I eventually found a self-contained flat I liked – at 6a Kingscroft Road, Shoot Up Hill, just north of Kilburn High Road. A fairly nondescript area, but quite attractive, I thought, full of converted semi-detached houses. It was a long way from the areas I really wanted, but I worked out I could walk to the heath in about an hour. I had my own front door, leading to the upstairs of a semi-detached. I had a living room, a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. The living room had a proper fitted carpet, off-white, which I thought was awfully luxurious. We never had fitted carpets at home in Carlisle or in the two flats I had rented in Manchester.
The rent was six guineas a week. I had to give the landlord, a Mr Polak, endless references and bank statements. On 19 June 1959 I paid him a deposit of £25 and got the flat. I was thrilled. I could now leave Squire Barraclough’s sofa and concentrate properly on my new job, which I had rather neglected in the first ten days with trying to find accommodation.
I rang Margaret and she came the first weekend I moved in. She declared at once that the road and house were nasty and suburban, the furnishings dreadful, including the fitted carpet of which I was so proud. The whole flat was awful and poky. I was so upset, especially after all the hours I had spent traipsing to places that had gone when I got there. ‘You should have seen the flats I turned down,’ I said. ‘Okay for you to criticise, you didn’t have to go through it all.’ She said it was just the sort of awful Carlisle suburban semi she had hoped never in her life to have to live in.
Mike Thornhill, our friend from Carlisle, still at Balliol, later came through to London for a weekend with a college chum and asked if they could stay. I said no problem, of course, after all the times I stayed with him. It felt wonderful having my own place and being able to give hospitality for a change. The chum he brought with him was a young man with floppy fair hair, same age as us, called Angus Douglas-Hamilton, later the 15th Duke of Hamilton.
I didn’t realise his background till later, but when I told Margaret that the aristocracy had stayed and had not complained, she said, ‘So what, it’s still a horrible flat.’
My new job was on the Sunday Graphic, a paper I knew of but had never read, one of the two popular Sunday papers that Roy Thomson bought in 1959, the other being the Sunday Times.
The Sunday Graphic began in 1915, and at one time was the sister paper to the Daily Graphic. It was a homely, unsensational tabloid, at least when I joined, a bit like an English version of the Sunday Post, a paper all the family could read and not be offended by. The Empire News, Thomson’s other popular Sunday paper, was founded in 1884 in Manchester as the Umpire, when it mainly covered sport. Edward Hulton bought it in 1917 and it became a mainstream national newspaper. It was a broadsheet, with rather heavy type and big headlines, full of crime and sex and scandals and was competing hard with the News of the World.
The Sunday Graphic offices were upstairs at the back of Thomson House, all a bit dusty and cramped. When Roy Thomson took over, changing the building’s name, he slowly revamped the main entrance, making it much more modern, and built himself a penthouse on the top floor, with his own lift. He wore pebble glasses and was known for being canny with his pennies.
The first day he arrived to move into his penthouse, a rival newspaper sent a photographer to hang around all day, waiting for his Rolls. The photographer had thrown some pennies in the gutter, where he knew Thomson would alight. Sure enough, as Roy got out, despite his bad eyesight and heavy specs, he managed to spot the pennies and bent down to pick them up. Good trick. Snap, snap. It amused all the rest of Fleet Street. I don’t think Thomson himself was at all bothered.
The big worry for the staff was that having bought all these papers, plus the provincial ones, he would start pruning, but slowly, as the months went on and nothing happened, everyone began to relax. Best of all, he did not interfere editorially, being primarily interested in studying balance sheets.
I sat in the Sunday Graphic’s main newsroom, as I had done in Manchester, a big open space, with the news editor and his deputy at one end, keeping an eye on everybody. Like the paper itself, the atmosphere was homely, good-natured, nobody shouted at you. Lots of people seemed to float in and out, freelances bringing stories or gossip. Around the newsroom were offices where the editor and assistant editors and star writers lived.
