Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  Over the years I have acquired more knowledge of life and learning from friends, who might be described these days as my gurus, rather than from my nominated teachers. At school it was Ken Osborne, another of my very tall friends, who introduced me to reading The Observer. He won a history scholarship to Oxford after writing an essay titled ‘Red Indians’ that described the threat of Communism on the Indian subcontinent. He emigrated to Canada and I never saw him again.

  In the RAF, I had a brief acquaintance in the officers’ mess with David Raven, who was soon after released from National Service through the efforts of Edward Heath, then the government Chief Whip and a family friend of his from Broadstairs. My conversations with David in the mess bar and in our rooms were effectively tutorials, and when he resumed his research at Oxford and became Dean of Trinity College, I called on him later while I was at Cambridge. David was a sensitive soul who was never suited to the military life. He later committed suicide while teaching at the King’s School, Canterbury, which, several decades later, was attended by my daughter Laura.

  David told me that Heath had fallen in love with his sister Kay and they had been expected to marry. In the end, fed up with waiting, she had married someone else. Heath apparently kept a photograph of Kay Raven by his bedside until the day he died. In those days, of course, homosexuality was a crime and rarely talked about. David didn’t say that Heath was gay; just that he wasn’t ‘the marrying kind’. He believed Heath had considered marrying Kay to assist his political career, dithered about it, then decided against it on the grounds that it would be a dishonest and ignoble thing to do to someone he really cared about.

  In my first term at Selwyn, I was invited for a coffee in the rooms of a tall, rather tortured-looking student with a big nose and floppy black hair. He admitted afterwards that he had been attracted by my looks – he swung both ways, as they say – but had realised at our first meeting that I was as straight as an architect’s ruler. Christopher Dixon and I became good friends, to the extent that Richard Harries, later the Bishop of Oxford, said of us: ‘We used to watch in awe as Christopher and Donald walked round the quad deep in conversation, wondering what they were discussing. They were both much cleverer than the rest of us.’

  That was certainly true of Dixon, who got a First in part one of the English Tripos, then a starred First in part two of the moral sciences Tripos, a two-year course which he completed in a year. I couldn’t have dreamt of getting a First without Dixon as my guru. At Oakham School and later as a subaltern in the Sherwood Foresters, he had amassed a formidable knowledge of literature and philosophy, which he took no pains to hide, often to his tutors’ discomfort.

  He once took me along for moral support to a lecture given by John Wisdom, the professor of philosophy, because he believed he had spotted a logical flaw in one of his books. When he put the point to Wisdom at the end of the lecture, he was invited to discuss the matter in his rooms at Trinity College. Again, I went with him for moral support.

  As we climbed the unlit stone steps to his rooms and knocked on his door, there was no reply. We waited a while, then heard a heavy tread coming up the stairs and a voice coming out of the darkness asking us our business. When Christopher explained that we were there to visit Professor Wisdom, the voice boomed: ‘I am Wisdom,’ which was evidently a practised response that he enjoyed saying. I can’t now remember the outcome of the philosophical debate, but I do remember noting with surprise that the venerable philosopher read the Daily Express.

  One evening, Dixon decided to trace the concept in Shakespeare that beautiful women have a duty to bequeath their beauty – essentially the parable of the talents – and found a date when the bard had heard this theme in a sermon in London. He then produced a long sheet, the pages stuck together into a roll, tracing the theme through all the plays and sonnets from that date onwards. It was virtually a doctoral thesis produced in a single night.

  He woke me at around 7 a.m. by throwing pebbles at my bedroom window and took me through his findings. He asked me to accompany him to visit James Winny at Selwyn. The English tutor, probably fed up with being disturbed so early, was unimpressed. He made a single laconic comment: ‘The problem with you, Dixon, is that you’ve had too much Kant and too little c***.’

