GEORGE WAS THE DRAGON

A great week for fecundity. I went today for a test of my foolish heart, foolishly.

"What are you going to do?" I asked nervously.

"It's the test we give pregnant ladies," the nurse told me.

Now I know the Good Lord has in his lack of wisdom designed me on circular lines but this was altogether too much. Over the near century I cannot tell you the number of clumsy jokes I have suffered. Not only jokes. The last time I went to the dentist I was required to fill in a form denying I was pregnant.

The nurse reassured me. All she was going to do was rub cooling ointment on me and send exciting little charges coursing through my eager body.

"I won't bring the wife, then?"

"Oh bring her," insisted the nurse,"she will be interested."

By the time we arrived the little heart was pounding. The wife was reserving her options. Reassuring myself that there were no three-king-carrying camels in the car park, I hurried to begin what sounded like a merry meeting. It wasn't. The nurse just took pictures which came up on a screen which I couldn't see because my face was turned to the wall. The nurse was right, though. My wife WAS interested. But my tale of fecundity was not done.


PAGE ONE RUSH RUSH
First Great Grand-daughter. Now I have full set!!!




Not all meetings have been so trouble free:

Harrop by Ed Rawlinson

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.

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.

STARDUST AND TINSEL

The civilised world may be tumbling round our ears, World War 3 may be sharing our Christmas, the Government may be alone in not realising that Britain is broke. There remains one crumb of comfort. Stephen Fry, nibbling at his aspirin butty, perennially peddling his gobbets of knowledge, is not equipped to breed with Mary Portas, of whom I cannot catch a sight without every quality of mercy dropping like a gentle monsoon from heaven and gurgling down the plug hole of consciousness.

It is her boast that she decided to crusade for shopkeepers when she read that shops were closing at the rate of 100 a week. Judging by the advice I heard her giving on a dire Channel 4 show, she has easily improved on that figure. She told a charity shop that it would improve its sales if it increased its prices. In less prosperous days I bought my clothes at charity shops BECAUSE THEY WERE CHEAPER. At twenty stone and five foot eight, I had achieved dimensions at which people were dropping like flies so there was no shortage of gentlemen's light and casual.

I put my permanent poverty down to a friend I made early in my career. Search hard enough and there is always one word which exactly describes a person. In the case of Bill Marshall that word was 'outrageous'. I did not know what trouble was until I met Marshall, the Daily Mirror district man in Liverpool. He was a library of opposites. Lanky without being tall; a Lincolnshire lad with an American accent; immaculate blazer worn with stained trousers; cowboy boots without socks; wild hair and an occasional beard.

That was the picture I had when I saw him for the first time in the Liverpool Press Club a week after I joined the Daily Dispatch. Though we kept in touch until the weeks before his death and I loved him like a brother, we did not see each other for 30 years. Which may explain why I was able to have a successful career as an author and broadcaster. Had Bill still been around there would not have been time and I could well have been in prison.

I should have been warned when his wife invited me to a party at his flat at Formby and said, “Don’t bring Bill.” Getting barred from your own house takes dedication and a lot of effort.

There was the time he sold my passport and used the money to buy drugs for re-sale. But he wanted to be sure they were genuine. In those days Bert Balmer was Head of the CID in Liverpool and his deputy was a man called Jimmy Morris. They were both members of the Press Club. This night he passed me the drugs and said, “Go and ask Bert what it is.” So in his thrall was I that I went to the head of CID and said, “Bert, what are these?” passing him some curled-up leaves.

“Bill sent you?” asked that excellent man, and then passed them to Jimmy. “What do you think, Jimmy? Rhododendron or Azalea?”

"Azalea," said Jimmy as he handed them back to me. "But tell your mate Bill they'll never grow.  He'll need seed for that, not shredded leaves."

There was the time he bought a roulette wheel and made me go out and buy a black shirt and white tie and be the croupier. I thought they looked silly with a sports jacket but I always did what he said. Even when he got me to shave off half the beard of News Chronicle reporter Jackie Yeadon as he slept drunkenly on the club sofa and then prop him up still asleep on a parapet whilst Bill shouted: “Roll up and see the midget with half a beard!" at the Saturday shoppers below in Lime Street. Yeadon was small - and majestic with it. During the war he had got extra meat by telling the butcher he was the captain of a midget submarine.

