A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  Around the pub was a small, permanent encampment of caravans and boarded-up fairground stalls. It was strange to find them there in such a select, expensive location. This was the nucleus of the famous Hampstead Heath annual fair. Several fairground families, who had been there for decades, lived on the site all the year round. Once a year, at Easter, the encampment exploded, spreading right over the Heath. The posher Vale of Health residents would then always move out to their country cottages.

  One of the fairground men, one of the residents, we always knew as Mr Shouter. Several times a day he would walk past our house shouting. It was alarming at first, worried that we had caused some offence, till we realised he was perfectly nice and harmless – just had some involuntary tic which caused him to go around shouting.

  The only drawback to our Vale of Health idyllic, sylvan flat came after about a year – when I started to have asthma. I suffered from it all my childhood, but assumed it had gone for good. We put its return down to the fact that our bedroom window overlooked the Vale of Health pond. In the evenings, there was almost always a mist hovering and hanging over the pond, which soaked and seeped into our bedroom, and then sneaked its way into my lungs. That was my theory. It might or not have been the true cause, but it did not really matter as asthma is a psychosomatic illness. Once you begin to imagine you have it, you have it. So much for it being healthy, living in the Vale of Health.

  It got so bad we decided I should go to a doctor. We had not yet got round to registering with a local GP, but then you don’t, in your early twenties, never thinking you will ever need a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer, an agent – nor a personal trainer, a yoga teacher, a masseur, or a brand manager. The last four are modern references. Still not got ’em.

  We got the name of a GP from the Post Office board in the High Street, someone we were told was called Micky Day. I had presumed at first it must be a man. Her real first name was Josie, but for some reason she had always been known as Micky. It was a bit confusing, as her husband, also a doctor, was called Michael.

  They lived in Thurlow Road – and she had her surgery in her house. The first time we went to see her, to register, we went into a front room where a young woman was sitting reading the Manchester Guardian with her feet up. I said we had come to see the doctor. She folded the Guardian, disappeared, and then put her head round the door and said come in, I will see you now.

  She came from Macclesfield and had a broad northern accent, which was reassuring. It turned out to be her first week and I think we were probably her first patients. We remained with her ever since. In fact, fifty-seven years later, I am still with her, or at least with her practice. She has retired but the Hampstead surgery she created continues in Park End, beside the Heath. Today, I am always asking the young doctors in the practice, most of whom look about thirteen, if I am their longest-living patient. They just stare at me, not understanding what I am on about.

  I did once call Micky in the middle of the night, when we were living in the Vale of Health. I had a bad attack of asthma, convinced I was going to choke to death. She came and gave me an injection. Which knocked me out.

  I later decided that it was not the mist on the pond which had done it this time but earlier that evening, stuffing my face at a free press night meal in the West End, I had eaten crab for the first time. I was convinced it was the crab what done it. So I have never eaten crab again.

  Dry sherry did not really agree with me either, causing a burning sensation in my tummy after five or six glasses, but that was not the reason I gave it up. Fashions and styles moved on.

  On the morning of 4 February 1962, another fashion, another style, came into being. It was a Sunday and early that morning, lying in bed, we were awakened by the sound of Mrs Woodcock outside our bedroom, clattering about it, muttering loudly, which was not like her. We could hear her opening the front door, then banging down the dustbin lid, having dumped something into it, and then she returned to her sitting room, still muttering and complaining.

  The very first edition of the Sunday Times Magazine had arrived. It was the beginning of a small but significant revolution in British weekend newspapers, but not as far as Mrs Woodcock was concerned. She immediately declared it to be a cheap, nasty, vulgar American abomination and she certainly did not want it in her flat a moment longer than necessary.

  In talking to her the next day, still moaning on, furious at the impertinence of such a thing being delivered to her home, unasked, I discovered she had worn rubber gloves, so as not to be contaminated by this awful, disgusting publication.