  I was able to perform one single service in return for the many lessons Dixon had taught me. I enabled him to meet his future wife, Christine, who worked as a staff nurse at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. I used to smoke a bit in those days and lit up as we left the college hall after dinner. There was nowhere to dump the match, so I put it back in the Swan Vestas box. The next minute my right hand was on fire. Dixon, who loved a drama, summoned an ambulance and off we sped to Addenbrooke’s, where Christine happened to be on duty.

  He had actually met her before through a doctor he knew at the hospital, but hadn’t built up the courage to ask her out. Later I met the doctor friend at a party and heard him say to someone: ‘If you are ever in doubt on a question of taste or etiquette…’ (the subject under discussion was whether coloured wine glasses were ever acceptable) ‘…just ask yourself this: would the Queen do it?’

  Christine was a very attractive brunette with an extremely posh accent, so I was surprised to discover, when I attended their wedding in Leicester, that she came from the same kind of lower-middle-class family that I did. Christopher, using the pseudonym Matthew Vaughan, went on to write three novels, the first of which, Chalky, won the David Higham Prize for Fiction in 1975.

  He was an inspirational teacher at a number of schools, including City of London, where he taught Julian Barnes, and Eton, where Charles Moore and Earl Spencer were among his pupils. After a spell in the United States, he became headmaster of Cobham Hall in Kent before ending up at Radley College, where he and his wife lived a hermetic existence. Later, Christopher died and Christine survived in what appears to have been a suicide pact.

  • • •

  I must be the last journalist ever to have got a job by simply walking down a street and seeing a sign in an office window saying: ‘Reporter Wanted – Apply Upstairs.’ I was in my last long vacation from Cambridge and wandering aimlessly around Coventry city centre when I saw the sign. I opened the door to a winding staircase and fetched up outside a door marked: ‘Editor: Captain Edgar Letts.’ This was only a decade or so after the war and many former officers hung on to their military ranks.

  I straightened my tie, tidied my hair and knocked on the door. ‘Come in,’ cried a brisk, military voice. As I stood in front of his desk, I suppressed a sudden urge to salute him. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. When I told him who I was, careful to mention the RAF and Cambridge, he visibly relaxed.

  After a few more questions, he barked: ‘Right, you’re on. Eight pounds a week.’ I was rather startled by this and it must have shown on my face, for he went on, obviously thinking I was disappointed with the wages on offer: ‘Did you, by any chance, hold the Queen’s Commission?’ When I said I had been a pilot officer, wondering what on earth this had to do with anything, he beamed and said: ‘Well, in that case it will be ten quid a week.’

  I went downstairs to meet the other few members of staff and confided to one: ‘I didn’t tell Captain Letts that I’m only on vacation from university and will have to leave in a couple of months.’ The reporter replied: ‘I shouldn’t worry about that. Nobody here lasts that long anyway.’ One who didn’t last was a woman who wrote a jokey headline on a page proof above a picture of a church fete: ‘Fete Worse Than Death.’ She never intended it to go in the paper but, sadly for her, it did.

  It was rumoured that the chief reporter, a racy Scotsman who covered theatre as well as several other subjects on the weekly paper, as we all did, had a habit of tempting actresses back to its Dickensian offices from the green room at the then newly opened Belgrade Theatre. He would write his review of the show, and especially her performance, while she hung around the otherwise empty newsroom.

  Legend has it that he kept a blow-up mattres
s in a cupboard on which the actresses were invited to return the favour of a rave review. After writing the puff, he would take the mattress out of the cupboard and blow it up: whether he had any puff left for anything else is not recorded.

  He left the paper suddenly in unexplained circumstances and I later heard that he had become a highly paid press officer with the United Nations in the Congo. I hoped he fared better in the Congo than a boy in my class at school who had gone out as a missionary and ended up dead and reportedly eaten.

  The Scotsman’s successor as chief reporter was sacked a few days later when the editor caught him with a bottle of port on his desk. That is how I became chief reporter after only three weeks on the paper. It was this that decided me to become a journalist: as Malcolm Muggeridge famously said, it was better than working. I wonder, though, how many journalists would have survived in Fleet Street, then or now, if they had had to pass a breath test after lunch (me included).

