Cudlipp's Circus

By Peter Thompson

Award-winning Australian author Peter Thompson evokes the now-vanished world he encountered on joining 'Cudlipp's Circus' at the Daily Mirror in 1966, bringing to life the days when Fleet Street was the front-page equivalent of Dodge City and its pubs shuddered to the midnight roar of mighty rotary presses. The Mirror's daily quota of mischief, mayhem and madness attracted journalists from all over the globe. The columnist Cassandra called this convergence of talent 'Cudlipp's Circus' after its ringmaster, the great tabloid editor Hugh Cudlipp.
The author was night editor and deputy editor of the Daily Mirror, editor of the Sunday Mirror and a director of Mirror Group Newspapers. He describes the Mirror scene in its heyday from the baroque splendour of the chairman's office to its fabled pub, the Stab in the Back, and tells the inside story of the paper's great scoops, love affairs, vanities and vendettas.
But Cudlipp's Circus is much more than a classic tale of newspaper life appealing to journalists and the general reader everywhere. Written in the age of the Leveson inquiry following public revulsion over the News of the World's hacking of the mobile phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, it examines the acquisition of press power and its abuse through the lives of the four newspaper barons for whom the author worked: Cecil King, Hugh Cudlipp, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.
His portrait of Maxwell as a corporate psychopath rampaging through the lives of others has never been bettered since he plunged from his yacht Lady Ghislaine into the Atlantic waters on 5 November 1991 after committing the biggest fraud in British criminal history.
Thompson also charts the fall of Maxwell's favourite daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, from her first appearance at the Daily Mirror in 1984 to the denouement thirty-eight years later in a New York courtroom, where she faced charges of the sexual abuse of under-aged women.
Drawing on his extensive archive of documents, diaries and interviews with many of the great names in postwar journalism, the author has written an explosive memoir of extraordinary power, depth and perception.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667849164

Book preview

Part I

Origins

‘We possess nothing certainly except the past’

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945

Beach boy circa 1945

1.

FOR the past five years it had been my ambition, bordering on obsession, to make my way to Fleet Street and work for the Daily Mirror. The Mirror was Oz, home of the tabloid wizards. It represented a world I could only imagine, a world in which journalists ridiculed rank and privilege and spoke up for the underdog. No other newspaper radiated the same energy, humour, compassion or excitement. Hugh Cudlipp and his editor L.A. ‘Lee’ Howard had found a way of articulating the hopes and demands of their fifteen million working-class readers while at the same time burying the imperial past and seeking a future for Britain in Europe.

The Mirror’s daily quota of mischief, mayhem and madness attracted journalists from all over the globe. The great columnist Cassandra called this convergence of talent ‘Cudlipp’s Circus’. The fact that in my time the Mirror was physically located at Holborn Circus added to the big-top image.² The gravitational pull was so strong that in August 1966 I resigned my job on the Sun News-Pictorial, a Melbourne tabloid, and with my wife Stephanie boarded a propeller-driven Douglas DC-4 bound for London. After stopovers at Singapore, Bangkok, Bombay, Tehran and Vienna, we emerged through the dawn-grey clouds somewhere over Surrey. Down below villages, woods and fields were dissolving in the misty rain. As the plane touched down at Heathrow, I thought, ‘Well, at least I’m in the right country.’

It was August Bank Holiday Monday, an auspicious day in the history of the Daily Mirror. On that day in 1935 Hugh Cudlipp, Bill ‘Cassandra’ Connor and the great sports writer Peter Wilson (‘The Man They Can’t Gag’), had reported for work at the Mirror for the first time. I had two letters of introduction to people at the Mirror, one to Cudlipp himself. I was twenty-four, the age at which he had been appointed editor of the Sunday Pictorial (later the Sunday Mirror). He was now editorial director of all IPC newspapers and had the power to give me a job with a click of his fingers.

This was a good time to arrive in London. England was celebrating its victory in the World Cup at Wembley and the Swinging City was on a high. On the bus ride into the West London air terminal red, white and blue bunting flapped in the rain and Bobby Moore’s picture was framed in many windows. We hailed a black cab to complete the journey down Cromwell Road to Knightsbridge, along Piccadilly and round the statue of Eros to Nelson’s Column at Trafalgar Square and thence along the Strand to our first London address, the Strand Palace Hotel.

The abiding memory of that journey was of leaden skies and ancient, blackened buildings lining streets dressed in Dickens’s ‘penitential garb of soot’, with an unexpected splash of neon colour at Piccadilly Circus. After years of economic gloom, the city was gradually moving from monochrome to Technicolor. Beat music, peacock fashions, the Quant miniskirt, Sassoon haircuts, the Mini-Cooper, new-wave cinema, the Pill and the Daily Mirror had created an exuberance that made up the legend of Swinging London. These were the days when you could still hear English spoken in Bond Street and no one had heard of Rupert Murdoch.

The Strand Palace Hotel (£15 a night for a double room) was on the north, or Covent Garden, side of the Strand opposite the little private road that runs down to the Savoy. We entered the lobby through an art deco revolving door designed by Oliver ‘Bunny’ Bernard, father of the columnist, gambler and bon vivant Jeffrey Bernard, one of the few Fleet Street characters never likely to slip through the fingers of history.

At daybreak the next morning – 30 August – the rainclouds cleared and I found the morning newspapers arranged on a trestle table on the pavement outside the revolving door. They were all there, the Fleet Street ‘linens’:³ the broadsheet Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, Express, Mail, The Sporting Life and the old IPC Sun, and the tabloids, numbering just two, the Daily Sketch and the Daily Mirror.⁴ The Mirror led on a picture of bedraggled holidaymakers sheltering under Margate pier, with the headline WISH WE WEREN’T HERE. The story began, ‘It’s cold. It’s wet. It’s depressing.’ Not for me it wasn’t; the street paved with headlines was just round the corner.

Clutching a copy of the Mirror, I headed down the Strand, past the Royal Palace of Justice to the griffin atop the Temple Bar monument. So this was it – the start of the one-third of a mile named after the dirty little river flowing beneath it: Fleet Street, ‘the Street of Adventure’, ‘the Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ or ‘the Street of Shame’, or possibly all three if you stayed too long. ‘I would never advise anybody to come to Fleet Street,’ Cassandra had written in a recently published book about the London Press Club. ‘Learning this trade is like learning high diving – minus the water. But I wouldn’t have missed it for all the treasure of Araby.’⁵

FLEET STREET: The Royal Law Courts and the griffin statue at the west end

In the early morning light it seemed incredibly old and extraordinarily small: nothing more than a church (St Dunstan’s) and two lines of shops, pubs and offices facing each other across a narrow thoroughfare. But to walk down Fleet Street from the Cock Tavern to the inky maze of courts and lanes around the Cheshire Cheese was to follow the ghosts of Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Addison and Steele, Milton, Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Dickens, Edgar Wallace and the great Northcliffe himself. I half- expected to see the spectral outline of a tall, slim figure in a black hat but Hannen Swaffer, editor, reporter, drama critic, spiritualist and the Daily Herald’s first correspondent on ‘the Other Side’, has been dead for four years and he isn’t coming back.

