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I am sometimes told how remarkable it is that I made such a success of my career in spite of my poor background and having to leave school at fifteen. But of course that’s nonsense. I succeeded not in spite of it but because of it. And anyway I had some huge advantages. My mother was one of them. She left school at fourteen without a single qualification and had never, as far as I could tell, read a book in her life. Not that there was much time for reading with five children and no little luxuries such as a vacuum cleaner or washing machine or fridge. The only time I remember her sitting down was when there was darning to be done. Mostly socks as I recall.
She seldom expressed opinions – certainly never political ones. But she was utterly, single-mindedly determined that her children should have the education that was denied to her and my father. That meant that, unlike the other kids in our street, we were forced to do homework. It also meant that when the Encyclopaedia Britannica salesman came knocking on our door Mam made my father buy a set.
It cost a shilling a week and the salesman called every Saturday morning to collect the payment. It was the only thing my parents ever bought on the never-never. She told us one evening that the woman who lived opposite had paid for a holiday on the never-never. She could not have been more shocked if the neighbour had sold her children to the gypsies who came to the door every few weeks selling clothes pegs.
So precious were the encyclopaedias that my father built a bookcase especially to protect them. It had glass doors so the neighbours could admire them. Sadly, the doors had a lock and he was the key holder so when he was out – which was most of the time – we kids couldn’t use them. That might have seemed rather to defeat the reason for buying them, but even if we had never opened them they sent out an important message. Knowledge was important. It was empowering. My parents wanted their children to have something they could not have dreamed of in their own childhoods: access to everything they wanted to know beyond the grinding poverty of their own lives. Hence the homework.
There were two rooms downstairs in our house: the kitchen with a coal fire in it where we cooked and ate and washed (dishes and selves) and a tiny front room where no one was allowed except at Christmas and for homework. At least a couple of hours a night. That was when the encyclopaedias came out of the bookcase.
My parents were utterly determined that we would pass the eleven-plus and go to high school – we didn’t use the term ‘grammar school’ then – but beyond that, I don’t think they had any real ambitions for us. There was just the unswerving certainty that if we went to high school we would have a very different life from theirs. And we did pass – all of us. My younger brother Rob and I went to Cardiff High, which was regarded as the best school in Cardiff, if not in Wales. I hated it from the day I joined until the day I left.
The headmaster was a snob and I was clearly not the sort of boy he wanted at Cardiff High – far too working class for his refined tastes. I remember being beaten by him because I was late one morning. I tried explaining to him that it was because I had a morning newspaper round and the papers had not been delivered to the shop as early as usual because it was snowing heavily, which also made it difficult to get around on my bike. I tried to suggest I could not let down the shop’s customers and we needed the money from my job, but he was not impressed. The pain from the beating did not last long, but the anger never faded. Some years later, when I had started appearing on television and was considered something of a celebrity, I had a letter from the school. Would I accept the great honour of making a speech at the annual prize-giving? I replied immediately. Yes of course, I wrote, and then I added a few lines about what I proposed saying. The invitation was swiftly withdrawn.
By then the various chips on my shoulder had been firmly welded into place. Growing up in the immediate post-war years in Splott (an ugly name for a pretty ugly neighbourhood) I’m not sure children like me were really aware of being poor. We knew there were rich people, of course, but we simply did not come into contact with them. The man who owned the timber yard a couple of doors up from my house had a car, and that put him in a totally different class way beyond our own imaginings. It wasn’t, I think, until some of the neighbours got television sets and we were able to see inside the houses of middle-class people like the Grove Family (the first TV soap opera in Britain) that we realised the gulf between them and us.
I remember clearly the first time I was invited for tea in a middle-class home and how surprised I was that the milk came out of a jug rather than a bottle and the jam was in little cut-glass bowls. There was even a bowl of fruit on the table for anybody to help themselves. An old friend of mine, the brilliant comedian Ted Robbins, always says you could tell someone was really rich if they had fruit in the house even when no one was ill … and if they got out of the bath to have a wee.
