The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  They welcomed me back when I asked for a job on The News. Ron Boland, the editor-in-chief, wanted me on the subs’ desk, but I resisted and became a feature writer. The office had been rebuilt. Instead of separate rooms for reporters, subs, sports, and features, we were all in one huge desegregated newsroom.

  Five years in Fleet Street had taught me a lot. The News was a first-rate local newspaper, better than most of its British counterparts. But for me the place that had been so frantic and intimidating years before now seemed leisurely. Nothing improves a newspaper more than the stress of competition, and in Adelaide there was almost none.

  After 10 months living with Mum and Dad in their bungalow, we sailed back to England. We had never intended to stay, and Mary, who was five months pregnant, wanted our baby to be born in Britain. We might not have made the best decision. It was a six-week journey, and by the time we arrived at Southampton docks, I thought Mary might die. She had become ill three days before arriving in Southampton and was losing blood. We were in an Italian Sitmar Liner, and the ship’s doctor seemed bewildered by her condition. He sent a radio message to Southampton that an extremely sick mother-to-be was on board and, while I sat at her bedside, spent most of his time playing cards with shipmates.

  The doctor who came on board in Southampton wouldn’t let Mary get out of bed. When I asked whether the baby would be all right, the doctor led me out of Mary’s room. We sat down together, and she looked at me silently and gravely for a moment.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘this could be very serious. Never mind the baby for now — we need to worry about your wife.’

  The doctor had diagnosed a condition called placenta previa, which meant that the placenta nourishing our unborn child was in the wrong place inside Mary’s womb, blocking her cervix. As well as being in the wrong location, her placenta had lost blood and might do so again, putting both mother and baby in danger. Mary was wrapped in blankets against the cold and carried by stretcher down the gangplank to a waiting ambulance. She was admitted to the Southampton General Hospital maternity ward, surrounded by newborns and their happy parents. Our child was not due for two months, and the doctors ordered complete bed rest. Southampton was 80 miles from London, but the doctors said even an ambulance ride was too risky.

  Life stood still for four days. None of our plans mattered — no new house, no reunions with Mary’s family and our old friends, no job. Everything was in limbo and I was a wreck.

  ‘I feel fine,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll lie here because they’re telling me to, but honestly I feel normal. You can’t just sit there for the next two months. Go to London and find a job.’

  I had been in London 48 hours when a doctor called from Southampton. ‘How soon can you get to the hospital?’ he said. He sounded so anxious, I panicked.

  ‘We need you to pick up your wife as soon as possible,’ the doctor said. ‘She’s well enough to be discharged.’

  It turned out the hospital had made a serious mistake. By the time I arrived back in Southampton, she had been moved from the maternity ward to an isolation room. Mary’s illness had been misdiagnosed. She was suffering a serious bout of contagious food poisoning — salmonella. This poisoning had been the cause of her bleeding, not placenta previa.

  The hospital had put into a maternity ward of vulnerable newborns a woman with a condition that could be fatal to them. For three days, proud mothers had allowed her to hold and admire their new babies. No wonder the doctor who phoned me had sounded desperate.

  ‘They were really alarmed when they found out,’ Mary said, as we drove to London. ‘They thought I was going to kill them all.’

  Mary recovered, and Martin was born on 9 January 1971. I did not see him for several hours; it was not yet customary for a father to be at the birth. When we met, I stroked his cheek with the outside of my left index finger. His skin was as soft as velvet.

  —

  The Sun was not glad to see me when I arrived in search of a job. Nick Lloyd, the news editor, gave me a few late-night shifts, but that was all. Lloyd was then 29 and starting out on a long newspaper career that would reach its peak with his editorship of the Daily Express and a knighthood from Margaret Thatcher when she resigned as prime minister in 1990. Lloyd was then at the height of a distinguished career. His newspaper had been one of Thatcher’s most ardent supporters.

  ‘I can’t give you a full-time job,’ he said. ‘Larry doesn’t want any more old Sun trade union militants. They’re causing havoc.’

