When my wife and I became engaged, I was trooped a tattered colour round her grand relations.
One dining room was hung with a Canaletto, several Gainsboroughs and the odd Alan Ramsay. Reflected in the 18th century glass and the glassily polished Chippendale table was an array of cutlery that looked like Mappin and Webb’s window.
Over all flew Mr Pooter, the family’s pet and presumably house-trained pigeon.
Except that it wasn’t.
As I nervously muttered the “start at the outside and work inwards” mantra, it landed on my head and crapped down the back of my neck.
“Can’t be much wrong with you,” my host, the knighted chairman of multi-national Albright and Wilson boomed. “Mr Pooter has obviously taken to you.”
Uncle Sydney and I became great friends. I once asked him whether being chairman of an international company was difficult. “On the contrary,” he told me, “it’s always an each way bet. By the time a development reaches my desk the work has already been done by my staff. I just have to say yes or no.”
So the talk of the difficulties which earn tycoons their high salaries is just so much spin. Like the rest of life.
I discovered this in childhood. We were told that night fighter pilots could see in the dark because they ate masses of carrots. In my innocence, I had a double helping of the loathsome vegetable, then went out into the yard in the black-out and banged my knee on the dustbin. Had I known it, that was my epiphany in the evils of spin, though it was many years later that I learned it was a governmental device to ease a glut of carrots.
Democracy is a summit of spin. The classic democracy on which it is based was undemocratic. Indeed racist .Only citizens of Athens and Rome had a vote. Democracy was not even popular. Thucydides points out that none of Athens’ achievements happened under a democracy.
H. L. Mencken had it sussed: “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
That touching tale of 400 Spartans fighting the entire Persian army at Thermopylae is rubbish. The classicist Mary Beard points out they were assisted by a thousand Helots and other tribes. There was no room in the Pass for Persians.
The ultimate spin, surely, is the notion that God created the world in six days. Not that He would be unable to do so. But would He really need a day off? In my view that Sabbath business throws the entire Creation scenario into doubt, and when in the ‘30s the Immaculate Conception was introduced in a contested divorce, the Judge wisely ruled it was inadmissible.
At times of stress young creatures turn for succour to their parent. Parents have no-one so they invent a spectral parent, Freud suggests. The Ionian philosophers postulate a god which could create but not direct. Sir Thomas Browne quotes Hermes, The Thrice Great: “God is a circle the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”
My chum Syd Wignall, a Himalayan climber, would go with that. He was hired by the Indian army to spy in Tibet on the Chinese, who captured him and imprisoned him in Takalot. Freed in the depths of winter, he had to traverse the Himalayas on foot to reach India. In his fine book “Spy on the Roof of the World” Syd tells of a presence which guided him safely down an ice cliff.
Another chum, Douggie Brand, a much decorated Royal Marine and veteran of the SBS, spent the best part of a year in one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious torture chambers. Every day he talked with a palpable ‘presence’ which came into his cell.
I talk to God all the time. He is a Great Listener. Like these men, I have no truck with religion which, to me, is just crowd control.
The Crusades, we are told, were fought to safeguard the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem, at that time occupied by Arabs. More spin. Arabs did not interfere with pilgrims. The Koran forbids it, or indeed any hindrance of the People of the Book. The purpose of the Crusades was to enable Western monarchs to give their mutinous nobles someone else to fight. And those noble warriors sacked Constantinople en route, raping and pillaging, at the request of the Venetians who controlled the cruellest and most repressive empire on earth.
It wasn’t Drake who beat the Armada. It was the weather. And the fact that Spanish arms dealers supplied King Philip with duff ammunition, as Wignall demonstrated in another book. After he had climbed across the Himalayas, he was so fed up with mountains that he invented marine archaeology and went round the world diving and discovering Armada galleons.
More recently, the Establishment would have us believe the world is about to stop spinning and burst into flame. I share the view of David Bellamy: “The last peak global temperatures were in 1998 and 1934 and the troughs of low temperature were around 1910 and 1970. The second dip caused pop science and the media to cry wolf about an impending, devastating Ice Age. Our end was nigh! Then, when temperatures took an upward swing in the 1980s, the scaremongers changed their tune. Global warming was the new imminent catastrophe.
“But the computer model - called “hockey stick” - that predicted the catastrophe of a frying planet proved to be so bent that it “disappeared” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s armory of argument in 2007. It was bent because the historical data it used to predict the future dated from only the 1850s, when the world was emerging from the Little Ice Age. Little wonder that temperatures showed an upward trend.
“In the Sixties I used to discuss climate change with my undergraduates at Durham University. I would point to the plethora of published scientific evidence that showed the cyclical nature of change – and how, for instance, the latest of a string of ice ages had affected the climate, sea levels and tree lines around the world. Thank goodness the latest crop of glaciers and ice sheets began to wane in earnest about 12,000 years ago; this gave Britain a window of opportunity to lead the industrial revolution. Despite the $50 billion spent on greenwashing propaganda, the sceptics and their inconvenient questions are beginning to make their presence felt.
“A recent survey by Klaus-Martin Schulte, of King’s College Hospital, of all papers on the subject of climate change that were published between 2004 and February of 2007 found that only 7 per cent explicitly endorsed a ‘so-called consensus’ position that man-made carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming.”
Like Mark Twain’s death, reports of the demise of the polar bear are exaggerated.
According to Bellamy, their population is increasing.
The most successful spin in our times has been the Mafia. In fact they did not launch an Empire of organised crime. According to the Pulitzer Prize winning author Jimmy Breslin, that was the work of a mill worker’s son from Wigan, Owney Madden, who learned the gangster’s trade in Liverpool.
He emigrated to the US where Prohibition made him powerful enough to call, on the advice of Damon Runyon, a meeting of other major gangsters in Atlantic City in May 1929. The subject was Al Capone whose antics were getting respectable killers a bad name. Capone was shovelled off to prison, Madden spread out street maps of New York and the bootlegging territories were defined. Rules for murder were established. Nobody could be killed unless a local commission agreed.
After the re-districting, which was copied by gangsters in other cities, a banquet was held to honour Madden. A gangster called Frenchy deMange was chosen to present him with a watch for “services to the American underworld”.
The truth is always more interesting than the spin.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I ALWAYS 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 of them 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
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 its 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
* * * * * * * * * *
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK…………………….
“The Royal Portraits is a collection of snaps by the late Cecil Beaton. In the course of taking these he met the old Duke of Gloucester who, when told Beaton was coming, said: ‘That’s the fella in the floppy hat, aint it? Can’t stand the man. Never stops talking in a funny voice. Bloody suspicious, I think.’
“On an Egyptian tour being introduced to a belly dancer he kicked off affably with the question “Ever been to Tidworth?”
Is there a biography of this remarkable man?”
ends
Saturday, 27 October 2007
Saturday, 20 October 2007
postal disorder
Strike action has all the relevance of the blunderbuss and most of its shortcomings. Its effects are felt over a wide area but it frequently misses its target and does more harm to the man who pulls its trigger than to those at which it is aimed.
Union officials and employers continue to draw their salaries. Only the workers suffer. When my union went on one of its ineffectual strikes, I was the father of a young family. We won nothing like the figure for which we were striking and it took many months to recover from the loss of wages incurred by our industrial inaction.
Neither side seems to regard the needs of its customers yet postmen are part of the furniture of our day. A pal of mine who used to own Snowdon Mountain admitted that he did most of his farming through the letter box, harvesting the subsidy cheques.
In the far off days of fatherhood when my post contained more bills than a flock of starlings I remember the dread with which I awaited the crash of final demands on the mat.
It is true occasional eccentricities added to the charm of the Office. I lived in a Cheshire village where the postman was a tireless poacher. His sack was the perfect hiding place for assorted dead game. Few things concentrate the mind so swiftly as getting a letter from the Inland Revenue in a bloodstained envelope.
When I moved to Chester I used to get LPs through the post and on one occasion the postman folded the LP neatly in half to make it easier to post it through the letter box. When I complained compensation was reluctantly awarded but I was required to promise I would not attempt to play the LP. I agreed since it could only ever have been played on a crescent-shaped turntable.
Print workers were the most imaginative strikers. At the height of the IRA mainland bombing campaign printers on the Daily Mirror struck for danger money on the grounds that coming to work on a paper which attacked the IRA was dangerous. It was pointed out in vain that English reporters working in Ireland did not get danger money; that the printers were working three floors underground in what was virtually a nuclear bomb proof shelter. The printers were obdurate. Only directors running round with bundles of cash got the paper out.
In the brave new world of instant re-location there are few strikes in private industry. Only our public servants still enjoy that dubious luxury.
The rest of us are often baffled by their reasons’
When Tom Ellis, the Wrexham MP, left the Labour Party to become a social democrat I accused him of treachery. He denied the charge. He said he was leaving because socialism had achieved all its aims, and it is certainly true that we are living in a golden age. We live longer and are healthier and more prosperous than ever before in the history of man. But we are still unhappy.
Oddly, unhappiness seems only to affect the “First” World. In a recent TV series, a young man lived in turn with tribes of primitive people who die young and live hard. The most abiding quality they showed was happiness and content with their way of life. In another series, a tribe from Borneo was brought to the West and shown its glories. They were baffled by a society that had so many empty buildings yet allowed its people to sleep on the streets.
In the tribal world man helps his neighbour. Here we are perpetually at war with someone. A friend points out that our unions and employers are greedy in turn and that we are living in the directors’ cut.
Pay received by directors at leading FTSE companies grew at double the rate of the average workforce. In the past five years they have earned an average £850, 000, which does not include bonuses and shares. The typical salary increase of executive directors was seven per cent last year, against the UK average of 3.7 per cent.
Nevertheless Post Office workers are on a kamikaze track. I do business with two of the mail order firms which turned its losses into huge profit. Both are deserting it for private firms. Yet one can see the postmen’s dilemma: their boss takes home a million pounds a year. Perhaps it is understandable that there are 92 “Spanish practices" through which postal workers are alleged to wring overtime and expenses. The Union claims its members work flexibly and they are entitled to go home early if they finish a task.
Why not? The Government urges flexible working and few workers are as flexible as our over-paid MPs.
* * * *
RENTING THE MOUTH FOR MONEY ...carries with it the burden of celebrity. I found my brush with celebrity very worrying. It usually consisted of perfect strangers doing double takes when they saw me. For a long time I thought it meant that my fly buttons were undone.
My first major TV engagement was a series of Welsh Sheepdog trials. I was stopped by a man in Llandudno.
“Saw the show last night,” he said. “Terrific.”
