FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  The Dominions Fellowship Trust office was just off Sloane Square, by the side of Peter Jones, which was great as my parents and friends could come and chat to me through my window. The boss was called Miss Macdonald of Sleat (pronounced Slate); she was very grand and had been a childhood friend of the Queen Mother. What the Trust did was to look after students from the Commonwealth coming to study, often on scholarships, in the UK. We had, for instance, to find them places to stay during the holidays if they couldn’t go home. This involved endless letters to potential hostesses and students, which I would type and send off – quite often in the wrong envelopes, so that I had to spend a good deal of time standing by the pillar box on the pavement outside the office praying that the postman would come and give me back my letters because otherwise disaster would strike. ‘Dear Lady Fotherington, thank you so much for offering to take Njogo Ceesay for the Christmas holidays. He is twenty-four years old, very dark and a little unusual to look at because of the tribal scars on his cheeks, but he has a heart of gold, is an excellent student and I am sure you will find him a perfect guest’ would be en route to Mr Ceesay, and ‘Dear Mr Ceesay, I am delighted to tell you that Lady Fotherington has kindly agreed to host you for the Christmas holidays. She is a very large lady with unusual blue hair and you might find her intimidating at first, but she had a heart of gold, etc., etc.’ was on its way to Lady Fotherington.

  I loved the postman because he always let me go through the letters to find mine, even though it was against all the rules. He used to call me his Little Ray of Sunshine.

  Eighteen months later, I left my old ladies and went to work as a typist at Westminster Press Provincial Newspapers’s office in London. I didn’t want to work on a paper, I had no ambition to become a journalist (‘Men don’t like career girls’), but Moira, who was on the Sunday Times by then, had begun her own successful newspaper career at Westminster Press as a temp (which is probably why I was offered the job) and she persuaded me to make the move. I worked for the same boss as she had – a wonderful woman with nicotine-stained hair and fingers, called Margaret Pierce, who put together daily women’s pages, including fashion articles, which were sent out to the provincial papers in ‘our’ group, the main one being the Northern Echo of Darlington. I was happy in the typing pool with a couple of new friends, doing letters, and Margaret would occasionally pluck me out and get me to work with her on fashion captions or choosing photographs.

  And then a vacancy came up for a fashion assistant at the Daily Express and Margaret and Moira urged me to apply. I wished I hadn’t when I got there. My boss was Jill Butterfield, aka the Golden Girl of Fleet Street, whose photo appeared on the sides of London buses and I found her – and everyone else for that matter – utterly terrifying. My biggest shock was the swearing – my parents never swore (strangely, I happened to be watching the television with them when Kenneth Tynan said the F-word on it for the very first time; none of us made any comment, it might never have happened). The only person who took any notice of me was the cartoonist Artie – he was short and plump and half-Indian, I think, and whenever there was a particularly gruesome murder, everyone used to tease him by shouting out, ‘Where were you yesterday, Artie?’ and Artie would look guilty.

  I don’t think I dared raise my eyes far off the floor of the Express for most of the time I was there, though I did eventually make a lifelong friend in my protector and ally against the Golden Girl: Meriel McCooey, who was the senior fashion assistant. My job was mostly to telephone manufacturers and call in clothes that the Golden Girl had seen at fashion shows and wanted to feature on her pages, and then to help Meriel carry them to the studios where she had arranged for them to be photographed. And I was supposed to contribute IDEAS at brainstorming sessions which were agony because I never had any, and even if I had, I would have been too shy of being laughed at to mention them.

  It’s hard to imagine now, but the Daily Express was the cutting-edge newspaper at that time. It had a brilliant associate editor, Harold Keeble, who understood the importance of layout, and the paper employed two legendary art directors: Ray Hawkey, who went on to the Observer (he also designed Len Deighton’s state-of-the art book covers as well as the first paperback James Bonds), and Michael Rand, who became art director of the Sunday Times and designer of its colour magazine – the first one published in Britain. This meant that on our fashion pages the photographs were used bigger and more dramatically than in any other paper – or even in most magazines – so all the best photographers were keen to work for us.