  Larry Lamb, the new editor, was the prickly son of a Yorkshire colliery blacksmith. He had been a veteran of Cudlipp’s Mirror, but was Manchester editor of the Daily Mail when Rupert poached him.

  The Sun’s trade union roots — dating back to the days when it was the Daily Herald — lived on among a significant number of journalists. Disputes with management were constant.

  ‘But I’m not an old trade union militant,’ I told Lloyd. ‘And I started working for Rupert in Adelaide when I was fifteen.’

  Lloyd paused when I told him this. I reinforced my case by sending him a note with details of my association with the new owner. I don’t know what happened next, but within a few weeks I was on the staff.

  By now, The Sun’s circulation was soaring — and Rupert’s infamy was growing. In 1969, the News of the World published the memoirs of Christine Keeler, a model and ‘party girl’ whose relationship with John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, had forced his resignation.

  As scandals go, the Profumo affair of 1963 had everything. It was a blend of juicy hard facts and wild rumour, with beautiful call girls, country mansion frolics featuring masked aristocrats, royals, and a love triangle that included a Soviet spy. It was the biggest political scandal of the 1960s, and a perfect story for the News of the World. The difficulty was that the paper published the Keeler memoir six years after the scandal, by which time Profumo was redeeming himself with charity work in the East End of London.

  The newspaper and Rupert were eviscerated for digging up old dirt. There were angry denunciations in the House of Lords and from church pulpits — as well as among the Fleet Street rivals he had beaten to the story, and who were by now worrying that they had underestimated this interloper from Down Under.

  Rupert, in an effort to explain himself, made the mistake of appearing on live television. He put his case to David Frost, then Britain’s paramount TV interrogator. With a studio audience cheering him on, Frost demolished Rupert, who stormed out of the studio, allegedly hissing at Frost: ‘You’ll keep, David.’

  Rupert said later that when he and his wife, Anna, left in his car that night they felt like heading straight for the airport and leaving town.

  That was the early drama that inspired Private Eye, the satirical magazine, to award Rupert the immortal name of Dirty Digger.

  Everyone knew by now that Rupert had come to Fleet Street to tear up the rules. Criticism never seemed to deter him. Like a punk rocker storming the stage of a Mantovani concert, he showed no respect to anyone.

  The Sun that I returned to had joined the world of Murdoch and was a changed place. The easy life had ended. Long lunches and late filing had been abolished, and everyone had more work to do. There were fewer reporters and no longer a large contingent of specialist writers. On the old Sun, reporters expected to be assigned a story a day, maybe two, and sometimes none at all, but getting no assignment was a terrible feeling. Even now I get anxiety dreams that I’m sitting in a newsroom waiting to be sent on a job while everyone else is busy. At the new Sun, we were each given three or more stories a day.

  There was no dallying in the pub over lunchtime pints. If you were given a story in the morning, you needed a good reason for failing to hand it in before lunch. To achieve this, reporters could be seen eating sandwiches at their desk, which was unknown in the old days.

  The new newsroom overlooking Bouverie Street was tightly packed
and spartan. In the space occupied by reporters, padlocks and chains secured a typewriter to each desk. A thief would have to be strong and poor because the typewriters were heavy and old, and pretty worthless.

  I was soon caught up in the militancy that frustrated Larry Lamb. Strikes had become commonplace. We walked out over crazy grievances. Even the National Union of Journalists wouldn’t support us most of the time.

  We once stopped work when a reporter in the Glasgow office was sacked after he returned drunk from lunch, unzipped his fly, and exposed himself to female staff. This sounded to me solid grounds for dismissal, but we went on strike for almost two weeks. I couldn’t pay the mortgage that month. But management refused to reinstate the Glasgow flasher, and we went back to work when they agreed to give him a payoff.

  Striking journalists never prevented the newspaper being published. Senior editors could patch a newspaper together with agency copy. These editions weren’t much good, but they thwarted the militants. Only print unions had the power to stop the newspaper going out, which made journalists feel like second-class strikers. Sometimes journalists would talk about physically preventing the newspapers from leaving the building. This never worked because it required confronting our brothers in the press hall, and they were tougher than us.