“Oh, you like sheepdog trials, then?”
“Most boring things ever seen on TV,” he told me.
“You liked me, then?”
“You? You were crap.”
“Well, what was so good about it?”
“Your waistcoats. Fabulous,” he said. “Where do you get them?”
Once in Bangor a man barred my path. “Don’t tell me,” he said, “I’ll have you in a minute.”
“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” he went on, and then, “Gotcha! You are the Town Crier of Llandrindod Wells. Know you anywhere.”
I wear a Hapsburg moustache in honour of my favourite city, Vienna. My late landlord and supposed friend, the cavalry historian, the Marquess of Anglesey, claimed it made me look like a junior officer in a third rate Prussian cavalry regiment.
The attendant in the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna was more flattering.
“Welcome home, Your Majesty,” he said, with a low bow and not a hint of satire.
And a waiter in a restaurant in the Fleischmarkt asked if I was related to the Royal family. It was the waistcoat again
On the same holiday, I was buying gluhwein at a street stall when my voice was recognised by a girl from my home village in Anglesey. She was spending a DAY in Vienna on leave from Australia.
In a bar in Barcelona it struck a chord with a group of well endowed ladies with TITS embroidered on their T-shirts. They said it stood for Team of Independent Travelling Sisters. Years later I discovered it was the first case of Boob plagiarism. The last S stood for Swansea. It is the logo of the city’s football supporters club.
It was not only the audience which had me banjaxed. The BBC itself was a great leveller. My producer got a first class travel warrant: I travelled second class.
In the early days of TV there was a children’s show which the Corporation thought ought to be transmitted from Manchester. Unfortunately, on the morning of the show, the producer discovered that the toys, which were part of the set design, had been left in London. He ordered a researcher to collect the toys and bring them to Manchester by taxi. As she was loading them she was spotted by a BBC “suit”. When he heard what she was planning to do he hit roof.
“Researchers are not allowed to use taxis,” he stormed.
So the toys went by taxi to Manchester and the researcher followed later by train.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
“Henry Rees, 17, set off from his farm home near Rhayader, taking the first train ride in his life alone to the Army Centre at Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham.
“He arrived at Birmingham and then got lost. On Saturday, after four police forces had been alerted, he was found walking along a road near Wimbourne in Staffordshire. He told the policeman who picked him up he was trying to find the Army Centre. He said he could not find the right train from Birmingham to Sutton Coldfield.
His mother said: “It seems that after a while he gave up and decided to get back home and start all over again. But it took him three days to get out of Birmingham. Even when he was found he was walking in the wrong direction. Accompanied by relatives he will report to the Centre to-day HOPING TO START A CAREER IN THE ARMY’S ADMINISTRATION SERVICE.”
Union officials and employers continue to draw their salaries. Only the workers suffer. When my union went on one of its ineffectual strikes, I was the father of a young family. We won nothing like the figure for which we were striking and it took many months to recover from the loss of wages incurred by our industrial inaction.
Neither side seems to regard the needs of its customers yet postmen are part of the furniture of our day. A pal of mine who used to own Snowdon Mountain admitted that he did most of his farming through the letter box, harvesting the subsidy cheques.
In the far off days of fatherhood when my post contained more bills than a flock of starlings I remember the dread with which I awaited the crash of final demands on the mat.
It is true occasional eccentricities added to the charm of the Office. I lived in a Cheshire village where the postman was a tireless poacher. His sack was the perfect hiding place for assorted dead game. Few things concentrate the mind so swiftly as getting a letter from the Inland Revenue in a bloodstained envelope.
When I moved to Chester I used to get LPs through the post and on one occasion the postman folded the LP neatly in half to make it easier to post it through the letter box. When I complained compensation was reluctantly awarded but I was required to promise I would not attempt to play the LP. I agreed since it could only ever have been played on a crescent-shaped turntable.
Print workers were the most imaginative strikers. At the height of the IRA mainland bombing campaign printers on the Daily Mirror struck for danger money on the grounds that coming to work on a paper which attacked the IRA was dangerous. It was pointed out in vain that English reporters working in Ireland did not get danger money; that the printers were working three floors underground in what was virtually a nuclear bomb proof shelter. The printers were obdurate. Only directors running round with bundles of cash got the paper out.
In the brave new world of instant re-location there are few strikes in private industry. Only our public servants still enjoy that dubious luxury.
The rest of us are often baffled by their reasons’
When Tom Ellis, the Wrexham MP, left the Labour Party to become a social democrat I accused him of treachery. He denied the charge. He said he was leaving because socialism had achieved all its aims, and it is certainly true that we are living in a golden age. We live longer and are healthier and more prosperous than ever before in the history of man. But we are still unhappy.
Oddly, unhappiness seems only to affect the “First” World. In a recent TV series, a young man lived in turn with tribes of primitive people who die young and live hard. The most abiding quality they showed was happiness and content with their way of life. In another series, a tribe from Borneo was brought to the West and shown its glories. They were baffled by a society that had so many empty buildings yet allowed its people to sleep on the streets.
In the tribal world man helps his neighbour. Here we are perpetually at war with someone. A friend points out that our unions and employers are greedy in turn and that we are living in the directors’ cut.
Pay received by directors at leading FTSE companies grew at double the rate of the average workforce. In the past five years they have earned an average £850, 000, which does not include bonuses and shares. The typical salary increase of executive directors was seven per cent last year, against the UK average of 3.7 per cent.
Nevertheless Post Office workers are on a kamikaze track. I do business with two of the mail order firms which turned its losses into huge profit. Both are deserting it for private firms. Yet one can see the postmen’s dilemma: their boss takes home a million pounds a year. Perhaps it is understandable that there are 92 “Spanish practices" through which postal workers are alleged to wring overtime and expenses. The Union claims its members work flexibly and they are entitled to go home early if they finish a task.
Why not? The Government urges flexible working and few workers are as flexible as our over-paid MPs.
* * * *
RENTING THE MOUTH FOR MONEY ...carries with it the burden of celebrity. I found my brush with celebrity very worrying. It usually consisted of perfect strangers doing double takes when they saw me. For a long time I thought it meant that my fly buttons were undone.
My first major TV engagement was a series of Welsh Sheepdog trials. I was stopped by a man in Llandudno.
“Saw the show last night,” he said. “Terrific.”
“Oh, you like sheepdog trials, then?”
“Most boring things ever seen on TV,” he told me.
“You liked me, then?”
“You? You were crap.”
“Well, what was so good about it?”
“Your waistcoats. Fabulous,” he said. “Where do you get them?”
Once in Bangor a man barred my path. “Don’t tell me,” he said, “I’ll have you in a minute.”
“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” he went on, and then, “Gotcha! You are the Town Crier of Llandrindod Wells. Know you anywhere.”
I wear a Hapsburg moustache in honour of my favourite city, Vienna. My late landlord and supposed friend, the cavalry historian, the Marquess of Anglesey, claimed it made me look like a junior officer in a third rate Prussian cavalry regiment.
The attendant in the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna was more flattering.
“Welcome home, Your Majesty,” he said, with a low bow and not a hint of satire.
And a waiter in a restaurant in the Fleischmarkt asked if I was related to the Royal family. It was the waistcoat again
On the same holiday, I was buying gluhwein at a street stall when my voice was recognised by a girl from my home village in Anglesey. She was spending a DAY in Vienna on leave from Australia.
In a bar in Barcelona it struck a chord with a group of well endowed ladies with TITS embroidered on their T-shirts. They said it stood for Team of Independent Travelling Sisters. Years later I discovered it was the first case of Boob plagiarism. The last S stood for Swansea. It is the logo of the city’s football supporters club.
It was not only the audience which had me banjaxed. The BBC itself was a great leveller. My producer got a first class travel warrant: I travelled second class.
In the early days of TV there was a children’s show which the Corporation thought ought to be transmitted from Manchester. Unfortunately, on the morning of the show, the producer discovered that the toys, which were part of the set design, had been left in London. He ordered a researcher to collect the toys and bring them to Manchester by taxi. As she was loading them she was spotted by a BBC “suit”. When he heard what she was planning to do he hit roof.
“Researchers are not allowed to use taxis,” he stormed.
So the toys went by taxi to Manchester and the researcher followed later by train.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
“Henry Rees, 17, set off from his farm home near Rhayader, taking the first train ride in his life alone to the Army Centre at Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham.
“He arrived at Birmingham and then got lost. On Saturday, after four police forces had been alerted, he was found walking along a road near Wimbourne in Staffordshire. He told the policeman who picked him up he was trying to find the Army Centre. He said he could not find the right train from Birmingham to Sutton Coldfield.
His mother said: “It seems that after a while he gave up and decided to get back home and start all over again. But it took him three days to get out of Birmingham. Even when he was found he was walking in the wrong direction. Accompanied by relatives he will report to the Centre to-day HOPING TO START A CAREER IN THE ARMY’S ADMINISTRATION SERVICE.”
Saturday, 13 October 2007
GORE ?????? BLIMEY!
We are told that we are diminished by the number of species the world is losing. Certainly, nightingales no longer sing in Berkeley Square, or almost anywhere else in the UK for that matter. The boom in bitterns is over and I cannot remember when I last saw a worm glow.
The anguished publicity these losses generate speaks much for our love of wild creatures. They are not new. I expect that when the cave man came shuffling back to the cave at night, dragging his club behind him, he complained he had not seen a dinosaur all day. And no doubt told his mate it was the fault of global warming.
He would doubtless envy Al Gore, who gets a Nobel Peace Prize this week for making us aware of its dangers. In the same week, he was criticised by a High Court judge for claims he made in his film, which is riddled with errors and can only be shown in schools with a disclaimer. This followed disclosures that his own carbon footprint is Yeti-sized. Which makes him a fitting recipient of a prize for peace awarded by the son of an arms dealer who refined nitro-glycerine to make it safe to use in bombs.
I console myself with the thought - in my view the only original contribution to philosophy our century can boast – that ‘Stuff happens’.
I am much more concerned with the loss of the smile. Look at the people in the background of any photograph taken up to the Sixties and the chances are that one or more of them are smiling. You do not see that in the photographs we take today. Plenty of laughter, but it is possible to laugh and be angry at the same time. The grin is the response to humiliation, but smiling is impossible unless one is completely at ease with oneself.
I am fortunate: I live in Cambridgeshire, where the smile survives.