Anyway, I stood behind the wheel of a game I did not understand in the Press Club annexe and lost £45 in ten minutes - and that was in 1953 when I was paid £15 a week.

He made up stories for the Mirror that nowadays would have got him an overnight declaration in the Booker Prize. Like the one about the girl who couldn’t afford the cruise her doctor ordered so she bought (or, to be more truthful, Bill did) 45 round-trip tickets on the New Brighton ferry.

Then there was the dog he tied to the railings of the Bridewell with a note attached to its collar which read: “My daddy says he is going to shoot my dog when he comes home because we cannot afford to feed him, though I have given him my tea every night. Please give him a home.” The story he wrote produced so many offers of a home the Daily Mirror phones were blocked for three hours.

It was catching. Even Balmer, the Head of CID, caught it. Every Saturday he would make up a story for us so we could claim a shift from the Sunday papers in our group. My favourite was a spin off from a fashion among criminals who had been in prison to have a swallow tattooed on the joint between thumb and forefinger. Bert told us the CID was worried the fad was being copied by juveniles. Having a sparrow tattoo (the juvenile version of the swallow) showed that they had been to reformatories, Bert claimed, and all our offices fell for it.

Marshall struck when you weren’t watching. Years later when I lived in Chester he rang me from Liverpool to say another of his many wives would be coming through Chester. Would I meet her off the train and give her dinner? “She is pretty upset,” he confided.

I met her and we had a jolly meal. Over coffee she admitted she needed cheering up and I said, “Yes, that’s why Bill suggested I meet you.”

I thought she was going to explode. “Do you know why I am upset?” she said. “We were divorced this morning and that ******* turned up in his oldest clothes, pleaded poverty and I have got peanuts for maintenance.”

When I heard some days later that Bill had turned left at a level crossing and driven several miles along the Liverpool-Formby railway line I felt a pang of regret he hadn’t shared the experience with an oncoming express. But the feeling didn’t last. You could only dislike him for about five minutes.

There was this time when I was sleeping on the newspaper files in the Daily Dispatch office, where I worked, because I had no money for digs. He rang to tell me that Hoagy Carmichael was in town and we should go and pay him homage at the Adelphi, where Hoagy (who for some reason he called Hoagland) had a suite.

Hoagy could not have been kinder. He invited us in and although it was a little after 10am poured us both giant Scotches. Inevitably Bill asked him to play the piano. Characteristically, this very nice man agreed: but he wouldn’t play his signature tune “Stardust”. He said he couldn’t stand the damn thing and HE wrote it. So for an hour or so he plied us with Scotch and entertained us on the piano with tunes for which, he said, he had not been able to find a publisher.

A yelp from Bill brought the performance to an abrupt end. He had remembered that he should have been across the city covering an Assize trial.

“Anything I can do?” asked Hoagy, before I had a chance to warn him.

Bill said, yes, there was. He knew Hoagy didn’t like Stardust but he asked could he ring his news editor Roly Watkins and when he came to the phone, hold the instrument over the piano keyboard while Hoagy played a few bars of “Stardust” and say: “Hello Roly, this is Hoagy Carmichael. I am afraid I have detained your reporter Bill Marshall.”

Good as gold, Hoagy did as Bill told him. He played the opening bars down the phone and said his piece. There was a pause and then a suddenly angry Hoagy said: “No, this is not Bill Marshall, I am not pissed at half past eleven in the morning and I have no idea what is on at the Assizes.”

After the show that night, one of only two he did in Britain, he came over to the Press Club and once again at Bill’s command (by his time Bill saw him as his property) he played for the members.

After an hour or so he wanted to stop but Bill commanded him to play on. “Look Bill,” he said, “I get a thousand pounds for a concert.” ”Oh, it’s money you want?” sneered Bill, and promptly wrote a cheque for £1,000, which Hoagy pocketed and then played on.

The next morning there was another call from Bill who wanted to know if he had cashed any cheques because one had gone from his book and his bank manager had warned him if he cashed any more cheques he would close his account.

I said: “Only the thousand pounds you paid Hoagy,” and enjoyed the panic I could feel down the phone. “We have to get it back,” he said, and off we went to the Adelphi.

Hoagy was full of apologies. “I cashed it with the hotel half an hour ago,” he said. In the minutes that followed I was repaid for all the indignities Marshall had heaped on me. And then Hoagy relented. “I haven’t cashed it,” he said, “but you cannot have it back. I am going to have it framed and put in my den to remind me of a great night.”

