Reporters in the 1950s lacked mechanical means to record what was said in an interview. The only way to validate a quotation was to produce shorthand notes. Before turning up for work in Fleet Street, I enrolled for evening classes at the Pitman Shorthand school in Wimbledon. The well-attended college was in a red-brick Victorian Gothic building in unsmart lower Wimbledon. Our grey teacher was a dedicated Pitman pietist. Having taught the Method for many years, she still gloried in the codified deftness with which whole syllables could be collapsed into a single stroke, light or heavy, up above or below or along the line on the page. She talked, with apostolic zeal, of the beautiful symbols and inescapable speeds that a true initiate could achieve. No accelerating speaker could ever get away from a fully armed, 200-words-a-minute Pitman graduate.
We sat at scholarly desks in a classroom. The hieroglyphs were chalked, in all their loopy elegance, on a wide blackboard. The quick clatter of trainee typists came from an adjacent room. I should have been wise to acquire their skill, but the girls (90 per cent of the tiros were female) sounded dauntingly fast as they translated the teacher’s dictation onto keyboards masked, by a wooden panel, from visual inspection. The school brochure promised that a Pitman secretary could produce a page of flawless text in pitch darkness. I have never taught myself to type with more than three or four fingers; two usually suffice. Nor did I assimilate a full range of calligraphic elegance from the shorthand course. However, I did leave with enough of the curves and straights of the now archaic notation to be equipped to play the part of the Beaver’s Johnny-on-the-spot.
Alan ‘Brocky’ Brockbank was a tall, sandy-haired balding man in his early fifties. In the war he had worked his way up from the lower deck to become a lieutenant-commander in the ‘wavy navy’ (the RNVR). With his notepad braced open at the due page by two rubber bands, he transcribed and composed his copy at speed, in 2B pencil, onto sheets of foolscap, no more than nine lines on a page, four or five words on a line. The corrected version was hammered out, double-spaced, on a heavy Royal Sovereign. A copy-boy then passed it to Bernard Drew, the garter-sleeved chief sub. He sat, scissor-fingered, at a long table in the middle of the wide, low-ceilinged newsroom.
The one thing reporters dreaded was that Bernard should scan their copy, look at the low, green ceiling, and then impale it on one of the two spikes in the centre of the table. If the piece survived to be allotted to a sub, his business was to eliminate symptoms of individual style. Even if its author merited a byline, as Brocky sometimes did, every text had to be trimmed in the house style so that it spoke in the accents only of the paper and of its proprietor.
The subs were the Beaver’s military police. Guy Ramsey told me how Randolph Churchill, who wrote a column for the Evening Standard, had come into the office one day, loaded with a liquid lunch at White’s, and abused one of the secretaries for making a mess of his copy. When she was reduced to tears, one of the subs turned to Randolph and said, in his oikish treble, ‘Know your trouble, Churchill? Your name begins with C, H in Who’s Who and S, H in what’s what.’
The core staff of the Sunday Express was composed of men (there were no females in the newsroom) of a kind I had never met before. In 1950, popular journalism was an activity for artisans, rarely for graduates, never for first-class minds. Brocky and Bernard Harris, the sandy, blue-eyed, pipe-smoking chief feature writer, supplied most of the copy that bulked out the dummy edition of the paper, which grew fatter as the week progressed. Many-hatted in his roles as diplomatic correspondent, industrial correspondent, naval correspondent or Sunday Express reporters (the plural suggested that the Beaver had unlimited, ubiquitous resources), Brocky rarely stayed long in the office. He had no use for cyclostyled hand-outs from ministries or advertisers.
We were regularly on our way by taxi to confront politicians or businessmen. While other journalists waited in the proper place for the man of the moment, Brocky found his way to the back door and whoever might be coming out of it. Few escaped his mild, prehensile greeting, ‘Oh, Sir Bernard … Alan Brockbank, Sunday Express…’ The Sir Bernard most regularly in the news in the 1950s was Sir Bernard Docker, the chairman of both BSA and Daimler motors. He and his ex-showgirl wife Norah were notorious, but not wholly unpopular, for flaunting their wealth in a time of austerity. Their Daimler was covered with gold stars and was said to have gold bumpers. The couple’s flagrant ability to gild lilies was at once scandalous and entertaining. While his lady revelled in her notoriety, Sir Bernard was never seen to smile.