The first sign that this is a newspaper village is the Dundee Courier’s title picked out in mosaic tiles on the front of a dour Caledonian brownstone, once the site of Sweeny Todd’s fabled barbershop just before the junction with Fetter Lane. And not only the Dundee Courier, for this is the London headquarters of D. C. Thomson, publishers of the Sunday Post, the Dundee Evening Telegraph, the People’s Friend and, more importantly to me because I have actually read them, The Beano and The Dandy. That, I thought, must be one of the great posts in journalism: Fleet Street correspondent of The Beano.

At the Cheshire Cheese the street took a slight turn to the right and there was a sight to behold: the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral backlit by the rising sun. Sometimes life seems too good to be true and this was one of those moments. From the crest of Ludgate Hill the Almighty was looking down on the sinners of the Fourth Estate.

St Paul’s Cathedral as it is today, still towering over the new Fleet Street

The aromatic smell of coffee and grease led me into a café full of large men in the baggy, ink-stained, navy-blue overalls that identified them as members of ‘the Print’. Some were wearing little paper caps that further identified them as machine minders, brake-hands, oilers or reel-hands in the pressrooms of the Daily Telegraph and its neighbour, the Daily Express, the only two dailies actually printed in Fleet Street. The café was called Mick’s. I squeezed into a spare seat and repeated the order of the man opposite me: ‘Bacon and eggs with two slices and a cuppa char, luv’.

Publishing had begun in Fleet Street around 1500 when Caxton’s apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde, opened a printing shop at the sign of the Sun near St Bride’s Church at the Ludgate Circus, or eastern, end of the street and Richard Pynson set up as publisher and printer next to St Dunstan’s at the Temple Bar, or western, end. Initially, printers supplied texts and documents to the large numbers of clergy inhabiting nearby religious establishments and the legal fraternity at the four Inns of Court. All that changed with the advent of the first Fleet Street newspaper, the Daily Courant, which was printed on a little flatbed press above the White Hart Inn at Ludgate Circus in 1702, leading in time to a thriving industry involving hundreds of newspapers, magazines and periodicals.

The printers were the true princes of Fleet Street. While Downing Street might toss the occasional knighthood to favoured editors - or, as Alfred Harmsworth, the future Viscount Northcliffe, put it, ‘When I want a peerage I shall buy it like an honest man’ - the printers were happy to settle for a life of anonymous affluence.⁶ Years before the Tolpuddle Martyrs formed the first trade union in 1832, ‘companionships of compositors’ combined forces for the mutual benefit of their members, not only to extract higher rates of pay from their boss, the master printer, but to settle arguments among themselves. ‘The disputes which frequently arise in printing-offices upon trifling as well as intricate points, can only be settled by a reference to the general custom and usage of the trade,’ the printer Caleb Stower wrote in 1808.

These misunderstandings, which annoy and retard business, often take place in companionships consisting of three or four compositors; it is therefore highly desirable that the generally received rules and regulations on this subject should be explicitly and clearly laid down for the future comfort and government of the compositor.⁷

The men in Mick’s that morning were Fleet Street’s elite workforce, members of the NGA and SOGAT,⁸ the former a craft union and the latter unskilled. Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ had left them untouched. Their technophobic presidents, general secretaries and fathers of the chapel (FOCs)⁹ opposed every attempt to introduce mechanical innovations such as phototypesetting and the facsimile transmission of pages to satellite print centres. At the same time they kept a firm hand on ‘fat takes’ (work not done but paid for), ‘blow’ (time off during a shift, sometimes on a one hour on-one hour off basis), ‘ghosts’ (non-existent workers whose pay packets were shared) and other arcane expressions related to the Old Spanish Customs that would bedevil Fleet Street until its demise in the 1980s.

No one knows the exact origin of the term but it could have come from Walsingham’s description of ‘Spanish practices’ in 1584 as ‘deceitful, perfidious and treacherous’. There were literally hundreds of these practices, all designed to squeeze extra payments out of Fleet Street proprietors. This is how it worked: one particularly hot summer the compositors on the Daily Mirror voted to take an icecream break in addition to their usual ‘blow’ of one hour on, one hour off. The management agreed and even supplied the icecream. When the weather cooled down the FOC returned to the negotiating table. ‘My members are prepared to work through their icecream break,’ he said, ‘but they want an extra payment for giving it up.’ And they got it.

The Inland Revenue estimated that more than half the pay packets in Fleet Street pressrooms were made out to false names such as Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley and Charlie Chaplin, representing fraud on an industrial scale. Sabotage was so common that no management dared to do anything about it. Half a cup of tea casually thrown from the overhead bridge into the spinning reels of newsprint would cause a paper break, leading to missed trains and lost sales. Blackmail, intimidation and sabotage were so much part of the fabric of Fleet Street life that the one thing investigative reporters never investigated was the inky underworld operating beneath their feet.

As a young production manager on the Daily Mirror, Ted Blackmore learned a salutary lesson in what happened to anyone who challenged chapel power. One night he refused a demand for extra cash from SOGAT staff in the warehouse. The men promptly stopped work, with the result that thousands of Daily Mirrors were lost. Next morning, Blackmore’s bosses carpeted him. ‘Young man, we are in the business of producing newspapers,’ one director told him. ‘Don’t do that again.’ The chairman, Cecil Harmsworth King, explained to Blackmore exactly what that meant: ‘Always get the paper out but do it at the cheapest rate.’ From then on night production managers at the Mirror walked around with fistfuls of fivers to grease the palms of recalcitrant printers.¹⁰

John Bonfield, one of the NGA’s leaders, admitted he exploited the system to the full. ‘I’m a Socialist, I believe in a Socialist world, and I’ll work to create one,’ he said. ‘But in the meantime we live in a capitalist world, a jungle. And while that’s true, we’ll play the capitalist game.’¹¹

Daily Mirror printers were paid so highly and had so much time off that some ran businesses, such as pubs or newsagents, while others worked in the black economy or improved their golf handicap. The public might read somewhere that blue movies were being shown in a makeshift cinema in the bowels of the Mirror Building or that the Kray Gang had an interest in the big Mirror card game. What no one would ever read was that, on average, more than 60,000 copies of the Daily Mirror disappeared from the publishing hall every night, or that stolen goods were moved around the capital in the backs of its yellow newspaper vans.

