TRAINEE REPORTER ON THE HAVERHILL ECHO
Back home in the village of Clare from my few months in Liverpool at the close of 1971, I was even more awash in my life than before, though at least I had my growing collection of notebooks safely hidden away in my bedroom.
What to do?
My father Tom noticed a vacancy for a trainee reporter on the local paper. By this time, I had an O level in English and had to prove I was worthy of the post by writing a feature length article. Luckily, our new doctor, Doctor Carter, let me interview him about his work as a young GP in the village.
Eventually, the article was attached to my application and I was soon employed by The Haverhill Echo on a six months contract. I was promised training, which I needed to get to grips with the job – training in short hand, how civic society works, interview techniques and journalistic styles of writing.
But my first training was on the job writing up wedding, funeral and sports reports. I took hand written reports of these events and puffed them up. For example, if an opening batsman had scored 102 runs – with four sixes – I began “Mark Bishop blasted his team to victory with an unbeaten century! The Steeple Bumpstead opener was undefeated, hammering four sixes over the heads of Little Yeldham.”
Funerals and weddings were more pedestrian: “Bride Alice Cropper wore an A-line satin dress fringed with pink lace and carried a bouquet of carnations.”
I waited for my training to commence but there was no training – ever.
I was however quickly introduced to “news gathering.” There were three elements to this in the pre email age: read over copy sent in from village correspondents, visit village contacts in person and, each Friday, go out and find the news. Fridays news gathering consisted of visiting markets, shops, libraries and pubs to literally find the news.
Attending district and parish council meetings posed my biggest problem: I began with no understanding of proceedings whatsoever and I was given no instructions, except to listen and take down (as quickly as I could in long hand) what transpired.
Thus it was that I missed a Big Story (a big story for the Haverhill Echo): a district council was being taken to court for failing to meet an outstanding bill – of a few pence! This had obviously been a small human error but when it appeared as headline news in the rival Suffolk Free Press and the regional heavyweight, the East Anglian Daily Times, I was sorely reprimanded.
Still, I struggled on. I bought a Honda 50 motorbike so that I could collect the news and tried to get to grips with the company’s camera. As office junior I got all the ‘filler’ stories, such as Carving out a terrier dog – while wating for the bus!
“Mr Ford of Shudy Camps has put his skills to use while waiting at a bus stop for twenty years, cutting out a topiary terrier dog from a nearby hedge with his penknife!”
Actually, when sent to the location to take a photo of the cloth capped sculptor, I couldn’t make out the dog at all! But as the fog lifted, there was the lumpy little rascal amid the thorns.
“Oh, is that it?” I quizzed as it was more hedge hound than canine but I didn’t want to offend.
The best of my encounters were in reviewing village and school drama productions; and the best of these was a farce written by and for Stambourne Players. The village’s actual vicar was the Thespian vicar, who dutifully lost his trousers in the play; and when pretend rockers came on stage all dressed in black leather, a huge cheer went up from the audience – the local gang of rockers had leant their leathers for the show, and were sat at the front, laughing and joshing that they’d got their gang into Am Dram. Surely now they would be accepted into the community!?
I also covered local bands and interviewed some interesting people – , a Cambridge academic archaeologist, historian A.L. Morton, a union leader and the direct descendent of Josiah Wedgewood, together with The Groundhogs and Nigel Olsson, Elton John’s drummer.
My first and only by-line was for a women’s wrestling match – which I utterly loathed!
The main bought was between Naughty Nancy Nolan and Saucy Suzie Parkins – and that about sums it up! It was a struggle for women to escape sexism in the early 1970s – as it is now – and earning money in such a comedic profession as professional wrestling must have been tough indeed…
My great rift with The Haverhill Echo however was in May 1972 when I was instructed to write an upbeat article about Risbridge Hospital, a facility for the mentally ill – and the disabled. An isolation unit for 240 people. They had redesigned the interior of this old workhouse and wanted to present a modern, caring face to the local community.
I paid a visit. Yes, there were improvements but the inmates (the patients) were addressed as girls and boys, patronising them. I encountered a tiny little woman kept in a large pram. I think she was 60 with a very twisted frame. Her illness – her crime – was that she had had a child out of wedlock. Once inside the “isolation” of Risbridge, she had no family.
While many seemed, superficially at least, content and relaxed, I found out this wasn’t just a mental health facility. It also isolated those with downs syndrome. In a back workroom many undertook tedious tasks, earning pennies from the very skilled assembly of electronic components. Who reaped the profits from this?
On my return to the office, I protested that I couldn’t write an enthusiastic article – an article flowing with praise for such an institution. With my ear bent I crumbled and wrote such a feature. Any writing skills I had withered immediately left me as I went against my own nature. My empathy grew with my anger, and this was among those experiences which later shaped my socialism.
Frustrated in the job and increasingly doubtful that journalism per se was a career for me, my six months moved towards a catastrophe. Without a news story once a week I was going to be dead meat anyway. Pressured day in, day out for the news, I decided to drown my sorrows one Friday.
Haverhill is in the south west corner of Suffolk, close to Cambridgeshire and Essex borders. In those days, the pubs opened at 10am in Cambridgeshire and remained open in Essex until 3pm – then such a drunken roundabout journey could be finished off in Haverhill, where it was market day and the pubs there were open all day! I was going to be legless, if not hospital bound!
However, wobbly on my bike, it was in Birdbrook, Essex that a news story finally came to me: I saw a group of thatched terraced cottages with stand pipes in their gardens. I lingered. A frail elderly woman (who turned out to be in her eighties), fetched water from the stand pipe in her garden. I asked what the water was for? “Everything,” she replied, “baths, washing and washing up. No mod cons here!”
I hurried back to the chief reporter and told him of my newsworthy find! Luckily, he thought the story was too big for me and took it up himself. The next Friday, the headline in The Haverhill Echo was, ’82 Year Old Widow Has No Mod Cons,’ with a photo of the woman at her stand pipe slap bang in the middle!
The following week, her landlord phoned. As a result of urgent improvements – inside toilets, a bathroom, sinks and other plumbing – the cottages would no longer be offered for peppercorn rents but at the private market rates… and the lady in question was to be evicted as the cottages were vacated for this essential work!
This did me in. I hadn’t got the skin for journalism. Nor did I have the skills. There was no training and I was thankful to be shown the door at the end of my contract. The journalist I was brought in to replace went on to work at The Sun.
My lack of success? I’m eternally grateful to it!