I nurtured early ambitions to be a concert violinist. This conceit was based on nothing more than a genetically modified ability to imitate my Russian forebears’ fiddling the tearjerking tunes of their motherland. (I had played as a so-called child prodigy at the old Crystal Palace which subsequently burned down, an overreaction if ever there was one.) I had won an acting award playing Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII, drawing a rave notice by W. A. Darlington in the Daily Telegraph of the day. The curtain fell to thunderous applause from my press-ganged relatives in the stalls. I received several tempting offers. But all attempts to repeat the triumph with other roles failed on the grounds that these all bore an uncanny resemblance to Cardinal Wolsey.

Two Muses down, and out. A job as a negotiator with a dubious estate agency was similarly abortive. Issued with a bowler hat, umbrella and, oddly, a Raleigh drop-handled racing bike, I prospected London in the style of a real-estate salesman. At one house in Tottenham I tried to impress the owner, and a prospective customer, with my knowledge of building construction. “Sound as a bell”, I said, prodding the ceiling with the umbrella, and puncturing it… Plaster showered down on to a rosewood table and the ceiling light exploded. The owner, who had “Ypres” tattooed on his arm and plaster on his head, propelled me towards the door. En route to the street I contrived a smile assuring my client of my best endeavours at all times. The bowler hat and umbrella followed. I cycled home and reviewed the situation. With Archer Street and Shaftsbury Avenue no longer in the frame, Fleet Street entered into the reckoning.

In those days, the “Street” housed most of the great national newspapers. Not any more. That Fleet Street is dead, its ashes scattered over Wapping, the face-lifted dockside pioneered by Rupert Murdoch. Now it is just another London thoroughfare, descending from the Strand down to Ludgate Circus and the river. The nearest I had come to the printed word at the time was selling advertising space for The Floor Coverings Review, a pulse-quickener if ever there was one. My first and only contact, a linoleum company, having laughed me off the premises, I threw the sales literature into the nearest dustbin, phoned my resignation from a call-box in Hatton Garden, and headed for the “Street of Adventure”. The shortest route, via Shoe Lane, E.C.4. proved to be the most fortuitous. It housed the London Evening Standard which together with the London Daily Express, were the pride and joy of their buccaneering owner, Lord Beaverbrook.

Newspaper buildings have a resonance all of their own. The subterranean roar of the monster print machines, the vans fanning out all over London with the early editions, it was heady stuff to this ambitious by-line seeker. Architecturally cheerless, well-distanced from its more powerful sibling in Fleet Street, the Standard was still the most influential London evening paper of the thirties The received wisdom in those days was that a stint on a provincial newspaper was an essential baptism for Fleet Street. The great preponderance at the time of Welsh editors, Mancunian subs, and brittle editorial executives with Tyneside accents underscored it. The alternative was to aim at the lowest rung of the ladder and hope that by guile and a touch of chutzpah one could short-circuit the system. I chose that route and joined the Standard with no recognisable status except mandatory membership of Natsopa, the former National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants. The branches were called “Chapels” which I innocently assumed implied some quasi-religious connotation; a direct line to the Almighty in the event of a dispute. I expected the FOC (Father of the Chapel) to look like Moses and speak like Solomon. That stained-glass reverence disintegrated when I arrived one morning to find the entire staff out in the street on a lightning strike. Still new to the game I attempted to enter the building.

“Where are you going?”, enquired an official.

“To work”, I said

“Oh no you’re not!”?

“Who says I’m not?”

“The F.O-fucking C, that’s who!”, he said.

The brief impasse was interrupted by the arrival of a shortish Edward G. Robinson look-alike with intimidating eyebrows and what biographers called an “impish” smile. A Canadian multimillionaire, Lord Beaverbrook was not grinning that day. Recognising him, the strikers respectfully drew back allowing him to pass through to the front door. An unashamed propagandist, who used his newspapers to bludgeon those he disliked, he was in no mood to lose a day’s publication. “What do they want?” I heard him ask a subordinate. “More money” was the answer. “Give it to ‘em” was the order (a surrender which pundits years on cited to support their predictions on the death of Fleet Street).

Trust

Few premiers, union bosses, or other public figure escaped Low’s genial mischief. His ability to raise hackles in high places particularly delighted him. It showed in the roguish grin on that pink and cherubic face with the little goatee beard. Nothing amused him more, as I recall, than some of his own cartoons. On arrival at his first floor studio in Hampstead I was directed to sit stage left while he put the finishing touches to the day’s masterpiece. I was instructed not to move, cough, burp or otherwise interrupt the genius at the drawing board. He would labour long and silently until he was satisfied. Clearly he found himself hard to please. He would brush or pen a line, scrape a razor-blade over another, finally standing back like a benign mandarin. Once in a while he invited me to view the work.

