Funny Stories
It is laughter which separates humans from the animals, and everyone
has a different sense of humour. When I was serving in N.A.T.O. during
two years National Service, I used to go from the HQ in Fontainebleau
to Paris and visit a bar near the Moulin Rouge where a man told stories.
He was a paid storyteller, and the customers sat around listening and
then he took up a collection. There have been public storytellers throughout
history, and this Frenchman may have been the last of the line. He made
us laugh, and ever since I have enjoyed telling stories to make people
laugh. Here are some favourites.
The Street of Adventure, as Gibbs called Fleet Street, had its share of humourous
characters.
Hannen Swaffer, an editor on the Daily Mail when Lord Northcliffe was in charge,
took long liquid lunches in the hostelries of The Street, and returning one afternoon
he was crawling up the marble staircase of the office when he came face to face
with a pair of highly polished shoes. Looking up, with bleary eye, he saw Northcliffe
glowering down at him. "Swaffer -- there's too much damned drunkenness
in this office," he roared. "Yes, sir," said 'Swaff', "and
if I can get to the top of these stairs, I'll fire the lot!"
Lord Beaverbrook used to tell a story of dining with Lady Astor at Cliveden with
twenty guests and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, at the head of the
table. Lady Astor noticed that her Scottish butler was drunk. She wagged a finger
at him and scribbled furiouisly on a pad, tore it off and gave it to the butler,
who read it, took it to his side table, placed it on a silver tray and carried
it the length of the table and gave it to Chamberlain, interrupting his flow
about his meeting with Adolf Hitler. The Prime Minister opened the note and read
it. It said: You are drunk. Leave the room at once!
Morley Richards was the news editor of the Daily Express when I joined the paper,
soon after the demise of the great Arthur Christiansen. He did not last long
as he spent more time listening to the cricket matches on the wireless than running
the newsroom, and one night he drowned his sorrows at the loss of a match at
the Press Club bar, where he fell asleep, head on arms, snoring softly. Morley
had been married three times and may have been reluctant to go home, so the Head
Steward said to his helper: "Phone for a taxi for Mr. Richards. Tell them
it is on the Press Club account and get his address from the Members' Book." They
carried him down the stairs to the cab and the driver dropped him in Smith square,
Westminster, refusing payment, saying "It's on the
club account, sir." Morley found the key under the mat, dragged himself
up the stairs and into the bedroom, where the lights were switched on suddenly
and a voice called: "Morley, darling, you've come back to me!" The
Press club book was sadly out of date. They had sent him back to his first wife.
Hugh Saker, a reporter on the Daily Mirror, having drunk more than his usual
quota of brandy, was sound asleep at 2 a.m. on the reporters' desk, and there
was no office car to take him home. The night news editor, who was sympathetic
as he knew Hugh drank brandy to kill the pain as he had his eye shot out by a
Messerschmidt when he was a rear gunner in the R.A.F., telephoned his wife in
Guildford and asked her to drive up and get him. The long-suffering lady was
accustomed to such antics, a she was a reporter on the Evening Standard, specialising
in animal stories. She had prepared two pepper steaks and retired to bed, but
she flung on a negligee and dressing gown and drove up to Fetter Lane, off Fleet
Street, where Hugh was put in the back of the car. Half way down the by-pass,
she felt the urgent call of nature, stopped, and went behind a hedge. Hugh woke
up. What on earth was he doing in the back of his own car on this by-pass? He
got into the drivers seat and drove off, leaving his wife running down the road
waving and hoping he would see her in the rear view mirror. At 3.30 a.m. she
found a phone box, called the Mirror and they sent a taxi for her. She looked
in the kitchen: he had cooked and eaten both pepper steaks, and there was the
sound of snoring emanating from the bedroom upstairs..
Spike Milligan had a great sense of humour, but his wife did not always find
him amusing. My colleague Frank Smyth once worked for them as an au pair boy
in London and he had said to her: "I will never speak to you again as long
as I live," and she replied with the same threat. Frank spent the next month
taking telegrams which had been sent by phone from Milligan in his bedoom or
his wife in the kitchen or sitting room. "Please bring me a cup of tea
- Spike" "Get your own tea." etc. And when I interviewed him
once, the telephone started to ring. He continued talking, telling me that Peter
Sellers had rung his doorbnell at 4 o'clock one morning, stark naked, carrying
a tray of matches and saying: "Can I interest you in a lumber and sulphur
business?" The telephone continued to ring. "Aren't you going to
answer your phone, Spike?" I asked him. "No, it's alright," he
said, "if it rings forty five times it's my mistress. So far it's only the
wife."
