Flecks of spittle would fly with the curses as Frank Poulton and Cecil Catling argued about who was the more senior of these two reporters in the Tonbridge Free Press newsroom hierarchy. They were both well past their prime and had sunk from past glories, Cecil as a crime reporter on the London Star, for which he had covered the hangings of Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, and Frank, who had spent many years on The Times of India.
What made the frequent arguments particularly sad was the fact that there had only been one other (very young junior) reporter on the staff before I joined on March 1, 1965. Cecil was a short man with a comb-over hairstyle who always sported copious amounts of fag ash on his crumpled, stained waistcoat. Frank carried himself - and a brolly - with a certain bearing, as if he had been a member of the Raj rather than the fourth estate. Each had cultivated a sneering disdain and carefully-fashioned put-downs for the other.
Looking back, I suppose that each saw in the other a reflection of his own decline and either had to assert a superiority or admit that he was finishing his working life as the lowest of the low on an old-fashioned broadsheet newspaper with a circulation of well under 10,000 in an unremarkable town.
Me? I was thrilled to have stumbled into such a glamorous job.
I had a sense of guilt about this until a website called Gentlemen Ranters came along. You see, I soon learned that there were thousands of youngsters who had dreamed of becoming journalists almost as soon as they had learned to scribble and even while still at school had written to the editor of every paper in Great Britain seeking a job. The lucky few were overjoyed at finally being given a job at one shilling and ninepence a week on the Penury Gazette, where they lived hundreds of miles from home, family and friends in a hutch of a room, working 100 hours a week, thinking how fortunate they were.
Whereas I had wasted four years by clerking in the Civil Service and had even applied for a job as a cigarette salesman (thank God I failed!). Having just moved to Tonbridge I joined a young adults’ club to meet some locals. When no one volunteered to become secretary I took on the job and taught myself to type. And when no one volunteered to take on the role of press officer I took that on as well, sending in a couple of paragraphs to the Free Press each week. And here’s the ridiculous piece of luck that changes lives. The chairman of the club lived next door to Free Press editor Eric Maskell who leaned over the fence one day and asked who was sending in the club’s weekly reports because they were very good.
I had, in all honesty, never thought of becoming a journalist but this seemed too good an opportunity to ignore.
The job interview lasted about half an hour, of which some 15 minutes consisted of Eric, who had been with the paper since 1918, being wracked by violent, raucous paroxysms of coughing which left him almost too exhausted to take another drag of the untipped Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes which he chain smoked.
Eric, a considerate, benevolent man when he could manage a word or two, offered me a job and said he thought I would enjoy the life of a reporter. What an understatement.
I often suffered pangs of guilt at the way in which I had barged to the front of the queue of all those desperate youngsters knocking on journalism’s front door and had nipped in through the back entrance. Then I found the Gentlemen Ranters website which published the reminscences of old Fleet Street hacks and I read how other journos had also tumbled almost by mistake through that same door (But then again, perhaps finding back doors is an essential part of journalistic success.).
I now suspect that a good proportion of journalists of a certain old age are akin to bastards in the sense that our entry into this world of journalism wasn’t planned. It almost certainly couldn’t happen today. Only those who have gestated through journalism degrees are likely to be granted a chance at this privileged life. Just call me a lucky bastard!
My training on the Free Press lasted two days as David Best, the office junior until I arrived, showed me where my daily rounds would take me. On the third morning came the total immersion, sink-or-swim test of journalistic competence. I was sent solo to report on an inquest. I felt it wiser not to ask what an inquest comprised nor how it worked. I fathomed it out as it proceeded.
I also learned that we had to sub our own copy and assess whether it was worth putting the intro across two columns in 8 point. Bigger stories might merit a couple of pars across two or three columns in 10 point and a real belter would get the 12 point treatment. My hazy memory suggests that Eric added the headlines. Once enough stories had been set in metal, pages were assembled jigsaw-style in the forme, without a layout, and on a Thursday afternoon the flatbed press would swing into action.
There was a moment a few years later when my new career almost came to a halt. I told the editor-in-chief of the Northants Evening Telegraph where I was working in May 1971 that I didn’t like the way the paper insisted on doffing its masthead to the local gentry and I was resigning forthwith. I had no job to go to and learned later in the day that I would be competing for a job with the entire staff of the Daily Sketch which closed that very day.
But Dudley Moore - yes, the Dudley Moore, the famous Medway Towns freelance journo and Kent contributor to Wisden (not the comedian and actor chappie) - came to the rescue by inviting me to join him in selling stories to Fleet Street from his ramshackle Dickensian office in Rochester High Street. (Photo: the interior of the building on the right was even more sloping than the exterior.)
