The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  Above all, I read books by journalists. The first was Teach Yourself Journalism by E. Frank Candlin. It was a tiny volume in a yellow-and-black dust jacket, and I practically memorised it. I learned that if you were a success and managed to get a job in Fleet Street, which was unlikely given the talent required and the intense competition, you could earn as much as £1000 a year. That was when I started saving for a ship’s ticket to London.

  But my favourite books were about the adventures of foreign correspondents. James Cameron tracking down Albert Schweitzer in the African jungle; Russell of The Times covering the Charge of the Light Brigade. ‘Surely that handful of men are not going to charge an army in position? Alas! It was but too true — their desperate valour knew no bounds,’ he wrote. René MacColl of the Daily Express wrote in his Deadline and Dateline: ‘Humanity can be divided roughly into the statics and the transients.’ If you were a static by disposition, his advice was to forget about being a foreign correspondent. My wandering life, I decided, was definitive proof I was perfectly qualified.

  Certain books by the great editors of Fleet Street became well known even outside the obsessive and self-regarding world of journalism. Hugh Cudlipp’s Publish and Be Damned, about the Daily Mirror in its heyday, was like that. The Mirror, Britain’s first ‘red top’, was a brilliant, buccaneering paper for the workers. Cudlipp and crew exulted in the risk of pushing against the boundaries of contemporary taste. He wrote of the Mirror: ‘Millions swear by [it], regard it as their daily Bible; others loathe it, curse it, reject its news and views as the modern works of Satan. It has been threatened with suppression by Parliament, attacked by other newspapers, denounced by prelates … Some politicians who have flayed it in public have enjoyed, or sought in private, its approbation.’ I heard the echo of these words years later when I was executive chairman of News International and The Sun had deposed the Mirror as the newspaper to love or hate.

  Arthur Christiansen was editor of the Daily Express for 24 years. In his autobiography, Headlines All My Life, he wrote of the importance of mixing entertainment with serious news: ‘The reader requires cakes and ale as well as bread and butter.’ Every day, before lunch, Christiansen wrote a review of that day’s edition. I remember these most:

  Here is a three-fold rule of conduct for our paper:

  1. Never set the police on anybody.

  2. Never cry down the pleasures of the people.

  3. Remember our own habits and frailties when disposed to be critical of others.

  Are we not in danger of becoming a nagging paper, simply because it is much easier to criticise than to praise?

  There are too many stories about things and not enough about people …

  News, news, news — that is what we want. You can describe things with the pen of Shakespeare himself but you cannot beat news in a newspaper.

  Cudlipp called Christiansen ‘the patron saint of urgency’.

  An editor’s job didn’t seem so much fun to me as the lives of Cameron and MacColl. Christiansen wrote despairingly about being the victim of a harrying proprietor who was forever on the telephone: ‘The telephone constantly rang. Wherever Beaverbrook went, the telephone followed.’

  When he cracked under the pressure, a Harley Street doctor injected Christiansen for 12 days with a preparation of strychnine, iron, and arsenic. He said this treatment restored his shattered confidence, but the remedy seemed drastic to me. He also died when he was 59. I decided as a teenager that I never wanted to work at close quarters with an overbearing proprietor. Not everything works out in life.

  Christiansen was a popular newspaper genius — circulation of the Daily Express reached 4 million under him — but coverage of his death exposed the everlasting rift between posh and popular newspaper cultures. His 1963 obituary in The Times was sniffy: ‘By one yardstick at least he was a successful editor; how good an editor he was is another matter.’ He defined for decades much of the style of popular newspapers — the sharpness of their writing, the style of their layouts and photo selection — but in those days, as now, some ‘heavy’ newspaper editors regarded themselves as the officer class, and their popular counterparts as members of the other ranks.

  All this reading I was doing mattered, but back at the office the objective was to be selected from among the copy boys to become a trainee reporter — a ‘cadet’.