Brian Hitchen was driving to his home south of the Thames after a shift on the Mirror’s night news desk when he found himself following a Mirror van over Waterloo Bridge. The van hit a bump and its roller door shot up, revealing a grand piano, which rolled forward on its castors and toppled overboard. The van driver carried on, unaware that his cargo had smashed to pieces on the roadway.¹²

While eminent leader writers lectured British industry on its manifest inadequacies, newspaper proprietors turned a blind eye to even worse malpractices in their own backyards. ‘Dog don’t eat dog,’ Randolph Churchill proclaimed in 1953. ‘That is one of the reasons why the London press is so very bad. This handful of wealthy men have formed a cartel to immunize themselves from anything said about them, though some of them dish out a cataract of dirt and filth at every institution and individual they feel moved to criticize.’¹³

El Vino of wig, pen and wine fame refused to serve women until 1982

Leaving Mick’s café that summer’s morning, I walked back towards the Strand along the south side of Fleet Street past the wedding cake steeple of St Bride’s, the Lutyens-designed Reuters Building and El Vino’s wine bar. Back then Fleet Street cast such a long shadow that no one could have envisaged it would ever end; no one, that is, except James Cameron. ‘I foresee looking down Fleet Street one day and seeing the main street of an abandoned mining village,’ the great reporter opined from his El Vino barstool. ‘All this concrete and glass is just a lot of hooey.’¹⁴

Our worldly wealth of £200 had been entrusted to the Kingsway branch of the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac) but even in those days £200 wouldn’t last more than a few weeks and it was essential that one of us found work as quickly as possible. The following day I visited the Savoy Taylors’ Guild opposite the Strand Palace Hotel and invested fifty-five guineas in an interview suit, a Chester Barrie charcoal grey two-piece. I might not get a job on the Mirror but at least I’d look the part.

In September 1966 we moved into a bedsitter at Fitzroy Farm, a converted farmhouse next to the Ponds on Hampstead Heath. Sitting in the garden on a sunny Sunday afternoon, England suddenly came to life. A bumblebee droned among the sunflowers, the grass was a brilliant shade of Wimbledon green and noisy blackbirds were nesting in a sturdy Robin Hood oak. It was as though someone had animated an old picture postcard of Constable’s ‘Kitchen Garden’.

As I said earlier, I had two letters of introduction, one to Hugh Cudlipp, the other to Alick McKay, an Australian-born IPC director based in the Daily Mirror Building. This second letter had been written by Mr McKay’s goddaughter, Pam Kinloch, a friend of ours in Australia. It seemed the better bet, so I rang the Mirror number (353 0246) and made an appointment to see him. On Monday 5 September 1966 the Chester Barrie suit took a bus ride down the hill from Highgate to Kentish Town Tube station and half an hour later climbed the steps at Chancery Lane to see the red, white and blue Mirror Building rising skywards at Holborn Circus. Covering the V-shaped plot between Fetter Lane and New Fetter Lane, this modern eyesore looked out of place among its handsome neighbours, the Prudential’s pink Gothic palace and the Tudor façade of Staple Inn.

Hannen Swaffer took one look at the new glass tower and informed Hugh Cudlipp that he was founding The Society for the Abolition of Ugly Modern Buildings. Hideous or not, this was Oz, the repository of my tabloid dreams. I walked through the swing doors and reported to the reception desk.

Daily Mirror Building at Holborn Circus. The statue is of Prince Albert. Alamy

The Daily Mirror was born late on Sunday evening 1 November 1903, a day of sunshine and intermittent showers, when the old Hoe presses rolled at 2 Carmelite Street on the Thames side of Fleet Street. The intention of the new paper’s proprietor, Alfred Harmsworth, was to produce a daily tabloid ‘written by gentlewomen for gentlewomen’. ‘No newspaper was ever started with such a boom,’ he later reflected. ‘I advertised it everywhere. If there was anyone in the United Kingdom not aware that the Daily Mirror was to be started he must have been deaf, dumb, blind, or all three.’¹⁵

Harmsworth borrowed the idea for his latest ‘Schemo Magnifico’ from the feminist newssheet La Fronde published in Paris during the Belle Époque. But whereas La Fronde (meaning ‘Slingshot’ to indicate a female David opposing the male Goliath) gave the feminist view on work, politics, education and trade unionism, the Daily Mirror title was chosen because the paper was to be a reflection of feminine interests as Harmsworth perceived them: fashion, beauty, society functions and ‘cookery above stairs’.¹⁶

The first editor was Mary Howarth, editor of the Daily Mail’s women’s page, who was paid £50 a month (£5200 today) to preside over a staff of female journalists from the better class of weekly magazine. On launch night several of her staff fainted from stress and although Northcliffe sent in champagne to revive them the paper was running dangerously late. Kennedy Jones, Harmsworth’s tough, hard-driving editorial director, summoned a team of male subeditors from the Daily Mail to hustle the paper to press. Harmsworth recorded in his diary: ‘Came down to the Mirror office and found Kennedy Jones in full swing, and after the usual pangs of childbirth produced the first copy at 9.50 p.m. It looks a promising child, but time will tell if we are on a winner or not.’¹⁷

They were not; for once, Harmsworth had made a serious miscalculation. The circulation plummeted from 265,217 on 2 November, the first day of sale, to 24,000 a month later. Kennedy Jones, meanwhile, was struggling with the editorial content. ‘You can’t imagine the things I had to bluepencil,’ he said. ‘Two people acting at Drury Lane got married and went on acting as usual – they didn’t go away for a honeymoon. The paragraph about this ended, The usual performance took place in the evening.’ Elsewhere in the paper, a column called ‘Our French Letter’ quickly became ‘Yesterday in Paris’. Kennedy Jones lamented that he expunged or corrected so many of these solecisms that ‘I gained the reputation of being a coarse-minded man’.¹⁸

Harmsworth was losing £3000 a week on his latest ‘Schemo Magnifico’ and his mother Geraldine and brother Harold were advising closure. Instead, he hired the editor of the Morning Advertiser, Hamilton Fyfe, to take over as editor on 23 November. His first duty was to sack the female staff. ‘They begged to be allowed to stay,’ he said. ‘They left little presents on my desk. They waylaid me tearfully in the corridors. It was a horrid experience - like drowning kittens.’