Dudley could sum up a day’s cricket for BBC Radio Medway off the cuff to the second. He might be told that he had 60 seconds to fill and then, just as he was about to go to air, that it was now 90 seconds. Without an ‘err’ or an ‘ahm’ and with only half a dozen miniscule notes, Dudley would include every significant statistic from the day and finish with a flourish after exactly 90 seconds.
Dud’s mastery of the art of sporting summary was somewhat mitigated by the fact that he couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate ‘th’ – so that thirty three became firty free.
It was during this incarnation that I became (like many others, I suspect) Keith Miller for a day.
I was sitting in the press box in the wooden grandstand at Canterbury Cricket Ground reporting on a County Championship game for PA and ExTel when one of the clutch of phones rang. Being early in the morning (it was only 11.15am) I was the sole reporter there. I answered it and: ‘Hello old boy, who’s that?’ the Great Man asked.
‘Look, I’m supposed to be covering the game for the Express but l’ve been unavoidably detained by a lady in Kensington. Could you file for me?’
The piece, written by the Medway Media XI’s number 11 batsman and right-arm donkey drop bowler, duly appeared next day under Miller’s by line.
Nine years in Fleet Street on the News of the World, when it still treated people and news ethically, involved having a packed bag with passport in the office and a mix of being away from home for three or four 18-hour days or disgracefully long lunches at the City Golf Club.
And then in 1982 another door opened and I emigrated to Brisbane to join the Sunday Sun.
In 2006 (by which time I was Premier Peter Beattie's principal media advisor) my wife and I hosted old friends from Kent, including former BBC network radio foreign news editor John Brice, BBC national radio sub Jackie Hearn and former Evening News chief sub and Sunday Independent editor Alan Cooper, in a box at the front of the upper tier of The Gabba for the first of the Ashes Tests of that season.
Cricket fans are adept at applauding statistical achievements as games progress but the packed stand behind us must have wondered what was going on as eight of us stood as one and raised our glasses ‘To Dudley’ as the scoreboard ticked over to ‘free hundred and firty free for free’.
Eric Maskell was right. I never stopped thinking how lucky I was to earn a living by talking to fascinating people and having a front row view of momentous events.
Thanks Eric. Thanks Dudley.
http://www.gentlemenranters.com/ is no longer active but still worth a browse. An earlier version of this blog first appeared on that site.
What made the frequent arguments particularly sad was the fact that there had only been one other (very young junior) reporter on the staff before I joined on March 1, 1965. Cecil was a short man with a comb-over hairstyle who always sported copious amounts of fag ash on his crumpled, stained waistcoat. Frank carried himself - and a brolly - with a certain bearing, as if he had been a member of the Raj rather than the fourth estate. Each had cultivated a sneering disdain and carefully-fashioned put-downs for the other.
Looking back, I suppose that each saw in the other a reflection of his own decline and either had to assert a superiority or admit that he was finishing his working life as the lowest of the low on an old-fashioned broadsheet newspaper with a circulation of well under 10,000 in an unremarkable town.
Me? I was thrilled to have stumbled into such a glamorous job.
I had a sense of guilt about this until a website called Gentlemen Ranters came along. You see, I soon learned that there were thousands of youngsters who had dreamed of becoming journalists almost as soon as they had learned to scribble and even while still at school had written to the editor of every paper in Great Britain seeking a job. The lucky few were overjoyed at finally being given a job at one shilling and ninepence a week on the Penury Gazette, where they lived hundreds of miles from home, family and friends in a hutch of a room, working 100 hours a week, thinking how fortunate they were.
Whereas I had wasted four years by clerking in the Civil Service and had even applied for a job as a cigarette salesman (thank God I failed!). Having just moved to Tonbridge I joined a young adults’ club to meet some locals. When no one volunteered to become secretary I took on the job and taught myself to type. And when no one volunteered to take on the role of press officer I took that on as well, sending in a couple of paragraphs to the Free Press each week. And here’s the ridiculous piece of luck that changes lives. The chairman of the club lived next door to Free Press editor Eric Maskell who leaned over the fence one day and asked who was sending in the club’s weekly reports because they were very good.
I had, in all honesty, never thought of becoming a journalist but this seemed too good an opportunity to ignore.
The job interview lasted about half an hour, of which some 15 minutes consisted of Eric, who had been with the paper since 1918, being wracked by violent, raucous paroxysms of coughing which left him almost too exhausted to take another drag of the untipped Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes which he chain smoked.
