PART
II
We arrived in England late in 1951, but I did not get
an offer as a journalist until two years later when I received a surprise
answer to my response to an ad in the World Press News, which each Thursday I
scoured for job opportunities. The offer
came from the editor of The Coventry
Standard, and after an initial visit this man, Edgar Letts, offered me a job
as a reporter. Although Coventry was the first big city we had lived in (apart
from London) this was small-town journalism with a vengeance. The newspaper, a weekly, had been founded
back in the eighteenth century. It was owned by The Coventry Telegraph, the local daily, which evidently was trying
to make up its mind what to do with this odd little paper, published from its
odd little rooms in a small mews in the city centre of this much-bombed city.
Edgar Letts was a sort of phenomenon, almost of the Fred Miller type, whom I
had first encountered in Invercargill. Except he wasn’t modest and human like
Fred, but was full of what I have to call a sort of pathetic English pomposity.
He had
decided on certain ways in which he could raise his circulation, for example,
by taking photographs of weddings, family events and so on, then selling the
pictures to those photographed, and hoping that they would buy the newspaper to
see them printed.
Somehow or
other this seemed to be working, adding a few subscriptions a week. He had also
initiated a feature called Our Farmer Friends,
one of the jobs that was given to me. Every week I sallied out into the
countryside to interview a farmer about his farm, what he was growing there,
who he was selling it to, and so on. And in this way, too, he might add one or
two a week to his list of subscribers. I enjoyed these jobs, because I got to
learn about English farming, and especially about the almost medieval
conditions on which farmland was leased, usually from some big landowner. One
thing I discovered that was surprising was that a farm I visited which had only
scrub vegetation was nevertheless classified as Grade A land because he was
raising goats, which will eat anything, and, when milked, will give the
best milk available anywhere. That
farmer was making a killing by selling his goat milk to London hospitals:
goat’s milk did not need to be pasteurized, which killed the health-giving
enzymes, because goats were not prey to tuberculosis.
We found it almost
impossible to find anywhere to live in Coventry. Shirley, as usual, was snapped
up by the first principal she came in touch with, so she had a more or less permanent
job during our year there. But we were never able to find anywhere to live except
a small room, with a tiny gas ring to cook on, one of 16 similar rooms in a
large house kept by a Communist landlord who worked for the city. Some
communist, that one!
The inconvenience
of this was bearable; we even had our friends around for visits. But what
interested me most about Coventry was that it was run by an old-fashioned city
council made up of self-educated unionists of the Labour party who loved cocking a snook at the powers that be. Coventry was a thoroughly
Labour town, thanks to the workers in all the highly specialized factories,
especially those manufacturing motor vehicles. When the central government in
London decided that every municipality had to have a civil defence system to
defend themselves against nuclear war, the Coventry city council would have
none of it. A waste of time, they said, and refused to install it. So the
central government, to preserve its dignity, had to install the system itself.
The city
council twinned with the city of Stalingrad --- infuriating the popular press
--- partly as a provocation against the British establishment, and partly in
recognition of each city’s having been sorely used during the war. The city had
drawn up a plan for rebuilding the central area that had been destroyed by
German bombing. The new Cathedral, designed by Sir Basil Spence, one of the
great British architects, was well underway, but the rest of the reconstruction
was jogging along at a very measured pace. The old-time union politicians who
ran the council had no time for the press, and when Edgar Letts decided to protest
that they so frequently went into camera to discuss business, those of us who
were present as reporters had to refuse to leave, in accordance with our
instructions from our editor. I didn’t
like it, but the council adjourned, got in touch with Edgar, and they came to a
compromise, so we were withdrawn from the chamber, Edgar considering he had
protected the freedom of the press.
The staff we
had was very much of an ad hoc character. We had two young local lads as apprentice
reporters (one of them in later life became head of the BBC’s London area news
service); the Chief Reporter when I arrived was an Australian from Hobart,
who was filling in time while making a leisurely visit to England. For a time
we had an ageing man who had been a Fleet Street guy until the liquor got the
better of him: now he was just filling in his time, hoping to be able to keep
himself together long enough to pick up his wages every week. Not surprisingly,
he didn’t last too long. Our sub-editor used to cycle in on his tricycle every
morning from Leamington, a nearby town, and we also had another reporter, a
South African, whose naked hatred of the blacks in his home country exhibited
itself in his despicable way of speaking of them, and set my nerves on edge.
I took
advantage of the opportunity to write a weekly column about film and theatre,
and was able to interview many performers at the various theatres in which I
took an interest. These included the local variety house, the Hippodrome; the
Belgrade theatre company, a local repertory, not yet established in its own
home; the Birmingham rep, one of Britain’s most famous repertory companies; the
amateur groups in Kenilworth, and locally; and the Stratford-on-Avon
Shakespeare company. All were within
thirty or forty miles, no problem for us with our new scooter. Eventually the
Aussie and his friend, an English reporter, left, and I was promoted to the top
position, a sort of combination of Chief Sub-editor and Chief Reporter.
When the time
came for me to leave --- we were intending to emigrate to Canada --- at least Edgar
did not offer me more money, but thanked me for my service, and wished me well.
My last experience
of a small town newspaper came with my first job in Canada. It was well-known
that Thomson Newspapers in Toronto would hire anyone who would work for the miserable
wages they offered. The job they offered me was in Kirkland Lake, northern
Ontario, in their newspaper the Northern
Daily News. Here I ran across something I had never before seen, a system
of handling news designed specifically to ensure that no union ever crossed the
doorstep. The editorials and features
were written in Toronto and sent out from there. The paper was kept ticking
over by two long-term Thomson employees, the editor and sub-editor. Such local
reporting as was needed was done by our remarkable staff of me, a New
Zealander, a young South African (married to a New Zealand girl), a Jamaican
(who kept his house heated to above 80 degrees all winter long), and an
Englishman named Giles Wordsworth, descendant of the great poet, who was
engrossed in absorbing everything about the local scene. Our photographer was
the later famous chronicler of the Canadian North, Fred Bruemmer.
It was a lot
of fun, so long as you didn’t mind being expected to work at any time of any
day, and for minimal wages. We lasted three months, at the end of which we took
off for Kenora in the far north-west of the province of Ontario, where Shirley
had obtained a teaching job for $1500 a year in a small rural school.
It was New Year’s Day, 1955, when we took a
milk train from North Bay right across the breadth of Ontario. The whole
snow-covered landscape was of endless evergreen forest, countless lakes, and
rocks. Each stop was about 90 miles from its neighbor, and the people
travelling from one place to another were mostly Finnish bushworkers visiting
their neighbours, where most of them must have arrived more or less the worse for wear after all the
holiday festivities.
Six months
later, in response to an article I had contributed criticizing something in the
paper, I was offered a job by the Winnipeg
Free Press, and I took it, ending my career as a denizen of the small-town
newspaper.
Towards which
exhilarating experience I have never had a moment’s regret.
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