There’s nothing quite like the thrill of your first job on a local paper.
Former Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo and nationals man Patrick Nicholson continues to remember his cub reporter years.

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There was a broken sewer in Deptford High Street during my first week on the Mercury and traffic had to be diverted. I know because I was there; it was the first story Harold Bawden sent me on and it made nine lines.

Proudly I pasted it into a cuttings book which I had inscribed with these words I had picked up from somewhere:

Not like Homer would I write
Not like Goethe if I might
Like myself however small
Like myself or not at all.

If there is someone still living out there who owns the copyright I apologise. Anyway, that was the beginning.

So what were the stories that preoccupied a local paper in those days?

I had good shorthand and typing and soon I was covering everything in the diary. I had one day’s tuition in the magistrates’ court and then I was on my own. I never had a single complaint.

Admittedly court reporting was not as complicated as apparently it is now. There were no ASBOs, Section 39 orders, Youth Court identity or the Data Protection Act.

In my Pitman’s shorthand I dutifully recorded society’s misdeeds in some detail on my beat at Woolwich Magistrates’ Court: WOMAN COMMITTED ALMOST EVERY OFFENCE KNOWN TO RATIONING.

And a fierce copper named PC Brandon gained national notoriety in that courtroom because of his zest for nicking anything on wheels for speeding – and that included trams. I made quite a lot in linage out of him.

I lost count of the number of interviews I did with old folk celebrating their golden and diamond weddings. One pair were both deaf and dumb and we conducted our conversation with the aid of my notebook and their slate. We even had a photograph on the front page of the three of us, with a caption referring to ‘the Mercury reporter’.

By-lines were unheard of. Old folk, with their wealth of memories, always provided good copy. We had a charming little feature called ‘Cornerpiece’, so termed because it sat in the corner of the front page, boxed neatly in italics.

In my day I interviewed, among others, a Zulu war veteran with an assegai wound, a ‘sea-dog’ of 91 (‘a well-loved figure at the Lee Darby and Joan Club’) and ‘the cage-bird king of Downham’.

There was an innocence about our reporting which was certainly not so hard-edged as it is now. Press officers were few and far between and information was often released as a sort of favour and sometimes reluctantly. The establishment was firmly in place in all areas of society.

We were circumspect about the unsavoury details we revealed. The word cancer was never mentioned, a practice all newspapers – national and local – followed as far as I know. ‘A serious illness’ or sometimes ‘an incurable illness’ were the accepted euphemisms.

I once picked up a tip on the weekly rounds of police stations that a man had been found dead in an abandoned house near Blackwall Tunnel, dressed in women’s clothes (I don’t recall the term ‘transvestite’ then). I dashed back to the office with this bit of breathtaking news.

Mr Bawden smiled benevolently: ‘We don’t print things like that,’ he said.

On a paper dominated by diary engagements which had you working four or five evenings a week after a day’s newsgathering it was very satisfying to find your own story.

A long-lost daughter, for instance, whose heartbroken parents put a postcard in a newsagent’s window – long before printed flyers became as commonplace as they are now – which I spotted. My joy was short-lived because I didn’t follow up my initial exclusive and I wasn’t there when the family were reunited but the opposition were; remember there were always at least two local papers competing in the same area.

On another occasion I discovered that a pub which commanded a tactical view of a local railway station was being restored to its former condition after having been cunningly converted into a reinforced machinegun emplacement at the beginning of World War II in case of invasion.

This made the front-page lead which, apart from exceptional circumstances, never exceeded a two-column head.

In the summer of 1952 I felt I should move on. I went north to join a small evening paper, a journey that was to take me to Fleet Street. But I’ll always cherish my time during those early heady days in journalism.

In the great age of the Beaverbrook empire august magazine The Strand (sadly long-since dead along with Lilliput, Picture Post, Everybody’s Weekly and John Bull) carried an article about the regional press: ‘The Daily Express may sound like England’, it said. ‘But the local paper is England.’

A shorter version of this article first appeared in The Lewisham Mercury.

Comments

Paul Kelly (15/02/2008 23:42:28)
What a delight Patrick Nicholson’s memoirs are to read. As a reporter who started on local papers and now works for the national press I, too, remember my first job on a weekly with similar fondness.
But his recollections also go deep, I feel, into the heavy heart of the reporter’s job today.
Nicholson’s reflections on his past show how we in the 21st century are the very much the poor relations of our forefathers.
Perhaps local (and national) newspapers need to re-learn their craft: we’ve all become far too reliant on space-filling rubbish. It’s about time we reclaimed our editorial space from PR companies seeking free ads for their clients. I’m sure our advertising departments would welcome the money.
Every aspiring reporter (and news editor) should read and re-read these memoirs to learn how the reporter’s job should be done properly: out of the office, face-to-face and at the places where news happens.