William Somerset Maugham had a sharp sense of humour. In Hollywood, on the set
he was visiting, they were making an early version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
and his guide pointed and said: "That's the star of the film, Mr. Frederick
March." "Willie" replied: "Oh, and which one is he playing
today?" On the steps of the Garrick Club in London, Maugham met Ernest
Thesiger, who called out: "Willie, my dear, you have three plays running
in the West End! When are you going to write a part for me?" "But
I have, Ernest," said Maugham, "the trouble is that Gladys Cooper always
seems to play them." And travelling on an Italian liner (because they
were the most economical) Maugham, at the Captain's table as usual was asked
why he always travelled on Italian ships. "B-b-because, in cases of emergency,
there's n-n-none of this n-n-nonsense about women and children first."
Prince Philip had a sharp sense of humour, not always apparent to the Press.
A William Hickey diary "tipster", who had donned a white coat for disguise,
was following him around a new computer factory, in the wake of the Queen. He
heard the assistant manager say to Philip: "Her Majesty is asking a lot
of questons, sir. Do you think she is really intersted in our computers?" To
which he replied: "If you can get these things to fart and eat hay, she
will be."
Arthur Miller told the tale of his own visit to Hollywood with his wife Marilyn
Monroe when Spyros K. Skouras, at the welcome lunch for Nikita Kruschev told
for the thousanth time the epic story of how he and his brother left Armenia
with carpets on their backs as their capital, worked hard in the land of opportunity,
and now he was the president of Twentieth Century Fox. Kruischev said: "My
father was a poor coal miner, and look at me now -- I'm the head of the Soviet
Union!" Miller also recounted the time he had taken Marilyn to supper at
his parents home, a two-room dump of an apartment in the Bronx, where the toilet
door opened onto the dining room, and Marilyn, suffering from the trots, had
gone in and, fearing they would hear her, turned on both taps. As she sat there
she heard through the thin door Miller's mother say: "Yer goil friend pisses
like a horse."
Terry-Thomas told me in a bar in Santa Eulalia, Ibiza, of a drunk in a restaurant
who called a passing waiter and ordered fish and chips. "I'm sorry, sir,
but I am the wine waiter." "All right," said the drunk, "I'll
have some wine and chips."
Field Marshal Lord Montgomery of Alemein had given a lecture to students of Durham
University when I was a young trainee reporter and rounded it off by saying: "The
best advice I can give to all you young people is -- Get Your Hair Cut!" My
own habit has always been to go to cinemas in the afternoon: no smoke and no
crowds. Robert Shaw was starring as Hitler's top Panzer Corps general, leading
the fanatical dash to split the Allies towards the end of the war, and in the
gloom of the cinema, the Columbia on Shaftesbury avenue, I saw the bald pate
of Montgomery, three rows down, all alone. At the end of the film the manager
gushed: "Did you enjoy the film, my lord?" "Yes, yes" he
snapped in his usual way, walking slowly to his car parked near the pavement.
I could not resist it. I sidled up behind him and shouted in his ear: "Get
your hair cut!" "What, what?" he snapped, startled, as his chauffeur
helped him into the back seat. I have to admit I had the idea from an American
journalist. J. Allen Smith, a columnist in New York who had seen John D. Rockefeller,
richest man in the world, sitting in the back of an enormous open limousine outside
a bank, while his driver was inside. Allen, knowing he had to do something, walked
up to the shrivelled miserable little figure, flicked his hat brim and said: "Hi,
toots!" But Montgomery also had a sense of humour, and loved to tell the
story of when he was a young subaltern on the Western front and HQ was starved
of knowledge from the front line. "Bring me your fastest runner," said
the General, "We must have a sitrep from the front." A sitrep or
sitintrep is a situaton intelligence report, and the runner dashed off with his
carrier pigeon, away from the HQ. Frantic after two days, the General was suddenly
told that they had sighted the pigeon, which circled, and landed on the table. "Get
it, man" shouted the General. "What does the message say?" A
young officer took the message from the pigeon's leg and blushed. "Well,
read it out, man. Got a tongue in your head, haven't you?" "Sir," said
the officer, his face red and his voice trembling. "It says: I am tired
of carrying this fucking pigeon."
Excuse the four letter words, but I cannot resist this final line: The newly
born northern televison company now known as Tyne Tees television, had a Press
conference at the outset, where I learned that they had had to throw away thousands
of letter headings and change their name, because the first title of the new
company, printed on the letter heading, was Tyne Wear And Tees televison.
President John F. Kennedy
“A terrible beauty is born” wrote Yeats when the Irish Troubles
started and the British fought the Irish Republicans in the streets of
Dublin, bombarding the Post Office so that it caught fire and all the
valuable files in its archives, including all the birth certificates,
were destroyed in the flames.