Envy was one thing. Anger was something else again. Anger not because they were richer than us but because of the sense that some looked down at us for being poor. People like my old headmaster, and the hospital consultant I was sent to see when I was thirteen because I had developed a nasty cyst at the base of my spine. I was lying naked face down on a bed when the great man arrived, surrounded by a posse of young trainee doctors. He took a quick look at my cyst, ignoring me completely, and told his adoring acolytes: ‘The trouble with this boy is that he doesn’t bathe regularly.’ Mortified, I lay there, cringing with shame and embarrassment and hating the arrogant posh bastard and all those smug rich kids surrounding him who were sniggering at the great man’s disgraceful behaviour.
The resentment had been building for a long time. I was barely six years old when it began. It was a Friday lunchtime (dinner time) and although it was seventy years ago I remember it in terrible detail. I had been sent out to the local fish and chip shop to buy dinner. This was a huge treat – the closest we ever got to eating out. All the more special because it happened so rarely and only ever on Fridays. I got back to the house, clutching the hot, soggy mass wrapped in newspaper, vinegar dripping through, the smell an exquisite torture of anticipation. When I stepped into the kitchen my small world had changed for ever.
Dr Rees, our local GP, was there. This in itself was an extraordinary event. He visited very rarely – only when one of us was literally incapable of walking to his surgery – was always handed a glass of whisky by my father who kept a half-bottle in the cupboard for just this purpose, and never stayed more than a few minutes. This time he looked different and so did my parents. They were white and visibly trembling. The tears came later for my mother. I never saw my father cry. The doctor had just told them that Christine, my baby sister and the apple of my mother’s eye, was dead. She had been admitted to hospital the day before, suffering from gastroenteritis.
That is not a disease that kills people – not even in those more clinically primitive days – and for as long as he lived my father believed she died because we were poor. How can I make a judgement on that? All I know, because he told me years later, was that he and my mother had not been allowed to visit their dying child in hospital and, had they been middle class, things would have been different. She had been put in the ‘wrong’ ward and nobody spotted how ill she was. My mother would have spotted it had she been allowed to.
She never recovered from it. She had been blessed with a head of magnificent raven hair. It went white almost overnight. She had been strong and confident and healthy. She lost all that when Christine died. Eventually, of course, she came to terms with the loss. People do, don’t they? But she was never the same woman, and my father’s resentment and anger towards what he saw as the ruling class grew even stronger.
Their one consolation was their surviving children – especially my younger brother Rob, who was born five years after Christine died and took her place in my mother’s affection if not in her memory. As for me, I found another reason to rail against the establishment some years later.
My career had prospered and I was living overseas. On one of my weekly calls home my father told me he was desperately worried because he had been summoned to an interview with the tax man. It was a serious matter. He had been accused of fiddling his taxes. I knew this to be total nonsense. My parents were as honest as it is possible for two people to be. And anyway, my father earned so little from his one-man business he scarcely paid any taxes. That, it turned out, was the problem. My mother was summoned with him because she kept his accounts – such as they were. She told me some years later what happened.
She and Dad had been made to sit on two hard chairs in the inspector’s office and he sat behind his desk. He handed Mam a copy of her accounts and told Dad to swear they were accurate and that they would be in very big trouble if they were not. Dad said they were. Then the inspector said:
‘The accounts show you have earned very little money indeed. If that is so, would you explain how it is that you and your wife were able to take very long holidays not only to the United States of America but also to South Africa? And don’t try to deny it. We have checked out the information handed to us and it is accurate in every detail.’ Presumably some jealous neighbour had snitched.
Dad told me what happened next:
‘Your mother leaped to her feet and she looked that man straight in the eyes and said: “My son lived in America and he lives in South Africa now and he sent us the tickets and paid for both holidays. My son is the correspondent for the BBC. And if you don’t believe me you can watch him on television!”’
I talked to Mam about it in her closing years. She told me it had been one of the proudest moments of her life.
You can add that tax inspector to my blacklist of authority figures. It is a long one and, I fear, still growing.