Eric, a considerate, benevolent man when he could manage a word or two, offered me a job and said he thought I would enjoy the life of a reporter. What an understatement.
I often suffered pangs of guilt at the way in which I had barged to the front of the queue of all those desperate youngsters knocking on journalism’s front door and had nipped in through the back entrance. Then I found the Gentlemen Ranters website which published the reminscences of old Fleet Street hacks and I read how other journos had also tumbled almost by mistake through that same door (But then again, perhaps finding back doors is an essential part of journalistic success.).
I now suspect that a good proportion of journalists of a certain old age are akin to bastards in the sense that our entry into this world of journalism wasn’t planned. It almost certainly couldn’t happen today. Only those who have gestated through journalism degrees are likely to be granted a chance at this privileged life. Just call me a lucky bastard!
My training on the Free Press lasted two days as David Best, the office junior until I arrived, showed me where my daily rounds would take me. On the third morning came the total immersion, sink-or-swim test of journalistic competence. I was sent solo to report on an inquest. I felt it wiser not to ask what an inquest comprised nor how it worked. I fathomed it out as it proceeded.
I also learned that we had to sub our own copy and assess whether it was worth putting the intro across two columns in 8 point. Bigger stories might merit a couple of pars across two or three columns in 10 point and a real belter would get the 12 point treatment. My hazy memory suggests that Eric added the headlines. Once enough stories had been set in metal, pages were assembled jigsaw-style in the forme, without a layout, and on a Thursday afternoon the flatbed press would swing into action.
There was a moment a few years later when my new career almost came to a halt. I told the editor-in-chief of the Northants Evening Telegraph where I was working in May 1971 that I didn’t like the way the paper insisted on doffing its masthead to the local gentry and I was resigning forthwith. I had no job to go to and learned later in the day that I would be competing for a job with the entire staff of the Daily Sketch which closed that very day.
But Dudley Moore - yes, the Dudley Moore, the famous Medway Towns freelance journo and Kent contributor to Wisden (not the comedian and actor chappie) - came to the rescue by inviting me to join him in selling stories to Fleet Street from his ramshackle Dickensian office in Rochester High Street. (Photo: the interior of the building on the right was even more sloping than the exterior.)
Dudley could sum up a day’s cricket for BBC Radio Medway off the cuff to the second. He might be told that he had 60 seconds to fill and then, just as he was about to go to air, that it was now 90 seconds. Without an ‘err’ or an ‘ahm’ and with only half a dozen miniscule notes, Dudley would include every significant statistic from the day and finish with a flourish after exactly 90 seconds.
Dud’s mastery of the art of sporting summary was somewhat mitigated by the fact that he couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate ‘th’ – so that thirty three became firty free.
It was during this incarnation that I became (like many others, I suspect) Keith Miller for a day.
I was sitting in the press box in the wooden grandstand at Canterbury Cricket Ground reporting on a County Championship game for PA and ExTel when one of the clutch of phones rang. Being early in the morning (it was only 11.15am) I was the sole reporter there. I answered it and: ‘Hello old boy, who’s that?’ the Great Man asked.
‘Look, I’m supposed to be covering the game for the Express but l’ve been unavoidably detained by a lady in Kensington. Could you file for me?’
The piece, written by the Medway Media XI’s number 11 batsman and right-arm donkey drop bowler, duly appeared next day under Miller’s by line.
Nine years in Fleet Street on the News of the World, when it still treated people and news ethically, involved having a packed bag with passport in the office and a mix of being away from home for three or four 18-hour days or disgracefully long lunches at the City Golf Club.
And then in 1982 another door opened and I emigrated to Brisbane to join the Sunday Sun.
In 2006 (by which time I was Premier Peter Beattie's principal media advisor) my wife and I hosted old friends from Kent, including former BBC network radio foreign news editor John Brice, BBC national radio sub Jackie Hearn and former Evening News chief sub and Sunday Independent editor Alan Cooper, in a box at the front of the upper tier of The Gabba for the first of the Ashes Tests of that season.
Cricket fans are adept at applauding statistical achievements as games progress but the packed stand behind us must have wondered what was going on as eight of us stood as one and raised our glasses ‘To Dudley’ as the scoreboard ticked over to ‘free hundred and firty free for free’.
Eric Maskell was right. I never stopped thinking how lucky I was to earn a living by talking to fascinating people and having a front row view of momentous events.
Thanks Eric. Thanks Dudley.
http://www.gentlemenranters.com/ is no longer active but still worth a browse. An earlier version of this blog first appeared on that site.
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