembling a task force to sail to the South Atlantic. Just as our own D-Day day arrived, so did the British forces in the Falklands. Editor Bernard Shrimsley was pleased: ‘I love a war.’ he said, ‘There’s never any argument about what to lead on.’

The first paper was not a great one. The lead headline, ‘Our Day’, on the story of the successful landings on the islands appeared above an old agency picture of General Galtieri riding a donkey. Inside were lots of maps and graphics. It didn’t really set me alight; it didn’t set the readers alight, either.

I rang picture editor Gary Woodhouse on the first Sunday morning of publication after listening to the review of the papers on Radio Four. He told me never to ring him again at home on a Sunday. He’d previously been picture editor of The Observer.

Shrimsley lasted eight weeks as editor.

We came in on the Tuesday to be told he wouldn’t be there, but that the morning conference would be held as usual at 11am. I was running the desk that week with Gary on holiday. Not really sure what to make of this news, I went to see Wendy, Bernard’s secretary. She was in tears. The door to his room was ajar and I could see the desk had been emptied and turned upside down with papers scattered everywhere. It looked like a crime scene.

Small muttering groups gathered in the newsroom. None of us really knew what would happen next. I prepared a picture schedule and we filed into the editor’s office. We all looked at the desk in the same transfixed way you look at a serious road accident.

It was freezing in the room and the net curtains waved in the breeze from the open windows. John Walker, the entertainment editor, said he thought things might soon warm up. He was right.

The door burst open and in walked Lord Rothermere. The senior staff of the Daily Mail - editor David English, news editor Paul Dacre, executive editor Stewart Steven, and a few others - followed him. Most were in dark blue suits, white shirts and restrained ties. You could cut the tension with a knife.

Rothermere announced that Bernard had been fired. ‘He had to go. He has not given us the paper we needed.’ He told us from now on the Daily Mail would take over and David English would edit both the daily and Sunday papers. Changes would follow and we would be informed about them. ‘Let there be no mistake,’ said Rothermere, ‘The Daily Mail is now in charge. There will be a few small changes…’

Just small changes, but by the end of the day there was only a handful of the original staff of the Mail on Sunday left in the building. People were taken up to the next floor to be told their fate. Either they left immediately, never to be seen again, or came down silently to clear their desks. Amazingly, the picture desk was untouched. It was if an Exocet missile had struck our editorial floor.

The next day we came in to pick through the wreckage. There were a few survivors. Art editor John Butterworth and Trevor Bond on the sports desk were still standing, as was news editor Iain Walker, and the minders from the Daily Mail were beginning to arrive. The picture desk minder was a guy named Harvey Mann, with a thin moustache, a grin and a perma-tan, who specialised in showbiz pictures from his ‘contacts on the coast’. That was California, not Eastbourne. After a ten-minute conversation with him, I was left alone for the rest of the week. Perhaps he thought I might know what I was doing.

The week wore on and the tension didn’t ease. David English took daily conferences and dismissed most of our offerings and assured us that there would be plenty left over from the Daily Mail to fill that week’s paper. A steady trickle of former staff came into the office to empty their desks properly, or to collect their severance cheques.

Saturday arrived and we made the usual move up to the Daily Mail floor to get the paper out. Bernard’s brother, Tony Shrimsley, had also somehow survived the week, or possibly had simply been overlooked. He had been a distinguished political editor and editor of the failed news magazine Now and had joined Bernard at the new paper as executive editor.

There was much laughing and joking on the Back Bench that first Saturday under the new regime. Tony, however, was not included in any of it. He took his customary seat at the table and was completely ignored for the whole day and evening by the others. They didn’t speak a word to him, didn’t ask him anything, didn’t consult him on anything, didn’t say goodnight when he left later. His loneliness lasted four weeks until he managed to negotiate a settlement from the management to ease his obviously wanted departure.

Tony had a drink with a few of us in Scribes, and we asked if he had been given the cheque. ‘Not yet,’ he replied, and then, producing a set of keys from his pocket, ‘but I’ll keep the company car until I get it.’

It was obvious the paper was better for the surgery. Nonetheless, it was painful to lose friendships forged in the heady pre-launch days of long lunches with no paper to produce.

David English could not continue editing two papers simultaneously for long, even given that he was one of the most talented journalists of his generation. He appointed Stewart Steven as the editor of the Mail on Sunday and gradually David faded into the background.

Stewart was an excellent editor, the best I’ve worked for, but he had a bit of baggage to lose first. He had been responsible for two terrible errors of judgment in the past – he believed he had found Nazi Martin Bormann hiding in South America when he was at the Express, and had been involved in breaking a series of stories about a slush fund operating at British Leyland when he joined the Mail. Both had turned out to be untrue. But Stewart had established himself as a shrewd operator and often used to joke about his two failures.

I instantly hit it off with him in two ways. First, I supplied him with an autofocus camera for his holidays, complete with an ample supply of colour film, which I would collect from his secretary on his return and make sure was promptly processed and returned. Second, he could not understand how to work the video recorder in his office and I would be summoned to set it to record his choice of programme most days. This gave me a little privileged access and we occasionally chatted about office events as I punched in the channels for the video.

Stewart’s greatest gift as an editor was a supreme confidence in his own ability to become the greatest newspaper editor the world has ever seen.

He was also able at conference to absorb a long and detailed list of stories and features planned for the week ahead and immediately home in on the best contenders, especially for the centre spread display. Sometimes this would be simply a schedule one-liner or a passing comment from an executive. Stewart would fall upon it, issuing instructions for writers to be engaged, pictures to be taken, with ideas for the show it might make on the Sunday. He would brief writers and photographers alike, with a confidence based on his ability to visualise the end result, before they had even left the office.

The paper was soon steadily building circulation under his command and establishing a reputation for exclusive stories and pictures.
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Alun John started his career on the South Wales Echo in his hometown of Cardiff before transferring to the Western Mail, he worked for the Press Association and the Evening Standard, before joining the launch of the Mail on Sunday and then was launch picture editor of The Independent, assistant editor of The European, and later managing director of Syndication International.

In God’s name

2007-07-26T23:52:00.000+02:00

By Patrick O’Gara
Although the name of God, and of his Son, would be invoked frequently during times of stress or even of sheer bewilderment, or when a story stood up, or when one fell down, I can’t say I was ever greatly aware of the presence of much religious fervour in any of the editorial floors on which I have toiled.

The final stages of the Sunday Mirror (and the Pictorial, before it) seemed to be put together almost entirely by Jews, working before sunset on Shabbat. Presumably they had a perpetual dispensation to do that, in the same way that in the old days the Romans among us were allowed to attend functions on a Friday where fish was unlikely to figure on the menu.

Good Friday – the most holy day in the Christian calendar - was a normal working one for us, with the added magic of providing a traffic free opportunity for driving to the office, and even parking on the street outside it. There’d be a service at St Bride’s for those committed people who couldn’t get along without one: posters usually advised that entry that day would be only via the Rector’s office (usually some wag would add ‘just step over him’, or alter the wording to orifice).

Apart from that, Scotsmen and Geordies, being all considered heathens, were expected to allow God’s Englishmen the day off on Christmas Day, in return for being encouraged to go home to celebrate their pagan festival of Hogmanay. And that was about as religious as we ever got.

So why, in God’s name, did the Mirror Group employ a chaplain? A perpetual stream of them. Not just on call, but on the payroll, each full-time with his own office and, for all I know, his own choirboy. Perversely, it was the only department in the company not controlled by a chapel, so far as I recall, but there was no need for one because most of the incumbents, like the rest of us, tended to congregate on the other side of New Fetter Lane and mass at the altar of Bacchus.

Some of them seemed pleasant enough coves wandering the corridors, not surprisingly, with a perpetual air of astonishment.

But I remember one, less bright even than the rest of them, less pleasant, and far less (if the word is assumed to have any element of the idea of giving) Christian.

He might even have passed relatively unnoticed if the story hadn’t got round that he had asked Felicity Green for advice concerning a friend of his who he described as being persecuted ‘by a frightful little Jew’.

I have to report that her response was not overly helpful.

He also started to frequent the Oak Room on the ninth floor. This was the executive dining room which offered rather good and, more importantly, highly subsidised meals at canteen prices but with tablecloths and silver service, and a wine list.

Lawyers, circulation managers, production bosses and senior bean-counters took full advantage of its amenities but editorial folk seldom used it, preferring pub culture, or restaurants where they could perform out of sight of the boss class.

The journalistic exception was Reg Payne, when he was deputy editor of The People and then editor of the Sunday Pic/Mirror.

He would go there most days with people like Mark Kahn and Cyril Kersh and a small clique of execs and hangers on – usually about six of them.

The Mirror chaplain, being head of his own department – at least in this world – was also allowed to use it and became a regular. Being, to put it charitably, of a frugal disposition he would lunch alone, then - when other diners were calling for the brandy - would wander over to their table, hovering and hoping to be invited to join them in a glass on their tab.

Possibly, he had tried it successfully before with Reg. But on one memorable day Reg's cup of Christian compassion runneth not over.

‘Listen, Vicar,’ he said, before the man of God could utter a word to get himself invited to pull up a chair, ‘Why don't you just bless us all and fuck off?’
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Paddy O'Gara worked on the Daily Mirror for 23 years before joining the new Today. He left that to help start up HELLO! magazine then spent a few months on The Star before joining The Toledo Blade to redesign it, becoming editor (Americans call it managing editor) in 1990. He retired, exhausted, in 2003 and now lives in Spain. He has also has a blog, http://elcaminounreal.blogspot.com/

His nibs

2007-07-26T23:49:00.000+02:00

By Edward Rawlinson
I suppose because I failed my 11 plus I was destined to be a Lens, rather than a Nib. Nibs often went to grammar school and either went on to university or spent those same formative years as a junior reporter on some suburban weekly, then on an evening newspaper before joining the officer ranks of a national daily.

A Lens moved up the ranks after being allowed out of a darkened room and promoted to the rank of Snapper. The dark room was his training ground where he learnt the skills of photography. I can recall many Nibs who had been to university but not a single Lens other than the two bigger Lenses I will mention later.

The great advantage a Lens had over a Nib was that he had the chance to see how Nibs worked and was able to compare them with other scribblers. He learnt a lot from that experience and was able to guide young inexperienced Nibs when they went out together on assignments. A Lens always seemed older than a Nib somehow; it could have had something to do with early developing.

One lesson many young nibs learnt in early scribbling was never, no not never, call a Lens ‘my photographer’. Trilby and notebook have gone flying at such words and a Nib’s only transport back to his office been seen departing in a cloud of blue smoke and screeching tyres… leaving him interviewing a very confused person.

An advantage a Nib had over a Lens was when the going might have been getting tough he had no need to be at the scene of any violence; he could get the words at a later stage from his - oops sorry: from a - Lens. The worst Nib to work with was one who had a vivid imagination, producing words unable to be portrayed truthfully with light. I have seen many encounters between Lens and Nib staged on the sawdust strewn floor of Yates’ Wine Lodge after such complication.

Nibs - Lens, Scribbler – Snapper, Reporter - Photographer, name them what you like but when working together as a team they were invariably a formidable force, much like Starsky and Hutch but occasionally (can’t deny it) more like Laurel and Hardy and very rarely even a bit like Tom and Jerry; but like Morecambe and Wise the truth was that they were best as a double act, and were generally less effective as a solo turn.

Don’t want to take sides, of course. But could I just mention the words, ‘by Royal Appointment’? Yes, we had Tony Armstrong Jones and Lord Lichfield, one the Queen’s brother-in-law, the other her cousin. Beat that, His Nibs.
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Going downhill

2007-07-26T23:43:00.000+02:00

By Paul Bannister
Cyril Jones was my first news editor, at the Eccles Journal, and he nagged a reporter’s education of sorts into the likes of John Stapleton of TV fame, the late Peter Hollinson (Western Mail editor, if memory serves) and tabloid titan Brian Wesley.

Jones of Eccles was an unlikely candidate for cycling’s hall of fame, but he deserves a pedestal there because he comprehended what riding a bicycle was about.

Bless you and your large Family Ales, Mr Jones. I forgive the year’s miserly payoff of 7s 6d for calling in copy to the Manchester Evening News almost every day, because now, I understand.

Cyril tutored us in the information business but he knew when to stop. He didn’t inform his juniors about the linage fees we’d get, and matters went smoothly (at least until Christmas, and the three half-crowns each.)

In similar fashion, too much info has wrecked my sport.

In 1962, I was a teenager obsessed with bicycle racing. I rode several hundred miles a week, (14,200 that year, my diary tells me) ate three extra, donated, breakfasts daily as I did the rounds of police, fire and ambulance stations en route to the office and was as lean and hungry as Cassius.

A bicycle was an instrument of speed, poise and glamour, I felt.

Cyril, on his rod-braked Rudge, belted and generously insulated in sub-editor Maurice Brown’s camelhair demob overcoat (bought from him for ten shillings in a moment of Maurice’s weakness, then dyed navy) seemed to have none of these qualities. He would pedal to town hall or magistrates’ court, upright and trouser-clipped in horseshoe-shaped spring steel, as the very image of stately motion.

I’d sigh, ease my Campagnolo gear lever forward and stamp my Stallard up Church Street.

I left Eccles for London, where today’s Tour de France voice Phil Liggett was my colleague at Cycling magazine, was my team mate on the squad sponsored by Witcomb Cycles and was my flatmate in an orange-and-black-painted Palmer’s Green lodging that brought people out in a rash when they saw the decor.

We lived within earshot of the North Circular, and trained in the evenings across Hertfordshire with a chain gang of 60 or so Londoners who had no clue what we Northerners were saying.

And I loved cycling.

Today, from the Pacific coast of America, I look sourly at Le Tour and wonder where my sport went wrong.

I’m not addressing the issue of cheating through doping, which seems to have permeated almost all sport. I’m talking technical and informational advantages.
Ranters use the phrase ‘In My Day’ a lot, and I gladly employ it here. IMD, we wore wool shorts and shirts, and leather shoes with slotted shoe plates. Our Brooks Professional saddles of leather, steel and brass rivets weighed about the same as a modern bicycle’s entire frame.

It was essentially the equipment used 40 years earlier, and only Bri-Nylon was our concession to modernity.

We didn’t have aero helmets and skin suits with bootees, and we didn’t ride in Superman-style tucks to slice more easily through the air on our non-cavitating, solid disc rear wheels and tri-spoked carbon fibre front hoops, with their ultra-slippery ceramic bearings. We thought if we just kept our elbows in, that was enough aero concession.