‘Amiable’ is the mot juste for this multi-coloured, colonised corner of the Fens. The original dwellers might have been sullen swamp people but they had a good deal to be sullen about. For centuries they lived outside the law and lived well. The Fens provided plentiful game and fish; transport was by boat, stilt and ice skate, than which there can be no more pleasant locomotion. Fruit and green stuff were to be had for the picking, wood for the fire and the buildings. Above all, the outside world rarely bothered you. True, you died young, but no younger than the people in the Outside, where Fenmen scarcely ventured from their Wind in the Willows world.
Then along came the Duke of Bedford and his land-hungry friends. They hired a team of interfering Dutchmen and the great drainage began. The labourers were starving Scottish prisoners of war and the great ditches they dug were named for the amount they dug in day. Thus we have the Forty Foot and the Hundred Foot drains, which are in fact war graves. When these forerunners of the navvies died, as they frequently did, they were buried in holes dug in the banks.
The Fenmen lost their freedom; but the inner content remains, like the vestigial tail we all carry at the foot of our spines.
Gangmasters, the 21st century equivalent of the Press Gang, have imported field workers from China and all over Eastern Europe. Like dolly mixtures, the pupils of the school near me come in all colours and great harmony, and the people I meet seem at ease with themselves and not remotely curious about others.
When I went to live in a Cheshire village, the grocer, Geoff Salt, told me not to worry if people asked me about myself and my business: it was the village equivalent of a weekly newspaper.
In Wales, dislike of the English is endemic. They dislike the English almost as much as the North Walian dislikes people from South Wales and vice versa. I thought ‘Gog’ and ‘Hontu’ were swear words, but they merely define geographical location, north and south.
The Welsh still blame us for Edward I’s invasion of North Wales, though his army of 15,000 included 12,000 South Walians. We are criticised for forcing our language on them. Yet it was a Welsh king, Henry VIII, who tried to kill their language, and Welsh parents in Gwynedd who, a century and a half ago, started a movement which aimed to have a thousand English speaking children by 1952.
An historical oddity decrees the most fervent nationalists should be aliens.
Catherine the Great was a German; Hitler was an Austrian, determined to give the lie to a natural truth that an Austrian is an unsuccessful attempt to turn an Italian into a German. Napoleon was a Corsican. Our Royal Family is German and Greek. The Arab nationalism which threatens the west was formulated by American missionaries who ran a literary society in Beirut in the 19th century; the IRA was manned, and often led, by English men and women. Of the two iconic Welshmen, R.S.Thomas, the poet, only became Welsh late in life, and the founder of Welsh nationalism, Saunders Lewis, was born in Liverpool. The first meeting of the Gorsedd of Welsh Bards was held in the 18th century on Primrose Hill in London; the first modern Eisteddfodd took place in Liverpool.
I blame the scenery. So bold and demanding is the landscape, so tempestuous are the seas in Wales that they take a great deal of living up to. One has to make grand gestures to be noticed. In the Fens there is no scenery to speak of, merely horizons and sensational skyscapes. It is easy to be placid and to concentrate on enjoyment and architecture. Our noblest churches and cathedrals, our diverse vernacular buildings, are our defence against nihilist surroundings. Christmas in the Fens is ablaze with light. Every village explodes in a carnival of faery lights. On the river Nene in March even the barges are illuminated. Only Vienna does it better. And possibly Bruges.
Long may it continue, if the Health and Safety restrictions which have banished them from some towns permit them.
The one loss I cannot bear is a little bird called freedom
End
When Oscar Levant was conscripted, the recruiting sergeant asked him if he would be able to kill the enemy. Levant replied, ‘The enemy? No. A friend? Yes.’
His friends felt much the same about George Harrop, the subject of the caricature above by my talented friend Ed Rawlinson.
George was Night Picture Editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester when I ran the night news desk, a job I would have held much longer had someone else run the picture desk. A former cinema manager, wartime Chindit and PR man, he had the fastest tongue in the West - and also the loosest. Predictably so, since he incessantly lubricated it with whisky. He was even shaped like a Dimple Haigh bottle.
The telephone was his straight man, and his conversations with it were endless. On one occasion, the Sports Editor Peter Thomas tweaked his phone line out of its socket.
George went on talking for a full five minutes.
His tongue frequently got him into trouble, but it feared no man. Not even an editor, a wartime Commando major whose nickname was ‘Strangler’ and who had once held a junior executive by his ankles out of a fourth floor window.
‘George, get off the bloody phone,’ he raged one night.
‘Have to go,’ said George, in a voice everybody in the room heard, ‘the editor wants permission to change a crosshead.’
A photographer who fell foul of him was ‘a panchromatic Judas Iscariot’. Describing the foremen’s Christmas lunch at a smart hotel, he said: ‘They rushed through the swing doors in their suede clogs shouting, “Where is the foremen’s lavatory?”’
Once, returning home, he could not find his front gate. He hacked a great hole in the hedge, assuming he was back in the Chindits. It would be dishonourable to him to call him predictable.
I was not the only man to suffer from his friendship. Another martyr, the Night News Editor of the Daily Express, was on his way to a Christmas party when he discovered George asleep in the back of his car. Something which quite often happened to many of us.
Good sense dictated dumping him at the earliest - or nearest – convenience, but foolishly he took him to the party. In quite a short time, the host was so keen that my friend should take George home that he gave him the keys of his car.
The years have not diminished the horror of that drive. Distracted by George’s seamless monologue down some imagined phone, my friend drove over the bumpy flowerbeds of a roundabout. This startled George, who demanded to know where he was and how he could open the steamed-up passenger window.
A few moments later, my friend felt a breeze and assumed George had opened the window. But his seat was empty and in the rear mirror my friend saw a bundle of rags rolling down the road. George had opened the door and fallen out.
Numb with fright, my friend knelt in the road beside the rags, fearing the worst. To his relief, George`s head emerged. He got to his feet, dusted himself down and insisted on being taken to a pub 500 yards down the road. The pub was in darkness, but George hammered on the door until the bedroom lights went on and the landlady appeared in her dressing gown and curlers.
‘Madam, said George at his most courtly, ‘I am sorry to have awakened you but there has been a terrible accident. The victim is in shock: a large medicinal brandy would help.’
Still half asleep, she only began screaming for the police when George explained that he was the victim and that he preferred his brandy without ice or soda…
My friend eventually shook George off, which was never easy, and got home on Boxing Day to find his wife had left him. The party host subsequently attacked him with his crutch when my friend told him he could not remember where he had left his car.
Alas, George has long ago gone to the Great Saloon Bar in the Sky. Somehow R.I.P seems inappropriate.
End
From my Book of Dangerous Cuttings:-
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance, Bernard Chinzero, upset a number of Harare luminaries the other day when he failed to turn up after agreeing to be the guest of honour at a business luncheon.
When the organiser phoned Chidzero’s office for an explanation, the Minister’s secretary replied: ‘He was not hungry.’
.
The anguished publicity these losses generate speaks much for our love of wild creatures. They are not new. I expect that when the cave man came shuffling back to the cave at night, dragging his club behind him, he complained he had not seen a dinosaur all day. And no doubt told his mate it was the fault of global warming.
He would doubtless envy Al Gore, who gets a Nobel Peace Prize this week for making us aware of its dangers. In the same week, he was criticised by a High Court judge for claims he made in his film, which is riddled with errors and can only be shown in schools with a disclaimer. This followed disclosures that his own carbon footprint is Yeti-sized. Which makes him a fitting recipient of a prize for peace awarded by the son of an arms dealer who refined nitro-glycerine to make it safe to use in bombs.
I console myself with the thought - in my view the only original contribution to philosophy our century can boast – that ‘Stuff happens’.
I am much more concerned with the loss of the smile. Look at the people in the background of any photograph taken up to the Sixties and the chances are that one or more of them are smiling. You do not see that in the photographs we take today. Plenty of laughter, but it is possible to laugh and be angry at the same time. The grin is the response to humiliation, but smiling is impossible unless one is completely at ease with oneself.
I am fortunate: I live in Cambridgeshire, where the smile survives.
‘Amiable’ is the mot juste for this multi-coloured, colonised corner of the Fens. The original dwellers might have been sullen swamp people but they had a good deal to be sullen about. For centuries they lived outside the law and lived well. The Fens provided plentiful game and fish; transport was by boat, stilt and ice skate, than which there can be no more pleasant locomotion. Fruit and green stuff were to be had for the picking, wood for the fire and the buildings. Above all, the outside world rarely bothered you. True, you died young, but no younger than the people in the Outside, where Fenmen scarcely ventured from their Wind in the Willows world.
Then along came the Duke of Bedford and his land-hungry friends. They hired a team of interfering Dutchmen and the great drainage began. The labourers were starving Scottish prisoners of war and the great ditches they dug were named for the amount they dug in day. Thus we have the Forty Foot and the Hundred Foot drains, which are in fact war graves. When these forerunners of the navvies died, as they frequently did, they were buried in holes dug in the banks.
The Fenmen lost their freedom; but the inner content remains, like the vestigial tail we all carry at the foot of our spines.
Gangmasters, the 21st century equivalent of the Press Gang, have imported field workers from China and all over Eastern Europe. Like dolly mixtures, the pupils of the school near me come in all colours and great harmony, and the people I meet seem at ease with themselves and not remotely curious about others.
When I went to live in a Cheshire village, the grocer, Geoff Salt, told me not to worry if people asked me about myself and my business: it was the village equivalent of a weekly newspaper.
In Wales, dislike of the English is endemic. They dislike the English almost as much as the North Walian dislikes people from South Wales and vice versa. I thought ‘Gog’ and ‘Hontu’ were swear words, but they merely define geographical location, north and south.
The Welsh still blame us for Edward I’s invasion of North Wales, though his army of 15,000 included 12,000 South Walians. We are criticised for forcing our language on them. Yet it was a Welsh king, Henry VIII, who tried to kill their language, and Welsh parents in Gwynedd who, a century and a half ago, started a movement which aimed to have a thousand English speaking children by 1952.
An historical oddity decrees the most fervent nationalists should be aliens.
Catherine the Great was a German; Hitler was an Austrian, determined to give the lie to a natural truth that an Austrian is an unsuccessful attempt to turn an Italian into a German. Napoleon was a Corsican. Our Royal Family is German and Greek. The Arab nationalism which threatens the west was formulated by American missionaries who ran a literary society in Beirut in the 19th century; the IRA was manned, and often led, by English men and women. Of the two iconic Welshmen, R.S.Thomas, the poet, only became Welsh late in life, and the founder of Welsh nationalism, Saunders Lewis, was born in Liverpool. The first meeting of the Gorsedd of Welsh Bards was held in the 18th century on Primrose Hill in London; the first modern Eisteddfodd took place in Liverpool.
