The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  I rang the Daily Express one week, after I had done a piece about a women’s boat club, St Hild’s, which at the last moment in a regatta had replaced one of the women rowers with a man. The woman at bow had suddenly fallen ill, just as the race was about to begin, so they substituted their male coach, who did have rather long hair. I got two guineas for the tip-off.

  However, whenever I felt pleased with my own little journalistic efforts, I only had to read some of the student newspapers that started coming in from other much bigger, wealthier, more famous universities. I remember the Leeds one as being superbly professional, with loads more pages than ours, better layout, great photos, none of them cut up. The London ones were also excellent.

  But the one that really depressed me was Varsity, the Cambridge student newspaper. The Oxford one, Cherwell, was fairly boring and predictable, but Varsity had a column by someone called Michael Frayn. It was so brilliant, so imaginative, so funny. Whenever it arrived, I used to think, why do I bother, I will never be in the same league.

  My final exams were coming up, but I wasn’t too worried, even though I had done so little work, being up to my eyes with Palatinate. I was sure I had done enough. What I was more worried about was getting a job. I still had no idea what I was going to do.

  I went to the appointments board, who are usually a joke in any university – what do they know about the world of work, sitting there shovelling leaflets? They asked what I liked doing and I said, ‘Well, journalism,’ and they opened some filing cabinet, turned over a few folders, then shook their heads. The computer says no, or whatever it was jobsworths said in the fifties. They had no record of anyone from Durham going into journalism, and had no application forms.

  I mentioned this to my moral tutor, at his once-a-term sherry party, and he said it was not quite true. About eight years ago, he remembered that there had been a Castleman who also edited Palatinate, name of Harold Evans, who had gone into journalism. No one knew where he was now, or if he was still a journalist. So that wasn’t much help.

  But the appointments people did give me lists of graduate training schemes, such as with ICI, Metal Box, Marks and Spencer. They were apparently offering management training to graduates, but they mostly seemed to involve sales jobs, which sounded attractive enough. They gave you a car, before sending you out on the road, and you got to stay in hotels. That might be fun. My dad had never driven a car or stayed in a hotel. I filled in a few application forms and was called for an interview by a well-known company called Benzole. They were a British petrol firm, long established, dating back to 1919. There used to be a joke about them: ‘She was only a garage man’s daughter but she loved the smell of Benzole . . .’

  I wrote to Margaret, boasting about landing an interview, thinking I had done well. ‘What the hell are you thinking of,’ she replied, ‘you will be useless selling petrol.’ I said, ‘Yes, but that’s just the beginning, learning the ropes, then I will be a manager one day, you’ll see. Anyway, I will get a car.’

  The interview was in Newcastle. I can’t remember what they asked me, or what I said, or how long I was there, but the answer came pretty quickly. Sorry, no thanks. They had obviously seen at once that I would be pretty useless.

  The other thing hanging over me was national service. There had been two periods of forcible conscription in the UK for fit young men – during the First World War, from 1916 to 1920, then in the Second World War, when it lasted from 1939 to 1960, going on so much longer than the actual war itself. Around one and a half million were called up after 1945 – when supposedly it was all over. After the war we got into a series of post-colonial local wars and rebellions and fit young men were needed as fodder, to fill up the ranks. Conscripts, called up straight from school, found themselves fighting and killing in Korea; against the Mau Mau in Kenya and terrorists in Cyprus and Malaya.

  You were called up at any age from eighteen, regardless of class and family background, so there was very little fiddling or evading, though of course it did go on, with false medical reports or hiring ringers to take the medical tests for you. There were three exempt occupations, deemed to be essential to the national good: coal mining, farming and the merchant navy. Students and apprentices could defer it if they were in full-time study or training, but they still had to do it, either before or after graduation or qualifying. All healthy young men got called up, sooner or later.