So when the Irish-American Kennedy family were asked where they came from, old Joe Kennedy recalled a village in Ireland being mentioned by his parents. The Kennedy family fortune came largely from bootlegging during that period in America’s history which ushered in gang warfare and murderous mayhem. The various factions, Italian, Irish and Jewish, fought each other for the profits. One of old Joe Kennedy’s sidekicks was “The Real McCoy”, William S. McCoy the bootlegger who refused to water the booze, hence his nickname. Al Capone managed the Italian side and the Bronfman family ran whisky from Canada into the U.S., and now own Seagrams who make Canadian Club whisky. One of their drivers was “Legs” Diamond, his name coming from his time as a 10 cents a dance hoofer in the same dance-hall where Lily Langtry ended up, paying men to dance with and hold close the former mistress of Edward VII, the King of England who said to her: “I’ve spent enough on you to buy a battleship,” to which she replied: “And spent enough in me to float one” As American Ambassador to England just prior to World War II , Joseph P. Kennedy, nursing an understandable Irish-American grudge against his hosts, said confidently that Hitler would win the war against the British. Answering the question about the family origins, he simply thought of a village and said that was the birthplace of his ancestors. It was a guess but it turned out quiet well because the scouts sent ahead to arrange a visit by the President, Jack Kennedy, son of Joe, discovered two Kennedys living there: a grumpy old man Kennedy and a sweet old lady Kennedy with a nice little cottage and garden.
So they picked on the sweet old lady and told her she was related to the President of the United States, and he was coming to visit and could they paint and decorate her cottage, install a flush toilet, in case the Pres. was taken short, and knock down the old wooden privy in the back garden, called “the haggert” locally, so that they could have a splendid buffet lunch in the newly tidied-up garden.
On the great day they lunched on smoked salmon and lobster and fine ham in the sunny garden, the President chatting with the little old lady, watched, from over the garden wall by Old Grumpy Mr. Kennedy and Vincent Mulchrone of the Daily Mail, covering the story for his London paper.
Mulchrone, a former Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain (which was won by Britain and not by Germany, old Joe was surprised to learn) had a fine sense of Irish humour. Covering the opening of a new music hall in North London he wrote: “I saw an Irishman with a horse and cart coming up the Edgeware Road tonight. I knew he was Irish because the horse was in the cart and he was pulling it...” the stunt by the strong-man advertising the opening. When Germany played England in that famous European Cup Final, Vince wrote: “If the Germans beat us at our national game today, we will at least have the consolation of having twice beaten them at theirs...” Outrage from the German fans, and laughter from everyone else.
“Will you just look at them, Vince?” said Grumpy Kennedy, jealous of losing the refurbishment battle and Kennedy kudos to his neighbour.
“They used to shate in the haggert and ate in the house. Now they
ate in the haggert and shate in the house!”
The Editors
Some were funny, and told funny stories, but others constantly amazed
the journalists working with them, making them wonder how this group of
men with “their fingers on the pulse of the nation” had ever
managed to get their jobs and keep them. Nepotism, sycophancy and ruthlessness
played a part, of course. Asked why so many of them were Geordies, (Sylvester
Bolam of the Mirror, who went to prison, Sir Denis Hamilton of the Sunday
Times, Sir Edward Pickering of the Express, William “Nicely Nicely” Hardcastle),
a reporter replied: “Because they are hard-bitten, ruthless bastards.” Sir
Harold Evans was an honorary Geordie, for he was born in Manchester, was
at Durham University and edited the Northern Echo, the paper on which
Sir Edward Pickering was a sub-editor. “Pick” went to Middlesborough
High School, started on the Northern Echo and a Newcastle paper, and moved
to The Street as a sub. on The Daily Mirror. In the Royal Artillery during
the war, he later wrote Eisenhower’s daily bulletins from SHAEF
HQ. Sir Denis Hamilton, also from Middlesborough, was a reporter on the
Newcastle Evening Chronicle, jumped at Arnhem, and was later on Montgomery’s
staff.
The reporters did not mind tough editors, for Fleet Street was a ruthless
place, where it was hard to survive: it was the stupidity of some of them
(not the Geordies) which left them aghast.
After two years in the British army as a conscript, I returned to civvy
street to my job on the Daily Mail, but the unions had moved in and NATSOPA
insisted on having one of their paid-up members operate the teleprinter
in the office, so I was moved to the old Sunday Dispatch in Manchester
where the editor was Aubrey Viggars, a huge man of similar build to Christopher
Soames (didn’t some girl say sleeping with him was like having a
large wardrobe fall on her with the key still in the lock?). He had horses,
so when the day came to see Britain’s High Executioner, Mr. Albert
Pierrepoint, they had something to talk about because Mr. P. was due to
hang Ruth Ellis on the Monday and we wanted a picture of “The Man
in Everyone’s Thoughts Today” in the Sunday Dispatch, and
Albert just happened to be grooming a pony in his back garden. Great Picture!
He was not allowed to speak, of course, under the Official Secrets Act.
Like most reporters, I would do anything to avoid visiting Mr. P. in his
public house. It was called Help The Poor Struggler, which reporters unkindly
changed to Help The Poor Strangler, and he would lock the Press lads in
for the night as he was afraid to go to bed with his nightmares. One recurring
nightmare was hanging the “nigh on two ’undred” SS
men and German war criminals at Nuremburg. The reporters’ excuses
of returning to wives and children were ignored. Our Albert needed company.