Of course, airflow had its advantages. Cycling to work in a suit can be a sweaty business, and a brisk, Lancashire-damp breeze had fine cooling effects.

I kept regular shoes at the office, because Cyril taught us that people checked your tie and shoes first to see what kind of clown the local rag had sent round to report the chip pan fire, and it made for difficulties if ‘lad from t’Journal’ clattered up in metal-cleated cycling shoes.

I devised a means of fastening my briefcase around the crossbar of the bicycle frame, and this allowed me advantages because I could hide the bike and stroll up like a somewhat odiferous insurance agent.

Once or twice a month, I’d have the duty of covering council meetings in a steelworks town a few miles away and for that respectable duty I’d use my brother’s orange-painted Mobylette moped.

This allowed me not only to arrive in unsweated if seriously windblown state, but allowed me to claim mileage, a privilege not given to mere pedal-pushers.

The disadvantage, I found on the night the councillors celebrated the free bar at the opening of a new social club, was that the moped was much harder to push when one was too inebriated to ride.

This might be too much information, but it brings me back to my rant: Tour de France riders get too much info.

I’m talking about the ear-piece wireless devices the professionals use to communicate with the team manager in the following car.

With them, he can tell the rider up the road what’s happening as he monitors matters, and it’s infuriating.

Time was, you broke away from the front end of the bunch and slipped out of sight. Maybe you’d be joined by a few others and would work together to stay away. Maybe the bunch would catch you. Maybe an escaper would sneak off before the catch and the main group might not realise there was still the One That Got Away somewhere up the road.

Enterprise, effort and cunning could pay off, just as it does in the world of doorsteps and stakeouts.

When the sport is controlled by a manager who has half of French television telling him who’s where by their bike-mounted GPS, individual effort is undermined.

The manager knows his équipe, working together, can cut X seconds per kilo from the gap. A bit of maths to calculate distance to the finish and he can tell his boys (whose heart rate monitors he can also read remotely) exactly how hard to work to bring back the escapee.

What a cheat, and what a bore. Forget the drugs, the sport’s busy cleaning itself up (and don’t get me ranting about steroid-loaded US baseball players who are stealing records fuelled by hot dogs and beer).

Just take away the damn radios, which already bedevil other arenas.

American ‘football’ – a game where the only foot to touch the ball belongs to the smallest man on the squad – has drugs, technology and radios.

The quarterback is told what to do by a squadron of advisors who call in every play. The receivers run planned routes, the blockers step into scripted gaps, the running backs follow designed pathways.

It’s a radio-controlled spectacle, and I hate it. I want my two-wheeled heroes battling it out elbow to elbow, on empty roads unscripted and on their own initiative.

There are times to remain silent, as policemen have advised me. It’s bad enough that mobile phones can keep you in constant touch with the office, especially when you want to hide for an hour or two.

Let’s resist an in-your-ear stream of instructions, let’s have some quiet.

If Cyril Jones could traverse Eccles radio-less on a Rudge, surely the professional entertainers who roll around France can manage without hints.

Cyril knew that a bike was for transportation. I knew it was for sport. We each did our thing unimpeded by instruction. Maybe we can’t stop tech fiddlers ‘improving’ sports equipment from tennis racquets to pole vaulters’ springy poles.

Maybe we can’t stop drugs in sport, or halt the development of jumbo cricket bats and carbon fibre canoes, but please, please, let’s have radio silence.
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Bring back fun

2007-07-26T23:37:00.000+02:00

By Ken Ashton
An Independent profiler, writing on the appointment of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as Tory communications director, said Coulson - unlike many media figures - had gone to ‘an ordinary school’.

Wow!

And now I read that Simon Barnes, The Times chief sports writer, is to be given an honorary doctorate by his old university and, while reporting it, comments on the fact that many journalists worked their way through the ranks, eschewing media courses.

Ah, the dreaded media courses. When I was 62, I was enrolled at a local comprehensive school to teach journalism and media. After being roped in to help design their course material, since the head of department knew nothing about journalism, I was appointed a teacher, but paid as a technician, because I didn't have the relevant qualifications.

The students, bless them, were happiest designing cannabis posters on their Apples or filming each other. They didn't read newspapers because ‘you can’t believe them’ and they were not interested in public affairs, because ‘Dad pays the rates and the tax.’

All of which reminds us of our own golden days as, straight from school or national service, we went into the hallowed trade of journalism.

And here I am, at 75, mentoring would-be journalists in foreign climes. And many of them are not just good, they are brilliant. Like the guy who sent me an article yesterday and said he was having problems, being a Nigerian in Spain and finding doors closed to him. Or the woman in Sierra Leone who tells me she is sorry her work is late, but she can use her laptop only when the generator is free.

We, who gaze at journalism through our rosy Specsavers glasses, see the good old days as the best.

Were they? Well, the training was. Editors like Alf Glynn (who often would look out of his window in the office and think he could see Red Indians, covered in blood, coming up the High Street – and then carry on editing), who sent me back once on a five-mile bike ride to gather a first name I'd forgotten to ask for. I’d already been out pedalling all day doing district calls, but not many people in those days had a phone.

I covered Harold Wilson’s constituency on a bike and one of my rare car trips was accompanying him in his chauffeured car on election night and being despatched in the rain to buy fish and chips for three... ‘Put ’em on your exes, lad. Tell your boss they were for Harold.’

News editors like Gordon Bennett, at Warrington, who would make trainees stand to attention and sing misspelled words. Try ‘accommodation’ to the tune of Little Brown Jug.

Thank the Lord we didn't have mobiles in those days. How would we have stayed out of the reach of news editors who never would have believed we couldn't find phone kiosks that worked?

I once missed almost a whole day's play at Chesterfield between Lancashire and Derbyshire because my car had broken down on the moors. I cobbled something from the radio and Manchester Evening News, but was unaware there had been a public address call for me to contact the office. Bob Findlay was not best pleased.

Today's media students and university qualified ‘journalists’ have never experienced the trauma of door-knocking the bereaved, milling with strikers, using the stubs of cheque books as note books, à la Arfon Roberts, RIP.

When I tell some students of journalism how to write an intro, they will argue with me.

This is the guy who once rewrote the intro of a column by Peter Wilson, The Man They Can’t Gag. He came all the way to Manchester from London to chastise me - then took me out to lunch.

I have no quarrel with the trendy journalists who now have their shoulders clapped for mixing fact with opinion when reporting, or the Top Shop models who pose while they shout the evening news at me (... the girls Sir Trevor McDonald called docklands hookers on News Knight).

But I hanker for the days of yore - was it all of 50-odd years ago? - when we seemed to have more fun doing the job.

Maybe abolish media studies and bring back the fun? Now there's a thought.
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Ken Ashton worked on the St Helens Reporter, Yorkshire Evening News at Doncaster, Lancashire Evening Post, Liverpool Echo, Mirror and Sketch and on the Birkenhead News and Runcorn Guardian and Rhyl Journal.

All Capps

2007-07-26T23:28:00.000+02:00

The Guardian Diary:
Remember Andy Capp? The Daily Mirror’s ‘loveable’ cartoon character has been immortalised in bronze and now graces Hartlepool seafront. Hartlepool is the home town of Capp’s creator, Reg Smythe, and his widow, Jean, appears to have won the battle against the PC brigade, who seemed to think a fag-smoking, hard-boozing sexist was not a suitable mascot for the town.

Meanwhile, the Lowry art gallery in Salford is hosting a major new art exhibition that features vintage Capp cartoons. The curator, Bill Longshaw, says: ‘Andy Capp is the original northern anti-hero who spends most of his time smoking, drinking and sleeping - combined with trips to the bookies or pigeon lofts. Rightly or wrongly his character has, over the last 50 years, helped create a popular image of chauvinistic, work-shy northerners - and exploring such cultural myths that have stemmed from the north is what the exhibition is all about.’

Back in Hartlepool, no local business wanted to put its name to the £20,000 project, so the local development agency pitched in with the Mirror. Next stop Trafalgar Square and the fourth plinth?
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Revel Barker:
I met Reg Smythe only once. He told me the inspiration for the strip was a guy he saw at a Hartlepool football match, which he’d attended with his father. It started to rain and the man standing next to him took off his cap and put it inside his coat.

Young Reg said: ‘Mister, it’s started to rain.’

The man said he knew that.

‘But... it’s started to rain - and you’ve taken your cap off,’ said a puzzled Reg.

The man looked at the youngster as if he was stupid.

‘You don’t think, do you, that I’m going to sit in the house all night wearing a wet cap!’

My (now fairly vague) recollection is that Mrs Maxwell failed to see the humour in the strip.

When Cap’n Bob queried it, he was told how much it made from world-wide syndication - after which there was no argument about continuing it.
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Brian Hitchen:
Cudlipp told me that he was in the Mirror editor’s office, can’t remember which one, when Reg Smythe came in to present his Andy Capp cartoons for the first time. [Jack Nener; the cartoons first appeared in the northern editions in August 1957, and ran in all editions from 1958 –Ed.]

Cudlipp laughed (a rarity unless he was firing somebody on Christmas Eve), and told Smythe to bring them back after lunch. If he still thought them funny, he’d be hired.

He did. And he was.
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Bill Freeman:
I remember Len Woodliff telling me when he was editorial manager that Reg Smythe was by far the biggest earner in the Mirror group.
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John Edwards:
Don’t know how it happened but I picked up the job at the Daily Mirror in the mid sixties as chronicler of Reg Smythe’s career and stunts.

We travelled together a lot.

One time we went to Devon to look up H E Bateman (dropped rifle etc). We found him in desolate poverty in a cheap cottage through which a stream ran after heavy rain. Memory now a bit shaky but I believe they exchanged cartoons.

We went everywhere by train. Reg would buy armfuls of those old joke books they used to sell and note down ideas for Andy.

I’m guessing this date is 1966... Al Capp was in a suite at The Savoy. Li’l Abner was his cartoon character. He was probably the richest cartoonist on earth.

I arranged for Reg (Andy Capp) to meet Al Capp. Al was delighted for the opportunity. This was because Andy Capp was now being syndicated in America to more than 150 newspapers. Later it was more than 200.

There was coffee and whisky and beer (Reg) and they drew Andy meeting Li’l Abner for a big Mirror spread that I would write.

All done, Al Capp asked Reg what he was going to do with all the money he was earning. Reg was puzzled. Al said his syndication in the US would bring him in a fortune. Reg was listening, smoking a fag and coughing.

Then Al said he had his own syndication company and would be quite willing to represent Reg worldwide.

He said he thought he could guarantee Reg $100,000 in the first year. Reg said he was earning £8,000 a year (about $20,000 in those days).

Al was astonished. Told Reg he should get in touch again and quickly.

We walked back to the office. Reg was talking money like an investment banker. And grumbling.

I did the piece. Mike Christiansen (Asst Ed) liked it and it was marked up for a spread. The cartoon was great.

Christiansen asked me what I thought of Al Capp. I said he was an easy guy to get on with and what fun it had been listening to him trying to get Reg to join his syndication firm and let him handle Andy Capp in America.

Jesus Christ! Christiansen almost exploded.

‘What do you mean? What do you mean? This is f***ing dynamite. Tell me again.’

So I did. And he stormed off.

Perhaps 30 minutes later he was back and called me into his office with the door shut.

I had to write a memo to him recalling every single word said between Reg and Al. Christiansen told me the memo was actually for Cudlipp.

I was concerned I had stupidly got myself involved in something very serious.

Around 6pm I got a call from Reg. I had been trying to ring him to let him know what was going on. No reply. Now he tells me he has spent all afternoon with Cudlipp and a lawyer.

His basic salary had been raised to £25,000 a year (a huge amount) and he was to get a decent cut of the Andy Capp annuals published in the UK. US syndication hadn’t been discussed.

We went across to The Stab and had several drinks.

In a day or two he called me into his Mirror studio and gave me a gold Cross ballpoint pen.

Not many nights later I handed it to someone in The Cock Tavern to write down a phone number and that was the last I ever saw of it.
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Clive Crickmer:
In 1976, Reg Smythe, then aged 57, and his wife Vera moved from upper crust Harrow to distinctly unfashionable Hartlepool - a seemingly improbable step for a man who must have made millions - but he had felt the call of the town of his birth. I read a pathetically short piece about it in the Hartlepool Mail (shame on them, it was a bloody good local story) and suggested I did a feature on it - which appeared as a centre page spread in the Daily Mirror on April 2.

Their new home was a luxurious five-bedroom bungalow called White Gates incongruously surrounded by a pleasant but totally unpretentious private suburban estate. Perhaps appropriate, for I found this small, bespectacled and quietly spoken man, who had been a post office worker before Andy Capp brought him fame and fortune, to be utterly unpretentious, too.

Hull-born Vera, however, was quite the opposite; buxom and rather brassy, she wore her husband’s wealth on her fingers - I’ve never seen as many ostentatious rings on one person. But she was friendly and I would guess fun to be with and their marriage lasted 40 years.

Reg told me that he decided his cartoon character would be called Capp to reflect the flat caps of the working class of the north, but he couldn’t decide on the first name.

He said: ‘I was going to call him Johnny Capp or Freddy Capp but then I hit on the terrible pun Andy Capp because he was obviously going to be a social handicap. I never dreamt for one moment he was going to become such an international celebrity.’

That he was most certainly was, appearing in 1,700 newspapers in 17 different languages in 48 countries and enjoyed by an estimated 250 million people from the Yemen to Yokohama and all points north, south, east and west from Hartlepool.

Reg apparently liked the piece I had written and we enjoyed a good relationship after that.

The Mirror in those good old days loved stories containing the splendid Geordie ingredients of whippets, stotty cakes, black pudding, bookies and Newcastle Brown Ale, and I quite often phoned Reg for a ‘what would Andy have to say about this?’ comment. He never let me down; sometimes his reply was instant, on others he would ask me to call back in ten minutes. Always Andy had something pithy and apposite to say. (These stories frequently got a far better show in southern editions, the London back bench evidently regarding us in the north east as outlandishly quaint.)

Reg died of cancer, aged 81, in June, 1998, and on a Sunday morning of leaden skies I returned to the bungalow where this time, in contrast to the extrovert Vera who had died the previous year, the door was opened by his second wife Jean, a small, slightly-built and reticent lady who had been his secretary or something and who had married him just three weeks earlier. Presumably she came in for his fortune but she seemed genuinely upset and didn’t strike me at all as the mercenary type; quite the reverse, in fact.

