Читать книгу The Inside Story - Anthony Westell - Страница 14

~ Chapter 4 ~

Funerals, Fleet Street, Family Man

Having laid my genes, nurture and experiences as a youth face up on the page, as it were, I can now begin the substance of this memoir, which is my life and good times as a journalist. When I left school in 1941, at age fifteen, my father explained that there was no money for further education — my brother had been at a boarding school until he was seventeen — and when I said I would like to be a reporter he might well have objected because in those days it was not really a career for a middle-class boy in Britain. There were basically three ways into the business: As an inky copy boy of fourteen hoping to get a chance to move up to reporting; as an apprentice training to be a reporter; or by way of Oxford or Cambridge and family connections for the few chosen to be editorial writers or foreign correspondents on a major paper. The fact that there were apprentices and unions revealed that it was a trade or craft rather than a respectable profession like law or medicine or accounting. In fact, the newsrooms of most papers were “closed shops,” meaning that you couldn’t work there unless you were a member of the National Union of Journalists. The phrase “gentlemen of the press” was intended ironically because reporters were mainly from the lower middle or working classes and certainly not gentlemen in the sense of class. Except for a few stars, they were poorly paid, and the pub was their club. As one cynical poet put it:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist

Thank God! the British journalist.

But seeing what the man will do

Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Nevertheless, my father arranged for me to have an interview with the formidable lady who was a part-owner — the other owners being a London-based chain — of the local afternoon paper, the Express & Echo. She agreed the paper would take me on as an apprentice for five years, not, I suspect, because I was such a promising lad but because there was a manpower, even a boypower, shortage, in the war years. Terms of apprenticeship, or indentures, varied in the different trades and crafts. Under some, in the nineteenth century, the apprentice’s parents paid for his training and upkeep by his master, and others which I came across during my family research forbade dancing, drinking, fornication, even marriage. Of course, it wasn’t that strict for me, although under the union agreement, apprentices started out at a few shillings a week — perhaps $20 in today’s money. And there wasn’t much training because most of the senior reporters were away at the war, and those who remained were old or unfit. We did have an able “district man” who covered rural affairs, but he had the bulbous nose of a drinker, and when he came into the office he often carried a fishing rod and had a collection of flies in his hat. He was not above borrowing a few shillings from a junior if he could, and had a beguiling way of asking: “Would you care to increase my indebtedness to you?”

The paper’s building was in no better shape than the staff. The exterior was black oak Tudor, and the interior a warren of corridors and offices, some of which were braced by two-by-fours, no doubt because when the presses ran the whole place shook. Here, the week after my sixteenth birthday, I joined two other apprentices who, like me, were waiting to enter the forces, and being older left before I did. We worked in what was called the junior reporters’ room, and the chief reporter had a cubicle in the corner. We were required to learn shorthand and typing in our own time, which meant evening classes at a secretarial school. I had no trouble with typing, or rather, I soon learned to type very fast with two fingers, as I am doing now. But my handwriting had always been messy — now it is illegible even to me, unless I print — and I never did learn to write neat shorthand outlines, correctly positioned on the line. I lived in dread of the occasional days when the chief reporter would call one of us into his cubicle and dictate the leading editorial from The Times or The Daily Telegraph which we would then have to read back from our shorthand notes. I survived by reading the editorials every day and memorizing enough to help me over illegible words and sentences in my shorthand.

To emphasize the importance of shorthand, the chief reporter, a kindly old gent we referred to behind his back as Father, liked to tell us the cautionary story — quite true, he insisted — of the young reporter who had the misfortune to be in the assize court in the middle of an important trial when the official reporter making a shorthand record could not continue. The judge — and they were awe-inspiring figures in wig and robes with almost unlimited power in their courtrooms — was under the mistaken impression that all reporters could write shorthand, and he more or less drafted the young reporter into taking the official note. As bad luck would have it, there was a query that afternoon about exactly what had been said just before, and the reporter was asked to read out the disputed passage. When the judge saw the young man was flustered and in difficulties, he instructed him to retire to the chamber adjoining the courtroom, study his notes, and return when he was ready. After an hour, the judge sent his usher to find out what was happening; the usher returned and whispered in his Lordship’s ear; the window to the street was open and the reporter was gone, no doubt having decided that flight was the better part of having to tell the judge that he couldn’t read his notes and incur some imagined but dreadful punishment. The chief reporter supposed that to avoid such humiliation we would be more diligent in our shorthand studies, but it merely persuaded me to resist any and all pressure to take an official note at any time. Eventually, I did learn a sort of bastard shorthand, some as invented by Mr. Pitman and some by me, which served, barely, until I came to Canada where, I discovered to my delight, shorthand was considered an advantage but not a necessity.

