They didn't believe me........

Thanks to Jimmy Lovelock's lady for finding this proof of anecdote. That it still exists is a tiny miracle.

We used to live in
LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBWYLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH. Living in a Welsh village, the name of which you cannot pronounce, plays havoc with your social life. Pub crawls are impossible. Imagine ringing for a cab at closing time and trying to tell the driver where to take you. I have had trouble in the past with Oswestry; and Llanuwchllyn is out of the question. Dwygyfylchi is worse but it is shorter. It reminds me of the English writer at the Hay on Wye Literary Festival where I interviewed Rowan Williams, then bishop of |Monmouth and later Archbishop of Canterbury. It had as its Green Room an infants’ schoolroom in which all drawers were  labelled in Welsh.  “Is that where they keep the vowels?” the writer asked, with persuasive innocence. A great place to live but a constant humiliation.

I used to know a colourful line in archbishops but my favourite is Dr Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales, who relieves stress by baking unbelievably rich cream gateaux. I met him just before my Hay appearance and told him I was interviewing Williams on the Disestablishment of the Church in Wales and I hadn't the faintest idea what that was.

"Don't worry," he said. " That has never bothered you in the past. Anyway, I am meeting him at the Synod. Tell him if he is rude to you it's Croziers at Dawn."

Another old chum was the Bishop of Hereford, the only non-royal with the power vested, in the time of medieval Welsh rebellions, to raise an army and to nail the skin of any Welshman he found in the city after dark to the door of Hereford Cathedral.

When I lived in Wales I used to do a weekly broadcast on Australian radio and always signed off
“...good night from Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.............”

Every week without fail after the broadcast went out, an expatriate Taff would ring me in a rage from Brisbane: “If yer caint pronounce the name why don’t you move to f......... Rhyl?”

He was lucky to get through.  An Australian fan tried to write to me for nearly a year but his letters all came back from the Australian post office marked “No Such Place”.   I know about this because he rang his sister in Derby to check with a friend in Mold if he had the address right and she rang me to find out.

It is not just the Australians who had trouble. The vicar of the parish church in Upton Scudamore in Wiltshire sought a contribution to the restoration of my ancestors’ tombs.  He sent the letter to the Isle of Anglesey - by air mail.  It  came by road from Manchester airport across one of the two bridges which linked us to the mainland.

For some time the Post Office in Chester refused even to put Isle of Anglesey on its database. Whenever I asked for a Welsh number a Query Page flashed up. “Do you mean Wales, Yeovil,” it asked, “or Wales, Sheffield?”

I used to drink for Wales so I was well known there. Bit surprising then that at a computer shop in Wrexham my application to buy a PC on the drip was turned down. The manager was surprised too.  He rang his finance office in Leeds. They said: “It’s the address. There is no such place." The manager said: “There must be.  He's just come from there.”

The trick is to make up a name. My credit card statement from the Royal Bank of Scotland was always addressed to me at Virgin and Childs Cottage at Brymsitmoy, which, so far as I know, is the
Welsh Brigadoon because it does not exist.  But the bill arrived every month.

The whole Llanfair etc., etc. name is a con. I do not know a Welshman who couldn’t give Machiavelli six blacks and still beat him off the table. They invented almost their entire history. Outsiders are not told the Great Welsh rebel Owain Glyndwr was a general in the English army, married to an Englishwoman, or that his half-Welsh legitimate children married into the English aristocracy. Only his nine bastards married Welsh people. Edward I  invaded Wales with an army of 15,000, of which 11,000 were English. Even the Welsh 'Not' is not. Though the English Not is widespread.

Our village was for centuries called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.  A lovely name which means the “Marychurch by the white hazel pool”. When Stevenson brought the railway to Anglesey there
were no plans to build a station here. But no station would have meant the lucrative tourist trade passing us by and we weren’t having that. A local cobbler added a description to the name and wrote it on slips of paper which he then put in plain brown envelopes and sold as a cure for lock-jaw. We became overnight and irrevocably the village with the longest name in the world:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwryndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. The addition means “near the fierce whirlpool with the church of St Tysilio by the red cave.”

As a result we became so famous our local draper’s shop was - and still is - the size of a bus depot, visited by coachloads of visitors from all over the world.  So much so the shop has a sign post which shows the distance from Llanfairpwll to the North Pole and cities the world over, including New York and Tokyo, all the homes of customers.

I just wonder how Japanese coach drivers cope when they got lost. I suspect a lot of our oriental business ends up as day trips to Bangor.