She showed me Reg’s ‘den’, as he called it, a small room where he created his cartoons - sometimes seven a day - and it was much as he had left it with his upright chair in front of an easel and drawing paper and pencils strewn about on a small table beside it. It gave me a strange tingle; that of being in an inner-sanctum of such journalistic and artistic accomplishment and history.

After I had filed my piece from home I opened a can of the famous Broon - it seemed appropriate - and raised it in salute to Reg. He was a very nice guy.

It is well known that Flo was based on his own mother - also Florence - who had the same indomitable spirit as Andy’s long-suffering spouse. Although Reg, I believe, denied this, the real-life Flo, who lived all her days in a terraced flat in a working class area, once told me she believed Andy was modelled on her late husband, Reg senior.

She said: ‘Unlike Andy, my husband was never an aggressive man but, my goodness, he didn’t like work though he loved a pint of beer and a bet on the horses.’

And, so I was to discover, all his characters contained images of people he knew. His funeral was a private affair, though the Mirror was represented by ex-editor David Banks, managing Editor Pat Pilton and cartoons editor Ken Layson.

I broke away from them when, before the cortege arrived, I saw a small group of mourners had gathered. One was Madge Rigg, immortalised in the strips as Madge the barmaid, whose late husband Jack was known throughout the world as the stoical landlord of our lad’s local. She told me - and here I am looking at my Mirror report on June 18, 1998 - ‘Jack and Reg were great pals and I like to think of them in Heaven playing dominoes together and cracking jokes as they used to. Jack would always stand behind the bar with his arms folded - just like Andy’s landlord. But Reg was the absolute opposite to Andy. He didn’t swig pints and get into trouble. He sipped gin and tonics and enjoyed a quiet chat and chuckle.’

Ex-barmaid Doris Robinson, 66, was there as well. She once appeared in a strip as a pub Mrs Mop in which Andy said she should be charged with burglary - for breaking into a smile. She said ruefully: ‘Trust Reg to depict me as a scrubber - and I don’t think I was that miserable.’

Retired police sergeant Alan Goodman knew that Reg had him in mind as the firm but kindly bobby who oft times escorted a drunken Andy home or to the nick. They - and their alter egos - had come to pay their last respects. And I now intend to do the same, by opening a second bottle of the old nectar and raising my glass to a most likeable legend.
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Letters to the editor

2007-07-26T23:15:00.000+02:00

ranterseditor@gmail.com

JULY 27:
Dr Syntax (Ms appropriation, July 20) is spot-on in bringing the heavies to task for describing Kate Middleton – or any single young woman – as Ms.
The Observer Style Book says: ‘Use Ms unless subject specifically styles herself Miss or Mrs.’
I think they have got that instruction completely arse-to-cock. For a married woman to be required to point out to a reporter – ‘specifically’ – that she is called Mrs is ludicrous. A former prime minister of my distant acquaintance referred to herself, when the situation arose, as Margaret Thatcher. So it would have been Ms Thatcher, in copy at the Obs, then, would it – the lady not having ‘specifically’ referred to herself as Mrs?
The paper’s stable-mate, The Guardian is far more sensible: ‘We use whichever the woman in question prefers: with most women in public life (Ms Booth, Mrs May, Miss Widdecombe) that preference is well known; if you don't know, try to find out; if that proves impossible, use Ms.’
The Times says: ‘Ms is nowadays fully acceptable when a woman (married or unmarried) wants to be called thus, or when it is not known for certain if she is Mrs or Miss.’
And that is also ok, if she actually says she wants to be called Ms – except that, as the good Doctor points out, it provides a get-out for any incompetent or lazy reporter.
– John Dietrich
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Trust the ‘blunts’ to get a simple picture caption arse about face (Ah yes: I remember it well, July 20). The photograph of the two ‘toffs’ and the urchins was in fact taken outside Lord’s Cricket Ground and not under the portico at Waterloo Station.
It was captured during the Eton v Harrow annual cricket match at the famous old ground in July 1937.
The picture is not cropped or altered in any way and the boys on the right are not looking at ‘something completely different that is going on off-stage’... they are really, REALLY looking at the boys from Eton because they might as well be men from Mars, and even today I’m sure Etonians dressed in their school ‘uniform’ would also cause some amusement in certain parts of our capital.
It was taken for Picture Post by photographer Jimmy Sime ... why did he take it? I think the fact that it is a great image and he must have had a very good eye for a picture might just be stating the bleedin’ obvious.
By the way, the Eton v Harrow match is still played yearly at Lord’s to this day.
- Brendan Monks, Sports Picture Editor, Daily Mail
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Congratulations, very well done; shows what can happen when good memories and good writing come together. – Austin Wormleighton
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From Grey Cardigan at Press Gazette:Congrats on the new blog. There’s some interesting stuff on there already (which may or may not get stolen at some point!)
Feel free to link to The Grey Cardigan column in the Opinion section at www.pressgazette.co.uk .Your readers might enjoy it. Regards - Grey

[What Mr Cardigan may not know is that his excellent column is not readily available on-line – unless readers pay a subscription. Press Gazette charges ₤50 a year to read him, which also includes access to any letters, obits, or articles that any of OUR readers might have submitted to the Gazette as copy free of charge – just in order to keep the wheels of communication turning. Is that a good deal? Possibly not. But it is encouraging to get the approval of Mr Cardigan, who might well be the last Old Fart who is still in harness. – Ed.]
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Please count me out of this. I have better things to do with my precious time than go down memory lane with ex-journalists I never worked with and whose experiences I care even less about.It’s a pity you have some [sic] much time of [sic] your hands that you have to spend it surfing the web. Sadly you appear to be turning into a lonely old recluse. Snap out of it! – Dennis Casson
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FROM JULY 20:
Excellent. I am really enjoying the articles and the memories. I look forward to the weekly update but hope the pressure on the deadline doesn’t get to you; maybe it will provide the necessary spark of adrenaline in recalling those venerable days? - Colin Hills
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A great idea and a good read! - John Izbicki
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Retired Old Hacks prove that they are not so much in their dotage, as in excellent anec-dotage. Congratulations. - Richard Evans
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Wonderful. - Mike Gallemore
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Not bad for a bunch of Old Hacks! – Henry Hain
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My only concern is that you may have set the ‘bar’ too high in your Blog Pub. I fear it will be difficult to sustain such a standard of excellent writing and story-telling. But, here’s hoping! – Anthony Lee
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A masterstroke, if I may say so. – John Blauth
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Well done on the blog. – Quentin Letts
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This is great, look forward to future editions. – Sue Bullivant
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[Living In a Democracy by Paul Bannister, July 13] Wonderful writing and fascinating details. I want more, please. – Dawna Kaufman (Los Angeles).
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The blog is brilliant. I have forwarded the link to all my friends who can read. – D J Brand
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I have just had almost two hours reading the new Gentlemen Ranters blog site and it is great. I am sure that it will be a success. I shall make its existence known to my friends. My best read in a long while. – Derek Jebson
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Read it all at one go. Great stuff. A wonderful mix. – John Garton
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[There Stands The Enemy by Ian Skidmore, July 13] Ian on Nye Bevan reminds me of a visit by Arthur Scargill to South Wales during the 1984 miners’ strike. It was a cavernous sports centre and the press area was a very prominent, raised structure surrounded on all sides by strikers and their families and supporters. In the middle of his typically fiery speech, Arthur turned and pointed at the assembled hacks, film crews etc. Deriding the stream of NUJ donations to the strike welfare fund, he raised his voice to a virtual shriek and exclaimed: ‘Don’t send us your shekels. Stop spreading your lies.’ If he’d added the single word ‘Attack’, we’d all have been dead. – Colin Randall
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Jokes

2007-07-26T23:12:00.001+02:00

If you have a joke or a daft tale that might even possibly be both funny and true – please submit it to ranterseditor@gmail.com
Please do NOT send the one about the interview at the Wailing Wall.

[Contributors: Eddie Rawlinson, John Edwards, Revel Barker, Peter Morris.]

The Crown and Kettle, Ancoats where many of the famous - Annie Leslie, George Gale, Peter Dacre among them - have stood, had three entrances, all visible from the bar.
I witnessed this and many not there claim the same... I’ve also heard it told as a joke.
Charlie the landlord was like a protective goose to the staff of the Daily Express as it was a wino's route to Yates' Wine Lodge.
One day Charlie saw an old drunk about to enter the door on Oldham Street,
and was there in advance to turn him round and send him on his way. Charlie watched the drunk’s progress as he passed the windows.
The guy made his way to Ancoats street and Charlie again was ready to meet him as he tried for the second time to get into the pub. Same procedure.
He then arrived at the third door where he found Charlie waiting and before he was barred for the third time greeted the landlord with the words: ‘How many fucking pubs have you got in Ancoats?’
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Pat Doncaster, wonderful old showbusiness editor of the sixties Mirror was a pal of Tommy Cooper. I went for a drink with them once at the Piccadilly Hotel. Tommy got half pissed, called for his new Jag to be brought from the car park to the front door and intended to drive us all to Thames TV HQ in Euston.
He turned left down Piccadilly, then sharp left into Swallow Street which connects with Regent Street.
It’s one way. We were going the wrong way.
We got about 15 yards into Swallow Street and stopped with traffic coming against us.
Moments into this scene there arrived a cop. He obviously knew who Cooper was and tapped the window.
‘Mr Cooper, can you tell me where you think you are going?’
Cooper looked at him a bit dazed but didn’t take three seconds to reply: ‘I don’t know officer, but we’re obviously too late because they’re all coming back.’
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A female witness, giving evidence at Leeds Crown Court in a case of sexual assault, was asked to repeat what the accused man had said to her. She told the QC that she could not bring herself to mouth the words, so was invited to write them down and handed a piece of paper and a pen.
She wrote: ‘I am going to give you a right good shagging, later tonight.’
The paper was then passed to the judge, then to counsel for the prosecution and the defence, and eventually to the jury who passed it along their two rows of seats. A woman juror, in the back corner of the jury box, had nodded off in the heat of the courtroom and was therefore oblivious to what was currently happening in the trial. She was suddenly woken by a nudge from the man sitting beside her as he handed her the note which she read, refolded, and placed in her handbag.
The judge told her: ‘Madam, you have just been handed a piece of paper. Would you please give it to the clerk so that he can pass it to me?’
‘Ooh, no,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t possibly let you see it. It was personal.’
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A photographer for CNN was assigned to cover southern California’s wildfires. He wanted pictures of the heroic work the fire-fighters were doing as they battled the blazes. When the photographer arrived on the scene, he realized that the smoke was so thick it would seriously impede, or even make impossible, his getting good photographs from the ground level.
He got permission from his boss to rent a plane and take photos from the air and used his cell phone to call the local county airport to charter a flight.
He was told a single engine plane would be waiting for him at the airport.
Arriving at the airfield, he spotted a plane warming up outside a hanger. He jumped in with his bag, slammed the door shut, and shouted, ‘Let’s go!’
The pilot taxied out, swung the plane into the wind and roared down the runway.
Once in the air, the photographer instructed the pilot: ‘Fly down the valley and make two or three low passes over the fires on the hillsides.’
‘Why?’ asked the pilot.
‘Because I’m a photographer for CNN,’ he said. ‘And I need to get some close-up shots.’
The pilot was strangely silent for a moment. Finally he spoke: ‘So, what you’re telling me is... you’re NOT my new flight instructor?’
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The second edition starts here:

2007-07-26T23:09:00.000+02:00

Posted July 20, 2007

Read all about it

2007-07-20T03:14:00.000+02:00

Three items, included in this our second ‘edition’, about proprietors – with whom, perhaps understandably, some of our ilk appear to have something of a fixation.
Paul Bannister continues his astonishing account of the mentality of his old boss on the National Enquirer, Generoso Pope; Geoffrey Mather reveals that, when told that he was mad, Lord Northcliffe reacted in a manner that might be seen as a sign that he was perfectly sane; and Sue Bullivant reports on watching a one-man play – which may still be doing the rounds in the provinces or home counties – written by a journalist and based on the presumed thoughts of Chairman Bob.
Stepping back in time, which is our wont if not our veritable raison d’etre, Paddy Byrne looks at a photo from just before the War and says it might not be quite what it seems. It was actually queried by another publisher, John Blauth of Media Digest. But since John is hugely popular with his staff, and has the wisdom to read this blog site, he obviously cannot be counted along with the other loonies.
Eddy Rawlinson (briefly a publisher himself) describes how, in roughly the same generation, he narrowly escaped becoming an inky by moving into the world of flash-powder and block-making for the old rotaries, in a period of his life in which he could invite people to see his etching.
Back in the land of the living, Revel Barker recounts a possibly true tale about how the Daily Mirror brought romance – typically, at totally unnecessary cost – into the debate about the UK joining the EU (or the EC: in the days when it was merely a ‘common market’ and not just a bunch of overpaid, underemployed and interfering legislators).
Ian Skidmore describes how he set up a ‘pirate’ radio station – for the BBC. This was before being presented with a Golden Microphone for broadcasts to an audience in Australia, British Forces Network, Radio Ulster and Radio 4 – a total of 26m listeners. And being sacked a fortnight later by BBC Wales for being English.
For those who missed it we include Professor Roy Greenslade’s take on this website, published by Media Guardian within an hour or so of our launch last week.
Pickfords are meanwhile moving in a couple of items of furniture. We are introducing a Letters Page, which we can at least promise will be more accessible and user-friendly than the same thing on The Times site. We bring out of retirement Dr Syntax, last seen in the pages of Worlds Press News, before its reincarnations as (UK) Press Gazette.
And finally… What would the Internet be with Jokes? A darned site better; we agree. So the strict policy of this site’s er, Editorial Board on the subject is briefly explained in a new feature, with a couple of examples of what is acceptable, to which everyone is urged to contribute. But any offerings that start: ‘This is true! It appeared in the Washington Post / New York Times / Warrington Bugle this morning!’ go straight onto the spike.
Find articles by scrolling down, or by clicking on names or subjects from the permanently updated Archive, top left.
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Ah yes: I remember it well

2007-07-20T02:58:00.000+02:00

By Paddy Byrne
Take a look at this photo and guess what is going on.
Paul Callan and Magnus Linklater awaiting a carriage to take them home to Eaton Square at the end of summer term, perhaps?
First published in (we think) Picture Post, it is often dusted off and used to illustrate the great social divide, the class structure of pre-war Britain.

