Confessions of a Norfolk Newshound

KEITH SKIPPER IFC Confessions of a Norfolk Newshound Published by Thorogood 10-12 Rivington Street London EC2A 3DU...

Author: Keith Skipper

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KEITH SKIPPER

IFC

Confessions of a Norfolk Newshound

Published by Thorogood 10-12 Rivington Street London EC2A 3DU Telephone: 020 7749 4748 Fax: 020 7729 6110 Email: [email protected] Web: www.thorogood.ws © Keith Skipper 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser. No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person acting or refraining from action as a result of any material in this publication can be accepted by the author or publisher. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 85418 377 X Cover and book designed and typeset in the UK by Driftdesign. Printed in India by Replika Press.

CONTENTS FOREWORD................................................................................................5 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................8 Cub reporter is foxed by firemen .........................................................11 Greek drama with a bathroom twist ....................................................15 Brandon Broadsides carry icy spurs ..................................................19 Allwood stars on Dereham stage..........................................................23 Battle of birds has fans in a flutter .......................................................29 Broomstick and big pair of bloomers ..................................................35 Cricket maidens make their pitch ........................................................39 Home truths at election time ................................................................45 Police look into Tomb of Tremor..........................................................51 A Cock and Bull story comes true........................................................55 Pulse of history beats proudly..............................................................59 Ethel the cleaner and news gleaner .....................................................65 Wintry welcome to ‘last resort’ ............................................................69 My refuge down the garden path..........................................................73 Uncle Don leads to front page...............................................................77 Brothers share a flair for words............................................................83 ‘Gorleston is all about waiting…’ .........................................................89 Hat-trick glory amid carnage.................................................................95

CONFESSIONS OF A NORFOLK NEWSHOUND

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Quipfire Eric is king of parade.............................................................101 Invading armies on Golden Mile .........................................................105 Captain Boyton’s band of hopefuls ....................................................111 Keir Hardie and the bear facts ............................................................115 Learning trade on weekly treadmill ...................................................121 Royal opening’s pigeon flypast ...........................................................125 ‘I’m a reporter – not a supporter!’ ......................................................129 Bondwagon hits colourful trail ...........................................................133 Set ‘em alight on the night! ..................................................................137 Loyal gentlemen of the press ..............................................................141 Pranksters cheer up City travels ........................................................145 Guinea’s apple a mild response ..........................................................151 Good old days of village fun ................................................................157 Final edition full of thanks ...................................................................161 Late Extra! Read all about it!................................................................167

Index of photographs ...........................................................................171

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FOREWORD By Charlie Catchpole, national newspaper TV critic As a fellow son of Norfolk, and a toiler at the journalistic coal-face for even more years than Keith, I was delighted and honoured to be asked to pen a few words introducing the distinguished author’s latest volume of reminiscences. My abiding memory of Keith was a grim day in 1960-something when we sat at adjoining desks in the Redwell Street headquarters in Norwich of what was then the Norfolk News Company for a torture session that made incarceration in Guantanamo Bay seem like a stroll in the park – a shorthand exam. My shorthand was, always has been and still is, pathetic. However, I somehow struggled to attain about 50 words per minute. Keith didn’t even manage one. Instead, he wrote in longhand at the top of his examination paper: “Sorry, can’t keep up” and spent the rest of the allotted time gazing out of the window. A fat lot of harm it did him, too. During a long career in what I still think of as Fleet Street, I have met many newspapermen and women with exemplary shorthand, who can type 120 words a minute and quote at length from Essential Law for Journalists (one of the most tedious books ever written).


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But they wouldn’t recognise a good story if it bit them on the backside, and they could no more turn a witty phrase or come up with some clever pun than I could climb Beeston Bump in a sack with my feet tied together. Keith was that marvellous rarity in newspapers, a natural. For all I know, he may have sweated blood over his match reports for Dereham Town Football Club (before he was promoted to covering the mighty Canaries) but he made them look easy and they were always a delight to read, packed with sly humour. That’s enough sucking-up to the author. He was also a lazy little git and a menace in drink. When I arrived, sopping wet behind the ears, as a junior reporter at the Dereham and Fakenham Times office, Keith led me into the town’s twilight zone, the Red Lion Pub, where I was to while away many a happy hour in the company of some pretty desperate characters, the like of whom I had never encountered in my sheltered, middle-class upbringing. To Keith the glass was always half-full, never half-empty. Actually, it was usually three-quarters full. Dressings-down from editors were commonplace. I managed to escape the paint-blistering rollicking that Keith and other miscreants received over the notorious Sandringham Gates escapade, but during my time in Norfolk I was on the carpet more often than Dot Cotton’s fag ash. I might have got away with dodging a meeting of Dereham’s Trade Council I was supposed to be covering, so that I could get legless at the annual Battle of the Bands gig….if only a photographer from the Dereham and Fakenham Times hadn’t been in the hall. His picture appeared on page one of that week’s paper. And who was that tall, gangly bloke jumping about at the front of the crowd? Oh, dear. Sorry, boss. Such experiences were to stand me in good stead when I eventually left Eastern Counties Newspapers and plunged into the rough and tumble, back-stabbing, bulls***ting world of national newspapers.

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During my spells on such mighty organs as the Sun, Daily Mail, News of the World, Daily Mirror and Daily Express, I often reflected that Keith could easily have cut it here. But he chose to stay and ply his trade where his roots were in the county that he loved. Also, he didn’t travel well. Can it be true that a colleague on the Eastern Evening News once fixed him up with a job in Australia, but Keith couldn’t be bothered to make the trek to London to arrange a visa? I don’t think he even had a visa for Suffolk. When the legendary Captain Boyton’s Benefit Band, whose exploits are featured in this book, recorded their first and only demo tape, Keith was persuaded to ride the white man’s iron horse to the big city. But the tall buildings and the moving staircases frightened him, and I suspect he was secretly relieved when we unaccountably failed to win a recording contract, and our gravel-voiced lead singer (eat your heart out, Joe Cocker) was not faced with the scary prospect of tax exile in Switzerland or the Bahamas. The rock world’s loss – and Fleet Street’s – was Norfolk’s gain.


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INTRODUCTION By Keith Skipper These reflections on my full-time career with Norfolk newspapers cover the years from 1962, when I left school, until 1979 and largely follow a chronological pattern. Time may have spiced up one or two paragraphs – or even erased a few left mouldering in the office wastepaper basket – but they are for the most part honest pages from a souvenir edition printed with affection and gratitude. Countless colleagues helped me along the trail at Thetford, Dereham, Yarmouth and Norwich. They were liberal with their advice and support despite my incessant chuntering, punning, cadging, smoking, interrupting and technical dyslexia. I am grateful to them and their families for providing precious pictorial evidence to go with all the memories. Special thanks to Alfred Jenner for paving a path to the sports desk – and to Ted Bell for letting me stay there. They typified the ‘old school’ in which loyalty, opportunity and respect remained primary considerations whatever the pressures for embracing latest trends. Charlie Catchpole, one of many contemporaries to fly the Norfolk nest in search of bigger and juicer worms, underlines the fun and friendship overflowing on our 1960s provincial beat. His entertaining and revealing foreword crystallises an era when hard work constantly wore a broad smile in its face. Even if that did mean an occasional rocket from headquarters. Reporters, especially young ones, were expected to plough long furrows, many of them after dark and at weekends, and so it was vital to be under the wing of understanding landlords and landladies. My erratic hours – and occasionally erratic behaviour – were patiently borne mainly by Ma and Pop Healey in Thetford, Phyllis and Fred Myhill in

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Dereham, Dorothy and Les Gould in Gorleston and the legendary ‘Mrs P’, Pauline Preece, in Norwich. She kept me on the domestic straight and narrow for over a decade, never once complaining at my tardiness over coming up with my modest fee for a paying guest. I keep in regular touch with a host of old press colleagues, several of them tempted back into the open when these reflections appeared on a monthly basis in the Norfolk Journal magazine. Many contacts old and new prove the enduring strength of that ancient adage: Old newspapermen never die…they just revert to type. And willingly lose themselves in a lather of large headlines and stirring stories carved out of a golden age held together by typewriter ribbons, paste pot brushes, reverse charge calls from rural red phone boxes and the sort of camaraderie worthy of constant front-page billing.


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Cub reporter is foxed by firemen remarkable coincidence as I case the joint they call the past. Butchers’ vans and amiable uncles take starring roles in two of the most significant expeditions of my young life.

A

Uncle Harry – master butcher Harry John Wyett – coaxed me away from the old Beeston homestead for the first time in 1955 on learning I had passed the 11-plus examination. He felt a holiday in Sedgeford would set me up nicely for the challenges of grammar school days at Swaffham. I blubbered myself to sleep that first night, a telling signpost to constant trouble in coming to terms with being uprooted from a familiar Norfolk environment and routine. Seven years later, Uncle Cyril – known, inevitably, as ‘Oxo’ Graver, a key figure in Wilson’s butchery business at Swaffham – cleaned out his van and transported me and all my worldly goods to Station Road in Thetford. Ma and Pop Healey added a nervous country lad to their cosmopolitan bunch of paying guests. Uncle Cyril worked overtime to cheer me up on a glorious Sunday evening, as I followed a trail carved out by thousands of Londoners. I had nibbled round the edges of Breckland throughout Swaffham schooldays, but this was my introduction to the delights of new estates, new factories and new horizons in one of Britain’s fastest-growing towns. I went to bed that Sunday night desperately wishing I had come when it was all rather homely and unexciting. As first cub reporter for the local newspaper, I didn’t have to live up to any burgeoning reputations of young scribes who had gone before. Those who followed should be grateful I left that tradition intact, despite the patient promptings and tolerant tuition from office colleagues Jim Wilson and John Kitson.


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JIM WILSON, CHIEF REPORTER at the Thetford office when I arrived in 1962. He went on to become Head of News at Anglia Television and was awarded the OBE in 1995 for services to broadcasting. Jim later became chairman of the Norfolk Police Authority.

Perhaps they saw me as a little bonus with a pencil that might grow into a useful dividend before their careers ended. In any case, they chuckled rather than chided on discovering my telephone answering routine bordered on the flimsy – “Hullo, thass me here …… who’s that there?” – and accepted without serious question that a boy from Cowpat Drive, Sugarbeet Acres, Deepest Norfolk, would find it difficult to tempt the teleprinter into giving up its secrets. It was much safer to send me probing the soul of Thetford society, leaving no sermon unturned as I rattled doors, sipped tea, scribbled notes and went away to compile weekly paragraphs about all denominations. There were instant perks to go with the role of chief church news gatherer – personal invitations to social events such as coffee mornings, sales of work, musical evenings, annual bazaars and even welcoming or farewell services for ministers and other leading personalities. Without sounding too morbid or ungrateful, I must admit there were less enticing calls now and again. Like attending funerals for folk you didn’t know after finding excuses for not wanting to see the body ‘lying in state’ in the front room. I did learn, however, that a local press reporter, even one still very damp around the ears, could provide a means of solace in sad and

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tragic situations simply through offering a sympathetic ear and an understanding smile. My first contact with the brave new world blossoming on Thetford’s fringes could have been inspired by a short sermon I delivered in the press office concerning chopping off a chunk of capital sprawl and trying to attach it to a modest country town. I was encouraged to go and see if this exciting social surgery might be working by asking some of the newcomers if they availed themselves of the Thetford and Watton Times. An Alf Garnett-soundalike, wearing red braces but no shirt, answered my initial tap and gentle inquiry with a deafening thunder-and-spit reply, “Clear orff, mate, we ‘ave the bleedin’ East ‘Am Gazette round ‘ere!”. I took that as a possible no and decided missionary work would be more fun in the pub. I thought my first red-hot scoop had arrived in only my second week as a fearless reporter. I was left alone in the office for the first time. My midday reverie was broken by the sound of a fire engine rushing by along King Street. I commandeered a bicycle from a nearby baker’s shop and pedalled furiously to follow the fire-fighters. They urged me on with waves and yells towards an estate on the edge of town. “Where’s the blaze?”, I cried on screeching to a halt behind the parked vehicle and whisking a clean notebook from my pocket. “There isn’t a fire” replied one of the smiling lads. “Billy here was late for dinner, so we were just giving him a lift home.” If Uncle Cyril’s van had drifted round the corner at that moment, I would have given serious thought to wrapping myself up like a pound of sausages and beating a hasty retreat back to my mid-Norfolk village world of innocence. More practical considerations soon took over. The hungry firemen, bravely stifling laughs, showed me the quickest route back to the office. They even promised not to tell a soul how a fresh young news-hound on the block had been barking up the wrong tree.


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JOHN KITSON, WHO SUCCEEDED JIM WILSON as chief reporter in Thetford and ran the office for 30 years. He is seen here presenting a Thetford and Watton Times service award at the Rosemary Musker High School in Thetford. John was awarded the MBE in 2004 for long and devoted service to Link-Up, Breckland’s talking newspaper for the blind.

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Greek drama with a bathroom twist y colourful impact on Thetford’s cultural life belied a brief sojourn of under six months as an eager newsgatherer in a fast-changing town.