There were two male reporters, just a few years older than me – Eric Tyson, who was always busy, making endless notes, seemed very efficient, and Gordon Jackson, who was more laid-back. Then there were three older women reporters, feature writers really, who specialised in the sob stories and anything human interest. The paper did have a lot of heartbreaking stories about candlelit vigils for dead grannies or missing children or runaway pets.
I sat next to Dorothy Harrison, a very experienced Fleet Street woman reporter, who had spent many years on various magazines and newspapers. I thought she was pretty old, but she was probably little more than fifty. She wore a lot of make-up and perfume, flowing clothes and was always pumping up her bosom, as if checking all was well, that she was still intact, busty and blooming. She took me under her wing and was endlessly helpful, telling me how the paper was run, who was who, which pubs to go to. She always had a glass or two of wine at lunchtime, which I thought very cosmopolitan. I didn’t know anyone in Manchester who drank wine at lunchtime.
I would join her as she sat on her high stool at the bar and after two glasses she would be full of gloom about the future of the paper. And about herself. At her age, this would be her last job, she would never get another. She was very matter-of-fact, not really moaning. Yet she constantly reassured me. I would be okay, she could tell, things would work out for me, trust her, she had been around. I suspected she was simply trying to cheer me up.
I never discovered where she lived, whether she had been married, or had children, but I met quite a few of her friends, including a gay journalist called Freddie. I never knew journalists could be gay. He and his boyfriend lived in a very small flat in Hampstead over the Coffee Cup in the middle of the High Street. It seemed to me like the Left Bank.
The news editor of the Sunday Graphic was John Ralph, an ex-RAF officer type, with a trim moustache, hearty laugh, posh accent, who was always bubbling with new ideas, most of which seemed potty to me. In the first week I had to go with a driver out into deepest Surrey to observe the effect of new road markings on traffic. I think either red lines had come in or double yellow lines on main roads. There was no story. Even if I had found a line, or something amusing, it would not have kept from Tuesday to Sunday.
Another time he called me over and said, ‘Quick, get to Heathrow airport, Frank Sinatra is coming in – you might get a word with him.’ I jumped on the first bus to Piccadilly, knowing that was the heart of London, got out and asked people the way to Heathrow. I had absolutely no idea where it was, what direction, how to get there. It took me took two hours, by which time Sinatra had long gone. If, of course, he had ever come. Which I always doubted.
The first useful thing I learned was to fill in your expenses. In Manchester you were lucky to get your bus fares back. Fleet Street was so different, and also the regime of a Sunday paper. Sunday paper journalists begin their week on a Tuesday and work Saturday. The whole of Tuesday morning every week was taken up by one thing: filling out your expenses. Once you had done that, you could go off for lunch. Perhaps never come back that day.
I was instructed to make sure I claimed £5 every week – that was the rate for my level. Not official, nothing written down, but the editor and the management knew all about it, because they had their own agreed level. If you didn’t claim your agreed weekly expenses, it would muck up the whole system.
I was told how to write down that I had had lunch with a contact, and if not lunch, describe it as social expenses or entertainment. Any name would do of some sort of contact. And enclose a bill, any old bill, but you did need bills when claiming for any meals. Didn’t matter who the meal was with or what for, personal or otherwis
e, you just needed a receipt. Friendly restaurants and pubs would give you blank bills to fill in.
If you actually spent real money, on a real job, going somewhere, then of course you claimed this to the hilt, over and above your normal, agreed £5. Each week, if you were hard up, you could get what was called a ‘pink slip’, an advance on your expenses. You named some contact you needed to meet, some story you were going on, and as long as an assistant editor signed it, you rushed off to accounts, handed it over and got the money in cash, always crisp pound notes, as if they had just printed them. Fleet Street’s version of quantitative easing.
The problem was to remember what you had claimed on a pink slip and make sure your next expense sheet covered it all. There were several semi-contract freelances who totally abused the system, living entirely on pink slips for months and never filling in their claim forms. Then a heavy from accounts would come round and issue dark threats.
