The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  I had seen a little of London as a child. We had passed through after disembarking from troop ships at Southampton, but we always headed straight to Euston station for the connecting train to Liverpool. We might have waited hours to catch the Liverpool train, but Mum thought we were safer waiting on the hard seats at Euston, and that is always what we did.

  Australians in London carved out their own ghettos and dominated certain pubs. Before high commissions and embassies became fortresses against terrorism, the vast ground-floor of Australia House in Aldwych was open to anyone, and was a hangout for young visitors. Scores of newspapers from home were kept on file. The streets outside were a marketplace where young Australians back from a European tour would park their camper vans with ‘For Sale’ signs in the window, ready for new arrivals to make the trip — sleeping bags and Primus stoves included. Parking rules were more relaxed then.

  The Surrey, a pub down the hill towards the river, was an Australian-occupied zone. So was Earl’s Court, then a cheap and rowdy world of shabby bedsits with perhaps London’s highest ratio of gas rings per head of population. So many Australians arrived there in the 1960s it was nicknamed ‘Kangaroo Valley’. There were no livelier pubs or noisier neighbours. Rising property prices would later civilise Earl’s Court, and make it duller, as the Australians scattered.

  Rex and I stayed with Mike Quirk and a group of other Australians and Canadians. The tough street in Willesden where they lived was badly lit, and the flat itself had only a one-bar electric fire in the tiny living room. There was a sofa and a chair. We slept on the sloping floor. The tiny kitchen’s tabletop was an old door resting on a bathtub. There was no running hot water.

  But here I was in the big city, excited and broke apart from the sacrosanct return fare in the bank back in Adelaide, and £50 cash. I needed a job.

  I first set foot in Fleet Street when Rex and I went job hunting without appointments. We were getting desperate for work, and thought it was a bold, Australian thing to do — I wasn’t really Australian, but my British passport certified me as an ‘Australian Resident’. We walked up the dusty stairway circling the brass cage of an elevator shaft in 10 Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street, across from the News of the World, the newspaper Mum caught me reading when I was five years old.

  All along one side of the street, tightly parked lorries were piled with huge reels of newsprint. The reels were being slung with thick rope and lifted by cranes off the lorries and into a building. People walked nonchalantly along the pavement beneath their crushing weight.

  No one was expecting us at the office of British United Press. It was the British wing of United Press International, the US news agency that had employed famous journalists such as Walter Cronkite, Harrison Salisbury, and Martha Gellhorn. On the third floor, we stood at a high wooden counter, and banged on a rusty desk bell. Rex and I wore suits and ties; our jackets buttoned very high, our ties very thin, according to the fashion of the day. Behind the counter were a horseshoe of desks and a battery of black teleprinters. It was a small room and the teleprinters filled it with their rattling and ringing. No one sitting at the desks heard us until we began shouting.

  A tall man in a white shirt with pencils in the breast pocket came towards us. He was slim apart from the belly pressing against his belt. His hair was combed close to his head on each side of a dead straight parting. It was shiny and pure black, but he was not young.

  ‘We are journalists from Adelaide in South Australia looking for work,’ Rex said.

  Frank H. Fisher, the editor of British United Press, looked at us in fierce silence. I felt an urge to flee, but Rex was closer to the exit and in my way. He was also less timid.

  ‘Even a few shifts would be good,’ he said.

  ‘Where are your CVs?’

  Fisher took them and read quickly, for less than a minute.

  ‘Come back at ten tomorrow morning and we can talk,’ he said.

  We left feeling exhilarated and brave, and went across the street to The Tipperary pub to settle our nerves and drink alongside actual Fleet Street journalists.

  Next day, Frank Fisher gave us each a handful of cables from UPI correspondents. ‘Choose two stories from them and edit them for transmission,’ he said. ‘No more than five hundred words a story. You’ve got an hour.’