“What do you think, son?”

“It’s good”, I would mumble.

“Good? It’s bloody great!”, declared the master.

The cartoon frequently shared space with the Evening Standard’s “Londoner’s Diary”, a mischievous platform for political gossip, upper crust scandal, and His Lordship’s vendetta of the week. Its contributors included important political and literary figures like Michael Foot, Malcolm Muggeridge, Howard Spring, Robert Bruce Lockhart and Harold Nicholson. They generally wore horn-rimmed spectacles, hairy tweed jackets and corduroys and called each other “Old Boy” a lot. Just to hover in the room where they worked — or plotted — was instructive. I hovered and learned a lot. I graduated from intelligent messenger to editorial dogsbody. Promotion to the “racing room” introduced me to the Maharajah of Baroda, who introduced me to his favourite horses. I visited stud farms and reported which stallion had serviced the most mares, and in the process learned more about sex than anything my prolific father was prepared to impart.

European Fascism polarised political attitudes. I read every paper I could lay my hands on and joined the Left Book Club (Gollancz, half a crown a time) and talked exhilarating nonsense with other aficionados late into the night. Now and again friends would quietly disappear. We learned eventually that they had joined the International Brigade fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Some never returned home. I was still not a real reporter. I decided to take a chance elsewhere. The Father of the Chapel sent me away with the benediction, “You’re bleedin’ mad my son.” It was just a short walk through narrow passageways to Fetter Lane, and the Daily Mirror.

Geraldine House, headquarters of the London Daily Mirror, rose in tiers like the decks of a passenger liner, the printing machines in steerage the bosses in the staterooms above. By the time I joined as a reporter in 1938, the paper had given up imitating its racy American counterpart, the New York Daily News. But not without some reluctance. War was little more than a year away, but the headlines of those days scarcely reflected the fact:

Ex-Typist Crushed Me Like a Worm... Kings Counsellor;

6ft 4in Wife Bounced 3ft 11in Midget on Her Knee Too Often...;

Stars weep as $60 a day Chimpanzee is buried in satin coffin;

Girl in Dustbin - Theory of Bloodlust.;

Pupil, 22, Weds Her Tutor, 83.?

Thus, in the lively prose of popular journalism, the dramas of everyday life were recorded. Like this straight-faced collectors’ item:

Sleeping on a sofa over which there was a large mirror, Mrs. Fanny Peacey , 89, of Worthing, dreamed that it (the mirror) was falling on her. The nightmare woke her up. She jumped up from the sofa in a daze, lost her footing, fell over a fender and never recovered. The story of Mrs. Peacey’s dream was told at the inquest yesterday.

Paragon

By the mid 30s the paper was in crisis. It was rescued by Guy Bartholomew, regarded as the father of Britain’s tabloids. His formula was roughly sex, sincerity, and sensation. The man he chose to execute his design was Hugh Cudlipp, whose flamboyant genius has been told and retold by the many who were lucky to come within his Havana-flavoured orbit. Hugh was every serious newspaperman’s guru. His mind worked at the speed of light. He could deliver an inspired headline while applying a match to his eight-inch Bolivar cigar. Ash would hardly be forming for him to have designed the entire centre spread. A full-blooded campaign might just occupy his inventive mind before the Cuban missile needed to be re-lit. He was a hands-on editor who conducted rather than dictated, encouraging virtuoso performances from some of Fleet Streets best-known names, like Keith Waterhouse, “Cassandra” (the late Sir William Connor’) the multi- award winning John Pilger and the late legendary agony aunt, Marje Proops. All the surviving pupils have cited Cudlipp as the catalyst, the Great Inspirator of their exceedingly successful careers. He was the dominant figure of a journalistic phenomenon — three brothers, Hugh, Percy, and Reginald, all at one time editors of national newspapers.

But he was only a name to me when I landed a three-day trial on the paper, at the end of which no decision was forthcoming, I stayed for 40 years. My first assignment was a disaster,but instructive. There had been a fire at a nightclub in Soho. I returned from the scene and clacked out 200 words on an old Underwood typewriter, which began as I recall with the turgid intro... “Firemen were called to extinguish a blaze at a night club in Old Compton Street yesterday...” The news editor read no further and slowly shook his head. “This is shit,” he said, not unkindly. “Let Dudley Hawkins have a go at it”. Five minutes of interrogation by this old campaigner produced the following re-write: “CIad only in her scanties, a blonde, 22-years-old night-club hostess climbed along a 30ft parapet in a Soho fire last night to rescue her pet cat Timothy.”