ROYAL FIRST: Queen Alexandra chose the Daily Mirror to show Edward VII on his deathbed to the world in 1910

The saviour of the Daily Mirror was a Hungarian photo-engraver, Arkas Sapt, who worked for another Harmsworth publication, Home, Sweet Home. Sapt was sent to Fyfe with a note from Alfred Harmsworth saying that he was ‘probably mad, but that I might listen to what he wanted to tell me. I listened’. Sapt claimed he could print photographs from half-tone blocks on high-speed rotary presses. No newspaper up to that time had been regularly illustrated in this way. The usual method of reproduction was for photographs to be copied in pencil or pen and ink, and then printed from an etched line block. ‘I formed the opinion that this man was certainly not mad, though perhaps eccentric,’ Hamilton Fyfe said, ‘and that what he had discovered might, if it satisfied our tests, make the fortune of the Daily Mirror.’

The Mirror’s two Hoe rotary presses were designed to print only type and Sapt’s early efforts at half-tone reproduction were badly smudged, so much so that when Harmsworth relaunched the paper as the Daily Illustrated Mirror on 25 January 1904 the front-page illustration of Miss Marie Studholme, a young actress, still relied on the old pen and ink method to display her charms.

Hannen Swaffer was twenty-five when he became the paper’s first art editor. ‘Swaff’ was known to Harmsworth as ‘the Poet’ because of his black hat, flowing locks, floppy bow-tie and lean, foppish appearance; half a century later Rupert Murdoch would dub him ‘the Mad Republican’ because of his Socialist views. Swaffer and his young assistant Harry Guy Bartholomew worked day and night to provide clearer photographs and improve processing techniques.

‘Bart’ was nineteen when he joined the Mirror on a salary of 30 shillings a week from the engraving department of yet another Harmsworth enterprise, the Illustrated Daily Mail. With his round, cherubic face and shock of thick fair hair, he was likened to the young Alfred Harmsworth and when rumours swept the building that he was one of ‘The Chief’s’ several illegitimate children he did nothing to dispel them. Like every one of Harmsworth’s employees, he worked incredibly long hours, leaving the office every day to take photographs and then developing the prints and etching the half-tone blocks until late in the evening.¹⁹

By late February 1904 Harmsworth had succeeded in printing actual photographs with the presses cranked up to the optimum speed of 24,000 copies an hour, more than double the output of the rival Daily Graphic. Within two years he had scrapped the old Hoe presses and bought modern machines from the Goss Printing Press Company of Chicago.

In the Daily Mirror’s modern history there were three indelible names: Harry Guy Bartholomew, who took the circulation from 720,000 when he was appointed editorial director in 1934 to 4.5 million when he departed in 1951; Cecil Harmsworth King, who created the unwieldy IPC empire out of the newspapers’ earnings; and Hugh Kinsman Cudlipp, the editorial genius who took tabloid journalism to new heights.²⁰

‘And how did they get on, this happy few, this band of brothers?’ Terence Lancaster, the Mirror’s political editor, wrote in reviewing Cudlipp’s autobiography, Walking on the Water. ‘Well, Bartholomew sacked Cudlipp, then King sacked Bartholomew and rehired Cudlipp, and eventually Cudlipp chaired the board meeting which sacked King.’ Betrayal of one kind or another was so commonplace at the Mirror that Cassandra had named the office pub ‘The Stab in The Back’.²¹

The commissionaire made a phone call to announce my arrival and I was escorted to one of the lifts marked THIS CAR UP and delivered to the eighth floor just before 3 o’clock. Alick (or, from 1976, Sir Alex) Benson McKay was a big, bulky, dark-haired man sitting behind an enormous desk, with dozens of magazines stacked side by side in racks covering the entire rear wall of his office. Woman, Woman’s Own, Woman’s Weekly, Nova, Country Life, Horse & Hound, Ideal Homes, Homes & Gardens – there were at least seventy-five titles, the results of Cecil King’s spending spree in the Fifties and early Sixties when he had taken over three of the biggest magazine publishers, Odhams, George Newnes and Northcliffe’s old company, Amalgamated Press (renamed Fleetway in 1959).

Alick McKay was born in Adelaide on 5 August 1909 and had married Muriel Freda Searchy on 15 June 1935. A couple of years hence he would retire from IPC following a heart attack but make a good recovery and join his friend Rupert Murdoch as deputy chairman of News International (now News UK). Through no fault of his own he would make headlines in November 1969 when Muriel, mother of his three children, was kidnapped and murdered by two West Indian brothers in a bungled ransom plot. They had mistaken Muriel for Rupert’s then wife, Anna Torv.²²

I had prepared for my interview with Mr McKay as well as I could but there were serious gaps in my knowledge. I wouldn’t have known where to find The Kop (Liverpool), Piccadilly Railway Station (Manchester) or the Elephant and Castle (South London). At any rate, none of this was necessary. He read my letter of introduction from his goddaughter, tossed it on to his desk and looked at me warily.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘I want a job on the Daily Mirror.’

‘‘I don’t hire people for the Daily Mirror,’ he said. Gesturing towards the riot of colourful front pages behind his back, he added, ‘I run these magazines.’

‘But you must know somebody who does hire people for the Mirror,’ I heard myself saying. He looked at me even more warily, thought for a moment, and then reached for the receiver on his intercom. Five minutes later I was in Room 305 on the third floor in front of the Daily Mirror’s deputy editor, Bryan Parker, an elderly gentleman in a spotless grey suit. He glared at me over his spectacles as though I had interrupted something important, which was almost certainly the case. ‘I understand from Mr McKay that you want to look around the building,’ he said.

This was not in the script I’d written and nor was it what Alick McKay had said to him over the intercom. ‘No, I want a job as a news subeditor,’ I said. ‘I’ve brought my cuttings with me.’

A look of utter astonishment passed over Bryan Parker’s ruddy face but he recovered quickly. ‘I don’t hire subeditors,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ll have to apply to the night editor, Geoff Pinnington, and I don’t know whether he’s got any vacancies.’

Having got this far, and sensing that Parker was a little uncertain about my connection with Alick McKay, I ventured to ask whether I might meet Mr Pinnington now. Parker’s face flushed a deeper shade of crimson – Now? - but he was a careful man and after considering the pros and cons picked up the receiver of his intercom and summoned Geoff Pinnington. Stocky of build and bull-necked, the great night editor strode into the room, sat down on one of Parker’s padded benches, a half-smoked cigarette depositing ash on his creased grey flannel suit. He eyed me curiously and said, ‘You’d better come into my office.’