Bill knew how poor I was.  I was getting fifteen quid a week and sending ten of it back to my family in Doncaster.  The fiver I had left paid for my digs.  But if I wanted to eat as well I had to play poker.

Fair play, he was always very worried about my poverty and constantly thought of ways of making us both rich.  Like the roulette game he set up in the Club.  I had taken a few quid off John Edwards, who was working – but not very often - at the Daily Post at the time. Marshall allowed me to put most of my winnings in the bank.  He even left me enough to buy the black shirt and white tie he said I would need for my part as the croupier.

I realised why when at the first spin of the wheel we lost £75.  Most of it to Les Clare who was not famous for benignity.  Which is probably why we couldn’t find Marshall anywhere.

My favourite memory of Liverpool concerns the minesweeper the Admiralty forgot.  It seemed to be welded to the dock wall.  The crew had honorary membership of the Press Club and we enjoyed membership of the Ward Room.

I was there one day when a messenger came on board from the office.  He said: “Mr Wigglesworth says not to hurry with your copy.  The paper has been bought by the Mirror and closed down.”

I must have paled because the skipper asked: “Bad news from home?” in the In-Which-We-Serve voice used by naval officers.

“My paper has closed down,” I said.

“Is this the first you’ve heard?”

“Yes.”

“If their Lordships of the Admiralty had taken a ship of mine out of commission in such an ill mannered way I would send them a pretty snotty signal.”

“And if I knew Lord Kemsley’s telephone number I would give him a piece of my mind,” I retorted.

At this point Hugh Medlicott from the Daily Mail (Harry Slime or the Turd Man, as he was known to Les Clare) broke in:  “It’s Mayfair 1111.,”

“If I was near a telephone…"

“Use our ship to shore,” the skipper offered.

Several large gins later I plucked up the courage, rang the number and, thank God, a footman told me his Lordship was out but he would be glad take a message.

Brave now, I gave him a very abusive message indeed.  When I finished the skipper begged to be allowed to come on the phone.

“And that goes for Her Majesty’s Royal Navy,” he told the footman.

The footman seemed very pleased.

Predictably Wiggie, who was the news editor of the Daily Dispatch and a man with favourites, had left me off the list of those transferring the Mirror.  The Editorial Director Hugh Cudlipp heard the story and insisted I should be employed.

FAREWELL TO HIPKIN

The great joy in our lives is our old gardener Hipkin. Alas, after fifty years with the family he retired this week, leaving us one of his fleet of lawn mowers (he is far richer than we are) as a memorial. He is the quintessential Fenman and a keen observer of his neighbours. This week he excelled himself. I wish you could hear his brogue, which, alas, is dying in the Fen towns in favour of Estuary English.

“Now,” he said, “Ahm goin to tell e somthin. This woman what I work for she sez to me, she says, 'Ahm gooin on oliday tomorrer and I dunno know weer to hide me money.' And er usband, he says, 'Ah'll bury it in't gardin an I'll stick a twig in so we'll know weer it is.' So that's what they do and they goes away.

“And what happened next day is along comes their son with his rotavator and rotavates the whole garden. And his machine chews up the stick. Took em a week to find the tin.”

Hipkin is 83 and seriously rich yet until recently he delivered papers every morning and on two afternoons. He still tends twenty gardens, making no charge for many of them. We pay him but he refuses to take more than £8 for a shift that lasts at least four hours. His great joy is to take his partner Miss Beart to “Skeggie” (Skegness) where he plays bingo and always wins. And he always takes his sagacious terrier Bailey, who can count, with him. “I says to 'im in the mornings, how many sausages d'you want for your breakfast and he goos 'Wuff, wuff, wuff'.”

Bailey has three meals a day of whatever Hipkin is eating. When they are going to Skeggie he gets very excited the night before because somehow he knows.

Miss Beart has seven rabbits which she keeps in seven hutches because she don't want no baby rabbits and Bailey likes nothing better than to go to their shed where he sits for hours looking at them adoringly. Hipkin adores Miss Beart who is 19 carat all through. He came one morning with a stone dog ornament which he wanted us to give a home. He explained: “Miss Beart cannot abear to look out of the window and see it sitting there in the cold.”

                                                         .............................................

Many of you have asked to meet some more of the friends of my youth. Enter stage left....Kenneth Graham, my colleague on The People, who had a head apparently whittled from balsa wood. Superficially craggy but wont to crumble under pressure.