But according to John Blauth, publisher of Media Digest, it’s a cropped picture.
The full thing tells a different story. Or it would.
The only problem is that John can’t remember what it is. And the cropped version is the only one that Getty Images has.
Apparently, though, the urchins are not staring at the young toffs at all, but studying something completely different that is going on off-stage, in the bit that was cropped.
Every picture tells a story: we know that, and this one tells one of sorts but it is not necessarily about what was going on at the time the shot was taken.
The camera never lies: we know that, too (and we are talking, here, of the days before Photoshop was even imaginable), and although we can justifiably believe that the boys were all standing there under the portico at (presumably) Waterloo station when the bulb was squeezed and the shutter clicked, what we don’t know is what it’s really about. Nor, perhaps more importantly, what prompted the photographer to take it.
Does anybody know?
There is a photograph in the war museum in Jersey showing hordes of children with their right hands raised, as if in salute, and the caption ‘Sieg heil!’ But the story that the picture doesn’t tell is that a German soldier of the occupying forces had walked into the park, gathered the kids around the bandstand, and told them: ‘Anybody who would like chocolate, raise your right hand…’
Never lies, eh?
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Maxwell’s House

2007-07-20T02:49:00.000+02:00

By Geoffrey Mather
Newspapers attract erratic proprietors. Northcliffe once phoned the office to declare, ‘They say I am mad. Send your best reporter.’ Beaverbrook was mean, ebullient, outrageous, and always a force beyond reckoning. And so to Maxwell, a seedier man than these, the bouncing Czech, who bought the Daily Mirror, raided its pensions fund of £440m, left 30,000 pensioners in despair, and floated into an uncaring sea alone to die. Mourned by somebody, one supposes, but not by most.
His life recently unrolled on TV, compressed into an impossible 90 minutes, but not to the point where his principal characteristics were obscured: the bullying of his wife, his children, his colleagues, his business associates. He had a devious mind for creating obscure companies with shifts of money from here to there; he was a conjuror, a juggler, a manipulator, ultimately disgraced and left without respect or honour to be buried in Israel.
I watched the portrayal of all this through the actor David Suchet and was fascinated by what I saw. None of it unexpected - the moods, the Citizen Kane backdrops, the rants, the nonsense of the man - and I was glad to have had no part of him. Suchet managed, for me, the near-impossible: he exuded power, threat, irrationality in the way I had always imagined Maxwell. True or not, those closest to him will decide for themselves.
I came close to him only once, I am glad to say. I had arranged to meet him in London because it was rumoured that he was to buy Manchester United. I had a phone call from his secretary at 7.30 in the morning. He sent his apologies but he was already in conference and would be unable to make it. Perhaps as well.
Magnus Linklater, a journalist I had been more than pleased to work with, became one of his editors. He wrote about that experience in The Times. ‘... and my last meeting with him (was) after the (London Daily News) paper folded, as we all somehow suspected it would. I had gone to see him, bearing my watertight contract, which he had signed. ‘It’s been fun, Bob,’ I said, ‘but now I would like the money you agreed to.’
‘Mister,’ came the almost inevitable reply, ‘if you think I am going to honour your contract, then you don’t know me very well’.’
It was all very Citizen Kane, and there is ample evidence that newspaper proprietors as a genre are never short of, at the very least, eccentricity.
Henry Luce, of Time magazine, chastised a writer who complained that he did not have a desk, for lack of log cabin spirit. A satirical piece in, I think, the New Yorker describing Time contained the words, ‘Backward ran the sentences till reeled the mind.’ The descriptions of people were lurid. ‘Snaggle-toothed and pig faced’ was one.
As boss of Life magazine, Luce sent out an edict to all staff - ‘Let us bend our attentions to the Japanese beetle.’ And they did. At great expense.
Dorothy Parker wrote for the New Yorker, and told the editor she was absent from the office because someone else was using the pencil.
A New York man for the Daily Express once described for me a visit by Beaverbrook:
‘I was sitting in the office when I got a phone call from London. No 1 Reader arriving. Meet at airport. No, no, I said. I can’t. Deadline looming. Busy writing a story you want. Forget story, said London. Meet No 1 Reader.’
So off he went to the airport, late, having first ordered two large limousines - one to collect the old man, the other to be available round a corner should the luggage exceed the capacity of the first.
Enter Beaverbrook and secretary. New York correspondent missing so that the No 1 Reader was not smoothed through the arrival process. The New York man explained his dilemma of having to write a story and be at the airport. ‘That,’ said Beaverbrook, ‘must have been a very difficult decision for you.’
Second limousine required...
So the old man went to his hotel and began to send messages about share movements on the exchanges. And our New York man was hunting in the waste paper baskets for old envelopes in which to send the replies - since Beaverbrook would have complained about wasting new envelopes…
The old man invited him to breakfast at his hotel. The New York man began to study the very large menu with great anticipation. From the other side came the small voice, ‘I always think that at this time of morning, an egg and toast is enough...’
Beaverbrook rolled away and eventually returned for his flight home. He sat hunched at the head of his plane waiting, with impatience, for his secretary. He had bought a copy of Lolita. Finally she arrived, breathless, and thrust a present into his hands. He brightened. Then darkened once more as he unwrapped his present. It was another copy of Lolita.
Once he was walking, in the South of France, with several colleagues, all in black suits and homburgs, one very tall and wearing a black eye patch. They were surrounded by people in bright clothing, some in bikinis.
‘Why,’ asked Beaverbrook, ‘is everybody staring at us?’
Beaverbrook managed to form a strong, workable relationship with his editor, Christiansen, though it was never, I imagine, easy going. I was once in the London Express when a phone rang in the editor’s office. I had been left to wait there. A middle-rank editorial executive had joined me. We both stared at the phone.
Eventually, I said, ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’
‘Not bloody likely,’ he said. ‘You answer it. Last time I picked up that phone it was the old man.’ Fear was abundant. When Beaverbrook walked into London office, the footsteps quickened in Manchester.
Once when the general manager, editor and Max Aitken were gathered in conference, Beaverbrook phoned from the south of France. ‘What’s the weather like?’ he said.
‘Snowing,’ said the general manager, his brow perspiring from the sunlight blazing through the window.
‘In that case,’ said Beaverbrook, ‘I think I will delay my return to London.’ All three were relieved, that editor told me.
So to Maxwell. He behaved like the others, but whereas they - particularly Northcliffe - had a feeling for newspapers, he appeared to me to lack it. He was all power, and seemed to impede editors around him who had great competence in their line of business. He reminded me of Joe Hyman, who once bossed Viyella. Hyman said he was interested in buying The Spectator.
‘What would you do with it?’ I asked.
‘I would have a headline - ‘Joe Hyman says...’ - on Page One.’
That, I imagine, would have killed off The Spectator in no time.
Journalists go through a long learning process. Proprietors tend to think they understand the business without the training because they know money. Murdoch at least had a go at being a journalist before tycoonery whirled him to his penthouse in the sky. Thomson rode the Underground to work and remained modest. Beaverbrook always paid well for the not-so-obvious reason that it put pressure on other papers.
As for Maxwell. Poor man to rich man, rich man to poor man, lost at sea. What an epitaph! Oh dear.
#
Former Daily Express assistant editor and columnist Geoffrey Mather publishes his own regularly updated web of comment and jottings about newspapers and current affairs, at:
http://www.northtrek.co.uk

Here’s to you, Mr Robinson

2007-07-20T02:41:00.000+02:00

By Revel Barker
We were travelling first class – don’t know what it’s like today, but in those days it was an entitlement for all inter-continental travel – on the London to Singapore leg of a flight to Sydney. And like all journalists, anywhere, were swapping yarns about our colleagues. I stretched my limbs (the next row of seats was so far ahead that my feet didn’t touch it) and asked Molloy, the editor in chief, whether he remembered the story of Penrose and Anton Karas.
He said he didn’t think he did. But if I’d care to hum the first few bars…
It was the time, I said, when the Mirror was trying to persuade its readers to vote in favour of joining Europe, and constantly thinking of story ideas that might suggest to xenophobic Englanders that the Continent could be an interesting place. It produced features on the romance of Paris – lovers walking along the banks of the Seine – on la dolce vita that was Rome, on saunas and free love in Scandinavia… but by the time they got to Austria they had run out of ideas. Never mind that Austria wasn’t actually a member of the European Community: it was in Europe.
It had been Molloy himself, a dedicated film buff, who had suggested an interview with Karas, the man who wrote The Third Man theme – ‘the most romantic piece ever written for the zither, which is itself the most romantic of instruments.’
John Penrose (now better known as Mr Annie Robinson, but then a person in his own right), newly detached from the newsroom to features, was given the job.
[Molloy said that he did not remember the story, but admitted that it all sounded likely enough, so I continued.]
Penrose couldn’t find Karas in the phone book, but eventually discovered an address, and set off to Austria, by plane to Vienna, then to Innsbruck, then in a taxi – but sod the expenses, this was Mirror features – high up into the Tyrol.
Karas invited Penrose in to his home and asked why he had come all the way from London to see him.
‘To interview you. Because you wrote the theme music for The Third Man, which is the most romantic piece ever written for the zither, which is itself the most romantic of musical instruments.’
‘But why did you come… here?’
‘To interview you, of course.’
‘But why,’ the old zither-plucker persisted – ‘… why come here?’
Penrose asked how else could he have done the interview.
‘Well,’ explained Herr Karas, ‘every Thursday afternoon I play my zither for afternoon tea in the restaurant at Bentall’s store in Kingston on Thames…’
No, said Molloy: he had not heard the story, even though he had been in charge of features at the time. Interestingly, I told him, nor had Penrose heard it – but he had liked it when I’d told it to him, and said that he was perfectly happy for the story to be ascribed to him.
I couldn’t remember who had told the tale to me.
#

The Old Devils

2007-07-20T02:25:00.000+02:00

By Edward Rawlinson
Printer’s Devil survives today as no more than a name for a pub, before it gets re-christened as something ‘trendy’ like The Slug in Sandwich. But it used to be a real job.
The first print shops astonished the world by producing bibles that were all perfectly identical, and monastery clerics reckoned this was the work of Satan (not least because they were being put out of their jobs, spending about a year to produce a single copy) and the apprentices were usually stained from head to toe in black ink so, the story goes, they became the Devils. And type that became confused in its cases, or was dropped on the floor – usually by the harassed assistant - was said to have been devilled, or pied: a printer’s pie was a mix-up of type, long before it was adopted as yet another pub name.
Among the old devils whose names you may be familiar with are Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Guy Bartholomew, Ian Skidmore… and your humble correspondent.
Three months into the craft I was about to sign a seven-year apprenticeship as a young devil at a local printers. I’d already recognised the boredom spent putting type back into cases so that one day I would be able to call myself a compositor. After I’d put every individual letter of used type into its proper place my initials were chalked on the case to show I had done the job correctly. Anyone knowing single 6pt type fonts will understand just how hard it could be to recognise the difference between individual loose letters like b, d, q or p and it often resulted in my getting a clout from the foreman. Printer’s pie was no meal for a 14 year old apprentice. In those three months I learnt quite a lot about type and attended night school for typography three times a week, continuing my studies for another two years when not working nights.
I hadn’t yet signed my apprentice indentures when the opportunity came for me to join the bi-weekly Burnley Express as an apprentice engraver and photographer so I went off into what became a lifetime of enjoyment.
The war had taken most of the young men and I had to learn fast about block making and photography and within six months I was out and about taking photographs and then turning them into zinc printing blocks. There was only me to help the boss take pictures and produce blocks because the others had left the department and gone off to the war. The boss, Fred Simcock, was in his mid sixties – that seemed old, then - and sometimes would miss work through illness and I’d be left on my own.
Only a few photographers will be around today who have wound up a spring to fire a flint, to make a flash, to take a picture. Flash powder was used in those days after your rationed quota of flash bulbs had been used up. When using powder you soon learnt to make a quick exit from a room before a cloud of dust started to descend on the people you’d just been photographing.
One of the jobs that took me closer to the war, as a boy, was having to go to the homes of servicemen and collect photographs if they had been killed in action, were missing or taken prisoner of war.
It was a task as hard as that of the telegram boy who pedalled his red bike delivering the sad news to the families. I never received any resentment when I knocked on a door to ask for a photograph; in their grief everyone seemed to be proud that their next of kin had served his country. My constant fear was that one day I would have to copy a photograph of my brother who was in the Navy. I had already made a block from a photograph of my cousin who was lost at sea.
Having taken, or copied, a photograph, developed and printed it, sized it up and coated a glass plate with collodian and silver nitrate, I’d re-photograph my picture and make it into a metal image. After etching the blocks I had to stick the thin metal zinc plates on to the rotary press. It was a worrying time when the huge Crabtree machine started to go into top gear, waiting to see whether any of the blocks would go flying across the press room. Fortunately that never happened to me.
Nowadays, so I hear, you just press a key on a computer.
#
Eddy Rawlinson also worked on the Manchester Evening News, then the Daily Express. In 1964 he bought a pub and started his own free sheet, Motoring Gazette, running it from behind the bar. He sold it to the Rochdale Advertiser and joined the Daily Mirror as a photographer, eventually becoming northern picture editor.

Lies have been told

2007-07-20T02:20:00.000+02:00

By Sue Bullivant
I saw this play by journalist Rod Beacham at the Edinburgh Festival last August with Cathy Crawford, former head of Mirror Readers' Service.
To our amazement, it was brilliant. A one man show, the performance by Philip York was incredible (apparently he went to drama school with Maxwell’s daughter, and met him a couple of times); an interpretation rather than an impersonation, there were moments when, in my not particularly humble opinion, he totally captured the essence of the fat old git.
Without in any way being an apologia for Maxwell's life, it gave his point of view, and almost made it possible to understand and even sympathise with his bitterness at the snobbery and racism with which he was greeted when he started a new life in England after the war, and his resentment at not getting credit for being a patriot and decorated war hero.
And all the time the spoilt little Aussie rich boy – ‘about as English as a kangaroo sandwich’ - was being accepted by the establishment and allowed to buy The Times and the Sun.
The bullying, megalomania and disregard for the niceties of the legal side of big business came across, but the performance and writing still conveyed his humour and charisma as well as the undimmed sexual confidence of a man who, in his youth, had been Hollywood handsome.
This bloke Beacham has clearly done his homework. The Daily Telegraph described it as ‘a spell-binding tour-de-force’.
See it if you get the chance (I think it’s still touring).
#
The play was still doing the rounds of the provinces last month when Mike Tully (who, for his sins, worked more closely with the Fatman than most people) saw it in Guildford. However he was not quite as impressed by the portrayal as Sue was. Nevertheless, if anybody can track down a run-sheet for it, we’ll be happy to post it. -Ed.

