Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  Thalidomide was marketed by the British whisky-, gin- and vodka-maker Distillers until it was taken off the market in late 1961. But 180 million tablets had been sold worldwide, destroying or damaging over 100,000 babies.

  Mr Mason told English he was effectively being blackmailed into accepting a pay-off as part of a cover-up by Distillers. ‘Scandalous’ was the front-page headline just before Christmas 1971. ‘I remember discussing it at the time,’ said Brian Freemantle. ‘And it wasn’t a fitting word, it wasn’t a bad enough word – a big enough word.’26

  The Mail came under pressure to stop any further articles, with threats coming from all sides – including the Government’s lawyers – as court proceedings were active and reporting the story could be subjudice. Other parents also attacked the Mail, as they wanted to accept the settlement that David Mason was blocking. English’s attention moved on and he pretty much let the story go (but the Sunday Times editor Harry Evans stuck with it, finding a way around the legal problem by focusing on the families).

  Scoops were a good sign that the paper was getting back to where it belonged, and everybody at Associated Newspapers knew, scoops or no scoops, that Vere had absolute confidence in his editor and that editorial was entirely English’s domain; editorial was king. Like his forebear Sunny Harmsworth, Vere kicked the management into the backrooms and, said English, ‘let me and my people have the best offices and the best expenses – and the circulation went up’.27 Editors at Associated Newspapers, English said later, were blessed with being totally free to choose their own staff. But only God could choose the proprietor.

  Down at the bottom of the Daily Mail hierarchy David English was also still making his presence felt. One day English pulled his favourite messenger boy aside. ‘So, Charlie,’ he said, ‘what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Stay looking like a bovver boy with not a thought to what lies ahead, or are you actually going to do something positive?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr English,’ Charlie replied. ‘To be honest with you, sir, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.’

  ‘What would you like to be?’ English asked.

  ‘Well, I’d like to be one of those,’ Charlie said, pointing to the reporters. English looked over at the toilers, as they compressed or inflated themselves – depending upon their character – at suddenly being in the editor’s line of sight. Charlie had joined the Mail straight from school and had zero qualifications and, of course, the Daily Mail editor knew this already, having spoken often to the boy. ‘Okay, I give you my word. If you can get me an English A-level at night school, I will get you a job as a journalist.’ Whebell thought he was kidding but the editor stared hard at the boy and said: ‘Oh no, I mean it.’

  A year went by, Charlie’s hair grew and he went to night school, where he learned shorthand and how to type. ‘I got an A-level in English, and I went up to him and I said: “Here it is, Mr English.” And I gave the certificate to him. And within a month, he’d got me a job on a local paper.’ Whebell spent most of his career on the Daily Telegraph and then moved to the United Arab Emirates as production editor on the National, the country’s national newspaper. ‘If it wasn’t for Sir David English I’ve really got no idea what I’d be doing now. I’d probably have ended up working in a factory – Fords of Dagenham. I owe that man everything. He saw something in me that I certainly didn’t see in myself.’28

  9

  How to be Different

  Regular readers of the reborn Daily Mail may well have been mildly bemused when a culinary column called ‘Instant Gourmet’ suddenly appeared, offering recipes on ‘Ancient British Dishes’, and then promptly vanished after only ever offering up one dish. ‘Rook Pie’ didn’t sound too tasty either, with the main ingredients being four rooks (‘use only young birds’) and hard-boiled eggs:

  Skin and draw rooks. Lay the birds on their breasts, cut down each side of the spine and remove back-bone as this makes the birds a little less bitter . . . Not a dish one would want every week – but on occasions tolerable in the right company.1

  In May 1972 David English had insisted, furiously, that space be made in his paper for this cryptic recipe. It was his revenge against Jean Rook, his star columnist who had defected to the evil Express, to which the Mail was still losing readers. She had betrayed him. Rook was the self-proclaimed ‘first lady of Fleet Street’, who’d been a columnist and woman’s editor on English’s Sketch before it took over the Mail. Rook’s Mail column ran on a Wednesday and began with the headline: ‘Introducing a very important lady in your life . . . The lady has views. The lady will amuse . . . The lady makes news – Jean Rook, the Mail ’s new columnist.’

