The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  THE BOOTLE BOY

  Les Hinton was born in Bootle, Merseyside, in 1944, the son of a British Army sergeant. For the first 15 years of his life he lived in Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Germany, Singapore, and numerous places in Britain. In 1959, his family emigrated to Adelaide, South Australia, where he became a copy boy in a small evening newspaper owned by a rising young publisher, Rupert Murdoch. In the next 52 years, as Murdoch grew his empire, Hinton travelled the world, first as a correspondent, later as one of Murdoch’s most senior executives. He lives with his wife Kath in New York and London. This is his first book.

  For my Kath,

  thank you, thank you

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  Published by Scribe in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and North America 2018

  Copyright © Les Hinton 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  9781925322828 (Australian edition)

  9781911617013 (UK edition)

  9781925548730 (e-book)

  CiP records for this title are available from the British Library and the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  CHAPTERS

  1: Uncle Bill’s wedding ring

  2: 149 St John’s Road

  3: There’s a minefield at the bottom of our yard

  4: Don’t mention Hitler

  5: Guglielmo’s happy voice

  6: ‘Yes, Mr Murdoch’

  7: ‘Christ, Hinton, don’t you know . . .’

  8: Frank and Lilian

  9: Warm beer, cold rain

  10: Hired. Fired. Hired

  11: The Dirty Digger storms Fleet Street

  12: Bombs, bullets, and a shaving cut

  13: Coward at war

  14: Rupert’s raiders

  15: Johnny Rotten’s leather jacket

  16: The psychic and the White House

  17: Pissing with Picasso

  18: Down the Fox hole

  19: Lost in Hollywood

  20: Fleet Street RIP

  21: Wappingworld

  22: Twilight

  23: Damsel in distress

  24: No thanks, Rupert

  25: Barbarians in the elevator

  26: Thirteen days in July

  27: Meltdown

  28: Draining the swamp

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  Uncle Bill’s wedding ring

  A life builds on itself, but its architecture follows no rules. It can appear at the beginning to have a strong foundation and then be swept away in the first storm, mystifying those who failed to see the flaws in its design. It can seem ramshackle, yet rebuild itself to withstand whirlwinds. My own life has surprised itself again and again. In my first 15 years, we moved so many times I didn’t understand what people meant when they talked about the comfort of being ‘home’. I still don’t get it, but eventually, when I was older, I worked out my own personal definition. We lived in Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Singapore, and the British occupied zone in West Germany — all places where, for one imperial reason or another, the British had some kind of control. They were the dying days of the Empire, and everywhere we went the sun was setting on it.

  Between these postings — most of them lasting a couple of years — we existed in a limbo the Army called ‘transit’, which meant spending weeks or months any place the military could make a deal to accommodate us. We stayed at seaside boarding-houses in the seedy charm of Blackpool by the promenade and near the pier in Southend-on-Sea. We lived in a green, corrugated-iron hut, insulated with asbestos, in a Liverpool suburb; and spent six months in a worn-out village hotel in the Scottish Highlands.

  The rest of my life might be explained by the ingrained restlessness this childhood wandering created in me. I went to so many schools I cannot be sure of the count — in some, I was only there a couple of weeks — but they number somewhere around 13 in 10 years. I didn’t keep any childhood friends until the age of 15, when Dad left the Army and we went to live in Australia. The only name I remember is Brenda Laidler in Singapore, but she hardly even noticed me.

  These foreign places evaporated behind us. Everyone was a nomad, so the families we left melted away as we did, off to their own new postings and own new worlds.

  The only constant place for me was Bootle, a once-prosperous Lancashire hamlet, jammed hard against the docks of Liverpool, and shattered by war. If ever I had roots, they were here, and if a life’s foundation begins with the ground from which it emerges then tough and blighted Bootle, and the people there who loved me, must go some way to understanding mine. First, I found safety and happiness there; then, in a complicated way, it was terrifying; and then, almost when I wasn’t looking, the heart of my childhood was lost forever, its people gone and all its physical evidence erased.