  There were lads who loved military service, enjoyed the camaraderie, excited by the chance to see the world, fire guns and drive tanks and shoot at people. The majority, however, seemed to spend most of their time either square-bashing or painting cobbles with white paint. There were some good courses, a chance to learn new skills, such as the Russian course that many of the clever conscripts – such as Michael Frayn and Alan Bennett – went on.

  I didn’t fancy any of it, so I began to think of doing some sort of postgraduate course, which would keep me as a student for at least another year – and possibly out of national service forever. We knew by 1957 that national service would soon be coming to an end – but we had no idea when. I would have been furious to be called up – and find I was in the last ever batch.

  Also in my mind was the desire to remain as a student. I wanted to have the same vacations, and concerns, as Margaret, who was about to start her first year at Oxford. I felt somehow this would help me to stay in touch with her and her world. I then heard that Ian Johnstone, my friend from school, was applying to Oxford to do a year’s diploma course in something to do with overseas administration, which would equip you for work in the colonies. He wanted to go abroad and work in what was left of our empire.

  I did not know such one-year specialist postgraduate courses existed, so I got a list and applied to do one in social sciences at Oxford, the sort of course that prepares you to be a social worker. You had to apply to the social sciences department at Oxford and also to a college. I applied to St Catherine’s, knowing Reg was headed there after his national service. I got an interview with the master, Alan Bullock, who was very friendly and chatty with a strong northern accent, which was reassuring. Looking at my CV, he noticed that I was editor of Palatinate. ‘That will be useful. Cherwell needs improving.’ He said he would take me in St Catherine’s, if I went on the course.

  I then had an interview with the social sciences department, but they turned me down. My heart was not in it anyway. I was just looking for an excuse to be in Oxford for a year, near Margaret.

  In desperation, or at least thrashing around for something to do, to cover myself for the next year and avoid national service, I decided I had better stay at Durham. So I applied for a one-year Diploma of Education. It would please my mother. And if all else failed, I would at least have some sort of qualification to get a job. They always want teachers.

  The other attraction of staying at Durham for another year was that I could carry on editing Palatinate. Towards the end of the last term, before my final exams, I happened to be talking to Michael Bateman, my friend who was on the local paper. He asked why I had not applied to be a graduate trainee journalist. I told him I didn’t know there were such things. The appointments board had never mentioned them or given me any applications. He explained that there were two – the one he had joined, run by Westminster Press, which had local papers all over the country, including the Durham Advertiser. The better one, with bigger, more important papers, was Kemsley Newspapers. He had applied for their scheme, but had been turned down.

  I immediately contacted both of them for further details and got the application forms, but alas, I was just too late for this year. They had taken their quota for 1957. But I could apply in due course for next year, if I was still interested, after I had graduated.

  I passed all my final exams and was awarded a second-class degree. When I went to look at the results board on Palace Green, for one moment I allowed myself to think I might get a first, which of course was pure fantasy. How could I have done, spending all that time on Palati
nate?

  My mother came for the graduation ceremony in Durham Cathedral, the first time she had been to see me. One of my sisters, Annabelle, came with her. They sat next to the parents of my friend John Davies. His father, the electrician who worked for Kemsley Newspapers in Newcastle, turned to my mother and said, ‘This is the proudest moment of my life.’ And then he fell asleep.

  To celebrate being a graduate, I did what most other new graduates did – I got myself studio-photographed. In Durham this was always done by Daisy Edis, an elderly woman who had cornered the market in university photographs. I thought she made me look really good, sitting solemnly in my graduate gown and white-fur-trimmed hood, and so did my mother. I showed it with pride to Margaret – and she burst out laughing. ‘Your spots!’ she exclaimed. ‘She’s got rid of your spots!’

  She thought the result was phoney, effeminate, unreal, not at all attractive. It is true that in this photo – see back cover of this book – I do appear to have the most perfectly lovely skin. In reality, at the time, I was always a mass of spots. During the first year going out with me, Margaret says she never saw me without a sticking plaster on my face. I had either squeezed a spot which had then left an awful, ugly blemish or I was trying to hide a fresh spot.