  ‘You’ve seen the headline and already you’re asking a question,’ she wrote, ‘what’s this column all about? It’s about you. And me. What I think about British Rail (!!), David Frost (!!!) and university students (!!!!). What makes me think that my broad and sometimes bloody minded views are worth reading? The fact that thousands of women write to tell me that I’ve said exactly what they think.’2

  Rook’s chatty style and rather silly rhetorical questions would become the template for this kind of writing, satirized so perfectly by Private Eye as the columnist ‘Glenda Slagg’.

  We’ve really got woodworm in Olde Englande, haven’t we? The rot truly is setting in. I was maddened – weren’t you? – to read about bulldozers crunching down a 1490 Hertfordshire farmhouse while ‘weeping villagers’ and protesting policemen looked helplessly on . . .3

  Rook, a lass from the West Riding of Yorkshire, wasn’t afraid of saying what was on her mind and her writing seemed to somehow perfectly embody the opinions of a certain kind of Briton: the lower-middle-class housewife. ‘Talking about nuisances, what secretary can’t tell when her boss has had a row with his wife?’4 or Prince ‘Philip’s pearls of wisdom often drop with a clang. But what do we want . . . a stuffed Duke who daren’t open his mouth?’5

  The Mail ’s top Femail seemed very 1970s glam in her byline photo, but in the flesh she looked, dressed and acted like a brassy blonde barmaid from a pub on Hull docks; she had a boxer’s jaw, wore leopard-print outfits, had exploding hair and a permanent sunbed tan. John Junor, the fifty-three-year-old predatory womanizer who edited the Sunday Express, liked to have pretty young females on his staff and it was his lunch invite that led Rook away from the Mail. But when ‘J. J.’ saw what the forty-one-year-old Femail-in-chief looked like in the flesh . . . he recommended her to the editor of the Daily Express instead.

  ‘Once your name is worth selling, the trick in Fleet Street is to walk from one side of the pavement to the other for more money,’ wrote Rook in her autobiography but she added that there were other reasons to be tempted away.

  I was disturbed to find the Mail an unhappy ship, right from its spectacular launch. Perhaps because of the Sketch/ Mail merger – at the start, two people for every one job, and one bound to lose it – it was a back stabbing staff. And, given half a chance, your Mail colleagues would stab you front and sides for good measure. The Mail whined, and griped, and could never raise a smile at its earnest self . . . even under ever-inspirational English, I wasn’t enjoying what should have been the Total Tabloid, but was in fact a greyish, moaning publication, with such vicious in-house politics that the walls ran blood.6

  It was a slap across the face for the Daily Mail editor; his paper was aimed at women and to lose his star female columnist to his deadliest rival was a nightmare. David English needed to find a replacement and he needed to find her fast. English knew more than most that there’s nothing more pointless than a columnist with no opinions – the Mail ’s top Femail had to appeal to the housewife, she had to leap to judgement, because that’s what real housewives did, in real life. Most people don’t pause and ponder, they don’t police their thoughts and their language when sharing a cup of tea or a glass of wine with their friends. And English, from day one, wanted his paper to be ‘a conversation between friends’.

  The Mai
l is a newspaper and a product, not a court of law. Never mind depth or ‘truth’, Rook’s replacement had to be bloody entertaining; she had to be absolutely sure of what she was absolutely sure of – at least for the moment or two she sat at the typewriter. Jean Rook had been a natural. She could file 1,000 words armed with the flimsiest of ‘facts’ and she may even have felt it all for real, for a while at least. It quickly became a formula, though, but Rook’s readers loved her for it. She’d instinctively known how to pander to their prejudices without challenging them – if a Mail reader wanted a sermon over breakfast she could subscribe to Church Times instead. English had conjured Jean Rook up himself on the Sketch in the first place, and he could do it again; he’d write the bloody column himself if he had to. But maybe there was another solution.

