While I was working in Birmingham, I was working as a sub-editor on the Evening Mail, but I made a friend of a guy I met while working subbing shifts on the morning newspaper, the Birmingham Post, which as it appears in the morning is subbed and produced the night before. (The Mail, an evening paper, is subbed and produced during the day — please keep up.)
Nigel had a friend who I later met and about whom I remember little except his ancestry and the short tale I am about to relate. The friend, who I now seem to remember was called Ben Travers, was the grandson of another Ben Travers, a playwright known for writing farces.
Nigel and Ben (the younger Travers) had worked together as reporters on a weekly in (I think) Cheshire and were there when a Daily Express reporter was killed in an IRA. I don’t know which one and a brief web search, a brief and superficial web search, as thrown up nothing. Ben somehow got wind that the Express reporter was not just a general news reporter but worked on the paper’s gossip column, still known in those days as William Hickey. So he rang them up.
‘I hear one of your reporters has been killed and you have a vacancy,’ he asked when he got through to the William Hickey editor, one (again I think) Ross Benson. Wikipedia says Benson was ‘a reporter for William Hickey’ not the editor, but as we used to say (or rather as I heard rather than said myself) don’t let a couple of facts stand in the way of a good story.
Benson (or whoever was the editor at the time) said, yes, you’r right and when Ben informed him he would like to be considered to fill the vacancy, asked him go down to London for interview. That interview consisted of a night on the piss and just one question: ‘Tell, me Ben,’ said Benson (or whoever was the William Hickey editor at the time), ‘would you be prepared to do the dirty on your friends?’.
‘Yes,’ Ben told him. And it was the right answer, because Ben was given the job. Whether or not he really would have been prepared to do the dirty on any friends or, more to the point, whether he actually did do the dirty on friends I have no idea. But it was the right answer.
I met Ben once, perhaps twice, in the early 1990s while I was living in London working shifts wherever I got find shifts, which wasn’t difficult. I was quite organised and used to ring around until my weekly diary was filled, and it was my proud boast then that I never had a day off I didn’t want. Mind unless you totally screwed up — and I never totally screwed up — and papers liked the cut of your jib, in time you became ‘a regular’ which helped a lot.
(I was in London working shifts for the nationals for five years — when I married and moved to Cornwall in 1995, I only worked shifts for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Express — that I finally learned the wisdom of keeping your mouth shut, as in ‘you don’t always have to speak your mind’. I was never shy about speaking out, ever, but I now learned that you weren’t always obliged to speak out. Sometimes it was useful to adopt a lower profile.
. . .
My second anecdote involves on Jeff S. I shan’t give his full name — see above where I allude to the virtue of occasional discretion — but I have, in a way nominally, known Jeff for about almost 40 years. When I first worked on the Evening Mail as a news sub-editor, Jeff was working as a sub-editor on, I think, the Sunday Mercury.
I didn’t quite know him well then, but I bumped into him again when I started working shifts on the Daily Mail features sub-editing desk and knew him for many years after. By the way, I should add, because I hate to give the wrong impression, that I was almost 41 when I worked my first shift on the Mail and was far too old (and possibly not a good enough sub) to be considered for a full-time job on the desk. And although I subsequently went on to work for the Mail on that same desk for the next 28 years, every day when I turned up I was ‘a casual’ and a sub hired by the day — literally ‘hack’ derived from a ‘hackney carriage’ a vehicle hire by the day.
That might not sound too complimentary but given that as ‘a casual’ you were hired and worked one night on The Times, the next on the Mail, the next on the Independent, the next on the Sun etc and had to be able to sub in the style of that paper, and furthermore if being ‘a hack’ means you were versatile enough to carry it off, I would be proud to be described as ‘a hack’. Sadly, as far as I know no one has done so. Oh well. Perhaps they were out of compliments.
Anyway, Jeff
. . .
While Jeff was beavering away on the Sunday Mercury, he, like many of his colleagues was hoping to land ‘a job in London’ and had arranged to work a week’s worth of shifts somewhere or other in London to land such a job. London money was always better as in higher, though I assume kids from ‘the provinces’ never realised that London prices and rents were also always higher which might have accounted for the higher wages.
Anyway Jeff landed his week’s worth of shifts and booked a week off of annual leave, telling his boss — in the odd belief that his boss would not be too chuffed to know he was working shifts in London with a view to getting a
He worked wherever he worked in London for a week, then returned to Birmingham at the weekend. At some point it occurred to him that as he was supposed to have been in sunny Saudi Arabia for a week he would be expected to show a slight tan.
The trouble was that he was still as pale as a lump of Cheshire cheese. So he went to a chemist’s and bought himself some tanning lotion which he then applied. But the following morning the lotion did not seem to have done the trick and he panicked a little and decided to apply the lotion again. He did, and he woke up the morning he was due back at work a bright orange colour. And that was how he went to work. What they said when they saw him I don’t know.
. . .
Eventually, Jeff moved to London in the 1980s to work shifts much as I did in the 1990s. Before Fleet Street got digital, efficient, binary and I don’t know what else and pretty much all the papers were based in Fleet Street, some casuals (as those working casual shifts were called) managed a trick of working parallel shifts, that is working a shift on one paper while working a shift on another paper just up the road (the Mail, the Express, the Sun and the Telegraph were all within a stone’s throw of each other).
The trick was to turn up at one paper, make your presence known, sling your jacket over chair (presumably as far away from the main desk as possible), then pretty smartish leave the premises — the jacket staying behind, of course — to turn up to your other shift. Then for the next six or seven hours it was just a question of commuting between the two papers for whom you were working shifts. No one will have noticed because if you weren’t at your desk, it would have been assumed you had gone to the loo or the library or the canteen. I never tried it and here I am simply retelling the story of what Jeff did.
. . .
I know the rules of nostalgia oblige us to pretend that ‘fings ain’t what they used to be’ but that is nonsense. Eccentricity is not only not a purely British trait but is universal, but it is also timeless and you will find as many examples of outright eccentricity in 2020 as you would have found 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. There will never be a shortage of nutters.
I get very impatient with all folk who regard the past through rose-tinted spectacles, and when, for example, they bemoan the passing of ‘the good old days’, I always ask whether those would be ‘the good old days’ when you could be sacked and thus penniless at a moment’s notice, when if you didn’t have any money illness spelled complete penury, when catching tuberculosis was a daily risk and when being forced to sell you brother into male prostitution was not such a bad idea if it helped save a family of 12 from starvation.
So further examples of tragic deprivation in the past and why we must can be found on The Official Labour Party Guide To 100 Years Of Tory Inhumanity.
So to cut a long story short future generations can look forward to any number of extraordinarily funny comedians, very talented actors, writers, directors, footballers and painters and, of course, outrageously eccentric hacks.
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