  2

  PAPER PLEASURES

  There was part of me which rather delighted in Mrs Woodcock’s reaction to the first appearance of the Colour Magazine. I knew by then how vital the launch of the Colour Mag was and how much had been invested in it. Their staff already seemed to lord it over the so-called steam section, working away in black and white and cheap newsprint, whereas their product was glossy, colourful, glitzy, ever so trendy and fashionable. Just like the Colour Mag staff, or so we thought they thought about themselves.

  I had been on the Sunday Times just over a year by then, having moved from the Sunday Graphic, a paper which no one has heard of now. Not many at the time seemed aware of it either. It was a popular, tabloid, national paper, one of several in the Thomson stable – formerly Kemsley newspapers, which I had joined in 1958 as a graduate trainee.

  We were in the same building, 200 Gray’s Inn Road, as the Sunday Times, but we were below the salt, other ranks, not exactly viewed with contempt but ignorance, as if we did not exist, were not part of the same brotherhood, the same profession.

  The Sunday Times staff were rumoured to work in oak-panelled offices, like an Oxford college, not that I ever ventured into their quarters, or knew anybody who worked on the paper.

  I used to imagine how wonderful it must be to work there. If you rang to say you were from the Sunday Times, they probably stood to attention, hanging on your every word. On the Sunday Graphic, when you rang up, you just got a grunt, and they never rang you back.

  But of course on any paper, in any occupation, it is your colleagues who make it, not the bosses, not the outside image of your firm. I remember thinking at the time I was on the Sunday Graphic that it was unfair to stigmatise workers by the institutions they work for. On the whole, owners are remote and usually bastards. You have to remember that owners change, sell out, get caught out, but the workers carry on.

  Coming to London as a total outsider, it took me a while to pick up the pecking order of institutions. The Savoy and the Dorchester were the two best hotels, no question. People wanted to stay there or work there, for having worked at the Savoy you could always boast you had trained there.

  I had begun to interview quite a lot of authors, a breed I had never met before, and I picked up that a publishing house everyone admired was William Collins. It was felt if you worked there, you could go on to anywhere else.

  In daily newspapers, the Daily Express was considered a brand leader, the one with the money and power, ideas and invention, well-designed, clever columnists, top-class reporters, both at home and abroad. The Daily Mail in the 1960s was a pale imitation, not quite as much of a rag as the Daily Sketch – which the Mail eventually took over in 1971 – but generally viewed as a poorer paper, less professional than the Express.

  In Sunday papers, the Sunday Times had for long been seen as the number one. It was not as dominant, or as fat and self-important as it later became, and was helped by the lack of competition in the so-called quality, broadsheet sector. In 1960 when I joined, the only real opposition was the Observer. The Sunday Telegraph was not founded till 1961.

  During the summer and autumn of 1960 we were all aware that the Sunday Graphic, where I was still working, was going to close. Roy Thomson had made no major changes when he had taken over the group the previous year, but was now starting to shed the loss makers.

  It was a miserable time on the paper. The ol
der reporters, such as Dorothy Harrison, whom I sat beside in the newsroom, were convinced they would never get another job. I never knew her age, probably mid-fifties, but she seemed totally ancient. When I was moaning on, saying what about me, I have just got married, I need a job to pay the rent, she always said the same thing: ‘Oh you’ll be fine . . .’ Which I always thought was an empty platitude, to cheer me up.

  A few weeks before the Sunday Graphic finally folded, in December 1960, three of the staff were whisked across to join the Sunday Times – Robert Robinson who did films and show business for the Graphic, Peter Wilsher who was a brain box with a first in Mathematics from Cambridge, so I was told, and the sports editor. One day, all three suddenly got up, cleared their desks and departed the sinking ship.

  I was so jealous, convinced that was it, the three chosen ones had gone. I was clearly not going to the Sunday Times. I was probably going to be offered a job back in the provinces, in Manchester or Sheffield or Newcastle, on one of the group’s local papers, or offered redundancy. I had only been working as a journalist for two years, so I wasn’t going to be offered much money.

