The conditions of a trainee newspaper reporter in the mid-sixties were somewhere just above slavery; you could live at home and not be beaten with chains. On several occasions I worked every day of the week, including most evenings; and certainly Saturdays, especially in the summer, were seldom my own. There was a mystical beast known as the “day off in lieu.” But it was seldom seen until later in my career. I was an apprentice, a genuine apprentice, my father even had to sign a copy of my indentures, a mediaeval-looking document. Basically, it sold my soul for three years, in return for which you were taught the rudiments, tricks, dirty jokes, suspicious folklore, and clichés of local newspaper journalism. If Johnny Howe was your subeditor, you got all the dirty jokes very quickly, because Johnny was blessed with a wonderfully dirty mind; he needed it, oh yes indeed. A subeditor, on a local newspaper at least, needs a pin-sharp apprehension of every inadvertent double entendre. Did a correspondent once send in a report about a Women’s Institute flower, fruit, and vegetable show that actually included the bit about the naked man streaking through the marquee, “causing disarray among the tarts before he was caught by the gooseberries’? Johnny, the spit and image of the late Stubby Kaye, looked me firmly and trustingly in the eye, and almost certainly, I suspect, lied. Any writer needs an eye for the double entendre in the same way that the gamekeeper has to have the mind of a poacher. The deliberate double entendre, on the other hand, is not to be sneezed at; I myself once perpetrated a treble entendre, and I suspect that if sufficient grant money could be made available, the quadruple entendre should not be beyond our grasp.
Whereas Johnny was short and fat, Ken Burroughs (called Bugsy behind his back), the saturnine news editor, was tall and thin, and when the two of them headed off down to the pub at lunchtime it looked like the number 10 going for a walk. Bugsy taught me to get my copy in on time, check my facts, and never to try to put one over on him. George Topley, Chief Reporter, and the best natural journalist I have ever met, taught me the uses of the truth and some useful secrets about human nature. And finally Arthur Church, local boy, editor of the local paper, who took the affairs of High Wycombe very seriously, taught me honesty and self-respect and not, if at all possible, to offend the Methodists. A decent man, the sixties were puzzling him in the same way as they did my recent headmaster, but the sixties were okay with Arthur provided they included High Wycombe. When the first Apollo mission to the moon sent back those glorious pictures of the earth seen from its satellite, Westminster Press, owners of the paper, got hold of some of these and looked around desperately one Thursday to see which of their papers with colour capability was going to press soonest; and how they must have groaned when they worked out that somebody would have to ring up Arthur Church and tell him to clear the front page and two others at least. Probably, the Chiefs tossed a coin, but us reporters listening at his office door heard his agonized voice as he defended the interests of High Wycombe against those of the universe. And he had a point; every national newspaper next day would carry the pictures of the moon, but only one newspaper would carry the affairs, the important affairs, of High Wycombe, not to mention Marlow, Lacey Green, Loosely Row, West Wycombe, and Speen. It was a Chestertonian moment, and there was no doubt that he was right, but although they were asking, he recognized an order in disguise after a fairly lengthy tussle, and we set to work clearing the decks while he walked about grumbling, very nearly in tears. After all, the moon was just a lump of rock, right? And then suddenly the issue was happily resolved in his mind as he beamed and said with good grace, “Well I suppose the moon shines on High Wycombe just like everywhere else.” We nearly cheered!
Next day the Bucks Free Press sold out within minutes, even in Speen, and Arthur’s phone was constantly off the hook because local dignitaries were ringing up to congratulate him on his wonderful coup. High Wycombe had approved! He very nearly bought us all a drink, he was so pleased.
The editors of local newspapers were—and probably still are, insofar as they still exist, many having given way to the useless and suspect local government “information sheets”—often accused of parochialism. But a sense of the parochial is needed for the job. Everybody in the world knows how John F. Kennedy died; somewhat fewer would want to know about the demise of some luckless citizen found dead in his car, in his garage, with a pipe from the exhaust through a partly open window. Murder, probably not, suicide quite likely, but their town or neighbourhood should know the truth and in those days it was conveyed to them by me because I had sat there glumly in the coroner’s court taking down the facts of the matter as deduced by the coroner in reasonably good Pitman’s. We did not like to do it; people find many and varied ways to end their lives abruptly, and all of them are nasty, especially for those who have to deal with the aftermath—because suicide really needs practice, and there lies the problem. Pierrepoint the executioner knew how to hang a man swiftly, and knew how long the rope should be and where on the neck the knot should lie to ensure a merciful end. Most people don’t. And one day, the relative of a particularly gruesome suicide asked the coroner to tell the newspapers not to publish the finding of the inquest. He said, quite correctly, that we were entitled to be there by law, and all would have been well had he not added something on the lines of “although I sympathize with you and sometimes I myself have wished that the press was at the bottom of the sea.”
Of course, we published that, and Arthur Church, who as I say took local journalism very seriously, wrote an eloquent defence of reporting even the nasty things. The gist of it was this, that it was in the public interest that the truth be known and known because it has been carefully reported and published. Without it, you are relying on the man in the pub, and rumour, possibly malicious rumour. If the local paper does for some reason get it wrong, then this would be known, and an apology and clarification would be made. This was not the best of all worlds, but better than the world of hearsay. Arthur laid this out very carefully and the coroner instantly apologized, handsomely, and honour was satisfied.