Her critics said Lee-Potter showed no great style or perception in her interviews, but she was always dogged enough to come out with masses of quotes from her subject, and was able to fill several pages of the paper at short notice. Her mind-set and attitudes appeared to be exactly in accord with those of her readers, although obviously she was much richer and more successful than the average Mail reader.
The one word to describe the readership of both the Mail and the Express in those days was ‘aspirational’. Hugh Cudlipp once mockingly remarked that ‘the Express thinks its readers all have two-point-four children, live in mock Tudor homes in Surrey and have two cars in the garage – but in fact they don't, that's just how they want to live.’ The point was not lost on Bob Edwards, who edited the Daily Express twice in the 1960s. When his deputy pointed out one night that they had two stories in the paper about public schools – ‘and our readers can't actually afford to send their children to public school’ – Edwards replied: ‘I know that. But our readers like to think that the editor thinks they can.’
So when Mrs. Lee-Potter referred in her column to the grassy area at home as ‘the lawns’, she probably knew exactly what she was doing, and for whom she was writing. She had also, by this time, started referring to her father as ‘a painter’ – seeing no necessity to add ‘and decorator’.
Sometimes witches, sometimes bitches, the argument raged across Fleet Street about who was the better. Some said that Rook had the edge because she was sharper and wittier; others claimed it was Lee-Potter because she, not to put too fine a point on it, had David English. Some said Rook had a lighter touch (not necessarily a compliment when dealing with bitchiness); others said Lee-Potter was heavy handed (not always a positive factor in dealing with commentary-style journalism).
The important thing, however, was that outside the close environs of London EC4, nobody cared, nor did anybody even give the question a second thought. Fleet Street believed that the universe revolved around its own being; fortunately they didn’t believe it sufficiently to let the navel-gazing permeate into the paper. The readers liked what they got. When Mail subscribers got Rook, they were content; when they suddenly started getting Lee-Potter instead, there was little evidence that anybody could be bothered to trek to the newsagent to switch allegiance. By the time they went round to pay the newspaper bill (and the majority of newspapers were home-delivered in those days) they had probably forgotten what the fuss was about.
The columnists were, nevertheless, household names. And if you failed to notice that somebody had been attacked in one of their columns, you’d learn all about it soon enough. Just in case you’d missed it, when Lee-Potter homed in on Dr Miriam Stoppard, the good doctor felt obliged to ask everybody who would listen: what has she got against me? The answer was, most probably, nothing at all; it was just that Stoppard was an easy target that week. People wrote about people being written about; it was perpetual motion. It was fame of a kind.
Journalist Michael Leapman, emphatically not a Lee-Potter fan, said of Lee-Potter: ‘She recognises that it does not matter what opinions you express, whom you choose to hold up to contempt, whose physical appearance and dress sense you mock, as long as you write with verve and venom, especially venom… So what has nourished the spite, the anger, the sheer nastiness of Lee-Potter’s print persona?’
He felt that she invariably picked the soft targets, the ones who could not easily hit back, and subjected them to ‘withering scorn and personal criticism, unsupported by anything except her prejudices.’
Lee-Potter, Leapman said, was careful to come across as charming, giggly, sympathetic, in public but was always fulfilling her mission to make life miserable for such celebrities of the day as singer Elaine Paige, TV presenter Anthea Turner, Princess Michael, Prince Andrew and Germaine Greer, who she described as being ‘muscly, greying and scrawny with a skin like leather’. She thinks of herself, according to Leapman, as the ‘hooded avenger. But – avenging what, exactly?’
Paul Dacre, David English’s successor as editor of the Daily Mail, decided not to try to replace Lee-Potter after her death in 2004 as he realised she had become a kind of national treasure who had also been much in demand as a public speaker. And for all that Lee-Potter’s column had originally been a kind of revenge on Rook, it lasted for 13 years after Rook’s death, during which time no new Rook had been found at the Express. During the months of Lee-Potter’s long, last illness, the words ‘Lynda Lee-Potter will return soon’ appeared every week underneath what would have been her column, even though everybody knew she never would return.
After a decent interval, her place as a ‘Wednesday witch’ was taken by Allison Pearson, a worthy successor and wittier and more insightful than her predecessor, it has to be said, although Pearson did not last at the Daily Mail and soon moved over to the Daily Telegraph. Her place as a ‘Wednesday witch’ was taken by Sandra Parsons who, at the time of writing, (2013) remains the incumbent. There has never been a true successor to Jean Rook at the Express which shows just how rare these true tabloid stars really are. Ann Widdicombe, the former MP, simply does not have Rook’s light and clever touch.
Katharine Whitehorn, who held court at The Observer for about 36 years, was not a gritty northerner like Rook or Lee-Potter. Far from it. Her father was classics master at a public school and her mother’s father founded the National Marriage Guidance Council. Whitehorn’s mother had herself secured a place at Cambridge, although she was considered too delicate to go up, but Katharine went in her stead, after being educated at Roedean. Her brother John went to Trinity College, Cambridge.