  Malcolm Withers was our Father of the Chapel — a quaint old term for union leader — and he once urged us to lay in front of lorries to prevent them leaving Bouverie Street with their cargoes of newspapers. Attempting to lead the way, he sat feebly on the pavement with his feet in front of a lorry, wearing a suit and clutching a briefcase to his chest. Withers was a cautious kind of militant, whose plan fell apart when the lorry moved a couple of inches and he quickly withdrew his feet to let it pass.

  Putting aside the mischief of militants, I had sympathy with old Sun people who had honest trouble adjusting to the redtop rowdiness. The new Sun was rough-edged and proud of itself. A typical self-aggrandising front-page description of itself in huge type was: ‘It is the biggest, the brightest, the boldest, the very, very best.’

  Television was still seen as the enemy of print, but Rupert became the first proprietor to use it to sell newspapers. These commercials were low-budget and it showed — not many retakes were allowed for a Sun spot. The frenetic, shouted voiceovers were like old-style fairground barking.

  Their creator was Graham King from Adelaide. King was a 1950s pioneer of the Murdoch empire. He was promotions manager of Rupert’s first television station, Channel 9. King was a genius at getting attention. When Rupert wouldn’t give him a raise at Channel 9, he delivered socks with holes in them to his office every day, with notes saying he couldn’t afford new ones, until Rupert relented.

  Intentional or not, King’s television ads were hilarious. They were also effective. Here’s one about suburban ‘swingers’:

  Scene:

  Couple in a passionate kiss.

  Voiceover: There’s a whole new freedom in sex today … behaviour once confined to the free and easy world of the rich is becoming more commonplace. How far can it go …? The Sun reveals that ordinary people who meet every day at work, or even down your street, are taking this new sexual freedom for themselves.

  I helped write that Sun series and spent time with these wife-swapping ‘swingers’. They didn’t seem ordinary to me.

  My neighbour in the newsroom was Keith Deves, a veteran of serious news. He had covered trouble spots in the Middle East as a Reuters correspondent; known Kim Philby before he was exposed as a Soviet double agent; and been shot in the leg with a Sten gun during a coup in Baghdad.

  On The Sun, different work was required. Deves was sent to interview a Miss Whiplash at the house where she entertained clients. As he was leaving, Miss Whiplash stopped him. ‘Wait, I’ve forgotten something,’ she said, and opened a cupboard to reveal a naked and agitated old man, gagged and bound. ‘Now calm down, judge,’ she said. ‘I’m only showing this nice man from The Sun newspaper around.’

  Deves was perturbed. ‘Was it really necessary to tell the poor old judge I was a reporter from The Sun?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Miss Whiplash. ‘It’s all part of his torture.’

  The Sun’s wild side gave it much of its commercial success, and the disdain of newspapers whose circulation it was stealing. But it ran many serious stories about politics, economics, industry, health, and crime. It was the combination of these two extremes that made it exceptional and successful.

  For me, it meant a lot of weird work, and not what I imagined as a 15-year-old dreaming of life as a foreign correspondent. After a while, the silly-to-serious ratio of my assignments changed for the better, but I covered a lot of strange things.

  I had to walk the streets asking bald men to talk about their sex lives. Research, very dubious research, had found that bald men had more sex. I gave up on that job when a huge man in a camel hair coat with a velvet collar chased me across the concourse of Euston station shouting, ‘Sex life? I’ll give you sex life. Come back here and I’ll end yours with a bloody big kick in the balls.’

  Other research, this time about people’s willingness to accept charity, had me offering strangers £1 notes. This was interesting. Those who looked most hard up were least likely to take the money. The woman in hair rollers pushing a pram through a Brixton council estate looked terrified by the offer, but a man in a bowler hat on the steps of the Bank of England accepted it without hesitation.