The doors and windows were locked. All the reporters could do was pray: “Forgive
us Our Press Passes...” The hangman had them trapped!
Fingering the wad of notes in his pocket, he pretended that Ruth Ellis
was just a job like any other, but we crime reporters knew that ladies
who were hanged by the neck in England were put into rubber trousers to
catch whatever fell through with the shock. “Topping” was
the same for women as for men: the handshake, the half-Nelson, the hood,
the rush through the false door in the condemned cell, the drop.
In Barlinnie, Glasgow’s tough prison, they used to throw the prisoner
off the top floor so that his neck stretched several feet, like a rubber
band, and the Press, police, and warders below were often picked off the
floor, having fainted at the sight, and then a verdict of judicial hanging
was brought in by the coroner, who did not faint as he was accustomed
to the spectacle. My night news editor on the Daily Express, John Young,
had actually witnessed this barbarism as a junior reporter in Glasgow.
Mr. Viggars said the London editor, Mr. Charles Eade had been on to
him about a Welshman called Dylan (he pronounced it Die-lan) Thomas. Had
I heard of him? Yes, and in fact I had read him, all that he had written.
Knowing the answer beforehand, I had to phone all the libraries in the
North to find out if this poet was being read by the public. Of course
he was, and he was very popular, but what I could not understand was that
these two editors had never heard of him, and Charles Eade who claimed
he loved literature, was actually living in Bleak House, of Dickens fame.
When I decided to go to an evening paper for court reporting experience,
I recommended Anthony Gilbey, the only officer who had been refused a
long term commission in the Grenadier Guards, but a great man on horseflesh,
for his father was Quintin Gilbey the racing corresondent for Kemsley
newspapers, whose family made the famous gin. He was appointed after he
had pulled the old school tie over the eyes of Mr. Viggars and talked
bloodstock and racing.
I cannot remember the name of my editor on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.
To the staff he was the secret editor, who lived in carpeted splendour
in “The Mahogany End” far from the working journalists and
sub-editors on the floor below. Unless you were put on the carpet for
some misdemeanour, you were liable to see him only once a year, on Budget
Day, when he sat, captain of the ship, choosing headlines.
He did swing into action on one memorable occasion, however, when he
heard that Lord Kemsley was to pay a sudden visit to this far flung outpost
of his empire. Men dashed about like headless chickens, all drivers of
vans recalled to duty: around fifty motor cars had to be moved out of
the ground floor garage and hidden in the surrounding streets behind Kemsley
House in case his Lordship asked why there were so many and why they were
not accounted for. Every minor executive had managed to get a free car
and free petrol for his personal use, while reporters were not even allowed
to take a taxi on an urgent news story. When I resigned and said I was
heading for Fleet Street, the News Editor said: “You have to walk
before you can run, you know.” I said “The trouble here is
that you can walk for ever.”
Three weeks later, I was a sub-editor on the Daily Mirror in London,
which was then selling 4,500,000 copies a day, having worn out one pair
of shoes, hoofing around The Street, but based in Hampstead, The Wells
Hotel, where the huge breakfast, served late in the day, staved off youthful
hunger (I was 21) until evening. When I moved on, to Kensington Close,
my room was taken by a young actor in search of fame and fortune: Albert
Finney, who succeeded in seducing the landlord’s daughter, a buxom
16 year old. I was jealous.
The Editor of the Mirror was Jack Nener. When Kruschev’s son in
law, Adjubai, editor of Krokodil, visited the office, Dick West, who
had taken my job as a sub-editor in the features room (it was staffed
by several future authors, Keith Waterhouse, Angus Hall, Norman Longmate
etc) was delegated to act as guide/interpreter, but Mr. Nener was in
Winnie’s
bar at 10 Fetter lane (during the war Winnie was sipping her scotch
with milk when the phone rang: “Is that No. 10?” a voice said. “Yes” “Put
me through to Winnie please” “Speaking” she said,
and heard a spluttering on the phone before it went dead.
When Dick introduced them, Mr. Nener said: “Pravda! You say you
have the highest circulation in the world. Bollocks. The Mirror has the
highest -- and we sell ’em. You give ’em away! You’re
a shitsky and a spysky.”
His cry which rang out from time to time across the sub-editors room
was: “When are we going to get some tit and cunt in this newspaper?” made
the Pictures editor scrabble in the pile for the closest they could get
then to what later became a “page three girl”.
