PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Below: Blackburn Boulevard. Left of the tram: the Northern Daily Telegraph
headquarters. That is where I earned £1 a week after moving to "the big time"..
More than half a century ago now, it seemed to me that there was nothing more important In life or on earth than to be a reporter. I had equipped myself as well as I could for this task, acquiring a good shorthand speed and a skill in typewriting to match, courtesy of Mr George Guest's Business Training College. I read a lot, but had no qualifications other than desire and hope.
I played for Church Cricket Club in the Lancashire League, one of youngest players of the time because much better ones were batting for England on various fields of battle In World War 2. This was fortuitous. The Accrington Observer did not always turn up to report extraneous matches - those charity affairs involving trips to Yorkshire, for instance. The expense of travel probably put them off. I did not know anyone at the newspaper, but I filled the gap, unasked, unrewarded, and saw my reports of matches in print. I recall particularly one at Pudsey St. Lawrence (Lancashire v. Yorkshire XI, it said on the posters): As we played we could hear Black Dyke Mills Band in the distance. We were deep in Len Hutton country without armed escorts. After the game, I fretted in the pub where the ale was free to the players (though I was too young to be served) because I did not have detailed scores.
A sub-editor from the Lancashire Evening Post drove me back to the deserted ground in the darkness to make up the discrepancy, I did not know him. He seems in the memory dark, almost saturnine, a gentlemen: curious attributes for a sub-editor. The memory of youth probably exaggerates. At any rate, my efforts led to my becoming an Accrington Observer man, licensed to read proofs all week, work at reporting over week-ends, and sell the mid-week newspaper to newsagents at 6.30 a.m. on Tuesday mornings.
This, for 12s 6d (63p) a week. I would have done it for nothing.
The Accrington Observer was housed in Edgar Street in unpretentious premises and was headed by Mr Richard and Mr Robert S. Crossley. Mr Richard was my boss. He was portly and suffered from indigestion. It must have been distressing because he had a large area to contain his twinges and gurglings. I had to shop for his pills. The Editor was a Mr Tom Watson. He regularly brought in more than 100 sheets of scrawled copy after a week-end and could drink up to 40 cups of tea a day. I know. I made them. I made them stronger and stronger until they looked like treacle, but he seemed to enjoy them all the more.
When the previous tea-maker called in during leave from the Navy, he was told: "Norman, this lad makes better tea than you ever did." Poor Norman was not impressed and never returned from the war so far as I know.
In the reporters' room were Roland Joynson, Alan Lambert, Bill Palmer, Frank Kitchener.. Roland Joynson, a bachelor, wore leggings, and ate a great deal of peanut butter . He had difficulty with phones, "What name? Armitage? No. Hewitson? What then? Ah, ah - SMITH!" How he deranged his hearing to that extent, I will never know, even though phones baffle my own hearing now.
Alan Lambert composed music. He was an accomplished pianist and would play Mozart for hours on end. Unsuspecting people would appear and he would ask, innocently, "Care to come to the house for supper?" If they accepted, he settled them down and Mozarted them to death. Supper was the last thing on his mind, but probably the first thing in theirs.
Sometimes we lost him. The editor would say, "Find Mr Lambert, will you?" and I would walk the streets trying to plot where I would discover a piano. I might then find Alan Lambert. There was one in the town hall, and it was on his urgent calls list.
When he reported a long-running case in Preston, he wrote his copy returning on the train and it occupied a good roll of London, Midland and Scottish toilet paper. I duly checked it against a galley proof.
Bill Palmer had the most manic laugh in creation and used it to good effect.. When amused, he would give every indication of climbing a wall, legs and arms all over the place. The joy was intensely physical. He organised a cricket match during a works outing. Legend has it that the game was on a hill and the ball kept rolling down the sides. His companions were not overjoyed by this. So that when he punted along a river, others on the outing gathered on a bridge to throw clods of earth at him. When they went to a ballet performance his manic laugh came into play at the sight of a male dancer teetering about. The artiste was, they say, disconcerted.