M

I moved in purposefully on the worlds of fashion, dance and drama, searching for a bit of a playboy image to take back to my quiet village homestead at weekends. Some ventures were less embarrassing than others, but there can be no reasonable explanation for purchasing a hideous pair of purple winklepickers at Bernie Pett’s gents’ outfitters as the nights started pulling in. Perhaps I hoped they wouldn’t be noticed as I strutted my stuff towards the Bell and Red Lion after tea, but I finished up trying to convince at least half the population of Breckland that an atom-crusher had fallen on my feet. Hence the stomach-turning bruised tints of an autumn gone wrong. Thankfully, the offending articles had been given marching orders by common sense before old-tyme dancing lessons called. Despite two left feet and painful memories of the humiliation tango in the primary school playground, I was bold enough to heed landlord Pop Healey’s constant overtures to join his stepping-out enthusiasts in the room where genteel gyrations took your mind off the mundane things of life. Bold? More like daft as I provided comic relief for three madcap weeks, prancing about like a cross between Norman Wisdom and Toulouse-Lautrec with a succession of startled partners pretending they had won me in the raffle. Most of Pop’s high-stepping harem were at least three times older and twice as tall as me, crisply-coiffeured survivors of an era when there were more willing and able young bucks to go round. My final victim was a statuesque woman with a fixed smile, two strings of pearls and a closely-fitting supporting undergarment that I found difficult to grasp during our more tender moment on the


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ENCOURAGING REVIEW FROM the drama critic of the Thetford and Watton Times. floor. After a one-sided fling – she was doing the foxtrot and I wasn’t – I bought her a pineapple juice, made my excuses and left. Pop reluctantly agreed it might be for the best. So there remained ample scope for improvement in my campaign to find social acceptance. I needed a good reason to get out of shorthand lessons – an art I cultivated shamelessly over the years – as well as a more suitable stage for my creative urges. Enter Thetford Festival Players with an offer I couldn’t refuse ….to dress up in a Greek costume and be saucy and silly opposite someone twice my size. If only my old-tyme mentors had thought of that! My partner in this early version of the Little and Large show was Keith Hodson, elder son of the local Methodist minister. When I bumped into Big Keith about 30 years later he was confronting the most critical audiences in the world as a children’s entertainer. Our 1962 combination on the boards of that homely little playhouse on Croxton Road in Benn W. Levy’s curious comedy The Rape of the Belt sent us in gleeful pursuit of Amazon queens. He blustered and glowered as Heracles while I lisped and winked as Theseus, a contrast in heroic

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styles which impressed the critics. I still blush when I read the review from the Thetford and Watton Times under the headline Successful Step Into The Unknown: ‘A newcomer to the group, Keith Skipper proved the comic hit of the evening with his rolling eyes, cultured tones and lecherous glances at the women …..’ Just the boost my confidence needed after the footwear fiasco and dancing disaster. But, The Case of the Multicoloured Sheets was lurking in the wings to take much of the wind out of my freshly-trimmed sails. Our post-production party was a lively affair as we basked in good notices and mutual compliments. I remained in character, fully anticipating to be fed grapes while lolling nonchalantly in the auditorium as nubile females of all ages came to pay homage. I was offered the occasional drink, mystery concoctions in paper cups, but any whiff of a romantic interlude disappeared with any ability to converse, stand up or recognise who might be addressing me. They carried me home at midnight, I am reliably informed, and organised a touching little put-him-to-bed ceremony at No. 6, Station Road. I woke in a pool of sweat at 2.36am, jumped out of bed and then jumped in as it came round again. My Greek costume was damp and crumpled. My Thetford resting place resembled something out of Tutankhamen’s tomb with an imprint of a sad little form glaring up at me from besmirched sheets. I tore them off, kneaded them into a manageable pile and set off unsteadily across creaking floorboards to the bathroom. The rough plan was to wash away greasepaint remnants from my body and then put the sheets into soak. I had no clear strategy for drying them, restoring order in my boudoir or bringing fresh life to a forlorn Greek outfit. Ma Healey came in just when I could have done with a laurel wreath to hide my modesty. A former district nurse, she was unmoved by the sight of quivering, multicoloured flesh but rather concerned about the state of her bedlinen. “What would your mother say?” she asked in a way that suggested she didn’t really expect a sensible answer before breakfast. My ‘punishment’ was extra household chores for a week while fellow lodgers chewed over my nocturnal laundering with self-righteous grins. I left town for reporting duties elsewhere before the trickle of the greasepaint and the guffaws of the crowd could inspire another Thetford thespian adventure.


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OLD TYME DANCING and drama with a Greek flavour featured prominently on my programme in the name of social acceptance during my brief stay as a reporter in Thetford. Dancing steps were painful, while success on stage with the Festival Players was followed by dramatic adventures in both bedroom and bathroom.

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Brandon Broadsides carry icy spurs y free transfer from quick-change Thetford to the more traditional market town flavours of Dereham at the heart of Norfolk, coincided with the coldest winter since 1740.

M

Weather hugged too many headlines from Boxing Day in 1962 until early March, as the region shuddered under a heavy blanket of white. Drifts whipped up by gale-force winds blocked roads and left armies of snow ploughs fighting hopeless battles. Bus drivers were issued with spades before taking out their vehicles. Frozen rivers, ice floes at sea, sugar beet released by pick-axe and rabbits turning to furze and bark for food added to an arctic scene already taking ominous shape, as I struggled to return in time for reporting duties after the festive break. Charlie Draper’s pick-up truck, my taxi for the day, skidded and bounced its way from Beeston to Dunham, where I was to catch my train to Thetford. I had the platform to myself as bitter blasts charged over surrounding fields, ignoring hedges and any other obstacle in their paths, and more snow approached like crazy confetti at some pagan rural ritual. Eventually, a train nosed through a tunnel of white to offer sanctuary, but it was a painfully slow and chilly journey back to work. It was then that I realised how a ceaseless search for all-Breckland news fit to print had helped prepare me for such wintry trials. Regular trains from Thetford to Brandon allowed immediate scope to develop budding journalistic skills and a thirst for travel at the very start of a long and much-envied career as a non-driver. Indeed, public transport and a cultivated gift for cadging lifts kept me going – and coming back – throughout my reporting years. I hit the track to Brandon on Tuesday mornings, launching an earnest hunt for snippets of information at the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel and then moving along the High Street to take advantage of Doris Carter’s


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already-legendary hospitality. Steaming hot cocoa, biscuits and cakes accompanied her latest batch of fresh paragraphs designed to maintain a reputation for ‘plenty going on’ in a growing community. It was painful to leave this cosy retreat, especially when the outriders of winter galloped through the pines to dig their icy spurs into anyone foolish enough to loiter along the main thoroughfare. One of the coldest spots I have ever encountered, Brandon High Street, forced me into a half-trot on several occasions in order to reach the welcoming fireside at The Flintknappers before the mid-day rush. Evening council meetings had me jumping up and down to keep warm while waiting for the last train back to Thetford. Remembrance Sunday reporting duties of 1962 threatened to number me among the fallen as the notorious Brandon Broadsides added shivers to the solemnity. Perhaps it was all part of a carefully-nurtured plan to harden me up for tougher challenges to come, but it left me less than warmly disposed towards the place – a feeling that endures to this day.

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ICY GRIP – from Boxing Day through to early March, the winter of 1962-63 kept Norfolk shivering, with blocked roads and iced-up fishing boats familiar sights.


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Chief reporter Jim Wilson left newspapers to become head of news at Anglia Television, a post he filled with distinction. He remained a busy type in retirement; with the job of Norfolk Police Authority Chairman one of his top priorities. John Kitson, a fellow paying guest at 6 Station Road during my stay in town, took over as main newsgatherer at the Thetford office before completing his one-company career with a late stint looking after the Swaffham base. Many times he illuminated my comparative darkness when I had need to discover more about post-war Thetford. I bumped into my first mentors many times over the years, constantly aware of how their sartorial sense and brisk demeanour contrasted rather sharply with my scruffy appearance and tentative approach. John offered a few fashion tips from his extensive wardrobe, all razor-sharp creases and elegant matching colours, while Jim concentrated on sprucing up my writing style and time-keeping. While these efforts met with limited success, they did help me over those first tricky hurdles on the local media circuit. I was treated with commendable good humour and endless tolerance – qualities in ample supply among future colleagues at Dereham and Yarmouth. I ought to point out that this was the age of newspaper office paste pots, scissors and spikes, and typewriters made my Mr Olivetti or Mr Remington. I taught myself to type with two fingers, but the clattering teleprinter up the corner remained a technological tiger way beyond my taming powers. So, a few rough edges knocked off, I packed my bags for Dereham as cold winds blew and the snow refused to budge. Just seven miles from my home parish of Beeston, the town wore a familiar look despite the season’s extra layers. I booked in at Phyllis and Fred Myhill’s snug bungalow on Theatre Street, sharing digs initially with a couple of policemen and a bank clerk. “Boy, you look frozen!” bellowed Phyllis in greeting, forcing two inches of ash on her cigarette into a fatal somersault. Her rasping chortle and stentorian tones became firm friends over the next two-and-a-half years. Our first cup of tea together hinted at balmy days ahead while winter kept a grip outside.

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Allwood stars on Dereham stage f being sent to Thetford to cut my reporting teeth was a bit like finding out how a foreign correspondent feels, a posting to Dereham had to be voted a timely return to the home front.

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This was more my kind of town, ready to rebuff a much-vaunted population ‘invasion’ from Birmingham way and to set its own agenda for gradual and well-ordered growth in the middle of an area still close to its rural roots.

BUSTLING Dereham market place. I knew Dereham well. One of my earliest memories featured a sticky bun sliding down beautifully in Brunton’s tea shop where young ladies in black and white uniforms floated among busy tables surrounded by soldier portraits trimmed


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with patriotic flags. It must have been a special occasion, probably a birthday or a reward for not letting all the real chickens out that week, for I also collected a chuck under the chin as I sat on the counter in the big store, Kingston and Hurn, and Mum added a sheep and a cow to my farmyard while I drooled over regiments of pastoral creatures demanding to be released from Fanthorpe’s magical window. Bus trips into town continued over the years but cakes eventually gave way to ale, and lead animals to a rough-and-ready light fantastic. Perhaps it fell a step or two short of Saturday Night Fever, but mid-Norfolk social ambitions soared dramatically as village youngsters poured in to sample pub, cinema and dance floor. My first regular watering hole was the Lord Nelson, close to the town sign depicting the legend of St Withburga and spanning the High Street at its junction with the Market Place. The sign went up in 1954 on the 1,300th anniversary of Withburga’s death. It was carved by my old art and handicraft master, Harry Carter of Swaffham, and presented to the town by the local Rotary Club. Withburga strides on, but the Nelson pub had to make way for a shopping precinct. I wonder if that Victorian jukebox we played on a Saturday night at a penny a time, still goes round in time with the trolleys or jingling tills… So, genuine fondness to go with all the familiarity as I settled down to mix a little work with well-honed pleasures. The town seemed to be teeming with strong newsworthy characters – as well as a few determined to fight shy of any publicity at all after Friday morning appearances at the local magistrates court. One of the first major hurdles I had to surmount was to convince people I happened to know that I couldn’t keep their names and misdemeanours out of the paper ‘for old times’ sake’. It wasn’t my decision. It was up to The Editor, that strange, mystical figure who peered down on errant souls from his lofty perch in faraway Norwich. Yes, they could try writing to him but that might lead to even bigger headlines and wider shame. Best to let justice take its natural course, and, no, I didn’t want a nice brace of pheasants for the weekend. Leslie Allwood dominated this Friday stage as a no-nonsense Clerk to the Magistrates, sorting out pompous solicitors, wandering defendants and misleading witnesses with equal vigour. He would allow the occasional dash of courtroom drama, as long as it was tastefully presented – a legacy, no doubt, of his years of treading the boards after helping to found Dereham Players and Operatic Society. Leslie was Dereham Coroner for 30 years and chairman of trailer

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company Crane’s, one of the town’s major employers along with Jentique (furniture) and Metamec (clocks). He and his wife Pamela, who lived at Scarning Grange, played bridge for Norfolk, and were at the heart of local life during my spell on the Dereham and district news beat. Plenty of other forceful personalities awaited close scrutiny as I began my round of committee and council meetings. It was here I had to learn fast to distinguish between those simply playing to the gallery and the few with something substantial to offer. The trouble was, seasoned performers knew how to hog the spotlight, looking directly at the Press table as they whipped old hobby horses into a frenzy and dared you not to harness all their golden words into telling paragraphs. A new kid on the printing block should be an easy touch.

LESLIE ALLWOOD – dominant figure Leslie Potter had earned his reputation for having something to contribute to every Dereham Urban District Council debate long before I arrived for a close-up of a natural performer at work. As I gradually sifted useful wheat from whimsical chaff he paid tribute to my emerging talents as a succinct summariser. I had no reason to inform him that had something to do with my


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lack of a proper shorthand note. During my second year in town, Leslie would often pop into the office on a Friday morning to thank me for putting in the paper what he had meant to say on Tuesday night. In direct contrast to a pushy member of the Mitford and Launditch Rural District Council who regularly complained that I did not put in the paper what he had said. Frankly, he should have been truly grateful that I spared his blushes of embarrassment.

NOEL BOSTON – many talents

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Away from local government deliberations, it soon became a treat to be in the company of Canon Noel Boston, round, rosy and genial, the much-loved Vicar of Dereham for 20 colourful years. Surely one of the most gifted clergymen to make a Norfolk mark, he included antiquary, musician, preacher, broadcaster, writer, lecturer and organiser on his credentials list. He collected ancient musical instruments, such as the large, curly bassoon-like serpent, and he could play them all. He also collected old firearms – and loved giving demonstrations to prompt a fusillade of punny headlines about firing canons. It has been claimed that he was the only speaker to keep all members of Dereham Rotary Club awake after a good lunch.


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Battle of birds has fans in a flutter passing interest in sport soon blossomed into a passionate affair destined to pin me to touchlines, terraces and boundary ropes for well over 20 years.

A

Some of that passion may have been sparked by blatant desires to get out of regular Saturday afternoon rituals like dog shows, floral and vegetable exhibitions and sales of work in aid of less fortunate brethren in faraway countries. But the general standard of sporting encounters in Dereham and district throughout the early 1960s ensured a perfect grounding for a young scribe peering towards those impregnable twin towers of athletic virtue, football and cricket. Well, a dash or two of naivety helps as you thump your feet on rock-hard turf to see if they still belong to you on a day of unrelenting iciness, or pretend the great summer game knows no disappointments as you watch a clearly outclassed visiting side put up the shutters for a draw with three hours to spare. There were a few other minor pitfalls on the roads to Wembley and Lord’s, as well as the inevitable cry after a critical report that those who can’t kick a ball or hold a bat properly write snide things about those who aspire to certain levels of achievement. While my soccer-playing career had never recovered from being made chief scapegoat for a Swaffham grammar school trouncing by Gaywood Park under13s from King’s Lynn – I found more speed to get away from the scene than at any time during a horribly one-sided encounter – I did resume modest cricketing action on moving to Yarmouth and joining forces with a cheerful bunch at Caister C.C. Indeed, I achieved one of my big ambitions with them in the 1980s, returning to dear old Dereham to play on that sacred town turf in a Norfolk Junior Cup semi-final. We lost, but I had a bowl and lingered at the bar long enough to prove I could still talk a good game.


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ON THE BALL – Dereham Town Football Club line-up in the 1961-62 season. Back row (left to right): George Barnes, Ian Battelley, Bob Parker, Ivan Smith, Joe Ellis, Chris Battelley. Front: Terry Purple, Wilf Pearce, Mike Robinson (captain), John Crisp, Barry Battelley.