  Our main fashion photographer was the legendary John French – a tall, thin, elegant man in a grey suit who looked exactly like a crane (the bird sort). He never actually took a photograph himself but had young male assistants who, when John had posed the model girl to his liking and called out ‘STILL!’ in his grand camp voice, pressed the button to snap the picture.

  John French was generous and encouraged these assistants in their own careers, and nearly all of them went on to great things – particularly David Bailey, of course. I often met him at the John French studio when I was carrying clothes in to be photographed; we were almost the same age (he was twenty-two, I was twenty) but I was nervous of him as I had never met anyone like this cocky, confident, energetic, handsome lad in a black leather jacket with an irreverent sense of humour. (‘ “Hello,” he lied’ was a favourite greeting of his that still makes me laugh.)

  Years later he had to take a portrait of me and, to make me relax and forget my nerves, he threatened to undo the zip of his flies – I can’t say that made me relax exactly, but it did make me scream. After he had joined Vogue and become famous, a story went round about Bailey and a model who was considered a bit dim; I have no idea whether it is true. The tale goes that the model was posing for him at the Vogue studios and he was making the usual encouraging remarks: ‘Great, great. Wonderful. Great. Hold that pose, darlin’ . . .’ Then he walked out of the studio and caught a plane to Paris where he had lunch, and when he got back to Vogue hours later, the model said, ‘I haven’t moved!’

  Back at the Express, at John French’s suggestion, Bailey, who had just gone independent, brought his own portfolio in to show the art director. Almost immediately it got lost but was eventually found under a carpet in Harold Keeble’s office – perhaps Bailey’s life would have been different if it hadn’t turned up. He was booked for a sitting (as they were known in those days, rather than ‘shoots’) at the studio in Shepherd Market where he was working then; it was for a fashion feature being organised by Meriel called ‘Autumn Girl’. The picture they took became an iconic one – it was, apparently, the reason Vogue magazine signed up Bailey, which led him to fame and fortune. I say ‘they’ took, because Meriel was an inspired stylist and it was she who chose the clothes and the model, Paulene Stone, and took the stuffed squirrel to the studio (squirrels = autumn). Bailey photographed Paulene kneeling, as if talking to the squirrel, instead of standing facing the camera in the usual model stance of that time; it was a wonderful picture – the Express used it across the top half of a page – and nothing in fashion photography was ever the same again. In fact it got quite silly, with photographers and fashion editors vying with each other to do something ever more ‘different’. Photographer John Cowan pictured models hang-gliding or was it parachuting, I can’t remember. Molly Parkin at Nova had them posing in bed together, pretending to be lesbians, as well as girls in white dresses and real diamonds on top of a mountain in real snow. My own personal best came later, when I had moved to the Sunday Times: I hired a horse, A LIVE HORSE, and took it in a lift up to the photographer Barry Warner’s studio in Kensington, where we photographed a model sitting on it wearing a selection of leather ‘riding’ boots (these were the point of my fashion story). The art department at the Sunday Times cut the picture so that you could hardly see the horse – it could almost have been a patch of paint daubed on to the background paper, and I’d gone to all that trouble . . .

  Almost a
s much trouble as when (once again for the Sunday Times) I decided to photograph a copy of one of Yves Saint Laurent’s sequined dresses on a trapeze artist. I contacted Bertram Mills Circus (still going strong in those days) and was put in touch with a charming member of the family, Cyril Mills, who was quite enthusiastic about the idea and persuaded their own real trapeze star, Shirley Fossett, to dress up in the glittery garment and do her high-flying act – spinning in mid-air from her teeth – for the photographer Norman Eales. He did a dazzling picture of her whirling round in space, but I don’t have even an old yellowed newspaper cutting of it now. Norman Eales died many years ago, but I wonder if this fantastic image still exists somewhere: I hope so. We were all so careless of our fashion pictures then, just chucking them in the dustbin when the drawers of the layout table got too full.