Graham was always under pressure. His supreme creative act was throwing the “future features” box through the news room window and into the Manchester Ship Canal. He survived that to be sent to expose a massage parlour. He was instructed to accept the ministrations to a certain point and then to sit up and say: “I am from the People and this is a disgusting exhibition” , at which point a photograph would be taken by People photographer Dennis Hutchinson, unkindly known as "the Poison Dwarf ".
Three times he struggled from a recumbent posture, only to fall back under the mesmeric fingers of the masseuse for a moment more of pleasure.

At last he struggled to a sitting position, cried “Bugger the People” and abandoned himself to hedonism.

He was The Great Complainer. He stopped going to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous when a fellow alcoholic failed to buy his round of lemonade. When I organised trips to Sweden for a pal who was a director of Tor Line, Graham was my first choice. His reaction to any given siuation was always a joyful surprise.

At Immingham we were shown in to a board room, handed G and Ts the size of crystal fire buckets and invited to make free of a lavish buffet. “It should have been my day off today,” Graham said mournfully.

In his hotel room in Gothenburg he took an apple from a fruit bowl that was doing its best to be a Harvest Festival. An hour later when he returned to the room he rang reception to complain it had not been replaced.

On the voyage home the ship’s chef assembled a smorgasbord which had the Swedish passengers gasping with joy. I watched Graham shovelling away at the dishes on offer in a Lucullan buffet like an under nourished JCB. As he staggered back to our table under the weight of his plate I said to the girl with whom I was lunching: “Bet you when he comes back his first words are a complaint.” She said: “He couldn’t. That is a Christmas Smorgasbord. It has everything.”

Graham did not disappoint. “Trouble with these meals,” he told the table aggrievedly, “you are spoilt for bloody choice.”

I must not give the wrong impression. It was impossible not to be fond of him. He had a terrible time living up to his craggy face and a voice that rasped with a thousand Woodbines. Underneath his bluster, he was a gentle drunk and I would not have been at all surprised to find him talking to a six foot rabbit that only he could see.

A person so innocent was a natural butt for our news editor Mike Gabbert. Gabbert was to complex practical jokes what Cecil B. de Mille was to Hollywood spectaculars. His hoaxes had casts of thousands and we were all, at one time or another, grist to his malevolent mill.

Like the day he put Ken Graham down in the diary for a wholly mythical parachute jump.
Graham went white when he read the entry but did his best not to show it. Not even when a man from accounts rang and asked if his insurance was up to date and did it cover him for sudden death on the job. Because, if not, the paper would insure him for £50,000.

An Air Ministry PRO was the next one to call. He wanted to know if Graham enjoyed good health and sound limbs. Especially, he added darkly, limbs.

I thought Graham took it well. He was less successful when the picture desk rang from London to say they were putting a special helmet in the Manchester despatch box. The helmet had a camera in the front and a cable which went into the mouth. Graham was to grip it and jerk his head when he left the aircraft, and continue to do so during the fall, so that the paper would have a sequence of thrilling photographs.

I for one thought he was bound to break when Neville Stack, who was news editing our sister paper the Daily Herald, rang and said he had heard Graham was going to do a parachute jump. Stack said he wouldn’t do anything like that, not for a gold clock. But, he said, the daily was anxious to commemorate the event, so would it be OK if they photographed Graham as he landed? Graham said in a very small voice that it would.

“There is just one thing,” said Stack. “I gather you are jumping in a stick. How will we know which one is you?” Graham said helpfully that he would wave, but Stack said he wouldn’t advise that. Graham would need both hands to pull on the parachute harness or he would break his leg in landing.
“I’ll tell you what," said Stack. “We will strap a loud hailer to your chest and just as you are about to land you can shout through it ' I am Ken Graham from The People.'

“And if you could add 'Over Here' it would be helpful,” Stack concluded.

At this point I think Graham’s nerve must have broken. He said to Mike was it alright if he took an early break. It was only 11 am but he was over the road, breasting the bar in the Chicken Grill, before Mike had time to answer.

I have always thought the ex-paratrooper at the bar was a plant by Gabbert. Like the transvestite lorry driver he introduced to Mike Kiddey, without telling him about the transvestite bit, thus causing Kiddey to make a very embarrassing discovery on a bomb site at the back of the office. Anyway, this “paratroop” got into conversation and when Graham told him about the parachute jump he pursed his lips and made the sucking sound that workmen make when you show them work done by any other workmen.