To those reporting pitfalls. There was no telephone on Dereham Recreation Ground, so I had to tear back to the press office to send over my 50-odd words of wisdom for the Pink ‘Un football paper at half-time. Invariably, action had resumed by the time I returned. One or two puckish spectators considered it a real hoot to suggest a blank picture had transformed dramatically into a 5-4 thriller in my absence. They would reel off a list of dashing goal scorers before club stalwarts of respectability, such as secretary Johnny Cole or chairman Alfred Mack, restored order with a true account of what had happened since the interval. Then there were risks involved in following the team on their Norfolk and Suffolk League and cup rounds. Some fixtures had a bit of history attached and feelings would spill over on to the pitch and along agitated touchlines. I recall a particularly raucous clash at Reepham when home supporters not only loudly doubted the referee’s parentage but offered to put him and the Dereham players up for the night – on top of a bonfire in a nearby field. They threatened to go for pitchforks when yet another perfectly straightforward decision went against the Robins. (Dereham were the Magpies in this battle of the birds, strange nom-de-plumage in view of their green and white outfits). Such a sense of foreboding surrounded the pitch before the final whistle that I joined several others seeking refuge beneath a hedge near the exit. I referred to the most effusive of these spectators as behaving like ‘Mau Mau terrorists’ in my carefully considered notes in the Pink ‘Un the following week. These were compulsive Saturday night reading, and four likely lads from Reepham had indulged before bumping into me at Dereham’s Sunshine Floor dance hall. They didn’t request a foxtrot or even a twist, but demanded a full explanation for such calumny aimed at pillars of their local community. I pointed out that I happened to be there while they had simply accepted a highly-biased version from some of those involved. I also pointed out an off-duty policeman on the other side of a busy dance floor. In fact, the tall, well-built chap with huge hands was a farm worker from Gressenhall way, but it did the trick and my inquisitors shuffled off into the night.

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SUMMER DAYS – Dereham Town cricketers from 1963. Back row (left to right): Harry Bone (umpire), Charlie Wright, Brian Pett, George Mason, Charlie Thompson, Horace Everett, Peter Fern. Front: Claude Cordle, Peter Parfitt, Walter Brand (captain), Cecil Cook, Barry Battelley, John Parfitt. Covering cricket matches proved less traumatic, although it was difficult to get any useful comments out of Dereham captain Walter Brand as he paced up and down, full of nerves and frowns, whatever the flavour of his side’s batting effort. In sharp contrast, Barry Battelley, oldest of a multi-talented quartet of sporting brothers – Chris, who died tragically young, Ian and Martin were the others – could smile through any crisis just to show how the most serious of competition needs to be garnished with a little humility and humour. So Dereham fed my aspirations towards full-time sports journalism – even if a chilly Saturday afternoon on the line at Reepham hinted at a possible career as war correspondent. Ironically, most of my subsequent visits to Reepham were in a police car. I covered cases regularly at the magistrates court, and prosecuting officer, Inspector John Kenny of Dereham Police, saw fit to give me a lift there and back. He quoted from Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard every time we passed Swanton Morley’s gravestones. I chipped


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in with the odd line from Troilus and Cressida. Our minds were really on higher things than driving without due care and attention or kicking up a racket at a local football match.

STALWART PERFORMER – One of Dereham’s outstanding sporting characters, Charlie Thompson at the crease against Ashill. Brian Taylor, wicket-keeper, and Rodney Hewitt wait for a mistake.

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Broomstick and big pair of bloomers hat was the year that was big for news stories. We were knee-deep in 1963 banner headlines before John Kennedy was gunned down in Texas and Lee Harvey Oswald charged with assassination. He, in turn, was shot dead by striptease club owner Jack Ruby as millions watched on television. Perhaps it had to be that bizarre, that dramatic to out-shout billboards displayed in previous saga-packed months.

T

I recall Dr Beeching ripping up our railway tracks. Henry Cooper floored the outrageously talented Cassius Clay, but couldn’t beat a cut eye. Scandal dumped Harold Macmillan’s government on the canvas, with Christine Keeler and John Profumo forming the most compelling tag-team of the year. Alec Douglas-Home became new Tory leader. Harold Wilson took over Labour’s helm. Martin Luther King exclaimed, “I have a dream”. The Great Train Robbers, with their own Mr Biggs, netted a million. No easy matter, then, to find enough items of genuine local interest to keep aficionados of the Dereham and Fakenham Times in the manner to which they had become accustomed through the diligence and dash of earlier scribes of note, like Bill Hicks and John Timpson. These names of revered reporters ‘who had made it big’ served both to inspire and to intimidate as I pursued paths they had cut through the mid-Norfolk jungle. Well, I saw it more as a draughty sugar beet field with endless rows of journalistic challenges waiting for expert knockin’ and toppin’. Fortunately, I had a couple of outstanding senior colleagues waiting to point me in the right direction and provide proper tools. They coaxed and criticised, flattered and flayed, praised and preached – and still found time to do their own jobs. Chief reporter Charles Sharp, rotund, passionate and supremely


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well-versed in all aspects of newspaper production, went on to build an international reputation with his pioneering press work in Nigeria. Bill Coller, wiry, chirpy and defender of the West Ham football faith, put down deep roots in Norfolk with his family. A former professional boxer, Bill taught me how to put a punch into the tamest article, leading with a sharp adjective and following up with a surprise simile. “Knock on any door and you’ll find a story” was the Coller credo.

INFORMAL STYLE – A typically casual press conference with the United States Air Force at Sculthorpe in the early 1960s. Charles Sharp (seated fourth from left) leads the local contingent while David Thurlow (seated right) takes notes on behalf of the Daily Express. Such contrasting characters – come to think of it, they would have made a good Laurel and Hardy at the office Christmas party – they appreciated each other’s skills and took genuine pleasure in lighting candles for dim young reporters. Even so, it didn’t pay to get too bright, too cheeky, too full of yourself. I remember charging into the office one morning with a side-splitting discovery that had to mark me down as the next David Frost. There was a

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chemist’s shop in Dereham run by D. Flatt. Our chief reporter was C. Sharp. How about that for a musical double to set your chuckle muscles a’quavering! A dismissive snort told me to get on with some worthwhile newsgathering. I slipped the Coller and Tye line into my bottom drawer, and vowed to stay silent for ever about Charles Sharp having W as a middle initial to give him the proud distinction of matching Co-operative Wholesale Society. There were other little diversions along the Dereham trail, not least when Don Urry arrived from Diss as the new chief reporter later in my stint at the heart of the county and I discovered he had dubbed one of his previous homes ‘Chez News’. I loved that sort of imaginative thinking, but it didn’t blind me entirely to the need for constant scanning of local headlands for good yarns to steer minds away from national and international scandal and skulduggery. The Portly Ladies of Sandy Lane certainly boosted my cause. The value of walking and talking your way to work was underlined by PC Colin Moore’s early-morning revelation about three women getting stuck in their baths. Colin, a Dereham Town goalkeeper, was a safe pair of hands when it came to reliable tips, and so I headed immediately in search of the best soapopera of my fearless career so far. A big mawther called Duty (something to do with NAAFI days, I think) admitted she had got wedged, and then discovered two similarly well-made neighbours had encountered the same problems. They agreed it was time to send an SOS to Dereham UDC’s housing department for bigger baths “so we can sit and soak like everyone else”. A broomstick and large pair of bloomers formed an ideal distress signal over HMS Stuckfast when the photographer turned up, and their plight drew a sympathetic response from local government. An unlikely adventure awash with nautical but nice possibilities, and I was all of a lather for weeks. A quick flip through other cuttings from that time suggests I got a bit carried away with the idea of tickling the punny bone in every paragraph. A plan to make rodent operators more efficient by providing auto-cycles was ‘rat-ified’ by Mitford and Launditch Rural District Council. That story, of course, had a tail-piece. A school dinner lady celebrated a notable ‘mealstone’. Chimney sweep Dicky Dodman hung up his brushes after more than 50 years in the trade and headed into retirement via his large garden and glasshouse – ‘exchanging sooty hands for green fingers’.


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FOND FAREWELL – Bill Coller (centre) hands goodbye gifts to chief reporter Charles Sharp as he leaves the Dereham office to take up a post in Nigeria. Photographer Brian Smith, using the time-exposure technique, joins the throng to give a thumb-up sign, while Fakenham reporter Freddie Fletcher, seated on the left, ponders his stocks and shares. One of my favourite stories concerned golden wedding couple Lewis and Alice Brooks of Toftwood. They were married in 1913 without paying a penny. Apparently, the officiating clergy forgot to call the banns and after keeping the pair waiting for three weeks, he kindly said “no charge”, to make up for the delay. A priceless relationship to light up the columns of the weekly paper. Yes, it’s lovely to go wandering down memory lane – even if it does remind me that I interviewed folk who took their vows before the First World War.

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Cricket maidens make their pitch here were several perks to savour in being stationed so close to my village home, even though I had embarked already on an illustrious Norfolk career as a dedicated non-driver.

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Beeston was just seven miles away, a ready refuge after another week of tireless probing in and around the mean streets of Dereham. Carter’s green bus mopped up little bands of rural pleasure-seekers, returned them to gentlysnoozing hamlets and alerted those who worked in town to be ready for an early call on Monday morning. I joined these dramatically contrasting excursions, regularly perplexed at the way Saturday night sirens, pouting, winking, alluring, could be transformed into start-the-week whiners, moaning, squinting, charmless. Fortunately, there were few checks on a window-hugging lad who might have betrayed signs of a late-night round of investigative journalism at Beeston Ploughshare. No shortage of self-appointed correspondents anxious to ply me with tasty titbits in exchange for the best Steward & Patteson could offer. I had to organise crash courses in the laws of libel and slander, as well as offer useful indications as to how to tell hard news wheat from rumour and gossip chaff while darts and dice rattled around the bar. The parish council and village hall committee provided most potential for headlines, especially when newcomers – anyone with less than two decades of local residence behind them – challenged methods employed at all manner of meetings since the three Rs reached the area. I was on hand to report predictable fireworks when a former union official, from the heart of London’s docklands, had the temerity to suggest the farm labourer chairing the village gathering about sports facilities ought to pay more attention to proper procedures. The vote for the amendment had to be taken


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first, he insisted. The chairman told him where to stick the vote, the amendment and anything else he wished to raise from the floor – and promptly walked out. It was unanimously agreed to end all deliberations there, so tempers could cool… and the chairman had a chance to consult the rule book for the first time since the Great Flare-up of 1938. Our former union official friend trod more carefully after that, and duly collected his reward by being elected to the committee the following year as a sort of unofficial ‘regulations watchdog’. Another constant source of lively debate emerged from Beeston Drome, where small concrete huts huddled together in a gradual dilapidation since the early war years when there was an American airbase in the village. I heard prolonged sighs of relief at a 1963 full meeting of Mitford and Launditch Rural District Council when the struggle to rehouse Drome tenants was completed. One of the two remaining families left for Thetford, and it was decided to allocate a pre-war council house at North Elmham to the other tenant. Only a few weeks earlier, 74-year-old Charlie Elliott, dubbed ‘The Hermit of Beeston Drome’ after 13 years on the housing list, moved into a new council bungalow in another part of the village. While a few parishioners resented an automatic connection among outsiders between Beeston and the Drome with its problem families and primitive conditions, there was surprisingly little hostility towards colourful colonies on Sergeant’s Mess and Water Tower sites. Indeed, there were loud guffaws from the concrete huts (and possibly further afield) when a team of evangelists set up their tent in the ‘respectable’ part of the village. “So, them missionaries have decided to tackle the lost sheep first…” Beeston’s sporting instincts reached a peak in July, 1963, when the fairer sex challenged the local men at their own game. I helped set up this intriguing cricket contest, acted as scorer and contributed a full report to the Tom Quill column on the back page of the Dereham and Fakenham Times. Brand new footwear and multi-coloured everything else added a touch of modern fashion to the sober but traditional white outfits of the men. The first over had passed before an observant umpire realised the women were bowling with the wrong kind of ball. The lady wicket-keeper was so intent on getting down to business that her smart Godfrey Evans-type pantaloons gave way amid the excitement. A split decision if ever there was one. The lads went in first, batting with the opposite hand they used normally. One poor chap was clean bowled while he waited for the umpire to give him a guard,

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but the ladies begged him to stay put. They wanted no charity with a large crowd watching.

MAIDENS ON MARCH – some of Beeston’s sporting ladies in colourful attire warming up for their cricket clash against the local lads in July, 1963.


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READY TO RELAX – Beeston’s senior citizens prepare to board the bus for a summer outing.

A few highlights …. Margaret Watson held a superbly-judged catch on the village hall boundary, and Wendy Skipper – one of several family members on parade – made a skier at mid-wicket look simple. The men were hard-pressed to make 93, and opposition hopes soared when Dorothy Burrell, who had played for Fakenham Women, presented a straight bat to the most wily of deliveries and tucked away anything short to the leg-side. The men, as well as bowling with the ‘wrong’ arm, had to catch with the ‘wrong’ hand as well. As dark clouds gathered menacingly overhead, the girls sportingly decided not to appeal against the light but to send in their number 14. They lost by 34 runs, but a splendid village occasion was destined for a full page in the sporting scrapbook. A memorable little footnote to my report of that epic encounter: The men of Beeston were narked after reading the previous week’s copy of our weekly newspaper. Their cricket report in the most unlikely of places – under the Women’s Institute reports! I had one heck of a job convincing them this wasn’t my idea of a jolly jape.

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Home truths at election time couple of highly-charged incidents conspired to cast me as the most dangerous mid-Norfolk radical extremist ever let loose to stir the political pots at local and national level. I still turn red with a mixture of anger, anguish and sheer embarrassment whenever these horrors on the hustings are recalled.

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Now, there was bound to be a bit of good-natured banter as election time in a household where varying shades of opinion were given full expression. Phyllis and Fred Myhill, my amiable hosts in Dereham’s Theatre Street, were leading members of the local Conservative club. As a respectable pillar of the Press, I worked overtime to steer a neutral course, even to the point of enjoying a pint with the Tories at headquarters one night and then sampling the ale at Labour’s lair the next. Even so, Phyllis hinted strongly that my sympathies seemed to drift considerably left of centre as she went through a certain manifesto line by line and dared me to find fault. I told her the beer was slightly cheaper at the Labour club, but this did not make me automatically susceptible to Marxist tendencies. My fellow-guests, a bank clerk and two policemen at either end of the age scale, tended to turn teatime debates into a sort of old-time music hall with attitude as they deliberately opposed the previous speaker and then proffered an outlandish selection of fresh views before the stewed rhubarb. Entertainment tipped over into serious drama after Harold Macmillan’s 1963 resignation as Prime Minister in the wake of the Profumo affair. Lord Home emerged from nowhere to take his place.


