BIG-CITY
JOURNALISM: PART IV
By the time I arrived in London in 1960 to be the
correspondent for The Montreal Star I
guess I could say I was definitely in big-city journalism at last. We had two
offices in the city, one for me in The
Daily Telegraph building in Fleet street, the other in a building in
Cockspur street, just off Trafalgar Square, occupied by two women, whose job it
was to do whatever the publisher might demand, and to look after him and his
needs on his fairly frequent visits to London.
As I settled
into my surroundings it was borne in on me more clearly perhaps than ever
before that The Montreal Star was a
wealthy newspaper, run by a wealthy family.
Although one would never have known it from reading the newspaper, we
seemed to buy every news service that money could buy. The first one delivered
to me, of course, was the service of The
Daily Telegraph. I suppose if I had
been interested in a quiet life, I could have just settled down to edit and
send on to Montreal items from this service every day. But this didn’t appeal to
me, since I regarded the Telegraph and
all its works as the most reactionary newspaper in London, a worthy
representative of the British monied class. (Years later, though briefly,
Conrad Black or Lord Black as he became before becoming a jailbird, bought the Telegraph.)
But this was just the tip of the iceberg. The New York Times apparently had a
staff of 13 reporters in London, and we bought all of their output. The Guardian had its own news service
which was also available to us; as were the services of The Times, The Observer,
and I believe, The Daily Express. Not
to mention the regular news services from Reuters,
Associated Press, United Press, and (I could be wrong
about this) Agence France Presse.
Given this
mountain of stuff pouring in to us every day, obviously we were covered for
every conceivable news event without raising a finger, so what was a single
reporter able to do that was of any use? I decided to ignore all of these
services, and just do my own thing, follow my nose. And, as I soon found, any reporter
in London who ran out of things to write about must be seriously inefficient,
inapt or lazy.
The Epsom
race meeting was about to be held, so I decided to look in on that, wrote a
piece about it, and apparently the quidnuncs back in the office were really
pleased, perhaps because I had started with such a quintessentially English
subject, and one that might presumably be of interest to our anglophile
publisher.
I quickly
decided to abandon the Fleet street office, mainly to detach myself from the
conservative influences of the Telegraph,
and instead to take up residence with the two women on Cockspur street, who
had a spare office I could occupy. I also quickly discovered how favorable were
the deadlines for the sort of reporter I was, one, that is to say, not unduly
interested in beating the competition. London is five hours ahead of Montreal
time, which meant that if I could send off a dispatch at, say, 7.30 or 8
o’clock in the morning, they would receive it in Montreal at the latest by 4
a.m., which would give them plenty of time to edit it and get it into the first
edition of the newspaper, that was published at around 8 o’clock, Montreal time.
This was
ideal for me in more than just not putting any great pressure on me, but
because I could, for example, attend the Prime Minister’s Question Period in
the House of Commons, or any major debate on the current hot topic, whatever it might be, at
2.30 p.m. of an afternoon, London time, confident that any real news that
emanated from these events would be in our office within minutes, allowing me
to forget about that aspect, and allowing me also to wait until the following
morning to write my own version of the events. This gave me time to whisk
through the nine daily newspapers that were delivered to my door at 7 a.m.
every day, so that my dispatch could be informed by what the best opinion of London
journalism was saying on the subject.
This had a
significant hidden advantage for me: on any subject of which my knowledge was,
shall we say, sketchy, I could, by paraphrasing the opinions of experts in the
various London papers, give the
appearance of having some expert knowledge. These were not my favorite
subjects, but it came to me so easily to knock off 500 or 1,000 words on the cable
forms supplied by Cable and Wireless, the government-owned telegraphing agency,
and writing them replete with every comma and stop and para indicated, that I
was always able to get my stuff away by 8 a.m. or 8.30 at the latest, with time
to drop off my kids at their school on the way to the cable office.
