Obviously riled, Rook interrupted him to say: ‘And she’s obviously a bit of a f…’
But Geoff, himself a skilled reporter but a necessarily anonymous foot-soldier working for the Press Association, who had always been immensely proud and encouraging of his wife’s glittering success, silenced her by saying fondly: ‘It’s you that they’re talking about, you chump.’
Rook had been up and writing from five o’clock the previous morning and had delivered the copy for her weekly column in the Daily Express. She had checked the proofs but hadn’t waited to see the completed page. After she’d left the office an assistant editor – one, apparently, with a limited vocabulary – had dreamt up the wording for the top of the page.
‘It wasn’t my idea,’ Rook insisted. ‘I had never called myself the First Lady of Fleet Street. But if I’d thought of it, I would – believe me, I would.’
And the title would stay with her forever. Jean Rook was to become, in her lifetime, possibly the most high-profile female journalist ever known.
Although a handful of women journalists had enjoyed their own columns from about the 1930s, the years from the late 1960s to the end of the 1990s are remembered as the time of the highly-feted, highly-paid and highly-publicised personal columnists whose weekly or occasionally even fortnightly pages gave a hard-hitting and, they hoped, often amusing take on the week’s news and current events and on their struggles with school sports days, children’s illnesses, husbands’ funny little ways or the agonies of employing a cleaner.
The most successful personalised columns were always easy to read and for that reason may have seemed easy to write: so easy that it could look as though anybody could produce them. In fact it takes a particular kind of mind to be able to turn any trivial occurrence into copy that thousands or millions of people are eager to read, and also to have instant opinions on any and every event that crops up in the news.
Although Jean Rook may have been known by the title First Lady of Fleet Street she was not the only female journalist to be given a huge picture byline and enormous space and prominence in her newspaper. At the same time as Rook was holding sway at the Daily Express, Lynda Lee-Potter, Katharine Whitehorn and Jilly Cooper were also effectively being promoted as ‘first ladies’ in their own papers.
Their guaranteed presence week after week helped to give women journalists a new prominence and influence in the world as well as providing shining examples of what could now be achieved by women writers.
Each of these columnists was long lasting, incredibly tenacious and hung on to her position for years, even decades in most cases. The era of the First Lady is now over, and there are no such big-name columnists anymore; but it was fun while it lasted – especially for the first ladies themselves who secured huge salaries and enormous prominence in their papers, thus giving other aspirants something to aim for.
The First Ladies have been collectively derided over the years as Glenda Slagg in Private Eye and are often considered to be not ‘real’ journalists, at least not worthy to stand alongside those who undertake dangerous undercover work or campaign to correct major injustices or financial scandals. The ‘Glendas’ have been seen as essentially lightweight and self-indulgent, but the best of them had a unique quality impossible to copy. There has never been another Jean Rook, another Katharine Whitehorn, or another Jilly Cooper, although there have been plenty of pale imitations. These writers demonstrated a quirky, witty take on life that, at the time they wrote, resonated exactly with their readers.
As such, they performed a valuable service. Their abiding talent was to spot subjects and issues that they believed would be of interest to their readers but which the readers themselves had not yet clocked. Thus they had to be just a little ahead of the time with their incisive and (they hoped) perceptive comments. In other words, they knew what their readers were thinking, or were about to think. They were there to take the words out of the reader’s mouth but only after they had installed it there in a wittier and more entertaining way than the average reader could manage.
Jean Rook reigned supreme at the Daily Express from 1972 until the Grim Reaper carried her off in 1991.
She was born in November 1931 in Hull, the only child of consultant engineer Horace Rook and his wife. She had a comfortable middle-class upbringing and although she was upset not to get into Oxford or Cambridge, she was accepted at Bedford College, London University, where she got a 2:1 in English and later wrote an MA thesis on the plays of T S Eliot. This academic background was not, perhaps, an ideal start for a rabble-rousing tabloid journalist and Rook says in her 1989 autobiography, The Cowardly Lioness:
‘I didn’t aim, from pramhood, to grow up into Britain’s bitchiest, best-known and loved woman journalist.’
