Can you remember the days when reporters were chauffeured around by messengers in company cars?
Hartlepool Mail editor Harry Blackwood looks back to the “good old days” – when a reporter and photographer might spend all day in pursuit of a five-par picture story…

Anybody who has seen – or heard – me clunking around in my old Volvo estate will realise that the life of a newspaper editor is not as grand as it used to be in the good old days.

I’m told that during the 1950s the editor of the Mail was called Mister or Sir and he used to have whisky and sherry decanters in his office.

According to journalism lecturer Robin Crowther, things were even more opulent down the road at the Evening Gazette in Middlesbrough.

Robin, who teaches law to budding journalists at Darlington College of Technology, started his career at the Gazette in the 1950s and told me a great tale this week about his first assignment.

Robin and a photographer had been asked to go to Otterburn army barracks in Northumberland to interview a territorial army captain. It took them all day to get there and back and the net result was a mere five paragraphs and a picture in the newspaper.

These days it would be unheard of to spend such valuable time and resources on such a job.

But there was better to come from Robin. How do you think him and the snapper got there? Believe it or not by chauffeur-driven Hillman Minx.

According to Robin, the Middlesbrough Gazette had a fleet of black Hillman Minx cars and chauffeurs and the editorial staff used to be driven from job to job.

It’s an incredible story and has already got our reporters talking.

I can see our resident ever-so-well-bred-posh-bloke-with-plummy-voice Simon Walton now, reclining in the back of a Hillman Minx. Silk smoking jacket, trilby at a jaunty angle and Benson and Hedges wedged precariously in the end of a mother of pearl cigarette holder.

He reckons it would be quite a change to being bounced about inside a Renault Clio being driven by a maniac claiming to be a photographer.

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