  Running copy and buying coffee, cigarettes, and sandwiches was how you earned your pay. But no matter how good you were at that, it was not going to get you a cadetship. They were hard to get — 8 out of 10 copy boys would give up and look for other work. You had to find stories and get them into the newspaper. To get stories, you needed contacts. This was tricky for a new boy in town who knew no one. But the first lesson I taught myself was that everyone was a potential contact. My first was my dad.

  Dad had become the chef at the immigration hostel where we first lived, and came home one night complaining how hard he would be working the next few weeks cooking for hundreds of new immigrants heading for Adelaide aboard the SS Strathaird. It was the biggest single intake of migrants ever to arrive at the hostel.

  That was my first story — my first words in print. It was a 17-line single column brief, and it appeared on 7 September 1959. The headline said: ‘265 migrants due Friday’.

  Nothing compares to the first time you see in print words you have thought up yourself, knowing they will appear in tens of thousands of newspapers delivered to every corner of your small town. Thousands of people would read my words — in the pub, on the train going home, over their evening meals. This was powerful stuff. I was 15 years and 7 months old.

  Once you realise everyone has a story fit to print, especially if they live in a small town, it gets easy. A couple that had arrived from Britain on the same ship as us opened their own barbershop, and, unheard of in Adelaide in the 1950s, the wife was cutting men’s hair. My first picture story — ‘Mrs Gwen Urch adds a feminine touch to her very masculine trade’.

  What are those men doing on the big vacant lot at the end of our street? They turn out to be surveyors, happy to answer my casual questions. My first page-three top: ‘A new shopping centre, the biggest of its type in South Australia’.

  The surest story source was council meetings. The hard part was spending evenings with the droning burghers of Marion Council. But it yielded results: ‘Dogs kill 84 sheep’; ‘Kindergarten for Oaklands estate’; ‘Talks sought on level crossing’; ‘Fire sprinklers needed in schools’.

  I kept up a routine of books before bedtime, and tried for a minimum of two stories a week in the paper. I learned shorthand. In those days, the smallest tape recorder weighed 20 pounds and cost a fortune. You couldn’t complete your cadetship without a 120-word shorthand note, and I wanted to get an early start. I learned the version created in the nineteenth century by Sir Isaac Pitman. Even today, when I’m writing rapid notes, it creeps in. My sister Mal taught me to touch type on an Olympia portable she still had 50 years later.

  In November 1960, three men with uniformly grey hair sat side-by-side in the editor’s office of The News. Ron Boland, the new-ish editor, Jim Wilson, his deputy, and Murray James, the chief of staff, had to make a decision. Their grave-eyed gazes were fixed on me.

  Every year, they awarded cadetships to one of the 25 copy boys, and I was among the five candidates to be interviewed. I had joined the newspaper 17 months before, and was flattered, but not hopeful.

  Reporters who had been through this ordeal told me what to expect. The editors would need to be convinced I followed events and read the whole newspaper; they’d ask questions about the front-page lead on, say, Monday of last week. They’d want to know what the second editorial was yesterday, and the names and jobs of cabinet ministers. They’d spring odd foreign questions, too: who is the American secretary of state; who was the British prime minister before this one. And, inevitably, they’d ask me why I wanted to be
a journalist, and what I wanted to be doing 10 years from now.

  That’s about how it went. I answered the questions and left the room. The conclave began. The next morning brought judgement. The panel had decided, unusually, to create two additional cadetships. I’m sure my best friend Rex Jory, who started at The News within a few days of me, was frontrunner, and I was a close second. We were both 16 years old.

  I learned of this decision from Murray James, and it was one of the most bizarre encounters I ever had with a boss. James beckoned me through a big blue swinging door into his glass-walled corner office. He was a short, square, hurrying man, who was forever on his way somewhere else. His hair was wavy and grey, swept back from his forehead, and kept so firmly in place it looked like curves of cement.

  ‘Les. You’ve done well. Really well. The editor wants to make you a cadet.’