  Probably David English’s single greatest gift as an editor was as a spotter and promoter of talent. Ian Wooldridge, for instance, had been a revered cricket writer for a decade before English gave him a full-blown sports column in 1972 – he covered ten Olympic Games for the paper, several football and rugby World Cups, numerous heavyweight boxing bouts and he spent many a sunny and not-so-sunny afternoon at Wimbledon – he was a master of the written word like Vincent Mulchrone, and far more than ‘just’ a sports writer: Wooldridge’s twice-weekly columns were read by people who didn’t even care that much for sport. Another columnist was the dapper gossip writer Nigel Dempster, who pointed his pen at the marital foibles of playboys, royalty and the mildly famous for his ‘Dempster’s Diary’ column.

  English had inherited the urbane Wooldridge, who had started out on tiny weekly newspapers on the south coast alongside English and Freemantle, from the old broadsheet Daily Mail. Quick-talking and charismatic deputy Mail diarist Dempster – who had been a vacuum cleaner salesman as a young man – was also promoted from within when English’s first two choices as diarist didn’t work out.7 Dempster had been on a New York stint at the time, after falling out with his predecessor, where he scooped an interview with a drunk Richard Burton about his break-up with Elizabeth Taylor.

  It was English who realized these two writers could do a lot more than that which they’d been asked, and he pushed them firmly and permanently out front. Their columns became two of the three pillars upon which he set his new Daily Mail. He needed the third after Rook’s defection to the Daily Express.

  And one of the heads sitting there quietly among all those typewriters in the Mail features department was an unremarkable thirty-seven-year-old Femail from Lancashire, looking out from under eyebrows like McDonald’s archways: Lynda Lee-Potter. She was on a day off when the call came.

  ‘Our features editor phoned up and said the editor wants you to come in and do a column, and I said “Oh, right”,’ she wrote. ‘I went in and did it. Every week I thought somebody else would probably take over.’8

  Nobody ever did. Lynda Lee-Potter, Wooldridge and Dempster were all in place within the first couple of years of the new paper and would underpin the Daily Mail until serious illness and the grim reaper scythed them away three decades later, within a few years of each other.

  ‘When he [English] first asked me to be a columnist, he told me a column was like a microcosm of a newspaper. “You need to make people laugh, make them think, make them cry and make them cross.”’9

  Lynda Lee-Potter’s style – based on Jean Rook’s template and forced upon her in person every Tuesday evening in his office by her editor before her column went to press – is utterly woven into the fabric of the paper. Lee-Potter was the voice of the paper, speaking directly to Vere’s target audience: middle-class mums and housewives. Yet when Lee-Potter had first joined the broadsheet Mail in Gordon McKenzie’s features department, she had been a writer of tame little tales and did not seem by nature to be as sharp, witty and bitchy as Fleet Street’s foul-mouthed and raucous busty barmaid Jean Rook. Lynda had fully expected to be one of those fired like so many others – all eight Femail writers, for instance, had been executed – when it merged with the Sketch. But English saw something he liked in this suburban housewife Lynda Lee-Potter – or Lynda Berrison, as she’d called herself in her short-lived days on the stage.

  Born into the Higginson family in the Lancashire mining town of Leigh, Lynda was northern and working class just like Jean Rook (Rook had been raised by an engineer and a cinema usherette on the direct opposite side of the country). Lynda Higginson was the granddaughter of a coal miner who had earned a little extra spare cash by running an illegal bookmakers from his front room. Her father had also started out down the pit but climbed free to become a painter and decorator. Lynda and her mother always dreamed of being ‘posh’ and, after Leigh’s all-girl grammar school, eighteen-year-old Lynda headed south to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

  ‘I got on the train at Warrington with a Lancashire accent,’ she wrote in her autobiography, Class Act, ‘and got off at Euston without it, which meant I had to speak very slowly for a very long time. My fellow students were mostly middle-class and I kept my background to myself. I described my father as a painter without adding “and decorator”. This made things very tricky when people asked what kind of pictures he painted. “Sort of abstract,” I said.’10