Ms appropriation

2007-07-20T02:12:00.000+02:00

By Dr Syntax
While the pops reckon that their readers will readily understand who is being written about by simply referring to ‘Kate’, the heavies insist on describing Kate Middleton, Prince William’s beleaguered on/off girlfriend, as Ms Middleton.
Is that because she has expressed a preference? Is she, perchance, an active feminist? Or is it because we are unsure about her marital status? I suspect the answer to all those questions is No. So what’s wrong with that good, plain English, word Miss?
I asked Sally Baker (Mrs), who is the prodnose on The Times and writes its weekly Feedback column. She said she suspects that what I suspect is correct; what’s more likely, she says, is that Ms has ‘undergone some linguistic mission creep’:
‘When it arrived on these shores, Ms was treated as an awkward Americanism and was cautiously reserved for women of unknown marital status. Now, however, we Brits have overcome our initial distaste for it and clasped it to our bosom, to the extent that it is fast becoming the appellation of first choice for all women. A pity.’
I have always tried to avoid arguing with subs but I find it hard to believe that the Brits have clasped Ms to their bosom, or that ‘all women’ are fast switching to its use.
You rarely hear the word used in conversation, by speakers of either sex, other than with an implied sneer (Muz Germaine Greer).
I further suspect that it is rather the ‘appellation of first choice’ for idle reporters who forgot to ask, or don’t know how to find out. Some newspapers now refer on second reference to all females, from teenage girls to grannies, as Ms. If I were a granny, I’d sue.
However, an old friend and QC (a lady of a leftish leaning) was in the Old Bailey fairly recently when the judge interrupted the prosecution and said he found it irritating to hear him constantly referring to the opposition as Ms. He suggested that defence counsel might be so kind as to enlighten the court as to her actual marital status.
She replied: ‘Widow, m’lud.’
The judge said: ‘Then please forgive my impertinence in enquiring, Ms.’
#

The publisher’s Christmas spirit

2007-07-20T02:00:00.000+02:00

By Paul Bannister
Of itself, the decoration of the Enquirer grounds is worth a mention – even if only to help describe the publisher’s mentality.
When Generoso Pope moved to Florida in 1971, he brought with him memories of large public Christmas trees in snowy New York venues. For Christmas ’72, he had his first big tree, a 45-footer, decorating the office’s extensive gardens. Traffic backed up on adjacent Highway One, as people gawked.
GP was gratified. He wasn’t a man to seek attention, and in his grey button-down short-sleeved Sears shirt and grey pants, with his favourite re-soled Florsheim moccasins, strangers didn’t give it to him. He might speak like his favourite movie actor, Humphrey Bogart, but he looked more like a janitor or gardener than a mob-connected big-time publisher.
There was no budget for decorating the gardens and acquiring the tree. It cost whatever it cost, ‘How many hamburgers do I need to eat?’ Pope would growl, if the question of profits came up.
The tab for the giant spruce and the gardens display was around a million dollars a year almost immediately.
‘Mr Pope loved the three or four weeks before Christmas, when he opened up the gardens, with the tree and Christmas display,’ said a former articles editor. ‘He disliked Christmas itself; it upset his beloved routine. He’d be morose around the house and play Mario Lanza songs, one after another, but getting ready to make the visitors happy gave him a deep satisfaction, and he got to show off his prized gardens.’
The manicured grounds really were his pride and joy. He had a few plants in that reminded him of New Jersey, and although it wasn’t a showpiece of rare and exotic plants, it was lush and green. The hedges were trimmed to an exact 9ft 6ins height, the lawns of Bermuda grass were cut exactly three inches high – he used a ruler to check on the gardeners – and it was, well, an engineer’s idea of nature as it should be.
‘He had aerial photographs taken and studied them. He at once saw that the gardeners had followed the same tracks when they mowed the grass, both at his home or at the office,’ said the one-time editor.
‘GP was not pleased. He said it left ridges. You might not be able to see the marks from ground level, but they were clear from the air. The gardeners had to vary their routine.
‘Yet he never minded that the grass got trampled by the Christmas crowds who jostled through the displays. He’d actually beam at some of them while he supervised every detail of where the model railroad went, how the lights were hung. It was like a kid playing with his best toys.’
But GP wasn’t playing. Being the man he was, he decided his paper was going to have the world’s largest Christmas tree, and he’d display it in a decorated landscape suitable to its status. If the Rockefeller Center had a 70ft tree, he’d have a 140ft one.
First, GP had a six foot deep concrete sleeve set into the ground, with a Stonehenge of concrete piers and an array of stout guy wires around it.
This footing and support would hold a tree that was usually around 120 feet tall, and withstand 80 mph winds, or ‘strong gale’ force nine on Sir Francis Beaufort’s scale.
The sump was filled with water, to reduce the chance of the tree becoming a burning bush, and to keep it hydrated for its two weeks of gawker fame.
Once erected, the giant spruce was given some artificial aid. Because very large trees usually don’t have branches for the first 25 feet or so of their trunks, they don’t look much like the traditional six-foot Douglas fir with its branches low to the ground that we see in our living rooms at Christmas.
Pope looked at his untraditional Christkindlein’s Baum with enough room to park a double-deck bus where the presents should go and decreed: ‘Give it more branches!’
A crew of tattooed bikers who were employed to hang the decorations on the tree found themselves affixing giant fir boughs to the trunk, boughs so long they were too heavy just to be nailed on, but needed to be suspended with hidden cables.
Only then, with massive creaking boughs sweeping low over the onlookers’ heads, was the tree decorated with its 15,000 light bulbs, a mile of garland and 1,000 oversized ornaments.
Several hundred red bows added the finishing touch.
Around this forest giant, all across the manicured grounds and lawns of Bermuda grass, was an array of individual displays.
They were Toytown landscapes, complex model railroad layouts, animated Santas and elves, reindeer and chimneys. Bemused busloads of tourists strolled the displays to canned Crosby or Sinatra songs, under the illumination of almost half a million lights strung through the trees and shrubs.
The displays were something, but the prime attraction, the mind-boggler to end them all, was The Tree.
It wasn’t just any tree, the colossus of conifers was claimed as the world’s biggest, and it was the Enquirer’s.
Over the 16 years the tree was erected, maybe two million people pilgrimaged to view it from all over the continent. When you live in December-frozen Michigan, a trip to see a Christmas tree in balmy Florida seems like a very good idea.
They came in busloads, carloads and on walkers. One old dear, driving the curve of Highway One into which the tree was tucked, happened by just at the moment some tired comedian from Pope’s youth was throwing the illuminations switch.
To the old lady’s startled eyes, a 120 foot lighted Christmas tree seemed to leap out into the road beside her, causing her to swerve onto the parallel railroad tracks and get a nose bleed.
That made a paragraph or two in the next day’s local paper, but they never did have the untold story of how the giant got there.
To find the magazine’s annual evergreen and fetch it home was a task given to an Australian journalist who was the wily sole survivor of the PR department purge, thanks possibly to his Dale Carnegie social skills training.
He flew to the Pacific Northwest in the fall and spent weeks with loggers, searching Oregon and Washington for the perfect spruce, one shapely enough and tall enough to please the boss.
Most years, the job was reasonably routine, but when GP heard of a 120 footer put up for the opening of an Oregon mall, he wanted to cap that.
The Tree Team located a 135 ft beauty after three weeks of damp tramping through Bureau of Land Management wilderness and called the office.
Enquirer business manager Dino Gallo flew west. He hired a team of loggers and had Southern Pacific roll up a rail flatcar to carry the forest giant 3,000 miles to Lantana.
All was ready, chainsaws primed, when a uniformed ranger stopped the show. ‘No trees can be cut this year,’ he said. ‘Conditions are too dry. There’s too high a fire danger. Dragging that through the forest could cause a friction fire.’
Thwarted only momentarily, Dino remembered another tree, 126 feet tall, he’d surveyed on a nearby Indian reservation. The Native Americans, he reasoned, lived outside federal laws.
After considerable negotiation with the tribe, a deal was struck.
The Indians would do a rain dance, soaking the ground and safely prepping the area against fire hazards, and the tree could be cut. Much cash changed hands.
The rain dance didn’t work. ‘The old guys can’t remember it properly,’ sighed one brave. That was when the Indians did remember that they’d be in trouble if they started a forest fire. The deal was off.
Dino made for the state capitol in Olympia and talked to the legislators.
Which lobbyists got what we’ll never know, but a special tree-cutting permit was arranged, with conditions.
Platoons of firefighters on five engines joined the Enquirer payroll for the day, an air tanker carrying tons of fire retardant circled overhead and a US National Guard Chinook helicopter was drafted to hook the tree into the sky and deliver it to the waiting rail car without danger of fire-producing friction.
A week later, the rail car halted on the curving line alongside the Enquirer office. The Tree was delivered.
It cost about a million dollars for the one evergreen, but the public got to view it for free.
For all that, GP never got his wish to have the world’s biggest tree.
He found that the Oregon mall’s one-time tree was actually 150 feet tall and had claimed priority in the Guinness Book of World Records.
His tree was in second place. Determinedly, he promoted it annually as the world’s tallest, using qualifying phrases to eliminate the competitor, and sent a series of editors to negotiate with the McWhirter twins who compiled the record book.
Ross and Norris were adamant. They’d turned down a Tasmanian Christmas tree because it was a eucalyptus, not a spruce, they’d disqualified a smokestack decorated as an artificial tree and they weren’t going to give the Enquirer’s annual tall Tannenbaum the official world title.
GP probably never knew which was worse: being frustrated in his purpose, or being unable to fire the McWhirters.
#

First cuttings

2007-07-20T01:49:00.000+02:00

Media Guardian, July 30:
Former Mirror reporter Revel Barker, who was editorial adviser to former Mirror owner Robert Maxwell from 1984 to 1991, said Stott was the only man he knew who "stood up to the bullying tactics of Robert Maxwell".
In his blog on the Gentleman Ranters website, Mr Barker added: "It was perhaps fortunate, for both of them, that much of Stott's ready wit and acerbic humour passed over the publisher's head.
"But Maxwell immediately identified him as a 'cheeky chappy' and appeared to enjoy his company and, sometimes, even to take his advice on newspapers.
"Indeed, arguments between them often ended with a resigned concession from the publisher. 'OK,' he would say. 'You are the editor.'"
+
In the afternoon of Boxing Day, 1989, feature writer Noreen Taylor answered the phone at home and heard a too-familiar voice: ‘Bob Maxwell here. Is your husband at home? I’d like to speak to him, if I may.’
‘Certainly, Mr Maxwell,’ she said, with a laugh. Then she turned to her husband, Roy Greenslade – managing editor of the Sunday Times – and told him: ‘It’s Paul Callan. Doing his Maxwell impersonation, again.’
Greenslade took the phone and said: ‘Piss off Callan,’ into the mouthpiece.
‘No,’ said the caller. ‘It actually is Bob Maxwell. And I’d very much like to offer you the job as editor of the Daily Mirror.’
Maxwell was eventually successful in persuading Greenslade that he was the genuine version. And thus started yet another new era.
Not just another ex-editor, he is a professor of journalism and media commentator of the Guardian and he was kind enough to welcome the launch of this Blog site thus:
Drop in for a quick one at the old hacks’ pub
Calling all ex-Fleet Street journalists! A blog, GentlemenRanters, has been launched today to enable old hacks to reminisce about their days of wines, headlines and deadlines. It’s a cyber replacement for the pubs of the past - such as the Mucky Duck, Stab, Poppins, Barneys, Auntie’s, Harrow, Wine Press, Tipperary, the Cheese and El Vino’s - so that the veterans can rant, recount and recant.
The ‘editorial board’ includes Paddy Byrne (freelance photographer), Ian Skidmore (freelance), Paul Bannister (Daily Mail), Geoffrey Mather (Daily Express), and Revel Barker and Alasdair Buchan (Mirror group). Barker’s opening words to his first posting give a whiff of what to expect: ‘I am old enough to remember the days when...’
Professor Greenslade somehow confused the first group of contributors with our Editorial Board, but no matter: a minor error – unless (or until) those journalists end up becoming members of the said board.
+
And this morning (Friday July 20) Press Gazette’s Axegrinder column reports:
A group of ancient Fleet Street hacks has started a group blog. They are calling themselves the Gentlemen Ranters and they include ex-Mirror executive Revel Barker (who had to cope with Robert Maxwell at his most deranged), ex-Daily Express features editor Geoffrey Mather, author Ian Skidmore and sometime Daily Mail reporter Paul Bannister. ‘Our contributors may not all rank very highly, but they certainly rant,’ says the blog.
Barker, who now lives on the Mediterranean island of Gozo, says from his sun-kissed balcony that the blog was started because washed-up old hacks no longer have Fleet Street bars like El Vino, the Wine Press or the Cheshire Cheese to gather in and tell ‘tales of glory’.
He adds: ‘The blog was created in about three days. Yes, I know… you’ll say it looks like it was. In that case it can only get better.’
Good on you, guys, keep trying, I say.
If it goes on like this we may have to buy a cuttings book.
#