“Have you practised landing?” he asked, and when Graham admitted he had not the “paratroop” said: “We had to practise for a fortnight rolling off the back of a lorry. Absolutely vital.”

“But the jump is tomorrow,” wailed Graham.

“Well, try falling and rolling here,” the “paratroop” suggested.

I would have thought the joke had gone far enough with Graham falling and rolling on the floor of the Chicken Inn. Not so. By the time we got over, Graham was jumping off a table, bending his knees and rolling along the floor.

It was at that point Mike Gabbert said: “Oh by the way, Ken, the jump is off. The Air Ministry won’t wear it."

“Oh Hell,” said Graham with a lack of conviction that fooled no one, “I was looking forward to it.”

My fall was simpler. I was happily night news editing the Sunday Mirror at the time and resisted Gabbert’s repeated urgings to move over to the People desk. In the end I agreed to a contest. I would join the People if he could out-drink me.

The day I joined the People he presented me with a brass plaque which still stands on my desk. It reads: “In hazy memory of March 20 1963 when Ian Skidmore and Michael Gabbert drank 12 and a half bottles of Chianti and a bottle of brandy at the Chicken Inn, Manchester. Because they were very thirsty.”

Looking back, I think he cheated. I have never left half a bottle of anything in my life and that night I was in sparkling mid-season form. Driving home to Chester I stopped off at the Farmers Arms in Huxley and had four pints of bitter with Curly Beard.

skidmore's island: A MOTLEY CREW

skidmore's island: A MOTLEY CREW: Jack Paterson , the Northern Night Editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester in the Fifties, was the archetypal newspaper man. He wore red br...

MAKING AMENDS

I wish to right a wrong. No one dismisses, as I did last week, Joe Minogue in a paragraph.

Joe Minogue was a giant cloth cap, a cigarette and a pronounced Manchester accent. It was possible to know him for several weeks before realising that beneath the cap lived a face like an angry nut and the body of an apprehensive leprechaun.

He had been a tank driver on D.Day and possibly the only tank driver to be wounded in the backside, that part of the body covered by the tank. He had dark suspicions the bullet had come from inside the tank, but nothing was proved. After the war he was translated from being a penny-a-line municipal correspondent at Manchester Town Hall to foreign editor of the Manchester Guardian. He said there was little difference in the two jobs, except that as foreign editor he was much bothered by coups in parts of the world you had to look up in an atlas. Though he said the politics in Manchester Town Hall were often much bloodier. When he was appointed, the cap toured the world visiting the Guardian's distinguished foreign correspondents. Alistair Cooke - which he pronounced with three ‘o’s, as he did coups - was particularly fond of him.

I worked for him for nearly three weeks in the Fifties before he was forced to sack me. He didn't like to tell me, so he gave me a letter for my wife asking her to tell me but to be sure to add there was nothing personal in it.

He did feel a little out of place in the rarefied Oxbridge atmosphere of the Manchester Guardian (never the Guardian despite what the masthead said). He was surprised when he took office to find his telephone was kept on the floor near the door. He never moved it in case it was a tradition. If you went to his office, the desk would, like as not, be unoccupied but you would find him curled up on the floor, settling a coup on the telephone.


Ever subversive, Minogue formed an Anti-Culture group at the paper which he invited me to join when I was a very senior reporter on the Mirror. Alas, the editor Alastair Hetherington refused to have me anywhere near the paper when he learned I hunted foxes although I had a pretty impressive cuttings book.

It must be admitted that Joe and I were among Nature’s subversives. When we could not work together we set out to undermine the industry with a series of improbable “Letters to the Editor” in which his boss, the news editor Harry Whewell, joined. I have written about how I wrote to the editor of the Manchester Evening News recalling how, as a boy, I had hunted my uncle’s pack of Rochdale Flock Hounds over the Lancashire moors and wondered what had happened to the breed.

Minogue responded by saying that although he remembered the breed well he was never convinced they had the true nose which one only found in the Doffcocker Dandy Dinmont, though for tongue he had always preferred the Chowbent terrier.

What was very odd was the spirited correspondence this produced from other readers until we began to believe in the breed we thought we had invented.