  Malcolm Street, where I was born, was a narrow, grey honeycomb of cobblestones, a dead-end flanked by small, bay-fronted Victorian terraces with no bathrooms, hot water, or indoor plumbing, except for a tap at each scullery sink. At the bottom of each hard-paved backyard was a brick outhouse.

  At one end of the street, beyond a high red-brick wall, panting steam trains billowed coal smoke that clung to windows and washing. At the other end, St John’s Road ran parallel to the mighty Liverpool docks half a mile west, near the point where the grey waters of the River Mersey flowed into Liverpool Bay. Auntie Gladys’ house was here, and just before dawn on Saturday 19 February 1944, I was born in her front parlour and placed on the floor in a laundry basket prepared with white cotton and lace. It was 110 days before D-Day, so there was a lot of grief to counterbalance this happy family moment.

  A few doors down, on the corner of Malcolm Street, at 149 St John’s Road, was the home of my uncrushable grandmother, Edith Emily Bruce, the widowed mother of 10. Her house was the chaotic and crowded gathering place for the extended Bruce family. Our house was three doors away from Auntie Gladys, who was my mother’s identical twin; their sister, Emily, lived a hundred yards away; brothers and cousins were a walk.

  The four-page edition of the Liverpool Echo announcing my birth carried more significant news: ‘STUTTGART Attacked In GREAT STRENGTH By Our HEAVIES’ … ‘Battering For Great Nazi Rail Centre’ … ‘NAZIS FALL BACK’ … ‘DEAD GERMANS IN HEAPS’. By the time I was born, the Luftwaffe had already devastated our dockside neighbourhood. After London, Merseyside got the worst of the Blitz; newspapers said bombs destroyed or damaged up to 90 per cent of the homes in Bootle.

  Merseyside was the key western port in the Battle of the Atlantic, and destroying its docks and railway system was central to the Nazi effort to starve and subjugate the country. Britain was isolated from occupied Europe, and ships carrying food and arms from the United States and Canada had to reach here past a blockade of enemy U-boats.

  Living in the middle of this was my family of cleaning ladies, cooks, seamstresses, boilermakers, dockworkers, and tailors. Their terraced homes were in the bull’s-eye, sandwiched between railway lines and docks. They had nowhere to go except the uncertain safety of their Anderson shelters, the build-it-yourself refuges that came with a spanner, nuts and bolts, and a page o
f instructions. An Anderson was less than 6-foot high, not much longer, and intended to accommodate six people. Each day, they carried gas masks to their jobs in the factories and wharves nearby, past the ruins and wrecked ships. Above them, tethered by long cables, were the floating hulks of barrage balloons, there to thwart low flying attacks. At night, they lived behind blackout curtains.

  The worst time was the May blitz of 1941, Merseyside’s deadliest air raid. In seven days, 680 German bombers dropped 960 tons of bombs and 112,000 firebombs. The May blitz killed more than 1700 people on Merseyside, including Uncle Bill, my mother’s brother. He was the quiet son in a raucous family, a tailor, tall and thin with horn-rimmed spectacles. He went to work as an air raid warden on 4 May and was never seen again. In the ruin of a warehouse, they found a left hand and knew it was Uncle Bill’s by the wedding ring engraved with the name of Rose, his wife. He was 34.

  The scale of events overwhelmed such family tragedies. Mr and Mrs Richard Cruise, of Kirkdale, lost their three sons — Harry, William, and Peter — in action within eight months, and that only rated a short single column in the Echo.

  I was born 18 months before the war ended, but in Europe the obliteration of German cities had already begun. When I was two days old, The Times of London reported that 2000 Allied aircraft had mounted ‘the greatest daylight air assault of the war’. The night before, 1000 RAF bombers dropped 2300 tons on Leipzig alone.

  Liverpool did what it could to live a normal life. A front-page advert in the Echo announced that Vera Lynn, the wartime singer famed as the British Forces’ Sweetheart, was appearing at the Empire Theatre, two performances at 5.20pm and 7.45pm. Gentleman Jim, starring Errol Flynn, was showing at the Commodore, our local cinema.

