by Gwen Russell
But it was school that was causing the real problem now. Despite the success of the business, Jeremy’s parents were having to make a considerable financial sacrifice to send him to the school, something the young Clarkson was well aware of, and yet that did nothing to modify his behaviour. He was difficult in the extreme: constantly challenging the masters, breaking rules, pushing boundaries and seeing what he could get away with. It was perfect training for being a journalist, but at the time his behaviour caused numerous problems. He was awkward, truculent and a nightmare for the masters to have to deal with. And he knew it, too.
He did, however, try to mollify his parents by lurking outside the school to ambush them and provide his own explanation for the latest crisis when they were summoned to see the head. ‘He always had the gift of the gab,’ said mum Shirley. ‘We used to know how much trouble he was in by how far he was beyond the school gates when we came driving in to see the headmaster yet again. If he was a couple of miles out, it was because he needed quite a lot of time to convince us it was all a horrible misunderstanding.’
At the time he was clearly a challenging pupil. Given the wisdom that years bestow, however, Clarkson did express regret at the way he behaved. ‘Mum and Dad must have worked every hour God sent them to get me to Repton,’ he said. ‘And how did I repay them? I fooled around for five years and got expelled [he was, in fact, asked to leave]. They were bloody livid. And they had every right to be. Don’t get me wrong: I knew I was upsetting them, but when you’re at boarding school, it’s very much out of sight is out of mind. It was only when they came to pick me up at the end of term that the sheer scale of what I was doing to their lives really hit me.’
But back then this was not enough to make him calm down. Clarkson was a rebel, and a conscious one at that. ‘At school, there are two ways of getting noticed,’ he recalled on another occasion. ‘One is to be good at sport, which was out of the question because I was total rubbish at football. The other way is by being Jack the Lad. So I set my stall out. I didn’t like beer, but I damn well had to drink it. I had my first cigarette on the moors when we were forced to play soldiers.’ It was clear that his actions were ultimately going to bring him into complete conflict with the school, and they did … Clarkson left in somewhat ignominious circumstances a few years later.
‘It was a boarding school, so we weren’t supposed to go out without permission,’ he continued. ‘But I used to slide out to see Peter Gabriel and David Bowie at the Derby Assembly Rooms. It was just a collection of minor indiscretions, but it was a public school and you don’t need to do that much to annoy them. Had I been at a high school back home in Doncaster, I’d have needed to rape the headmaster’s wife and burn the place down to get thrown out.’ But, according to Clarkson, at Repton the rules were sacrosanct.
His mother had a slightly different take on events. ‘It got to the point where I was being called up to the school every two weeks,’ she said. ‘The headmaster would say, “Now Mrs Clarkson, has Jeremy even told you what he’s done this time?” But he was never into the bad stuff. He never stole things, he never committed a crime; he just spent five years needling the staff and they eventually told me they couldn’t put up with it anymore. He was always the one creeping out to have a fag or breaking wind in the two-minute silence. I suppose some kids are like that. You love them dearly, but they’re a nuisance.’
Amid all the rebellious behaviour, though, a liking for cars had already taken hold. Jeremy was beginning to discover that he felt very comfortable behind a steering wheel and was keen to develop his new skills as often as he could, something that was encouraged by his much-loved grandfather. And his family’s comfortable circumstances were in evidence there, too: it has become part of the Clarkson legend that in 1977 he passed his driving test, at the wheel of his grandfather’s ‘R’ type Bentley.
‘I passed my test first time in 1977,’ Clarkson proudly recalled. ‘I was so arrogant I even took a pair of scissors along to cut the L-plates off – I saw it as a formality. My first car was a Ford Cortina 1600 E. It was a cool car. It had a wooden dashboard, a picture of Debbie Harry in the middle of the steering wheel and fur on the insides of the doors. I managed to stop short of furry dice; God knows how, because I don’t think I suffered from much in the way of taste in those days.’
But his truculent attitude certainly didn’t make him any friends among the schoolmasters, and so, perhaps inevitably, Jeremy ultimately left Repton shortly before he was to take his English and History A-levels – something that, in later years, did his reputation no harm at all. Accusations that he’s really a posh ex-public schoolboy can always be refuted by the fact that he was, after all, turfed out. It adds to the rebellious reputation and is something that he thoroughly enjoys.
But he did express some regret much later. ‘My parents were livid,’ he said. ‘All that money wasted. It was a hideous time and I don’t blame them. There were lots of warnings and my mother would come down and plead for me. I was difficult, disruptive, impatient, cynical and kept asking, “Why?”’
What finally pushed the masters into letting Jeremy go came about when he attempted to sneak off from games and head to the local girls’ school. ‘I refused to play cricket – it was dull,’ he protested. ‘There are better things to do when you’re seventeen than standing in front of a great yob who’s hurling a rock at you, interspersed with enormous periods of standing around suffering hayfever.
‘So I thought, “That’s it. I’ll go to see the birds at Abbots Bromley.” It was 7 miles, 300 yards 2 feet and 4 inches away, to be exact. I know because I traced that route a fair few times. But I wasn’t exactly shinning up the drainpipes when I got there. There were twelve day girls at Repton and one of them was my girlfriend, so there was a limit to what I got up to. Still, girls were certainly more interesting than study any day.’