Tiring of this subject into which others had introduced an acrimonious note, Whewell wrote to the Oldham Chronicle to enquire whether there were any photographs of his uncle, a Sioux chieftain who had come to the town in the mid 19th century as part of a delegation of American Indians to examine the cotton industry.

I wrote to say that I couldn’t help with a photograph but I did have a fragment of a war bonnet picked up in the eighties in Ashton under Lyne market by a relative of mine. Though it was a much treasured relic in our family, I offered to pass it on if the writer could give some proof of ownership.

Watching a TV broadcast of the “Antiques Road Show” some time later, I learned Lancashire was afloat with Indian chiefs in the mid 19th century and my daughter Gay, who looked after me this weekend, tells me that many districts in Lancashire have their own strain of dogs, such as the Ormskirk terrier. So Oscar Wilde had it right. Nature does imitate art.

Readers' Letters once ruined an editorial power lunch. Hugh Cudlipp, who ruined the Mirror, was in my view a foul-mouthed bully of little talent who did irreparable harm to the paper. From time to time he would descend on Manchester and inflict lunch on his executives. The better to enjoy tearing them apart, he always invited two reporters. It was not a pretty sight. The Mirror also owned the Glasgow- based Daily Record so when Cudlipp invited his executives for ideas to increase circulation the executive who suggested we do more Scottish stories was unwise. “Isn’t that a bit like Mr Marks out-voting Mr Spencer?” rasped Cudlipp.

Gerry McGee, the sports editor, was not falling in any traps. When Cudlipp said, “I now call on Mr McGee to give a short address”, he replied, “21 Washaway Road, Sale.”

It was not original but, by God, it was brave.

Cudlipp was bested only once and that was by my friend Bill Barton, who sadly has since gone on his lunch break in the sky. (For Bill, a lunch break that only lasts for eternity will seem sadly curtailed).

Besting executives was what Bill did best.

Cudlipp had been saying that everything in the Mirror was true. “Nay, nay, Mr Cudlipp,” roared Bill, whose “nay, nay” had the illuminating force of the Edison Light, “what about readers’ letters?”

“The readers’ letters are genuine despatches from the good people who buy our great newspapers,” answered Cudlipp.

“Nay, nay, Mr Cudlipp,” said Bill, “I had to write three before I could come here this morning.”

CRY GOD FOR HARRY

On the gorblimey trousers and the dustman's hat history is silent but Harry Whewell's Old Man was certainly, if improbably, a dustman. . . As a child on Friday nights Harry sat round the kitchen table with the family sorting through the likely rubbish brought home by his father searching for valuables.

Later in life from his mansion flat he toured the great universities, as news editor, then editor, of The Manchester Guardian, searching for literary talent.  Michael Frayn, Jonathan Steele, Benedict Nightingale and Simon Hoggart were among the many he discovered. He was part of the Team of Immortals: Alastair Cooke, Neville Cardus, Howard Spring among others which made The Guardian by a mile the world's greatest newspaper.  Last week he died at the age of 91 which came as a surprise to those of us who believed him to be immortal.  During the war he was a navigator with Bomber Command, surprisingly, since he could get lost in an office corridor. Training at "Hell's Mouth" in North Wales he met, married and loved Esther Rose, the daughter of a celebrated journalistic dynasty who worked on a weekly paper to fund his student years. She was one of the pioneer writers who launched Coronation Street and until her tragic death led its creative team.  They have a son, Tim, an outstanding foreign correspondent on Newsnight.

Harry was small, saturnine, with an impish grin like a devil on holiday and he could ruin a suit by standing next to it.  His cap was his badge of office and he had a genius for conversation.  Google lists only seven Harry Whewells in Britain.  Personally I don't believe in six of them.

Oddity in Harry was brought to a fine art.  Respected and enjoyed, he could only have found a home in The Manchester Guardian, which for him never became The Guardian.
He was discovered and encouraged by the empire building Alastair Hetherington,an unlikely pairing.  Although the great universities were his talent pool his net went wider . His choice of a foreign editor, Joe Minogue, he plucked from the small, irascible group who reported on Manchester municipal matters, with whom he had worked as a reporter. It proved a brilliant choice, though international coups never achieved a venom like to the municipal intensity.  Minogue formed an anti-cultural group[in the newsroom.

Harry was amiable and curiously domestic in his ways. Though obdurate.  Hetherington's, grand ideas were achieved round him, rather than through him.