There may have been little spare money in the Whitehorn household but there was plenty of gentle culture and the Whitehorns knew a lot of influential people. For example, after university Katharine landed at job at Methuen’s publishers when Dr E V Rieu of Penguin Classics and a friend of her father’s, happened to mention there was a job going as a junior publisher’s reader. The novelist L A G Strong, also a friend of the family, got her some reviewing work on John O’London’s Weekly.
Whitehorn said that she grew up with career women all around her and admitted that her background definitely gave her an early leg-up. Even so, no family background could have been responsible for her sparkling success as a columnist and media personality, and though her early jobs came from asking around her friends or being in the right place at the right time at a party, her talent soon shone through.
She landed a job on Picture Post, and was used as a model for a now-famous picture of a 1950s girl alone in a London bedsitter. After Picture Post folded, Whitehorn worked at Woman’s Own although claiming later that she never felt she got her head round that essentially working-class publication and in the event resigned after six months.
She first began to be noticed with her Roundabout column on The Spectator. This column made an instant impact as all previous Roundabout columns on the weekly journal had been about cricket or foreign policy or cars and although they were supposed to be funny, they had never been written by a woman before. The editor of The Spectator at the time was Brian Inglis, a brusque, monosyllabic man, difficult to talk to, who nevertheless liked women and who later wrote avant-garde books about alternative health and spiritual healing.
Roundabout attracted the eye of the bisexual George Seddon, an executive on The Observer who was at the time looking for a woman’s editor. Half of London, as well as Whitehorn, applied for this job and the upshot was that she briefly became fashion editor, taking over from Alison Settle, who was about to retire. Whitehorn has said in her memoirs and in several radio and print interviews since, that at the time – the early 1960s – journalism was bridging an ‘immemorial gap’ between male writing and female writing. George Seddon, she says, invented women’s pages that weren’t exactly women’s pages and which were soon copied the world over.
Considerably gentler than either Rook or Lee-Potter, Whitehorn was tough in her own way and has said she would like to throw down a
steep flight of stairs any woman who writes that women would be happier staying at home with their children than having a big career. Parenthood, she asserted, is ‘not what you ought to do but what you can stand’.
After a couple of early love affairs, Whitehorn settled down into a comfortable, long-lasting marriage with the thriller writer Gavin Lyall and produced two sons, Bernard and Jake. Her column at The Observer lasted until 1996, an astonishing thirty-year stretch, and then it was suddenly stopped by the new deputy editor Jocelyn Targett, a young man who appeared to be going places and who wanted younger writers for the paper. Targett did indeed go places and before long left journalism for the altogether racier world of horse breeding at Newmarket.
Targett had assured Whitehorn she would still be called upon for features, but the final blow came in 1997 when she was asked to do a big piece on nursing. When it didn’t go into the paper for several successive Sundays she contacted the woman’s editor to ask why, saying that it would be past its sell-by date if it wasn’t used soon.
The exasperated answer she got was: ‘Really, Katharine, I have 24 freelancers telling me why their piece has to go in on Sunday.’ This insulting remark made her realise her time was up, that she was no longer a valued contributor and she left to go to Saga magazine as an agony aunt.
‘Saga was my parachute out of The Observer,’ she said.
Some may think she was bloody lucky to have lasted so long on one paper, so what was her secret?
In an interview with Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian in March 2008 to celebrate her 80th birthday, she was heralded as the ‘original confessional columnist’ who blazed a trail for women who juggle a career and family life.
‘What women of my generation did,’ she told Jeffries, after asking him whether he was the window cleaner, ‘was to write like women. Before us, women were expected to write like men if they wrote on the serious pages. Now, it’s different: women like Polly Toynbee, Carol Sarler and Libby Purves say things that would only occur to a woman. They write just as seriously but have distinctive female voices.’
Whether her voice is distinctively female or not, Whitehorn was one of the original newspaper columnists – Jilly Cooper was another and Hunter Davies (a man) yet another – who looked to incidents in their own lives to provide copy. One of her most famous pieces was about ‘sluts’, where she asked: ‘Have you ever taken anything out of the dirty-clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleanest thing?’
This is the quote by which Whitehorn is best remembered and which will probably go down in history in a future book of the wit and wisdom of women journalists. OK, maybe it doesn’t sound very startling now but at the time, when everybody pretended they were clean and tidy and perfect in every way, it struck a new note of refreshing honesty.
There was also the famous column about putting an aspirin in a suspender to hold up stockings. But now – who remembers either suspenders or stockings? And even aspirins have changed their shape. The fact that an old-fashioned round aspirin would soon crumble to dust if it was used to secure a stocking to a suspender was somehow never asked. It just sounded amusing and outrageous at the time.
The notion of holding your clothes together with safety pins or, indeed, with an aspirin, seemed even funnier coming from an upper-crust Cambridge graduate – or at least, it did in those days, long before artist Tracey Emin could be paid thousands or millions of pounds for putting an unmade bed surrounded by hideous and unmentionable gunge on public display.