Occasionally
this method of working could rear up and bite me, as it did during one of my
infrequent return trips to touch base with home office, when George Ferguson
invited me to lunch with him and Eric Kierans. Kierans was a remarkable man, of
modest beginnings, who became President of the Montreal Stock Exchange, then
Minister of Revenue in the Lesage provincial government that transformed the
face of Quebec, and later still was a member of Pierre Trudeau’s federal
Cabinet. (As proof of his independence
of mind, he once suggested Canada should leave NATO, which he said had outlived
its usefulness. More than half a century later, amen to that!) In the face of
such a giant of the financial world, I had a distinct feeling of inadequacy as
the conversation ground on, and more and more difficult questions were asked me
about British financial affairs. I liked Ferguson and he seemed to like me, and
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he put me through this just to get a chuckle
at my expense, knowing full well that like most journalists, although I might
know a little bit about a lot of things, I was no expert on the economy.
One of the
surprising things about the newspaper I worked for was that although its
publisher was an alcoholic, and a rather hopeless one at that, when his family
decided to move him aside and replace him with one of these men-in-the-grey-suit
businessmen, the newspaper immediately took a dive. Within a few years it had
been sold to a chain, and a few years after that, it folded. At least the
alcoholic publisher cared about the paper, which is more than could be said for
his extended family, who wanted money from it.
Mind you,
John McConnell’s forays into London were rather distressing to witness. He
would normally stay at the Dorchester, but on one occasion he left the tap
running so that water cascaded down their stairs, and thereafter they refused
his booking. He had to stay at the Hilton on Park Lane on the first occasion I
was summoned to his presence. He was gravely irritated by the lack of service,
for example, that there was no pencil beside the phone for making notes. Such
are the problems of the mighty among us. He was amiable towards me, venturing
to say on one occasion that he thought from time to time I had a rather leftist
orientation in what I wrote, which was putting it mildly enough. On that
occasion he had been under some kind of treatment programme in Montreal, but he
broke clear of it, took a plane to London, and en route drank a bottle of
whisky. Thus when he arrived he was a sorry spectacle, his ankles swollen
monstrously, his speech slurred, his thoughts rambling. An acquaintance arrived
with his teenage son, hoping to set the boy up with a job in Montreal, but what
they could have made of McConnell’s performance when they met him I could not
even imagine. I would have sworn he could not last another two weeks, but in
the event he far surpassed my dolorous prognostications.
On another
occasion he set up to interview Max Aitken, the inheritor of the Beaverbrook
empire, and, like himself, a man who had problems with drink. Both were sons of
powerful capitalist-robber-barons. I was assigned to take the notes and write
up the interview which would, of course, be treated in the newspaper as the
day’s number one item on the front page.
I performed
my duty as best I could, drawing on my rather inadequate note-taking, which was
a mixture of Gregg’s shorthand with my own inventions on top (and using my excellent
memory, which was my number one asset in the job), and I sent it off by cable
as usual, having been punctilious to the nth degree, to ensure its accuracy.
The dispatch
began (in the publisher’s own words): “I interviewed Max Aitken in his office
in The Daily Express….” Unfortunately,
when it was published, the interview began: “I interviewed Max Aitken in his
office in The Daily Telegraph….” A
worse mistake one could hardly imagine, but, fortunately for me, the mistake
was not mine. To ensure complete
accuracy, they had had one of their best typists in Montreal take my cabled
copy and retype it, and therein the mistake was made. Presumably among the
sub-editors handling the copy, none knew the difference between these two
British newspapers. All I can remember of the interview was that it was
completely anodyne in tone and information, and had it been written by anyone
else, it would have been immediately spiked as unusable.
In London I
reaped the advantage of working for a newspaper that had a conservative
attitude towards the news. As long as I provided them with plenty of copy, they
left me strictly alone. It was like working for myself. A colleague who worked in
London for The Toronto Star told me
she got nervous if she didn’t receive four telegrams a day from her superiors
in the office. I knew, in fact we all knew, that this kind of thing was
completely unnecessary, merely expressions of office-holders’ ego, since their
reporters were experienced people, knew what news was, and knew how to write articles on any given
subject. In response, I was there for eight years, and I received only two such
telegrams in all that time. One of these arrived when I was at lunch one day,
and the woman in our office phoned me to tell me there was a telegram from
Montreal for me. I hurried back to the office, and tore open the dreaded
document. It was from the secretary to the Managing Editor: “Deeply regret your
expenses underpaid this month by $4.95…”
No comments:
Post a Comment