The first job of the junior reporters on Monday was to call on each of the movie theatres to pick up publicity handouts on the week’s films, and write brief digests — not reviews. These were a service to readers who wanted to know “what’s on,” and a free advertisement for the theatre. Well, not entirely free because they provided two free press tickets which could be picked up at the box office for each movie program. These not only saved us money, but also provided a little prestige; one felt like a real newspaperman when asking for “the Express and Echo tickets.” There was of course no TV in those days and as the city was full of soldiery who had girlfriends and so required not only entertainment but a warm, dark place in which to snuggle, movies were immensely popular. Each three- or four-hour show included two movies, news, and cartoons, and the program might change in midweek. In the grander palaces, a mighty organ flashing coloured lights would rise from beneath the stage, and the organist would lead a singsong, a popular attraction when the community spirit of wartime was strong. Movie houses were always full, the shows ran continuously, and as it was often necessary to queue and wait for a seat to become vacant, one might enter at any point in a film and remain for the next showing to see what one had missed at the beginning. Film notes were the first thing I wrote for a newspaper.

Reporting funerals was another job for junior reporters, and I covered scores. A paid death notice would appear in the paper, along with announcements of births, weddings and deaths, on the page popularly known as “Hatches, Matches and Dispatches.” No matter how insignificant the departed, if the family so requested the funeral would be reported. After all, this was local news that many would read. I or some other junior would first go to the home to express polite regrets and obtain enough details to write a short and laudatory obituary. At first, I was reluctant to intrude on private grief, but I soon learned, long before Andy Warhol, that everyone wants their few minutes of public attention, and for ordinary families death was one of the few opportunities they had to get their name in the paper. Very often, we reporters were pressed to admire the deceased in a coffin in the front parlor, and invited to borrow any family photo we thought would reproduce well. The next stage was to attend the church and take the names of all the mourners, which provided another lesson; get the spelling right because people can be very touchy about their names, and — horrors — might complain to the editor if it were wrong in the paper. If the family wanted the list of wreaths published with the funeral report they had to pay by the line, but it was the reporter’s job to make a list of names and notes on the “floral tributes.”

Funerals of course soon became boring, but there was sometimes a cash reward. If the undertaker pressed a few shillings into one’s eager hand — almost a week’s pay — one would attach a note to the bottom of the report, “Funeral arrangements by …”. The busiest undertaker in Exeter sixty years ago was H. Bidgood — see how readily the name comes to mind after more than fifty years — and he enriched me considerably. Nobody ever questioned this arrangement, so I suppose it was just an accepted bit of graft, like the movie tickets. Occasionally, a local dignitary would die, and then the chief reporter would turn out the entire staff to make sure we got every name at every door of the church, or perhaps even at the cathedral, and fill columns with them. Names made news, and I expect they still would if papers deigned to cover such mundane events.

The daily courts in which minor cases were tried were called police courts in those days because the police not only gathered the evidence but conducted the prosecution. The chief reporter showed me the the ropes, but soon I was covering them myself. There were also county courts and, occasionally, assize courts at which a real judge and the barristers who travelled the legal circuit would appear. As an innocent youngster I listened with keen interest to messy divorce cases, some of which went on for days. The London papers were always ready to pay for a bit of scandal, but we were allowed to report only the evidence the judge mentioned in his summing up. There was keen disappointment when, after a sexy case, a spoilsport judge would grant a decree without reviewing the evidence in open court. Looking back on it now, I wonder that the paper allowed such a neophyte as I to report courts when it would have been easy for me to make a costly mistake, but I suppose I learned quickly the simple formula most journalists used to report the courts: name, verdict, charge, sentence, evidence. In Britain in peacetime when there was plenty of paper, courts were extensively reported, sometimes with key evidence given almost verbatim and filling column after column, and I was surprised on coming to Canada to see how little attention was paid to courts. After all, even minor cases can provide tragedy, comedy, or sometimes drama.