My Life And You Are Welcome To It

2007-07-20T01:11:00.000+02:00

By Ian Skidmore
I won a Golden Microphone after thirty years as a ‘celebrity’ presenter on Radio Wales and a fortnight later they dropped me because I was English.
I took the BBC to a Race Tribunal and there was quite a lot of fuss about it. I had been rewarded with many by-lines on the splash of the Daily Mirror over the years. Now I was the subject.
The Head of BBC Wales told the paper I was a Victor Meldrew figure and the editor said I was too old. He didn’t say the same about Jimmy Young, Humphrey Lyttelton or Alastair Cook, to name but a few.
But the BBC gave me a few grand to keep quiet and I did.
Within a month both the Head and the Editor had been sacked.
But as I sit by my pond, keeping herons off my koi, I do ponder a bit. My Manchester accent has softened on account of marrying above myself and marinating the throat muscles in the benevolent sweat of the juniper. But I hope and pray I have not lost it.
At the time I had 26 million listeners worldwide to my rants. Plainly my bosses at BBC Wales were not among them. Or they might have noticed that I seldom said Yachi dda (I didn’t even know how to spell it).
The best editor I had in my years of Taff-railing was called Bob Atkins. He was an Englishman too, so he was scuppered from the first day.
He called me to Cardiff and said he enjoyed a programme I was doing at the time.
It was called Skidmore’s Island and how it worked was a producer called Jack King knocked at my door with his tape recorder playing and for the next half hour I talked. About books. About neighbours. If anyone knocked at the door I interviewed them and I played music on my radiogram. No scripts; no conception of what was going to happen.
Unfortunately Bob, who liked a drink, took me to the BBC Club in Cardiff and as he carried me out and poured me into a taxi he said, ‘I won’t ask you to explain how the programme works now…’ (which was just as well; it took me ten minutes to tell the driver where I wanted to go).
‘…Do me a memo.’
I didn’t remember that until I was back home in Brynsiencyn on Anglesey and, still pissed, typed out the following:
‘Radio Brynsiencyn -
‘This is your smallest outpost. In the customary fashion of BBC bosses I have slept with the entire staff. But since we have been married for ten years it may not count. Our Uher tape recorder is so old it has a pebble glass window and a thatched lid. Our music department is a wind-up gramophone and our record collection includes Teddy Bears’ Picnic and In A Monastery Garden. In fact that is the extent of our collection.’
Then I sealed and posted it and it wasn’t until I sobered up that I realised I had probably dashed the prospect of a glittering career with an audience of sheep and men who wore clothes that looked as though they had been made from the covers of old prayer books.
What happened was that I got a letter from Bob: ‘Forget Skidmore’s Island. I want a series of twenty Radio Brynsiencyn.’
The trouble was I had forgotten by this time what I had put in the letter.
But… I had a title for my programme, twenty slots at a peak listening time, and a Uher tape recorder I bought for sixteen quid on the same stall at Llangefni market where I had found the wind-up gramophone that was my music department. I had an outside broadcast unit, a sit-up-and-beg bike with an errand boy’s basket on the handlebars. I had a wife with a posh voice… and not an idea of what to do with any of them.
It struck me that was par for the course in my ‘parent’ BBC, and decided to do what they did in similar circumstances.
Surround myself with a staff.
Anglesey being an island I needed a Foreign Editor to handle matters in the dark lands on the other bank of the Menai Strait. Fortunately a chap I had first known on a Bangor weekly paper had just retired. His name was Angus McDairmid and he had some experience of the role. After brilliant coverage of the wrecking of a sailing ship in the Menai Strait he was poached by the BBC and went on to become a distinguished foreign correspondent, covering Washington at the time of Watergate and various wars for the BBC.
Eminently suitable to look after Bangor.
Angus had interviewed world leaders but remained obsessed with his home town, where he was still ‘Gus’ McDermott (his name before being swamped by the Celtic Renaissance of the Sixties).
He used the job to indulge a secret vice. Wherever he had been in the world, however great the crisis, he always found time to visit any town called Bangor. Every week on Radio Brynsiencyn, until his sad death, he told an eager world about them.
The programme was beginning to take shape.
A cleaning staff is vital because broadcasters are a messy lot. Fortunately one was at hand: the love of my life, Rose Roberts, who already cleaned for us and ruled us with a rod of iron. I christened her Attila the Hoover and I was only partly joking. Dirt was terrified of her and dust disappeared at her touch.
Rose had a voice with the carrying power of a giant crane. She had appeared in the programme for only a few weeks when she took a day trip to London. She was queuing for the Palladium and passing pleasantries with her companions that could have been heard in Newcastle upon Tyne
‘Blimey,’ came a voice from far down the queue: ‘It’s Attila the Hoover!’
No Welsh broadcasting station is complete without a choir. At a lifeboat charity evening I heard a quartet called the Oscars, and immediately recruited them.
A pal of mine, Derek Jones was a bit worried about his teenage son whose singing voice had just broken.
He was keen on broadcasting so Derek asked if we would teach him the art of interviewing. I was a bit reluctant. Whenever I heard the lad sing, the hair on the back of the head lifted and I had a sense that he had been touched by God.
His name was Aled Jones. Done quite well since, but at that time his preoccupation was a sandwich toaster he had bought with his first earnings and he was forever thrusting toasted sandwiches at you.
But I thought, ‘Give the lad a chance’ and employed him at a fiver a week.
Aled did nothing by halves. He played tennis to county standard; a fine footballer, he was offered trials with professionals, and he was so keen to get his O-levels that in the interval of a concert before most of America in the Hollywood Bowl he sat in his dressing room swotting. Aled went out with my wife on a couple of interviews and picked the art up so quickly he was soon doing them on his own. His dad told me he nearly drove his parents mad practising interviewing on them.
A remarkable boy. Never a trace of nerves. Singing for the Royal Family he forgot the lyric and made up one as he sang along.
He went to record Memories for Andrew Lloyd Webber. ‘Like to do a run-through?’ asked Lloyd Webber.
‘Can we go for a take?’ asked Aled.
They did and the first take was all that was needed.
‘Good God,’ said Webber ‘It took Barbra Streisand a week to do that.’
His Dad told me: ‘I didn’t like to explain he was in a hurry to watch Match of the Day.’
Aled has been blessed with three gifts. The voice of an angel and his parents, Derek and Ness, who kept his feet firmly nailed to the ground.
When he was awarded his first Gold Disc the BBC planned a huge reception in Cardiff for the award ceremony.
‘Out of the question,’ said Derek. ‘He would have to miss school.’ The BBC had to hire a helicopter for the ceremony; it landed on the playing field of his school in Menai Bridge.
The programme was beginning to take shape: a ‘pirate’ radio station that parodied the commercial radio of the day. We had a signature tune; a group of producers and broadcasters sang the jingles to announce the items; Celia [Celia Lucas, ex Daily Mail: Mrs Skidmore] did interviews and I headed the whole thing with a rant.
Wearing a dinner jacket, of course.
The BBC printed T shirts, ties and mugs with the station logo which started to appear in the oddest places all over the world. We had the highest listening figures on BBC Wales; a ‘club’ of listeners was formed in Boston in the USA and the daughter of a friend started a Radio Bryn fan club at Oxford University.
Islands can be dull paces in winter. Anxious to get away, a neighbour toured the Loire. By the river one day he switched on his radio as he unwrapped a picnic… and heard the signature tune of Radio Bryn doing an outside broadcast – outside his house.
Celia recorded the programme in our kitchen, rough cut it and sent it to Dewi Smith, head of light entertainment in Wales, for final polishing and transmission.
Then a funny thing happened.
Everyone was convinced it was a real pirate station and I started to get applications for jobs. WIs, youth clubs and at least one school asked if they could tour the studios and BBC Controller Ulster heard it while driving across Anglesey.
He rang my editor to ask ‘Do you have a studio in the cottage or does it come to you via landline?’
We were even a page lead in the Daily Mail.
The series ended seventeen years ago. It is still talked about in Wales.
Everything in what I laughingly call my career was an accident. This was the happiest of them all.
#

There’s more by Ian Skidmore on his own site:
http://skidmoresisland.blogspot.com/

The first edition starts here:

2007-07-19T12:52:00.000+02:00

Posted Fiday July 13, 2007

Whiffenpoofs and Rankers

2007-07-12T19:58:00.000+02:00

Welcome to this first issue of our blog. The title, as the literati among you will have quickly spotted, is a slight amendment of a lyric/poem by Rudyard Kipling, journalist and author and first English language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His poem was Gentlemen Rankers – one reason neither Jonathan Ross nor John Rossall made it onto the Editorial Board – which was brazenly stolen by Yale University to become the Whiffenpoof Song. Mr Kipling's exceedingly fine verse (about soldiers) had:
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha' mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!
Yale’s choir merely changed Rankers to Songsters, altered damned to doomed, cleaned up the grammar, and had three baas instead of only two plus a yah. Not, then, the sort of original work for which that institution claims fame.
Our contributors may not all rank very highly, but they certainly rant. Hence the name.
Freelance photographer PADDY BYRNE – a familiar name on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams (as the Street of Ink had not yet become) – popped along to the National Portrait Gallery to celebrate the Golden Years of Fleet Street which, as he says, is happening a bit late for most of us who were actually doing the gold-panning.
IAN SKIDMORE, successful (against his better judgment) freelance in Anglesey and Chester, prolific author (24 books published) and broadcaster, sometime Northern Night News Editor of the Daily Mirror, writes on the problems caused by having more columns than the Parthenon – including undergoing a sex change to write for the Manchester City News and becoming a streetwalker for the Sunday Pic. Elsewhere he writes about his short-lived experience as a Bevan Boy.
And we take a brief look at the little-known work of academic and poet KEITH PRESTON who wrote poems about columns while contributing seven of his own (columns) a week - two on Wednesdays - and editing the Books page with his other hand, on the Chicago Daily News.
Anybody who thought Beaverbrook and Maxwell were megalomaniacs will learn from former Daily Mail man PAUL BANNISTER what comparative pussycats they were in his description of newspaper life in the Sunshine State of Florida. And there’ll be more on this subject in later editions/additions of/to the Blog.
GEOFFREY MATHER, ex Daily Express columnist and features editor, says that “In Our Day” we had to make our own enjoyment – and reveals that one of the ways he did it was to invent well known old-fashioned Lancastrian customs for the local papers to remember.
Ex Mirror man REVEL BARKER looks at (but doesn’t buy) the newly published diaries of his former colleague Ally Campbell and also has a whinge about The Times Letters.
But none of this matters, in the end, because, as ALASDAIR BUCHAN reveals, nobody out there was taking a blind bit of notice about all our efforts, anyway.
However, we trust that our newly acquired readership is, er, reading, and hopefully enjoying these efforts. You can either scroll down the page to see everything, or use the Archive link on the left to find your own favourites.
Every article has a button on which anybody is entitled to click and add comments (which, please understand, may be “moderated” at this end). Comments will welcomed, as will offered contributions.
- The Editors.
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The golden boys

2007-07-12T18:59:00.000+02:00

By Paddy Byrne

“This is my photographer,” said the new girl on the Express to an interviewee, introducing the artist in light and shade who stood beside her.
“Yes,” said the snapper. “And these are her cameras, and this is her flash and I’ll see you back in the office, love, when you’ve done your photos.”

Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, in the 60s. Photo: Getty Images

Newspaper photographers are not as other men (most of them in the business still are men). They are not even much like reporters, although that’s probably the nearest trade profession or calling to ours that there is. Generally the two types were always great mates, despite the joshing; they called us Monkeys and we called them Blunt Nibs (or just Nibs) but we spent a lot of time in each other’s company, a lot of it just sitting around waiting for things to happen or for people to turn up. We were forced to talk to each other.
Where the Monkey name came from seems lost, now. Some say it’s because all we had to do was point a box and press a button – “and even a monkey can be trained to do that.” Others say it’s because we spent so much time perched in trees. The Nibs resented that, because we could justify claims for “grats for elevation” (for renting a step-ladder or borrowing a bedroom window) on our exes, and they couldn’t.
On the other hand, they travelled in our cars – because we had all the equipment in them – and they charged expenses as if they'd driven themselves, so it worked out about equal, I guess.
It matters not. Our day has finally come. About a quarter of a century late, but it’s come.
From now until the third week in October it’s our work that is on display at the National Portrait Gallery. They are actually celebrating “the golden age of Fleet Street” – a bit like this Blog site, in fact – and about time for that, too.
We panchromatic artists don’t claim all the credit for the gold that was mined in those days of mass circulation and of glory. There were other people writing the copy that illustrated our work, and presumably subs and layout men somewhere, fetching up well after the streets were aired, to draw the pages and make the gold fit the usually miserable amount of space that was allocated to display our craftsmanship.
The exhibition, Daily Encounters: Photographs from Fleet Street, covers the period up to the mid-80s, in other words ending around the time that people like Murdoch and Maxwell were exercising their muscle; sorting out the inkies and introducing colour, true, but screwing up everything else and firing good people, and worse, spoiling all our fun.
That was the end of The Street, geographically and spiritually.
The writing (and the snapping) was probably on the wall by then, anyway. The game had been invaded by the Paps, looking for an easy buck. Their nickname, at least, we can trace: it’s Italian dialect for a noisy irritating mosquito, the paparazzo, coined as a name for a photographer in Fellini’s film, La Dolce Vita, in 1960.
Your milkman could, and would, buy a Brownie and stand outside Tramp waiting for George Best to fall out of the door. With no employer and therefore no rules and no code, they would go where the pros wouldn’t venture – hiding in the bushes with a long Tom to watch Fergie having her toes sucked clean, or photographing Princess Di in what she thought was the privacy of her gym.

Di was without doubt the end of an era, and the end of an error. Most days she, or somebody on her behalf, would ring the office and say that if a snapper was in a certain place at a certain time, he’d be able to get a picture of her, apparently snatched, even if she was officially on a “private” visit.
And the readers who rushed to buy the papers with her photo on the front would tut-tut and say, “Poor child, she’s not allowed any privacy… Oh, look! Here’s an even better picture of her.”
The straight Fleet Street economics of the situation were that a picture of Di, on the Front, would typically put the day’s circulation up by more than five per cent. And remember, we were talking in real millions of copies in those days. Diana had displaced Joan Collins as the picture editors’ favourite. She was replaced by Posh Spice. What does that tell you about our readers – fickle, or what?
Then almost inevitably the Paps – the closest of whom might have been the best part of half a mile away when her fatal crash happened – got the blame for it.
Right or wrong, the game was up. The show was over.
But thankfully we still have our memories. Without any doubt we had the best years out of the game. The exhibition recognises that, even if we didn’t, at the time. At least we have something to celebrate.
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There stands the enemy

2007-07-12T05:13:00.000+02:00

By Ian Skidmore
I saw I was down on the diary to cover the Miners’ Gala on Hexthorpe Fields in Doncaster and to interview the guest of honour, Mr Aneurin Bevan.
I found him in the cocktail bar of the Danum, where in the future I was to sleep in a bath, to beat a UP man in interviewing Charlie Chaplin.
I knew it was the Great Socialist because of his Savile Row suit, the shirt from Thos Pink, the Lobb boots and the Trumper’s haircut. A fragrance by Floris lay heavy on the air.
He was knee deep in aldermen and I hovered uneasily at the edge until he summoned me to come forward and be identified.
“The Yorkshire Evening News? I am honoured. Come into the body of the chapel and tell me what I might buy you to drink.”
I said could I have a half of bitter and he said, “A HALF OF BITTER?” in that squeaky voice he had. “A HALF? OF BITTER BEER? You cannot dip the pen of eloquence in the watery ink of bitter beer... A large Scotch for my literary friend!”
In those days I had Scotch only at Hogmanay and I had never been anybody’s literary anything.
The minutes flew by in the sort of quiet content I expect you get by the yard in heaven. When the time came he put his arm round my shoulders and we walked together to the Fields. Hexthorpe? Elysian.
The miners parted like the Dead Sea and we strode through their ranks. As he climbed on to the dray from which he was to address them he was careful to plant me just where he could see me. He said I gave him confidence. I wasn't surprised. I assumed that's how it was with bosom friends.
The miners had been drinking Barnsley bitter since dawn and it was a hot day. The sun on their heads sent the bitter a-thump and you could see it lifting their scalps. They were looking for someone to tear apart and Bevan gave them someone.
Me.
“The enemy,” he explained to them, “is not the capitalist in his Rolls-Royce and his Savile Row suit…” (I thought: there is only one bugger here in a Savile Row suit, but the thought seemed unworthy and I banished it.)
“No,” he said in a triumphal squeak. “The enemy is not the National Coal Board in their swanky marble offices. No… THERE STANDS THE ENEMY!”
And he pointed at me.
“The prostituted press of our country - that is the enemy,” he said.
They would have torn me apart there and then but they were transfixed by his eloquence. My notebook was all wet and soggy and I didn't know if it was rain or tears.
As I shuffled off the field a pariah, I felt an arm round my shoulders. It was him.
“Mr Bevan,” I said, “I will probably get the sack for saying it, but I think you are a right bastard.”
“Oh,don't be like that,” he squeaked. “We both got a job to do. Come and have a drink.”
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Treadling a goat

