‘Hope it wasn’t because yon bloke on the telly were bloody terrible,’ he said.
My first review.
My stint as a presenter didn’t last long. It was interrupted by a phone call from London from the editor of the
Daily Express
, Edward Pickering. He said he wondered if I’d like to visit him in Fleet Street to talk about a job.
I told Harry Whewell and he said I should think carefully about it. He warned it wouldn’t be like working for the
Guardian
. And then he said, ‘But I sense you are already on your way. Good luck.’
Tony Howard cautioned against the move. He believed I would be unhappy. I said I didn’t know what they were worrying about because it would take an awful lot to make me leave Manchester and the
Guardian
. In fact it took about two minutes. Ted Pickering said, ‘How much does the
Guardian
pay you?’ I told him one thousand guineas. ‘I’ll give you two thousand,’ he said. I didn’t even say I’d think about it. ‘Done,’ I said.
It wasn’t quite like that. I had arrived the day before the interview and stood outside the shiny black building in Fleet Street, watching the people coming and going. I’d followed one or two hacks into Poppins, the
Express
pub in Poppins Court, sniffed the atmosphere and liked what I sampled. I had even dared to enter El Vino’s for a look around. I was standing at the bar, thinking it unlike any pub I had visited, when the barman, dressed as if he was an usher at a royal wedding, and without looking at me, asked what I’d like to drink. I requested a half of bitter.
‘Wines or spirits only, I’m afraid,’ he said in a manner that suggested I should take my custom elsewhere.
‘I think my friend would like a glass of champagne,’ said a voice behind me. It belonged to Cyril Aynsley, a man who was to have a lasting effect on my career as a journalist. Cyril was the chief reporter on the
Daily Express
and when I told him the reason I was in London he ordered a bottle of champagne in celebration. Giddy with booze, I looked around El Vino’s and what a moment ago had seemed a hostile environment now began to feel like home.
In those days the
Daily Express
sold more than four million newspapers every day. It was the most successful and glamorous organisation in all of Fleet Street. It billed itself as ‘The World’s Greatest Paper’. The building was a declaration of its confidence and success. Every day it was polished and pampered until it shone like a guardsman’s boot. Inside there were uniformed commissionaires and a lobby straight out of a Hollywood movie. You half expected to see Fred Astaire dancing down the stairs into the foyer. The women all looked like Vera Hruba Ralston or Veronica Lake. Or was I still drunk?
The editor’s office had sunshine slanting through venetian blinds. Ted Pickering was a tall, slim, elegantly dressed Yorkshireman who played a major part in taking the paper’s circulation to heights never before achieved and never since equalled. He had on the desk in front of him a folder containing many of the articles I had written for the
Manchester Guardian
. He said he thought I would be best employed as a features writer.
I said I liked the idea and he said I ought to visit the features department before I made up my mind. He took me through the reporters’ room into the office that was to become my home for the next two years or so.
The first person I saw was Osbert Lancaster, bewhiskered, rheumy eyed and immaculately attired in pin-striped suit with buttonhole. Cyril Aynsley was there, along with several of the Vera Hrubas and Veronicas I had seen in the lobby.
Ted Pickering invited me to sit in at that morning’s editorial conference to meet senior members of the staff and to see how the paper was planned. No sooner were we seated than the phone went. Ted Pickering picked it up, raised his eyebrows at the assembly and we all rose and left the office.
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Lord Beaverbrook on the phone,’ I was told. The Canadian proprietor of the paper was never seen in the office but his presence haunted the building, terrified the staff.
Mary shared my excitement at a move to London. But we decided she would stay in Manchester to have the baby and we made a perfectly reasonable agreement with the National Health Service for this to happen.
I took a room in Bayswater and drove to London in my Mini to start my new career. During the first night at my new address I discovered my neighbours were two ‘working girls’ with a regular flow of clients, many of whom noisily acclaimed the fact they were either approaching or achieving sexual fulfilment. Next morning, when I checked on my car, I discovered all four wheels had been stolen.
Then my father called. ‘Job’s done,’ he said.