After two weeks of being sent on dopey non-news stories, I discovered the real purpose of my sudden transference from Manchester. I had been taken on to work on a new gossip column, ‘The World of Peter Raymond’. There was no such person. He was like William Hickey, a fictional character, to cover whoever was writing.
I was working under the watchful eye of Terence Feely, an assistant editor. He was very debonair and handsome, pinstriped suit, always a flower in his buttonhole, part of the paper’s officer class. Another was Robert Robinson, a prematurely balding, confident man who was the film expert, interviewing Hollywood movie stars who were over here. I thought his life was incredibly glamorous. He always got a massive spread in the paper, yet he moaned all the time about his job, saying he was embarrassed by it, when clearly he was so clever and gifted. He had been to Oxford, quoted Oscar Wilde all the time. He obviously never thought he would end up doing this, on this sort of paper. But he was funny and caustic and I got on well with him.
My job was to write little gossip paragraphs about so-called well-known people, or at least people well known in other gossip columns. In the beginning, I had hardly heard of any of them. But once I got into the swing of things, I contacted all the theatre and film PRs, leading restaurants and posh hotels, all of which, to my surprise, had their own designated press officers, wanting you to write about their clients or mention their hotels or shows. I had not come across such people in Manchester. So the invitations were soon flooding in. There were also dozens of Chelsea freelances hanging around the King’s Road, who rang up all day trying to sell you tittle-tattle tip-offs about someone with a title. All gossip columns were obsessed by the aristocracy, more than they are today, now that the stars of reality TV have taken over as the true celebs.
The Sunday Graphic was hardly a major paper, and felt to me fairly folksy and harmless, so I was surprised that it was still considered worth courting by all the PRs, on the list for invites, first nights and press conferences. It was because we were a national paper. PRs needed their clients mentioned anywhere nationally, to get their contracts renewed.
When I first joined the paper there was some trouble with the National Union of Journalists, which was very powerful. I was still only twenty-three, and had been in journalism just eighteen months. The NUJ normally insisted on Fleet Street staffers being at least twenty-four, with two years’ provincial experience – but the management sorted it.
In my diary for July–December 1959, my first six months in London, kept for expenses purposes, I have a most impressive list of star names, famous people I must have seen or met or been in the presence of or at least observed across a crowded room. A lot were at press conferences, such as Noël Coward at the Savoy, so I was probably in a scrum of about a hundred press people and photographers at the launch of his new play. Then there was Bob Hope, Benny Goodman, Jayne Mansfield, Harry Secombe, Connie Francis, Lonnie Donegan, Otto Preminger, Julie Andrews, Yves Saint Laurent, Olivia de Havilland, David Niven, Alicia Markova. Oh yes, I met them all, sort of, got a sentence from them, more or less, then written a couple of pars in which it appeared they were talking just to me, personally.
As I got more space, and into my stride, and Terence let me get on with it, I did now and again do one-to-one interviews with people I really wanted to meet, such as Arnold Wesker, Tommy Steele, the Boulting brothers, who were well-known British film producers. I went to see Shelagh Delaney, who had just had a surprise success with her play A Taste of Honey. She lived in what appeared to be an old Victorian mansion block, possibly council owned, in a side alley off Charing Cross Road. I never knew such blocks existed in the heart of the West End. It was not just meeting Londoners but getting to know London that was endlessly interesting.
Now and again I managed to interview more offbeat people such as Frank Richards, the creator of Billy Bunter. I was surprised he was still alive. And that his real name was Charles Hamilton. He was in his eighties, unmarried, and living alone out in the country near the coast in Kent, so that gave me an excuse for a nice day out. He was funny and jolly and insisted on singing to me ‘(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey’. In Latin. He had translated it himself. I was entranced by it, the daftness and cleverness of what he had done. Being, of course, someone who had passed O-level Latin. Afterwards, he gave me a typed transcript, signed, which I still have. He died just a year later.