Nener of the dulcet tones had followed another famous editor, one Bartholemew,
the man who destroyed the Daily Mirror cuttings library on the same premise
as Mr. Henry Ford, that history was bunk, and the young readership of
the Mirror (Forward with the People, the reporters scoffed, should be
changed to “Every Day Has its Dog”) were interested in today,
not yesterday. The Mirror believed in youth. Dick West, who was subbing
the Viewpoint letters column, suggested one: “Why not a teenage
Archbishop of Canterbury?” Hugh Cudlipp, the big boss, travelled
with Bartholemew on a plane to South Africa, incognito, to buy up newspapers
there, and an American sitting next to Cudlipp asked who was the distinguished
silver haired old gentleman sitting over the aisle. “He is a Bishop.
Let him sleep,” said Cudlipp and then reached between his feet to
offer a whisky (duty free) to the Yank. The “Bishop” awoke
and snarled: “Get your fucking hands off that scotch!”
Mr Cudlipp had a glittering early career and as a young editor decided
to return to see his old newspaper pals in Cardiff, who said they would
give a party for him. They presented him with a Chinese box, which he
opened, slowly, one by one, wondering what his old colleagues had bought
for him. In the last box was a piece of shit. He learnt a lesson there
and then, that he had left behind the provincial, small minded, envious,
stick in the muds who hated success and were jealous of it. His return
had been a mistake. Never go back!
It is doubtful that Mr. Cudlipp had read G.K. Chesterton, but some
of us had, and it was a lesson all journalists who move on should learn:
WHEN I CAME BACK TO FLEET STREET
When I came back to Fleet Street, through a sunset nook at night,
And saw the old Green Dragon, with the windows all alight,
And hailed the old Green Dragon, and The Cock I used to know,
Where all good fellows were my friends, a little while ago;
I had been long in meadows, and the trees took hold of me,
And the still towns in the beech-woods, where men were
meant to be.
But old things held; the laughter, the long unnatural night,
And all the truth they talk in hell and all the lies they write.
For I came back to Fleet Street, and not in peace I came;
A cloven pride was in my heart, and half my love was shame.
I came to fight in fairy tale, whose end shall no man know -
To fight the old Green Dragon, until The Cock shall crow!
Under the broad bright windows of men I serve no more
The groaning of the great old wheels thickened to a throttle roar;
All buried things broke upward; and peered from its retreat
Ugly and silent, like an elf, the secret of The Street.
They did not break the padlocks, or clear the wall away.
The men in debt that drank of old still drink in debt today;
Chained to the rich by ruin, cheerful in chains as then
When old unbroken Pickwick walked among the broken men.
Still he that dreams and rambles through his own elfin air,
Knows that The Street’s a prison, know that the gates are there;
Still he that scorns or struggles sees, frightful and afar,
All that they leave of rebels rot high on Temple Bar.
All that I loved and hated, all that I shunned and knew,
Clears in broad battle lightning where they, and I, and you,
Run high the barricade that breaks the barriers of The Street,
And shout to them that shrink within, the Prisoners of The Fleet
Still “chained to the rich by ruin”, (marvellous phrase!)
I joined The Daily Mail as a holiday relief reporter, a six months’ job.
The editor was William (“Nicely-Nicely”) Hardcastle, another
huge man, ruthlessly trying to catch up with the Daily Express and its
four million circulation. Even more ruthless was the reporter he sent
to Moscow, Anthony Brown, who interviewed Boris Pasternak who asked him
to do a favour by taking a love letter to an old girl friend in Paris
(it would have been stopped by the Russian censors) and keep quiet about
it. Instead, Brown took it to London and after a confab. with Hardcastle,
it appeared as a front page splash in the Daily Mail. The famous lesbian
author Nancy Spain (another Geordie, but one who went to Roedean) had
once pushed big William into a lake on Newcastle Town Moor when they were
tots. No doubt Pasternak would have liked to push him and Brown into the
Thames.
Boris Pasternak said: “I will never trust another journalist as
long as I live.”
Hardcastle, who later worked for BBC radio World at One had replaced
Mr. Howard French, a former naval officer who had married into the family
that owned the Mail group. During his first week the men on the “back
bench” who make up the paper, were amazed to hear French say: “Look
what some idiot of a printer has done -- he’s set the headline upside
down!” They looked at him with disbelief and one of them quietly
explained to him that that is what printers do if a headline has “bust”,
too many letters to fit the space. Yachtsmen say the two most useless
things on a sailing boat are a wheelbarrow and a naval officer, and here
was the Daily Mail with a dumb Editor.
Nearby in the Daily Sketch office, Cyril Morton, the news editor, had
hired a van driver as a reporter only to find that he could neither read
nor write (see Don’t Tell My Mother I’m a Newspaperman” Volume
II of my memoirs). Morton offered me a job, but working for the Daily
Sketch was so infra dig that the reporters said: “I’m from
Associated Newspapers”. The rag that dare not speak its name!
