CHAPTER ELEVEN – DOWN WITH SCHOOL AND UP WITH NEWSPAPERS

 

My grand-daughter, Edie, could not wait to go to big school, up the hill from her primary classes in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, and her enjoyment of the many new challenges was clear to see – she even had a star dancing role in a musical production during her first term that featured 180 pupils, including sixth-formers.

 

In complete contrast, I was fearful of the change from a familiar village primary school to an inner-city establishment many miles away and maybe I had a premonition of what was to come.

 

It would have been scary enough had I joined the influx of youngsters starting on the first day in September, but that never happened because of a freak accident a week earlier.

 

Peter Gillow, his brother, David, and I had been asked by another friend to help demolish a concrete wartime Anderson bomb shelter in the garden of his home round the corner in a cul-de-sac, known locally as The Banjo.

 

It was a great job for youngsters on a sunny day, smashing things up with the full permission of adults.

 

But a playful shove by Peter’s brother sent me over awkwardly – the pain in my leg was excruciating and a visit by bus to the casualty department at Eltham cottage hospital confirmed that although my right ankle was not broken, it was badly sprained.

 

The nursing sister who wrapped a thick adhesive bandage all the way round my ankle and foot without shaving off my insipient hairs will forever live in ignominy. When it came time to remove the plaster my mother had to sit me in the bath and use several bottles of Zoff to free me from its sticky clutches.

 

As a result of this accident I missed the first few weeks at Colfe’s, so when I arrived I was the new boy on the fringes of the new boys, all of whom had already formed their groupings and regarded me with scarcely-disguised disdain as an outsider.

 

They had already been introduced to the mysteries of Latin and equations, chemicals and Bunsen burners – I did not even know my way to the dining room or the toilets.

 

This worst of starts was to colour my grammar school days and my life became infinitely worse when a teacher decided to discuss relationships, including the marriage of cousins – in my innocence I volunteered that my parents, of whom I was inordinately proud, were first cousins.

 

In what must be a textbook example of how not to handle such a potentially-difficult subject, the teacher said that such marriages had traditionally been frowned upon because the children of such unions could be cretins.

 

I little suspected then that it was a word that would follow me through the rest of my days at Colfe’s, shouted at me on occasion and inscribed onto my locker and carved into the outside of the pitifully-cheap attaché cases which I took to school.

 

It is a word which still instils a visceral fear in me should I find it written down – thankfully a rare occasion in these more enlightened times.

 

I did not share with my parents the problems that my naive admission had caused, but I am sure they would have been horrified to think that the attitudes which had caused them so much trauma 30 years previously were now affecting their child. 

 

With the sureness with which the pack spots a weaker animal, my classmates quickly worked out that for me to catch the train back home to New Eltham, which left Lewisham at 4.05pm, I had to leave school on the dot of 4pm and even then run, clutching my case.

 

So it was a simple and supremely entertaining matter to hide my case as the hour approached or ask the teacher a convoluted question which would ensure that the answer stretched beyond the bell.

 

It was great fun for them, but it meant I had to wait on an empty platform for half an hour, then catch a train in the opposite direction to New Cross and then wait another hour for a packed rush hour train back to New Eltham.

 

No, my secondary school days were not the best of my life, but I survived latterly because I was one of the first to discover Elvis, the Everleys and Buddy Holly, which made me almost cool.

 

In 1960, our careers master, Mr Golding, organised a visit to the school by the editor-in-chief of the Kentish Times Series of weekly newspapers, who unbelievably as it might seem nowadays was on a recruiting drive.

 

His message, ably illustrated by a film shown via a noisy projector on a screen in the school hall, obviously hit its mark as that evening I declared to my mother: “I know what I’m going to do – I’m going to be a journalist like Uncle Eric.”

 

Little did I know that in another Gibbs coincidence I was almost repeating the words of my uncle’s great friend from university, Matt Halton, who had become famous as “Canada’s Voice of War” with his dispatches from the front lines in Europe for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

 

He had told his mother some 40 years earlier: “Mum, I’m going to be a great famous war correspondent like Philip Gibbs.” – my namesake, but no relation, who had been knighted for his colourful reports about the fighting in World War One.