Another excursion I arranged for my own personal interest was going up to Wolverhampton to interview Billy Wright. He had just retired after a long career as a Wolves player and as England captain. Every English schoolboy for generations had admired him, our blond, comic-book hero. I must have been cheeky about him, or written something disobliging, for his wife Joy, one of the Beverley Sisters, wrote to the editor and complained afterwards. I never worked out what remark or quote had annoyed her. It can often be simply by saying someone is well built, which they take to mean fat, or untidy, i.e. scruffy, which can upset them or, more usually, their loved ones.
I also went to see Teasy-Weasy Raymond, a celebrity hairdresser, very well known at the time, who lived in a smart flat in Sloane Square. I happened to tell him I had recently arrived from Manchester, and this was my first job in London. He made some remark about my provincial clothes, then took me into his dressing room and threw open a large wardrobe. He then insisted on giving me one of his suits. It was in a very loud check, so I looked like a bookie on the way to Ascot. I showed it with pride to Margaret next time she came to visit – and she threw it straight out, saying it was an awful suit and I looked ridiculous. ‘But it’s free,’ I cried. ‘All free.’
Terence Feely, as my boss, would often drop his own stories into the column and would also arrange for me to meet well-known people, such as Fanny Cradock and her screen partner Johnnie, later her husband. She was one of TV’s first celebrity chefs, rather grand and imperious, her voice so posh you felt it must be a fake, who bossed around her henpecked partner.
I went with Terence to Fanny’s house somewhere near Greenwich and we were treated to an excellent meal, cooked by Fanny herself. Terence did most of the chatting – but then it turned out I should have been making notes. I hadn’t realised that my job was to write it all up. It was PR for her.
I also started a series of interviews, as Peter Raymond, which was called ‘Nothing but the Truth’. It was a Q & A format, even more popular in newspapers today, being cheap and simple to do. Once you launch it, PRs put forward their clients, and often write all the answers. I usually tried to do follow-ups on the phone, to get some genuine-sounding answers.
One of my subjects was the boxer Freddie Mills, born 1919, who had started as a fairground fighter and had risen to be light heavyweight champion of the world between 1948 and 1950. He had a bashed-in face, seemed practically incoherent, but was greatly loved by the great British public as a character, a trier. My piece about him had the banner headline: ‘FREDDIE MILLS – FIGHTING FIT AT FORTY!’ And the first question was – how old are you Freddie?
I was so ashamed by the banality of the piece, but we had to k
eep it soppy and harmless or so-called celebs would not be put forward by their PRs or agents. I never met him, just talked briefly on the phone. Turned out he wasn’t all that fit, mentally, financially or otherwise. He had got himself mixed up with Soho gangsters, including the Kray twins. He shot himself in the head in 1965, sitting in his car behind a nightclub, aged just forty-six.
I did one story the following year which made the front-page lead, the splash as we called it. It was just before the marriage of Princess Margaret, which took place on 6 May 1960. We had heard a rumour that their honeymoon, or part of it, might be on the royal yacht Britannia, but no announcement was being made. I was sent down to Portsmouth to poke around the docks and speak to sailors, so I went to their pubs, and also met a few of the wives, and it did seem to be true, the crew was secretly standing by to set sail imminently. I wrote the story, desperately hoping I had not misread all the signs, all the gossip, but it turned out to be correct.
When Margaret came through from Oxford for the weekend I now always had somewhere exciting to take her, unlike in Manchester. It was usually to the West End – and all free. She didn’t approve of free things, from a free bus ride to free meals. I explained it was work. I would have to write a paragraph somehow. And it involved other people’s work. There were PRs whose job it was to get people like me to go to an opening night at the Pigalle or Talk of the Town, stuff myself at the best tables with the best food and drink, and watch Eartha Kitt perform. Not easy.
One freebie consisted of a whole weekend by the seaside, for the two of us – at Butlin’s holiday camp in Margate. The Sunday Graphic had become sponsors of the Butlin’s glamorous granny event, which had been going for some years. As the Graphic was involved, we had to supply a judge and I was given the job on behalf of the paper, as Peter Raymond, their famous columnist. I had never been to a Butlin’s, or Margate or any other English southern seaside town. Would it be like Silloth?
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