  Then one morning I was called for an interview with the Sunday Times editor. I knew nothing about him, and had never even heard his name mentioned. He was called Harry Hodson, ex-Balliol and a Fellow of All Souls, and he was one of the dopiest, vaguest, least journalistic journalists I have ever come across. He was more like an absent-minded don than a Fleet Street editor. He had no interest in me, did not appear to have read the Sunday Graphic, was probably not even aware of its existence. He floundered around, abstracted, and then chanced to ask if I was interested in archaeology. I had studied Roman Britain for a year at Durham, and been totally bored, but I knew enough about the history of Hadrian’s Wall to chunter on as if I knew what I was talking about.

  On 23 December 1960, the week the Graphic finally closed, I got a note from him, saying I would be joining the Sunday Times on a salary of £1,350 a year. He welcomed me to the team. ‘And I hope that you will work happily with us for a long time to come.’

  In the event, it was he who didn’t last long. In a few months, he was gone, off to become Provost of Ditchley. When I mention his name now to people working on the Sunday Times today, they have no idea who Harry Hodson was, yet he edited the paper from 1950 to 1961.

  He was replaced by Denis Hamilton, Lt Colonel Hamilton, who was in his way an equally strange choice as an editor – in that he never wrote stuff, hardly read proofs, did not appear to be interested or involved in day-to-day journalism. He was more the leader figure, thinking and planning long term.

  Being called to his office, for good or bad reasons, was a nightmare. He didn’t speak, just sat there, austere and officer class, so in the end you blurted out any old stuff, comments and chat, stories which you should probably have kept to yourself.

  Almost everyone on the Sunday Times when I joined seemed to me to have been to a public school and/or Oxbridge, which created a bit of a chip on my shoulder for some time, mostly imagined. Denis Hamilton, despite his upper-class demeanour, his clipped moustache, perfect suits, polished shoes, came from a humble background in the Northeast and had never been to university. Before the war, he had been a sub on the local Thomson paper in Middlesbrough. When the war came, he zoomed through the ranks, commanding a battalion of the Durham Light Infantry at a very young age, ending as a colonel and aide to General Montgomery.

  After the war, he went back to journalism, but this time becoming editorial assistant to Lord Kemsley. When Thomson took over, he recognised Hamilton’s efficiency, making things happen, organising the troops.

  One of Hamilton’s earliest coups was in 1958 helping the Sunday Times purchase Monty’s memoirs. It ran for weeks and did so well, putting on a huge increase in circulation. Hamilton then bought further wartime diaries when he became editor. It began a long period of the Sunday papers competing to pay massive monies to serialise books. God, it made me scream, when I heard all the money being spent and the acres of space being devoted to these dreary old generals. I had lived through the war, as a child, and vaguely knew their names, and obviously was thankful we had won, but come on, surely we have had more than enough of wartime reminiscences, how about hearing from the new generation for a change? Such as, well, me for instance.

  Looking back at editions of the Sunday Times in 1961 and 1962, when I was working there full time, not getting my name in the paper but thrilled to be there, I am surprised how flimsy the paper was, so few pages, so few sections. Just two in fact – the main paper and the Review pages.

  There was of course no Colour Magazine, not till 1962, and that proved to be Hamilton’s major contribution to the British media. Thomson had got the idea from the USA and Canada, where coloured supplements had long been common, but it was Hamilton who pushed it through, made it work, after a dodgy start. Mrs Woodcock was not alone in being appalled.

  I sat in the newsroom, doing very little for a couple of weeks at the end of December 1960, till in the New Year I was eventually told what my job was going to be. I was to be the boy on the Atticus column, working with Robert Robinson, who had been with me on the Sunday Graphic. I didn’t really know Bob on the Graphic. He was ten years older, wiser, smarter, rather cutting and cynical and world weary, but very cultured and literary, always quoting Dr Johnson.