Persistent but never nasty, Brocky was adept at accompanying whatever absconding mogul it might be to his waiting black Humber or Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire (the cad’s Rolls-Royce, deemed luxurious on account of its ‘fluid flywheel’, whatever that was). Brocky could hold open a car door, with implacable courtesy, in such a way that his victim could not contrive to get inside before he had answered just a couple of questions. He always had a small point he wanted to clarify and, oh, one very last thing he wanted to be sure he had got right. After the publication of an annual report with one or two things in it that Brocky didn’t quite follow, we surprised Billy Butlin, the holiday camp king, at the back exit from one of the Nissen huts that augmented the BEA terminal at Heathrow. In the face of my master’s gentle inquisition, little Billy spilled enough beans to furnish us with an exclusive.
We had liquid sessions in a pub near Transport House with Herbert Morrison, another little man, at once cocky and shifty, his glass eye less elusive than the good one. What I heard from his lips was enough to rend from end to end my naïve notions of socialist solidarity, but memory’s sieve has not retained exactly what he said about Stafford Cripps or ‘Nye’ or the recently retired Ernie Bevin, whose post as Foreign Secretary Morrison occupied long enough only to establish his incompetence to hold it. Bevin’s reputation has been glorified by his civil service mandarins. The lecherous Ernie’s working-class anti-Semitism was an easy fit with that of The Office’s ‘camel corps’ of Arabists. The dockers’ leader took easily to ex officio presumption: Lady Diana Cooper reported, without surprise or outrage, how Bevin had pressed fat kisses on her at an embasssy reception in Paris. Morrison’s great achievement was domestic: he was the prime mover of the Festival of Britain. He urged us to go and have a look at what was happening on the South Bank.
Since the Beaver was not known to be dogmatically hostile to the Festival of Britain, Brocky deputed me to visit the dusty site. One of the press people described how the roof on the half-finished Festival Hall had been prefabricated in several large, hooped pieces. I could come and see if I was interested. Of course I was. ‘No inside access yet, unfortunately.’ He led me to a 70-foot wooden ladder attached, halfway up the building, to a girder, to which another ladder of the same length was tied, at a reverse angle. ‘Once you’re halfway up, all you have to do is swing yourself round and onto the other ladder and on you go.’ I invited him to lead the way. ‘Lean away from the ladder,’ he called down to me, ‘otherwise you bump your knees and block yourself.’ However shakily, what had to be done was done. At length, I swung myself over the parapet of the roof, took a deep breath, and showed interest in the metal tracks along which the sections of the roof were due to be rolled.
While we smoked our Woodbines, my guide told me the then new joke about the worker who went out of the gate every day with a wheelbarrow with waste paper in it. The security man checked it for stolen goods (there was no shortage of pilfering on any building site) but never found anything. After several weeks, the guard said, ‘I know you’re nicking something and I promise not to do anything about it, but what the hell is it?’ The worker said, ‘Wheelbarrows.’
With a long look at London’s flat, often still flattened, horizons, I climbed over the parapet and onto the first of the two pliable ladders. Back at the office, I wrote up the details of the revolutionary roof. Bernard Drew stabbed my work onto the spike without hesitation.
The sad-countenanced John Prebble was the Beaver’s house int
ellectual. In his mid-thirties, he smoked a straight pipe, lit with proletarian Swan Vesta matches, wore serious glasses and did not mix with the artisans. Having served in the Royal Artillery during the war, he owed his job, to some degree, to the fact that, like the Beaver, he had been raised in Canada. Prebble had his own small office. Its tight window opened only onto the newsroom, whence I could see him frowning over sources from which to cull material that would pass muster with the Beaver. Even a junior reporter could recognise a man who had hoped to have better things to do than try to wrest readers from Kathleen Winsor. I did not know at the time that Prebble was an ex-Communist. It amused the Beaver to employ left-wingers such as Michael Foot and, in due time, Alan Taylor, whom he could massage, with praise and money, into becoming right-handed, as it were. Prebble left Fleet Street after writing a 1956 bestseller, about the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879, and found a new allegiance in Scottish nationalism.