Here, in a single sentence of slick hyperbole, were all the elements of popular journalism — sex, heroism, drama and pet-worship. On those lively imperatives, popular journalism (and not a few noble proprietors) have prospered mightily over the years. So triumphantly, in†fact, that a learned American professor decades ago put the Mirror under the microscope, the better to analyse the phenomenon. It produced a fascinating little book entitled The Sugared Pill. What intrigued that serious observer was the skill with which the weighty news of the day was gift-wrapped in the friskier images of showbiz and fashion.

The duller the news, the greater the need for the soothing sweetener of chaste and cheerful sex. I personally witnessed a perfect example of that trusted formula in action:

Scene: the picture desk of the Daily Mirror newsroom circa 1960. Simon Clyne, a legendary picture editor of the Manchester school, is in earnest conversation on the phone. I may have misheard, but Simon appeared to be discussing a passage from the Old Testament with someone who I guessed to be a dignitary of their local synagogue. Looming over him was Jack Nener, the flamboyantly Welsh editor, silver-haired, bow-tied, good natured — but in a hurry. Brief references to (I think) Jonah and the Whale or some such allusion, merely added to his irritation. He suffered from gout and shifted painfully from one foot to the other. Finally, the picture editor became aware of the editor’s ominous presence. He cupped his hand over the receiver. “You want something, Jack?”

“Yes”, growled Nener... “I want some tits to go with the rail strike!!”

A short, succinct, and unmistakable directive.

Expenses

There is a class of drunk who, released of all restraint, will lurch on to any stage determined to out-perform the performers. He can be seen on the Costa Brava with a flower between his teeth, rear cleavage exposed, in a heavy-footed attempt at flamenco dancing. My effort was marginally more-up market. A violinist was performing on a dais at the other end of the bar. He was playing the dreamy melodies of my youth. I became maudlin and dangerously mobile. He†saw me coming and backed towards the pianist. I reassured him in words of slurred syllables that I could play the instrument. He hesitated. “LET THE BOOGER ’AVE IT!” roared a well-wisher from the back of the hall.. The musician capitulated. “Sorrento?”††I enquired of the pianist. Moonlighting from the town’s symphony orchestra he winced at the choice but played the introduction. By the time I had reprised the chorus the customers were joining in at full pelt. Pints of beer were sent up to the soloist from†boozed Andy Capps who were queuing with requests. Fyfe decided the recital deserved a wider audience. He pulled me to a telephone booth in the bar and dialled the Manchester news desk (where we had yet to present our credentials.). “You gotta hear this —†it’s fucking marvellous”, he insisted. The listener at the other end was the paper’s Northern Editor. A stocky, diffident character with rimless glasses, he had dropped by the desk to check the stories of the night. He got “Sorrento” . And then once more, with feeling.

Like an old Groucho Marx routine, Fyfe grabbed the phone. “Hey, whaddaya think o’that then, hey ? Hey whaddaya think..hey? Hello? Hello?” Silence. The following morning, the editor was not unkind. He felt obliged to remind us, however, that we were there to boost the paper’s sales in the north. On the other hand, if my musical inclinations were so strong I was free to approach the Halle Orchestra.... The point taken, we returned to our rooms at the Theosophical Society, only to be asked kindly†to pack and leave. Clearly the round-the-clock lifestyle of a newspaper reporter did not blend well with the essential serenity of the establishment. Its mission, to achieve an intuitive insight into the divine nature, required a sober response. This was not immediately apparent in the two gentlemen from London. We left with much mutual goodwill. I found rooms above the Elton School of Dancing in the Oxford Road. The landlady doubled as the school’s principal. An amplified gramophone barely drowned out the†noise of the trams and traffic. The other paying guests were mainly company reps whose crumpled suits and lifeless smiles were straight out of “Death of a Salesman”. In the “classroom” below the shrill-voiced madame instructed an awkward squad of pupils which included a detective, a Hoover salesman, and an unfrocked priest.

A formidable brunette of uncertain vintage, she suggested after supper one night that we both go downstairs and have a lesson on the house. After supping on a tepid shepherd’s pie, followed by jam roly-poly awash with custard, I did not care to fox-trot. Not with Madame. But she had already cranked the gramophone. She waited, arms outstretched, a heavily-corseted stand-in for She Who Must Be Obeyed. Her chosen record was “Lovely lady, I’m falling madly, in love, with. . . yee-oo’’. Whether this was wishful thinking or coincidence, was academic. She pulled me to her like a Sumo wrestler. I would have preferred a Sumo wrestler. She steered me through the basics adding a few innovations of her own. How that session might have ended, was never tested. In the middle of a 90 degree turn, one of the guests put her head round the door. “Where’s the cocoa, love?” she enquired. The spell broken, madame released me. “Another time?”, she asked, straightening my tie. “Of course,” I said. I left the next day and dived into the deep end of journalism.