  A pioneering dating company, Dateline, had the idea of organising a package holiday of single people paired into couples by computers. I flew to Corfu with 60 excited lonely hearts. Whatever success technology has since achieved at playing Cupid, the Corfu experiment was not an encouraging start. This became clear when the 60-year-old widow of a Surrey accountant was introduced to her computer generated ‘match’ — a junior supermarket manager of 30 who lived with his mother in Bridlington. Their friendship did not blossom. The women were divorcees, widows, and unmarried women looking for fun, but the men were younger, shy and terrified. On the first night, a dozen men organised a chess tournament among themselves, forming a defensive circle in the bar that no woman managed to penetrate. The newsdesk was expecting a story about frolics on a romantic Greek island. My story demanded careful exaggeration to avoid disappointing them.

  One story of mine was immortalised in a painting by Beryl Cook, a hugely popular artist whose work the art establishment of the time disdained. Linda Lovelace, the star of the porn film Deep Throat, wrote a memoir — Inside Linda Lovelace — that was so graphic its publisher was accused of obscenity at the Old Bailey. The jury reached a verdict of not guilty. The newspaper with my by-line — headlined ‘Don’t Crush “Sex Nut” Linda, A QC Tells Jury’ — appeared in Cook’s painting in the hands of a man on a crowded London underground train who appeared to be groping a woman passenger. I tried to buy the original, but its Swiss owner wouldn’t part with it.

  Sometimes the work could be serious and hilarious at the same time. Jeremy Thorpe was a 1970s Liberal politician alleged to have hired a hitman to kill his troublesome gay lover, Norman Scott, a former model. Thorpe was put on trial for conspiracy to murder; he was acquitted, but too late to save his career.

  Scott had threatened to make public his claim to have been Thorpe’s lover in 1961 when gay sex was illegal. At Thorpe’s trial, it was alleged his friends hired a hitman to kill Scott. Although this was never proven to a jury’s satisfaction, it was revealed that a man had driven Scott to Exmoor in 1975 and shot dead his Great Dane, Rinka. Scott claimed the man tried to shoot him, but that his gun jammed, allowing Scott to flee.

  The scandal made Norman Scott a household name and he became a Sun ‘buy-up’ — the term for when a newspaper pays the main character in a big story for exclusive interviews. My photographer friend Arthur Edwards and I were appointed to be his minders.

  Scott was completely open about his sexu
ality, which was not usual in the 1970s. He was also very fond of a drink, and since The Sun was paying to keep him safe from its rivals, he was drunk most of the time.

  One night, the three of us were hiding away in Devon at a Barnstaple hotel and found ourselves in the dining room in the middle of a gathering of Church of England ministers. They soon recognised the notorious guest among them and gazed at him with disapproval. This irritated Scott, who drank even more and started to pull tongues at everyone he caught staring at him.

  Arthur and I were already anxious when the bishop stood, with the clink of a glass, to silence his flock for the royal toast. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, raising his wine, ‘the Queen.’

  Scott staggered quickly to his feet, clattering the glasses and crockery on our table and capsizing a bottle of claret.

  The bishop froze and the room went silent as everyone turned their attention to our table. Scott was swaying severely, a beaming smile on his shiny red face.

  ‘A toast for me?’ cried Britain’s most famous gay man to a room of gasping vicars. ‘Oh, how kind of you all. Thank you so much. I should now like to make a few remarks in response.’

  Arthur and I seized our charge, taking one arm each, and marched him from the room.

  CHAPTER 12

  Bombs, bullets, and a shaving cut

  The bomb went off when we were halfway down the glass-walled fire escape of the Europa Hotel in Belfast. We were jumping the stairs two and three at a time. It was 1972 and Northern Ireland was plunged into the dark years of The Troubles; it was such an inadequate name — The Troubles — for a conflict that lasted 30 years and claimed more than 3,500 lives.

  My colleague, Gordon Broome, was close to the glass. I was ahead of him, curled in a hedgehog ball in a windowless corner, waiting for the shower of glass. Broome gave a cry as he stumbled down the steps towards me, holding both hands to his skull. Glass had peppered his bald head with a hundred cuts, and blood was running freely down his face.