The other feature writer with an office (and a page) of his own was Logan Gourlay, a tall, narrow, dandified and equally unsmiling Scot who covered show business and reviewed movies. With an elastic expense account, he could afford not to acknowledge the engine room crew even when we shared the lift with him. Not long after I joined the paper, he was found guilty of padding his expenses and dismissed. He later edited a book entitled The Beaverbrook I Knew.
Although His Lordship never came up to the office from Cherkley Court, his manor in the Surrey countryside, the proprietor kept a long-sighted eye on his publications. Fear (and vain hope) of a ‘call from the country’ procured adherence to his foibles. One of the loftiest of his courtiers, George Malcolm Thomson, was said to have told another journalist that, when alone with Max, he felt like Napoleon’s Marshal Ney. To which the other replied (or said he had): ‘Surely you mean Marshal Yea.’
It was mandatory to deny the existence of the Beaver’s blacklist. All the same, I soon learned, as if by osmosis, never to speak well of Lord Louis Mountbatten. In the Beaver’s inferno, ‘Dickie’ had an irredeemable place in the deepest circle of the damned: too vain to take expert military advice, Mountbatten had been responsible for sending a large contingent of ill-supported, under-trained Canadian commandos to their doom in the 1942 raid on Dieppe. To compound the scandal, he had, as the last Viceroy, given away India. Even the Beaver did not go so far below the belt as to publish what was loudly whispered in grand circles: that Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina, had a more than diplomatic affair with Pandit Nehru, and that her husband was more than somewhat complaisant.
The proprietor’s anathema extended to anyone who advocated joining the prototype of the European Union. Britain’s affiliation with the benighted continent would clash with the policy of Imperial Preference, the Beaver’s economic panacea. His opposition to the incipient Franco-German entente was embodied in the Crusader couchant, with lance and shield, in a niche at the top right-hand corner of our front page. To defer to the Beaver’s prejudices came as easily as the imitation of Ciceronian irony or Ovid’s metrical cynicism. Any party line, I realised, was liable to be as infectious as the common cold. Anyone could become an apparatchik, if duly salaried. There was secret comedy in honouring any creed that offered status and conferred privileges.
My St John’s College contemporary the historian John Erickson was the first to remark how, during Stalin’s Terror, those rounded up and accused of capital crimes appeared before ‘grinning judges’. Both the victims and those who condemned them to a slow or a quick death knew the whole thing to be an inescapable and bloody farce. To play the ambitious clerk required neither sincerity nor belief. Like Castiglione’s courtier, a journalist can remain free within his servility by knowing – but never, ever saying – how absurd it is, and how furtively delicious, to conform to the wishes of a tyrant who has favours to offer.
Brocky was gallant enough to act quite as if he needed a green bagcarrier. He often took me to the pubs where trades union leaders sighed with mild and bitter regret at Clem Attlee’s lack of socialist steam. Like ITMA’s Colonel Chinstrap, when offered another tongue-loosening glass, they never minded if they did. Brocky maintained that the key moment in British post-war history came when the National Union of Mineworkers refused the offer of a seat, or seats, on the newly nationalised Coal Board. By declining directorial responsibility, the NUM left the power where, in truth, they preferred it to be: in the hands of the middle-class managers whom they chose to denounce rather than to supplant.
As the days went by, I was entrusted with less minor errands and inquiries. It was surprising to discover how easily people were flattered when approached by a cozening apprentice and how willing, often eager, to disclose petty secrets. My initiation into the means by which our foreign news coverage seemed to be ubiquitous came when one of the subs approached me, one Saturday morning, with a flimsy print-out, on pink paper, from the Agence France-Presse. ‘Doing anything, Fred?’
‘No. Rather not.’
‘Write this up for me then, old son, would you, as if you were in Peking?’
As soon as I sat down at a vacant Royal Sovereign, I was looking out over the Forbidden City. In almost no time my Chinese meal was ready to go to the subs’ table. The capacity for fluent imposture supplied one of the reasons for the central role of the Classics in English establishment life. Like satire and snobbery, parody and docility are never incompatible: the satirist is often a toady with two sets of teeth: one snarls at the privileged, the other smiles when offered preferment. Sir David Frost and Sir Jonathan Miller came to prove the point.
