describe the atmosphere of the newsroom. I suppose there were thirty or forty people all sitting at desks with an amazing racket of manual typewriters being tapped so fast (usually with only two or three fingers) and copy boys (those were the boys who, when the journalist had finished typing his piece and shouted ‘Boy!’ would run over and take the sheet of paper downstairs to where the subeditors were) rushing around. The News Editor was a huge man called Gordon Farnsworth, a North Country man, shouting out instructions and demanding stories. The atmosphere was electric, absolutely electric. I just sat there, bemused, all day, because nobody spoke to you on your first day. Although Gordon Farnsworth did speak to me. He said, ‘So you’re another bloody student…I’m fed up with students, why can’t I have some journalists?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean, what are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Well the Editor keeps taking on these bloody students,’ and it was true because that day three other people of my age had joined the paper with no journalistic experience whatsoever. But the difference between them and me was that they had got temporary jobs because they were going to university and Gordon thought I was the same sort. I said, ‘No, I’m here to learn to be a journalist, that’s what I want to be.’ ‘Huh, we’ll see,’ he said. Terrifying, the first day was absolutely terrifying.
They gave me my own desk and typewriter, an Olivetti Letra 22, and after a couple of days of being shy in the canteen and not knowing what to do I was sent out on my first story. I was absolutely petrified! I had to go to cover an inquest of a man who had drowned in the docks. I thought, ‘Oh, good, thank you. What do I do?’ So I asked another journalist what I should do. ‘Inquests are very simple,’ he said. ‘I’ll write it for you.’ He wrote the outline, leaving only the gaps to be filled in with the facts. He said, ‘You write: “Today at Yate Coroner’s Court a verdict of …was returned on…” and you either fill in death by suicide or death by misadventure or whatever and so on.’ So off I toddled and filled in the gaps. I was quite proud and I couldn’t wait to see the paper…of course it didn’t say ‘by Keith Floyd’ but I took it home to my mum and said, ‘I wrote that!’
After a couple of weeks of really just hanging around and not doing very much at all I was put onto what they called the Duty Desk. You were given a list of numbers of the Police, the Ambulance Service, the hospitals, all of whom had a press helpline. You would ring them up every hour and say, ‘Hello, this is the Evening Post, has anything happened?’ and they would say, ‘Well, there was a crash at Cribbs Causeway,’ or, A woman was found floating in the docks, apparently having committed suicide,’ or ‘There’s been a murder on Bristol Downs,’ or something like that. With that information I would go to the News Editor and if it was an insignificant story he might give it to me to write, or if it was an important story he could give it to a senior reporter to write.
Sometimes I would be allowed to go with the senior reporter to see what he did and how he did it, which was really exciting. I remember from one of the helplines I discovered that the steelworks were on strike. The Editor told me to ring up and find out what was going on, so I phoned up the union representative and said, This is the Evening Post, can you tell me what is going on?’ and he said, ‘Well because we haven’t been paid properly we’re going on strike and this will disrupt things for as long as it takes.’ I reported this verbally to the News Editor, who said, ‘Well that’s OK, you can write that story.’ All these stories start with the word ‘today’. Today 600 steelworkers went on strike for better working conditions. A spokesman said…’ (you always have a spokesman and never a name and if you haven’t got a spokesman you invent one).
Digressing a bit, I remember one occasion I was sent out to the scene of a stabbing. I didn’t know what you had to do at the scene of a stabbing, there was nothing there. So I went back to my News Editor and said, ‘Well I went there but what do I do now?’ He said, ‘Well, who did you speak to?’ I said, ‘Nobody.’ He said, ‘Yes you did, you spoke to a passer by.’ I said, ‘No I didn’t.’ He said, ‘Yes you did, I’m telling you, you spoke to a passer by who said…’
Anyway, I’m typing out my story about the steel strike slowly and painfully, although I have already improved quite a lot at the old two-finger typing over six or seven weeks, when I’m aware that the words I’m typing are being spoken by somebody. I look up and there is a senior reporter behind me reading out exactly what I’m typing, down a phone. This was one of Bristol’s celebrated journalist characters called Joe Gallagher and he was the Chief Crime Writer for the Bristol Evening Post and also what’s called a ‘stringer’ or a correspondent for the London Evening Standard or the Daily Express, so whatever stories he sold to them he got a fee from them. He was dictating my story and was going to get paid for it. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘I’ve sold it to the Standard, dear boy, you ought to get into that.’ ‘Well how do I do that?’ I asked. ‘You speak to me because I handle these things.’
So Joe and I became quite good friends. He was a small, bespectacled, pugnacious, slightly balding Irishman who always wore flamboyant waistcoats and a trilby hat. I have no idea how old he would have been because I was seventeen and everybody was very old to me. Over time I also got to know his great buddy, a Yorkshireman who was the Sports Editor, Bob Cooper. Joe and Bob were inseparable and were up to all sorts of scams, really dyed-in-the-wool ex-Fleet Street professionals of the old school. They made themselves an absolute fortune on the paper because they invented a game called ‘Spot the Ball’. This shows a photograph of a man kicking a football and you have to mark with a cross on the picture where you think the thing was. People had to send in, I can’t remember, two shillings or something like that to have a go and win fifty or a hundred pounds. This thing really took off and the management of the paper was totally unconcerned and hadn’t seen it as anything more than a bit of fun, completely unaware that Joe and Bob were making an absolute fortune. They were doing nothing illegal or wrong, it’s just that it was their business and the paper let them print it because they thought it was good for the readers. They didn’t realise that these blokes suddenly became very, very rich. Once the paper saw how rich they had become they thought, ‘Hold on a minute, we want to be having some of this.’ As far as I know they were obliged to buy out Joe and Bob, who both promptly retired. Joe, with all this money, went off to Portugal to buy a restaurant. But that’s another story.
By now I was quite well integrated in the paper and even Farnsworth was taking me a bit more seriously and giving me more jobs. I was enjoying it very much. I soon realised we also had a morning paper called the Western Daily Press. When I joined the Evening Post, the Western Daily Press still had advertisements on the front page like The Times. Suddenly like a whirlwind a former Daily Express man came down to take over the paper and revolutionise it (it was a broadsheet paper in those days) and turn it into a campaigning, go-getting, sleaze-busting, hot, bright, brand-new newspaper. This, of course, shocked all the old hands who had been working on it for years because it really was a genteel paper that never looked for trouble and simply reported nice news. This was exciting to me because Eric Price, who had come to take over the Western Daily Press, had actually worked under the great editor Arthur Christiansen, so to me he was a hero. But he was like a film star newspaper editor: he didn’t actually have an eyeshield but I swear to God he had one really. He would march up and down with his waistcoat undone, shouting, ‘What the hell’s going on! Where’s my story, I need this now! Get off your arses!’ He was like a god to me and I contrived to meet him in the pub that we used to go to across the road in between editions (called the White Hart, I think). ‘Who are you, lad?’ he asked. ‘I’m Floyd, sir.’ I plucked up courage and asked, ‘Would it be OK if I came in and worked at night?’ because all the morning papers worked in the night. He said, ‘Yes you can.’ There was a lovely old-fashioned News Editor then on the Western Daily Press called Norman Rich, a gentle old man who was approaching retirement. He was such a gentleman that he wouldn’t say he hated Eric Price and the new paper. He would say he was ‘disappointed by the change and was looking forward to retiring’ because this wasn’t his style of journalism at all. So after I finished at 5.30, when the last edition of the Evening Post went out, I would go