2
The teenAGE pAGE (#litres_trial_promo)
I was seven when I knew that I wanted to be a reporter. I’d like to claim I was inspired by grandiose visions of speaking truth to power and enthralling my millions of readers with eyewitness accounts of the great events that would determine the future of humanity. The reality was rather more prosaic and a lot more embarrassing.
In post-war Britain poor families like mine did not squander what little spare cash they had on buying books and there was no television, and so much of my spare time was spent reading comics – mostly Superman. Vast bundles of second-hand comics were sent to this country from the United States as ballast in cargo ships. They ended up being sold for a penny or two in local newsagents and then getting swapped between one scruffy kid and another. Superman, as all aficionados will know, took as his human alter ego a chap called Clark Kent and Clark Kent was a reporter. Ergo: reporters were akin to Superman. I would break free from my grim existence in the back streets of Cardiff and save the world into the bargain by becoming Superman. And Lois Lane – adored by everyone who read the comics – would be my girlfriend.
You might say that for a very small boy that logic was perfectly understandable. Not so much for a grown adult maybe. But no matter, when I left school at fifteen I had only one ambition and that was to get a job on a local paper. There wasn’t much alternative. The monster of media studies had yet to be created.
No, you learned on the job – if you were lucky enough to get one. I got mine by lying, or, as we journalists prefer to describe it, through a little creative embellishment of the facts. My years in school had been, to put 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 still coal mining in the South Wales valleys but towns like Merthyr were living on their histories. And what a history.
At the peak of the Industrial Revolution, the Welsh valleys were producing vast amounts of coal and iron. Merthyr had four great ironworks (one of them was said to be the most productive in the world) and – maybe Merthyr’s proudest boast – the first railway. The locomotive was designed by the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick – Stephenson’s Rocket came later – and it managed to haul twenty-five tons of iron and a few passengers too.
So there was plenty of money being made, but not much of it found its way to the wretched souls slaving for a pittance in the ironworks and the pits as they created the wealth for the mighty ironmasters and pit owners to enjoy. The great Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote of ‘those poor creatures broiling, all in sweat and dirt, amid their furnaces, pits and rolling mills’.
The area where most of them lived became known as ‘Little Hell’ – and for good reason. If their jobs didn’t kill them there was a pretty good chance they and their families would be seen off by the cholera and typhoid which thrived in the open sewers. Flushing toilets were a stranger to Little Hell. A century after Carlyle, when I was reporting for the Merthyr Express, I had my own tiny taste of what the miners he had written about all those years ago had to endure. To this day I marvel that any of them managed to survive.
To drop in a cage to the bottom of a deep mine is not an experience for the faint-hearted. The speed of the descent through total darkness is terrifying, made worse by the grit that flies through the air, stinging your face. And when you get to the bottom all you can think about is how quickly you can get to the surface again. The idea that these men could spend a third of their lives down there was simply incomprehensible to me – as was the massive physical effort it had taken to create this and every other deep mine in the valleys.
I suppose I had imagined in my childish ignorance that once a mine had been sunk the miners immediately found the coal waiting for them to hack away and get it hauled to the surface. But first, of course, they had to dig out the thousands of tons of rock and waste to form the tunnels that gave them access to the black stuff. I looked up at the roof of the tunnel we were walking through to get to the coalface. All that stood between us and instant death were the ceiling props these men had put in place. If they got it wrong they died. And, of course, vast numbers did die: some from roof falls, many more from the deadly gases that could seep into the tunnels and reach the coalface.
Carbon monoxide was one of the big killers until, in 1913, someone had the brilliant idea of taking canaries down the mine. If the canary keeled over, the miners knew they had to get to the surface fast. Canaries were still being used until only a few years before I first went down a mine in 1961. An even bigger killer was methane.
An old miner told me what it was like to be working at the coalface and hear a loud bang. It happened to him once and, mercifully, turned out to be a relatively minor incident – a few injuries but no one killed. Even so, I struggled to imagine the sheer terror as he and the men with him raced back through the tunnel, not knowing whether the blast had brought down the roof ahead of them so they would be trapped. Perhaps rescuers would break through the fallen rock to save them. Perhaps they wouldn’t and they would die, as so many miners had, when their oxygen ran out or the attempt to rescue them brought more rocks crashing down and crushing them. Fatal accidents were commonplace.