Outstanding in the Beaver’s spectrum of hates was the annual British Industries Fair. This apparently benign and patriotic enterprise incurred his displeasure because exhibiting industrialists were encouraged, by the Labour government, to make deals with Europe rather than with the Empire. Brocky sent me down to Olympia to see what I could root out in the way of a story. If it was to make the paper, it would have to show that the BIF was doing a disservice to This Country.
The press officers at Olympia were busy handing out cyclostyled cheer that trumpeted record agreements to supply British products to all sorts of foreign markets. That sort of happy news was not what I was there to unearth. Then an aggrieved salesman told me that undercover agents from German industrialists, although officially proscribed, were on the prowl, like the spy in L’Attaque, with offers to undercut British prices. As a result, orders were being taken away from Our People by the resurgent Hun.
Fuelled with pay-dirt, I hurried back to the office, sat down at a spare typewriter and beavered away at a mostly monosyllabic exposé of Teutonic subterfuge. As he scanned my draft, I saw Bernard Drew’s brow lose its suspicious crevices. He looked up at me and said, ‘You couldn’t bulk it out a bit, could you, Fred?’ Of course I could. When my piece made the Scottish edition of the paper that Saturday, under the byline ‘By Sunday Express Reporters’, the Bernards, Drew and Harris, came across to show me the page hot off the stone. The novillero had made his first kill.
The word came down from Stanley Head that I should file my expenses. I asked Brocky what might count as legitimate apart from my bus fare to Olympia. ‘Bus? I told you to take a taxi. And those salesmen you talked to, you did buy them a few rounds of drinks, I hope, didn’t you? Go and do some clever arithmetic. Only, Fred, remember: no round numbers.’
After the paper had gone to bed, generous solidarity led the old hands to escort me to the Hole in the Wall for a celebratory drink. As our platoon of Expressmen came in, a solitary hack at the bar called out, ‘Here come the Beaverbrook lackeys.’ William Barclay, the Scotsman who wrote the ‘Crossbencher’ column (in which His Lordship’s likes and dislikes among politicians were praised and pilloried), responded, ‘Dirrty old News of the Worruld!’
I was shocked and liberated to find that the only morality in journalism was that the story came first. By the time I took the bus to north London to find out more about a man called Raven who, the Press Association reported, had taken his baby daughter an
d fled to Paris, I was Joseph Conrad’s Verloc, a secret purveyor of bombshells seated among leisurely citizens.
Raven and his family lived in Royalty Court, a block of 1930s flats regal only in name. A huddle of journalists and cameramen were loitering under the stiff canopy over the front door, hoping for a tearful statement from the abandoned wife. The Fleet Street code of conduct required that reporters ‘fill in’ any member of the fraternity who was late on the case. Even though I came from ‘the bloody Sunday Express’, I was suffered to fish in the common pool. There was little in it but tiddlers. My colleagues outside Royalty Court were content to spend their morning in paid patience. As soon as it was opening time, they took it in turns to go, in small groups, to the nearest pub.
As a pupil in Brocky’s school, it occurred to me that there had to be a back entrance to the Ravens’ second-floor flat. I walked round the block and found the narrow backstairs that allowed dustmen to collect and tote the tenants’ rubbish to their van. I went up cold concrete steps to the second floor and tried the appropriate door. I almost hoped that it would be locked. It was not. There I was in the small, empty kitchen of the beleaguered family. I looked at the used breakfast things, cosied teapot, United Dairies bottle (with a cardboard top, not gold foil, like our Express full-cream milk) and dented cornflake packet and I felt the triumph and shame of the debutant double-dealer. As I coughed and turned to go, a young woman came in from the hallway and said, ‘What the hell’s going on? Who the hell are you?’
I said, ‘I’m awfully sorry. Raphael. Sunday Express. The door was open.’
‘Press? You’re not supposed to be in here, press.’
‘Are you the mother, possibly, Mrs Raven, of the– the–?’
‘What if I am?’
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