Geoff Pinnington looked at my newspaper cuttings, read my references and chatted to me about my career but, to my relief, asked no questions about The Kop or the Elephant and Castle. The ice melted and he offered me a three-month trial on the news subeditors’ desk at £38 per week, more than double the average wage at the time. ‘There were a lot of Australians in my squadron during the war,’ he said, breaking into a grin for the first time.

Geoff Pinnington walked me to the far end of the vast open-planned, neon-lit Mirror newsroom. A bank of clocks showed the time in London, New York, Tokyo, Sydney. The entire floor was seething with men and women busily occupied in the multiple tasks associated with daily newspaper production. ‘See that desk in the middle?’ he said. ‘That’s the night desk.²³ The man in the middle is my deputy, Larry Lamb. The young chap on his left is Mike Taylor, assistant night editor, very bright. In front of him is the chief subeditor, Fergus Linnane. You’ll be working for him. You can start next week.’

It was just after 3.30 when I passed the clock in the foyer and walked out into Holborn Circus. The whole thing had taken just half an hour. I was walking down New Fetter Lane towards Fleet Street when the excitement of what had happened suddenly hit me. I was a Mirrorman, if only on a temporary basis, but a Mirrorman just the same. Had a passing clairvoyant predicted that I would do the jobs of Geoff Pinnington and Bryan Parker and edit the Daily Mirror over a thousand times on my way to the editorship of the Sunday Mirror, I wouldn’t have believed it possible.

Time passes, things change. Twenty years later I’m walking down New Fetter Lane again in search of a taxi. It’s a bright Monday afternoon just three days after my forty-fourth birthday. Nothing travels faster in Fleet Street than news of an editor’s sacking. Outside the Stab Anne Robinson stops me.

‘I hope you find what you want,’ she says.

I had arrived at the Mirror in 1966 to join Cudipp’s Circus and ended up working for a man who stands head and shoulders above all the other Fleet Street charlatans, liars and swindlers. Like Horatio Bottomley, Robert Maxwell was a scoundrel posing as a patriot. He was also the quintessential gambler, staking everything on the next throw of the dice. On the way to his final resting place on the Mount of Olives he stole £800 million of other people’s money and left debts of £2 billion. Banks that had taken security for loans in the form of shares forfeited more than £655 million.

Dr Robert Hare, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, describes a typical corporate psychopath as a ‘social predator who charms, manipulates and ruthlessly ploughs his way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations and empty wallets. He selfishly takes what he wants and does as he pleases without the slightest sense of guilt or regret’. That was Maxwell. Some of his crimes may remain undetected to this day but by his own admission he even got away with murder.

Had I known on that forlorn Monday morning about the forthcoming scandals - and the odium it would cast on Maxwell’s editors - I would have thanked my lucky stars that I was getting out. At this point someone might interject, ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ to which I would reply that the main point of a memoir is to propagate a particular point of view, just as many of my contemporaries - Keith Waterhouse, John Pilger, Richard Stott, Bob Edwards, Joe Haines, Mike Molloy, Noel Whitcomb, to name seven - have already done.

This, then, is my side of the story.

And now, like Maxwell himself, the old Fleet Street is dead and buried and nothing will bring it back. But, as Cassandra said, I wouldn’t have missed it for all the treasure of Araby.

2.

MY parents, Margaret Browne and Arthur Alexander Thompson, both Queenslanders, were married at the City Congregational Church, Brisbane, on 14 June 1938. Theirs was a love story; I doubt they ever looked at another. Like most of that generation they inherited the guilt and loss of the Great War and were then plunged into the Depression. Margaret and Arthur were lucky; they found jobs and then they found each other. In little black and white Kodak photos they look as though they have just stepped off the set of Brief Encounter, Arthur in his felt hat and crumpled suit, Margaret in twin-set and skirt.

We were a big, close family, Celtic as well as English, with a healthy Australian scepticism about Churchill and his generals but nonetheless Empire-minded. Margaret was one of the eleven daughters of Arthur Browne, a clerk at Cribb & Foote’s department store, and his wife Mary (née Wright) of Ipswich, a town on the coalfields of South-east Queensland. Mary’s father John Wright, my great-grandfather, was an Irishman who had so many daughters that he found it easier to address them all as ‘darter’. The Wrights hailed from the hamlet of Coolbawn, two miles outside Castlecomer, County Kilkenny, and were from a long line of miners who had toiled in collieries in various parts of Ireland since arriving from Kirklington, Yorkshire, in the Seventeenth Century.

By the time of the potato famine in the 1840s, the mines had been worked out and John’s father had turned to farming, so he worked in the fields as a labourer and grew into a sturdy, black-bearded young man imbued with a strong work ethic and, as a Congregationalist, a healthy fear of the demon drink. As a boy, he signed the Pledge and never touched a drop of alcohol until his life took a tragic turn many years later on the other side of the world.²⁴ At twenty-four he married Elizabeth Ann Wright, a nineteen-year-old colleen from Kildare, at St Mary’s Church, Castlecomer, on 27 September 1862. Despite the same surname the families maintained they were not related and as there had been many Wright families in Ireland since Cromwell’s time they may well have been telling the truth.

Four years later, with little money coming in and two sons and a daughter to feed, the Wrights looked for a way to escape. Deliverance arrived in the shape of Henry Jordan, the first immigration agent for the colony of Queensland. Jordan filled John’s head with visions of a prosperous tropical paradise where work was easy to find and no one starved. Elizabeth needed little persuading that a better life awaited them in the colony’s capital, Brisbane. The family moved to Liverpool in 1866 and booked passage to Australia but while waiting for a ship their one-year-old daughter Sarah died of fever contracted from the open sewers.

The Wrights arrived in Moreton Bay in the barque Naval Reserve in February 1867 and found lodgings in one of the Irish hotels on the south bank of the Brisbane River. Despite the agent’s promises, work was hard to come by and with another child on the way the family had a miserable time. When John heard that two men named Hooper and Robinson had opened a coalmine at Tivoli on the Bremer, a tributary of the Brisbane River, he invested in a ticket on the mail steamer up to Ipswich, the nearest settlement to the pit, and was hired as a miner, working five days a week at the coalface.