I blame the scenery. So bold and demanding is the landscape, so tempestuous are the seas in Wales that they take a great deal of living up to. One has to make grand gestures to be noticed. In the Fens there is no scenery to speak of, merely horizons and sensational skyscapes. It is easy to be placid and to concentrate on enjoyment and architecture. Our noblest churches and cathedrals, our diverse vernacular buildings, are our defence against nihilist surroundings. Christmas in the Fens is ablaze with light. Every village explodes in a carnival of faery lights. On the river Nene in March even the barges are illuminated. Only Vienna does it better. And possibly Bruges.
Long may it continue, if the Health and Safety restrictions which have banished them from some towns permit them.
The one loss I cannot bear is a little bird called freedom
End
When Oscar Levant was conscripted, the recruiting sergeant asked him if he would be able to kill the enemy. Levant replied, ‘The enemy? No. A friend? Yes.’
His friends felt much the same about George Harrop, the subject of the caricature above by my talented friend Ed Rawlinson.
George was Night Picture Editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester when I ran the night news desk, a job I would have held much longer had someone else run the picture desk. A former cinema manager, wartime Chindit and PR man, he had the fastest tongue in the West - and also the loosest. Predictably so, since he incessantly lubricated it with whisky. He was even shaped like a Dimple Haigh bottle.
The telephone was his straight man, and his conversations with it were endless. On one occasion, the Sports Editor Peter Thomas tweaked his phone line out of its socket.
George went on talking for a full five minutes.
His tongue frequently got him into trouble, but it feared no man. Not even an editor, a wartime Commando major whose nickname was ‘Strangler’ and who had once held a junior executive by his ankles out of a fourth floor window.
‘George, get off the bloody phone,’ he raged one night.
‘Have to go,’ said George, in a voice everybody in the room heard, ‘the editor wants permission to change a crosshead.’
A photographer who fell foul of him was ‘a panchromatic Judas Iscariot’. Describing the foremen’s Christmas lunch at a smart hotel, he said: ‘They rushed through the swing doors in their suede clogs shouting, “Where is the foremen’s lavatory?”’
Once, returning home, he could not find his front gate. He hacked a great hole in the hedge, assuming he was back in the Chindits. It would be dishonourable to him to call him predictable.
I was not the only man to suffer from his friendship. Another martyr, the Night News Editor of the Daily Express, was on his way to a Christmas party when he discovered George asleep in the back of his car. Something which quite often happened to many of us.
Good sense dictated dumping him at the earliest - or nearest – convenience, but foolishly he took him to the party. In quite a short time, the host was so keen that my friend should take George home that he gave him the keys of his car.
The years have not diminished the horror of that drive. Distracted by George’s seamless monologue down some imagined phone, my friend drove over the bumpy flowerbeds of a roundabout. This startled George, who demanded to know where he was and how he could open the steamed-up passenger window.
A few moments later, my friend felt a breeze and assumed George had opened the window. But his seat was empty and in the rear mirror my friend saw a bundle of rags rolling down the road. George had opened the door and fallen out.
Numb with fright, my friend knelt in the road beside the rags, fearing the worst. To his relief, George`s head emerged. He got to his feet, dusted himself down and insisted on being taken to a pub 500 yards down the road. The pub was in darkness, but George hammered on the door until the bedroom lights went on and the landlady appeared in her dressing gown and curlers.
‘Madam, said George at his most courtly, ‘I am sorry to have awakened you but there has been a terrible accident. The victim is in shock: a large medicinal brandy would help.’
Still half asleep, she only began screaming for the police when George explained that he was the victim and that he preferred his brandy without ice or soda…
My friend eventually shook George off, which was never easy, and got home on Boxing Day to find his wife had left him. The party host subsequently attacked him with his crutch when my friend told him he could not remember where he had left his car.
Alas, George has long ago gone to the Great Saloon Bar in the Sky. Somehow R.I.P seems inappropriate.
End
From my Book of Dangerous Cuttings:-
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance, Bernard Chinzero, upset a number of Harare luminaries the other day when he failed to turn up after agreeing to be the guest of honour at a business luncheon.
When the organiser phoned Chidzero’s office for an explanation, the Minister’s secretary replied: ‘He was not hungry.’
.
Saturday, 6 October 2007
Death, whatever happened to thy sting?
Since so many of the population watch the X Factor, it is probably not good news but the fact remains we are conquering Death.
Whatever else war was, it was an absurd waste of the flower of manhood and a greater condemnation of our collective intelligence even than watching the X Factor.
It is inconceivable that in the 21st century we are still resolving arguments, and stealing each others’ tribal lands and riches, by sending our young men to kill perfect strangers with whom they have more in common than in dispute. We should have got over that when we left the cave and abandoned the club. It defies common sense. If a farmer knew a field was full of poisonous weeds, he would be unlikely to test it by sending in his finest herd of young pedigree cattle.
Curiously, Russia, which has spent most of its existence either killing itself by the million or other people it has never met, takes the lead in showing us that killing people is unnecessary. All you have to do is switch off the light, as this week it threatens to do with Georgia. At a stroke, the country is helpless.
Another country which is demonstrating that it is quite unnecessary to go to all the trouble and expense of killing people is China. In fairness, this is a country which has so many people of its own to kill by the million that it has no need to look for fights with its neighbours as a means of population control. It now shows how absurdly easy it is to defeat an opponent by hacking into the IT systems by which we are governed - and we pass quietly into governance by Chinese restaurants, which I have been convinced for years ,judging by the number of waiters they employ have been outposts of the Chinese SAS. Though recalling the excellence of service and the delicious quality of the food in the ones I use, a Chinese take over might be the logical extension of a take away and not entirely a bad thing. We may not understand what our new rulers are talking about - but what else is new?
It is a sobering thought that in any contest between Western civilisation and a computer nerd, Western civilisation would be about ten to one against. Not only is warfare on its last legs: no sooner does nature invent a new disease to get rid of the human race which is wrecking its planet than our scientists invent a cure. Thus we are able to sink deeper in the primeval mud of old age, our minds blanked by Alzheimer’s disease, our bodies wracked with Parkinson’s or eaten by cancers.
Keep fit, keep well, the Government advises us, so you can spend long years sitting in rows in Non Care Homes, wetting yourselves and watching the X Factor.
I have never kept fit, nor consciously tried to be well. When a doctor warned me I was so fat that movement was a risk, I reduced movement to a minimum and survived. I even failed the entrance exam for a Slimmers’ Clinic.
Some years ago, an Anglesey doctor admitted, as he wrote approvingly “growing old disgracefully” on my medical records: “If we kept dogs alive in the state we do people, we would be summonsed by the RSPCA.”
I am like that character of Somerset Maugham’s in “The Razor’s Edge” who admitted he would not complain if he died tomorrow. I have seen the finest pictures in the world, listened to its greatest music, read its books, seen its plays. I have known in the biblical sense some beautiful women. I have enjoyed happiness in marriage, bred good children, been a professional success, eaten in the finest restaurants in Europe. I write this with my dog at my feet, surrounded by my books.
As an aspirant Buddhist, I do not believe in death, anyway. I am one with Dylan Thomas who prophesied “Death Shall Have No Dominion”. John Donne put it even more strongly “ And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.”
Though, mind you, for many years he kept his coffin by his desk. A great man for the each way bet was Dr Donne. And I am quite ready for my next body, too. Not for Enlightenment.
Enlightenment sounds too much like Alzheimer’s with attitude, celebrated in a Celestial Care Home.
I wouldn’t mind coming back as a grape.
THE STORY THAT TELLS A PICTURE
Readers may have been puzzled at the press cutting for my BBC Wales programme, “Radio Brynsiencyn”, which appeared by some quirk of word processery unknown to me on this page some weeks ago. This is its story
The best editor I had in my years of Taff-railing for BBC Wales was called Bob Atkins. He was an Englishman too, so he was scuppered from the first day on the job.
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 that a producer called Jack King knocked at my door with his tape recorder playing and for the next half hour I talked: about books and 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, when still, in Milton’s words, flown with wine and impertinence, I 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 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 in the shape of a sit-up-and-beg bike with an errand boy’s basket on the handlebars and 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 so I 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 Corporation.
Eminently suitable to look after Bangor.
Angus had interviewed world leaders but he 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.
Then there was the matter of a Cleaning Staff, 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 GCSEs 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?’ said Lloyd Webber. ‘Can we go for a take?’ asked Aled.
They did, and the first take was all that was needed. ‘Good God,’ said Lloyd Webber, ‘it took Barbra Streisand a week to do that.’
His Dad told me later: ‘I didn’t like to explain he was in a hurry to watch Match of the Day.’
Aled was blessed with three gifts: the voice of an angel and his parents, Derek and Nest, 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 to get him to 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 places 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 station and I started to get applications for jobs. W.I.s, youth clubs and at least one school asked if they could tour the studios. Then BBC Controller Ulster heard it while driving across Anglesey and 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.
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 Relations Tribunal and there was quite a lot of fuss about it.
I had been rewarded with many by-lines on the Daily Mirror over the years: now I was the subject of a front page lead. 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 Cooke, to name but a few. So perhaps the ruling just covred the foot soldiers. 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 da (I didn’t even know how to spell it).
Whatever else war was, it was an absurd waste of the flower of manhood and a greater condemnation of our collective intelligence even than watching the X Factor.
It is inconceivable that in the 21st century we are still resolving arguments, and stealing each others’ tribal lands and riches, by sending our young men to kill perfect strangers with whom they have more in common than in dispute. We should have got over that when we left the cave and abandoned the club. It defies common sense. If a farmer knew a field was full of poisonous weeds, he would be unlikely to test it by sending in his finest herd of young pedigree cattle.
Curiously, Russia, which has spent most of its existence either killing itself by the million or other people it has never met, takes the lead in showing us that killing people is unnecessary. All you have to do is switch off the light, as this week it threatens to do with Georgia. At a stroke, the country is helpless.
Another country which is demonstrating that it is quite unnecessary to go to all the trouble and expense of killing people is China. In fairness, this is a country which has so many people of its own to kill by the million that it has no need to look for fights with its neighbours as a means of population control. It now shows how absurdly easy it is to defeat an opponent by hacking into the IT systems by which we are governed - and we pass quietly into governance by Chinese restaurants, which I have been convinced for years ,judging by the number of waiters they employ have been outposts of the Chinese SAS. Though recalling the excellence of service and the delicious quality of the food in the ones I use, a Chinese take over might be the logical extension of a take away and not entirely a bad thing. We may not understand what our new rulers are talking about - but what else is new?