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The redoubtable Phyllis, self-elected Leader of the House, immediately pinned up a large photograph of the 14th earl in the hall and suggested he was just the man to put “that smarmy Harold Wilson in the shade”. Nocturnal skulduggery was waiting in the lobby to bring her thundering to the breakfast despatch box, a cross between Peggy Mount and Bessie Braddock. She wanted straight answers to straight questions while the bacon sizzled and the air turned blue.

VICTIM OF A ‘wanted poster’ jape for which I was wrongly blamed four decades ago, Lord Home became Prime Minister in the wake of Harold Macmillan’s resignation.

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The Home portrait had turned into a wanted poster for ‘Britain’s only living dinosaur’, those well-bred features sprouting hairy adornments of the most lurid kind. Phyllis took particular exception to a small black moustache blossoming beneath the aristocratic nose. Yes, I chuckled at the colourful transformation. No, I was not responsible for it. But as all four paying guests denied any part in the scurrilous escapade, a chief suspect had to emerge after a recount. I got the vote, a tribute methinks to a telling way with words rather than any talents with felt-tipped pens. I had been caught only a few days earlier describing our new Prime Minister as “a privileged nob, hauled up the Old Etonian back stairs by members of the Tory Magic Circle to run a country he knows nothing about”. That kind of utterance – reasonable or treasonable, according to your colours – had to be the prelude to artistic mayhem. I was banished to the back-benches for a fortnight despite unwavering protestations of innocence. No bacon for breakfast – “a bit rash” mused landlord Fred as he relished my discomfort – and mix your own bedtime cocoa. The real culprit never did step out of the murky shadows to clear my name. He left not long after ….. to sort out a few more posters in another Norfolk police station. If there’s one thing worse than being falsely accused of besmirching an important national political figure, it’s being forced to admit you have no reasonable excuse for insulting a local one. That was my miserable lot when Fred Nicholson rang the Dereham and Fakenham Times office from North Elmham, to complain about an election round-up story I had compiled, complete with pictures of the chief candidates. Fred, a leading member of the Mitford and Launditch Rural District Council, and, I believe, at the time, chairman of the South West Norfolk Conservative Association, had miraculously transferred to the Labour line-up. I simply could not explain this colourful somersault, and after a one-sided inquest in Charles Sharp’s office a verdict of “mental aberration” was returned by a smooth-talking chief reporter. Fred bore me no obvious grudge as he continued to play a prominent role on the local political scene, and he’s remembered today with considerable fondness by supporters and opponents alike. A school in Dereham is named after him. Even so, there was a price to pay for my inexplicable lapse. Charles Sharp, impervious at first to whispers from the Myhill household that young Skipper


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A ‘MENTAL ABERRATION’ by young Skipper transferred leading local Conservative Fred Nicholson into the Labour fold. Fred is seen here on his binder at harvest time on Foxburrow Farm at North Elmham in the 1930s.


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could be a left-wing extremist in the making, decided I needed a few outings into ‘true-blue society’. I attended every local Conservative meeting, dinner and social gathering for the next three months, a programme designed to acquaint me more fully with main officers, serving councillors, potential candidates and key supporters. I put on nearly a stone in weight as a result of all this grand hospitality. Phyllis watched as I squeezed into my dark suit for yet another evening function. “I told you life is much better with the Tories”, she smirked. Lord Home, restored to all his natural glory on the hall wall, pursed his lips, looked down benevolently and didn’t dare disagree.

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Police look into Tomb of Tremor write with a tear in my eye and an ache in my heart. You see, it should have been me up there on that silver screen with a galaxy of international stars.

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I had rehearsed the Beeston smoulder hundreds of times. But the new boy on the block, all Gallic good looks, practised poise and big-city confidence, convinced the moguls he had what it took to bring a bit extra to a bid for a box-office bonanza.

ROLE MODEL – a Holkham setting for Operation Crossbow filming in 1964 as Roderic Leigh rehearses his part as a German sailor.


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Roderic Leigh, my new colleague on the Dereham and district reporting rounds, went filming on Holkham Beach in Operation Crossbow, one of the main productions of 1964. The Second World War thriller also starred George Peppard, Tom Courteney, John Mills, Lilli Palmer, Anthony Quayle, Patrick Wymark, Jeremy Kemp, Trevor Howard, Silvia Sims and Richard Todd. Sophie Loren had a small part as a Dutch war widow – but didn’t call on her Norfolk fan club. While Roderic gloried in his role as a German sailor, I covered Royal British Legion and trades council meetings, flower shows, sporting fixtures, golden weddings, magistrates’ courts and two chimney fires. I told anyone who asked that he was away skiving. Not an ounce of envy or spite in my voice. I was holding myself back for remakes of Farewell, My Bewty at Etling Green or Gone With The Wind at South Creake. The reading room on Holkham Estate also had an important part to play in Operation Crossbow, the story of how trained scientists were parachuted into Europe to destroy the Nazi rocket-making plant at Peenemunde. The Swissstyle building with a tower, put up by the Earl of Leicester in 1886 as a reading room and library, was transformed into a costume centre. Row upon row of German uniforms were brought in to suit all the extras patrolling the beach nearby. Filming did cause a headache for the estate’s administrative staff when so many workers put in for holidays so they could go for screen excitement. The going rate was £8 a day, plus free meals, juicy inducements in 1964. Operation Crossbow made a fair impact. The old reading room was left with a handy windfall; Roderic Leigh took his cue and eventually went into the acting profession. He did condescend to join a few less-exposed Press colleagues, not long after the Holkham extravaganza, in a homespun adventure destined to put West Norfolk on the cultural map and an energetic cast under close scrutiny at a local police station. The Tomb of Tremor was a small-budget feature with Alan Howard, Press photographer at the King’s Lynn office, in charge of all camera operations as we went on location in such exotic spots as Bawsey Sandpits. A bit like Frankenstein meets the Keystone Cops when The Mad Professor, played with matinee idol flair by Frank Gordon, and The Monster, swathed from head to foot in white bandages and wearing an unconvincing mask to disguise the dashing good looks of our Roderic, led a frantic charge across the countryside. I completed this galloping trio, over-dressed as an Arab, complete with tea towel

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held in place by a neck-tie, gallons of runny make-up, dark glasses and a flowing robe that wouldn’t have been a tight fit on Hattie Jacques. These were innocent times, remember, when such playful antics could be put down to a Bank Holiday tradition, a youth opportunity scheme for would-be contestants in an early version of It’s A Knockout or simple boredom with office life. We drew a mixture of amused and bemused glances until the chase stopped abruptly outside the Norwich Gates entrance to Sandringham House. An AA patrolman parked and waved as we bowed politely, tiptoed past and then resumed our high-speed way. Unfortunately, a woman visitor to the area read far too much into this episode and alerted the police. We were halted in our tracks soon after by officers in plain clothes, and requested to accompany them to Dersingham Police Station for a few security checks. Our plight took a slight turn for the better when Roderic unpeeled and was recognised by one of our inquisitors as a Young Gentleman of the Press he had seen in court a few days earlier. A ticking-off for scaring lady tourists on the Royal patch and a courtesy call to Norfolk News Company headquarters left us short on Hollywood aspirations. We were read the Riot Act (sub-section 21b, Mucking About In An Area Of Outstanding Sensitivity) by our editorial lords and masters at Redwell Street in Norwich, and urged to concentrate a bit more on finding news rather than trying to make it. Any misgivings among the hierarchy were forgotten when they joined in prolonged applause at the world premiere of The Tomb of Tremor at the next weekend school for the company’s young reporters. Libra Productions, under the enthusiastic leadership of Alan Howard, flourished for a reel or two more. I landed the starring role as a stallholder on Norwich Market Place in that sadlyneglected short epic Their Own Sweet Way, tipped at the time as a possible for the Cannes Film Festival. I don’t recall any more squad car escorts, either to or from the set, or obvious breaches of the Norfolk peace. We heard years later that Roderic Leigh had won a small speaking part in a James Bond film – so it clearly did him no harm to serve a colourful apprenticeship on Holkham Beach, in Bawsey Sandpits and helping the police with their inquiries on an otherwise uneventful Sunday around Sandringham.


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TROUBLE IN STORE – memorable stills from The Tomb of Tremor, a homespun production destined to land the cast of local newspaper reporters in Dersingham Police Station. Frank Gordon, Roderic Leigh, myself and Sid Langley had some explaining to do after a complaint from a lady visitor to the Sandringham area.

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A Cock and Bull story comes true octurnal adventures around the pubs of Dereham were based almost exclusively on vital board meetings, blatant double-dealing and colourful flights of fancy.

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The darts scene was booming during my reporting stint in town, and I volunteered eagerly for the top job of Thursday night scribe among the flings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Well, to be accurate I created the post to meet an obvious demand for extra publicity in local hostelries where sporting chat was not confined to cricket and football. My Dereham Match of the Week bulletin in Saturday’s Eastern Evening News underlined the amount of raw talent aiming for recognition – and earned me the rare luxury of being provided with my own table and chair close to the action in several pubs. This ringside seat had its hazards, not least when a dart strayed off course or hit the wire and bounced back perilously beyond the throwing line. I also had to contend with constant offers of half-pints from victorious players, liberal landlords and cheerful spectators. A stiff reminder that I had to be in court by 10 o’clock next morning to report on mid-Norfolk’s latest misdemeanours steered me adroitly from excessive temptation. I did yield rather tamely, though, when edible refreshments came round, most notably at The Fleece where landlady Edie Head’s rolls were regularly voted biggest and best in the league. A Fleece feast took the pain out of the most humbling defeat and there was always the bonus of an after-match mardle with Billy Hurrell, one of the few window-cleaners I met with a neat line in philosophising out loud. Billy could move easily from double eight to existentialism, from treble five to fundamentalism, from bull’s eye to biophysics. Perhaps he mesmerised an opponent or two with little asides during combat,


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and he was certainly the top performer when it came to explaining why buying him a drink would make the planet a better place.

TOP FLIGHT – Dereham Fox and Hounds showed champion form to reach the grand finals of the prestigious Norwich Mercury Darts Competition staged at Norwich Norwood Rooms in 1964. Barry Battelley, one of the town’s most talented all-round sportsmen, is seen taking aim watched by colleagues Ernie Allison, Lenny Stokes, John Owen, Jimmy Skipper, Dick Turner, Gerald Reeder and captain Bill O’Callaghan.

Headlines came easy as Dereham teams did the rounds. Fox and Hounds were usually on a winning scent. Cherry Tree got cut down to size now and again. Standard could unfurl defiant displays. A charge by the Light Horse brigade was a joy to behold. Toftwood Tuns would come down heavily on flimsy opposition. J.J. Wrights and Rix Motors revved up for a classic showdown. Chequers occasionally got played off the board. But I wanted more. I yearned for a true Cock and Bull story to put all other reports in the shade.

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That story duly arrived when a housewife stepped out of the shadows to fill a gap in the Bull ranks at the Cock… and proceeded to steal the Thursday night thunder. When regular Derek Brooks couldn’t make it, Jenny Baldry accepted the call to partner her husband of just a couple of months in the final encounter. He scored well in the opening leg against ‘Twink’ Tennant and Sid Stokes, but the Cock crowed first. Jenny then showed her class with scores of 72 and 85, and hubby Derek levelled matters. He did the early spadework in the decider and a splendid ton left his partner 55 to kill for the points. With no sign of nerves, Jenny landed 15 and double top to earn a 4-2 win for the Bull and fervent thanks from a young reporter looking for a good yarn. Colourful characters and exciting contests abounded, and my affection for the game blossomed into a vain but commendable desire to emulate the best. A chance to practise hours on end came when my hosts in Theatre Street, Phyllis and Fred Myhill, went on holiday and had the good sense to book me in at the Duke of Wellington pub nearby with Doris and Dougie George. I became useful enough to team up with brother Malcolm for the odd weekend exercise on home territory at Beeston Ploughshare, or on our sporting travels to Mileham Royal Oak, Litcham King’s Arms or Beetley New Inn. We steered well clear of Foxley Chequers where landlord Billy Dobbs, a fine player himself, was constantly facing an overcrowding problem – where to put all the trophies his team kept winning! That’s a good tip. Take a careful look round for signs of darts prowess in any pub before issuing or accepting a challenge. My Dereham and district experiences, both as reporter and occasional performer, inspired long-term interest destined to bring a small measure of success a few years later, culminating in pushing taxi-driver Big John Wilson all the way before bowing out in the Lakenham Darts League singles semifinals. Some have a finest hour. I enjoyed the odd glorious ten minutes.


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BILL THE SURVIVOR Dereham Fox and Hounds were the team to beat during my time on the local darts circuit. They were led by a quiet, methodical player with remarkable wartime experiences behind him. Bill O’Callaghan was one of only two survivors when just under 100 officers and men of the Royal Norfolk Regiment were taken prisoner, marched into a field in the little French hamlet of Le Paradis, mowed down by machine gun, finished off by revolver shots and bayonet thrusts and left for dead. By a miracle, Privates Bill O’Callaghan and Albert Pooley escaped death and crawled away under cover of darkness. They were both taken prisoner later on by the Germans and owing to the seriousness of his wounds Albert Pooley was repatriated to England. The authorities dismissed his story as too far-fetched, but eventually he set the wheels of justice in motion. In October, 1948 Fritz Knoechlein, who gave orders for the massacre, was convicted of “being concerned in the killing of about 90 prisoners-of-war of the 2nd Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment and other British units”. He was sentenced to death. A tragic and gruelling but eventually uplifting episode, in which Bill O’Callaghan played a full part, was chronicled in The Vengeance of Private Pooley by Gressenhall author Cyril Jolly, first published in 1956.

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Pulse of history beats proudly y affection for Dereham and its environs has been tested severely in recent years by fearsome-looking arrows of development aimed at the heart of Norfolk.