  This is when I discovered ‘cable-ese’ — a long-dead prose form dating to the days when distant correspondents filed stories by telegram. Every word in a cable cost money, and cable-ese is a compressed, money-saving dialect. Instead of writing ‘does not know’, a cable would say ’unknows’. If something was not wanted, it was ‘unwanted’. If a correspondent was heading to Saigon, he was ‘Saigonwards’. If there were no news on American casualties in a particular conflict, but the correspondent would send a story as soon as possible, his cable would say — ‘unnews khe sanh casualties will file soonest’.

  This lost language created memorable lines. A UPI correspondent, quitting in frustration, wired his office: ‘upstick job asswards’. Evelyn Waugh, when he was a journalist, was cabled in Ethiopia about a nurse said to have died in an Italian air raid: ‘require earliest name life story photograph american nurse upblown’. Discovering the story wasn’t true, Waugh replied, ‘nurse unupblown’. One journalist was fond of signing off memos sardonically, ‘ellenkay’ — love and kisses.

  These cables were sometimes riddles. Acronyms saved words, and politicians would often be referred to by job title only.

  Fisher had told us not to refer to the clippings library for information — this was to be a test of how we wrote and how much we knew. The first cable I looked at said: ‘exlagos stop pm nairobiwards prooau talks president’. I had to make a coherent intro from these words. My throat dried.

  exlagos — Fine, the capital of Nigeria. That’s the dateline.

  PM — Prime minister, obviously.

  nairobiwards — He’s heading to the capital of Kenya.

  prooau talks — He was going for talks about the OAU. That, I was pretty sure, was the Organisation of African Unity.

  president — Kenya’s president was Jomo Kenyatta.

  All good, except who was the prime minister of Nigeria? I had no idea, so I skipped to another story. I passed my test, and in June 1965 became a desk editor at British United Press. I also discovered, and never forgot, the lyrical name of the Nigerian prime minister at the time: Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

  Within a few weeks, I learned other new and exotic names: Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Mobutu Sese Seko, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Moïse Tshombe, Souvanna Phouma, Hastings Banda. I discovered countries and tyrannies I had never heard of — places boiling with revolution, civil war, martial law, insurgencies, or riven with apartheid. The main thing I learned was how little I knew.

  The important break for me was that British United Press was tiny and strapped for cash. Within two months, at the age of 21, having just discovered a country called Upper Volta, I was in total charge for 10 hours a day of the BUP news feed to national and provincial newspapers all over the country. I’m not sure paying customers were well served by my good fortune, but it was great for me.

  I worked from 10pm to 8am four days a week, including weekends. While I was wrestling with a long read on the Mekong Delta, my happy Aussie friends would phone me with drunken accounts of their Earl’s Court parties. But midnight in London was late afternoon in California, and the day was just beginning across Asia. In Vietnam, where American escalation had begun after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, terrible events were unfolding. While the rest of Britain slept or caroused, I was happily lost down a black hole of lonely nights and no social life, learning about the world, buried in a mountain of foreign cables, and guided by the big atlas I kept hidden in a drawer until I was alone.

  Working in a small office is the best thing a young journalist can do; it forces you to learn at the deep end. This did n
ot mean I was unsupervised. The ever-looming Fisher marked my overnight work — literally. His first daily task was to sit with the overnight file and read it, page-by-page, armed with a thick pencil and a constant frown. Fisher was looking for factual mistakes and clumsy sentences, but his fetish was the purging of all American terms before copy went on the British wire. This was a challenge, since all but a few correspondents were Americans writing for their home audience. Fisher was bad company when he was displeased, and nothing angered him more than Americanisms. No one seems sure who first said that the Americans and British were two peoples divided by a common language, but it could easily have been Fisher.

  He gave a loud grunt at every mistake, pressing a heavy black circle around it with his pencil. Sometimes he would type a stern note, put a copy on every desk, and pin the original to the notice board.

  Some translations were easy. ‘Fanny’ refers to the human backside in America, but definitely does not in Britain. We knew that labor needed a u and that center should be centre, and defense defence. But others were subtler, and a small misunderstanding could lead to a big mistake. When American negotiators want to table an issue, they mean put it aside. When the British say it, they mean they want to discuss it, often urgently.