 

Matt was captivated by Gibbs’ explanation of why he couldn’t abandon journalism: “The lure of the adventure was too strong. The thrill of chasing the new story, the interest of getting into the middle of life, sometimes behind the scenes of history...the meetings with heroes, rogues and oddities, the front seats at the peep show of life, the comradeship, the rivalry, the test of one’s own quality and character and vision.”

I am sure these sentiments will resonate with anyone who has had the privilege to be a journalist.

 

Matt went on to become a broadcasting icon - I went with my father  to the Kentish Times head office in Sidcup and was told that if I obtained the requisite O-levels I would be indentured for four years as a junior reporter, on papers signed by my parents, and put forward at the end of that time for the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) proficiency test.

 

Despite the fairly-unremitting unpleasantness at Colfe’s and with some welcome encouragement of my précis skills from Mr Golding, who was also my English teacher, I passed six of my eight GCE O-levels – failing English Literature (I never did get Henry IV Part Two) and German (they had always been bad news for my family).

 

The O-levels passed, I got the job, starting in August with some 16 others, who were then dispersed around the group’s offices – I was assigned to the Bromley and Kentish Times.

 

From my unhappy schooldays as a barely-tolerated pariah, I was suddenly transported to an endlessly-exciting world, where news stories were king and I could walk into a hall of Women’s Institute members and be ushered to a special desk at the front and deferred to as The Reporter.

 

My new colleagues in Bromley, including the doyen of provincial drama critics at the time, one Mr Hammond, affectionately known as Ham, welcomed me into their ranks, even gently teasing me when I was initially given a desk with wheels, calling me their roving reporter – it was a world away from the nastiness of Colfe’s that I had escaped only a few months previously.

 

Us juniors were also sent off each Friday to the North West Kent College of Technology in Dartford, where were to be taught British Constitution, Law, Economics and the delightful art of Pitman’s shorthand, a skill which young ladies seem to pick up with ease, but I found impenetrable.

 

It was a shared bafflement which led to the frustration and then departure of a succession of teachers – I only managed to fudge the shorthand requirement to take the NCTJ test four years later by persuading a tutor at an evening class to give me a piece of paper that stated that if I took a speed test for 60 words a minute I would pass.

 

I remembered this subterfuge many years later when I was interviewing would-be reporters as assistant editor at the Bristol-based Western Daily Press morning newspaper and grilling them about their prowess at shorthand, which I informed them was an absolute necessity for the job.

 

It was the Kentish Times policy to switch reporters around from time to time, so after some months I moved to Orpington, where I consolidated an initial friendship with Colin Cook, which has lasted to this day.

 

He was the son of Norman Cook, then London editor of the Liverpool Post and later group editor and a CBE, but Colin abandoned the proper world of newspaper journalism a few years after gaining his proficiency certificate and opted for public relations in the motor industry.

 

He retired as PR director for Jaguar after a fascinating career, including attending Formula One races all over the world and writing keynote speeches for the head of Ford Motors.

 

I could not have had a better training, reporting on everything from weddings (the details supplied on pre-printed proformas, which led to races to see who could complete them first) to flower shows and jumble sales and from magistrates court hearings to trades council meetings, at which the committed trade unionists never suspected that their eager confidante was the son of a family line of Conservative agents.

 

It was in Orpington that I was lucky enough to be present on the night when Liberal candidate Eric Lubbock (later Lord Avebury) trounced the Conservatives in a famous by-election. This led to the creation of Orpington Man, used by the media in subsequent years to designate a typical member of the lower middle class in, for instance, the target audience of an electoral or advertising campaign.

 

The Labour candidate lost his deposit and such were my credentials with local trades council members that George Brown, deputy party leader, who was there to show solidarity, grabbed my arm and said: “Don’t worry, brother. We’re going down the hill singing the Red Flag.” And so we did.

 

Orpington provided valuable experience but I found the editor’s often bullying manner a little challenging, noticing at the same time that he seemed to defer to Colin, probably because of his father’s exalted job.

 

As ever, my father came to the rescue, talking to the editor-in-chief and having me moved to the Eltham and Kentish Times – far more convenient for me and with the bonus of valuable tutelage from the ever-patient editor, Peter Jolly, and Chief Reporter Carol Askill.