As well as writing her weekly column for 30-odd years, Whitehorn sat on endless committees, was a regular fixture on radio and wrote endearing, very amusing little books about how to survive in the kitchen, or with children, or in hospital and how to cook in a bedsitter. In fact, she pioneered the art of writing about living in a ditzy, slapdash, booze-filled way that sounded new and daring. It all seemed much more fun, anyway, than the prim, repressed, striving-to-be-perfect way of life to which most women had previously aspired, and which was encouraged by the women’s magazines of the time.
Donald Trelford, a former editor of The Observer, says of his former star employee: ‘Looking back from today, when most newspapers have half a dozen columnists, many of them female, it is hard to convey the bracing sense of fresh air blown in by the pioneering Whitehorn columns… She wrote as she spoke, in that crisp, amused, rather plummy style that used to be called an educated accent.’
In her memoirs, Whitehorn managed to make her long lasting and very public career look like one happy accident. She ‘bumped’ into somebody at a party who ‘gave’ her a job; ‘happened’ to know somebody through the family who could give her a start, landed a job when somebody else left and she was the only girl around to take over, and so on.
In fact, as we who are journalists ourselves all know, there is a kind of eagerness and magnetic vivacity on the part of the ambitious career person that is noticed and the vibes are picked up. At parties, these people shine like stars, and that is how and why they are hired.
But having been given that apparently lucky chance, you then have to prove your mettle by turning copy in on time, every single week, that will make the readers – and the editors – keep coming back to you for more. Most importantly, you have to turn it in on time. Newspaper deadlines are inexorable and will not, cannot, wait. As Whitehorn herself admits: ‘The average editor’s cry is: We don’t want it good, we want it Thursday.’
So far as their private lives went, it seems that these lippy female columnists managed to have long-lasting and, reasonably happy marriages. Jean Rook was married to Geoff Nash for 25 years although admitting in her autobiography that for most of that time they had separate bedrooms. There was never any suggestion that either of them had affairs with other people. Rook was probably far too busy and said that she did not socialise. Whether there is a hidden meaning in that word ‘socialise’ we shall now never know.
Lynda Lee-Potter, who married at 21 also had an enduring marriage to the same man, Dr Jeremy Lee-Potter. Katharine Whitehorn was married to Gavin Lyall for 45 years although there could be stormy moments as both were big boozers and Lyall, who later suffered from alcoholism, was also a chain smoker who frequently appeared to be living on the frayed ends of his nerves. Geoff Nash worked for the Press Association where he was a highly regarded reporter; Dr Jeremy Lee-Potter had a major career as a doctor but was never in the public eye; Leo Cooper, Jilly’s husband, published military history books but was probably otherwise unknown beyond that milieu, and Katharine Whitehorn’s husband Gavin Lyall wrote thrillers.
These busy writing women probably earned far more than their husbands, whom they frequently wrote about in their columns, and they carved out an affluent and interesting lifestyle for themselves and their families, entirely by their own efforts.
Jilly Cooper became a major personality after her Sunday Times column brought her to public attention for its apparently intimately revelatory content. In her column, Jilly always made a big thing of being blissfully happily married to ‘heavenly’ Leo, as his second wife. It was only much later that the world learned of Leo’s eight-year affair with another woman.
Primarily a fiction-writer, Cooper had her first outing as a writer on Petticoat magazine in the 1960s, where she was noticeably outstanding and her very sexy short stories, highly permissive for the time and later lengthened into novellas with girls’ name titles such as Prudence, Imogen and Bella, had the nation’s young women gripped from week to week.
Cooper, nee Sallitt, comes, like Katharine Whitehorn, from an upper middle-class background although in her case it was army and landowning rather than academic. Trained as a secretary – her Who’s Who entry describes her as a ‘very temporary typist’ – her first job in journalism was as a junior reporter on the Middlesex Independent.
She married Leo in 1961, and was soon writing young, exciting and publishable short stories. In 1968, she met the then editor of the Sunday Times colour supplement at a dinner party who w
as intrigued, and asked her to write a humorous piece about being a young working wife.
The piece duly appeared in the paper and it was obvious that here was a fresh, new and potentially very big talent. Cooper’s forte from the start was writing about her home and family in a modern, upbeat way and Sunday Times readers loved her as a person they thought of as being much like themselves but vastly funnier and kookier. Sunday Times readers were at one with Cooper in all her domestic adventures and mishaps and her persona was, if possible, even more sluttish than Whitehorn’s. She wrote, for example, about redecorating her house and just painting round the pictures, not bothering to remove them first.
Again, this apparent bohemianism was a refreshing antidote to the humourless household advice coming from the average woman’s magazine at the time and Cooper’s life appeared to go from one delightful knockabout calamity to another.
But, as ever with major talents, Cooper’s chatty, friendly style and sometimes excruciating puns hid a fierce ambition. Her cleverness was to come over as an impossibly zany but totally lovable housewife, and her columns were such an enjoyable read that one could fail to notice that the pieces were in fact, brilliantly crafted little masterpieces.
Cooper wrote about her infertility, about her experiences at boarding school, about being a bigger earner than her husband, all in a frothy light-hearted way that sometimes concealed the seriousness of the subject. Often, the candour was more apparent than real – she was, of course, not on oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth but commissioned to amuse readers with her wit and humour.
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