Every miner in the Welsh valleys had his own story to tell of disasters that nearly happened – and those that did. The worst – only a few miles from Merthyr – killed more men and boys than any other mining disaster in the history of British mining. It was in 1913. Nearly 950 men were working at the Senghenydd colliery when a massive explosion ripped it apart and 439 were killed either by the blast itself or the poisonous gas that had created it.
Like most reporters working in the valleys in the days when almost every village had its colliery and every colliery had its share of tragedies, I was occasionally ordered by the editor to knock on the door of a grieving widow. I dreaded it. How could such an intrusion be justified at such a time? But never once was I sent away. Invariably I was invited in, given a cup of tea and shown photographs of the dead miner while the widow talked about what a wonderful man he had been. I seldom saw a tear shed – and I have always wondered why. Perhaps it was because women who married miners lived with fear from day one. They were prepared for the worst to happen. They knew, too, that even if their husband survived, his retirement would be a short one. The biggest killer of all was not the gas: it was the dust.
The first time I went for a drink in a miners’ club I noticed that many of the miners coming in after their shift would have a pint of water plonked in front of them by the barman. I asked him why. His answer was obvious when you think of it: ‘Waste of money buying a pint when your throat’s full of dust isn’t it? Makes sense to wash the dust away so you can taste the beer.’ If it was doing that to your throat, I thought, what the hell was it doing to your lungs? The answer: pneumoconiosis or silicosis or any of the other hideous illnesses caused by a life spent underground breathing in the deadly dust.
Many years after I had left the valleys behind me I reported on the 1984–5 miners’ strikes that brought the coalfields to a halt in a doomed attempt to save them from the cost-cutters and the hated Margaret Thatcher. I talked to many angry miners. But it was rare to meet a miner’s wife who mourned the death of the industry. In all my years in South Wales I never spoke to a mother who wanted her sons to follow their father down the pit.
I was to see for myself the ultimate, unthinkable, price of coal: a disaster in so many ways worse than all the others because its victims, crushed or suffocated to death, had not chosen to face the dangers of deep mining. But that was a few years after I had left the Merthyr Express to return to Cardiff and take another step up the journalistic greasy pole.
I had been offered a job as a reporter on a national daily no less – though not exactly the giddy heights of Fleet Street. It was the Western Mail, the national daily of Wales. I’d like to report that pretty soon my name was up in lights, or at least writ large on the front page. Sadly it never was. Not once. My great mistake had been to bear the same surname as the news editor of the paper, though he spelled his with an ‘e’ which I affected to think rather vulgar. Mine, I claimed, was pure Welsh, which was complete nonsense. The truth was that an incompetent registrar had misspelled my surname on my birth certificate so my parents and older siblings were ‘Humphreys’ and I was ‘Humphrys’. I pointed out to my news editor – a rather unpleasant bully with one of the most prominent beetled brows I had ever seen – that the different spelling would remove any confusion in the reader’s mind, but he was having none of it. He ordered me to adopt a different name for byline purposes. I chose Desmond and so I became ‘John Desmond’ for Mail readers. (I had been christened ‘Desmond John Humphrys’ but contracted very severe hooping cough when I was little and was such a miserable child my mother decreed I should henceforth be known as John. She was not, she announced, going to have people calling me ‘Dismal Desmond’.)
In spite of my new name, my brief time on the Mail was not particularly distinguished. But I suppose I must have done enough to impress someone because, my editor told me after I’d been working there for a year or so, I had come to the attention of ‘London’. He seemed almost as surprised as me. For a young provincial hack, ‘London’ was not just beyond my wildest dreams. It had not even figured in them. Until now.
The Western Mail and many other papers, including the mighty Times and Sunday Times, were owned by the Thomson newspaper group. My editor told me the Sunday Times, no less, was thinking of giving me a job and I was to go to London to meet both its managing editor and news editor over lunch. I was terrified – and totally intimidated. I’d been to London only twice in my life and I had never eaten in a restaurant anywhere near as grand as Simpson’s in the Strand, which was where they took me. Nor had I met such imposing journalists before.