Her father hoped she would be a barrister and she herself initially longed to be an actress. But she considered that as a big, raw-boned girl of 5ft 8 and certainly no raving beauty, she would never make it as a leading lady on the stage.
However, she wanted to be famous one way or another: ‘Fame was not just my spur. My consuming ambition slashed me to ribbons even as a fat kid in plaits. Whatever I was going to be, it had to be big. I always saw my name in lights. If the actual light bulbs failed me, I’ve at least seen it in the biggest, boldest type ever used on a Fleet Street byline… I am the highest paid woman in Fleet Street… I’ve always said what I think, forcefully, and, I hope, amusingly, at the given moment. Hundreds who feel as I do write back.’
In answer to the often-asked question as to whether her column came naturally to her, Rook responded: ‘The sentiment, in a flash. Expressing it in readable form can take mere heady minutes when your mind is up and running or tedious, sweating hours when it’s not and every word has to be dragged out with pliers.’
Rook was 25 years old before she decided to try to become a journalist. After finishing her MA on Eliot she felt she was not cut out for the plodding, academic life and she applied for, and landed, a job on the graduate trainee scheme of the Sheffield Telegraph. From then on ‘I knew I would make Fleet Street if I had to crawl from the Strand to St Paul’s in gutters running with my own blood.’ In the event, Rook’s first editor, Ernest Taylor, told her there was no opening for women columnists at the top and she had better stick to reporting, on which she reflected later: ‘I’ve often hoped Ernest has looked down to see the massive openings I’ve dug for a whole new genre of women columnists.’
She met her future husband, fellow journalist Geoff Nash, at the Sheffield paper where he advised her to forget about news and concentrate on becoming a great feature writer. Times were changing for women, he told her, presciently, adding: grab the chance.
Rook next went to the Yorkshire Post where she was sent to Paris and ‘it was here that I first saw Fleet Street’s mighty, throned in their red plush chairs on the front row. Iris Ashley of the Mail, Jill Butterfield of the Express, Felicity Green of the Mirror… the terrifying old American tiger, Sunday Times’ Ernestine Carter.’
For all her ambition, Rook could not find an immediate opening in Fleet Street and so became fashion editor of a (now long-defunct) magazine, Flair, which she hated. She wrote: ‘either you have a monthly magazine mind or you haven’t and I was strictly a racy, pacy daily newspaper journalist. Flair’s snail pace was killing me.’
The Welsh-born newspaper giant Hugh Cudlipp was one of the most influential personalities in the history of newspapers in the twentieth century; according to Jean Rook: ‘He was the sexiest man I have ever known, who ever made a woman draw heavy breath. He had a voice like a Welsh harp and looked like a cross between Richard Burton and Owen Glendower.’ She found him even more appealing when he asked whether she would like to be fashion editor of the new newspaper he was planning, to be called the Sun, and she replied: more than my life.
This was not the current Murdoch Sun but the paper that succeeded the trade-unions’ Daily Herald, and it was an unmitigated disaster. Carrying the astonishingly clumsy banner,
A newspaper born of the age we live in, the new Sun was launched in September 1964 in the biggest blaze of advertising publicity ever known for a national newspaper, in spite of which it sank like a stone. Cudlipp later wished he had never heard of it and it was rescued by Rupert Murdoch, who already owned the News of the World.
Rook’s boss on the old Sun was Amy Landreth: ‘hell in high heels’. She was Rook’s first female newspaper boss and, Rook swore, would be absolutely her last. Rook’s stint as fashion editor did not really suit her and soon Howard French, then editor of the fast-failing Daily Sketch, offered her a job at twice what the Sun was paying. Rook jumped at the chance and soon met David English, who had been brought onto the Sketch to oversee its merger with the Daily Mail and was ‘the most demanding and inspiring editor I have ever worked for’.
The Sketch folded on ‘the night of the long envelopes’ in 1971, and Rook landed her own column on the quickly-rising Daily Mail. After 18 months at the Mail she had a call from John Junor, then editor of the Sunday Express. Rook went to lunch with Junor but did not go to the Sunday paper. Instead, she was offered the top columnist’s slot at the Daily Express, a job she decided to take as she was finding the Daily Mail a fairly unhappy ship with two people for every job.