It is a sobering thought that in any contest between Western civilisation and a computer nerd, Western civilisation would be about ten to one against. Not only is warfare on its last legs: no sooner does nature invent a new disease to get rid of the human race which is wrecking its planet than our scientists invent a cure. Thus we are able to sink deeper in the primeval mud of old age, our minds blanked by Alzheimer’s disease, our bodies wracked with Parkinson’s or eaten by cancers.
Keep fit, keep well, the Government advises us, so you can spend long years sitting in rows in Non Care Homes, wetting yourselves and watching the X Factor.
I have never kept fit, nor consciously tried to be well. When a doctor warned me I was so fat that movement was a risk, I reduced movement to a minimum and survived. I even failed the entrance exam for a Slimmers’ Clinic.
Some years ago, an Anglesey doctor admitted, as he wrote approvingly “growing old disgracefully” on my medical records: “If we kept dogs alive in the state we do people, we would be summonsed by the RSPCA.”
I am like that character of Somerset Maugham’s in “The Razor’s Edge” who admitted he would not complain if he died tomorrow. I have seen the finest pictures in the world, listened to its greatest music, read its books, seen its plays. I have known in the biblical sense some beautiful women. I have enjoyed happiness in marriage, bred good children, been a professional success, eaten in the finest restaurants in Europe. I write this with my dog at my feet, surrounded by my books.
As an aspirant Buddhist, I do not believe in death, anyway. I am one with Dylan Thomas who prophesied “Death Shall Have No Dominion”. John Donne put it even more strongly “ And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.”
Though, mind you, for many years he kept his coffin by his desk. A great man for the each way bet was Dr Donne. And I am quite ready for my next body, too. Not for Enlightenment.
Enlightenment sounds too much like Alzheimer’s with attitude, celebrated in a Celestial Care Home.
I wouldn’t mind coming back as a grape.
THE STORY THAT TELLS A PICTURE
Readers may have been puzzled at the press cutting for my BBC Wales programme, “Radio Brynsiencyn”, which appeared by some quirk of word processery unknown to me on this page some weeks ago. This is its story
The best editor I had in my years of Taff-railing for BBC Wales was called Bob Atkins. He was an Englishman too, so he was scuppered from the first day on the job.
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 that a producer called Jack King knocked at my door with his tape recorder playing and for the next half hour I talked: about books and 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, when still, in Milton’s words, flown with wine and impertinence, I 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 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 in the shape of a sit-up-and-beg bike with an errand boy’s basket on the handlebars and 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 so I 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 Corporation.
Eminently suitable to look after Bangor.
Angus had interviewed world leaders but he 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.
Then there was the matter of a Cleaning Staff, 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 GCSEs 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?’ said Lloyd Webber. ‘Can we go for a take?’ asked Aled.
They did, and the first take was all that was needed. ‘Good God,’ said Lloyd Webber, ‘it took Barbra Streisand a week to do that.’
His Dad told me later: ‘I didn’t like to explain he was in a hurry to watch Match of the Day.’
Aled was blessed with three gifts: the voice of an angel and his parents, Derek and Nest, 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 to get him to 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 places 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 station and I started to get applications for jobs. W.I.s, youth clubs and at least one school asked if they could tour the studios. Then BBC Controller Ulster heard it while driving across Anglesey and 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.
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 Relations Tribunal and there was quite a lot of fuss about it.
I had been rewarded with many by-lines on the Daily Mirror over the years: now I was the subject of a front page lead. 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 Cooke, to name but a few. So perhaps the ruling just covred the foot soldiers. 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 da (I didn’t even know how to spell it).
Sunday, 30 September 2007
Goody Two Brains
The interesting thing is that we have got two brains. There is the nice, civilised brain in the neat bed sitting-room behind the eyes. Then there is the other brain, the animal brain left over from our tree-swinging days: Cro Magnon. A survival, like our coccyx, which is all we have left of our tails.
If you want to meet prehistoric man, the brontosaurus basher, the chest thumper with the dinosaur dangling from his belt, just go straight up the spine, turn left at the ears and you cannot miss him in his dark little nest.
The moment I read about him, I recognised him at once. He is the one who has been getting me in trouble all these years. I am a stout, elderly gentleman of quiet pursuits and academic leanings. That is the influence of Better Behaved Brain. Nice little property he has up there in the head. “First Floor Front” the address runs “Forehead, Upper Nose on the Brow, ME.”
You will get him there most times, enjoying ‘Country Life’ like as not and listening to music. He does all my thinking and worrying for me and as a tenant is very desirable. He is not a scrap of trouble. About once a year he will come out, give me a nudge and say, “About time we were writing a book, isn’t it?” I say nervously, “It won’t hurt, will it?” “Of course not,” he reassures me, and off we go arm in arm to the word processor.
Never a cross word but we are often puzzled. Sometimes Better Behaved Brain and I have dozed off during our evening gin and wakened to find the glass empty and the bottle all but dry. Then we notice the sherry has gone too and the wine we were going to have with dinner. Some nights we have even had our suspicions about the washing up liquid. Now we know it is Animal Brain. The moment our eyes closed there he was swinging down the spine looking for trouble; emptying every bottle in sight and playing havoc with my good name.
It is all clear now but I used to wonder why people who invited me to their dinner parties were always a touch frosty when we met the next day. It was the old story. You get invited twice. Once to apologise.
It got so bad, that after the 100th birthday party of his mother, I had to write as follows to my host Lord Langford:
“.........It has come to my attention that your mother’s party was disrupted by a person posing as me. Sadly this is not the first time this has happened. I can only assume that some impudent fellow lies in wait for the post and steals my invitation..........”
Fortunately my old friend, the Ninth Baron, has a sense of humour and I was forgiven. Now I realise that no blame should have attached in the first place. It wasn’t me who goosed his cousin, a Governor of the BBC and the one who taught Mrs Thatcher to be a lady, emptied three decanters, sang the ‘Gallant Forty Twa’ and marched up and down The Boudoir playing imaginary bagpipes. It was Animal Brain. He had locked the forehead so that Better Behaved Brain and I couldn’t get out, and taken over the piloting of the body.
It was he who started arguments in pubs, sent rude letters to editors and producers. He is the racehorse urger. It was his nose that twitched with desire all those years ago. He who, when I won a pig in an army raffle, insisted on riding back to the camp where I was Provost Sergeant on the Orderly Corporal’s motor bike, with the pig on the pillion. I will bet it was Animal Brain who was forever pushing me off bar stools.
With Better Behaved Brain you know where you are. Stuff some chocolate caramels into his dressing gown pocket, poke up the sitting room fire and give him a Ngaio Marsh to read and you can leave him for hours. He likes a glass of wine, of course, and I keep a small cellar of choice wine just for him.
Animal brain is jealous. Not only is he programmed to self destruct; he wants to take Better Behaved Brain with him. As you know, our Better Behaved Brains have a quadrillion of cells. That is a million with nine noughts.
The trouble is every time you have a hangover you wipe out a million. Even worse, the ones that go first are the cells of memory, with the result that thanks to Animal Brain I am heavily overdrawn at the memory bank. I think I am down to five.
Animal brain can remember nothing and is wholly uneducated. When I was working, producers of television and radio programmes used to ring me up from time to time, saying, “We are looking for someone who can take a fresh look at……” whatever the subject was of the programme they planned.
Animal Brain always got to the phone first and he knew that what they were really saying was that the search was on for some incompetent who knew absolutely nothing about a subject. You were the only representative of the species who knew nothing about, say, sport, or farming, or, come to that, pretty well anything. Indeed Animal Brain has cornered the market in abysmal ignorance. It knows less about more subjects than any other brain operating in the secondary jungle of the media.
For a decade I made weekly appearances on a popular news quiz on BBC Radio Wales chaired by a man who knew everything, Vincent Kane. In ten years I doubt if I won more than a dozen times. Indeed I won so rarely that when I did Animal Brain demanded a recount.
The interesting fact is that although Animal Brain was asked to appear every week, my fellow contestants, politicians, business tycoons and academics who had developed their Better Behaved Brain and evicted AB’s Dark Shadow, only appeared once a month.
IT IS ONLY COMMA SENSE
As I admit in my profile, I am stranger to punctuation. Readers of these essays may therefore wonder that the punctuation is immaculate. That is because I always marry above myself. My posh wife has ‘A’ levels in every conceivable subject and an Oxford degree and she very kindly looks over everything I write.
My friend Ken Ashton knows my attitude to punctuation, which incidentally was shared with Wordsworth. In his book on the Lakeland Poets, Thomas de Quincey tells how Wordsworth sent him to London to correct the proofs of a pamphlet because Wordsworth had little sympathy with punctuation.
Ashton has been kind enough to draw my attention to a friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley who lacked the comfort of a learned wife. He complained that whenever he began to write, he never could arrange his ideas in grammatical order. Which occasion suggested the idea of the following lines to the poet:
Here I sit with my paper, my pen and my ink,
First of this thing, and that thing, and t'other thing think;
Then my thoughts come so pell-mell all into my mind,
That the sense or the subject I never can find:
This word is wrong placed, — no regard to the sense,
The present and future, instead of past tense,
Then my grammar I want; O dear! what a bore,
I think I shall never attempt to write more,
With patience I then my thoughts must arraign,
Have them all in due order like mutes in a train,
Like them too must wait in due patience and thought,
Or else my fine works will all come to nought.
My wit too's so copious, it flows like a river,
But disperses its waters on black and white never;
Like smoke it appears independent and free,
But ah luckless smoke! it all passes like thee —
Then at length all my patience entirely lost,
My paper and pens in the fire are tossed;
But come, try again — you must never despair,
Our Murray's or Entick's are not all so rare,
Implore their assistance — they'll come to your aid,
Perform all your business without being paid,
They'll tell you the present tense, future and past,
Which should come first, and which should come last,
This Murray will do — then to Entick repair,
To find out the meaning of any word rare.
This they friendly will tell, and ne'er make you blush,
With a jeering look, taunt, or an O fie! tush!
Then straight all your thoughts in black and white put,
Not minding the if's the be's, and the but,
Then read it all over, see how it will run,
How answers the wit, the retort, and the pun,
Your writings may then with old Socrates vie,
May on the same shelf with Demosthenes lie,
May as Junius be sharp, or as Plato be sage,
The pattern or satire to all of the age;
But stop — a mad author I mean not to turn,
Nor with thirst of applause does my heated brain burn,
Sufficient that sense, wit, and grammar combined,
My letters may make some slight food for the mind;
That my thoughts to my friends I may freely impart,
In all the warm language that flows from the heart,
Hark! futurity calls! it loudly complains,
It bids me step forward and just hold the reins,
My excuse shall be humble, and faithful, and true,
Such as I fear can be made but by few —
Of writers this age has abundance and plenty,
Three score and a thousand, two millions and twenty,
Three score of them wits who all sharply vie,
To try what odd creature they best can belie,
A thousand are prudes who for Charity write,
And fill up their sheets with spleen, envy, and spite[,]
One million are bards, who to Heaven aspire,
And stuff their works full of bombast, rant, and fire,
T'other million are wags who in Grubstreet attend,
And just like a cobbler the old writings mend,
The twenty are those who for pulpits indite,
And pore over sermons all Saturday night.