So I joined the Daily Express. It was full of war heroes: the RAF men,
Group Captain Hugh “Cocky” Dundas; spitfire pilot Max Aitken,
son of The Beaver; Cyril Aynsley (another Geordie); Major Hugh Pond, Sefton
Delmer of the Woburn Abbey black radio, and reporters who had been shot
down, torpedoed, wounded or spent years as prisoners of war. The great
Arthur Christiansen had been given a little office over what was known
as “the bridge of sighs” with nothing to do but mope. The
Beaver, too, was ruthless, and had booted out his greatest editor. Replacing
him was the quiet man who had learnt his trade as a sub editor on the
Northern Echo, so he knew about upside down headlines. But he clearly
had his eye on a knighthood (he became Sir Edward Pickering) and it was
clear how he achieved this because when shown a wonderful set of photographs
taken by a great photographer, Victor Blackman, who had spent cold weeks
high up in the tower of the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral, photographing
the Royal corgis playing with the Royal children, etc., Pickering took
a tin tray and set fire to the negatives right there on his desk, telling
Blackman, “This is intrusion into privacy” and a great historical
record had been destroyed for ever. It is hard to believe, but not far
away in Temple Bar, Hilary Rubinstein, (who was married to the daughter
of Victor Gollancs), an agent with A.P. Watt (the world’s first
literary agency) was destroying the files of William Somerset Maugham,
Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, Sir Arthur Bryant,
Pearl S. Buck, Richmal Crompton and others, paying £5 to have them
thrown on a rubbish tip in South London. Invaluable research material
which should have been given to the British Museum, was blowing around
in the wind. Another editor was conned into paying a large sum of money
for fake history: The Hitler diaries were sold to editor of the Sunday
Times Frank Giles in 1983, even though his own journalists, like Magnus
Linklater had told him they were a fake. It is extremely unlikely that
the two editors before him, Sir Denis Hamilton and Sir Harold Evans would
have been deceived. Hamilton picked a good team to start INSIGHT and Evans
used them to expose Rachmanism and the profiteers from Thalidomide, both
first class editors.
But let us come back Henry Ford, who only talked about history: Bartholemew,
Pickering and “Hilarious Philistine” destroyed it, and Giles
was spoofed by it.
The editor who replaced “Pick” was Bob Edwards, son of a milkman,
who was not liked by staff when it was reported that he had said “reporters
are just taxis in a rank” when the Express was known as a reporters’ paper,
dealing in hard news and investigative reporting. The story goes that
he had a call to go to the Beaver’s flat in Arlington House. He
dashed from the house, his wife drove him to the railway station, where
the porter handed him all the daily newspapers which he scanned feverishly.
He had to be able to answer any question the boss threw at him. The Beaver
had one question: “The Sunday Times has stolen one of my best men,
and I am going to steal one of their best. Who is he?” “Smith,
sir.” “Buy him.” “Right, sir,” said Edwards
bowing out. “There must be someone called Smith with the S.T.,” he
thought as he went to the office.
The Beaver had some nasty habits: he made Ian Aitken run up his staircase
in the villa in Cap Ferrat while he took the lift, asking questions; he
liked to crumble up and throw every piece of paper he read on the floor
for his secretary to pick up; he liked re-using old envelopes, so some
of his executives jumped on new ones to age them and placate him; he liked
ordering his minions into his presence “immediately if not sooner” and
Richard Killian a reporter who had shared a flat in Paris with Marlon
Brando and was the laughing stock of The Street when he wrote, in Algeria: “I
heard the sound of machine gun fire. I ran towards it...” had the
call when he was Rome correspondent, the job I was to inherit. Furiously
reading all the ANSA (Italian news agency) tapes, in case he was asked
a political question, he dashed to where the boss was staying, above the
Spanish steps. “What street is this hotel in, Mr. Killian?” he
asked, and the trembling reporter had to go downstairs to ask the desk.
Sitting with Derek Driscoll on the reporters’ desks, reading the
1st edition, Driscoll said: “Can you believe it? They’ve
got the arrest of Eichmann as a par on page two. It’s the story
of the decade.” “Go and tell the idiot,” I said to
Driscoll, who went over to Edwards and told him that we were missing the
biggest story to break in ages. Eichmann was the most wanted man in the
world, along with the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.
“People aren’t interested in war stories today...” said Edwards.
Then the 1st edition of the Daily Mail came up with their splash: EICHMANN
CAUGHT.
A red-faced Edwards had to re-plate and splash the story.
Eichmann’s ID card No. 131 in the name of Riccardo Klement was provided
for him in Italy by a Roman Catholic Bishop and a priest who had helped
40 Nazis who claimed they were “escaping from the Russians as anti-communists”.
The Red Cross issued him with a passport in his new name and the Argentian
consul in Genoa stamped in a permanent visa. His application had been
signed by the Franciscan priest on 1 June 1950 Six weeks later the SS
mass murderer was in Buenos Aires.
He was caught by a blind man.