Our circulation went far beyond Exeter and juniors were assigned what the chief reporter called a “parish,” meaning a rural town to which we had to travel from time to time to cover council meetings, courts and other events. As the most junior, I got the parish furthest away, Okehampton, a town on the edge of Dartmoor about twenty miles as the train steamed from Exeter. So at the end of a day of work in the city, or sometimes on a Saturday morning, I would take the train to my parish. Twenty miles doesn’t sound much now, but wartime trains were so crowded that getting a seat was a bit of luck, and one never knew when the local passenger train would be shunted onto a siding to make way for something with higher priority, perhaps a troop train. If there happened to be an air raid warning in effect in Exeter when I was returning at night from Okehampton the train would be parked on a branch line to await the “all clear.” Then I had to go into the office to write my copy. It sounds terrible, but I loved every minute of it — or most minutes anyway. I learned mostly by reading the papers to see how various types of stories were handled, but one subeditor — what we would call a deskman — seemed to take particular pleasure in correcting my English; I remember clearly when he stormed into the junior reporter’s room and said, “Westell, if you confuse accept and except once more, I’ll personally fire you.” I don’t think I have ever since used either word without checking to see I had got it right, so I suppose I should be grateful to him, but at the time I thought him a tyrant. I described earlier the bombing of Exeter in May, 1942, three months after I had started work. While the fire which consumed so much of the High Street was stopped before it reached our offices, the explosions upset our presses, and production of the paper was shifted that very day to Torquay, about twenty miles away, where the chain had another daily. Our editors went by bus to Torquay every day to produce our paper, leaving we reporters, senior and junior, with even less supervision than usual. And the paper became, if that were possible, even less enterprising in covering the news.

One day in 1943 my father passed on a tip that Bob Hope and his company, who were touring to entertain American troops would be arriving that night at a local hotel he was frequenting at the time, contemplating, I think, marriage to the sophisticated blonde lady behind the bar. I took a seat in the hotel lobby that night and waited for Hope, who arrived eventually. Rushing up, I sought an interview. He, seeing a scruffy seventeen-year-old before him, asked if I was from the “college paper,” to which I replied with all the dignity I could muster that no, I was from the local daily paper. I asked a few no doubt banal questions, and he tossed off a few cracks, and so I had my interview, and rushed back to the office to write up the scoop, making as much of so little as I could. It did appear in the paper, savagely cut in length, and I was advised that the Express & Echo was not much interested in American movie stars. But I’m sure it was one of the best-read items in the paper that day.

Soon after, when I was twenty months into my apprenticeship, there came the eagerly awaited call to join His Majesty’s navy. On demobilization — in my case almost three years later — one of the few benefits offered to servicemen was the right to get their old job back, so in 1946 I returned to the Express & Echo. At the paper, not much had changed except that the prewar editor had returned, having risen to the rank of captain in the army, and was even more conservative than his wartime replacement. To relieve the housing shortage, the government was buying aluminum homes prefabricated in factories that had previously produced aircraft. The houses were small, but well equipped, and a score or so were assembled on sites in Exeter. I discovered somehow that there was a problem with ventilation, causing moisture to freeze on the inside walls during the cold winter of 1947. So tenants were existing in a sort of igloo, or ice house. I wrote an excited story but it never got into the paper; our editor said that if there was anything to it the problem would be on the agenda of city council’s housing committee and we would report it then.

Speedway, or motorcycle racing, began in Exeter around that time, and I was assigned to cover this dubious new sport. For a small city, the crowds were large and the interest high, but the paper refused to print more than a few paragraphs. So I conceived the idea of starting a speedway weekly — called Fanfare, naturally — and persuaded a couple of other young reporters to work on it with me in our spare time. It paid its way and survived for several years after I left Exeter, so was I an entrepreneur in the making? I think not; I was restless, looking for new challenges and inclined to a sort of reckless optimism, a pattern which has recurred in my career. A year or so later, frustrated by the Express & Echo, I abandoned my apprenticeship which had more than a year to run, and moved to a larger city. I was at first concerned about breaching my contract, but I reasoned that the Express & Echo had never fulfilled its side of the bargain by providing training. And when I heard that the editor had complained that I was leaving just when I was becoming useful, I thought of the countless hours of cheap and reasonably competent labour I had given the paper, and departed with a clear conscience.

I would have preferred to have gone straight to London but could find no opening in Fleet Street, so I went to Bristol, the next city up the country from Exeter, where there were two afternoon papers in fierce competition, and a sluggish morning paper. All career changes alter the direction of one’s life, but that one had larger consequences than most. A few days after I started work at the Evening World a young woman returned from holiday, Jeannie Collings, and we were neighbours at the huge reporters’ table. I can’t say I paid her much attention, but she soon noticed that I was something less than a snappy dresser. I was quite likely to have a hole in the elbow of my jacket, and the collar of one of my few shirts was too tight to button up because I had bought it from a smaller colleague in Exeter who needed to raise a few shillings. Such things did not bother me then, and they still don’t. Nature, eating, and drinking made me apple-shaped and clothes, no matter how expensive, don’t sit well on apples. In those days, men could get away with being scruffy, but women journalists were expected to dress respectably, often with hat and gloves, which was quite a feat when wages were low and clothes were rationed. All we young, single reporters lived in rooming houses, some better than others, but Jeannie had a particularly dismal room with no running water. She contrived nevertheless to emerge every day like a butterfly, with clean gloves and starched blouse, having done her laundry in a bowl on the gas ring.