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Satellite villages like Swanton Morley, Scarning, Shipdham, Gressenhall and Beetley can be caught wearing that suburban dormitory pallor, and it’s likely others will catch the affliction before long. Dereham itself staggers into Toftwood on a trail of new houses squeezed among factories and stores, a jumble of bollards, lights, lines of parked vehicles and enough street furniture to cover the Neatherd Moor a dozen times. The town, perhaps forced into a more self-analytical mood by the building of the by-pass – and how many places think most of their troubles will be over when they get one of those – has the inevitable problem of showing respect for the past while welcoming the future. Dereham should be well used to this dilemma. I recall council meetings, public inquiries and agitated debates of over 40 years ago. An overspill agreement with Birmingham and the urban limit map were two big issues as the town was urged to be bold and square up to continued growth. I remember a stark warning that Dereham would become an industrial backwater if development at South Green was blocked. It was the obvious place, trumpeted the new missionaries, a natural continuation of the industrial premises to the north – Jentique and Cranes – and the comparatively new Moorgate housing estate to the north-east. Even then, when it was hardly fashionable to protest over environmental matters, some found it hard to watch trees coming down by the dozen to make way for the new post office site in Quebec Street. Majestic sycamores and


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elegant poplars disappeared from the skyline, and I had the temerity to ask workmen how they felt. More like intrusion into private grief than sound investigative journalism. “So few lovely trees are left that we shall be an industrial area before we know where we are” sighed one, peering down on a large fir he had just helped to topple. A fortnight before that demolition, Dr A. J. O’Connor, retiring chairman of Dereham Urban District Council, told a council meeting that trees in the town should be better preserved and care taken not to lose too many of the few. A genuine concern for the future of village life dominated a one-day school at Dereham I attended in 1963 when Norman and Elizabeth Tillett, WEA tutors in Norfolk and lecturers for the Civic Trust, issued grave warnings. They said our villages would be transformed within a decade through being forced to marry industry to rural life. Mrs Tillett claimed overspill would affect villages as much as towns, but here the problem would be more of a sociological one for “a community spirit within the village is something that cannot be forced”. There were already signs of the two-dimensional village – those who worked in and around the parish and commuters who worked in cities and towns. She was convinced that planners and surveyors did not know enough about the countryside. Haphazard plonking of houses was evidence of that. Her husband, a former Lord Mayor of Norwich and city councillor, said the expected influx of population into the county would make the current overspill programme look like chickenfeed. One thing we didn’t want was a “nasty mixture of part village, part town”. The town and country represented two ways of life and it was wrong to mix them indiscriminately. A few jottings from my Dereham and Fakenham Times notebook of more than 40 years ago. I reckon the Tilletts read the signs right. All Norfolk towns are tatty round the edges as ribbon development continues to gnaw away precious character and space. Shipdham and Scarning may call themselves villages, but they betray many of the symptoms of towns losing track of once-distinctive shape and identity. They have put on too much weight too quickly. We who remember trimmer figures shake our heads in deep disappointment.

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DEREHAM’S FINEST – workmen on the roof of the parish church of St Nicholas in the mid-1960s.


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So what did take my fancy during those two and a half years based in Dereham? Well, I had soft spots for the Cosy Corner sweetshop – jar upon jar of juicy temptations on my way to work – and the clubroom above the Eagle pub nearby. Apart from serious meetings, especially when the Trades Council got going, I climbed the stairs as several budding pop groups organised impromptu jam sessions. I was guest vocalist and chief publicity officer. When it came to the pulse of history beating proudly, I could hear it regularly in and around the parish church of St Nicholas. Once at the centre of town, this impressive church moved further west after a disastrous fire in 1581. Bishop Bonner’s Cottages crouching close by were among few buildings to survive. Dated 1502, the thatched row is decorated by plaster pargetting and is now a popular museum. There’s a holy well named after St Withburga to the west of the church. The poet William Cowper died in the town in 1800. His splendid memorial window in the parish church always reminds me that this timid, gentle, disturbed soul who rarely found respite from mental and spiritual stress, left us lines that have become familiar expressions without it being fully appreciated they came from him. Lines like “The cups that cheer, but not inebriate”, “Variety’s the very spice of life”, “God made the country and man made the town”, and “England, for all thy faults, I love thee still”. I simply replace ‘England’ with ‘Norfolk’ in that last one and acknowledge that Dereham is at the very heart of a county still ahead of so many others when it comes to protection of true character.

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BISHOP BONNER’S COTTAGES, crouching close by the parish church of St Nicholas, were among the few buildings to escape the great fire of 1581. The impressive thatched row now houses a popular museum.


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Ethel the cleaner and news gleaner arrived during the coldest winter for over two centuries. I left in freezing fog for the heady delights of a coastal December. But there were plenty of sunny interludes in between to pack away with notebook and typewriter. Days as a Dereham newshound, sniffing around my beloved home patch, remain close to the top of my ‘favourite’ file.

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Perhaps my mentors noted how familiarity was beginning to breed contentment at the stage of an embryonic career when a more thrusting and ambitious approach should be emerging. Maybe my regular calls at the family seat a few miles up the road were interpreted as dangerous reluctance to scan fresh horizons. (They forgot, quite conveniently, that I had already survived a major cultural transplant by starting my career at Thetford.) In any case, I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or flummoxed when editorial executive Alfred Jenner made a special journey from Norwich to inform me the Yarmouth Mercury was ready to embrace my emerging talents. Well, he didn’t put it exactly like that – it was more along the lines of fresh air doing me a bit of good – but he made it sound something like promotion to a much bigger office with two staffs, one for the weekly paper and the other to meet daily requirements. My selection for the weekly ranks could have been influenced by what was fast becoming a regular talking-point at gatherings of the mighty at headquarters – Skipper’s blatant lack of a shorthand note. Over two years later I received a call at Yarmouth from the company’s training officer Ralph Gray, who doubled as military correspondent. He congratulated me on my shorthand result in the latest round of tests for young reporters. I stood to attention, spluttered a few incomprehensible words and went back to my desk to nurse a dreadful secret. Dear Ralph thought “outstanding” next


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to my name heralded a massive breakthrough. It really meant I hadn’t done it yet. But I didn’t want to cause fresh dismay at head office… As I digested news of a seaside transfer over a pint at The Bull next door, headlines from a Dereham dossier flashed past my eyes. I was particularly proud of “That was the tweak…”, in honour of David Frost’s bowling contribution to a local charity cricket match, and “Bye George – it’s St Nicholas!”, when the old George Hotel bowls green gave way to a new set-up. One of my favourite stories concerned speech day at Dereham High School for Girls when the chairman of governors had a go at the alarming state of pupils’ feet. Mrs B. A. Smart, who kindly gave me a copy of her speech before the event, remarked: “We do ask fathers to put their feet down over this matter. Your daughters may be fine buxom wenches but they might well finish up with bad hips and bad postures if they carry on like this. We do ask you to ensure that the girls come to school in sensible shoes – never mind the tears or the cross words that will probably result”. Jeffrey Aldam, Director of Education for East Suffolk, presented the prizes and declared: “Schoolgirls are today heavier and happier than they have ever been before”. He went on to highlight “a curiously zoological taste” in current music and admitted that the manner in which some young people dressed astonished him. I was to hear similar sentiments expressed at a few more functions over the years. Then there was the case of the weekly wash turning “browner than brown” at Shipdham. Even local coal merchant Donald Dodd complained “it’s filthy” as he sized up the water supply. I asked Mr Barker, Engineer and Surveyor to Mitford and Launditch Rural District Council, for the cause of these washday blues. He said the council received their Shipdham supply from Bradenham where the equipment did extract a certain amount of iron. He hoped that when new equipment was installed it would be possible to flush the mains to get rid of the trouble. So what would I miss most as my Dereham and district news tap dried up? I liked the town by day and night, still small enough to exchange homely glances but sufficiently large to offer plenty of variety in a local newspaper. I enjoyed my stay with Phyllis and Fred Myhill, the kind of hosts who could pass on useful advice to a young reporter without making it sound pompous or patronising.

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My working colleagues fed enthusiasms, camouflaged shortcomings, pretended not to hear weak jokes and made me believe them when they said they’d miss me. I also got on well with a lively selection of advertising and front-counter females, several of whom unveiled a tender maternal streak whenever I arrived the worse for wear following a heavy night on the social circuit. Tea and sympathy too from office cleaners Ethel Battelley and her daughter Phyllis, especially when the Monday morning blues carried an extra plaintive verse or two.

PROUD MUM ETHEL BATTELLEY with three of her talented sporting sons (left to right) Ian, Chris and Martin. She was cleaner at the Dereham and Fakenham Times office – and a rich source of local news on a Monday morning. Ethel, mother of four outrageously talented lads on the sporting scene, Barry, Martin, Ian and Chris, made sure I was the best-informed scribe in town as I returned from a weekend break. She richly deserved her honorary title of ‘cleaner and gleaner’, tidying up desks, emptying waste paper bins, hoovering


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carpets and sharing all the news fit to print, much of it from her home beat in and around Sandy Lane. Her cheerful chatter set me up for any challenge. However, the last word in this farewell-to-Dereham epistle has to be ‘synopsis’ as rendered by the avuncular Bert Yallop, manager of the Exchange Cinema and Sunshine Floor beneath. Bert had a bit of a speech impediment accentuated by loose-fitting dentures, so anything with an ‘s’ or two would resemble a light shower of rain and have us taking refuge behind the latest edition. He came in every week with a list of forthcoming attractions on his silver screen. When he produced the synopsis for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers I knew it would be safer sitting on the sand and sampling the surf at Yarmouth.

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Wintry welcome to ‘last resort’ had never seen Yarmouth wearing a winter overcoat before. All previous calls on the Sunday School outing bus in the 1950s attracted full rations of warming sunshine as our little country cavalcade tested the waters, tasted annual treats and wondered how much longer this seaside magic could weave its spell.

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Now an icy wind bullied its way along Regent Road. Figures outside the House of Wax seemed to shiver under their out-of-season smiles. A deserted Golden Mile mocked short-trousered memories. Hotels, boarding houses, restaurants and amusement arcades huddled together for a modicum of comfort. Eventually I found sanctuary in a café still catering for Sunday afternoon itinerants. It wasn’t much of a welcome to the third stop on my newspaper reporting circuit. I mumbled something about “a last resort” and shared some of young David Copperfield’s instant misgivings on arrival, particularly the one where he thought Yarmouth might be situated at one of the poles… Perhaps this prize specimen from the Bloaters’ winter collection should have persuaded me to stop toasting myself on golden reflections of childhood pleasures along the bucket-and-spade beat. There was much more to this place than donkey rides, candyfloss and slot machines. As a market town, industrial base, thriving port and home to a remarkable amount of fascinating history, Yarmouth could stretch its importance well beyond national holiday playground status. One of the most complete medieval town walls in England awaited inspection. The biggest parish church in the country, largely rebuilt after Luftwaffe bombing, demanded attention. A unique grid-iron formation of narrow lanes known as The Rows still excited historians. Proud literary links with the likes of Charles Dickens, Anna Sewell and Daniel Defoe had to be explored.


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I warmed to these topics and many others during the mid-1960s as a working life by the sea taught me how to peel away the layers of “the resorts that have everything” – Gorleston always by big brother’s side – during a period of considerable challenge and change. They were still talking about the Scottish fishergirls’ dexterity in gutting fish and spying armadas of drifters ploughing through heavy seas. But King Herring’s reign was over. Long live the offshore industry! Exploration for oil in the North Sea led to discovery of gas in large quantities. By the late 1960s, Yarmouth was the largest offshore marine base in Europe, supplying no less than 27 rigs.

COLOURFUL STALLS AND CHARACTERS made an immediate impression as I crossed Yarmouth Market Place on my way to work at the local newspaper office. In those days before pedestrianisation traffic flowed in a clockwise direction around the market. Colourful stories of boom-town affluence – there’s a tempting alliteration when it comes to Yarmouth and the Yukon – might have encouraged some to expect too much, like looking for Cadillacs in every drive. Even so, it brought a timely

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economic boost as fishing’s glory years slid into history. Petroleum Wives replaced Scottish Lasses. The Stetson became more fashionable than the sou’wester. Now and again the Dallas drawl drowned out the Norfolk accent. Manufacturing industries were in fairly good shape when I hit town. The South Denes area had been extensively developed since the war with Birds’ Eye, Erie Resistor Electronics and Hartman Fibre among big employers. Smith’s Crisps factory was still crunching numbers on Caister Road. Grout’s silk factory, established in 1815, saw few troubles looming. The power station dominated the skyline with its 360ft high chimney. Yarmouth still had its own brewery; Lacons owned well over one hundred pubs in town before the Second World War. A tidy few kept that local flag flying as I did the necessary rounds in the ceaseless search for a good pint and a good story.

LACONS BREWERY closed in the late 1960s – and a supermarket was built on the site.


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Speculation over the future of our holiday trade had scarcely reached fever pitch, although I soon noted rumblings about growing numbers looking to foreign destinations for sun, fun and frolics. That could seem a shrewd idea as you took on hail, wind and snow served up by one of January’s kinder days, but I knew sun-kissed sands, horse-drawn safaris, scenic railway adventures and star-studded shows were waiting to remind me and everyone else why the Great British Holiday had plenty of Golden Mileage left. In the meantime, here was a perfect chance to get to know this corner of Norfolk playing out other important roles, and to serve my apprenticeship as an unashamed lover of the coast in winter. I am now a fully paid-up member of that club, regularly offering thanks for Yarmouth’s bracing introduction. My first digs were in Hamilton Road, one of those heavily-populated diversions on the trail to fast-changing Caister, not far from where the big blue Corporation buses lived. Unless I was desperately late, I walked down Northgate Street and across the market to get to the office in Regent Street. I soon fell for the charms of all those colourful stalls and characters, the bustle and banter and old-fashioned bonhomie born out of coastal familiarity. Always a party atmosphere round Jimmy O’Connor’s tea stall as the Market Minstrel picked up his guitar, brewed up fresh yarns and home-made songs and sent up anyone not prepared to join in the fun. My first Yarmouth story featured a baby seal fighting for life after losing its mother in a wicked storm that lashed Scroby Sands. Shrieking winds, blinding snow and crashing waves told me not to go looking for Sunday School footprints or sun-swept hours on the beach – or even for the Peggottys’ upturned boat with smoke curling out of a funnel on top. This was the real seaside in winter. I’d better get used to it.

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My refuge down the garden path t was a bit like moving from the cosy corner shop to the bustling supermarket. After operating from comparatively small depots at Thetford and Dereham, the news emporium on Yarmouth’s Regent Street had me joking seriously about the need for a map, oxygen mask and diplomatic handbook.