  Atticus was the paper’s diary or gossip column, though not as we know such animals today. We had different forms of celebrity in those days, so we did stories about who would be the next Master of Balliol, or Archbishop of Canterbury, our Ambassador in Washington. As if I cared. But I had to ring round our so-called contacts and get names of people possibly in the running and do little bios.

  The Atticus column had a long and distinguished history. Previous editors of it had been John Buchan, Sacheverell Sitwell and Ian Fleming. Sitwell was reputed to have got a lifetime’s supply of Mateus Rosé after he had been the first person to mention the name Mateus Rosé in a British newspaper. Someone clearly to look up to.

  Ian Fleming was still around when I joined the paper, supposedly foreign manager, but he didn’t seem to do much, swanning off on Friday after lunch to play golf in Kent, which I thought was shocking. On a Sunday paper, Fridays and Saturdays are the two most frantic days.

  We had our own Atticus office, me and Bob, a wood-panelled office – so the rumour was true. Our secretary, a debby-type girl, was best friends with Gillian, secretary to William Rees-Mogg, who was the paper’s city editor. The two secretaries would sit and gossip in our office when Bob was out and I was supposedly working. I would listen to their chat about dear William, and discovered that he did not even seem to be aware that Gillian, his secretary, existed, and yet, so I picked up, she was secretly in love with him. Eventually she decided it might be best to give in her notice. I told William how lovely Gillian was, how much he would miss her if she resigned, and hinted that he had missed his chance. The upshot was that he proposed, they got married and lived happily ever after and produced a large family including the Tory MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

  That’s my memory of the sequence of events back in 1961 – and I’m sticking to it. I have recently reminisced with Lady Rees-Mogg, formerly Gillian Morris, and she smiles and sighs and agrees, yes, that was roughly what happened. William died in 2012.

  Everyone, apart from humble reporters, had a secretary and their own office. It was part of one’s status, to have a good-size office and a smart, well-bred secretary. She answered the phone, booked lunch for you, typed your letters – bashing away at the office sit-up-and-beg manual type writer. Often not very well, for Sunday Times secretaries were prized for their breeding as much as their typing. The more brazen members of the staff had their secretary doing their bills, their personal affairs, buying presents for their wives or girlfriends. All gone. Almost all secretaries went out when computers came in.

  Bob did try to shake up the contents of the Atticus column, make it a bit less stodgy and old-fashioned. He
was a polished and amusing writer – but he was not a good interviewer, either on the phone or in the flesh. Probably too fond of his own opinions to be bothered listening to others. It meant I did most of the interviewing each week, a lot of which Bob would rewrite in his style.

  I once went to an art gallery in Mayfair for the opening of an exhibition of drawings by L. S. Lowry. I had assumed he was long dead, so was surprised to find this funny, untidy old man sitting in a corner, smiling to himself at all the preening, phony Mayfair arty types bustling about. I sat down with him and got on well with him, so well that I arranged to go and see him at his house in Lancashire later in the week, and do a proper interview.

  I had of course heard of Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887–1976), knew about his matchstick men drawings, his paintings of industrial Lancashire, knew that in his working life he had been a rent collector, which was funny, how he had turned down various honours, which seemed admirable, but was said to be something of a recluse, unmarried, living on his own. Most people in the sixties who had come down from the North had heard of him, felt affectionate towards his drawings and felt affectionate towards him, but the mainstream art world of London, or art lovers in London, if they had heard of him, saw him as a niche artist, a primitive even, not mainstream or important. I was so excited to have talked him into an interview, in his own home, which I don’t think many journalists had ever managed.

  When I got back to the office, I told Bob, half thinking he might never have heard of Lowry. He said well done – but I will do the interview, if you don’t mind.

  I was furious. I felt I had bonded with Lowry as a northerner, whereas Bob was from suburban London. I had shown journalistic nous in getting Lowry’s address out of him and arranging a date.