  • • •

  My life might have taken a completely different turn if I had succeeded with two job applications when I left Cambridge. One was to become a graduate trainee at the BBC. The interviewer was called Brian Batchelor and we seemed to get off on the wrong foot from the start. He asked me: ‘Are you an optimist or a pessimist?’, which struck me as a pretty pointless question.

  So, I replied – cheekily, even arrogantly, as it might seem now – by saying: ‘I’m not an optimist if that’s the kind of question you want me to answer.’ His face showed that he wasn’t impressed with this young Oxbridge smartass. A friend told me afterwards that he would have replied differently: ‘An optimist can be defined as the only man in the room who hasn’t heard the bad news.’

  The other interview was for a job with The Guardian, which had only just ceased to be called the Manchester Guardian and moved its head office to London. The interview took place in Cambridge with two genial and long-serving Guardian figures, Patrick Monkhouse and Harry Whewell, and I left with the strong impression that I had a good chance of securing one of the two traineeships on offer. When I mentioned that I had done some summer work on the Coventry Standard, they asked me to send them some cuttings.

  This is where it all went wrong. I rang my mother, who got in touch with the Standard office and asked them to send her a collection of my articles, which she could then post on to Manchester. Unfortunately, they sent the clippings of somebody else; there were no bylines in the paper and my mother wouldn’t have known who had written what. They belonged to the racy Scotsman, whose tabloid writing style clearly failed to commend itself to the Guardian talent scouts.

  In due course, I received a long and rather puzzled letter from Harry Whewell saying that I had seemed just right for the paper when they met me, but that unfortunately another candidate had pipped me for the job. I only discovered the error over the clippings when they were sent back to my mother and I saw them while visiting her in Coventry. I decided not to tell her. As a result, I was to start my career in journalism on the other side of the Pennines.

  • • •

  At Cambridge, I had written for Varsity, mostly on sport (‘Don Trelford reporting’), and told my tutor that I wanted to become a journalist. The tutor had evidently conveyed this to the University Appointments Board and the next thing I knew I had received a letter at my Cambridge digs from the Thomson Organisation, enclosing a railway voucher and inviting me for an interview in London about becoming a graduate trainee.

  When I arrived at their Gray’s Inn Road headquarters, I was asked to use the tradesman’s entrance at the back rather than the swanky main reception area, so my expectations of the visit were not high. I was met there by a man called Wenbourne, who was evidently impressed enough by my flimsy credentials to show me in to see C. D. Hamilton, who was editorial director of Thomson’s rapidly expanding group of regional papers at the time.

  This was in 1961. Later that year, Hamilton was to become editor-in-chief of The Times and Sunday Times, two years after Roy (later Lord) Thomson had bought the newspaper group from Lord Kemsley, for whom Hamilton had been a sort of chief of staff since the end of the war. When I saw him for my interview, he was still running the regional papers.

  He was a tall, dark, trim-looking figure with neatly combed hair, dressed in an immaculate double-breasted pin-striped suit, which I wouldn’t have known where to buy even if I could have afforded one. He wore a military moustache that reminded one of his distinguished war career on Field Marshal Montgomery’s staff as the youngest brigadier in the British Army.

  It was a strange interview, in that Hamilton said virtually nothing throughout, just stared down at my application form on his desk, hardly looking at me. I learned later that that was his style, allowing the other party to the interview to babble away and thereby reveal oneself. After several long, embarrassing silences, he finally looked at a map of Britain on the office wall, on which all the Thomson regional offices were marked with a star. Finally, after looking several times between me and the map, he uttered the single word: ‘Sheffield.’

  This, I gathered, meant that, when I left Cambridge in the summer, I was to become a Thomson graduate trainee on the Sheffield Morning Telegraph. I worked there, learning the nuts and bolts of the newspaper business, for a couple of years. I arrived early for my first day and was met by Gordon (later Sir Gordon) Linacre, then editor of the Star, the evening paper, who asked me into his office.