With no rail link between Ipswich and Brisbane, John walked the twenty-five miles home through the bush, leaving Tivoli on Friday night and arriving in Brisbane on Saturday afternoon. He delighted his children with tales about the Aborigines and the kangaroos and emus he encountered on the way. After Sunday lunch he set off again to walk back to Tivoli in time for work on Monday morning.

The family’s fortunes changed for the better when John was granted the lease of 300 acres on the north side of the Bremer at Tivoli and struck a seam of coal thirteen feet thick. He named his mine the Eclipse Colliery. The family moved into a house in Pine Street, North Ipswich, where my grandmother, Mary Wright, was born on 2 May 1872, one of John and Elizabeth’s sixteen children, six boys and ten girls, eleven of whom grew to adulthood.²⁵

John opened up new coalmines on the Tivoli lease and became a wealthy man. To accommodate his large brood, he built a huge timber house named ‘Oaklands’ near the first mine. Three of his sons worked in the colliery and the first tragedy to befall the family occurred when a runaway coal wagon hit Richard, the third son, killing him instantly. Then, in February 1893, the Bremer broke its banks and flooded the old Eclipse mineshaft. The eldest boys, Thomas and George, were among seven miners drowned. John Wright was never the same again. He broke the Pledge and sought solace in drink.

By the mid-1930s one wing of the ‘Oaklands’ mansion had been cut into four sections and transported to Brisbane where it was reassembled to make a new home. Margaret was living with her mother in this house, Saint Eloi, in Martindale Street, Corinda, a southern suburb, when she met my father, Arthur, at a local dance. He was one of the eleven children of John Thompson and his wife Frances (née Pritchard), both Australian-born but of Scots and English descent. John Thompson, son of a Lancashire blacksmith, had travelled all over Queensland from Ayr and Charters Towers in the north to Toowoomba, Roma and St George in the southwest in the service of the Post Office, packing his large family into a couple of Cobb & Co coaches to move from one posting to another. Aged twelve, Arthur slept in the clock-tower of Toowoomba post office and learned to sleep through the clock striking the hour through the night. In later life he could never rely on an alarm clock to wake him up.²⁶

Arthur excelled at mathematics and drawing at Toowoomba Grammar School and was also a good athlete. Like many of his generation, he left school at fourteen with his education incomplete. He moved to Brisbane to work for the Postmaster-General’s Department, studying at technical college at night and living in digs at Norman Park, then a tough riverside area. He was obliged to put his athletic skills to good use to avoid the razor gangs who terrorized the neighbourhood, once jumping on to the back deck of the ferry after it had pulled away from the Kangaroo Point jetty. This agility stood him in good stead when he got a job with the Lighthouse Service off the Queensland coast and had to jump on to the slippery decks of lightships in pitching seas to service the big lamps warning of the approaches to the Great Barrier Reef.

Arthur joined the Bureau of Meteorology in 1938 and became a weather forecaster at Darwin airport. In World War II he followed his younger brother, Pilot Officer Henry St George Thompson, into the RAAF and served with Submarine Patrol No. 36 Squadron based at Lowood, west of Brisbane, and was then posted to Broome, Western Australia. There was great sadness in the family when news reached Brisbane that Henry had been killed when his bomber crashed into a mountain on the Isle of Man while on a mission to Germany. With talk of a Japanese invasion of Australia on everybody’s lips, Margaret, my three-year-old sister Jocelyn and widowed grandmother Mary Browne were evacuated from Brisbane to Melbourne. I was born at Frankston Base Hospital on the outskirts of the city at 3 a.m. on 18 April, the day of the Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo. My Christian name came from no one in particular but my middle name, Alexander, was the surname of my Scottish great, great grandfather, Robert Alexander, a tenter (or fabric worker) from Paisley, the great textile centre of Glasgow. As soon as the threat of invasion eased following the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, we returned to Brisbane, making the 1200-mile journey on trains with no sleeping accommodation, quite an ordeal for a young mother with a baby, a toddler and an elderly parent in tow.

Margaret Browne at the time she met my father, Arthur Thompson

Brisbane in 1942 was a predominantly Anglo-Irish city that had buried its lowly convict origins beneath the foundations of a sturdy Empire loyalism. Its subtropical character was firmly stamped in its sprawling suburbs of weatherboard houses with iron roofs and wide verandas, shaded by camphor laurel, hoop pine and every variety of palm, fig and eucalyptus.

For much of the war, and for some years afterwards, I lived with Grandma Browne, Margaret, Jocelyn and my younger sister Helen on the south side of Brisbane in Gaba Tepe Street, Moorooka. Like so many Australian place-names, our address reflected one of the facets of the country’s incongruent character. ‘Moorooka’ was an indigenous Jagera word meaning ‘iron bark’ while Cape Gaba Tepe was the Anzacs’ first landing site at Gallipoli on the night of 25 April 1915. The rent of ‘Resparva’, as our home was called, was seventeen shillings and sixpence a week.

At the top of the street old ‘toast-rack’ trams, with the conductor in his Foreign Legionnaire’s képi swinging along the footboard to collect the fares, rattled down Beaudesert Road to Woolloongabba and then over Victoria Bridge into ‘Town’, the commercial heart of the city built on a thumb-shaped peninsula in the Brisbane River. The tram’s northern terminus was at Clayfield, one of Brisbane’s smartest suburbs where the well-to-do owned American cars and were rumoured to have swimming pools in the backyard.

Moorooka on the other hand was true-blue working class. There was an ambulance station, grocer’s shop, butcher, baker and hairdresser. The only ‘foreigner’ was an ancient Chinese market gardener who sold salad vegetables from a barrow on Ipswich Road. He looked old enough to have entered Australia prior to the White Australia Policy becoming law after Federation in 1901.

Sweltering under iron roofs during the heat of the day, the houses were perched on high, round stumps to catch the breeze. It was easy to catch the spirit of Moorooka. The windows were open to the elements, so people could hear each other’s conversations, analyse the smells from their Kooka gas stoves, listen to their radio programmes – Much Binding in the Marsh, Dick Barton, The Search for the Golden Boomerang, Biggles (‘Baked potatoes, Bertie!’) and Dad and Dave (the Australian equivalent of The Archers) - and generally know one another’s business. The only secrets were in the heart. Sex, if it existed at all, was muffled beneath flannelette nighties late at night while the children slept.