As her mentor, David English was predictably furious and made Rook an offer he thought she could not refuse – loads more money, a seat on the board, a trust fund for the baby and other riches beyond the dreams of avarice but in the event Rook jumped ship and joined the Daily Express, where she was to make her name. She admitted in her autobiography that this largesse being offered was not so much because she was particularly valuable personally, but because of the bitter rivalry at the time between the Express and the Mail.
There was always a certain amount of ego in the salary game – which newspaper could pay the most, or offer the most glittering golden handcuffs.
Rook’s apparently vast, although undisclosed, salary at the Express prompted some of the sub-editors on the back bench there to ask themselves why the Express couldn’t have paid even more money and to have also hired the re-write man – always assumed to be David English – who could make sense of her copy, while they were about it.
The baby in the deal over which the newspapers haggled was Gresby, Jean Rook’s only child, and 18 months old when she crossed the Street. She and Geoff Nash had married when Rook was 31 but in agreeing to the marriage she gave him an absolute ultimatum: no children, ever. This was an agreement that lasted nine years, until their much-loved and – in truth – much-wanted only son, who would become the actor Gresby Nash, was born by Caesarean section when Rook was 40. She had said initially that ‘no screaming bilious little bundle was going to come between me and the top job in Fleet Street’ – words she risked having to eat when Gresby arrived although, it has to be said, he never did come between her and that ‘top job’. Nor, in spite of his own and his fond parents’ ambition for him, did he ever enjoy the star billing with which his mother was favoured.
It may have been the fabled Yorkshire grit that got Rook to Fleet Street, and perhaps a tempering of Sheffield steel that kept her there. But she would not have lasted, nor have been given such accolades, unless she had been something special once she had arrived. Many women are called to the Street of Adventure, but few are chosen for the top jobs. Jean Rook had two outstanding journalistic qualities: an ability for clever and often biting wordplay and an instinctive understanding of politics, something few female columnists have apparently been able to match.
Jean Rook had declared that she would never work for a female boss again after her experience under Amy Landreth, but when Albert (Larry) Lamb became editor of the Daily Express after being sacked from The Sun, she found him even worse than any female boss could have been.
They’d met before. Lamb had tried to tempt her to the Murdoch Sun from the Daily Mail and had been insulted by her refusal – even when Rook had told him she was earning more money than he was offering. Lamb wanted big-name writers on his paper but, Rook deduced, he was against the system of creating star names. The only star in any newspaper’s firmament should be the editor.
She called him ‘the fiend of Fleet Street’ and says he slapped yellow stickers – indicating he wanted the content changing – on everything she wrote. He and Rook hated each other and Lamb did his best to get rid of her.
He might have succeeded but instead he was ousted himself when he fell out with Lord Matthews, then the proprietor of Express Newspapers, and Derek Jameson took his place as editor. According to Rook, Jameson was ‘a brilliant intuitive editor, farcically conceited. He was inspirational and ran the paper like a knees-up.’ She says she survived herds of editors, and certainly in her last days at the Express there were herds of them to be survived.
In common with many journalists, Rook had a dab of greasepaint along with the printing ink in her veins; although the actual acting could be handled vicariously by Gresby, Rook would never disguise her desire to perform – posing in such stunts as taming a lion in a circus, driving a chariot with Charlton Heston as ‘Ben Her’ and posing at the drop of a flashbulb with politicians and celebrities, ostensibly always as big a star as they were.
By the mid-1980s, Rook had achieved everything she wanted: a huge, five-bedroom house in Kent, a 4.2 Jaguar car, a trendy Wapping flat and a son at Eton. It was all, she wrote, ‘the sweet fruit of 31 hard years in journalism.’ She added: ‘I fervently believe if you’re well paid, well-advertised and well-plastered across the country’s billboards, you’ve a duty to deliver the goods.’ She would start writing her column before sunrise when two alarm clocks knocked her out of sleep, and usually finish around 4pm, when she was, in her own words, wrung dry.