When I said Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch English listeners found my command of language impressive. Welsh speaking listeners shuddered. That was my problem. I lived in a place I could not  pronounce.

The Welsh can do things with their curious assemblies of letters that in other cultures can only be achieved by musical notation. Welsh is not just a language: it is performance art. "Becod" is pity carried almost to the point of tears and no girl, surely, can resist the sweet blandishment of "cariad", against which sweetheart sounds like a lump of toffee.

In Wales pronunciation is the key to acceptance. It is phonetic freemasonry and it is planetary.
As I said, I used to broadcast every week to Australia a newsletter about life in Britain. I was a sort of Alistair Coookaburra.

Because - as it sometimes seems - the entire population of Australia is either Welsh or from Liverpool, which is  much the same thing, my producer insisted that I call it "A Letter from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch". I tried not to because of the previously mentioned irate Welsh Australian who telephoned me from Brisbane to complain. His telephone bill must have been longer than my address. Not only can I not PRONOUNCE  Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogh; nor even act it. I cannot write it down  except with great difficulty. Mail order purchase, the mad lottery of the glossy magazine bargain offer, was forever closed to me. There was never room on the coupon for my address.

To live in a fictional island in a village you cannot pronounce is to know despair. Though to be strictly ecumenical I have had some pretty bizarre postal experiences in England. When we lived on the City Walls in Chester I worked under the window in the sitting room (I will write in a future column about bitter injustice and how whenever we move my wife gets a study and I write on the corner of a table). Through the window I could watch the postman coming, a mixed blessing when you owe as much as I did in those halcyon days of determined debauchery. Mostly I watched the advance of the daily sheaf of bills. One day a month I looked forward to his visits. That was the day he brought my selection from Records With Pleasure, recordings of potted versions of Shakespearean plays put out by the Daily Express. On this occasion I hurried to the door to take the precious recording from his hands. Too late. He had already folded it neatly in half and posted it through the box.

There was a certain cachet in having the only crescent-shaped production of Macbeth on record, but playing was not easy. No sooner had the warrior tones of Macbeth boomed questions at the three witches than Birnam wood was galloping to high Dunsinane hill as the needle slipped down the inner slope of the crescent like a demented skier.

The man the Post Office sent to process my complaint was dressed to intimidate.Why else should a man who arrived on a red bicycle wear a crash helmet and black leather gauntlet gloves? He clearly did not believe my story. Indeed he seemed convinced I was the Mr Big of an international ring of record benders. Finally he conceded my complaint. But he was not done. As he left he uttered a sentence that has lodged itself in my mind: "Do not dispose of the record without permission," he warned. "It is now the property of the Post Office and we may need to call it in."

For God's sake, tell me. Does the Post Office run to crescent-shaped gramophones?.

A GARDEN IS A BOTHERSOME THING

I have had a tip off from the doctor. There is a shadow on my lung. Provokingly he won't say which lung, nor even describe it so that I can take the necessary action. Is it a Bogart shadow, all trilby hat, upturned Burberry collar, a wisp of cigarette smoke and the tell tale pocket bulge of a Luger, or  worse a Gluck. Or is it one of those merry shadows of a rabbit, a giraffe or a crouching lion which you can create on a sheet by manipulating your fingers. I would prefer that on the whole. I could never tell what Bogart was twitching.
I do hope its not one of those formless clouds so beloved of ghost stories. If they are formless how do you know what they are? Do they have a beginning and where do they end ? It would be nice if they were Siamese Temple Dancers one can operate by sticks of Balsa wood.
I do not see how it can effect me. How curtail my life? I don't have a life outside "Lewis" and endless repeats of  "Morse" and "Midsomer Murders." Something in the way of a web would be fetching. Bad call. Just back from the doctors. Its Bogart. More tests than Botham. Hope it doesn't end with a jar full of ashes.............................

THE GARDEN IS BEING PARTICULARLY LOVESOME

My garden is my favourite thing although I am not, and never was, an obsessive gardener. When I lived at Tattenhall on the Welsh border I had to remonstrate with an enthusiastic neighbour whose
flower seeds blew over the fence and choked my weeds. At a subsequent flat on the Rows in Watergate Street, Chester, the single window box was tended by a firm of jobbing gardeners which was also responsible for the hyacinth bowl.They were also charged with maintaining the level of sugar and water in my pet spider's food bowl.

So there is no need to warn me that lawn mowing brings on heart attacks. More active gardeners may wish to know that it is the first cut of the season that is the unkindest cut of all and does the damage.
Doctors call it 'lawnmower angina' and I can take a hint. When my doctor said I was so overweight the slightest exertion could kill me, I acted at once. I gave up exertion.