My own recollection of the lunch was more of trying to remember which knife and fork to use and agreeing with everything my hosts said rather than making a serious attempt to impress them with my journalistic brilliance. I had no doubt they would send me on my way with a pat on the head and a patronising ‘perhaps you’re not quite ready for the big time just yet’ and, had they done so, I suspect I’d have agreed and felt rather relieved. But they didn’t. They offered me the job of reporter on the paper’s brand-new Insight section. This really was the cutting edge of national investigative journalism. Insight, which exists to this day, was to become one of the most respected institutions on one of the most respected newspapers in the world. On the train back to Cardiff I wondered when I would wake up from this ridiculous dream.
The next day I told the Sunday Times I didn’t want the job.
Like so many things in life it happened because of a chance encounter. When I got back to Cardiff from London I’d gone to meet a few reporter friends for a drink in our favourite pub to do some serious boasting. One of them, Norman Rees, had left newspapers to work for the new commercial television station TWW. He out-boasted me. Newspapers, he told me, were old hat. Television was where it was at. He made it sound amazingly glamorous and exciting. I’d be famous – plastered all over everyone’s TV screens, the prettiest girls in Cardiff throwing themselves at my feet wherever I went! Why didn’t I join him? He promised he could persuade his editor to give me an interview if I was up for it. I was and he did and I got the job.
The Sunday Times were furious. They told me I had wasted their time (not to mention a fat bill at Simpson’s) and my name was on their blacklist. If I ever so much as dreamed of working for Times Newspapers again I could forget it – which made it all the more gratifying when, thirty years later, I was invited to write the main comment column for the Sunday Times and did so for five years.
It’s fair to say that Norman had rather overplayed the glamour and excitement bit. TWW was among the first companies to get a commercial television licence. It broadcast to South Wales and the West Country – a ridiculous cultural mix given that the two regions had virtually nothing in common apart from the Bristol Channel – and it was also among the first to lose its licence. That did not come as a great surprise. Most of us thought its owners were far more concerned with selling exciting new adverts. showing perfectly made-up housewives, with just a few stray blonde hairs escaping from their Alice bands, glowing with pride as they told us how happy they had made their hard-working husbands by discovering how to make the perfect gravy. Not to mention the sheer joy of washing dishes, knowing that it would make their hands just as soft as their face – which would make those hard-working husbands even more proud of them. Ah … the glory days of television advertising.
It might have been sexist garbage, but the profits poured in. Charging a fortune to broadcast commercials was so much easier than trying to produce insightful television programmes. The Canadian publishing tycoon Lord Thomson, who owned TWW and half of Fleet Street, famously called it a ‘licence to print money’ and so cross was he when they lost their licence that they abandoned the station months before they were supposed to. I suspect few tears were shed by the viewers.
My own contribution to TWW was limited but it taught me a lot – such as not getting drunk at lunchtime on Christmas Eve if you were live on telly that night. I did – and when I leaned in closer to try to read the autocue I fell off my chair. No one in the studio or the newsroom seemed to care very much – possibly because they were all as drunk as me. I also learned that nothing in the whole world is more scary than drying up on live television. I did it twice. It’s the most extraordinary sensation – as though you are floating just below the studio ceiling looking down on a young man whose body, tongue and brain have become totally paralysed.
The first time it happened I was trying to interview the most famous broadcaster in the land, the ultimate smooth-talking Irishman Eamonn Andrews, and the second time I was interviewing the finest rugby player Wales has ever produced, Bleddyn Williams. Bleddyn rescued me but Eamonn just smiled and waited for consciousness to return to me, which it did after an hour. Or maybe it was only five seconds. Either way, the scars remain.
One memorable (for me) story was the disappearance of a middle-aged man who had vanished from his home in Cardiff without trace for no apparent reason. An everyday event, perhaps, but this was local telly and ‘man disappears’ was news. So I was sent off to interview his wife. She was a nurse – clearly in great distress – and she greeted me warmly, sat me down with a cup of tea and talked at length about her fears for what might have happened to her beloved husband. She shed a quiet tear and my heart bled for her. Some months later he turned up. The police found him underneath the patio on which I had been sitting taking tea with the loving wife who buried him there after she had murdered him.