And now my good friends — who come after I mean,
As I ne'er wore a cassock, or dined with a dean,
Or like cobblers at mending I never did try,
Nor with poets in lyrics attempted to vie;
As for prudes these good souls I both hate and detest,
So here I believe the matter must rest. —
I've heard your complaint — my answer I've made,
And since to your calls all the tribute I've paid,
Adieu my good friend; pray never despair,
But grammar and sense and everything dare,
Attempt but to write dashing, easy, and free,
Then take out your grammar and pay him your fee,
Be not a coward, shrink not to a tense,
But read it all over and make it out sense.
What a tiresome girl! — pray soon make an end,
Else my limited patience you'll quickly expend.
Well adieu, I no longer your patience will try —
So swift to the post now the letter shall fly.
YET ANOTHER GOODBYE
Jim Lovelock, my good friend and one of the oldest, died this week at his home in Spain. Death must have had quite a struggle because Jim was the stuff that old boots are made from.
Editor of a weekly newspaper in his early twenties, he was crippled with polio as a child, but nevertheless became a mountaineer, a pot-holer and a member of the expedition which climbed Nuptse, Everest’s younger sister. Working for the Daily Mail, he once climbed the south face of the building and climbed through the window into the editor’s office.
He was also my boss for a day and a half when he was proprietor of Stockport News Service.
Jim was a remarkable man who collected oddities. The rest of the staff of Stockport News Service was an odd little chap called Mickey. We had to find him to be introduced, 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”. He 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 had come from.
He thought 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. This time, disposing was child’s play: acquiring, he never quite mastered.
He had one suit he wore to the office, except on the days when he wore a mackintosh in the hope that “Master” would not notice he was wearing 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 Stockport.
I was touched that he went further: he drove all the way to Crewe to collect me. I see now that the reason was 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 alternatives. 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 copped 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 money 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, on one occasion sleeping in his car outside the vicarage in Cheshire in case his prey, the naughty Vicar of Woodford, sneaked back from his love-nest in the South of France
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 would have had every right to be cross. George Harrap, the picture editor, 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 breast 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 Mac.
But I will be waiting for the publication of Jimmy’s will………………
If you want to meet prehistoric man, the brontosaurus basher, the chest thumper with the dinosaur dangling from his belt, just go straight up the spine, turn left at the ears and you cannot miss him in his dark little nest.
The moment I read about him, I recognised him at once. He is the one who has been getting me in trouble all these years. I am a stout, elderly gentleman of quiet pursuits and academic leanings. That is the influence of Better Behaved Brain. Nice little property he has up there in the head. “First Floor Front” the address runs “Forehead, Upper Nose on the Brow, ME.”
You will get him there most times, enjoying ‘Country Life’ like as not and listening to music. He does all my thinking and worrying for me and as a tenant is very desirable. He is not a scrap of trouble. About once a year he will come out, give me a nudge and say, “About time we were writing a book, isn’t it?” I say nervously, “It won’t hurt, will it?” “Of course not,” he reassures me, and off we go arm in arm to the word processor.
Never a cross word but we are often puzzled. Sometimes Better Behaved Brain and I have dozed off during our evening gin and wakened to find the glass empty and the bottle all but dry. Then we notice the sherry has gone too and the wine we were going to have with dinner. Some nights we have even had our suspicions about the washing up liquid. Now we know it is Animal Brain. The moment our eyes closed there he was swinging down the spine looking for trouble; emptying every bottle in sight and playing havoc with my good name.
It is all clear now but I used to wonder why people who invited me to their dinner parties were always a touch frosty when we met the next day. It was the old story. You get invited twice. Once to apologise.
It got so bad, that after the 100th birthday party of his mother, I had to write as follows to my host Lord Langford:
“.........It has come to my attention that your mother’s party was disrupted by a person posing as me. Sadly this is not the first time this has happened. I can only assume that some impudent fellow lies in wait for the post and steals my invitation..........”
Fortunately my old friend, the Ninth Baron, has a sense of humour and I was forgiven. Now I realise that no blame should have attached in the first place. It wasn’t me who goosed his cousin, a Governor of the BBC and the one who taught Mrs Thatcher to be a lady, emptied three decanters, sang the ‘Gallant Forty Twa’ and marched up and down The Boudoir playing imaginary bagpipes. It was Animal Brain. He had locked the forehead so that Better Behaved Brain and I couldn’t get out, and taken over the piloting of the body.
It was he who started arguments in pubs, sent rude letters to editors and producers. He is the racehorse urger. It was his nose that twitched with desire all those years ago. He who, when I won a pig in an army raffle, insisted on riding back to the camp where I was Provost Sergeant on the Orderly Corporal’s motor bike, with the pig on the pillion. I will bet it was Animal Brain who was forever pushing me off bar stools.
With Better Behaved Brain you know where you are. Stuff some chocolate caramels into his dressing gown pocket, poke up the sitting room fire and give him a Ngaio Marsh to read and you can leave him for hours. He likes a glass of wine, of course, and I keep a small cellar of choice wine just for him.
Animal brain is jealous. Not only is he programmed to self destruct; he wants to take Better Behaved Brain with him. As you know, our Better Behaved Brains have a quadrillion of cells. That is a million with nine noughts.
The trouble is every time you have a hangover you wipe out a million. Even worse, the ones that go first are the cells of memory, with the result that thanks to Animal Brain I am heavily overdrawn at the memory bank. I think I am down to five.
Animal brain can remember nothing and is wholly uneducated. When I was working, producers of television and radio programmes used to ring me up from time to time, saying, “We are looking for someone who can take a fresh look at……” whatever the subject was of the programme they planned.
Animal Brain always got to the phone first and he knew that what they were really saying was that the search was on for some incompetent who knew absolutely nothing about a subject. You were the only representative of the species who knew nothing about, say, sport, or farming, or, come to that, pretty well anything. Indeed Animal Brain has cornered the market in abysmal ignorance. It knows less about more subjects than any other brain operating in the secondary jungle of the media.
For a decade I made weekly appearances on a popular news quiz on BBC Radio Wales chaired by a man who knew everything, Vincent Kane. In ten years I doubt if I won more than a dozen times. Indeed I won so rarely that when I did Animal Brain demanded a recount.
The interesting fact is that although Animal Brain was asked to appear every week, my fellow contestants, politicians, business tycoons and academics who had developed their Better Behaved Brain and evicted AB’s Dark Shadow, only appeared once a month.
IT IS ONLY COMMA SENSE
As I admit in my profile, I am stranger to punctuation. Readers of these essays may therefore wonder that the punctuation is immaculate. That is because I always marry above myself. My posh wife has ‘A’ levels in every conceivable subject and an Oxford degree and she very kindly looks over everything I write.
My friend Ken Ashton knows my attitude to punctuation, which incidentally was shared with Wordsworth. In his book on the Lakeland Poets, Thomas de Quincey tells how Wordsworth sent him to London to correct the proofs of a pamphlet because Wordsworth had little sympathy with punctuation.
Ashton has been kind enough to draw my attention to a friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley who lacked the comfort of a learned wife. He complained that whenever he began to write, he never could arrange his ideas in grammatical order. Which occasion suggested the idea of the following lines to the poet:
Here I sit with my paper, my pen and my ink,
First of this thing, and that thing, and t'other thing think;
Then my thoughts come so pell-mell all into my mind,
That the sense or the subject I never can find:
This word is wrong placed, — no regard to the sense,
The present and future, instead of past tense,
Then my grammar I want; O dear! what a bore,
I think I shall never attempt to write more,
With patience I then my thoughts must arraign,
Have them all in due order like mutes in a train,
Like them too must wait in due patience and thought,
Or else my fine works will all come to nought.
My wit too's so copious, it flows like a river,
But disperses its waters on black and white never;
Like smoke it appears independent and free,
But ah luckless smoke! it all passes like thee —
Then at length all my patience entirely lost,
My paper and pens in the fire are tossed;
But come, try again — you must never despair,
Our Murray's or Entick's are not all so rare,
Implore their assistance — they'll come to your aid,
Perform all your business without being paid,
They'll tell you the present tense, future and past,
Which should come first, and which should come last,
This Murray will do — then to Entick repair,
To find out the meaning of any word rare.
This they friendly will tell, and ne'er make you blush,
With a jeering look, taunt, or an O fie! tush!
Then straight all your thoughts in black and white put,
Not minding the if's the be's, and the but,
Then read it all over, see how it will run,
How answers the wit, the retort, and the pun,
Your writings may then with old Socrates vie,
May on the same shelf with Demosthenes lie,
May as Junius be sharp, or as Plato be sage,
The pattern or satire to all of the age;
But stop — a mad author I mean not to turn,
Nor with thirst of applause does my heated brain burn,
Sufficient that sense, wit, and grammar combined,
My letters may make some slight food for the mind;
That my thoughts to my friends I may freely impart,
In all the warm language that flows from the heart,
Hark! futurity calls! it loudly complains,
It bids me step forward and just hold the reins,
My excuse shall be humble, and faithful, and true,
Such as I fear can be made but by few —
Of writers this age has abundance and plenty,
Three score and a thousand, two millions and twenty,
Three score of them wits who all sharply vie,
To try what odd creature they best can belie,
A thousand are prudes who for Charity write,
And fill up their sheets with spleen, envy, and spite[,]
One million are bards, who to Heaven aspire,
And stuff their works full of bombast, rant, and fire,
T'other million are wags who in Grubstreet attend,
And just like a cobbler the old writings mend,
The twenty are those who for pulpits indite,
And pore over sermons all Saturday night.
And now my good friends — who come after I mean,
As I ne'er wore a cassock, or dined with a dean,
Or like cobblers at mending I never did try,
Nor with poets in lyrics attempted to vie;
As for prudes these good souls I both hate and detest,
So here I believe the matter must rest. —
I've heard your complaint — my answer I've made,
And since to your calls all the tribute I've paid,
Adieu my good friend; pray never despair,
But grammar and sense and everything dare,
Attempt but to write dashing, easy, and free,
Then take out your grammar and pay him your fee,
Be not a coward, shrink not to a tense,
But read it all over and make it out sense.