  In the giant open-plan office at the Daily Express, which had banners strung across it saying ACCURACY FIRST LAST AND ALWAYS and GET IT IN YOUR FIRST LINE, GET IT IN YOUR HEADLINE AND IN PICTURES MOST OF ALL, I sat next to the famous cartoonist Osbert Lancaster. He was about fifty and looked exactly like an upper-class gentleman from one of his own cartoons – immaculately dressed in pinstriped suits, with a flamboyant moustache, and a cigarette held elegantly between his fingers. He used to come into the office fairly late, do his cartoon for next day, and then leave. Sometimes I was allowed a say in what his main character, Maudie Littlehampton, wore – a suit, a dress, spots or stripes, etc. Was it this that encouraged me to invite him for drinks at my flat? Otherwise what on earth possessed me to do such a thing? Was I unwittingly social climbing? (No one talks about social climbing these days, it’s known as ‘networking’ and is perfectly respectable.) I was such a weird mixture of recklessness and extreme timidity. Fifty-five years later, writing this, I still feel horrified at the thought of my invitation, remembering how, having issued it, I was overcome by total panic. I couldn’t think of anyone to invite with him, so in utter desperation I got a group of girlfriends from my secretarial schooldays to come. They were thrilled to meet the great man, and sat at his feet looking at him adoringly all evening. I think that he might even have enjoyed himself.

  A working day at the Daily Express didn’t end when you went home in the evenings: about three times a week the phone would ring and it would be someone at the office wanting you to go back in to a write a caption for a picture of the Queen opening a school, or a film star on the red carpet at a première in Leicester Square or, basically, any photograph involving a woman and clothes or hats. They could easily have done the captions themselves – perhaps they just liked torturing us.

  During the summer of the year I was at the Express, I was asked by someone on the William Hickey page (the gossip column) to give them a hand with their annual Ladies’ Day at Ascot races story. ‘This is what I’d like you to do,’ the journalist instructed me. ‘Once you’re there, try and spot a celebrity and then follow him or her round for the rest of the afternoon and note down everyone they speak to, what they are wearing, and so on.’ I was incredibly lucky – the moment I arrived I spotted the Aga Khan and followed his handsome figure all afternoon. Sure enough, he was always talking to someone famous – of course, I said to myself, keeping a discreet distance so he wouldn’t realise I was stalking him, his friends would all be celebrities like him. I was thrilled at the brilliant job I was doing, jotting everything down in my notebook like a real reporter, and then I went back to London to hand in my notes and accept lavish praise. To my puzzlement, as I walked into the office, the first person I saw was the ‘Aga Khan’ . . . who, it turned out, was Peter Sen, a British-Indian reporter working on the William Hickey column whom I hadn’t come across at the paper before. Of course he was talking to all the famous people at Ascot because he was doing the job I thought I was doing.

  I was given the task of looking after a woman who’d won a fashion competition we had run on our pages. The prize was a free couture outfit, plus the accessories that went with it, and a day in London visiting the couturier – John Cavanagh – to choose it all and be measured and so on. The Golden Girl had decided in advance that the winner had to have a little black dress because the fashion page was going to offer a paper pattern of the garment that was chosen, and she wanted this to be a party frock. The winner, poor nice Mrs X (I can’t remember her name), lived in the country, and all she wanted was a useful but pretty woollen suit and some smart everyday shoes and matching handbag, but she was made to have the little black dress instead, and then of course the accessories that went with it. I was sad about her disappointment, but I felt even more like a traitor when, later on, I was asked by the picture desk to book a pretend fashion sitting with a model, April Ashley, who, one of the news reporters had discovered, had only recently been a MAN. ‘Get her to pull her skirt up her thighs, make her cross her legs, get a shot of her cleavage,’ they instructed me. I just wanted to cry because April Ashley was charming, and really believed she was modelling for a fashion picture and not a lurid story about her sex change.