By now I had been a journalist for the best part of ten years. I was to practise the trade for another fifty years, travelling the world, reporting on many of the great events that would come to define the century. I would, in the words of the old cliché, have the great privilege of occupying a ringside seat at history. I would watch an American president forced to resign in disgrace. I would report on earthquakes and famines and wars around the globe. But nothing would compare with what happened just a few miles from where I was born, on 21 October 1966. I was still a young man who had barely set foot outside South Wales. I watched a community deal with a tragedy I still struggle to comprehend. It left me with memories that will never fade, an immense respect for the strength of human beings faced with horror beyond comprehension and a lifelong distrust of authority.
On that terrible morning I had turned up as usual just after nine in the TWW newsroom, and I wandered over to the Telex machine that was always clattering away spewing out endless, useless information. One relatively small story had caught my news editor’s eye. It reported that there had been a tip slide at Aberfan in the Merthyr Valley.
There was nothing particularly unusual in that. It often happened. The waste tips above the old collieries were notoriously unstable and shamefully neglected. They were slipping and sliding all over the valleys. Sometimes a slide would take the occasional miners’ cottage with it, but mostly they just made a mess of the road and the land beneath. This time it seemed it might be a little more serious than that.
I knew Aberfan well from my years on the Merthyr Express. My closest friend on the paper lived there and I often stayed with him after we had drunk too much beer in his local. So I knew that there was a primary school below the tip and at that time in the morning it would have been full of children. But there was nothing in the PA report to suggest that it had been affected or that this was anything more than the usual minor slippage. Even so, nothing else of any news value was going on in South Wales that morning, so I suggested I might as well drive up the valley to take a look. It was only twenty-five miles away from Cardiff and if I thought the story was big enough to merit sending a film crew I could always phone in and ask for one.
As soon as I’d started driving up the valley I began to get the sense that something truly awful had happened. The steep sides of the Welsh valleys are lined with cottages, little terraced homes of drab grey squatting defensively against the hillside. You could tell which were the miners’ cottages – almost all of them at that time – because it was the day of the week when they had their small piles of coal dumped outside. Cheap coal was one of the few perks of being a miner. Normally the women would have been busy shovelling it up and carrying it through their tiny terraced houses to dump in the small coal sheds at the back. This morning they were standing at their doors looking worried, peering up the valley in the direction in which I was driving. They knew something bad had happened and so, by now, did I. None of us could begin to imagine how bad. Here is how I described, all those years ago, what had happened:
Just after 9.15 a group of workmen had been sent to the top of the big tip that loomed above Aberfan, grey, black and ugly. There had been some worrying signs that it was sinking more than usual. A deep depression had formed within the tip like the crater in a volcano. As the men watched, the waste rose into the depression, formed itself into a lethal tidal wave of slurry and rolled down the hillside, gathering speed and height until it was thirty feet high and destroying everything in its path. From that moment the name of Aberfan has been synonymous with tragedy beyond comprehension.
It crushed part of the school and some tiny houses alongside like a ton of concrete dropping on a matchbox. And what that foul mixture of black waste did not flatten it filled – classrooms choked with the stuff until the building was covered and the school became a tomb. The moment the terrible news reached them, hundreds of miners had abandoned the coalface at the colliery which had created that monstrous tip and raced to the surface. And there they were when I arrived, their faces still black – save for the streaks of white from the sweat and the tears as they dug and prayed and wept. Most of them were digging for their own children.
Every so often someone would scream for silence and we would all stand frozen. Was that the cry of a child we had heard coming from deep below us? Sometimes it was and some were saved. I saw a burly policeman, his helmet comically lopsided, carrying a little girl in his arms, her legs dangling down, her shoes missing. She was a skinny little thing, no more than nine years old. Thank God she was alive. The men dug all day and all night and all the next day. They dug until there were no more faint cries, no more hope, but still they kept going. They were digging now for bodies.