  It was a total and wonderful surprise. I could feel my heart pounding and my face flushing as I gathered myself to speak. But James had not finished. He was now looking down, studying the scribbles that covered the green blotting-pad on his desktop. ‘However, there is an issue,’ he said. ‘It’s your eye, son. You can’t be going out representing The News with that eye.’

  I stood there in dazed silence, wondering what plan he was about to announce for my intolerable eye.

  ‘To be a cadet, you need to get it fixed,’ he said. ‘Go to a doctor. Get it straightened. We’ll pay whatever it costs, and then everything will be good. Will you do that?’

  In the years since, I have retold this story many times, mainly to young colleagues and human resources directors, enjoying their outrage, listening to them outline the terrible consequence for any modern employer who would make such a demand. But life was different in 1960, especially for a 16-year-old who had left secondary modern school only 18 months before. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  James was still looking down at his blotting-pad, so I addressed the hard top of his head: ‘Yes, Mr James, I will go to the doctor and I will ask him to straighten my eye — and thank you very much for this opportunity.’

  I became a cadet journalist, but the operation to straighten my eye was a failure. For decades to come, my wilful wandering eye would stare blindly out at nothing. Still, we managed to cope with life together, until 2003 when a persuasive Manhattan doctor convinced me modern straightening procedures were almost certain to succeed — as they did.

  As for Murray James, he never mentioned the matter again, and I avoided at all times making eye contact with him.

  I was made editor of ‘Possum’s Pages’ in The Sunday Mail, the daily News’s sister. Possum’s Pages was a two-page spread for children, and I was now ‘Possum’. I was inundated each week with mail from hundreds of young readers. They sent letters, drawings, jokes, and puzzles, and I chose some to publish. It was a child’s section edited by a child.

  I shared space behind partition walls with two people. Helen Caterer was a permanently excited feature writer who seemed about to break into a sprint whenever she walked. Cecil de Boehme, the features editor, was my boss. He had one arm that did not work properly, and a stern manner. Everyone else called him Cec, but he was Mr de Boehme to me.

  As Possum, I had to do everything in the production of my pages. I had to write copy and headlines, choose and edit stories, draw layouts, and make everything fit on the page. I had learned to write brief stories, but knew nothing about anything else. Cecil de Boehme was my teacher, and I learned from him the rudiments of newspaper production: selecting type sizes, counting out headlines, scaling pictures, shaping a page on a layout sheet.

  I also learned the dialect of newspapers: that ems, ens, and picas were printer’s measures; routed blocks were photographs with the background removed; that nonpareil was tiny type; and that serif meant fonts with curves, and sans serif those without.

  I had to edit the weekly horoscope, which arrived by mail each week. The week it failed to turn up, I wrote it myself.

  This was my baptism into journalism, a 12-month hazing. I made terrible mistakes and suffered Mr de Boehme’s terrible anger.

  After Possum, I moved to the reporters’ room of the daily newspaper, which looked like a classroom but was permanently shrouded in a blue fog of cigarette smoke. Small wooden desks were arranged in three rows with hard, numbing chairs. The typewriters were cast-iron monsters, some dating back to before the First World War, indestructible Royals, Remingtons, Underwoods, Coronas, and Olympias. Unlike their fragile electronic successors, no technicians were needed to keep these beasts running. Manual typewriters are more romantic to remember than they ever were to use — the jamming keys, the inky-fingered task of changing ribbons, and the pain of retyping whole pages to correct or re-write. That was all fine when we didn’t know any better. They were hard on the fingers, too. The last time I played with my Lettera 22 — now nearly 60 years old — it was like driving a car without power steering.

  Newspapers in Australia inexplicably used military vocabulary to describe levels of seniority: trainee journalists were cadets, from first year to fourth; trained journalists were given ranks — from D grade through to A, with Super A for the most highly rated; the news — or city — editor was grandly titled chief of staff. In keeping with this military structure, desks were occupied according to rank. At the head, just outside the swinging door of the chief of staff’s office, was Ken May, political editor, who would go on to run Murdoch’s Australian company and become Sir Kenneth. Behind him, sat the chief reporter, Frank Shaw, and behind him, the best writer in the room, Brian Gill, known as Beagle. He was furious when the subs deleted his funny pay-off lines, especially on the occasion he wrote about a poodle breeder’s failed attempts at artificial insemination: ‘It all goes to show that the poodle prefers a doodle.’