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Sizeable weekly and daily editorial staffs were housed on separate floors. Papers were printed in Norwich, and we were all working for the same firm, but friendly rivalry could occasionally spill over into something that took several earnest pow-wows to put right. There was a front office and a commercial and advertising department. Photographer Les Gould, surely a symbol of the need for peaceful co-existence as he strove manfully to serve two masters, lived, suitably enough, halfway up the stairs. A character of many endearing idiosyncrasies, Les complained constantly about the number of jobs he’d been asked to do by both camps on what was supposed to be his day off. He found sufficient energy and dedication to do them all. Then he’d call an extraordinary general meeting of the Tea Fund Committee, of which he was chairman, secretary, treasurer and chief mug-washer, to discuss apparent irregularities in methods of payment on the part of certain members of staff. I soon realised trouble could be brewing as an irate Les tapped on doors and typewriters with a dripping teaspoon and announced mournfully that he wasn’t born yesterday and had better things to do with his precious time. With a premonition, perhaps, that Les would soon be my benevolent landlord at his Gorleston home I maintained a better-than-most record in contributions to the tea fund. Even so, it was a blatant shortage of ready cash, brought about largely by vital nocturnal activities in the name of investiga-


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tive journalism around local hostelries, that left me without regular digs only a few months into my east coast career. The prospect of a few thoughtful nights under Britannia Pier carried limited appeal. I recall the smart shed at the bottom of the Gould garden had been acquired as a potential photographic unit for elder son Ivan. But it was really waiting for a waif-like figure with nowhere to rest his little head at the height of the holiday season. I gleefully accepted this offer of temporary quarters and a truly blissful phase of my life followed. As summer’s warmth gave way to autumn’s pinch I was invited indoors as a paying guest of the reasonably respectable kind, by landlady Dorothy who was clearly impressed by my apprenticeship down the garden path. I was cared for regally during the rest of my Mercury reporting days, sharing a host of assignments with Les and working overtime to find new excuses for being a few hours late for our evening meal. Now and again, it was our own fault. Someone would mention the spoons at a flagging function, and Les didn’t like to disappoint those who admired his impromptu musical talents. I chipped in with a few Norfolk yarns, a habit that would eventually turn into an integral part of my life. Now and again, Les would get drawn into a bout of his own anecdotes. He didn’t so much go round the houses as move to an adjoining estate. He had a delicious habit of interrupting himself and then correcting himself, an art often mimicked by colleagues but never with a grain of malice: “Now, let me see. Must have been George Formby at the Windmill in… no, hang on, I tell a lie. It was Jimmy Clitheroe at the Brit – or was it Charlie Drake? I ought to remember because that was the summer somebody on the short side asked to borrow my steps as he couldn’t reach his coat on the top peg in the Mayor’s Parlour at that reception when…” Les was the instantly-recognised and cheerfully-hailed ‘Man from the Mercury’ for well over 30 years, often perched precariously on a makeshift podium employing his catchphrase “Just one more!” as insurance against any possible gremlins in the darkroom. His late-night transmissions to headquarters via the temperamental wiring-machine were better than anything Houston ever offered – “Hello, Norwich. Are you receiving me? Hello, Norwich. This is Gould at Great Yarmouth. Can you hear me? Over”. We stifled our giggles as we eavesdropped at the bottom of the stairs as Les battled on at mission control.

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LES GOULD, instantly recognised as ‘The Man from the Mercury’ for well over 30 years at Yarmouth – and leading light of the Tea Fund Committee. He recorded this unlikely scene (below) from Regent Street office life in the mid-1960s as reporting colleagues ‘helped’ with renovation work. On parade, left to right, are David Hill, Roland Adburgham, Keith Skipper, David Wakefield and ‘foreman’ Mercury chief reporter Ralph Eustace Sherwin White.


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He came from the old school of newspapermen, working long hours in the town from 1949 when he became the company’s first district photographer. However, he readily encouraged young colleagues to strike an individual path, to show faith in their own talents and to be a part of the community they were lucky enough to serve. The other colourful personality demanding immediate attention on my arrival at Yarmouth was Ralph Eustace Sherwin White, chief reporter on the Mercury. Younger members of the staff called him Eustace – as did editor Wilfred Bunting – but he didn’t answer to anything during regular trips into a world of his own. He was away with the theories while composing his Scout column, a glorious mixture of anecdote, rumour, whimsy, fantasy and no-nonsense opinion, all tied up in extravagant similes by the yard. We knew when a gem was imminent. He’d rock back in his chair, clear his throat, twiddle his glasses, exclaim loudly “Ah, yes!” with a self-satisfied smile and then transform his massive old typewriter into a machine gun spattering golden words all over the paper. Eustace was apt to forget on which assignment he had embarked on leaving the office, usually dressed in blue beret, white mackintosh and brown sandals. His sou’wester and oilskin cape were reserved for wet days at any time of the year. Among many unusual incidents, I remember Eustace searching frantically through the contents of a large dustbin outside the Halfway House pub in Gorleston, not far from his home in Alpha Road. He’d lost a notebook. We didn’t find it – he sought my assistance as I strolled past innocently on the way to work – but he gave me a boiled sweet all the same from ample rations stored deep in his coat pocket.

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Uncle Don leads to front page had scarcely settled into my Yarmouth routine before it was time for milestone celebrations. My 21st birthday in March 1965 brought reassuring gestures from new colleagues with every right to consider transporting me to Scroby Sands for disturbing their peace.

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Perhaps I took my role as office joker a bit too seriously but dreadful puns, dubious impressions, daft songs and dialect yarns needed adequate rehearsal time before any tilts at summer season stardom. Not that I could claim exclusive rights to the Mercury entertainment licence. Fellow trainee reporter Mike Farman, the tall heavyweight to my short paperweight, occasionally burst into a medley from South Pacific, conducted an imaginary Viennese orchestra or presented brief but poignant extracts from Beyond The Fringe. His impromptu turns may have carried a slightly more sophisticated edge but I received more encores for Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy? Editor Wilfred E Bunting, who took up that post in 1940 and held it until his retirement in 1973, was a shy but fair and understanding man, ready to indulge youthful excesses whenever possible as well as to point out gently that a regular harvest of local news ought to take precedence over any wild crop of squit. He found it difficult to read the riot act, but a genuine liking and respect for his understated brand of leadership invariably restored order quickly after chaotic bursts among the typewriters and telephones. I felt especially chastened one morning on arriving alarmingly late from my Gorleston base with ardent claims the Haven Bridge had been up and so delayed my progress. Wilfred averted my guilty gaze, tapped his faithful pipe on the desk, stood up and strolled to the window. He didn’t have to tell me that he could see from there when the bridge was or was not impeding young men eager to get to work.


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Wilfred left most daily deliberations in our reporters’ room under the amiable guidance of Don Mills. Although the paper was printed in Norwich, the Mercury, like close neighbour the Lowestoft Journal, was fully prepared on home ground. Don, who also lived in Gorleston but never seemed to encounter Haven Bridge hold-ups, sifted through all copy as stories piled up on his desk. He gave them proper shape and headlines and chuckled contentedly as another broadsheet page surrendered to his impeccable sub-editing skills.

BRIDGE OF SIGHS – Yarmouth’s Haven Bridge, over which I travelled daily to work from my Gorleston base. I wasn’t beyond blaming the bridge for being late in the office – but there was no fooling editor Wilfred Bunting. Don’s most endearing – and enduring – gift was the little one-to-one masterclass in sorting out a story for publication. Young newshounds keen to impress were let off the leash in town and beyond. (A day out in Mautby or Martham could be fun). They returned to piece together articles for Uncle Don’s benevolent perusal. Something tasty could be fashioned out of a heated meeting of the borough council’s school meals sub-committee when dear old spotted dick lost out in the popularity stakes to a trendy new sweet covered in synthetic

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cream. Another assignment might herald a full-blown village row over a planning application for broiler houses next to a playing field at the back of a new estate. ‘Fowl play’ had already suggested itself as part of an enticing headline. Don’s smiling invitation to go through all paragraphs in turn to see if it was worth the honour of front-page lead story prompted a mixture of pride and apprehension…

PARTY PIECE – Don Mills leads the office festive entertainment.


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“Now, what’s this epic all about? Right, let’s make that clear from the start and answer the sort of simple questions our reader will ask – what, where, why, when, who and how. Shall we turn ‘erection of dwellings’ into ‘building homes’ and ‘halt in proceedings’ into ‘short delay’ just to make it more interesting? Good, coming on nicely, particularly that bit about making the feathers fly. But don’t you think that quote about the jackboot of big business crushing grassroots democracy deserves higher billing than halfway down? Oh, and that emergency meeting being called next week will provide a perfect followup story. What’s this here about father on one side and son on the other? ‘Family at war’ is always a winner. Think we’ve got pictures of them in our files. So, we’ll just trim that down, push that up, bring this across and save that for later. Is this your first front-page lead? Won’t be the last if you carry on like this!” Beams of satisfaction as Don made you believe it was truly your own creation as he applied the big bold headline and placed your story on top of a growing news mountain. The other rapid-learning classroom was the annual dinner circuit where some local dignitaries employed the same speech for every occasion. They simply changed the name of the club or organisation to fit the bill, severely testing any reporter’s initiative to find a new slant. Just my luck to be sent to hear one such speaker a dozen times in one month. (Seven turkey main courses, four chicken and one roast beef). Although it could hardly be deemed a pleasure or a privilege to be with them on such auspicious occasions – usual selling points to audiences unaware that they were being served up cold replays with slight amendments – I found the exercise useful. I soon got to know the most influential people in town and where they served the best grub. I worked overtime to avoid too many repeats in my notebook. I collected juicy titbits for the paper’s gossip column. And I stored away plenty of priceless tips for the ‘boring bits to avoid’ file on my after-dinner speaking rounds in more recent years. It’s always a good test. Would you like to be reporting on this speech? There were few formalities at my 21st birthday celebration in the bar of The Star Hotel, one of our favourite watering-holes near the office. Highlight of the evening, apparently, was an attempt by good friend Farman to place crisps in my left ear and then use a soda siphon to magic them across into the right

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one. I suggest it was no more than a squirt or two of revenge for daily floods of disruption on the shop floor of the Yarmouth news empire.

MILESTONE CHEERS – I celebrate my 21st birthday with reporting colleagues at Yarmouth in March, 1965. Raising their glasses are (left to right) Don Mills, David Wakefield, Mike Farman, Fred Body and John Anderson.


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Brothers share a flair for words y happy links with the Bagshaw dynasty were firmly established in the early paragraphs of a reporting career dotted with characters reluctant to chide but swift to bless.

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Stanley Bagshaw, only 50 when he died of leukaemia in 1964, was undoubtedly one of the most talented newspaper figures Norfolk has produced. He worked his way up to the post of editor-in-chief of the Eastern Daily Press and its associated papers after distinguished war service. We first met in the summer of 1962 when he tactfully ignored my excruciating pun about Redwell Street in Norwich being the ideal spot for a newspaper office (get it?) and decided my joined-up writing was just about good enough to warrant a job as a junior newshound. I then encountered Stanley’s brother Peter a few years later at the Yarmouth office. He garnered upstairs on the daily rounds while I winnowed below with the weekly ranks. Peter soon turned out to be one of the kindest, funniest and most inspiring personalities I met in an era when there was plenty of healthy competition behind those chattering typewriters. He taught me how to attract the attention of any centenarian waiting to blow out the candles: “Excuse me, but to what do you owe your remarkable longevity?” And how to build up expectations in a showbiz exclusive from the Golden Mile: “Two things struck me as I entered Anne Shelton’s dressing room”. Peter, who covered the fortunes of Yarmouth Town Football Club, the Bloaters, for many a season, also gave me a useful crash course in how to compile reports for those who liked the more traditional approach… “With the pivot and custodian in uninspired mood at the back, the marauding mudlarks experienced unmitigated delight in dispatching the greasy pill into the onion bag.”


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PETER BAGSHAW – “a kind, funny and inspiring colleague” at the Yarmouth office.

His throaty chortle, accentuated by years of smoking, and penchant for slipping witty notes across the reporters’ table brought relief and colour to countless council and court marathons when I felt like nodding off. Peter’s excellent shorthand note and full grasp of all rules and demands of provincial journalism made him the perfect colleague – even when we were sort of rivals working for the same firm. He spurned several chances of promotion to stay on the east coast beat he knew and loved. Sadly, Peter enjoyed too little of a richly-deserved retirement which should have yielded more books to go with his highly-praised novel, The Gap in the Dunes, published in 1959 and using the devastating floods of six years before as a dramatic backcloth. It was another two decades before I completed my Bagshaw hat-trick. Bob, youngest of the three brothers, was born in the little room above the Press

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office at Cromer. His father, Arthur was a highly-regarded journalist in charge of this corner of the local newsgathering empire during and after the First World War. Uncle Harry also picked up the pen to earn a living. With siblings Stanley and Peter destined to make their marks on the newspaper scene, young Bob’s future seemed to bear a predictable imprint, especially as he shared the family feel for language and imagination. He defied all the odds to become a dentist.

BOB BAGSHAW – dentist who became a potent communicator as writer and broadcaster.

On retiring from that profession Bob did revert to Bagshaw type, proving himself a potent communicator, both through his series of delightful Norfolk books and in front of a microphone for about eight years of turning the commonplace into the exceptional. Bob, now well into his 80s, might easily have been perturbed at our initial meeting in 1986 when he visited BBC Radio Norfolk for a mardle with me on the Dinnertime Show. He had under his arm a copy of Poppies to Paston, the


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story of his childhood – and I spent a fair part of that interview heaping praise on his brothers who helped me along my chosen path. However, he took genuine pride in their achievements and in my testimonials, chipping in with telling reflections of his own to demonstrate he had the mardling magic to go with the writing talent. It seemed only proper to invite him in every fortnight after 2pm on a Tuesday to share a few tales soaked in Norfolk ways and scenes. Bob’s regular broadcasts reaped rich little harvests of fresh grain as listeners responded readily to those homely tones and infectious chuckles, despite little habits like interrupting himself, reaching and rattling for another throat lozenge and complaining because time was running out. The books kept on coming to show he did know what to do with all that extra material. My favourite, A Norfolk Chronicle, published in 1997, carries the Bagshaw trademarks of affection, humour and variety, the humble and eccentric rubbing shoulders with the formidable and famous. Bob also blew dust off copies of his old school magazine, The Pastonian, pointing out proudly that he and one Horatio Nelson attended the same seat of learning at North Walsham, albeit with a little matter of 167 years in between. I settled on an article written for The Pastonian by 14-year-old Stanley Bagshaw in 1927. William – A Sewerage Aristocrat pointed emphatically to a newspaper man of rare pedigree in the making, a shrewd judge of character, mood and weakness. Stanley was ready for me at Redwell Street in 1962. My one regret about this vibrant Bagshaw connection is that I had little opportunity to get to know Stanley, whose early journalistic career had centred on Yarmouth. Transferred to the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War, he followed Field Marshall Montgomery like a shadow across North Africa and up through Europe, coming out with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and an award for gallantry. He was fluent in six languages, and when Khrushchev and Bulganin made their famous visit to England, the Eastern Daily Press carried a leading article he had written in Russian. Copies of this edition were sent to the Soviet Embassy and to the Kremlin.

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STANLEY BAGSHAW – one of Norfolk’s most talented newspaper figures.