Now I leave the garden to Paul. At our property on the Isle of Anglesey I was proud of my traditional
cottage garden. You would have loved  it. Right in the middle of my land I grew this traditional cottage; the rest was nature, red in tooth and claw. I am sure Conan Doyle had my bindweed in mind when he wrote "The Speckled Band". I wouldn't go out after dark in case it had me by the throat and dragged me off to its lair in the ivy that was gradually dismembering the garden wall.

The dog wouldn't go near the place. After the summer she was so covered in burrs she was four times propositioned by kerb-crawling hedgehogs. And the cat was mugged by a robin. I had convolvuli that could bring down a running rabbit in its own length and dandelions that were bred from real lions.
When you pulled my nettles they pulled back. I had nettle-strengthened soil so vitamin choked you could plant a seedling in the garden and by the time you reached the back door it was six foot tall and waving at you. Tendrils from my peas plucked passing pigeons out of the sky.

The real trouble with gardening is that whatever you grow you always have two hundred over.
Especially lettuce. Breed like triffids and there is no sight in nature more terrifying than a lettuce gone to seed.

Mind you, I love gardens. Other people's, where someone else does the weeding and you can
stretch out on a lawn without that nagging worry that it is growing so fast you are levitating and if you don't rush in for the mower you are going to have an angry giant fee-fi-fo-fuming at you. Also you don't have to buy packets of seed which cost you more than the Indians were paid for Long Island.
Can you understand it? Every year you weed away annuals that have sown themselves. Every marigold has enough seeds on its stem for the deposit on a house. Yet when you buy a packet the only variety you get is King's Ransom because that is what it cost.

And now we have something else to worry about. Killer tomatoes from outer space. American schoolchildren projected 12.5 million tomato seeds into space. After six years they came back and no sooner had they been planted in schools across America than NASA warned that their exposure to cosmic radiation meant they could be toxic. Lethal tomato butties. On top of which I do not understand why grown men want to float around on their backs doing unmentionable things into plastic bags just to get to the Moon. I would almost rather go to the Costa Brava.

All this recent TV talk of pigeons reminds me that my chum William Cross has been delving further into the colourful life of Evan, Viscount Tredegar, who, you may remember, was court martialled for disclosing the secrets of the Army Pigeon loft he commanded to two ladies who came to tea. Cross has discovered the diaries of the late Robin Bryans, who at the age of sixteen became one of the Viscount's army of male lovers, which included our former prime minister Harold Macmillan and Winston Churchill's brother Peter. In fairness, Cross insists that readers must make up their own minds about the veracity of Bryans' extraordinary account of the Viscount's hidden world. The book is entitled "Not Behind Lace Curtains". It is worth saying that the stories in it are backed up by a considerable catalogue of sources. I found it fascinating.

LAND OF NOTHING IS FREE

First an apology. I now find everyone but McQueen did get the blog. Sorry. Here in recompense is a letter from Peter Reece:

Of course we received the blog last week….McQueen was obviously pissed. Loved the piece on Harrap, but particularly the memory of Bill Marshall.

Back in the early sixties I was wandering through the backstreets of Istanbul (don’t ask why) when I came across an old Land Rover with UK plates. In a nearby tea shop I found its owner, a very handsome English lady, somewhat older then myself, but very desirable. I knew I was in luck when she asked me to escort her to Southern Iran where she was a nurse at an oil refinery somewhere across the Shatt al-Arab river. It’s a bloody long way through Turkey, the Lebanon, Syria and across the desert pipeline route through Iran (or was it still Persia then?) but a single woman had no chance of driving alone through Moslem countries.

Well anyway, we were somewhere near Damascus when the lady enquired if I actually had a job.

“Journalist,” said I proudly, having just been fired from the Sandbach Chronicle for landing a fantastic exclusive about Jodrell Bank without telling the editor first. He claimed I wasn’t qualified to find such a great story, and certainly not senior enough to write it. “Fuck!” said the lady at my side, which obviously left me wondering why she harbored a deep distrust of our species. “I was married to Bill Marshall,” she admitted with very obvious regret.
That would be Kathy, his first wife who threw terrific parties, from which her husband was barred

 THIS WEEK'S BLOG

I spent my childhood nights in an air raid shelter whilst Nazi bombers did their best to shorten my childhood. We were a nation of Burrowers, in turn cowering and exuding relief  in pits covered with corrugated iron as bombs exploded. Yet every  night we listened eagerly to the Berlin Radio from whence a phony Englishman we called Lord Haw Haw warned us that Hitler was going to annihilate  us. We thought it hilarious.