His Guardian did not encourage change.  He refused to have telephones in the newsroom because they disrupted his writers' thoughts and he was overheard  telling a correspondent: "The ManchesterGuardian does not take murders over the telephone."
The Guardian was the only paper he could have  worked for.  Impossible to think of him working anywhere else than the little rabbit warren of offices, sheltered by its milch cow The Manchester Evening News, in a court off Cross Street in central Manchester.  For years I have been telling the story of The Guardian news editor who counselled me never to learn shorthand if I wished to succeed as a newspaper reporter.  Harry's death frees me of the obligation.  It was he who gave me that gem of advice which flew in the face of received wisdom.  Harry was right, of course.  He said news editors needed reporters who wrote shorthand to cover courts, councils, and all the dross that made up an edition. Others would be chosen for those chores until I, without a Pitman's stroke to my name, was the only one in the office. "And that," said Harry, "is when the plane will crash."

A year later when I was working on The Yorkshire Evening News a jet fighter crashed at RAF Finningley.  I was the only reporter in the office so I was sent on the story and got my first byline.

In the early days of our friendship we competed in sending fantasy letters to weekly newspapers.  My winner was a query about the Rochdale Flock Hound, a mythical beast, which nonetheless brought letters from readers claiming to have bred them.  Harry's was to wonder whether pictures existed of the Sioux Indian chief photographed on a Bury tram in full ceremonials during a visit by American Indians to the town.  We were amazed at the number of readers who claimed to have seen the photograph.

Harry reached his apogee in the Battle of the News Editor's Desk.  To Harry's horror Hetherington announced The Guardian was moving to new offices in Deansgate, sharing with The Daily Mail.  This was across town from the Bodega bar and Sam's Chop House where Harry held daily court about fifty paces from his desk.

He refused to move.  They showed him his new state-of-the-art office.  He was unimpressed.  They offered him suites of executive furniture.  He spurned them.  He insisted his desk would be too large for the new office and abandoning it would be unthinkable.  He pointed out that the great C.P.Scott had sat at his desk.  We could all see the point.  Harry's desk was bigger than some sporting estates.  It had drawers that had remained unopened for years and candle sconces like the old pianos.  It was more than wood.  It was history.  And Harry was adamant.  Britain had conquered the world with smaller gunboats.  Some of the drawer fronts, it was said, were gun ports behind which cannons stood.  The impasse continued for weeks.  Both sides came to see the desk as a symbol of everything The Manchester Guardian represented.  To the management it was clumsy, fusty and out of date.  To Harry it was A Noble Tradition.  Our money was on Harry.

Finally management caved in.  They agreed to move the desk.  When it arrived at its destination, doors had to be widened but by this time management's nerve had been shattered.

Harry pronounced himself pleased and went back to the old building to collect the canary in its cage, his office companion over many years.  We formed a guard of honour for its progress from Cross Street to Deansgate, to admiring glances from shoppers.  There may even have been cheers.

Every holiday he took the bird home with him so that it would not be lonely.  Seeing him with it one Christmas, a printer asked: "Where you going with that?"  "I am taking it home for Christmas," said Harry.  "Are you?" said the printer. "We're having turkey."

Writer Colin Dunne recalls going for an interview with Harry who offered a different view on shorthand:

He sat me down across the desk before asking me exactly the questions I had been dreading.

How did I feel about American imperialism and their war-mongering in the Far East?  Oh Gawd.  I sort of shrugged and said I didn't know much about it and didn't - pathetically, no doubt - have any strong feelings about it.

Where did I stand on women's rights and the women's movement in general?  Oh Gawd, again.  I pulled a face and said it was all a bit of a mystery me and I'd rather leave the whole thing to women.

Which university did I attend?  Gawd.  None.  I left school at 16.  I did an A-level at Bradford Tech, if that helped.

Could I do shorthand?  At last - my moment.  Yes, I assured him, I could do reasonable shorthand.

"Thank God," he said, reaching over to shake my hand. "I have these buggers from university coming in here for interviews, they sit where you are and put their feet - in suede shoes - on my desk.  All they want to write about is the wicked Americans in the third world and the worldwide fight for justice for women.  And not one of them can ever do shorthand.  When can you start?"

Sadly I wasn't able to take the job.  He was a funny, clever man.  He used to pin up a list of slightly unusual words in the news room and invite the reporters to try to get them into their copy.  The idea was to raise the level of the language in the paper: it worked too.