Stanley, who had a remarkably wide outlook from his provincial editor’s chair, formed the Norwich International Club in 1951. I joined the Bagshaw Fan Club in 1962… with benefits coming my way ever since thanks to a trio of outstanding Norfolk brothers.


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‘Gorleston is all about waiting…’ lthough I lived in Gorleston for only a couple of years in the mid-1960s, it was impossible not to be drawn into occasional tribal jousting with that bigger and brasher cousin beyond the Haven Bridge.

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It didn’t end with local derbies on the football field between the Greens and the Bloaters. The Gorleston end of the borough seemed convinced that Town Hall rulers in Yarmouth would never play fair, and complained bitterly if there was no worthwhile fruit in another meagre portion of the municipal cake. Some of my neighbours recalled the year when the local parks department was mocked for growing so-called sub-standard wallflowers compared with super specimens then being dotted around Yarmouth. “Cheap revenge for one of our deserved victories in the past”, they mused. Resentment also lingered over the way Yarmouth had puffed out its chest as the greatest herring port of all time without ever mentioning the role Gorleston played in earning that reputation. Up to the 1930s, I was reminded, many Scottish curing firms maintained premises, yards and pickling plots at various points along the riverside to cope with regular landings on the quayside cobbles. I didn’t quite grasp the full significance of the old saying “Gorleston was Gorleston ere Yarmouth begun, and will be Gorleston when Yarmouth is done”, but it clearly echoed an intense rivalry still simmering despite the best efforts of tourism chiefs calling for a combined modern campaign to laud the virtues of “the resorts that have everything”. Gorleston’s holiday trade was built largely on a reputation for offering a gentler alternative to Yarmouth’s flashy fleshpots. It was also billed as ‘a nicer place to live’ as post-war development gathered pace. I certainly appreciated clear differences in summer as I escaped Yarmouth’s clutter and clatter and headed


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down Southtown Road for the tinkle of teacups and dawdling at dusk that gave Gorleston a pleasantly old-fashioned air. Inevitably, I suppose, such an image became a bugbear when the tide turned against traditional holiday haven pleasantries. ‘Genteel climate’ has been cruelly shoved aside by ‘whiff of decay’.

GORLESTON LANDMARKS – Gorleston Holiday Camp closed in 1973. Demolition began a couple of years later to make way for the Elmhurst Court housing development. This sort of downgrading, much of it encouraged by folk bitterly disappointed at discovering radical changes on a first visit in about 30 years, reached a crescendo in 1995 when Henry Sutton started his full-time career as a novelist with …Gorleston. He spent the first years of his life here after being born in the nearby village of Hopton. Developing his concepts of the way character and landscape can mirror each other, he offered his idea “of the town’s long past and its short future”. One of the main characters complains “Gorleston is all about waiting. Everyone is always waiting for something”. Sutton’s descriptions of the town’s social circuit, especially the Marine Parade pensioners, are quite explicit and uncomfortable and often employ real place names. He unwrapped Gorleston as a

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town that from the exterior appears deathly quiet and depressing, but behind that drab outside lay outrageous goings-on. A teasing backcloth for imaginative writing, but Mr Sutton wasn’t very popular in his home town when the novel was published. He was even threatened with a libel suit – but suggested with a smile that “most people in the place seemed to enjoy the notoriety”. Publicity, however lyrically pitched, couldn’t have done much for the resistance movement devoted to staying ahead of Yarmouth when it came to fighting off all those seaside labels marked ‘dilapidated’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘neglected’, ‘crumbling’ and ‘boarded-up’. We got Gorleston Pier, lonely, like a redundant runway, covered in cracked and rippled concrete. Old men sitting in a damp shelter, smoke billowing out into the wet sea air. Old women sitting behind consoles of flashing yellow and red in the small bingo hall, frantically pressing buttons and dragging on their cigarettes. The hotel, large and rambling and draughty with weathered wood balconies and rusting fire escapes. The old lighthouse, bricks crumbling and the tower, capped by a red beacon, looking as if it wouldn’t stand for much longer. Floods threatening, suburbia sprawling, rumours spreading, dogs chasing seagulls, hopelessly, pointlessly…

GORLESTON LANDMARKS the open-air swimming pool went in 1994 amid loud local protests.


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After that lot I needed a reviving stroll around the Gorleston I knew and liked when England won the World Cup at Wembley, when the Beatles ruled the pop waves and when mini-skirts kept on raising eyebrows.

GORLESTON LANDMARKS – the Coliseum Cinema on the High Street was closed and demolished in 1970. I started my nostalgic journey at the Coliseum Cinema on the High Street, complete with commissionaire in smart uniform at the door. Friendly shops and pubs, traffic never more than steady. A village flavour here rather than a holiday rush, although seafront activities were livening up. Rebuilding had started on the Gorleston breakwater, spelling the end of the popular cosies, as sheltered niches on the south side of the pier where known, and demolition of the coastguard look-out and lighthouse at the end of the pier. The open-air swimming pool reverberated with gurgles of excitement. The Floral Hall adjacent waited for another colourful concert or packed social function. I blushed a little at the memory of my debut as a popular music critic for the Yarmouth Mercury when a motley crew called Pink Floyd signed in with their

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psychedelic offerings. I dubbed them ‘Pink Fraud’ as paint splashed over projectors and bubbles climbed the wall. It was next stop Gorleston Pavilion Theatre for old-tyme music hall. Much more to my taste. An early-evening breeze sprang up off the sea as if in regret for an era soon to pass. My pitch-and-putt skills wavered at the prospect of the winner buying fish and chip suppers all round. Colleagues based over the river in Yarmouth said their wallflowers were swishier and sweeter than those on display near the final hole.


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Hat-trick glory amid carnage picked up the threads of a flimsy playing career with hearty and tolerant souls who went into summer battle under the banner of Caister Cricket Club. They gave my modest skills a home for over 20 years, setting the ‘bonus’ of regular publicity from a scribe on the local newspaper against the transparent risk of including an occasional spinner fully prepared to leave batting and fielding to others.

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Colleague David Wakefield, a determined and accurate medium-pace bowler, started the tradition of Yarmouth reporters turning out for Caister after attending their annual dinner and sampling an appealing brand of comradeship and fun. “They don’t take it too seriously” he confided, in a way that suggested even someone like me might squeeze into the team. I went for a net practice, pretended to know what I was doing and then blushed on receiving an immediate call to weekend action from jovial captain Eddie Brown. He told me years later that a reputation as a bad card player and useful pub entertainer had as much to do with selection as any proclivity for the great summer game. Certainly, I was often generous to rivals in sessions of three-card brag while a confident grasp of Singing Postman numbers pushed me to the fore in post-match pub festivities. With Mr Wakefield presiding at the piano, Caister’s old time music hall ranks were welcome visitors across Norfolk and beyond. We weren’t just good losers. We could celebrate with the best of them. I also developed a genuine liking for after-dinner speaking at Caister’s annual bunfights, not least because it gave me a perfect chance to turn tables on all the athletic mickey-takers. Perhaps I ought to mention that no-one else wanted


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SUMMER PARADE – Caister cricketers line up for action in the 1969 season. Back row (left to right): David Wakefield, Ian Boon, Ken Jary, John Plummer, Tony Rowe, David Harman, Russell King (umpire), Eddie Brown (captain). Seated: Alistair Low, Keith Skipper, Paul Barnard, Dennis Brown, Bob Middleton. Foreground: Chris Turrell (scorer).

the job and it was generally agreed a verbal contribution from one of the less effective club members would cause little embarrassment when it came to handing out trophies. ‘Player of the Season’ accolades, with presentations from enthusiastic president Dick Allen and ageless chairman Harold Gailer, did pass me by – but there were a few heady moments to remind good judges that the verdict of another Caister captain towards the end of my playing days should not be taken too seriously. “You are in the side for your timeless repartee” exclaimed Richard Hewitt when someone had the temerity to inquire why my longmatured talents as a spinner of note were not employed more often. (I believe I posed the question.) I threatened to peak too early with three victims in four deliveries on a golden afternoon in front of Somerleyton Hall and a career-best 22 not out (including three slices over slips, a blind hoick over square leg and two overthrows) in a friendly local derby at Filby. The latter occasion was also notable for the disappearance of my white pullover during inevitable celebrations at the local hostelry. It resurfaced the following summer in the same establishment, much the worse for wear after being used to dry glasses. The mystery of my disappearing trousers a couple of seasons later on one of our memorable trips to Weston, in Hertfordshire, was solved the same evening. But not before I had taken refuge in bushes behind the pub as local Womens’ Institute members arrived back by bus from their annual outing. Ironically, my most outstanding feat coincided with one of the most one-sided encounters in local cricket history. With several of our best players unavailable, I answered an emergency call to arms against Swardeston, fast emerging as a major power on the scene, in a Norfolk Junior Cup tie. We travelled in a mood of cheerful resignation. They piled up getting on for 400 runs, captain Peter Thomas plundering about half of them with towering sixes constantly threatening to put the ice cream van out of action on the edge of his village green. Amazingly, in the midst of all this carnage, I claimed six wickets for 72 with my gentle turners – including a hat-trick! Swardeston, who shot us out for 85 in reply, presented me with a smart club tie when I accepted an invitation to speak at their end-of-term celebrations and insisted they had not gifted me those three victims in a row as some sort of consolation prize.

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Most Caister outings during my time with the club were tied up more with pints than with points or progress. But there were clear signs of a new competitive edge being sharpened by the formation and rapid expansion of leagues and the introduction of new cup contests. Some of us mourned the passing of the good old friendly, mainly because the average performer could be given a run in those fixtures where results weren’t all-important. I collected more friends and yarns than wickets and runs, and also found time to jot down a list of favourite village grounds. Merton Hall, family seat of Lord Walsingham, Old Buckenham and Brisley Green came out on top. Caister’s windswept playing field held few charms, although our home venue was a popular choice for fixture-seekers as cricket ‘widows’ and their families took the opportunity to head for the beach nearby. Caister itself betrayed many of the sprawling excesses that went with increasing popularity as a seaside holiday spot and retirement haven next door to Yarmouth. Despite the best efforts of endearing village characters like shopkeeper Tom Jones, former lifeboat coxswain Jack Plummer and twinkling man of the sea ‘Skipper’ Woodhouse, I never took a shine to the place. I much preferred sepia images of a closely-knit fishing community. For all that, the cricket club fulfilled a colourful role in my sporting and social life, forging many friendships that remain intact long after close of play. I do owe old colleagues a big apology for putting the skids under that legendary cry from proud local lifeboatmen: “Caister men never turn back!” I was an exception to that rule on too many occasions, spurning calls for quick singles, or even slow twos and threes, so leaving partners stranded as I reversed breathlessly to the sanctuary of my crease. Lack of studs in my boots and too much smoking rendered me a truly dangerous batsman.


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Quipfire Eric is king of parade ny history of seaside entertainment in this country must devote an entire chapter to Yarmouth’s glittering parade of 1967, surely the summer when stargazing reached its peak. I still feel a sense of wonder and privilege when the curtain goes up on such a cast of big names.

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I had warmed up nicely as a budding showbusiness correspondent along the Golden Mile after being granted brief but productive audiences by the likes of Jimmy Clitheroe, Jimmy Wheeler, Tommy Cooper and The Bachelors. Impressionist Peter Goodwright gave me decent marks for my Captain Pugwash (seven out of ten). Donald Peers put me in my place when I asked how it felt making a comeback. “My dear boy,” he sighed… “I’ve never been away.” Jimmy Tarbuck would only talk to the national press when it was revealed he was to take over the plum television job as compere of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Norman Vaughan, who had the role until then, wouldn’t talk to anybody. The Singing Postman cancelled our interview one day and pulled out of his debut summer season the next. He was replaced by The Singing Dustman at The Windmill. Ah, the ups and downs of the showbiz ladder! Unfortunately, I remained on the bottom rung when it came to invitations to opening night parties. I could usually wangle tickets to the shows with their civic greetings and speeches of variable quality and length, but the real place to be was rubbing sequins with legends at the traditional cutting of the firstnight flan. I did manage to gatecrash a couple of gala occasions at the start of that memorable 1967 season, posing shamelessly as an indispensable assistant to press photographer Les Gould. I carried a camera case, a tripod and a star-struck grin through the throng to a table where the ‘good luck’ delicacy awaited ritual carving. I fought hard to keep my autograph book out of sight as Les jotted down household names for his caption beneath Yarmouth’s latest ‘flan club’. CONFESSIONS OF A NORFOLK NEWSHOUND

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MAESTRO OF MIRTH – Eric Morecambe in typical pose as he puts memorable comedy in the frame. I went to interview him at Yarmouth in 1967 – and listened attentively without interrupting for a good half hour.

Let’s savour the most compelling cavalcade in memory filing past to collect large slices of undimmed affection – Morecambe and Wise, Rolf Harris, Mike and Bernie Winters, Val Doonican, Arthur Askey, Mike Yarwood, Ivor Emmanuel, Ruby Murray, Joe ‘Mr Piano’ Henderson, The Three Monarchs and Freddie and the Dreamers. Spoilt for choice when it came to weighing up enticing posters round town, and there was also repertory at the Little Theatre, circus at the Hippodrome, Olde Tyme Music Hall at Gorleston and a miscellany of attractions at the Marina. This was my last full summer on the coastal reporting beat and I made it my supreme mission to land a dressing-room chat with my idol, Eric Morecambe. After much general badgering, and plaintive pleas to senior colleagues to use their charms and influence to prise open certain theatrical doors, one of the

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most exciting chapters of my working life unfolded. The great comedian was just as welcoming and wonderful as I wanted him to be. “Come in, young man, and take the weight off your notebook” he urged, as my apprehension turned into a fresh wave of adulation. He introduced me to his partner Ernie Wise, applying make-up and fully prepared to join me as the other half of a crowd scene as Eric let rip for over 30 minutes. I was mesmerised by his high-speed verbal magic, spectacle-fiddling mannerisms, sudden throaty chortles and genuine relish in addressing a youthful admirer. There was no chance to interrupt and it seemed rude to try to capture a few oneliners out of such an amazing torrent. I left notebook in pocket and heart on sleeve as the funniest performer I’ve ever met revved up for the next show.

OFFICE OUTING – Yarmouth press reporters of the mid-1960s dressed for the occasion at Gorleston Olde Tyme Music Hall. On parade from left to right – Dick Watts, myself, David Wakefield and Dick Meadows.