But Rook’s life, so sweet, successful and blessed in an upward-only direction, was to end in terrible tragedy. At the age of 56, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent the first of several agonising operations. While she was severely jet-lagged from a trip to America in 1985, the family home in Kent was invaded by armed robbers, who tied both her and Geoff up at gunpoint before they stole and made off with valuable jewellery and other goods.
She believed the aftermath of the armed robbery killed Geoff, slowly. Not long after the attack, he started showing unmistakeable signs of Alzheimer’s and died a pathetic, shambling wreck. Rook’s cancer returned and she herself died in 1991, at the age of 59. She had written, bravely (and always entertainingly) just before her death: ‘If the op goes wrong… I wonder if they’ll hold my memorial in the journalists’ Fleet Street church, St Brides. Or in St Paul’s? After all I was… still am… the First Lady of Fleet Street.’
Milk is regularly spilt and often spewed along Fleet Street but there is no time for crying over it. Before Rook’s seat at the Mail could get cold her instant successor was enthroned in it. While Rook was queening it in a plush room overlooking Fleet Street from the ‘black Lubyanka’ of the Express, a substitute columnist was wheeled into place to continue preening for the Mail from a dingy office in Whitefriar’s Street.
Few readers will have been aware of the switch; hundreds, possibly thousands, of readers who if asked would have described themselves as devoted followers of the column will not even have noticed that the name and the picture at the top of the page had changed overnight.
David English had created – or at least (credit where it’s due) had helped, inspired and promoted – Fleet Street’s First Lady; now, without pausing for a breath, he had to create a second First Lady, as good as or even better than the first. And he had to do it before the page came out the following Wednesday.
Like Jean Rook, the young Lynda Higginson had harboured ambitions to be a famous actress; opportunities were not exactly plentiful for council house lasses from Leigh in Lancashire but this daughter of a painter and decorator showed early persistence and at least made it from the mining town of her birth as far the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
There she learnt to lose her ‘working
class’ accent, and it was while she was appearing in Dry Rot, a Whitehall farce starring Brian Rix, that she met a young medical student from Guy’s Hospital, and they married in 1957.
Her husband served as a medical officer with the RAF in Aden and to pass the time Lynda started writing short stories that she would read on the radio. She also wrote for the Aden Chronicle. Her light touch soon became popular and on their return from Aden Lynda, who by now had three children, landed a job on Woman’s Mirror as a feature writer. This led to a job on the Daily Mail in a similar capacity in 1967 and her big opportunity came when she was offered the most glittering prize after Jean Rook suddenly decamped to the Express.
She had not been the first choice. David English had initially approached Jilly Cooper, then making huge waves at the Sunday Times, and offered her the then eye-watering salary of £15,000 a year. Cooper, although tempted, and being offered sums ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’ as she put it, eventually declined and stayed with the Sunday Times at the vastly lower (but still good for the time) salary of £5,000 a year, especially as her column appeared on the Look! pages only once a fortnight.
Rejected by Cooper, English decided to promote from within. It was, after all, far cheaper and – even more importantly – much quicker. Sitting in the feature-writers’ room, totally unaware of how her life was about to change, was Lynda Higginson, now Mrs Jeremy Lee-Potter. While nervous at first and even though never quite mastering Rook’s quick wordplay or fiercely barbed repartee, Lee-Potter soon gained confidence and before long became a major star in the Mail’s galaxy, hugely promoted along with diary editor Nigel Dempster. At first guided by David English at every step, Lee-Potter eventually found her own, individual, feet, even if she continued to be seen in some circles as a pale imitation of Jean Rook – particularly by Jean Rook herself.
Although it was Lee-Potter, rather than Rook, who had actually trodden the boards as an actress, albeit briefly, she was content to leave the theatrical performing and daft stunts that Rook loved to her rival. Instead, she became a serious interviewer in addition to writing her weekly column, talking to all the celebrities of the day and also to the victims of serious tragedies, some of whom would be tempted to open their hearts to Lynda Lee-Potter from the Mail rather than to any competing columnist by the inducement of a large Associated Newspapers cheque.
The Girl in the Film Page 44