Revel Barker recalls a typical Whewellism:

He was interviewing a girl from The Northern Echo Newcastle office for a reporter's job on The Guardian.

It was going very well and he asked her whether there was anything about the paper she didn't like, or might like to see changed.

Well, she said, she thought there might be a greater use of pictures (this was in the late sixites).

Ah yes, said Harry. Well of course they had thought about that, but they had come to the conclusion that ..."in the space it would take to display a decent size picture we could place... oh, I don't know... maybe a thousand words."

We shall not see his like again.

A BIRTHDAY THOUGHT FROM A CLEVER FRIEND

"My college flat mate Loren Needles, who is 71, pointed out to me that by

reaching 68 I am only 1.50% older than I was last year!

In your case you’ll only be 1.21% older than you were on your last birthday…"

“Venus was sculpted by man,

But the far more attractive woman, Margaret Thatcher,

Was sculpted by Allah.

My heart raced when I saw her face to face.

Her skin was smooth as ivory,

Her cheeks as rosy as an English rose,

And her eyes as lovely as a mare’s.

Her figure is more attractive than the figure of any cherished wife

Or coveted concubine.”

Ode taken from A Christmas Carol, being a commonplace selection by John Julius Norwich, 1984.

Written by court poet of Fahd of Saudi Arabia, it appeared in the 1^st edition of The Sunday Times but mysteriously not in the second.

I KIND WORD FOR LADY T

OK I can take a hint. Very flattered in fact and grateful for your kind wishes. Going for tests for my foolish heart........Alas wandering leg has signed up for Rio Olympics but look on the bright side. Soggy lung is showing a fine crop of watercress.
So its back to business............

I really did know a Tory Grandee  called Lady Guinevere who was given the fairy tale role of turning a grocer's daughter called Thatcher into a lady.
Another pal, John Julius, the Earl of Norwich, corroborates..His mother the  bewitching Lady Diana Cooper was brought up as the daughter of the Duke of Rutland. The truth was  she was fathered by the Hon Harry Cust, a neighbour in Lincolnshire who it might be said put the rut in Rutland.In my forthcoming book "Lusty Ladies"I list the other aristocrats Cust cuckolded.
Ever ecumenical he also bedded Margaret Thatcher's maternal grandmother, one of his servants. As JJ cheerfully admitted to me in an interview. "That would make us first cousins"
I couldn't resist a secret smile when I was told of Guinevere's role.
I am surprised that in the recent acreage surrounding her name so little was made of her defining bloodline. Her father the small town grocer was also an Alderman, which meant he was qualified to stand in as God.Her father if he deigned to think of it all would assume superiority.
You had to work as a reporter on a North country newspaper to appreciate the power wielded by that frightening creation of our Saxon past. The myth was that councillors became aldermen after many years in that lowly role but that was not always the case. Many were the sons and grandsons of aldermen. Some were honourable and wise men who cared for the people they had represented for a lifetime. Some were venal, Droite de Seigneur was alive and well in the Northen towns in which I worked. They signed off budgets of many millions, the decided where factories and housing estates were built, which land could be made available for purchase and what could be built on it.
One I knew in Chester began life as the chief clerk in a Territorial Army office. He retired the owner of enviable suits, breathtaking cars and a home to dream on. Somehow he became part of the army, a Lt Colonel in the army without once having heard a shot fired in anger, though he frequently shot pheasants with the Duke of Westminster. The City owed him much.  In fairness the regeneration of Chester was down to him. He called in the planners,fixed the finance and fired the population, The architect who took on the work told me a year later that the Carloginian ceilings which wre Chetser's pride were at the point of no return. The last I heard from the alderman from his reurement retireentvilla. " You never did catch me," he said.
The power those monoliths wielded was breathtaking. The St Leger racing classic
s is civic owned.The race, the course, the staff, even the boookys pitches ,finances were controlled by a diminutive railway boiler cleaner, Alderman Albert Cammidge, chairmanof the Racecourse Committee. Every year he hosted a dinner for the great and the good of racing at the Guidhall, an 18th century gem.
One year the guest of honour was the Queen. Alderman Cammidge took her into dinner , settled her into her chair.
As the waitresses brought the main course round the Alderman prffered a serving bowl with the words; " Have some cabbage Queen, it'll settle thi' stomach after all that bussin about "