2007-07-12T04:32:00.000+02:00

By Geoffrey Mather
The Lancashire of weft, warps and weavers was also where, if fun were not invented, it scarcely existed at all. Fun did not come down a wire or out of the sky and it was no worse for that. It lay in such things as running and jumping, wrestling and reading; in going to conversaziones (concerts: and whatever became of them?), in feats of various kinds - of eating prodigiously or fasting relentlessly - or wrestling bears at fairs (a Lancastrian who wrestled one such animal is alleged to have said, on being defeated, ‘I would have beaten yon mon if he’d taken his fur coat off’).
Newspapers reflected this fun, and they gave considerable space to Old Customs. As a trainee journalist on what was then called The Northern Daily Telegraph, I had a news editor named TC Colling, who employed me at £1 a week, but only after asking how many languages I spoke. I could speak two at the time: English and dialect, neither particularly well, but I said three, and included French, because my guess was that he would be either unable or unwilling to put me to the test. I was right.
I watched him mellowing and whitening down the years, and somewhere in this time he became an Old Customs man. He knew, as I knew, that people love old customs like they love their dogs. They harbour them in far-off recesses of the mind to be stroked in silent recollection, or in pub talk. Somewhere in old tin boxes, a man will keep yellowing cuttings of some claim, monstrous or otherwise.
TC’s name was Cuthbert, but he was never anything other than Mr Colling to everyone, including his second wife. In due time, he became a victim of mine. I had moved to the nationals and he still sat at his desk concerned with East Lancashire both past and present.
Old customs are minefields for the unwary. Consider treadling a goat, grain humping, huffling a pig, or going to watch a dancing troupe known as the Britannia Cocoanutters. It takes a clever, possibly a three-language, man to discern the true and false in them.
Treadling a goat is an invention of mine. There is no such thing. So is grain humping at Preston Docks. Huffling a pig... well, I am not sure about that. If you believe that Lancastrians in pubs kicked a pig around in stockinged feet then you believe in huffling. The Britannia Cocoanutters existed and, so far as I know, exist yet. They find pleasure in dancing around with blackened faces.
I had been bemused for some time by newspaper pictures of old men with big moustaches standing at the doors of butchers’ shops. The captions were similar: ‘Little would you guess that this is now where the new town hall stands,’ and so on. I wrote to TC a letter which went something like this:
“It has no doubt come to your notice that in the old days, there was a custom on Haslingden moors known as bunting, or treadling, a goat. You will remember it well. The idea was that you put a number of iron hoops in the ground and the first man to bunt, or treadle, a goat through all the hoops without the goat’s horns touching the tops or sides was awarded a hot barm cake and a pint of mulled ale.
“I well recall an old gentleman named John o’Jacks who was a champion bunter. One day he turned up for a match a bit the worse for drink, so that instead of bunting the goat, the goat bunted him. Laugh! We did laugh, sir! It so happens that I still have my old treadling irons and I thought you might like to look at them, but I would be much obliged if you could return them, as they are of great sentimental value.”
The treadling irons were, in fact, hoops from brewery barrels, large, ungainly things kindly provided by the then landlord, Bill Martland, of the Adelphi pub across the road from the newspaper office. I delivered them to the front counter and left them there. The letter bore a fictitious name and a non-existent address on Haslingden moor, which is vast and possibly uncharted. I then had the satisfaction of seeing my Old Custom printed in full and in black type and waited for years for it to appear in an authentic book on old Lancashire. It has not done so yet, and I am surprised. There’s time...
As for the hoops, I have no doubt that TC returned them and I had a vision of an old postman somewhere in the moorland grass, trudging about at the age of 103 wondering what in God’s name he was carrying on his back and trying to find an address totally unknown at the GPO. At this disastrously late stage, I apologise to him for involving him in something that was none of his business.
Being the inventor of an old custom gives one panache. I was encouraged by the experience and decided to take on another Old Customs expert employed by the same newspaper. Harry Kay, a man of great humour, had a column in which he frequently referred to a jumper named Jack Higgins.
Higgins was, indeed, a remarkable jumper. He could leap across a canal, put out a lighted candle floating in the middle with one foot, and land on the other bank without apparent effort. He could also jump over heaven-knows-how-many barrels, and there were pictures to prove it. One of these pictures was printed so many times that the metal block was almost worn away. The story always ended with the same words (since the story was never re-written): ‘He was a jumper was Jack Higgins.’
I thought we needed a new hero, so I wrote to Harry (a man with whom I drank, incidentally), in these terms:
“Whatever happened to the humpers at Preston Docks? Many’s the time I remember, as a child, seeing them carrying their huge sacks of grain from the cargo boats in endless procession, moaning their old Lancashire songs ... ‘Hook and carry, hook and carry.’ My old grandfather was one of the first humpers and the only man who could carry two sacks at one go. Hack was his name. Hack Jiggings. He was known far and near for his exploits among the humpers, and even at the age of 94 he was still to be seen humping his two sacks and moaning those old songs.
“Well, one day, he was humping and he went between the ship and dockside in an almighty splash, and some said it was the drink, and some said it was his age, but he never really got back into form again and he has gone into legend with others of his kind.”
The last sentence read, ‘He was a humper was Hack Jiggings.’
The whole letter was printed and not a word was said. Not one contradiction. I met Harry Kay in the pub some time later and he just stared at me, laughing gently. I suppose he guessed the truth, but he made no reference to it. It takes a gentleman to do that.
#
Geoffrey Mather, former assistant editor of the Daily Express in Manchester, joined the Accrington Observer for 12s 6d a week and was bought out by the Lancashire Evening Telegraph for £1 a week. The above is adapted from his book Tacklers' Tales (Carnegie), published in 1993, and still in print. Now he writes a regular column, often with news of old colleagues, on his own website, UK North Perspective: http://www.northtrek.co.uk/
Always worth a look.

Living in a democracy

2007-07-12T03:30:00.000+02:00

By Paul Bannister
Life at the National Enquirer had a flavour all its own, and it often tasted like fear.
Working in Lantana (FLA) was an edgy adventure, if sometimes a dangerous one for your career, because publisher and owner Gene Pope ran a very tight ship and instructed his hatchet men to fire at will. Or, if not at will, at least when he said to fire.
And they did. It was normal on Friday afternoons to see small knots of red-eyed young women sobbing farewell to one of their friends, who’d lost her job at short notice.
Dismissal wasn’t really that bad. Many editorial staff who were fired, hung around the area freelancing. They got handsome fees, worked a fraction as hard as the staffers and were not subject to the last-minute assignments that forced staff reporters out of town despite other, domestic, commitments. We envied the freelances, their days at the Banana Boat bar, their freedom. It seemed they’d been playing the tuba the day it rained gold coins.
Then Pope issued an edict, ex cathedra: no Florida-based freelancers would be employed. It was a typical GP move, cutting the Gordian knot. In one easy move he put fear of firing back into staffers’ lives and increased the flow of ideas from other parts of the US.
It was only one of the ways Pope kept control. GP was Mafia mobster Frank Costello’s godson, and knew all about power and influence. His father, Generoso Sr was said to ‘run New York’.
The Popes were connected, but when three of the New York mob families went to war, Costello got sent down, and his grip on power began slipping away.
Pope later said Frank made some bad decisions, and Pope’s New York Enquirer became a victim. GP had to ship the paper from its New Jersey printing works, and there was a dispute with the Teamsters union. The story went round that one of GP’s delivery drivers had been found dead in the back of his truck, a note pinned to the body with a knife stuck through the man’s heart.
The note said simply ‘Don’t fuck with us.’
Pope got the message. His papers, his guy, he’d be next. He announced that the Enquirer was headed south, to union-free Florida. Enquirer employees were told to show up at Grand Central with their families for the train ride south – GP didn’t fly – and his henchmen started handing out train tickets. That was when those employees found out if they had a job or not. Most of the 80 or so families had sold or rented out their homes, packed their goods for shipment. They were going to a new life.
They showed up at the station expecting to embark on their new adventure, and about one family in three found they had no ticket. They were not along for the ride. They were fired. Tough about your home, tough about packing your goods.
It was Pope’s way. A man who’d let his dog eat right off his dinner plate, he had a mental disconnect when it came to indifference to others’ feelings – or futures.
As corporate policy, he pitted editorial teams against each other, with the loss of their jobs the penalty for the losing team. Once, he pink-slipped the whole public relations department of about 20 people at an hour’s notice. Another time, when he came across a memo with a word misspelled by a photo assistant, he didn’t even ask whose error it was. He just growled, “Fire the dummy.”
In later life, Pope’s second wife, Lois, told how his favourite question was ‘What do you want from me?’ and said he told her to keep out of his business.
He even canned the guy who likely saved his life. In New York, GP was travelling to a lunch appointment with then-editor Ted Mutch. An oncoming truck swerved into their lane. Pope’s chauffeur pulled off a miracle of evasion, swerving up the sidewalk and around a telegraph pole before bouncing back into the roadway.
GP never said a word.
After lunch, at which Pope had his favourite meal, chicken soup (which he believed kept him healthy) followed by pasta, Ted was surprised to find the limo outside the restaurant, with no chauffeur in sight.
“You drive, Ted,” said Pope. “Yes, sir,” said Ted. “Where’d the chauffeur get to?”
“Hadda fire the stiff. He nearly got us killed,” said Pope.
At the other end of the scale, Pope could be loyal to his crew. Ted told me once of taking a glamorous woman to dinner. As they entered the restaurant, a couple of drunks made a crude remark to her. Ted, a mild-mannered man, left it alone and checked in with the maitre d’, who recognised him as the new editor of the Enquirer.They got a good table, and a complimentary bottle of wine. Ten minutes into dinner, Ted saw four large men enter and efficiently remove the two drunks.
“I excused myself for a moment and slipped outside,” Mutch said. “In the alleyway alongside the restaurant, the large men were using baseball bats to give the drunks a bad beating. One of them stopped to nod to me. ‘Mr Pope’s compliments,’ he said. “The maitre d’ had called someone to tell him about the insult.” It was Pope’s way. He could gift you with protection, or he could fire you. That message was plainly on the wall for all of us, so much so that, in my second month at the paper, a Scots editor held a ‘bank balance party’. He wanted to celebrate the fact that he now had enough in his bank account to move back to Scotland and set up house again if he got fired in Florida. It was an eerie feeling: we were celebrating ahead of the editor’s being fired. In fact, he hung on for years, but a metaphorical sword was dangling over our heads the whole time.We were also constantly and accurately reminded that we were highly paid, to shut up and get on with it.
Nobody was exempt. When one of Pope’s closest henchmen, Guy Galiardo, who was company secretary as well as a lifelong friend, was looking over the extensive office gardens with GP’s wife Lois, she made some suggestions about changes to the Christmas decorations.
Pope noticed the changes and brought up the matter with Galiardo.“Why’d you move that?” he growled.“Because Lois told me to.”
“See if you can get her to sign your pay cheque next week,” Pope glowered. “Meantime, move it back the way it was.”
Pope could be cruel. An editor presented him with an extremely expensive bottle of Scotch at a meeting, a bad error, as it put GP, a man who never wanted to be beholden, in a position of having to return a favour, and that was part of Mob code.
At the next meeting of the same group, Pope referred to the gift: “I took a sip of that cheap booze you gave me,” he said, showing his large teeth. “I must not be paying you enough. Stuff tasted like kerosene. I used it to clean the carb on my Chevy.” The other editors took mental note, and GP didn’t get any suck-up gifts after that, though I did present him with a copy of a book I’d authored, appropriately inscribed, as a thanks for his permission to use the magazine’s photographs in it. I have to admit, I was highly nervous about the offering but decided it might be an insult not to pay tribute. I chose my time carefully, going the day after the paper locked up, when he was least stressed, and right after lunch, when he’d cooked his own hamburger as usual. I also insured my safety with a discreet phone call to one of his secretaries to see how mellow he was at the moment.The planets were in conjunction and he took my Danegeld affably, but it was always a challenge to the heart monitor to enter his office…
Sometimes, the mountain came to Mahomet, and the boss would patrol the buildings with a sergeant major’s inspecting eye. Once, when he used the staff men’s room instead of his private one, Pope noticed a couple of cigarette butts in a urinal.Within minutes, a sign went up in the toilet, over his initials in the red ink only he was allowed to use in the office.
“Anyone caught throwing cigarette butts in the urinals will have to remove them with his teeth.”
The urinals had never been so spotless...
When Lois and her mother once walked past a line of people waiting to view the Enquirer’s Christmas decorations, Pope called them back.“Where do you guys think you’re going?” he demanded. “No cheating, everyone waits in line here.”
His wife and mother-in-law turned, humiliated, and joined the end of the line. “This place is a democracy!” Pope told his attendant editor, who was so afraid of the democratic despot he didn’t repeat the story for a couple of years.
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Paul Bannister was on the Bolton Evening News before moving to Fleet Street to work on Cycling magazine (next door to Mick's Cafe). He joined the Morning Telegraph, Sheffield, then the Odhams Sun and the Daily Mail, Manchester, before becoming a senior reporter on the National Enquirer.