At any rate, Bill knew his cricket and played it and wrote about it with great concentration and diligence.
Frank Kitchener always appeared to be independent of work and reward. I was told that his wife had a shop. He looked prosperous enough to me to have that enviable security.. Two incomes. My word.
Dick Pearson was a reporter who had preceded me. His name was a legend. He had a temper. On Friday nights people played cards in the proof reader's office. If Dick was losing, he was apt to gather up the cards, march downstairs, and post them down the nearest drain. He once played golf with his editor. Frustrated by his game, he broke his club over his knee and marched off shouting, "If you want that meeting covered on Sunday night, cover it your bloody self."
On Saturday mornings the reporters tended to chat in their room and they were joined by Joe Higgin, the Lancashire Evening Post's man. Joe was eccentric, highly intelligent, and well regarded. He had worked in London for Press Association, tended to use a bicycle as his form of locomotion and had all the appearances of a solicitor in his dark clothing had it not been for he hole in his sock. The hole was fully revealed if he donned bicycle clips. When Joe slowly pedalled through our village on his way back to Accrington he looked like the start of a cheap funeral. He lived alone and liked geraniums. Once, he bought a bunch from a man who knocked on his door at night. The following morning, he discovered they were his own geraniums, taken from his garden.
When the town centre was jammed by cars because firemen were trying to rescue a cat from a high viaduct he declined to attend saying, "I have cats at home, and nobody gives a damn about them except me.'' He spent time at the steps leading to the town centre lavatories and his explanation was simple: "Any gentleman you wish to see ends up there at one time or another." You can not fault the logic.
He declined to report the foremost authority on Shakespeare who was talking in town. The reason he gave me: "Shakespeare is dead."
Conversations on Saturdays were erudite: Lenin, Victoria, Elizabeth I, philosophy, economics, all were dissected. I went to work on Saturday mornings to be educated. My presence was not requested. I attended for the joy of it. Never, it seemed to me then, was there such a learned bench of elders. So I listened well, played my cricket on Saturday afternoons and learned my trade. On Monday mornings, I would be brimming with information about Saturday's game, and the sequence was invariably the same.
I would join Guy Cunliffe, the proof reader,, in his small office with its bare floorboards, and he would say, "Good game, was it?" Before I could reply he would say, " I remember when Charlie Llewellyn..." Then he would spit on the floor, rub it into the boards with his shoe, and stick the shoe on the table so that it was within eighteen inches of my face. From then on, it was Charlie, Charlie, Charlie until lunchtime.
Llewellyn had played as professional for Accrington;. Guy remembered games from before I was born and I was never able to describe mine.
I am possibly the only Lancashire League player who ran up and down main roads in whites while games were in progress, my studs clacking on the pavements. This is because a Northern Daily Telegraph reporter named Dennis Ditchfield paid me 2s 6d (13p) per game to phone reports at regular intervals to his office.
The phone was in the centre of West End, Oswaldtwistle. Hence my frequent trips from the field. At the other end was a telephonist named Cissie Fine. I would begin my hysterical babble and she would say, "Calm down, calm down. It's all right. There's no rush " like a psychiatrist dealing with a particularly deranged patient.
Eventually I moved to the evening paper myself, for £1 a week, and Mr Richard Crossley said I was not ready for the "big-time."
He could have been right. But I spent 12 years on the Telegraph and 32 at the Daily Express. If I looked at the Observer's old place in Edgar Street I am sure I wouldI smell the oily machinery and hear the thud of feet on bare boards. I would see the urgent faces of my elders and betters, and hear the joyful laugh of Bill Palmer; for the essence of them all is either still there or my memory makes it so.
They wrote long, accurate reports and had good shorthand, and these qualities are in short supply today..
The Observer, I note, is no longer anonymous in its side street, but flaunts itself on the main road.
I hope it was ready for the big time.
(The above appeared substantially as it is here in a book called An Accrington Mixture, 1995, edited by Bob Dobson, Landy Press.)
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
29 November, 2008