The Ministry of Information plastered the walls with posters warning us that spies were listening to our every unguarded word. Wisely the Ministry had them drawn by a talented cartoonist called Fougasse. We thought them hilarious too.

In his book on Stalingrad Anthony Beevor writes: "When a winter-campaign medal was issued the following year, it quickly became known as the ‘Order of the Frozen Flesh’. There were more serious cases of disaffection. Field Marshal von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army, exploded in rage just before Christmas on finding the following examples of graffiti on the buildings allotted for his headquarters: ‘We want to return to Germany’; ‘We’ve had enough of this’; ‘We are dirty and have lice and want to go home.'

"In Berlin, a city all but flattened by our reciprocal bombs, the humour was typically more dark and gothic than ours. 'Buy a useful present this Christmas," their comics advised. 'A coffin'."

Hardly a joke that would make it to ITMA, our weekly radio laugh-in. The programme was produced in Bangor by a man called Worsley whose son was to become a broadcasting chum of mine. He came home from school one day demonstrating a schoolboy jape. If you talked into the rim of a glass you could deepen your voice. His father was delighted. There was a new character in the show that week. It was a German spy called Funf who spoke into a glass darkly. It swept the nation.

If you look at any photographs taken in the Fifties everyone is smiling yet in contemporary photographs there isn't a happy tooth to be seen. Our media resembles nothing so much as the Fat Boy in the Pickwick Papers 'who wants to make yer flesh creep.'

This week we have reacted with horror to the news that the Government is reading our emails. It came as no surprise to me.When I was suspected of being a Welsh terrorist, Special Branch detectives showed me album after album of processions and demonstrations taken by Plod Photographers.
Today most of my email consists of bewildering pictures of naked women, sent to me by friends old enough to know better, and jokes so venerable one wonders they make the journey unaided. I feel sorry for any luckless terror-taker who has to read them every morning.

There is admittedly diminishing cause for glee. Although we are among the 'rich' nations we are closing libraries and lavatories, the roads are a disgrace, respectable people are queuing at soup kitchens and the disabled are being evicted because they cannot afford to pay an iniquitous bedroom tax. The cream of our warriors are being taken from the front line to be thrown on the scrapheap. In the past century our Leaders have launched 165 wars in which 180 million have given their lives at the cost of 350 million dollars. The Ministry of Health plans to strip 135,000 elderly and disabled survivors of basic care such as help with washing and dressing, yet despite protests they do not need it, we continue  to hurl gold coins at the heads of Africans, Chinese and Indians who are much richer than we are.

Rather than cheer us up the Government is intent on wiping the smile off our collective faces. They have set up a watchdog, the Efficiency and Reform Group, to house keep. It costs £72 million a year to run but it apparently hasn't noticed £500 million spent sending the children of senior officers and diplomats to public schools. Members of the Civil Service, which complains of cuts, get two and a half privilege days off a year, £75 evening dress allowance, loans to buy bicycles, as well as £912,000 a year subsidized flying lessons, diving lessons and trips to Barbados. Members of Parliament, of course, are preoccupied negotiating a massive pay rise for themselves. No wonder we cannot take life as light heartedly as when we were only being bombed.We are living in a world where in two years we are likely to be plunged into darkness. We are tied into a Europe which is going bust, country by country, where one in four young people cannot find a job. I wish it were yesterday.

When my good friend Jimmy Lovelock died few believed it. 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 twenties, he was crippled with polio as a child yet 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 scaled 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 the office 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 over 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 honorable amendment, 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. She was a tassle dancer and was very kindly demonstrating that antique art. 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.

My American chum Jerry Jasper brought a smile to my face with this:

"The Skidmore Fountain was dedicated September 22, 1888, in memory of Stephen G. Skidmore, a wealthy Portland druggist who died in 1883,^[1] and partly financed by his willl.  It is styled after fountains Skidmore viewed at Versailles on his visit to the 1878 Paris Exposition and intended for "horses, men and dogs" to drink from. Henry Weinhard offered to pump beer into the fountain at the dedication.^[1]

The open area around the fountain attracts street performers and entertained spectators. The fountain also serves as a gathering point for several Portland events, such as SantaCon.,Plunderathon and the Zombiewalk and several protest/activist gatherings."

You see, our idea of fun is to walk like Zombies. Come back Henry Weinhard we need you badly.

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...