 

Back at Domonic Drive, our home, which had rarely known visitors probably because of my father’s feelings of social estrangement, became the centre for gatherings of noisy teenagers and my mother was on hand to supply cups of coffee and meals when required to sustain us during games of cards and listening to the latest 45s on our Grundig auto-change record player. .

 

As I was negotiating my difficult school days and starting my career in journalism, my mother had escaped from the enforced co-educational dreariness of Kidbrooke comprehensive to move further into London to Christopher Marlowe secondary modern school for Girls in Deptford.

 

It was old, cramped and in the heart of a deprived area of the capital – and she loved it.

 

She was able to teach French to classes of mainly black pupils, most of whom had never thought they would ever learn a foreign language.

 

My mother delighted in their enthusiasm and would recount with glee some of their comments – one girl, trying to describe a spaniel, said to her: “You know, Miss, them dogs with the long earholes”.

 

She also experienced some black-on-black racism – on a school visit to a zoo the African, mainly Nigerian, girls were likened to the monkeys by their West Indian classmates to which they replied haughtily– “At least we weren’t slaves.”

 

It was a dream job for my mother, despite the long journey to work by bus and fairly frequent migraine headaches, which she self-dosed with barley sugar Spangles sweets.

 

At weekends now that my father could afford his own transport again, they would travel all over Kent and Sussex – first on a number of motor-cycles, including Silent Velocettes, and then in a succession of cars, starting with a Ford Popular, then a couple of Ford Anglias and finally his favourite – a VW Beetle.

 

They also ventured abroad, taking the car ferry flight from Lydd to Le Touquet and then heading for Normandy and Brittany – their favourite destination being the seaside town of Granville.

 

It allowed my mother to converse once again in the language of her childhood and my father to show the grasp of French, which had earned him a prize during his post-Southlea years at Worcester College, cut short when his parents ran out of money for the fees.

 

My mother never needed much persuasion to leave housework and when my father, said: “Fig – get your bonnet on” they would head off to the country or the seaside.

 

A stop at a pub always featured in their trips and while my father would have a couple of pints of beer, sometimes followed by a barley wine – this was in pre-breathalyser days – my mother would have a bottle of Guinness and in later years a half of draught Guinness as this became more available.

 

She would often take crotchet hooks and different coloured balls of wool with her, reckoning later that each square she completed represented a half of Guinness and they would be sewn into technicolour blankets and chair covers.  

 

Unfortunately the atmosphere at Christopher Marlowe school changed when the authorities decided to admit boys to the school – the girls’ interest in lessons and French declined as their interest in the boys increased.

 

There were also thefts from the staffroom and occasional assaults on teachers – my mother being pushed against a wall on one occasion.

 

Although my father undoubtedly enjoyed the fruits of family life in a home of his own, his career at the Civil Service Commission was less satisfactory and took a downward turn, which was eventually to lead to his early retirement.

 

He was involved in organising the selection boards for senior Government scientists and was very fond of his first boss, but all that changed when celebrated novelist C.P.Snow took over and, according to my father, spent much of the time shut in his office writing more books and ignoring the commission’s work.

 

My father became increasingly frustrated as appointments were missed and complaints piled up and this resulted in him having a nervous breakdown and being sent as a voluntary patient to a psychiatric hospital in Maidstone.

 

In those days, ECT (electric convulsive therapy) was the treatment of choice for such conditions and the superb brain of my father was hit with a multi-volt sledgehammer.

It may have lessened his feelings of depression, but it deadened his wonderful, vibrant personality.

 

I remember that while still a schoolboy I would talk to him as he sat stony-faced in a chair back home, constantly wringing his hands. It was probably the moment when I really grew up, realising that this towering authority figure, who had benevolently but firmly dominated my childhood, was painfully human and vulnerable.

.

He gradually recovered much of his old verve over the following years and we would enjoy long conversations and not a few debates (arguments) on everything from politics to rock and roll as he drove me to various newspaper assignments.

 

That was in the days before I passed my driving test and bought my first car, a blue Austin Mini (BUC 638 B), for the grand sum of £495, money I had been able to save thanks to my parents never charging me for board or lodging.

 

In 1964, by the time I passed the proficiency test, I was ready for bigger things, and word of a morning newspaper job, took me to Bristol and the Western Daily Press, where the many lessons learned in four fascinating years were put to good use.