  There were dozens of other traps: it was lorry in Britain — not truck; tin — not can; pram — not baby carriage; hotel porter — not bellhop; burgled — not burglarized; cheque — not check; lift — not elevator; rubbish — not garbage or trash; spring onion — not scallion; launderette — not laundromat; maths — not math; city centre — not downtown; anti-clockwise — not counterclockwise.

  This crash course in language and world affairs proved a great education, but did not pay well. Fisher was a good teacher, but he was also cheap, with a tight budget to manage. His first pay offer before I joined didn’t even cover my share of the rent for the bedsit in Swiss Cottage that Rex and I had found. When he told me to take it or leave it, I told him I couldn’t afford to work for him, that I was a member of the National Union of Journalists, and his offer was lower than the union minimum. I accepted his increased offer, although it was still beneath the NUJ minimum. Fisher told me the minimum only applied to national newspaper journalists who had reached the grand old age of 24.

  After a while, when I was more confident and learning fewer new things, the BUP job began to feel like solitary confinement. I was reading and writing about the world’s turmoil, while sealed away from it in my ticker-tape tomb, released each morning to head home to bed, against the rush-hour tide.

  The excitements of London were taking place in my absence. After almost a year of lonely learning, I began writing to national newspapers. I wrote to dailies and Sundays, tabloids and broadsheets, and papered the wall next to my bed with their curt rejections. At first, I pinned them up in defiance, but took them down when there were so many they became discouraging.

  I got a couple of interviews. John Grant, the brusque Home Editor of The Times, spent 30 minutes with me, and Jack Crawley at the Daily Mail, who liked to conduct his job interviews over drinks, took me upstairs at The Harrow in Whitefriars Street. I was told it was traditional for the interviewee to buy Crawley his drinks. Both told me I was too young and inexperienced, and needed to learn the ropes at a local paper somewhere in Britain before attempting the London big time. They refused to count The News in Adelaide.

  I wrote my final letter to the runt of Fleet Street, a broadsheet with dwindling sales and a doubtful future. It was called The Sun. The paper was bottom of my list, and I lied in my application letter and said I was 24 instead of 22. This was a great age, I decided, and quite old enough for a job in Fleet Street. It would also qualify me for the NUJ minimum wage.

  Within a week Barrie Harding, news editor of The Sun, had invited me to an interview.

  CHAPTER 10

  Hired. Fired. Hired

  The Sun had its offices in Covent Garden long before it became fashionably famous for its restaurants and boutique stores. For 300 years it had been London’s wholesale garden market. Covent Garden smelt country fresh early in the day, but later, on a hot afternoon, it was pungent with rotting fruit and vegetables littering its lanes.

  Covent Garden overlapped with London’s theatre district. The Royal Opera House was at its heart, and Drury Lane along its edge. It was a nocturnal world, an all-night intersection of bohemian theatre people, flat-capped garden porters, and lingering newspaper workers. This odd mix crowded into the all-night cafes, and pubs opened at 5am when most of the garden workers finished their shifts.

  When I arrived one mid-morning in July 1966 for my meeting with Barrie Harding, the working day was winding down. The fruit and vegetable stalls were mostly empty. Lorries had driven off with their purchases to distribute them among shops and supermarkets, and the flower ladies were making their late daily visits in search of bargains to take back to their street stands.

  Barrie Harding was blond and softly plump, and he laughed in explosive and disconcerting bursts. I told him about my work at The News in Adelaide.

  ‘Ha,’ he laughed. ‘I don’t know much about Australian newspapers.’

  I told him of my experience at BUP.

  ‘Ha. Working at an agency is very different to newspapers.’

  I could tell my interview was not progressing well, but then he surprised me.

  ‘We have a vacancy for a holiday relief reporter. It will last for six months or so. I can’t guarantee anything full time, but you will have to leave your BUP job.’

  ‘That will be absolutely no problem,’ I said calmly. On the street outside, I jumped in the air, and the fruit and veg men looked at me oddly. I had a job on Fleet Street.