  When I told him my background, he replied: ‘If you want to be a success in journalism you must forget everything – and I mean everything – you learned at Cambridge University.’ I reflected afterwards that he was wrong about this. Some of the things I learned at Cambridge were to prove extremely useful: how to play cards, chat people up and hold my drink, for example.

  I never thought of myself as ambitious, but it became clear that others did. Two incidents on the Sheffield Telegraph come to mind. One was when I accidentally overheard a conversation in the office canteen between the news editor, Michael Finley (later the editor), and Howard Green (father of Conservative minister Damian Green), who was a newspaper manager from Wales doing a stint as a journalist in Sheffield as part of his training.

  I suddenly realised they were talking about me. Green said: ‘Young Trelford is only twenty-three – just imagine where he’ll be when he’s thirty-three.’ I was astonished to hear this, but in fact, as it turned out, I became deputy editor of The Observer at thirty-one.

  The other conversation took place at the Royal Festival Hall in London, where I had gone from Sheffield with two colleagues to hear a concert by the Russian cellist, Rostropovich. The colleagues were Tony Tweedale, the paper’s film critic, and Michael Ratcliffe, who went on to hold senior posts in the arts and books sections of The Observer and the Sunday Times.

  In the drinks interval, one of them said I was bound to become a national newspaper editor, to which I replied: ‘I’m not ambitious. I just like to have things done my way.’ At this they laughed and said: ‘You idiot! That’s what ambition is.’

  I was sitting at my desk at the Sheffield paper one day when Tweedale came into the office, very excited about a fire that had broken out at the cinema where he was due to attend a preview. Seeing the editor, Bill Lyth, in the newsroom, he approached him and spoke in a rather camp fashion: ‘Mr Lyth, I think I may have one of those scoop things.’ The editor politely listened to the story and told him to go away and write it. Then he turned to the news editor and said with a curled lip: ‘Get that fat bastard out on the road.’

  • • •

  I spent some time as a leader writer, working in tandem with Peter Tinniswood, who went on to become a successful writer of comic books, like Tales from a Long Room, and television sit-coms such as I Didn’t Know You Cared. I once had a hilarious dinner in Manchester with Peter and his friend and fellow script writer David Nobbs, creator of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. He also came to see me much later at The Observer, still smoking the filthy pipe that caused his early dea
th.

  The editor of the Sheffield Telegraph when I joined, the aforementioned Mr Lyth, prided himself on having once been art editor of the Daily Sketch. I was surprised to find him one evening counting up the toilet rolls in a cupboard in the gents’ lavatory. By way of explanation, he said: ‘We’ve got to find ways to cut back on editorial spending.’

  He used to take great pride in mixing with the great and the good of the city in the Sheffield Club or at ceremonial dinners in the Cutlers’ Hall. He would come back to the office in high spirits, having had a good dinner, usually with gravy stains on his waistcoat to prove it. Tinniswood and I used to take turns: one of us would be in the pub while the other hung around waiting for the editor’s return.

  On one particular night, it was my turn to wait in the office while Tinniswood went to the pub. The editor summoned me with an air of suppressed excitement. ‘My friends and I’, he said, pausing for me to take in just how important his friends were, ‘have decided that the World’s Fair shall come to Sheffield. It is your great good fortune, Trelford, to write a front-page editorial about this historic moment for tonight’s paper. I’m going home now, but I look forward to reading it in the morning. I’ll give you the headline: Sheffield – Centre of the Universe.’

  I sat at my typewriter struggling with this bizarre assignment. In the end, I came up with something like: ‘It is Sheffield steel that makes the tanks that fight wars for freedom around the globe … It is Sheffield steel…’ etc, etc. As I sat there at my typewriter I made a silent vow that one day I too would become an editor and I too would return to the office from my club with gravy stains on my waistcoat and then go home after ordering some other poor blighter to write my editorials.