it kindly, undistinguished and highly unlikely to impress any prospective boss. But I’d been told that the editor of the Penarth Times – a weekly paper in a small seaside town a few miles outside Cardiff – was more impressed by athletes than brainboxes. So I allowed him to believe that I had often been first across the finishing line when Cardiff High School staged its cross-country races. It was technically true – but only because I was so hopeless at running that I was never selected to compete and instead chose to cycle alongside the real athletes shouting encouragement (or abuse). My deception worked.
‘Just what reporters need,’ huffed the editor, ‘plenty of stamina and determination!’ I still feel a twinge of guilt – but only a very small one.
I learned a great deal during my two years on the Penarth Times. For a start: how local papers stayed in business. The good people of Penarth were far more likely to buy it if their names were printed in it, so one of my regular jobs was to stand outside the church after a funeral or wedding and take the names of everyone who had attended. That taught me something else. Accuracy. By and large our readers asked little enough of the paper, but if their name was spelled incorrectly my editor would hear of it. They would demand an apology and a correction the following week. He would not be pleased.
Another skill I developed was how to stay awake in the local library, which was where I spent very large chunks of my time leafing through past issues of the paper in the hope that I might find something interesting enough to fill the ‘Penarth 50 Years Ago’ column. There almost never was anything interesting, so I filled it with boring stuff instead. Nobody seemed to mind – I suspect for the very good reason that nobody read it.
My biggest contribution to the survival of the Penarth Times was on a more practical level. I became an expert in operating a Flit gun: a hand pump you filled with insecticide and squirted at flies or other nasty insects in the house. It was a lifesaver for the Penarth Times when the printers went on strike. The proprietor had refused to shut the paper down. He rampaged around the place declaring that he wasn’t going to allow a couple of bolshie inky-fingered troublemakers to deprive the good people of Penarth of their democratic right to be informed about the local council’s latest pronouncements or who was the latest miscreant to be fined five shillings for urinating against a wall in the town centre after a pint too many. So the paper would be printed without them.
Sterling stuff, but not without one or two difficulties. It didn’t help that none of us had the first idea how to operate a printing press, even something as modest as the one owned by the Penarth Times. It wasn’t exactly one of those thundering behemoths I was to encounter on daily papers years later – the sort that made the whole building shudder when they roared into life – but still way beyond our ability, as was the typesetting. So instead we used just typewriters and stencils and an ancient duplicating machine. The problem was that the paper had a habit of sticking to the roller. My job was to stand beside the machine with a Flit gun filled with water, and give it a quick squirt when it happened. It worked a treat – even if it did end up looking like an extremely amateurish version of a parish magazine. Mercifully the strike didn’t last long: the printers had made their point and good relations were restored.
Sadly, the strike had done nothing to dampen our boss’s enthusiasm for establishing a publishing empire – albeit a modest one. Penarth’s population was tiny compared with Cardiff’s. It had a morning and evening paper (the Western Mail and South Wales Echo) but no weekly, so the boss decided we should fill the gap with a new weekly newspaper called the Cardiff & District News. It was a brilliant idea – or might have been except that we had no budget.
One feature of the paper was a double-page spread headlined, in huge type, ‘the teenAGE pAGE’. It was my job to edit it and, because there was no money for reporters, to do all the reporting as well. I did not complain – mostly because my editor would not have listened but also because I used my fancy title (I called myself Showbiz Editor) to blag free tickets for all the big concerts in Cardiff. Since it was the capital city of Wales it attracted lots of big stars and I usually managed to persuade the promoters to fix an interview for me with them. I won’t pretend they were memorable interviews, but when you’re sixteen and discovering (or hoping to discover) what sex was all about, that wasn’t really the point.
A casual ‘Fancy meeting Cliff Richard next week … or Billy Fury or the Everly Brothers?’ would surely work miracles with girls who had been way out of my league even before I was struck down by late-onset chickenpox and spottier than a Dalmatian. The theory was sound – I’d be able to bask in reflected glory – but I failed to spot the obvious flaw. The girls did indeed fall in love – but not with me.
My greatest professional triumph was to set up an interview with the one star who put all the others in the shade. She was Ella Fitzgerald, easily the greatest singer of her generation. It was also my greatest disaster. The interview was scheduled to happen in her dressing room before she went on stage with another musical giant, Count Basie, and his orchestra. When I arrived at the theatre I was not so much paralysed with nerves as the exact opposite. I was hyperactive, bouncing from one foot to the other, waving my arms and speaking much too loudly. And when I was finally ushered into the presence I was overwhelmed: hopelessly star-struck.
There she stood, magnificent in her glittering stage gown, and utterly terrifying. She was a living legend at the height of her powers and I was an awkward teenager in total awe of her – so awkward that as I advanced towards her my elbow caught the corner of a mirror, which fell from the table and smashed to pieces. Smashing a mirror was said to be bad luck at the best of time. Smashing a mirror in the dressing room of a star minutes before she was about to go on stage put it in another category altogether.
She glanced across at me. ‘Get that fucking kid outta here!’ she snarled. And they did. Within a second I was surrounded by her heavies. My feet literally did not touch the ground. They took my elbows, lifted me about a foot off the floor and deposited me outside the dressing room with the big star on the door. So ended my career as a showbiz reporter.
Many years later when I was working in New York for the BBC I (almost) met my other musical hero: Duke Ellington. He was performing for a small, invited audience in the Rainbow Room at the top of the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and I wangled an invitation. I was determined to shake the great man’s hand and be able to claim in years to come that we’d been old mates, so when he left in the interval I followed. He was headed for the gents’ toilet. I stood at the urinal next to him and tried to strike up a conversation. And I froze. I suppose I can boast that I peed alongside the greatest jazz musician of all time but the truth is I was so intimidated by his presence I couldn’t even manage that.
As for my career on the Cardiff & District News, it did not last long. Apart from writing most of the paper (stealing stories from the Echo and Mail) I also had to deliver it. Physically deliver it, that is, to the few newsagents in Cardiff who had agreed to stock it on the strict condition that if it didn’t sell they got their money back. I was too young to drive, so the publisher hired the services of a nice old lady who owned a pre-war Ford Prefect. She and I would pile the newly printed papers on the back seat and sail off to Cardiff. The following week we would repeat the journey, each time collecting the unsold papers and dumping them in the boot. Logic dictates it is impossible, but I have always believed that we took back more newspapers than we had delivered the previous week. The Cardiff & District News did not live to see the year out. I don’t think anyone noticed.
I had hit seventeen when that happened and decided it was time to leave to work on my next newspaper, the Merthyr Express. It was also a weekly, but there the similarity ended. Penarth was prosperous and so prim and proper in those days that it may even be true that it was the inspiration for the old gag about its residents believing that ‘sex is what coal comes in’. Merthyr was a tough industrial town with a glorious past and not much of a future. It went from being the most prosperous town in Wales to the poorest. There was