  Michael Parkinson was on the sports desk at the Express when I first went there; he was more or less unknown then, and was always kind to Meriel and me, which is why, ages later, after I’d joined the Sunday Times and had been roped into helping with a What Famous People Want in Their Stocking story (an annual newspaper Christmas favourite), I rang Parky, now a ‘celebrity’, to ask him the question. ‘I can’t believe you are still doing this kind of crap, Brigid,’ he said, and I remembered that slight feeling of shame I always had at the Express.

  One of my weirdest experiences there had nothing to do with journalism: it was my first and only experience of SMOG. No one who has not experienced smog can imagine what it was like: I stepped out of the famous black-glass Express building in Fleet Street and seemingly into oblivion – a dense white cloud through which you could see nothing. There was a deathly silence, no vehicle could move, so it was a question of walking home. It can’t be that difficult, I thought, even in this fog – but I ended up, not in Sloane Square where I had been headed, but on the other side of Waterloo Bridge: I had not even known as I walked, peering into the enveloping blankness, that I had crossed over the Thames. The only thing since that has felt anything like that evening was Antony Gormley’s exhibition Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery in 2007, in which he put ‘smog’ in large glass boxes that visitors had to try and make their way through – you could see that people were unnerved by the experience.

  Not long before I left the Express, I came across a company called Nylons Unlimited which sold stockings not in pairs, but in threes. We all wore stockings then, and when they laddered you were left with one that didn’t match any others, so this seemed like a good idea, and I mentioned it to the Golden Girl and she said, ‘Why don’t you write the story yourself?’ Panic-stricken, I wrote and rewrote my two paragraphs about fifty times and then handed them in; my first line went something like: ‘In the middle of the night John Jones [I don’t recall his real name] leapt out of bed with a really good idea . . .’ This was greeted with loud guffaws by everyone, and the Golden Girl made a copy of my little article to pass round the office for a laugh. I felt a complete fool.

  I thought of this some time ago when I happened to read the obituary of someone called Julian Thompson who had been chairman of Sotheby’s, as well as its distinguished Chinese porcelain expert. He joined the company aged eighteen and the first thing he did was to drop a stack of priceless Chinese famille rose plates he was carrying, which broke into a million pieces. That was much worse than my writing debut – but he went on to be head of the firm, and I went on to be a Young Meteor; so, if you are starting out on a career, making mistakes and blunders, and reading this, be cheered.

  After about a year of feeling like a fish out of water at the Express, I was offered a job as fashion assistant on the Sunday Times (where Moira was still working) and I left the black-glass building on Fleet Street for good – though it never quite left me. Even now, all these decades later,
when I hear a telephone ringing in the early evening – even if I am somewhere like Kazakhstan – my first reaction is a sinking heart because I think I am going to be called back to the office to write a fashion caption.

  Plate Section

  My French great-great-grandfather’s silk factory, Nakanda, in Bengal. The drawing was done by his son, Albert Dubus, in 1862. Quite recently AW and I went to India on a mission to try and find this place – we failed, but are still on the case.

  My mother, left, and her sister Dorothy (Aunt Thea) – both looking distinctly apprehensive – with Jacko, their father’s pet gibbon; my grandmother and the ayah are behind. The picture was taken in their garden in Madras (Chennai).

  My father and mother with my half-brother David and my sister Moira – all looking incredibly smart as they stroll on the promenade in Port Said, Suez Canal in 1935. Ships travelling to and from India stopped here briefly; I don’t know if the family were on their way home, or going out.

  At The Homestead, my great-uncle’s house in Kotagiri, Nilgiri Hills, in 1947, with Mum and Swaller and Tessa. I have just made my First Communion and am proudly showing off my white dress and veil.

  Indian summer: in Jabalpur, 1941, with my beloved Ayah-Ma.