We were initiated from birth into the Vicks Vaporub-Milk of Magnesia school of medicine for the treatment of chest colds and upset stomach, and fed on Kellogg’s Corn Flakes with milk, Arnott’s Milk Arrowroot biscuits (Iced VoVos for treats), Vegemite, a daily spoonful of Saunders’ Malt Extract and the seemingly innumerable dishes that could be made from scrag-end of mutton and a few bones. In the early evening while it was still light rosellas swooped down on the fruit trees, the biggest of which were the massive Moreton Bay fig trees, leafy cathedrals with flying buttresses like Notre Dame. Up in the top branches strange bats in clerical black hung upside down with their wings clasped like badly furled umbrellas.

Late at night Moorooka boys listened to the secret signals of the steam locomotives bedding down in the shunting yards at Yeerongpilly. The hiss and spit of escaping steam sounded like a copper kettle boiling dry on the hob and then the pot-bellied boilers would emit great booming rumbles as though someone had struck a giant bell with a muffled hammer. The sounds of the engines of the night travelled via shadowy crossroads in the clouds and reached their bedrooms down shafts of moonlight. In the hush before sunrise, a piercing whistle announced the passing of a real thoroughbred, the Kyogle Express, hurtling past on the wide-gauge track from New South Wales, beating out a louder rhythm as it rattled over rail bridges on its way to South Brisbane station.

And then, seemingly without warning, the troop trains started rumbling through the night. The Americans were here and Brisbane was suddenly full of Clark Gable’s cousins, thousands of virile young crewcut soldiers chewing gum, jitterbugging and dropping ‘Howdy!’ and ‘Yes, ma’am!’ in every other sentence. The most Hollywood figure of all was General MacArthur, the glamorous khaki Achilles who had escaped from the Philippines and had chosen Brisbane to lead the fightback against the Japanese. All too soon Brisbanites were complaining that the GIs were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. The resentment between ‘the Yanks’ and ‘the Diggers’ resulted in a bloody riot on Thanksgiving Day 1942 which became the subject of my first book with Robert Macklin, The Battle of Brisbane. I became aware of the American presence when a group of GIs based in nearby Yeronga Park ate all the icecream in the local milk bar and there was none left for my tuppenny cone. Margaret says I howled the place down.

I was three and a half when Arthur came home from the Air Force. I had no memory of him and had never felt such excitement. Two of his brothers, Bill and Norman, took me to the tramstop in Beaudesert Road to meet him. A well-built figure of medium height stepped down from the tram, still in uniform, with a smile on his face and a warrant officer’s cap on his head. I tried to carry his kitbag but ended up on his shoulders whooping with joy as we approached Gaba Tepe Street where a spread of home-made lamingtons, tea-cake and perhaps a Pavlova awaited the returning hero. By then the canvas city in Yeronga Park had been dismantled and the GIs had melted away to Tallahassee or Chicago, taking some of the local girls with them as war brides. Happily, the icecream supply was restored to normal.

As food became more plentiful, we sent parcels containing tinned meat, tinned fruit, sugar and cooking fat to Mr John Pennefather-Evans, who lived with his wife at Lion House, Budleigh Salterton, Devon. A short, fair-haired man, he had been serving as Commissioner of Police in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded the colony in 1941 and, along with thousands of others, was incarcerated in Stanley Internment Camp on a starvation diet for the next four years. ‘Australians are amazingly generous and we in England are tremendously appreciative,’ he wrote in December 1948 to thank Margaret for ‘a wonderful parcel of food’. ‘Everything that matters is rationed – we are now down to sixpence of meat a week so we buy meat once a fortnight.’

Our most prized ornaments might be nothing grander than a pair of brass Chinese lancers on horseback and our car might be a 1920s Oldsmobile (navy blue bodywork, leaky black canvas roof) but whereas other families had possessions we had aunts and uncles, thirty-two by my count and all but four living within a few miles of Gaba Tepe Street. The aunts were hard-working, love-dispensing, life-enhancing women who sipped tea out of bone-china cups on Sundays while their husbands could be found in a cool spot in the backyard drinking Bulimba Beer and smoking roll-your-owns.

Not one of these marriages ended in divorce; divorce wasn’t ‘the done thing’, but then, according to Grandma Browne, nor was drinking beer on Sundays. My young ears heard a lot about ‘the done thing’. There was a minor kerfuffle when one of the uncles admitted visiting the Theatre Royal to see a vaudeville show starring a bevy of scantily-clad showgirls known as the ‘Nudie Cuties’. ‘Nudie Cuties’ weren’t ‘the done thing’ either.

Our aunts and uncles provided a seemingly endless supply of cousins, whose ages ranged from three or four to the early thirties. Cousin David Suter, the wildest of the bunch, was three years ahead of me at Yeronga State School. He taught me about the explosive properties of fireworks, how to make a billycart and how to fight back against the local bullies. When he saw me being knocked off my scooter, he pulled up a huge tussock of mud and grass from a spare allotment and clobbered the bully over the head. He never touched me again.

Our only difficult relative was Arthur Lloyd-Nicholls, a crabby Englishman known as ‘Uncle Nick’, who was married to Margaret’s sister Ida. We speculated that he was a remittance man, the black sheep of a hyphenated English family exiled to the colonies for some crime or other. ‘Nick and Ida’ were the only couple without issue and Uncle Nick made it plain he was allergic to children. Waving a foul-smelling cigar, he held the floor during visits to our house about his latest run-in with the neighbours, the powers-that-be – the anonymous ‘they’ who controlled the world - or perhaps a complete stranger who had upset him.

His passion was litigation. A red-faced man in a white linen suit, he drove around Queensland selling costume jewellery to country stores, scattering writs along the way. I grew up hearing about his latest claim for damages. Uncle Nick sued so many people and lost so many actions that the Supreme Court declared him a vexatious litigant.

Grandma Browne was a regal lady in high lace collars with a cameo brooch at her breast, long swishing skirts around her ankles and long white hair tied up in a tight bun. She was a true Victorian who kept a scrapbook recording royal marriages, births and deaths, and historic events such as the Relief of Mafeking. Lace doilies with beads around the fringe, a set of mah-jong tiles and a box of neatly bundled stamps from all parts of the Empire spoke of a once-genteel life in full retreat.

I was astonished when one of our older relatives called her ‘Mary’ because I could never equate this ancient woman silently working the treadle on her Singer sewing machine with the mere slip of a girl posing in an immense flowery hat in the family photo album. Mary Browne was aged eighteen then and she about to embark on a long and painful matrimony. No one knows exactly how many pregnancies she endured; all eleven of her surviving babies were daughters while all her sons were either miscarried or stillborn.