Lothar Hermann, a half Jewish socialist who was so badly beaten in
Dachau before the war by the Gestapo that he lost his sight. He fled to
Argentina, had a beautiful young daughter who was being courted by Klaus
Eichmann, the eldest son, whose father insisted he used the real family
name and not Klement. Even though Hermann and his family had moved 500
miles away, he returned to identify Eichmann on his doorstep when his
daughter spoke to him. After two years of lethargy by Mossad the Israelis
were shamed into sending a team to arrest him. The day after Eichmann
was sentenced to death Graciela Sirota, daughter of the owner of the house
where the Mossad agents had held Eichmann, was kidnapped, tortured, and
had a swastika burned into her breast. Another innocent Jewish girl, Mirta
Penjerek, suspected of supplying the Mossad team with food, was murdered.
It took ten years and many furious letters before Golda Meier, Israeli
Prime Minister, settled the debt they owed Hermann and paid him the reward
money in July 1972.
I met Sir David English only once. He got his knighthood for blowing
the Thatcher bugle: “Maggie does it again!” “Hooray
for Maggie”) The smarming paid off. As Dominic Behan (Brendan’s
brother) said to Michael Parkinson on TV: “Well, it’s the
sycophantic man who wins in the end, as you know well yourself, Michael”.
English was with Angus Hall, another Geordie, recommending some freelance
work for the New York Enquirer, a scandal sheet whose editor gave an instruction
to would-be contributors: “The kind of story we want is: I SCREWED
A GRIZZLY BEAR FOR THE F.B.I AND FOUND GOD!, lots of animal cruelty but
no ‘knickers stolen off the clothesline’ perverts ...” They
paid $5,000 for a “Blockbuster” article and English had just
scored with one. In that issue was a story by a columnist who wrote, stoned
out of his brain on pot: “Where was Princess Margaret during the
Queen’s wedding anniversary celebrations? She was having an abortion
in a back attic in Buckingham Palace. Father of the child: colored cabaret
singer, Hutch.” This gem was sent to him by Frank Ross, who posed
as a Church of England vicar in order to interview men in the condemned
cell (see Vol II of my memoirs Don’t Tell My Mother I’m a
Newspaperman) and sell the stories. He showed me the fountain pen and
watch of Reginald Halliday Christie, the mass murderer, and when I asked
him what Christie was like he replied: “Well...he was a quiet little
man -- but he had a mind of his own!”
English the editor and Hall the freelance adjourned to El Vino in Fleet
Street. The famous bar sports LORD NORTHCLIFFE’S CHAIR in the nether
region. Ambitious youngsters dared not sit in it. In this bar John Raymond,
book critic, barred for drunken behaviour, looked in from the street and
said: “Sympathy, sympathy, where can I find sympathy?” to
which Philip Hope-Wallace of the Daily Telegraph replied: “Oxford
English dictionary, old boy. Somewhere between shit and syphilis.”
“Where does all this wine come from, Angus?” asked the great editor. “Oh,
mainly from France, but some from Italy...”
“Bullshit” said the future knight of the realm, “This stuff
is made in bathtubs in the East End. Don’t let them con. you.”
On my occasional visits to London from my houses in Languedoc and the
Aveyron, or my flat in Ibiza, I would see a remarkable man on television
speaking broad Cockney unashamedly, making Janet Street Porter sound like
Helena Bonham Carter. His name: Derek Jameson. He was the editor of the
Daily Express. The viewers were laughing at him. Was he really a Fleet
Street editor? In his autobiography in 1988, the first chapter is “East
End boy made bad” someone delights in telling him, in his office: “..they
really tore into you on radio 4 ... reckoned you’re an illiterate
yob!” The programme described him as “the creative force
who’s made the Daily Express what it is today -- the thinking man’s
bin-liner.” One of his reporters used the word “catafalque” in
her story and he said: “What the bleedin’ ’ell is a
catafalque?” She said it was used to display a coffin or it was
a stage or platform. “Well bleedin’ well say platform, then.” shouted “Sid
Yobbo” as Private Eye called him, and the girl reporter said her
paper was the only one next day to say the coffin lay on a platform. His
own staff were laughing at him.
It was all very cruel, the snobs taking revenge. They thought the days
of the copy boy of today being the editor of tomorrow had gone forever,
and graduates who “talked proper” were vying for highly paid
jobs in journalism. Yet here was a maverick, talented, but coarse and
vulgar. Although I admired his attaining his ambition, I was shocked by
what was happening in The Street. What were now called the Red Tops were
catering for the lowest common denominator. After fifty years of free
education in Britain, the populace read, or tried to read, The Sun, which
had no leader column (no opinion) when it first came out. In Spain tourists
took it to the beach at 10 a.m. and were still “reading” it
at 5 p.m. What started the downfall of The Street where once giants strode,
where I had drunk with Sefton Delmer of the Express who used to take the
top floor of the hotel Adlon in Berlin and invite the British Ambassador
to tea to give him the inside information, travelled with Hitler to his
rallies and had the world scoop on the Reichstag fire; Ralph Izzard who
climbed Everest and scooped everyone with CROWING GLORY on the day of
the Coronation; and the famous denizens of The Street, Evelyn Waugh and
Graham Greene etc?