I watched through the hours and days that followed as the tiny coffins mounted up in the little chapel. There is nothing so poignant as the sight of a child’s coffin. By the end of it there were 116 of them. One hundred and sixteen dead children and twenty-eight adults.
When the miners finally stopped digging they went home to weep, to mourn, to relive the nightmare. To cherish the children who were spared. And later to show their anger at the criminal stupidity and venality of the officials and politicians who had allowed it to happen.
Never was anger more justified. The National Coal Board who ran the mines had – from a mixture of deceit and cowardice and fear of retribution – tried to claim that the tragedy was an act of God. It was not. It was an act of negligence by man. Criminal negligence. The politician responsible for the NCB, Lord Robens, a blustering lying bully of a man, had gone on television to say that the cause of the disaster was the water from a natural spring which had been pouring into the centre of the tip and produced the water bomb that finally exploded with such devastating results. The spring, said Robens, was completely unknown. That was just one of his lies. Not only was it known, its presence was marked on local maps and the older miners knew exactly where it was and what the danger was and they had been saying so for years. They were ignored. Mercifully, they had put their fears in writing and the letters, written by the miners and ignored by the NCB, were eventually produced at the inquiry into the disaster so the truth could be revealed for the world to see.
I was twenty-three when Aberfan happened. I have been back many times over the years and talked to the dwindling handful of bereaved parents and to the few children in the school who survived the disaster. And every time I wonder how they were able to recover from their grief and the nightmare of that terrible morning. But ‘recover’ is the wrong word. As so many have told me, you don’t get over it … you just have to live with it. What is the alternative? To that, there is no answer.
What we owe the people of Aberfan
Today, 20 October 2016
When I drove here from Cardiff fifty years ago, the hills on either side of the valley were scarred with tips. Black and ugly and threatening. Now, as I look back down the valley from this cemetery, they’re gone. Bulldozed away or covered with grass and trees. The mining valleys of South Wales are green again. The river that flows beneath me was also black and dead. And now it’s clean and children can play and fish in its shallows. And the men of these valleys, unlike their fathers, do not end their day’s work with lungs full of coal dust. I never met a miner who said he wanted his son to follow him down the pit. The nations owed miners a debt of gratitude for the wealth they helped create over the centuries. The mines have gone, of course, but our generation owes something different to the people of Aberfan. Respect for the courage and dignity they have shown for fifty years in dealing with unimaginable grief. But more than that. The children in these graves were betrayed by the men in power decades ago who refused to listen to their fathers when they warned them their little school faced a mortal danger. If Aberfan stands for anything today, apart from unbearable grief, it stands as a reminder for every journalist in the land of this: authority must always be challenged.
3
Building a cathedral (#litres_trial_promo)
I was still in my early twenties when I was offered a job by the BBC. I remember feeling terribly pleased with myself. I was going to be based in Liverpool, the most exciting beat in Britain for a reporter in those days, with the Beatles and the Cavern club at one end of the news scale and dock strikes at the other. I was to work out of Castle Chambers, an office building in the heart of the city where the north-west Representative of the BBC was based. The Representative (I can never think of him without the capital letter) was a dapper little fellow called Reg. But only to his closest friends. To young pond life like me he was Major H. R. V. Jordan (Retd), JP, BA (Hons) and he was a very grand figure indeed.
Reg had an extremely large office with a well-stocked cocktail cabinet and two elegant young secretaries. Not one, you will note, but two. Their duties, it is accurate to say, were less than onerous. Reg graced the office a couple of times a week to sign a few letters, and occasionally drove up the coast to Blackpool for lunch with ‘my friend, the mayor of Blackpool’ in his large plum-coloured Jaguar and white cotton driving gloves before returning to his home in The Wirral.
Perhaps Reg’s relationship with His Honour and one or two other municipal worthies in the north-west was, as he insisted, invaluable to the well-being of the BBC. Whether it repaid the considerable sum forked out by the unwitting licence payer is debatable. And he was not alone. There were many of them here and abroad. Our Representative in the United States, where I was later sent to open a television news bureau, had a far grander suite of offices in New York and an apartment in the UN Plaza with stunning views over the East River that would not have disgraced the residence of a Saudi prince.