‘What job is this?’ I enquired.
‘Mary,’ he said.
‘What about her?’ I said.
‘She’s been moved,’ he said.
‘Where to?’ I asked.
‘Our house,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because we live in Yorkshire,’ he said.
‘I know that, but why have you kidnapped my wife?’ I asked.
‘I’ve already told you but you won’t listen. If the boy is born in Lancashire it can’t play for Yorkshire,’ he said, as if explaining something to an imbecile.
‘I know that but have you thought about the chance it might be a girl?’ I said.
‘Don’t talk bloody daft,’ he said.
A month later, at a nursing home in Wakefield, Mary gave birth to a boy. We called him Andrew John and he didn’t play for Yorkshire. It didn’t matter because he loved his granddad and was adored in return.
15
BRENDAN BEHAN’S FALSE TEETH
Brian Inglis, a journalist and author who knew what he was talking about, once observed that to have worked in Fleet Street and not been employed by Lord Beaverbrook was like having gone through the First World War without hearing a shot fired. Lord Beaverbrook’s chosen lieutenants in the glass palace lived in a constant state of paranoia, fuelled by long lunches and large amounts of booze. They were like mannequins in one of Harrods’ windows, constantly being moved around, or in some cases, disappearing forever.
In the two years I worked on the
Express
I had three editors and four features editors. There was a general extravagance of manpower, based on the assumption that Fleet Street would last forever. I was one of the thirty odd feature writers basically employed to fill the one gap left on the features page after the obligatory political piece, the blessed Beachcomber column, Rupert Bear, and the cartoon by the greatest of them all, Carl Giles.
Down below in the engine room, the print unions ran a system so blatantly corrupt it allowed employees to use pseudonyms, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, to pick up another wage packet. The man employed bundling papers on the weekend shift for onward distribution in lorries, was paid more than a feature writer.
But why worry? We were on a luxury liner without a care in the world. If a motor manufacturer was throwing a shindig in a foreign land to launch a new vehicle and was taking the media on a freebie, the
Express
man would pay his own way, and travel first class. Television was dismissed as a trite and boring intruder to be rejected at all costs. As an
Express
man you were forbidden to appear on the box.
I risked all by auditioning as a newsreader for Geoffrey Cox, the boss at ITN. I was given a script, autocue and a camera and, after a run through, required to present what was that night’s news. There was a Kenyan politician at the time called Oginga Odinga. As I performed my audition I could see this name coming towards me like Becher’s Brook. When it arrived I tried everything from Odinga Ogonga, to Oginga Odonga before ending the confusion with ‘Oh, fuck it.’
Geoffrey Cox was solicitous. He took me to a quiet corner of the studio and said he thought I looked OK on camera but found my performance unconvincing.
‘You are a very good writer,’ he said, ‘but if you take my advice you’ll forget about television.’
I was not at all downcast. After all, I was employed by one of the world’s most successful and glamorous newspapers. I was the new boy in the features department and, as such, given the buildup, which meant my name appeared on the features page at least once a week. This might not seem a lot but there were feature writers who thought themselves lucky to get a couple of articles a year in the paper, and one or two who had not been in the paper, or, indeed the office, for two or three years.
It was on the
Express
I first started interviewing celebrities. Bernard Miles had founded the Mermaid Theatre and I was sent to interview him after he offered a job to a controversial Communist trade union leader called Frank Haxell. Sir Bernard was a clever self-publicist so my report was a sidelong, slightly cynical, glance at him and his beloved theatre. The next day a telegram was delivered to me at the
Express
. It read: ‘After reading your article I have come to the conclusion you should go far. Can I suggest Australia . . . Bernard Miles.’
I went to the first night of John Osborne’s
Luther
in Manchester, prior to its London opening. The young Salford actor who played the lead was Albert Finney. On opening night he took a ten-minute standing ovation and we witnessed the burgeoning of a great new talent. The day after Albert Finney’s triumph I interviewed his mother. I asked her what emotions she felt as her son received the rapture of that first-night audience. She said, ‘I was very proud of our Albert. On the other hand, I kept looking at him on stage and thinking, “Oh Albert lad, I don’t like your haircut.”’