  I occupied the middle-row desk at the back of the room. Each morning, having read at home every page of our rival, The Advertiser, I waited to be summoned by the chief of staff. A copy boy sitting in the corner of his office summoned us in order of seniority.

  Mine were beginner’s jobs: hunting for stories among passengers arriving on the Melbourne Express; covering the wool auctions; sitting for hours in courtrooms, hoping for a headline; shadowing the chief crime reporter — specialist reporters were called roundsmen — and learning which violent deaths matter to newspapers; there was almost no interest in suicides.

  Stories spilled onto the platform when the Melbourne Express arrived each day at 9am. In 1960, this was how people came to town. The local airport was tiny and passenger jets so new that people were excited when they flew low and loud over the city. Deafening potential customers was a marketing tactic.

  The Melbourne Express came from the outside world bringing fame, glamour, and drama. Public relations were primitive then. To find out which actors, singers, and politicians were on board, you spoke to the guards. For human interest, you stood and watched, and had to be willing to interrupt emotional reunions. These reunions were often routine, but not always. Sometimes people arrived dressed differently, speaking a foreign language, and were held in long, weeping embraces. When that happened it was likely to be your story for the day. Even 25 years after the war, ‘New Australian’ immigrants struggled to bring together families it had divided. It was in 1960 that Dad’s deputy chef finally rescued his wife from behind the Iron Curtain in Ukraine. It was a great story for me when she arrived on the Melbourne Express.

  —

  I was working among a great cavalcade of characters, unlike any I had known — editors and reporters a world apart from my Bootle uncles and my dad’s army mates. There were few women in those days, and the most senior was ‘editress’ of the social pages.

  You cannot typecast a newsman. Never trust any effort to do so. They can be loud, as well as timid; mighty drinkers, or tee-totallers; lyrical writers, or great reporters with limited vocabularies; scrupulously principled, or shady chancers. Editors
can be calm and measured, or rampaging bullies. It would be good to say the calm version got better results, but there is no pattern; brutal genius can provoke great work.

  Murray Hedgcock was a tee-totaller and a cricket obsessive, a Methodist who never swore or even raised his voice. His sense of humour was dry and sharp, but his response to the most uproarious moment was limited to a mild smile. Hedgcock was features editor, and all that agitated him was sloppy copy. He was the office grammar despot; a tyrant in the face of redundant words, passive sentences, split infinitives, wayward apostrophes, and the overuse of adverbs and adjectives. Hedgcock taught me to take care with my copy, especially when I knew he would be editing. Even now, with him long retired and in his eighties, I still read and re-read emails to him before hitting ‘send’.

  Jeff Medwell was the editor of 5DN radio news, and taught me to write the spoken word. This is a special skill, which basically inverts the sequence of facts. In a newspaper, a story would begin: ‘Six people died in a head-on collision on North Terrace today.’ For radio you would write: ‘Two cars collided head-on in North Terrace today, killing six people.’ In radio, you delay the main information, first using the fact of the crash to gain the listener’s attention.

  Medwell was not a tee-totaller. His great feat was to return from drinking copious lunchtime pints and still produce flawless copy. I learned a lot from Jeff Medwell, but never matched his performance when drunk in charge of a typewriter.

  Ted Smith was a gentle feature writer with a round, owlish face and a wry laugh. He was the same age as my parents, but a wonderful drinking companion, full of wit and tales. Off duty, he produced a stream of short stories and pacy novels with titles like A Lively Form of Death, Northward the Coast, and The Killers of Karawala. He used a different name to write his fiction — Edward Lindall — that was derived from the names of his children. When I started writing features, I would show them to Ted Smith. I was amazed how quickly he saw the holes in them. He had brisk advice about writing: ‘Just sit at your typewriter and never retreat.’