  ‘Daisy Edis must be a miracle worker . . .’

  In the long vacation, I decided I should try to get some sort of journalistic experience, as it would obviously be a help if I applied for the training schemes. I wrote to John – later Sir John – Burgess, the editor of the Cumberland News, Carlisle’s main paper. He saw me in his office, and I flashed some copies of Palatinate to impress him, and of course he had never heard of it. He told me to slow down, start again, he couldn’t understand what I was saying. ‘You will never make it as a journalist if you speak so quickly.’

  He showed me out, saying sorry, there were no vacancies, neither for trainees nor temporary staff. Awfully sorry. So that was someone else I was going to sack, once I was lord of the universe.

  I then went across the road to the Carlisle Journal, a much older, more old-fashioned newspaper with a small circulation. It had been founded in 1798, so was much older than the Cumberland News. I got an interview with the editor, Fred Humphrey OBE. He had received his award for some wartime work in the Ministry of Information. He seemed about a hundred years old and dozy but very kind and gentlemanly – and he agreed to take me on for the summer.

  I would not get a salary, as such, but I would work as a reporter in the newsroom. For every story I got in the paper I would be paid one and a half pennies a line. It does seem incredibly low, even for the times, but there were two issues a week, mostly using the same stories, so if my stuff was repeated, I got more lines and more pennies. The money did not matter, of course. I was thrilled to have a chance to be working on a real newspaper.

  The offices were beside the City Picture House, in English Street. They had a shop window on the street, filled with dusty stationery, envelopes, lavatory paper, which was apparently a sideline of one of the directors. You entered by a side alley. The print room was on the ground floor, editorial was upstairs through lots of ancient bare rooms with wooden floors.

  The two editions came out on Tuesdays and Fridays, with Friday’s paper being the main one. It often ran late because the head printer had been refreshing himself at the Sportsman inn. He would come back striding around the office and shouting, ‘Fuck the Duke of Edinburgh!’

  There was a news editor and about five staff in editorial, plus a photographer, but I did get to sit at a desk and have access to a rickety old typewriter, which I bashed with one finger (today I am hugely advanced and can manage two fingers). I mainly rewrote press hand-outs and announcements, or lifted stories from other publications. When I was allowed out, it was usually to school prize-givings and flower shows. You had to include the names of as many people as possible, the theory being that they would then buy the paper.

  One day I was sent out of town, to a place on the Scottish border called Penton, to report on their agricultural show, the furthest away I had been on a story. It seemed a huge honour, to be allowed out on what was practically a foreign story. I would have to go on the bus, for which I could charge expenses. I boasted to Margaret about it, who was now back from France, waiting to go up to Oxford. She had found a holiday job for herself, in the Carlisle laundry, which sounded far worse than the labouring jobs I had done in earlier summers, and smellier.

  I had two entrance tickets for the Penton show and told her I would pay her bus fare, if she came with me. So off we went, into an area of north Cumberland, almost in Scotland, which not even Margaret had visited before.

  I dutifully made a list of all those who had won prizes for the flowers, vegetables, lambs, cattle, all the usual things that happen at local agricultural shows, plus the winners of the races, the tug-of-war and other competitions. It included pony-trap racing, which I noticed was a bit more exciting than the other events. It involved young men on little two-wheel carts being pulled by a pony, racing each other, doing a lot of shouting.

  When the Journal came out, I got a good show, big space, with long lists of people, and included a boring quote from the show secretary saying what a grand day it had been. When the Cumberland News came out, their headline was ‘Horse Runs Amok at Penton’. I had not realised anyone was there from the Cumberland News, nor had I seen any horse running amok. It is true that at the end of the pony-trap race one horse had rather reared up, but that was all.

  I got a bollocking from the news editor for having missed it, especially when he found out that my girlfriend had gone with me. He suggested I had probably not been concentrating properly and had missed a dramatic incident. Which wasn’t true. What a fibber the Cumberland News reporter had been, exaggerating such a minor event.