  The Echo’s conscientious editors found space to correct a mistake — a judge at Liverpool Assizes had not described the plaintiffs in a case as ‘abominable’ but ‘admirable’.

  An anxious Mr Edmund Percy wrote to the Editor:

  Whilst one hails with delight the advent of a few oranges in this country, one views with dismay and disgust the amount of orange peel carelessly thrown upon our streets and sidewalks. Quite apart from untidyness [sic] this is a very dangerous practice and is likely to lead to very serious, if not fatal, accidents, especially in the blackout.

  The peril of Mr Percy’s killer orange peel is overshadowed on the page opposite, beneath dense columns of type headlined ‘Local Casualties — News Of Our Men in The Forces’. The bleak listing of Merseyside’s latest dead, missing, and captured is broken with tiny headshots of the smiling, tragic faces of young men in uniform. The headlines three pages later provide the context for Liverpool’s grief — ‘NAZIS’ GREAT Anzio LOSSES’ … ‘AIR, SEA ONSLAUGHT’ ... ‘Furious Gun Duels’ … ‘CASUALTIES “ENORMOUS”’.

  My big sister Marilyn was three years old when war began. She remembers the noise and how buildings shook as the bombs fell, and being forbidden from using the top bunks because sleeping there meant being the first to die. During raids, the family shelter filled with the howls of Annie Laurie, the family’s Scottish Terrier, who Mum said was ‘shell-shocked’ and driven crazy by the blitz.

  In the panic of Bootle’s first air raid, Marilyn — we always called her Mal — slipped from the satin-covered eiderdown in which our mother had wrapped her, and bounced down the stairs. Next morning, as the family gathered in the back room at 149, my grandmother was less annoyed by the bombs than her daughter’s carelessness. ‘Well,’ she said, picking up her bruised and swollen granddaughter, ‘if Hitler doesn’t get her, you certainly will.’

  Along with the entire nation, my family was placed on a strict wartime diet to ration supplies of sugar, butter, margarine, cheese, jam, bacon, ham, and poultry. Ration books were buff-coloured for most people, but when my mother was expecting me she received a special green version, which meant extra eggs and milk, and the pick of what fruit there was. Blue books were for children between five and 15, guaranteeing more meat, fruit, and milk.

  Ministry of Food advertising lauded the versatility of rationed food, even offering recipes. ‘No limit to the tempting dishes you can make with dried eggs,’ it promised.

  Other advertising offered help in coping with the stresses of the time, promoting numerous and improbable cures for wartime nerves. Beecham’s Powders showed a woman’s anguished face with the line, ‘I can’t go on’. Beecham’s, it promised, was ‘a quick and certain remedy’ for ‘nerve pains’ — ‘thousands upon thousands resort to it with gladness the moment the attack commences’, adding, ‘Also recommended for toothaches, colds, and chills.’

  For suffering children evacuated away from their families and the bombing, help was at hand — ‘How Lucozade mothers home-sick kiddies.’ Three or four glasses a day was the recommended dose.

  Even chocolate was a necessity — ‘Education officers all over the country have ordered supplies of Fry’s chocolate as emergency rations for children. Because chocolate is a most valuable, highly-concentrated and energy-giving food, it is just the thing to keep children going in the event of temporary food-dislocation by air raids.’

  Families were scattered by the war. In 1941, my father, Frank Arthur Hinton, was already enlisted when Mum joined the women’s branch of the Army, the ATS — Auxiliary Territorial Service. She signed on while angry after a row with my dad, the cause of which she since forgot. It was an impulsive thing to do, especially since she had a five-year-old daughter. The recruitment office was unsympathetic when she returned next day, and declined to cancel her application.

  Marilyn was sent to live with my father’s parents, Frank and Magdalene Hinton, at their flat in Huyton, eight miles east. Huyton was not a Luftwaffe target. When the air raid siren sounded, instead of running to the public shelter, the family sat it out in the windowless hall of the flat. Grandad Hinton wore a big, black surgical boot on his left foot and was too slow to get to the shelter. He was a chef and had worn the boot since contracting blood poisoning after cleaning a contaminated rabbit.

