by Les Hinton
James, the fourth of my five children, urged me to write this book at an ideal moment; I had turned 70 and was feeling reminiscent and boring him, yet again, with old stories. I started making notes and, soon after, while shopping for Cumberland sausages at Myers of Keswick, a splendid British food store in downtown Manhattan, a man from BBC radio, on one of those off-beat BBC assignments, asked me to answer his questions about the superior quality of English chocolate. It was a serendipitous moment: Emma Parry, a literary agent with Janklow & Nesbit, overheard the interview, asked if I were interested in writing a book, and then guided me through the glacial labyrinth of the book world.
All my family helped. James got me started, and William, the book editor in the family, made important contributions to the penultimate draft. Martin and Thomas, the two eldest; Jane, the youngest; and Mary, my first wife, helped me remember. Duncan, my brother, the family archivist, quarried through generations of records to help me piece together our family history. Marilyn, my big sister, had a better memory of the early years. My Merseyside cousins — Judith Brindley and Heather Harrison — filled in Bootle detail.
Dozens of others contributed, either knowingly or unwittingly, as I mined their memories over long walks, lunches, and evenings. Rex Jory of Adelaide, my oldest friend, filled in the gaps of our shared youth, and dug out newspaper clippings to verify or correct our recollections. Mark Jackson fitted this manuscript into his voracious reading schedule, offering sharp-eyed observations. Arthur Edwards applied his prodigious memory to the details of our years together on the road as reporter and photographer. Marianne Krafinski, my assistant, had diligently filed my personal papers for a quarter of a century. There were many others, including: Col Allan, Chris Buckland, Ken Chandler, Stanley Chang, Vic Chapple, Paul Dacre, Alison Clark, Mark Day, Alistair Duncan, Bill Hagerty, Sheila Hardcastle, Stuart Higgins, Trevor Kavanagh, Deborah Keegan, Todd Larsen, Chip Loewenson, Murdoch MacLennan, James MacManus, Bill O’Neill, Paul Potts, Pat Purcell, Ian Rae, Marty Singerman, Joe Stevens, Peter Stothard, Ian Weston, and John Witherow. The Liverpool Central Library was my microfiche portal back to wartime Liverpool.
Philip Gwyn Jones of Scribe Publications coaxed me out of the deep-seated habits of journalese — too many short paragraphs and too much economy in my description of events and feelings. It was not often a newspaper editor told me to ‘expand and elaborate a little, say a bit more’. Molly Slight’s forensic copy-editing rescued me from numerous mishaps — grammatical, stylistic, and factual.
But my greatest debt is to my wife, Kath, my first reader and frankest critic, unflinchingly honest in matters both of style and substance, exorcising solecisms and warning against the more fatuous and clunky passages in my early drafts. I didn’t follow her advice every time, so any remaining fatuous, clunky, or otherwise flawed passages are my fault, as are any other failings in this work; I couldn’t have done it without help, but the mistakes are mine.