The Last Cuckoo

2007-07-11T16:35:00.000+02:00

By Revel Barker
I am old enough to remember the days when the Night News Desk always deputed somebody in the news room to read the Front of The Times, to see what they had that was interesting… among the packed columns of small ads.
It didn’t often reveal much (although it was probably more frequently a source of stories to follow up than it is these days) but maybe once a month there’d be something hidden away there: an announcement, an engagement, a legal notice – something.
At the same time somebody would be reading the Letters Page. This was always more productive, for it was where the nobs wrote to get a point across, and often where public statements were first announced.
It was also one of the best written parts of the paper. No journalists, but no end of experts riding their hobby horses. And wit (especially in the last short letter in the bottom right corner), and often wisdom.
After my own paper, The Times Letters was always the first place to which I turned in a morning.
It was a habit I found difficulty in kicking – at least until the Letters went on line.
Nowadays I do my gleaning of the blatts courtesy of the Internet. This isn’t only because I’m an impoverished pensioner: my better excuse is that I live on a rock in the middle of the Mediterranean and sometimes the newsprint copy takes several days to get here.
Still, all well and good. Everything is there, from the columnists to the famous Law Reports. It’s only the Letters Page that gives me gip.
On-line it’s a hotchpotch, a mish-mash, a veritable dog’s breakfast. Every individual letter needs to be accessed separately and individually (unlike the splendid Daily Letters page on the Telegraph site, which makes them all accessible on one click).
That’s bad enough, by merely being user-unfriendly. But worse is that the lead letter is not necessarily the one at the top of the screen. Worse still, for some reason they do not even appear on-line in date order – so the first letter might not even be today’s date. It’s almost as if they have taken a week’s input and jumbled them up.
The Internet is supposed to make things easy.
The first thing web designers learn (and I write, perhaps somewhat boastfully, as former webmaster of one of the first 50 websites in the world) is that nothing should be further away from the start than three clicks. With The Times Letters, the piece you might want to read could be as many as 16 clicks away from the Home Page.
And even then, you might not find what you’re looking for. Even if it’s a letter you wrote yourself.
There’s the rub.
I had written a letter to the paper and I couldn’t find it. I assumed it hadn’t made the grade.
Then I got an email from a chum referring to it (the wondrous benefits of the Internet, eh?). But even then, I couldn’t find it.
There you go.
Something else that couldn’t possibly have happened in our day...
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Gentlemen Ranters does not have a Letters page - yet. But readers are invited to click on the Comment link at the foot of any posting and contribute an opinion.- Ed.

Lucky, for some

2007-07-11T10:49:00.000+02:00

By Alasdair Buchan
Many years ago when I was on the Daily Star the editor decided we had to have a mascot. I was told to go and get a dog which I was to take to events such as the National Boat Show (which we sponsored ) and have it photographed with celebrities. Realising that straightforward refusal could offend, I went along with it hoping that something would turn up to put an end to such a humiliating - and apparently unending - assignment.
First I had to get the dog. So we went to the Battersea Dogs Home where, on their advice, I got a beautiful mongrel puppy and I was photographed holding it as it licked my face. We ran it big all over the front page (Save this Dog at Christmas, etc) and asked readers to suggest a name for the Daily Star mascot. (My instruction was that the entry nominating Lucky as a name was to win - remember that name in a moment).
Next came the question of where the dog was to live. I said no; the photographer, Stan Meagher, said no. He said he already had a dog. I played the trump card of the new baby at home being enough for one reporter and the snapper had to take the dog home.
To cut a short story shorter. Lucky went home to Stan's, developed distemper and died within days. Then Stan's family pet caught distemper and died too to the great distress of Stan's family.
Fortunately the mascot idea died with Lucky.
And the point of the story? We never mentioned Lucky again and not one reader ever contacted us to ask what happened to the dog. Or to the competition.
So never get carried away with concepts like "Our readers" or "Our viewers" - the bastards aren't reading or watching.
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Poems written on columns

2007-07-10T23:39:00.000+02:00

Keith Preston was a professor and a poet who, in his 30s in the Roaring Twenties, turned from academia to journalism as a columnist on the Chicago Daily News.
He contributed a daily column, plus a totally separate, extra, one every Wednesday. He also edited the paper’s books pages.
When he died in 1927 at the age of 42, he was described by the literary editor of the New York World, as “probably the most brilliant of the long succession of witty columnists that Chicago has produced in the last thirty years....He was a scholar turned newspaper man, and his excessive good nature made his shafts easy to take.”
He was, therefore, ideally qualified to describe the art or craft of The Columnist.

The Column In History
Great Emperors in days of old
On columns did their deeds unfold
To fill his column Trajan hurled
Red Ruin round the Roman World
Still columns mighty deeds record
But peace has triumphed o'er the sword.
I read a book or feed my cat;
My column tells the world of that.

The Top O' the Column
Day after day our daily muse,
Perched in this high position
Watches the fluctuating news
Edition by edition
From noon to early afternoon
Home, tenth, to final makeup
She sees the news room change its tune
In shake-up after shake-up
She watches the alleged confirmed
And the confirmed denied
Whereat what is politely termed
her mindpuffs up with pride.
Our muse seems light to sober men
Her mind no weighty matter
But when her mind's made up,why,then
You bet she's a standpatter.

[Editor's note: a standpatter is, fairly obviously if you think about it, one who stands pat, someone who is opposed to change. In poker it is a player who plays the cards with which he was originally dealt.]

No-one but a bloghead

2007-07-10T22:22:00.000+02:00

By Ian Skidmore
Here I am growing yet another crop of words on this strip of limitless space called a blog.
Did it on paper, man and boy, for nigh on fifty years.
I have been the sole proprietor of so many columns I am known in the trade as the Parthenon Kid. Got my name over the door in the end, but when I started it was the High Noon of the Flamboyant Pseudonym. In the trade magazines I was at the same time Bookworm, Hod Carrier and Pro Bono Publico. In the Hairdressers, Wigmakers and Parfumiers Gazette I was A Chiel Amang Ye, which any parfumier worth his ambergris knew was a subtle allusion to the chiel in the poem by Burns who gathered notes.
In those days a reader had to keep his wits about him. The Manchester City News changed me into a Greek lady called Thea Page (Theatre Page to the wide awake). I was Townsman in the Yorkshire Evening News; in the Yorkshire Evening Post, which was renowned for its perversity, I was Countryman; I was even Streetwalker - I still think I could sue - in the Sunday Pictorial.
I have never written downright rude columns about anyone. Not even the bank managers I have been tortured by, though I have been tempted over the years. I feel too sorry for them. The one thing you can rely on with banks is that they treat their staffs even worse than they do the customers. I am so sorry for them that I feed them money. Feeding a habit I have had for years, called marriage
When the trade figures go up, you know my Head Ferret has been to the dress shops. Which is very puzzling because she insists everything in her wardrobe is several years old. Of course she does go to every dress shop twice. Once to buy and once to take it back, because she no longer likes it.
I do not use a great deal of money for booze anymore, alas. Just an evening G and T in memory of the British Empire and an occasional mouthwash of the cheaper Champagne. In Britain, indeed, I am a near teetotaller. I used to be a teetotaller world wide till I went to the Loire on a chara and managed to fall off the wagon at a wine tasting. Now I am nominally teetotal only in areas covered by the National Health Service because I don't want to be disqualified from going into hospital on the grounds that I am not healthy. You have to be pretty healthy to survive hospitals these days.
I fear I occasionally declare our dining room French territory and keep a tricolour in the drawer under my shirts for lightning nationality changes.
Alas, the days have gone when I cashed so many cheques in my Anglesey local, the bank manager thought I was being blackmailed by the landlord. I am, in consequence, occasionally prey to a hangover. On such occasions I do not put in my teeth because I cannot bear the deafening click and I am trying to teach the dog to mew, because the bark forces the roots of my hair through the scalp and I am shattered by the sound of hair crashing onto the carpet.
There was a time when hangovers were delivered every morning with the papers. Those were the days when I was so keen on retirement as an art form, I worried that by the time I retired I would be too old to enjoy it. So I retired when I was thirty and had fifteen glorious years in a mist of perpetual revelry. Called it free lancing and hoped no one would notice. Then I went back to work, because there is very little money in perpetual revelry.
Champagne being the price it is, there was no money left to buy a weekly Health Stamp. When I went back to work it was fine. I wrote a few books, did a couple of TV series and hired the voice out for money. In no time I had enough to put back the stamps, even before the DOS realised they weren't there. Doesn’t make any difference. They could still have docked a fiver a week off my pension because I paid late. I suppose if I hadn't paid at all they would have shot me. In fairness you can appeal and when I did, a Portia among women came from the Contributions Agency in Colwyn Bay and took pity on me.
Can anyone tell me why we pay tax on our pensions? We have already paid tax on the money which paid the contributions to our pension. Why should we have to pay twice?
And they hanged Dick Turpin.
No wonder the Treasury lets the banks get away with murder. Not just because every time a Treasury mandarin retires he walks straight onto the board of a bank. It is because they could both give Jesse James three black masks and still beat him when it comes to Stand and Deliver time. This job that has bank-rolled Britain, I am now doing free. Even though I agree with Dr Johnson: No-one but a blockhead writes, except for money.
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Campbell's kingdom

2007-07-10T22:14:00.000+02:00

By Revel Barker
I haven't read the Campbell diaries, nor in all probability will I bother, not least because on the evidence of the lifted quotes I have read in the newspapers (on-line) the grammar is so sloppy, the writing so unstructured, that I would find it irritating. True, they are supposed to be extracts from a diary written late at night: but they are "edited", even "sanitised", extracts, edited by Campbell with the assistance of his old boss at the Mirror, Richard Stott. Both of them can write a bit. The least they might have done is clean up the syntax.
If, on the other hand, the fault is down to inadequate retyping, at speed, under pressure to meet the newsprint or agency deadline, heads should roll. Shorthand is long gone out the window, but typing - in a new world devoid of competent (or any kind of) subbing - is nowadays more important than it ever was.
It's fairly common, among our Old Farts' group, to say what would have happened "in our day". Nothing would have happened because even the lousiest copy typists (and on the Mirror we had one who didn't speak any recognisable form of English) were protected unto death by SOGAT. But now there is no such bodyguard system for the inept. Typists who press Send or Submit without reading their own copy or having it checked should be fired.
On the spot. These days it would be allowed. It doesn't happen, because editorial management is also incompetent and idle and, if its internal memos are any clue, similarly grammatically challenged.
As to the much-advertised revelations of the diaries themselves, within an hour of publication the Press Association reported that there was "nothing new" in those 816 pages. Possibly their reporter could reach that conclusion with such impressive speed - though I doubt it.
A day later the Daily Telegraph's Rachel Sylvester [who she? -Ed] writes that "politically, the diaries are not particularly revealing."
Oh really? Rachel and her chums knew all that stuff all the time then, did they?
Then why is everybody going on at such length about the political equivalent of those "Not many dead" stories?
"There was nothing to report from last night's speech," the meeja-trained reporter tells his news editor, "because somebody shot the speaker..."
But what - the chattering political classes kept all that information for cosy discussion in the Press Gallery, perhaps sharing it with their dinner guests at home in Islington without bothering hoi polloi readers with such trivia?
What the extracts that I have read do not reveal (possibly with good reason) is the total idleness of that most pompous group of scribblers - self-inflated far beyond the normal run of Fleet Street hack, or even of typical modern editor - the Parliamentary Lobby Group [their caps].
This is a club more elitist and exclusive than the Lords.
They do not see themselves as other men, which is a pity, not least because their role in life is supposedly to hear what is going on in the corridors of power - the rumour and the innuendo, the shared back-of-the hand confidence - and report and interpret it for the rest of the world, rather than to rely on official statements (those being the province of the foot soldiers, the parliamentary reporters).
But how do they set about this task under a new regime created by Campbell, a man most of them protest to despise?
They troop along to meetings that he calls so that he can brief them. They take notes, although these days - such is the level of "secrecy" and of "confidentiality" (and of Pitmans prowess) within the Lobby - they are also allowed to take tape recorders with them. Then off they go to their lap-tops in pleasant privileged rooms in the Palace of Westminster and file it back to the office. They quote Campbell (occasionally, if they'd been good, he would trot out "TB" as a special treat for them), apply their own... er, spin to the story and that's it. Back to Annie's Bar for a drink with the lads and with the MPs to whom they - out of touch with the reality of the world beyond SW1 - alone suck up.
So you get Campbell's spin (about which they complain), amended by the Lobby man's "expert" and "interpretive" spin. And the public pays through the nose for the sheer joy of being allowed to share it.
In my day (here we go) the Lobby man - he was the Political, rather than the Parliamentary correspondent - was the top job on any newspaper. It went only to an established reporter who already had the contacts in place, who could ferret out stories, could pick up gossip and interpret it as news. And additionally, he could usually write it well.
MPs with something to get off their chests could talk to them individually or in small groups in the certain knowledge that the source would remain confidential. The understanding, on both sides, was that the information was sound, and its basic truth was the only quid pro quo for the guarantee of total confidentiality.
When Joe Haines did the Downing Street job for Harold Wilson, he understandably had his own friends within the Lobby to whom he would drop stories that he wanted to get out. Bernard Ingham, in a similar role for Mrs Thatcher, did much the same. At different times in my childhood I ran up against both of them.
Neither thought twice about calling in commentators through the awesome door of Number Ten for a bollocking if he felt the hacks had let the side down, or strayed from the party plot. Being cut off from this innermost source would be a severe punishment for the wayward reporter.
But the difference was that those two men, even at their most belligerent, respected journalists.
Campbell, having been in the Lobby himself immediately before taking up the job, despised them.
For the plain truth is that - with the possible exception of so-called Crime Reporters who do no more than sit in the press room at Scotland Yard and feed back to the office official statements that have just been "released" to them by the Met's spokesmen - there is no more idle job in Fleet Street than that of a Lobby Correspondent.
Nor, given the fact that these days the Downing Street briefings sometimes appear in full on TV, is there a more useless one.
When I heard that Campbell was accused of "sexing up" the government's position, even on something as important as the threat imposed or implied by Saddam Hussein, I thought: Yes; that is what a press officer is paid to do. He takes the brief and he sexes it up.
Stories, in Fleet Street terms, are either sexy or they are boring. As a general rule, boring fails to make the paper. Derek Jameson once said that news was something with a CFM factor. If you read an article and said Cor, Fuck Me! It was a story. Andrew Marr described the same thing as FMD - Fuck Me Doris.
If nothing else, Campbell's diaries have exposed the system. Exposed it even for those readers and editors who didn't know how it worked.
Will it be reported among the acres of space being devoted to the Diaries?
I suspect not. For newspapers are putting their own censored and censorious spin on what appears in their pages.
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More by this writer can be found on his own blog: http://revelbarker.blogspot.com/

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