  My father’s parents had a three-bedroom flat, with an indoor bathroom, and a kitchen with hot and cold running water. In the living room was a small electric fire; Marilyn had never seen one. Trees grew along the street, and wartime rationing somehow had less impact in the home of a chef. Visitors were offered tea, sandwiches, and cake, which sailed into the living room aboard a glistening chrome trolley. At Sunday lunch, strawberries and cream was served for ‘afters’. Grandad Hinton was not so fearsome as first indicated by his wintry face and alarming limp. In the evenings, he would sit in his chair crafting butterflies and spiders out of silver wrapping paper, allowing himself a little smile as he presented them to Mal. Together, they planted apple seeds in a window box because Marilyn imagined they would quickly become trees.

  When I was born, the war in Europe had 15 months to run, but the last air raid had been two years before. The closest I came to wartime action was when I was two and my mother rushed with me into the street when an explosion rattled our windows. She said people were running and crying, and a column of smoke was rising from a fighter plane that had crashed in St John’s Road. It was a Fleet Air Arm Fairey Firefly fighter. The pilot bailed out, but his plane killed a neighbour’s child.

  The last family casualty was Uncle Joe, who was an infantryman in the South Lancashire Regiment and went to fight the Japanese in Burma. Uncle Joe came home with terrifying tales of hacking his way through the jungle in steaming heat, and of his perilous crossing of the Irrawaddy River under machine-gun fire as his regiment advanced against the Japanese. When a soldier yards ahead of him was shot dead in the back of the neck, Uncle Joe said he ran to his side to see the fatal bullet stuck between his friend’s teeth like a cigarette.

  Disease was another lethal foe in Burma and that is what killed Uncle Joe. Dysentery, dengue fever, and malaria were common enemies in his war. He came home with tropical sprue, a digestive disease
that basically destroys the body’s ability to absorb nutrients. After the war there was no sure treatment, and Uncle Joe was almost always sick, constantly thin and pale. He spent much of his post-war life in and out of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He suffered the fatal wound of his war far longer than he was in action. Uncle Joe died in 1954, aged 41, nine years after the war ended. Sprue was responsible for many Allied deaths — an Indian research team estimated in 2006 that the disease accounted for one-sixth of casualties in India and Southeast Asia.

  Air raids killed about four thousand on Merseyside, but few knew the scale of the carnage at the time. The morning following attacks, after hours spent in the cramped darkness of their Anderson shelters, my family would turn on BBC radio news, reacting with bleak amusement as the announcer played down, or even ignored, what they had just been through.

  For years after, lost buildings left great gaps in the streets. In many there were no buildings at all, only stretches of rubble, dusty pyramids of bricks, and high, lonely walls. The sight of young men in wheelchairs, or with missing arms and legs, was normal to me.

  Mum said she never imagined that Germany would win the war, which was a testament both to her powers of self-delusion and a brilliant wartime propaganda machine. I wonder now how the country’s spirit would have stood up in the era of 24-hour news, with Hitler’s blitzkrieg coming live into their living rooms, his mighty Panzer divisions spearheading the greatest war machine in history as it swept across Europe.

  While Bootle was a wasteland when I was born, my Auntie Gladys’ parlour was meticulous. Families lived in cramped homes but reserved their front parlours for occasions. This is where people gathered around newborns and coffins. I would sit alone in my grandmother’s parlour as a little boy. The room was cold and stale with a frayed effort at gentility. Antimacassars rested on the backs of chairs of carved wood and satin. They were laced and bright white, and no heads ever touched them. A yellowing music book was opened on the rack of an untuned upright piano. A grandfather clock stood still at 5.26. Photographs of long-dead relatives made it a shrine. Beautiful Auntie May, who died aged 20 in 1922, regarded visitors with an unwelcoming gaze. The parlour was dense with unlovely aspidistra plants. Aspidistras thrive in heat, cold, drought, bad light, and poor soil. Such an unconquerable survivor, so well adapted for hardship, must have been easy to identify with.