It was an unhappy marriage. Margaret said she never heard her parents exchange a civil word with one another: by the time she was old enough to notice, they communicated through their children: ‘Will you ask your father to pass the salt.’ As John Wright’s coalmines were passed down the male line, Grandma Browne never saw any of the family wealth, apart from a small dowry. It never occurred to me that living with the five of us on a widow’s pension in our small rented house might have been difficult for her. All I knew at the time was that she had high standards that small boys found difficult to maintain. My scruffy appearance – hair unbrushed, shoeless except on Sundays - was a constant source of reproach. She said I looked like ‘the Wreck of the Hesperus’, apparently a shipwreck in which everybody drowned.

Grandma was a good storyteller and I listened wide-eyed to her tales about the old days at Tivoli, the most moving of which was about the death of her sister Isabella, known as Bella, who worked in the colliery office and was a great favourite with the Welsh miners. Bella died of rheumatic fever aged twenty-seven and the grief-stricken men filled in every pothole in the rough stony road leading from ‘Oaklands’ to the cemetery so that her last journey would be peaceful. And then, just to make sure, they walked beside the funeral carriage all the way. To add to the poignancy, Bella was buried in her wedding dress on the first anniversary of her wedding day, leaving behind her husband and their month-old baby daughter.

One of the unwritten laws of Moorooka was that men worked and wives stayed at home. Nevertheless, Arthur and Margaret were determined to buy a home of their own and the only way they could afford the deposit was to find some extra income. The chance came just before my ninth birthday when Grandma Browne died quietly in our back bedroom in her eightieth year. Margaret led me into the room to say goodbye before the undertaker took her away. Grandma had been laid out on her bed in a long white nightie with her long white hair undone and a penny keeping each eyelid shut. She looked peaceful and when I leant over to kiss her goodbye her cheek was soft and smooth and smelled of lavender water.

Grandma’s death meant that Margaret was free to join the jobs market. She went to work as a secretary at the mining and construction firm of Thiess Brothers down near the Yeerongpilly railway yards. Considering the sexist conventions of the era, it was a brave thing to do. The Gaba Tepe Street grapevine was scandalized. Margaret was the only working wife in our neighbourhood and Arthur was unfairly stigmatized in local gossip as a man who could not support his family. One of our neighbours burst out laughing when she saw him bringing home the groceries – she had never seen a man carrying a shopping bag before; shopping was women’s work.

The first material benefits from the additional income coming into our house were a refrigerator, a Remington typewriter and a second-hand Ford Custom motorcar in that order. The Frigidaire (surely the perfect name for a refrigerator) made the hanging safe redundant and the iceman was no longer required to call at ‘Resparva’. The typewriter was a smart, upright machine that gave me the means of typing out little stories and plays. Having seen A Tale of Two Cities at the Boomerang theatre, most of my plays centred on the French Revolution and ended with one or other of the three-member cast being beheaded.

In the school holidays Arthur and I travelled up to Dalby on the Darling Downs to pick up the Ford Custom from Uncle Norman’s showroom. It was a gleaming, almost-new, eight-cylinder beast, heather-beige in colour, not quite a pink Caddy but it started with a deep-throated growl and roared all the way back to Moorooka. A car like that can do wonders for a boy’s self-esteem. The old, old Oldsmobile was consigned to the junkyard.

The Remington typewriter also produced the text for my own newspaper, a four-page full-colour production called the Boy’s Bugle. I typed out the stories and laid out the pages and Cousin David, a precociously talented artist, provided the coloured illustrations with crayon pencils, plus a comic strip of scenes from the Korean War which we had seen in newsreels at the Boomerang. The Bugle had no discernible editorial policy but was broadly in favour of increased pocket money, longer school holidays and liquorice. In the absence of a duplicator we could produce just one copy of each edition, so after six issues the management admitted defeat and closed it down.

Up to that point my interest in girls had been purely platonic. Girls were good fun but not much good at cricket. It was Cousin David who acquainted me and Cousin Geoffrey Hodsdon with ‘the facts of life’ as we walked along the beach at Currumbin, the Gold Coast resort to which our families repaired for their annual holidays. It was just as well he did, because no one else in my family thought to mention sex: my parents treated the subject with Victorian delicacy.

As described by Cousin David, lovemaking between a man and a woman sounded so preposterous that I could not imagine Arthur and Margaret indulging in anything quite so undignified. I kept a lookout. The only manifestation of sexual activity at ‘Resparva’ was the song that Arthur crooned during his morning shower. It was called ‘I Get Ideas’ and it began:

When we’re dancing and you’re

dangerously near me, I get ideas….

When the song was banned on the radio because of its ‘suggestive’ lyrics, Arthur looked shame-faced and, at least musically, stopped getting ideas. I never heard him sing it again.

My interest in sex was temporarily interrupted by another important discovery: Test cricket. From memory, I first heard John Arlott and Brian Johnston on our crackling short-wave radio during the 1953 Test series in England. All through the winter months I went to school with Arlott’s rustic burr ringing in my ears. Reporting from places I’d never heard of called Lord’s, Old Trafford and Headingley, he could make even a simple statement like ‘Trueman begins his run-up’ sound like the crack of doom. And that is exactly what it turned out to be: we lost the Ashes for the first time since 1934.

I was ready to blame the English commentators for this humiliation until Arthur explained it was the fault of Australia’s cricket selectors. It was an established fact, at least over the back fences of Moorooka, that Queensland was the nearest thing to paradise on earth and that ‘Southerners’ were incurably envious of everything north of the Tweed on the Queensland-New South Wales border, including our sporting prowess. We had lost the Ashes, Arthur said, because the selectors, Southerners to a man, had named only two Queenslanders, Don Tallon and Ron Archer, in the Test team.

This was my introduction to ‘the North-South divide’, a schism in Australian society that would shape my world-view for the next few years. As I understood it, ‘Southerners’ – that is to say, everyone in Australia with the possible exception of the Northern Territory and the top part of Western Australia - gathered somewhere called Canberra with the express purpose of plotting ways and means of doing Queensland down. The main conspirator was the Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, who was, of course, a Southerner.

Queenslanders were furious when it was revealed that during the war the generals were prepared to abandon all of their state north of Brisbane to the Japanese. The existence of ‘the Brisbane Line’ was officially denied but it was real enough to Queenslanders. It came as an unpleasant surprise when Margaret told me that Frankston Base Hospital, my birthplace, was in Victoria and that I was actually a Southerner. I kept this guilty secret to myself.

The first English cricketer I saw in action was Frank ‘Typhoon’ Tyson after I’d climbed on top of the brick