  Or was that how professional journalism worked? Did you have to do a bit of fibbing and flamming and taking things out of context to make a story? Which was a bit worrying. Perhaps I would never make it, at least not as a news reporter.

  My other worry was Margaret. I stayed working on the Journal till the end of the summer, then it was time for me to go back to Durham, for my very last year, while she went off to Oxford, for her first year. Would this be our last summer? I feared she might move on and away from me, once she reached the dreaming spires of Oxford.

  20

  DREAMING SPIRES

  Margaret went off to Oxford in October 1957. We wrote all the time, of course, but I did fear we would begin to lose touch, once she was meeting all these new gilded and sparklingly clever friends, seeing new wonderful and beautiful places, falling in love with the whole idea of Oxford.

  But the opposite happened. In her letters it soon began to emerge that she wasn’t enjoying Oxford, that she disliked the braying people, living in college and the history course she was having to study. It sounded as bad as mine had been in my first year. Their idea of modern history seemed to finish about 1815.

  The first term doing my DipEd was all lectures, based in Durham, on Palace Green, so handy to get to. Or not, as the case soon became, for I was bound up with something more enjoyable and fun and stimulating than lectures on the history of education or the Montessori teaching system.

  I was editing Palatinate again, part of the real reason for staying on for this extra year, and was trying to recruit some decent writers and increase the circulation. For years, in the hands of the Hatfield mob, Palatinate had been looked down upon, particularly in Castle, as a joke, a pathetic, ill-written rag, so it was hard to change the image, but I managed slowly to find some good new columnists.

  Two of them went on to careers in journalism – Dan Van der Vat on the Guardian, and author of many books, and Colin McDowell, who was our waspish film critic, later turning himself into one of the country’s leading fashion experts and writers. I also managed to recruit quite a few women, notably Jill Burtt, who was at St Aidan’s. Not sure what happened to her.

  Dick Evans, another of my conte
mporaries, who was a friend at my college, did no journalism at Durham, yet went on to be news editor of the Financial Times. Which shows you don’t have to do student journalism to get a job in real journalism – and also disproves my belief at the time that Durham was a total wilderness, cut off from the mainstream of media life and aspirations.

  Palatinate was doing so well that I decided to enter it for the annual students’ newspaper of the year awards, run by the NUS and sponsored at the time by the Sunday Times.

  We were very pleased to be told we had been put on the shortlist for one of the awards and I was invited to London to the presentation ceremony and to meet the judges. Bailes, our printers, as a little present, offered to print six copies of Palatinate, the ones we had to enter, on better-than-normal glossy paper. It did look rather posh and impressive, so I was sure we would win a prize.

  In fact, it was held against us. And we won nothing. The judges said we were being unnecessarily wasteful, printing on such expensive paper. Not knowing that only six copies had been printed like that. Students’ papers should be on bog paper, or similar.

  One of the editors from the Sunday Times who presented the awards was Kenneth Pearson. He looked so distinguished, tall and silver-haired, unlike the rather untidy, not to say scruffy, journalists I had met on the Carlisle Journal. I was told he had been a wartime pilot, winning some medal or other. I wondered if all London journalists looked as sophisticated and elegant, or just on the posh papers.

  I eventually received the application forms for the Kemsley Newspapers and Westminster graduate schemes and filled them in, though with not much hope, convinced it would be carved up by the clever young things currently writing for Cherwell and Varsity.

  I also wrote off to the Observer, having felt I had acquired a vague contact through Anthony Sampson asking me to ring him (even though nothing appeared in his ‘Pendennis’ column). In March 1958, I got a fairly nice letter from Frederick Tomlinson, administration editor of the Observer, who said they had no suitable vacancy. ‘But if you are coming to London in the near future, I shall be glad to have an informal chat with you.’ I took that as the bum’s rush. He added that I would be better off applying to Kemsley and Westminster. ‘Let me know how you fare.’