What a tiresome girl! — pray soon make an end,
Else my limited patience you'll quickly expend.
Well adieu, I no longer your patience will try —
So swift to the post now the letter shall fly.
YET ANOTHER GOODBYE
Jim Lovelock, my good friend and one of the oldest, died this week at his home in Spain. Death must have had quite a struggle because Jim was the stuff that old boots are made from.
Editor of a weekly newspaper in his early twenties, he was crippled with polio as a child, but nevertheless became a mountaineer, a pot-holer and a member of the expedition which climbed Nuptse, Everest’s younger sister. Working for the Daily Mail, he once climbed the south face of the building and climbed through the window into the editor’s office.
He was also my boss for a day and a half when he was proprietor of Stockport News Service.
Jim was a remarkable man who collected oddities. The rest of the staff of Stockport News Service was an odd little chap called Mickey. We had to find him to be introduced, 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”. He 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 had come from.
He thought 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. This time, disposing was child’s play: acquiring, he never quite mastered.
He had one suit he wore to the office, except on the days when he wore a mackintosh in the hope that “Master” would not notice he was wearing 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 Stockport.
I was touched that he went further: he drove all the way to Crewe to collect me. I see now that the reason was 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 alternatives. 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 copped 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 money 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, on one occasion sleeping in his car outside the vicarage in Cheshire in case his prey, the naughty Vicar of Woodford, sneaked back from his love-nest in the South of France
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 would have had every right to be cross. George Harrap, the picture editor, 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 breast 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 Mac.
But I will be waiting for the publication of Jimmy’s will………………
Saturday, 22 September 2007
SWALLOWING THE TABLOID
In the 1880s two young American salesmen-cum-pharmacists, Silas Mainville Burroughs and Henry Wellcome, invented the ‘tabloid’. It was not originally a cut-down newspaper but a form of compressed pill — the name was an elision of ‘tablet’ and ‘alkaloid’ — which they imported to Britain. Helped by its sales, their company Burroughs Wellcome achieved huge success: insulin was another of their inventions; while Henry Wellcome created the first proper medical bags, giving them to Stanley for his trips to Africa and Scott for his walk to the Pole.
Tabloid writing is designed to be an easy pill to swallow.
At its best, it is concise and composed of non-obscene short words. A story is never longer than two folios. It is always black and white. Colourful writing is for journalists.
Is there a difference? There is, and it was best expressed in an old Hollywood film: a journalist is a guy who bums drinks off reporters.
Content in a tabloid is important. There are certain essential ingredients. A very good tabloid reporter called Frank Howitt, whose son Peter is doing quite well on TV, once wrote the ultimate tabloid headline: “Glamorous dog-owning granny elopes with Vicar.”
Animals are important. The Daily Mail sacked a reporter for not including the death of a rabbit among the thirty people killed in an air crash.
I overheard the best lesson in tabloid writing in the fifties in the Mirror office, which I had just joined with another Kemsley reporter called Arthur. Brooks. Arthur was clothed in the invincible Armour of Vanity. I once heard him tell another reporter: “You supply the facts and I will do the word artistry.”
He invariably, and oddly, greeted you by rubbing his extended hands along the wings of his highly polished hair, straightening an already rigid tie, and saying “No danger” out of the corner of his mouth.
Bizarre greetings proliferated. A reporter called Rosenfeld always began a conversation with a request to borrow your comb and tuppence to ring a friend. He was cured by another very good tabloid reporter called Terry Stringer who pressed a silver coin in his palm and said, “Here’s sixpence. Phone them all.”
On the occasion of the lesson of which I speak, Arthur had handed in his account of a murder which contained sufficient words to be published in paperback. He was called up by the news editor who always resented people bringing him stories and so interrupting his study of the Sporting Life.
“Arthur,” he asked, “are you familiar with the Bible?”
“No danger,” said Arthur with a sideways sweep of the glittering hair.
“Then you will have noticed,” said the news editor, “that the story of the Creation is told in four or perhaps five paragraphs?”
When Arthur nodded, his hair caught the light and flashed like sunlight caught in a mirror.
“Then why does it take you five folios to tell the story of a tatty murder in Liverpool?”
Damon Runyon and Ernest Hemingway between them changed for ever the language of journalism when they fathered tabloid reporting.
Runyon was the Media Studies degree of an earlier generation. Few of us have resisted the temptation to plunge in at the deep end of the present tense; several have made a living from it.
When the critic Cyril Connolly praised Hemingway for killing the Mandarin style of writing he was referring to literature, but it also applied to Hemingway the Foreign Correspondent.
“By Line”, a collection of his early journalism, shows the emergence of the style which was to make him the finest short story writer of the twentieth century. The tragedy of Ernest Hemingway was not that he shot himself, but that he got his timing wrong. Had he shot himself in 1953 when he won the Nobel Prize for literature with “The Old Man and the Sea” his place in the World of Literature would have been assured. As it was, he lived to become a comic self parody in a cruel farce. As Freud points out, all novelists are fantasists with an end product. Alas, not all fantasists are novelists, which may explain why so many men one meets claim to have been in the SAS. To accommodate them all the regiment would have to be the size of the Salvation Army.
If Runyon did not invent the style he certainly brought it centre stage. His stories of life on Broadway and the Great White Way, both of which terms he invented, are classics. Sadly he did not use it in his newspaper reports, which are sadly overwritten.
.
Those who condemn my inky trade are perhaps unaware that it stands on the shoulders of giants. Dr Sam Johnson and Charles Dickens, Addison and Steele were practitioners. My present vehicle, the blog, was the child of a sixteenth century, retired diplomat Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay. He explained that he wanted to devote his life to writing on the subject of which he was the greatest expert - himself.
.
…THE LAW IS A ASS, SAID THE BEADLE……
WE “celebrate” the 60th anniversary of the bloodiest act of criminal ineptitude in the History of Empire, the Partition of India. It was the work of three lawyers, Ghandi, Jinnah and Nehru, assisted by a fourth who, without any knowledge of the country, decided the line of Partition in a month and then fled the country in fear of what would happen to him if he stayed. A senior civil servant minuted his Department Head: “I sometimes think,” he wrote, “that the worst disservice we have done to India is to take their best sons and turn them into lawyers.”
As, with the inevitability of Greek Tragedy, the ordeal of the McCann family reaches its denouement, it is perhaps timely to inquire why they should have been faced with hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal costs in their efforts to clear their name.
I wonder with Omar Khayam what they buy,these lawyers, which is half so precious as the stuff they sell
VINCE MULCHRONE AND THE FONEY FLOOK
Newspapermen don’t come much better than Vincent Mulchrone, a friend since weekly paper days. The last time we met before his too early death, I had been hired by the Brewers’ Society to argue the case for Sunday Opening of pubs in Wales. A cause close to my heart.
The most graphic way to illustrate the anomalies, it seemed to me, was to hire a coach and get my friend Robin Wills, the manager of the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester, to make a massive, extravagant picnic, because Robin did extravagance better than anyone I knew, as befitted a tobacco company heir
I would invite Fleet Street’s finest to join me in a tour of the Welsh border, visiting pubs. Pubs where you could get a drink in the snug, but not the lounge, the bar but not the dining room, and in once case where the boundary between England and Wales ran through the centre of the pub, on the left hand side of the bar but not the right.
Mulchrone was first on my list.
Late in the afternoon we left the main party and settled down to have a comfortable drink in the Crown in Denbigh, which had never closed in living memory. It was there that Vince told me the story of the time he hired a man to wear a Flook suit at a seaside promotion by the Daily Mail.
Flook was a very popular furry bear, star of the paper’s cartoons page. Vince said he found a reluctant candidate at the town’s labour exchange.
“A fiver,” Vince wheedled, “just for a morning’s walk on the sands.”
“Deck-chairs?” the man asked suspiciously. “I couldn’t give out deck-chairs. It’s me back and I can’t stand heat.”
“It’s not the bloody Sahara,” Vince said, “and we’ll throw in a water bottle. All you’ve got to do is be nice to a few kids.”
The man’s eyes blazed with panic. “It’s not Father Christmas, is it? I couldn’t do Father Christmas; not again. I ‘ad to do it three years ago. Horrible it was. I give out the wrong parcels and a little girl hit me wiv a bleeding train.”
“It’s mid-summer,” Vince told him, “you don’t have Father Christmas in summer.”
“They had me in September that year,” the man countered. “I wouldn’t have to give anything out, would I?”
“Lollipops. In a tray,” Vince told him quickly. “Round your neck. When you’ve given the last one out you’ve finished.”
“They wouldn’t have to sit on my knees, would they? I couldn’t have kids sitting on my knee. They all have wet drawers, you know. It’s the excitement.”
But he was weakening. “How many lollipops?”
“Fifty.”
He made up his mind. “OK!” he said. “But not a word to this lot. I don’t want to lose me amchoor status.” “And no sitting on bleeding knees,” he warned. “I ain’t ‘aving a conviction for that. Definite.”
“Flook has no knees.”
When they got to the Entertainments Shed on the prom and saw the Flook outfit, the little man changed his mind. “I’m not getting into that bleedin’ thing,” he said. “It’s horrible.”
He agreed when Vince doubled the fee but not even the lure of a third fiver, which Vince had to give him to put on the plastic head, would induce him to remove his cap.
The incessant electronic barking of Flook obviously unnerved him, Vince told me. With a sudden, desperate jerk, the little man tore himself away from the grips of a Circulation man and, banging and dipping his plastic head, shot through the hut door and out into the Great World.
Colliding almost at once with a group of holiday-makers, he tumbled and rolled down the promenade steps to the beach where the weight of his head sent his feet shooting into the air. In a moment he was up and running, little gauntleted hands waving wildly as he struggled to unfasten the head. Zigzagging across the beach, terrifying holiday-makers.
“Look at him!” A Circulation man fumed, “he’s ruining the whole bloody thing leaping about like that. He should be walking slowly, chatting up the children.”
From that day many readers of the Daily Mail were able to get instant obedience from their young by threatening them that Flook was coming. He emptied that beach faster than rain, or even a deck chair attendant. At first the children had been delighted. You could hear a concerted shout of ‘OOOOOH’ all over the front as a horde of children threw away the spades with which they had been burying their fathers and made for Flook. No doubt it was the lollipops that attracted them, for the trail of red toffee which charted his progress down the beach soon became a line of struggling, laughing children. But the mood changed dramatically when, brought to bay at last, the little man turned on his pursuers and started throwing lollipops at their heads.