I covered the Lady Chatterley trial and profiled the prosecuting QC, Gerald Gardiner. I reported the last night of the Crazy Gang – my everlasting memory is of a row of surgical trusses hanging in a dressing room at the Victoria Palace. I accompanied Princess Grace of Monaco on her trip to Ireland to visit her ancestral home. I covered Aneurin Bevan’s funeral and remembered a night in Doncaster when he spoke and I was so spellbound I stopped taking shorthand notes and watched this great orator and mesmerising performer at work. I had a page to write but when I went back to the office I didn’t need notes. I remembered everything he had said and rejoiced in the remembrance.
While editors came and went, the one constant presence in the life of the feature writer was a small man with a limp, and a love of good wines and fine restaurants, who was an alchemist at laying out a page and transforming a plain story into a seductive one. Harold Keble was the associate editor and admired by his bosses, if not liked. Bob Edwards, who succeeded Pickering as editor, described him as ‘utterly malevolent’.
He was fond of calling a feature writer into his office and displaying a page layout on an easel. It would consist, in the main, of a headline. It could be something like: ‘The Glory of Love?’ He’d ask you what you thought. Very interesting, you’d answer, but what’s the story? That’s for you to find out he would say. Let’s say about a thousand words by tea time and, by the way, pay particular attention to the question mark in the headline.
Keith Howard, the news editor, was a more straightforward newspaper man and a very fine one. He was also of good humour, a funny man with a keen eye for offbeat stories and the eccentrics who made them. It was Keith who suggested I go to Dublin to interview Brendan Behan.
At the time Behan was a successful but controversial playwright. Two of his plays,
The Quare Fellow
and
The Hostage
, had gained him an international reputation. He was a former house painter who had served a term in a British jail for his membership of the IRA. He was also an alcoholic – worse, a celebrity alcoholic more famous for his boozy behaviour than for his undoubted talent as a writer.
I had, in fact, met Behan before Keith Howard sent me to Dublin. I had been in an Irish pub in Fleet Street when Brendan came in attached at the waist to a rope which was in turn attached to a blind man he had found begging in the streets of London. Brendan announced to the landlord, a friend of his, ‘This is a case of the blind leading the blind drunk.’
Shortly after this episode he had collapsed and was taken to hospital, where he was told that if he didn’t stop drinking he would die. He was also advised that his teeth needed urgent attention and that they were poisoning his system. Whereupon, or so I was told, the
Express
arranged for him to have a set of false teeth, at considerable cost.
The story now was that he had stayed off the booze and was back home in Dublin prior to leaving for New York to launch a production of
The Hostage
. So write a positive piece about Brendan’s battle with the booze, they said, and, by the way, check on our false teeth.
The man who met me at Dublin Airport looked energetic and clear-eyed but clearly was missing at least a dozen teeth. I thought I would broach the subject straightaway, so the question was: ‘Nice to meet you, Brendan. The
Express
would like to know what happened to your false teeth?’ He said he couldn’t get on with them but they had been transferred to a friend of his who sold linen handkerchiefs in O’Connell Street and we should pay him a visit. The man was easily recognisable because Brendan’s teeth were too large for his mouth, which was stretched into a permanent rictus grin. Moreover he had to take them out to speak and tell us how generous Brendan had been. It was an appropriate start to what turned out to be a remarkable few days.
Behan insisted I stay at his home, where I met his attractive wife Beatrice. She was friendly but in that reserved way people acquire when any acquaintance of their alcoholic partner may be used as an excuse for a bender. She need not have worried. In the next few days he took me to so many pubs I lost count. I was perpetually sozzled on Guinness and he touched not a drop.
‘Eminence nearly killed me,’ Brendan would say. Wherever we went he was greeted like a hero. He would dance on tables and sing his latest song, ‘I met my love in a graveyard’, which had the line:‘Oh my old Irish tomb, I’ll be in there soon.’When the telephone rang at home he would pick it up and in a high voice say, ‘Noel Coward speaking.’