In actual fact this had been brewing for some time. His whole non-conformist approach to life meant that he found it almost impossible to settle down and play by the rules, which meant that, in the atmosphere of a boys’ public school, something was bound to give. And that something was the teachers’ patience.
‘It was for a whole series of misdemeanours,’ Jeremy later said of the school’s decision to wave goodbye to him, though Repton have never accepted that he was expelled. ‘[It was] best summed up by the headmaster when he said, “If you’d come up to me on the first day and punched me in the face, I’d have expelled you immediately. And if you’d come up and gone like this” – [Jeremy made a poke in the arm] – “I’d have been mildly irritated. But the thing is, you’ve been doing that [sharp poke] and that [sharper poke] and that [very sharp poke] for five years. Now get out!” There was no one big thing. I’d worked my way through the rule book, breaking them one by one, but there was no calamitous moment when I was caught in flagrante with the chaplain’s daughter. Mostly it was not being there. I was more interested in the local girls’ school. “Shall I do my history prep, or shall I go and see Sally Ann?”’
To say that Jeremy’s parents were not pleased is to understate the obvious. They were absolutely, utterly incandescent with rage. ‘My parents were pretty livid with me,’ he recalled. ‘They reckoned it was a complete waste of money sending me there. They said they’d worked their fingers to the bone to do it and I was just not taking it seriously. They never forgave me until I was twenty. On the other hand, my sister Joanna was very good at school. She’s got lots of qualifications and is now a solicitor. I must have been the black sheep.’ He was not entirely blasé about the turn of events, however – ‘I was utterly devastated,’ he said in later years.
This was certainly not what his parents wanted. Having made such a huge effort to get him into the right school, their son’s departure was a blow. Nor did Jeremy himself have any idea what to do next. Any thoughts of being Alan Whicker, an astronaut or the King appeared to have faded, and he had no clear idea what he wanted to do. He had never been particularly set on any rea
listic career as he was growing up and now, in his late teens, he remained unsure of what to do next. Going to university was out of the question: his early exit from his alma mater had ensured that – not that Clarkson ever wanted to go to university anyway. What he had to do was to find a job.
But no obvious career path presented itself. Jeremy was to spend a little time working in the family business, but he wasn’t ready to do so yet and, what’s more, it wasn’t even an option. Nor was he ready to leave Doncaster: that, too, was still several years away. And so, with the family fretting about what their eldest born and only son would do, it fell to the person to whom Jeremy had looked up for so many years to provide an answer. His grandfather had connections all over the part of the country in which the family lived, and one of these connections was to prove extremely useful. And so, to the surprise of everyone, not least Clarkson himself, the first job of his illustrious career loomed up on the horizon. Jeremy Clarkson was to become a journalist – or, to put it another way, a hack.
CHAPTER 2
THE RISE OF A LAD
Jeremy Clarkson has been so famous for so long that it is actually quite hard to associate him with humble beginnings. But that, as far as his career was concerned, is exactly how he started out. As a teenager who had failed to finish school and who had no qualifications, it didn’t exactly appear as if life was brimming over with opportunities, something Jeremy himself and his parents were all too aware of. With all that expensive schooling having gone to waste, even the indomitable Clarkson was experiencing moments of self-doubt … and his parents continued to make their displeasure extremely clear. Back then, it seemed as if Clarkson was going nowhere fast.
Nor were there any obvious opportunities awaiting him. While he was still at school Clarkson had no clear idea of what he wanted to do as a career; after his sudden departure, things were still no more obvious. There was a real danger of him drifting along if he didn’t manage to find some sort of job – although, saying that, his parents were still so angry with him that they probably wouldn’t have allowed that to happen. For a teenager who had been used to breaking the rules and flouting authority, as the reality of his situation set in, Clarkson was suffering a very nasty wake-up call.
Indeed, this period of his life was an unsatisfactory one. His younger sister Joanne was the white sheep of the family: working hard for the future, being a model pupil and doing everything Jeremy hadn’t done. The man – or rather, teenager – himself, meanwhile, just didn’t have a clue what to do. At this stage in his life, had anyone said that one day Jeremy would become one of this country’s most famous faces on television, no one would have believed it. He just seemed to be another teenager with an attitude problem – a reminder, in some ways, of the James Dean character who, when asked what he was rebelling against, replied, ‘Whaddya got?’
But something had to be done and a combination of family connections, well-meaning advice and the need to bring in some income – Clarkson’s parents were in no mood to subsidise their errant son, although he was still living at home – meant that a decision had to be made, and fast. And so the job in journalism began. It was certainly not something Jeremy had considered when he was growing up: as with so many careers that turn out to be extremely successful, he wandered into it almost by chance. He wandered out of it again, as well, a few years later. It seemed as though his early brush with the profession would not last.