  Shortly before she graduated from the Guildhall she also worked at a coffee shop near the Whitehall Theatre, where the actor-cum-manager Brian Rix was about to stage a ‘Whitehall Farce’ called Dry Rot. She auditioned and won a part. Rix later described her as an ‘awkward, snub-nosed girl’ and said it was her croaking voice that won her the part. ‘She was awful,’ he concluded.11

  Lynda left the stage when, in 1957, she married a student doctor called Jeremy Lee-Potter, the elder son of Air Marshal Sir Patrick Lee-Potter, pulling her into the upper ranks and skipping the middle classes altogether. Her husband got a job as an RAF doctor and they moved to Aden (now Yemen), where she started writing for the local paper about life as an expat housewife. When they returned to England, she joined the Mail and became, for the most part, an interviewer, with the disconcerting technique of scribbling shorthand in a notebook on her lap while never taking her eyes off her subject. Then Jean Rook flew the Mail nest, just as youngsters such as Rod Gilchrist, another rising star on English’s rejuvenated paper, and Lee-Potter were settling in for a thirty-year stay.

  ‘Lynda was a great believer in taking your opportunities when they came along,’ Gilchrist told the Guardian.

  She had been writing a series of personality interviews called Face to Face. They were almost always warm and unprovocative. That was her style in those days. But that was not what Sir David wanted; he wanted sharp claws and blood to be drawn, and Lynda was to become the new ‘she cat’ of the media, and take on Jean Rook of the Daily Express and, by God, she had to beat her. It was not Lynda’s natural forte. But the genius of David was that he knew what Lynda should be telling the readers of his newspaper even if in those days she didn’t. Lynda would emerge shaken from her meetings with Sir David, and in need of a glass of red wine with her friends. Of course it didn’t take her long to learn. And along with Nigel Dempster and Ian Wooldridge she became one of the three stars on whose bylines you could sell the paper.12

  Lynda Lee-Potter of the Daily Mail and Jean Rook of the Daily Express vied for the title but there was really only ever one First Lady of Fleet Street and she wasn’t even a journalist. Margaret Thatcher was a politician and David English’s kinda gal. They had a lot in common, both were nuclear-fuelled among coal-burning colleagues, and both came from humble lower-middle-class backgrounds. And the new Mail ’s political voice needed to be crisp and clear: the paper – unlike English – had been born a Tory and has never faltered from the Conservative cause (at election time).

  Margaret Thatcher, too, had always been a Tory. By the age of twenty-one, the grocer’s daughter from Grantham was already chairman of the Oxford Union Conservative Association and in the election of 1959 won the safe Tory seat of Finchley – right in the heart of Harmsworth country, next
to where Northcliffe himself is buried in north London. Unlike almost every other Tory hack in Fleet Street, David English ‘talent-spotted’ her early. Thatcher was, of course, a great story for a paper aimed at females: a woman’s bid to be leader of her party and maybe one day – mad as it sounded – even Prime Minister. English and Thatcher first met and became ‘affably friendly’ in 1970, when he was still editing the Sketch and she was Education Secretary in Ted Heath’s Government.

  A year later, and ‘Thatcher Thatcher Milk Snatcher’ was being savaged for taking free milk away from schoolchildren and Jean Rook, at the end of the Mail ’s first year as a tabloid, defended her, writing:

  Come off it Mrs Thatcher . . . Let’s see you hit back with a bit of the snooty, steel-blue-eyed bitch! . . . I do wish Mrs Thatcher would stop behaving like the frail, pale, Most Misunderstood Girl in the School. I do beg the Education Minister not to snivel into her initialled lace hankie that ‘you don’t know what it’s like when everyone hates you’. Show some spunk Margaret . . . You’ve got it in you. In fact I’d say you’ve got it in you to be quite a bit of a snooty, hard-hatted, steel-blue-eyed bitch. Show us.13

  A few months later Lynda Lee-Potter was less effusive; she wrote up a fairly flat and unconvincing interview – probably because she was flatly unconvinced by Thatcher (some colleagues suspect miner’s daughter Lynda was never really a Tory), writing: ‘She doesn’t look like a girl who used to serve behind the counter of a grocer’s shop in her school holidays.’14