“It’s all wrong,’ said the man from the Circulation Department pettishly, “there should only be one lollipop to each child. That little girl has been hit twice.”
Vince said he admired the man’s aim: he could not see and was directed solely by sound. Under the circumstances Vince thought he put up a creditable performance. Even when the last lollipop was discharged the man in the Flook suit fought on, hurling pebbles and even rocks of a respectable size. When he finally put the children to flight and sent parents scuttling for the protection of the promenade wall, the little man stood for a moment whimpering, a lonely figure on a deserted beach.
He threw himself down on the sand, kicking at the air as he struggled to pull off his head which by now was dented badly. Finally, he scrambled to his feet, skidding in the wet sand at the sea’s edge. Soon he was paddling, if you could so describe his nervous leaps and surges, as the water washed first round his ankles, then his knees, his little furry thighs and finally his middle as he floated further out to sea.
The Circulation man must have had a sticky few moments on the phone calling out a lifeboat to a man in a bearskin. When he came back he wore the air of a man who has known suffering. “They wanted to know, if they tow it in, do they get salvage money?’ he said.
End
Tabloid writing is designed to be an easy pill to swallow.
At its best, it is concise and composed of non-obscene short words. A story is never longer than two folios. It is always black and white. Colourful writing is for journalists.
Is there a difference? There is, and it was best expressed in an old Hollywood film: a journalist is a guy who bums drinks off reporters.
Content in a tabloid is important. There are certain essential ingredients. A very good tabloid reporter called Frank Howitt, whose son Peter is doing quite well on TV, once wrote the ultimate tabloid headline: “Glamorous dog-owning granny elopes with Vicar.”
Animals are important. The Daily Mail sacked a reporter for not including the death of a rabbit among the thirty people killed in an air crash.
I overheard the best lesson in tabloid writing in the fifties in the Mirror office, which I had just joined with another Kemsley reporter called Arthur. Brooks. Arthur was clothed in the invincible Armour of Vanity. I once heard him tell another reporter: “You supply the facts and I will do the word artistry.”
He invariably, and oddly, greeted you by rubbing his extended hands along the wings of his highly polished hair, straightening an already rigid tie, and saying “No danger” out of the corner of his mouth.
Bizarre greetings proliferated. A reporter called Rosenfeld always began a conversation with a request to borrow your comb and tuppence to ring a friend. He was cured by another very good tabloid reporter called Terry Stringer who pressed a silver coin in his palm and said, “Here’s sixpence. Phone them all.”
On the occasion of the lesson of which I speak, Arthur had handed in his account of a murder which contained sufficient words to be published in paperback. He was called up by the news editor who always resented people bringing him stories and so interrupting his study of the Sporting Life.
“Arthur,” he asked, “are you familiar with the Bible?”
“No danger,” said Arthur with a sideways sweep of the glittering hair.
“Then you will have noticed,” said the news editor, “that the story of the Creation is told in four or perhaps five paragraphs?”
When Arthur nodded, his hair caught the light and flashed like sunlight caught in a mirror.
“Then why does it take you five folios to tell the story of a tatty murder in Liverpool?”
Damon Runyon and Ernest Hemingway between them changed for ever the language of journalism when they fathered tabloid reporting.
Runyon was the Media Studies degree of an earlier generation. Few of us have resisted the temptation to plunge in at the deep end of the present tense; several have made a living from it.
When the critic Cyril Connolly praised Hemingway for killing the Mandarin style of writing he was referring to literature, but it also applied to Hemingway the Foreign Correspondent.
“By Line”, a collection of his early journalism, shows the emergence of the style which was to make him the finest short story writer of the twentieth century. The tragedy of Ernest Hemingway was not that he shot himself, but that he got his timing wrong. Had he shot himself in 1953 when he won the Nobel Prize for literature with “The Old Man and the Sea” his place in the World of Literature would have been assured. As it was, he lived to become a comic self parody in a cruel farce. As Freud points out, all novelists are fantasists with an end product. Alas, not all fantasists are novelists, which may explain why so many men one meets claim to have been in the SAS. To accommodate them all the regiment would have to be the size of the Salvation Army.
If Runyon did not invent the style he certainly brought it centre stage. His stories of life on Broadway and the Great White Way, both of which terms he invented, are classics. Sadly he did not use it in his newspaper reports, which are sadly overwritten.
.
Those who condemn my inky trade are perhaps unaware that it stands on the shoulders of giants. Dr Sam Johnson and Charles Dickens, Addison and Steele were practitioners. My present vehicle, the blog, was the child of a sixteenth century, retired diplomat Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay. He explained that he wanted to devote his life to writing on the subject of which he was the greatest expert - himself.
.
…THE LAW IS A ASS, SAID THE BEADLE……
WE “celebrate” the 60th anniversary of the bloodiest act of criminal ineptitude in the History of Empire, the Partition of India. It was the work of three lawyers, Ghandi, Jinnah and Nehru, assisted by a fourth who, without any knowledge of the country, decided the line of Partition in a month and then fled the country in fear of what would happen to him if he stayed. A senior civil servant minuted his Department Head: “I sometimes think,” he wrote, “that the worst disservice we have done to India is to take their best sons and turn them into lawyers.”
As, with the inevitability of Greek Tragedy, the ordeal of the McCann family reaches its denouement, it is perhaps timely to inquire why they should have been faced with hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal costs in their efforts to clear their name.
I wonder with Omar Khayam what they buy,these lawyers, which is half so precious as the stuff they sell
VINCE MULCHRONE AND THE FONEY FLOOK
Newspapermen don’t come much better than Vincent Mulchrone, a friend since weekly paper days. The last time we met before his too early death, I had been hired by the Brewers’ Society to argue the case for Sunday Opening of pubs in Wales. A cause close to my heart.
The most graphic way to illustrate the anomalies, it seemed to me, was to hire a coach and get my friend Robin Wills, the manager of the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester, to make a massive, extravagant picnic, because Robin did extravagance better than anyone I knew, as befitted a tobacco company heir
I would invite Fleet Street’s finest to join me in a tour of the Welsh border, visiting pubs. Pubs where you could get a drink in the snug, but not the lounge, the bar but not the dining room, and in once case where the boundary between England and Wales ran through the centre of the pub, on the left hand side of the bar but not the right.
Mulchrone was first on my list.
Late in the afternoon we left the main party and settled down to have a comfortable drink in the Crown in Denbigh, which had never closed in living memory. It was there that Vince told me the story of the time he hired a man to wear a Flook suit at a seaside promotion by the Daily Mail.
Flook was a very popular furry bear, star of the paper’s cartoons page. Vince said he found a reluctant candidate at the town’s labour exchange.
“A fiver,” Vince wheedled, “just for a morning’s walk on the sands.”
“Deck-chairs?” the man asked suspiciously. “I couldn’t give out deck-chairs. It’s me back and I can’t stand heat.”
“It’s not the bloody Sahara,” Vince said, “and we’ll throw in a water bottle. All you’ve got to do is be nice to a few kids.”
The man’s eyes blazed with panic. “It’s not Father Christmas, is it? I couldn’t do Father Christmas; not again. I ‘ad to do it three years ago. Horrible it was. I give out the wrong parcels and a little girl hit me wiv a bleeding train.”
“It’s mid-summer,” Vince told him, “you don’t have Father Christmas in summer.”
“They had me in September that year,” the man countered. “I wouldn’t have to give anything out, would I?”
“Lollipops. In a tray,” Vince told him quickly. “Round your neck. When you’ve given the last one out you’ve finished.”
“They wouldn’t have to sit on my knees, would they? I couldn’t have kids sitting on my knee. They all have wet drawers, you know. It’s the excitement.”
But he was weakening. “How many lollipops?”
“Fifty.”
He made up his mind. “OK!” he said. “But not a word to this lot. I don’t want to lose me amchoor status.” “And no sitting on bleeding knees,” he warned. “I ain’t ‘aving a conviction for that. Definite.”
“Flook has no knees.”
When they got to the Entertainments Shed on the prom and saw the Flook outfit, the little man changed his mind. “I’m not getting into that bleedin’ thing,” he said. “It’s horrible.”
He agreed when Vince doubled the fee but not even the lure of a third fiver, which Vince had to give him to put on the plastic head, would induce him to remove his cap.
The incessant electronic barking of Flook obviously unnerved him, Vince told me. With a sudden, desperate jerk, the little man tore himself away from the grips of a Circulation man and, banging and dipping his plastic head, shot through the hut door and out into the Great World.
Colliding almost at once with a group of holiday-makers, he tumbled and rolled down the promenade steps to the beach where the weight of his head sent his feet shooting into the air. In a moment he was up and running, little gauntleted hands waving wildly as he struggled to unfasten the head. Zigzagging across the beach, terrifying holiday-makers.
“Look at him!” A Circulation man fumed, “he’s ruining the whole bloody thing leaping about like that. He should be walking slowly, chatting up the children.”
From that day many readers of the Daily Mail were able to get instant obedience from their young by threatening them that Flook was coming. He emptied that beach faster than rain, or even a deck chair attendant. At first the children had been delighted. You could hear a concerted shout of ‘OOOOOH’ all over the front as a horde of children threw away the spades with which they had been burying their fathers and made for Flook. No doubt it was the lollipops that attracted them, for the trail of red toffee which charted his progress down the beach soon became a line of struggling, laughing children. But the mood changed dramatically when, brought to bay at last, the little man turned on his pursuers and started throwing lollipops at their heads.
“It’s all wrong,’ said the man from the Circulation Department pettishly, “there should only be one lollipop to each child. That little girl has been hit twice.”
Vince said he admired the man’s aim: he could not see and was directed solely by sound. Under the circumstances Vince thought he put up a creditable performance. Even when the last lollipop was discharged the man in the Flook suit fought on, hurling pebbles and even rocks of a respectable size. When he finally put the children to flight and sent parents scuttling for the protection of the promenade wall, the little man stood for a moment whimpering, a lonely figure on a deserted beach.
He threw himself down on the sand, kicking at the air as he struggled to pull off his head which by now was dented badly. Finally, he scrambled to his feet, skidding in the wet sand at the sea’s edge. Soon he was paddling, if you could so describe his nervous leaps and surges, as the water washed first round his ankles, then his knees, his little furry thighs and finally his middle as he floated further out to sea.
The Circulation man must have had a sticky few moments on the phone calling out a lifeboat to a man in a bearskin. When he came back he wore the air of a man who has known suffering. “They wanted to know, if they tow it in, do they get salvage money?’ he said.
End
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