They were still building the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool when I arrived, the largest religious building in Britain, and the longest cathedral in the world. One of my first assignments was to make a film about its construction. It was a massive project, started some years before I was born. I interviewed one of the stonemasons who had been working on it all his life. Young as I was, and trying to make my way in the exciting world of journalism, I pitied the poor chap. Rooted to one place, always following the same boring routine. There I was, dashing everywhere, never knowing what I might be doing from one day to the next, master of my own timetable and destiny (news editor permitting). And here was this man, turning up at the same time, day after day, week after week, chipping out more stone blocks to lay on the other stone blocks he’d chipped out the day before and so on ad infinitum.
‘Don’t you get bored?’ I asked him.
‘Why should I?’
‘Well, all you’re doing is laying one stone on another year after year.’
‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m building a cathedral. What will you leave behind when you die?’
It was a fair point. Broadcasting disappears into the ether, leaving little trace behind. Those who ply the trade leave no lasting monument. My stonemason was still building his cathedral when I left. By the time it was finished, in 1978, I had become a foreign correspondent.
The wireless in our house had always been tuned to the BBC Home Service and when I was a young teenager I listened to From Our Own Correspondent with awe. I tried to imagine being one of those correspondents reporting from around the world – but only in the way that my younger self had imagined being Superman.
Those were the dark ages for television news. There was no such thing as twenty-four-hour news, no satellite feeds or electronic cameras, and no smartphones. If an earthquake or revolution struck somewhere a long way away television news editors did not, as they do today, have their pick of endless footage filmed by eyewitnesses within seconds of it happening. The first thing they reached for was an airline guide. How quickly could we get a reporter and film crew there and, once there, how quickly could we get their film back to London so that it could be processed, edited and on the next news programme? It might be a day. It might be a week – or more. My first big foreign assignment – and, as it turned out, one of my most dangerous – was in the country now called Bangladesh. In those days it was East Pakistan. It took six months to get my most dramatic footage back to London.
The partition of India in 1947 remains perhaps the darkest stain on the history of the British Empire. For centuries Muslims and Hindus had lived together on the Indian subcontinent relatively peacefully. The creation of Pakistan for the Muslim minority led to a refugee crisis of biblical proportions. Fourteen million people left their homes either to flee violence between Hindus and Muslims or to seek a new home in a new country. At least a million – some estimates are double that figure – died in the violence that broke out. It was, by any historical measure, a shameful betrayal of a great nation and its hopes.
Pakistan was created out of two regions: one in the west and one in the east. East Pakistan was carved out of Bengal, which was part of India. The Bengali people living there refused to accept their status as Pakistanis. They demanded independence. Instead, they were savagely attacked by the West Pakistan military. Vast numbers died. When I arrived there in December 1971 the country was at war with itself.
I had been in the capital Dhaka for only twenty-four hours, and was asleep in my room at the top of the Intercontinental Hotel when I was woken by what felt like an earthquake. There were thunderous explosions and the hotel seemed to sway. During the night India, which had opposed the creation of East Pakistan, had declared war on Pakistan. Indian warplanes were bombing the city.
I shot off to the airport with my camera crew to film the destruction, naively believing that the attacks had ended at dawn. They had not. We were filming the wreckage of what remained of the East Pakistan air force and the runway when the bombers with their fighter escorts returned. They had come back to finish the job and – or so it seemed to me in the terrifying hour that followed – to finish us off too. Thank God, there happened to be a fairly deep bomb crater quite close. We made a run for it.
It struck me then that all those scenes in the movies when fighters fire rockets and machine guns at targets on the ground were about as realistic as kiddies playing at cops and robbers. It’s the noise that instils the fear. Not so much the gunfire and exploding rockets, oddly enough, but the noise of jet engines screaming above your head so close it feels you could reach up and touch them. I have never heard anything like it and nor do I ever want to hear anything like it ever again. I was terrified.
But we made it to the crater, jumped in and my cameraman started yelling at me: ‘Piece to camera! Do a fucking piece to camera!’