But, back then in the late 1970s, he was prepared to give journalism a go. The Rotherham Advertiser was looking for a trainee, Clarkson needed a job and so there it was. And his family history helped there, too. Many years previously, Jeremy’s grandfather had delivered the editor’s baby during an air raid in the Second World War. The editor was clearly well disposed to the Clarkson family and Jeremy was taken on in his first proper job. And, however hard he may have found it to settle in, at least he wasn’t office-bound – indeed, he never has been, at any stage of his career. His role required him to spend a lot of time out and about in the local community and it did not restrict him to a nine-to-five routine. He certainly didn’t realise it back then, but Jeremy Clarkson, the former public schoolboy, had landed on his feet.
As it happened, he couldn’t have made a better career choice. The best training for a journalist – something that Jeremy still is, albeit one in a different stratosphere – is a small, local paper, where junior staff are taught the rudiments of the trade. They have to learn how to write terse, readable prose and, as anyone who has worked on a local paper will tell you, if you can make a flower show sound exciting, you can write about just about anything with fluency and skill. Forget driving some of the fastest and most exciting cars in the world: Clarkson learned the hard way how to turn very little into a great deal; it is a skill that has stood him in immeasurably good stead as the years have gone by.
Then there are the fundamental principles of how to construct a story: the pyramid principle. This means that all the most crucial information must be contained at the top of the pyramid, within the first three sentences, and that the less important information must be added in as the pyramid widens out. The idea is that the pyramid shape can be sliced sideways from the bottom without harming the construction of the story. Look at anything Clarkson does today, from his newspaper columns to his onscreen reports, and you will see these techniques still apply. He might be utterly individual in what he says and he has indeed developed a unique style of his own, but his way of reporting is still exactly the same as any properly trained hack.
Indeed, so well did he come to learn his trade that it might even be said that being turfed out of Repton had been a blessing in disguise. Had he gone to university (which was unlikely, given how opposed Clarkson was to being an academic teen) or had he even just started work on leaving school in the more conventional way, he might well have embarked on a more mainstream job and never found his true metier. Adversity often brings out the best in a person and, by having to accept a job because there was nothing else on offer, Clarkson inadvertently found himself ‘choosing’ to do exactly the right thing.
Not that he either realised or appreciated it back then. Jeremy had never planned to become a journalist and to begin with, he didn’t think it was much cop. Much later, when asked if he’d decided to become a motoring journalist, he replied, ‘No, it never occurred to me until I was expelled or, rather, took voluntary redundancy from school, before my A-levels, for spending too much time at the local girls’ school and not doing any work. Then a chap in the village said there was only one profession for those who’d been expelled – journalism – so I got a job on that august organ, the Rotherham Organiser.’
Of course, the chap in the village may have been a good deal cannier than he was letting on. The best journalists are iconoclasts: they question everything, never let a story alone until they have got to the bottom of it and refuse point blank to believe any fact at all simply because someone told them so. Truculence and iconoclasm make for the best journalists … and Jeremy had plenty of both. In fact, if you put together a list of the qualities journalists need to get on and compare them with a list of Clarkson’s character traits, you would have a near-perfect match. He was made for the profession, and it was created for him.
However, despite the fact that in later years he was to become famous for his ability to communicate, he is adamant that this early foray into reporting wasn’t a great success. He was not yet writing about cars and, for a young man keen to make his way in the world, the work he was doing often seemed trivial and dull. ‘I was a crap reporter,’ he said. ‘The worst time was when I got slung out of an inquest for laughing at the evidence, which wasn’t funny.’ But, although he didn’t realise it at the time, he was honing the skills that would one day stand him in such good stead. As for the unfortunate laughing incident, it proved that Clarkson had a very irreverent streak running through him which was one day going to mark him out as one of the strongest personalities on television.
It has som
etimes been suggested that this period on the paper was only a very brief part of the young Clarkson’s life but, in actual fact, he stuck it out for some time. Three years of training ensued, interspersed with block-release courses at a college in Sheffield. In retrospect, these three years can really be seen as the foundation of his career; they were also years in which Clarkson displayed a certain tenacity, a quality for which he is not always given credit. He gave it a very good shot, continued to ply his trade and learned very quickly as he went on, but he wasn’t happy. He was unable to settle into the role and felt he had taken a wrong turn.
Although local newspapers cannot be bettered when it comes to learning the trade of a journalist, they are not, by their very nature, exciting places to work. This was not, after all, Bright Lights, Big City: it was small-town reporting, with a great deal of emphasis on court reporting and local events that would never have made the wider news. Increasingly, Clarkson wanted to be out there, mixing with the best of them, rubbing shoulders with other young people with great careers ahead of them. Instead, he was stuck in a small, local news-gathering organisation: it was not where he saw himself for the next forty years.
He was also still more of a teenager than a grown-up man. The fact that he continued to live at home meant that he had yet to break free and establish himself as an individual: it is hard to be your own man when you’re still under the thumb of your parents. He needed to break away from his familiar surroundings, to set himself a whole new list of challenges and begin to look further afield than his home town. Almost everyone has to make this break sooner or later and as long as Clarkson continued to stick with the familiar rather than getting out there in the big wide world, he would never achieve any of his real aims.