  The Sun then was an unglamorous poor cousin of the mighty Daily Mirror. It struggled with a sale below 1 million while the Mirror, with sales above 5 million, was the country’s biggest daily. The Sun was an experiment by the Mirror’s owners, the International Publishing Corporation, to produce a modern newspaper for Britain’s growing middle-class. It was born out of the Daily Herald, a paper with its roots in the trade union movement. In the 1930s it became the country’s biggest daily, but its circulation was eaten away by the intense post-war competition. The plan was to make The Sun subtly upscale, and it was given a dry-witted, whimsical style. This approach succeeded in setting The Sun apart from other newspapers; the trouble was it also set it apart from readers.

  The Sun was the most intense place I had worked. Everyone was so sure of themselves, so competitive and combative, and so impatient, that I longed for the quiet, sealed loneliness of BUP. Most of the editorial staff worked in the so-called Big Room. At one end, the sub-editors sat bowed and silent, wielding their pens. At our end, it was raucous. Reporters sat in rows of dark metal desks. The old hands were expansive and noisy, and relaxed in an exaggerated way, putting their feet up on the desks, flicking cigarette ash from their shirts. They debated loudly who had come back from lunch the drunkest, and told one another crude stories and jokes. They went quiet only when cursing the bosses who sat across the room.

  Few of the heavy black telephones had dials, and there weren’t enough typewriters for everyone, or even desks. We were hot-desking before anyone had thought of the term. This created a pecking order. If Sid Williams, the chief reporter, needed the typewriter I was using, he would snatch it mid-sentence from my desk. ‘Sorry, old boy, I have work to do.’

  Reporters congregated in two places during working hours: in the newsroom, or across the street in the Cross Keys. It was debatable where we spent more time. The Keys was a tiny pub, whose narrow front was a thicket of flowers and shrubbery with granite columns beneath two winged and naked cherubs holding huge, crossed keys. This was a version of the papal seal displaying the keys of heaven; certainly arrivals looked happy as they walked through its gates.

  Every day, from 1pm until closing time at 3pm — or a bit longer if Ann, the landlad
y, was in a good mood — we crowded into the Cross Keys. We might have received our assignments before lunch, but unless they required us to leave the neighbourhood, everyone walked over to the Keys. At 3.30pm we would be back at our desks to make a few more phone calls. When the pub reopened at 5.30pm there was time for a quick pint, then back to the office to file by 7pm or so.

  There were a lot of drunks among us, and a few geniuses. Sometimes both qualities were present in one person. The film critic Ann Pacey, wild and profane in the pub, would return to the office after lunch to write flawless pieces on the morning screening she had seen. Jon Akass was my hard-living hero, a debauched Ben Franklin, with long, shaggy hair receding at the front. I wanted to be him right down to the drinker’s paunch.

  Akass travelled the world, drinking and smoking, and producing colourfully descriptive copy from US presidential elections, African wars, and Iron Curtain countries. Akass was candid when drunk; his career faltered, but recovered, when he called the editor a ‘swivel-headed cunt’. He found writing a torture; on bad days, he would fill a room with cigarette smoke and empty a half-bottle of Scotch. This didn’t make him unique. Harry Arnold was short and slight, and baffled everyone with his capacity for accommodating beer.

  Akass and Arnold were at the two ends of the spectrum of newspaper writers. Akass was a ‘creative’, and studied in his shambly untidiness. Arnold was a straight newsman, presenting powerful stories in brisk, unadorned prose. Regular reporters were required to wear suits and ties, and Arnold bought his suits from Savile Row. He was fastidious about his appearance, and it was a bad day for him when he arrived at work with his usual shining shoes — one, however, being black, and the other brown. He dealt well with his embarrassment, announcing: ‘I have another pair at home exactly the same.’

  Arnold was peerless at writing hard news and fiction. The fiction was confined to his dazzling expense claims, which possibly explained his Savile Row suits. Expenses were a grey area then. The first stern words I received at The Sun were in a lecture from the newsdesk on the importance of claiming expenses every week: ‘At least ten quid, more if you actually spend anything.’ This was a tax-free tenner on top of my weekly salary of £26 10s, making me rich.