Some clever young ones scarpered to television: Parkinson, Desmond
Wilcox, Peter Woods, Tommy Mangold, had seen writing on the Fleet Street
wall. Many others became authors.
The downhill slide of The Street started with photographers being called “vultures” by
one Anthony Millward, a pompous British Airways employee complaining of
attempts to photograph the Manchester United plays in a Munich hospital
after their air crash. Today the TV cameras would be invited in.
Then there were the ruthless news editors and editors: Donald Todhunter
and Bill Hardcastle of the Daily Mail, Cyril Morton and Herbert Gunn of
the Sketch, Keith Howard, news editor of the Express, forcing their reporters
into “flamming” up their stories, vying with each other for
circulation. They ruined British journalism as we had known it before
the war, during it, and in the 1950’s., although its reputation
was not that high:
As the poet said, you cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the
British journalist....there really is no reason to, when you see what,
un-bribed, he’ll do!
A symbolic appointment before Howard was David Lewin as news editor
of the Express. He was a first rate show business reporter, Jewish, and
the one the stars trusted. Olivier, Rex Harrison, Vivian Leigh, gave him
scoops. He had integrity. He wanted his reporters, including myself, to
write stories about show business people. The news staff, including Trevor
Evans, later Sir Trevor, led the protest. He was removed from the job.
But they failed to see the writing on the wall: Lewin was way ahead of
his time. Eventually all the tabloids would feast on show business stories.
The slow slithering of the British popular Press into what it has become
today, the laughing stock of foreign newspapermen, had begun.
Then there was Piers Morgan, who did not stay long enough on the Mirror
to get a Knighthood, but left under two dark clouds: some city skulduggery
with shares and a gaff about British soldiers in Iraq urinating on helpless
prisoners. Old soldiers tried to tell him the pictures he was buying were
fakes: British soldiers lace their boots across the eyeholes like a ladder,
the Americans and others like X’s. He would not listen. He had never
been in uniform. His ego was almost as big as Noel Coward’s, and
in his autobiography it appears that he had no need of reporters because
he does most of the interviewing with the celebrities and Royals and the
politicians personally, crowing about how many times he met the Blairs.
It is a sad day for Britain when its Prime Minister has to butter up to
the editors of red-top tabloid newspapers and their proprietors.
On Sunday 10 November 1996 the great Mirror editor heard that Marjorie
Proops the Mirror columnist had died, and was determined to get tributes
from every great public figure. The busy reporters heard him shout: “Have
we got a quote from Harold Wilson?”
They did not dare to laugh.
Harold Wilson died in 1995.
Last but not least was John Junor, editor of the Sunday Express, whose daughter
Penny wrote in her biography of her father that she had thought he had a
Jekyll and Hyde character but discovered that he was Hyde "all the
way through". Born in poverty in Glasgow, he was part generous
and part mean, like many deprived children. He would hand out fivers
to down and outs but cheat his own reporters out of payments. Beaverbrook
told Junor,in 1961, that he would pay £75,000 for the scandalous memoirs
of William Somerset Maugham, who had given the rights to his secretary and
lover Alan Searle, and Junor conned Searle, in the villa Mauresque, Cap
Ferrat, into signing it away for £35,000, crowing back in The
Street that he had saved The Beaver £40,000.
John Junor the canny Scot read every word his writers wrote, and then checked the proofs, often telling the sub-editors: "It was better before you changed it. Print the original story. Don't pee in the orange juice."***
By a strange quirk of fate this was to result in a story reporters still
chuckle about:
David Eliades, now a successful author with a worldwide musical "After
me the Deluge" playing to packed houses and causing The Pope to laugh
uproariously when he saw it on Italian TV, was sent by the Sunday Express
to report an air crash (the plane was full of British package tourists)
in Perpignan.
The reporters decided to play a joke: they would start each paragraph with a letter which, if read down the column would spell: F.U.C.K.J.O.H.N.J.U.N.O.R. They scribbled away then filed their stories back to Fleet Street.
The only newspaper to print the story in this form (a single column on page 1) was the Sunday Express!
It was much later that Mr. Eliades discovered that his story had been
re-written by a sub-editor, but John Junor had blue-pencilled the
proof: "I prefer the original version. Print that!"
*** On the Express newspapers the reporters told of two sub-editors
crawling, dying of thirst, across the desert who saw a notice "Iced
orange juice 100 yards from this notice". They scrambled
on to find "Iced Orange juice 20 yards from this notice", and
finally dug up a metal case filled with cold orange juice. One of
them, about to reach down for a drink, was stopped by the other who said: "Stop! We
can better this. Let's piss in it!"