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I bumped into Eric again a few years later at Carrow Road when I was on Norwich City football reporting duty and Luton Town were the visitors. He inquired what I had done with my career since his Yarmouth masterclass. I confessed to being a soccer scribe following the fortunes of the Canaries. “You haven’t done much, then” he quipped with a twirl of his pipe. I had enough courage to return the compliment and ask why he was in Norwich. “I am here, young man, in my proud capacity as a director of Luton Town Football Club” he replied. “Oh,” I countered. “So you haven’t done much either since we last met.” He chuckled, pushed back his glasses, threatened to break into one of his famous face-slapping routines and then continued on his cheery way. I’ve dined out on that episode many times, emphasising how the Morecambe and Wise bandwagon really gathered pace after my little publicity nudge of the summer of ’67. And I occasionally recall outstanding lines from Eric’s pulsating patter to plug little gaps on my entertainment rounds… “I was born in a little village called Wedlock… well, just outside, actually.” He has much to answer for, but would probably ignore the question. It may be churlish to suggest my showbiz reporting career in Yarmouth or elsewhere could head only one way after this meeting with the maestro of mirth. Even so, I knew it had to be the pinnacle of a memorable summer when so many stars of television and radio came out to play in the same place at the same time. As Eric might say, there’s no business like nostalgia business… and they can’t touch you for it!

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Invading armies on Golden Mile must be one of the few provincial press reporters to be afforded a police escort from Yarmouth beach on a busy Bank Holiday Monday in August.

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It was the first big examination of my credentials as a fearless investigator ready to take risks in the name of a scoop on the home front. The resort was packed with trippers and alive with rumours that the next big showdown between Mods and Rockers would be staged on or around the Golden Mile. I ate a hearty breakfast, dressed casually in sports jacket and flannels, armed myself with notebook, pencil and the glorious respectability of the truly impartial observer and set out under clear skies to probe this peculiar new ritual sweeping across our seaside world. There had been ‘Mayhem at Margate’ over Whitsun with more than 50 arrests and two youths stabbed. Sending four combatants to jail and imposing fines totalling £1,900, the Margate magistrate dismissed the brawlers as “little sawdust Caesars.” More clashes at Southend, Bournemouth, Brighton, Clacton – and even County Durham – put police, public and the media on full alert as another holiday beckoned crowds towards sea and sands. Suddenly, Churchill’s inspiring wartime words about fighting on the beaches took on a sad and scary new meaning. The Mods on their scooters and the Rockers on their motorbikes threatened to rev up for more ‘battleground’ headlines despite a promise of firm action from Home Secretary Henry Brooke after the 1964 disturbances. Now, a little over a year later, with Labour back in power, Churchill laid to rest and American troops fighting in Vietnam, Yarmouth braced itself for invading armies…..leathers, anoraks and crash helmets likely to put buckets, spades and kiss-me-quick hats in the shade. An air of apprehension loomed


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over Regent Road as I strolled towards the seafront in search of some truth behind this new Bank Holiday phenomenon.

GENTLER GOING – plenty of smiles to the gallon with this Yarmouth transport. Comedian Jack Douglas at the wheel of a veteran Ford model during a summer show run in the 1960s. I demonstrated readiness for serious business by removing jacket and loosening tie on meeting with photographer colleague Les Gould. We approached one of several police contingents placed strategically between Britannia Pier and the Pleasure Beach to keep any rival factions apart as crowds and temperatures built. We were warned to be careful by a grim-faced inspector notorious for lack of tolerance towards visitors bent on anti-social behaviour. Prosecuting regularly at the town’s magistrate’s court when young offenders were brought to book, he insisted several of them had deliberately smartened up to face the bench. His line of questioning concentrated on the length of their hair and the flavour of their language towards custodians of the law at

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the time of their alleged offences. As his own silvery locks had all but disappeared, and his clipped tones smacked of the archetype stage policeman, these courtroom confrontations seemed rather comically one-sided. On one famous occasion, however, a young tearaway caused the inspector to splutter and call for the stiffest sentence possible when he gently inquired if all balding policemen had it in for hairy teenagers out for a good time. We promised to heed the good officer’s advice on our tour of inspection along the Golden Mile. Les chatted and clicked wherever he found knots of motorcycle enthusiasts, mostly regular callers at the resort anxious to distance themselves from any unruly antics likely to be perpetrated by Rockers. We were mixing, mardling and musing what all the fuss might be about when up went the cry: “They’re on the beach!” I knew that didn’t refer to donkeys or deckchair attendants and so joined the human flood pouring towards the golden sands. About two dozen leather-clad figures were being given a very wide berth as they snaked provocatively from under the Wellington Pier into the glaring holiday spotlight. They punched the air turning blue with crude chants and snatches of songs unlikely to feature on any summer show programme. There was no sign of opposition to this grubby formation team. Gradually, deep fear gave way to mild curiosity among rows of onlookers congregated close to the model village. “What on earth are they doing?” asked an elderly man in a flat cap and with a rolled up mackintosh under his arm. His incredulity was spiced with the sort of sweeping gesture I had seen many times in chapel pulpits. This was my cue for an evangelical mission into the unknown. Plenty of uniformed police about and I could hardly be mistaken for Mod or Rocker. I clambered over the wall, girded my loins, cleared my throat and called to a couple of stragglers in the leather-clad party. They stopped, turned, stared, sneered and inquired something along the lines as to what did they owe the inestimable pleasure of this homely interruption to their gentle routine. I took such smooth talk in my sandy stride, assuring them I was not a copper in plain clothes but just a humble scribe seeking a few Bank Holiday paragraphs. Just doing my job. “Why on earth have you come?” I offered as the subject for debate. They appeared to be signalling for their official spokesman at the head of the column when, out of nowhere, two policemen pounced. I had no option but to go quietly


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BANK HOLIDAY BIKERS – police and trippers look on with interest as leather-clad bikers meet on Yarmouth seafront on August Bank Holiday Monday in 1965 while rumours abound of Mods v Rockers confrontations.


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as my new-found friends rejoined their galloping colleagues near the water’s edge. The policemen suggested they were removing me from the beach for my own safety, and if I had any sense I would stay well clear of undesirable elements for the rest of the holiday. They did stop short of threatening me with a certain inspector whose silvery locks had all but disappeared. But when I saw him in court the following week – I was there as a reporter – he did ask, with just a hint of a smirk, if too much sun could make a young pressman go off his rocker…

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Captain Boyton’s band of hopefuls ‘A

ll work and no play’ hardly introduced itself as the most obligatory headline of the era. We needed the odd diversion after countless committee meetings, court hearings, golden weddings, council debates, annual dinners, missing pets, tearful reunions, sporting fixtures and occasional off-beat stories starring a defecting circus acrobat or a battling onearmed wrestler.

Young reporters working at different district offices often met up for social events. The Yarmouth crew even rolled out the welcome mat for colleagues posted ‘over the border’ at Beccles and Lowestoft. Such was the cosmopolitan spirit urging on our creative cultural crusade in the mid-1960s.We flaunted acting talents on a series of low-budget, high-octane feature films that might have required sub-titles in Cannes, Montreux, Hollywood or the other side of Southwold. Photographer Alan Howard, plying his trade in and around King’s Lynn, was the talented one-man camera and sound crew in studio and on location. He provided the same sort of all-purpose expertise as Captain Boyton’s Benefit Band bid for stardom after an impromptu jam session clearly signalled danger to those promising lads The Beatles and Rolling Stones. I couldn’t read music. I hadn’t mastered an instrument. I didn’t know one end of a plug from the other. So they appointed me lead singer without hesitation on the strength of a powerful rendition of Wilson Pickett’s Midnight Hour, offering full range to my soulful falsetto and uninhibited defiance of most musical rules. The Norfolk Sound was born – later cultivated for public relations purposes into The Sugar Beat – and I had to learn the words of at least two other songs. My repertoire expanded dramatically as eager mates showed they really meant business with a number of home-made compositions. I chipped in with Banquo’s Ghost, a meaty answer to A Whiter Shade of Pale, that massive hit for Procul Harum.


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BAND OF HOPE – rehearsal time for five creative press reporters making up Captain Boyton’s Benefit Band. Left to right – Charlie Catchpole (guitar), David Wakefield (keyboard), Keith Skipper (lead singer), Sid Langley (guitar) and Dick Watts (drums). My warbling excursions were cheerfully suffered, and intermittently followed, by Sid Langley and Charlie Catchpole on guitar, David Wakefield at the keyboard and Dick Watts masquerading as a musician on drums. Dick, first of the group’s rather languid beat merchants, evidently won the role after ‘borrowing’ a snare drum belonging to Bob Sheldrake at the King’s Head pub in Dereham. This was Dick’s home town, but the full story behind this harmonious arrangement has yet to be revealed. Other press chums made guest appearances as reputations flowered, Frank Gordon’s contribution on cowbell for San Francisco Bay Blues generally voted most notable. Why Captain Boyton’s Benefit Band, clearly the signpost to an age-defining Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a few years later? Well, someone spotted an advert in an old newspaper and suggested this colourful character could be the perfect mascot or role model for young hopefuls aiming to negotiate choppy waters around the popular music scene. Captain Paul Boyton became the first man to swim across the English Channel on April 11, 1875 – four months before Captain Matthew Webb. However, because Boyton was

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COURT WARBLING – I was out to prove myself a good judge of a song as fame beckoned on the pop music circuit.


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assisted by a small sail attached to his foot and a paddle which he used as a rudder, Webb was credited as first in the record books. The redoubtable Boyton also wore an inflatable life-saving suit. He set off from Boulogne, floated on his back and propelled himself with his hands. Such inventive thinking soon became the hallmark of our rehearsals, recording sessions and occasional public performances. A Saturday night session at the old Fruiterers’ Arms pub in Norwich earned free beer and several fresh admirers, not least with a blues-tinged version of Pick a Bale of Cotton, the like of which we were assured had not been heard before in this hostelry… or anywhere else. We shunned all requests for Bob Dylan numbers, even though a recent band outing to Leicester’s de Montfort Hall to see and hear the folk singing icon put him on our shortlist of performers almost ready for the Norfolk treatment. Ambitions reached a pulsating peak when we were invited to take examples of our work for an airing to sound judges waiting expectantly along Tin Pan Alley. The train trip to London was crammed with plans for a large mansion in the country, complete with modern studios, swimming pool, cricket pitch, spacious library, willing staff, helicopter pad and an in-house tailor with a sense of humour. Sid put in a special request for a new Gibson guitar. Charlie said he was looking forward to international travel and adulation. I wondered how I would cope on being lured outside Norfolk. A large but friendly woman in a green velvet suit and smoky glasses at Chappell’s Music tapped her fingers encouragingly on an important-looking desk and then put our tapes into various lockers according to how she rated chances of placing them with leading artists of the time. She had particularly high hopes of a catchy little thing called Here on the Ceiling Everything’s Fine. “Kenny Ball might like that!” she enthused without the slightest hint that we might like to record it ourselves. We left somewhat deflated but not without hope of a future on the lucrative musical wing of show business. Kenny Ball was not tempted. We got a very nice letter of thanks, urging renewed efforts to fashion a breakthrough. We didn’t toss aside the day jobs. The blessed newspaper industry continued to pay our wages, hone our writing skills and leave us free to dream on of fame and fortune, while court cases unfolded, local councillors argued and missing dogs turned up after five days travelling on the back of a lorry to Aberdeen and back.

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Keir Hardie and the bear facts left Yarmouth and Gorleston, ‘the resorts that have everything’, with some reluctance after nearly three years of living, working and playing by the seaside. Perhaps I sensed my departure might prove a decisive blow in any campaign to cut off old-fashioned breezes still ruffling beehives and quiffs along the Golden Mile.

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In truth, this part of the east coast was vastly different to how I found it first as a wide-eyed schoolboy from the country a decade earlier. Package holidays abroad were now beginning to eat into the traditional family market. Fears that television’s growing tentacles could soon squeeze much of the life and novelty out of live shows reverberated around many a box office. The North Sea search for oil and gas filled some of the gaps left by the swift decline of the fishing industry, but shrewd operators knew this bonanza would be relatively short-lived. The rise of a self-catering army on sprawling caravan sites threatened the boarding house empire. While the theme park mentality had yet to take over the leisure industry, it was apparent how more ‘sophisticated’ tastes must reach the bucket-and-spade brigade. Amusement arcades with flashing lights and siren voices were multiplying at a remarkable rate to provide under-cover alternatives to simple fresh air pleasures like riding donkeys, building sandcastles and reflecting on life by the boating lake. Some of us still looked for Peggotty’s upturned vessel providing homely shelter on the beach and listened intently for John Knowlittle’s natural tones echoing across Breydon Water. But the wind of change was gathering force as I packed my bags and typewriter to head back inland in 1967.


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Most return visits leave me with mixed feelings, suitable enough for a big corner of Norfolk nursing an identity crisis. Yarmouth’s problems, social and economic, have been fully chronicled in recent times, but it seems to me that some could stem from a fundamental lack of direction. Does it want to be a national playground, retirement haven, port with renewed purpose or a leading industrial base? It cannot cope with all these objectives, and too many folk simply cite ‘poor communications’ as the only spur for any sharp criticisms of what is – or is not – going on either side of the Haven Bridge. I reckon those giant wind turbines squatting on Scroby Sands sum up the dilemma fairly well… “Look, fresh energy waiting to surge ashore. Where do you want it?” My supplies were seriously tested upon occasions when Yarmouth’s nightlife claimed too much of my attention, and I added to yawning-after feelings by volunteering regularly for duties on the annual dinner circuit. This arena widened as I cultivated close links with local sports clubs and organisations, an obvious pointer to the path my newspaper career was destined to follow. While my love affair with cricket inspired a return to active service (of a kind) with Caister CC, I honed my soccer reporting skills trying to keep warm watching Yarmouth and Gorleston chase points and cup glory. The Bloaters were a useful force in the Eastern Counties League, particularly on home ground at The Wellesley, while the Greens operated in the old Norfolk and Suffolk League, prompted by colourful characters such as trainer Titch Proudfoot and secretary Sid Walker. While sport increasingly dominated my notebooks, there were dramatic diversions along the general newsgathering trail. Like winning a massive teddy bear at a hospital fete and having the wind put up me by a fortune-teller on the Pleasure Beach. I felt silly escorting my new-found furry friend back to the office where more academically-gifted colleagues christened him Keir Hardie out of deference to my alleged left-leaning political tendencies of the time. He sat stoically at my desk for a week, keeping his views very much to himself before he found permanent lodgings at a local children’s home. The fortuneteller indicated palmy days ahead as she sized up my lifelines, but gave me a nasty turn when she included “early marriage prospects” in a flurry of forecasts. Noting this sudden unease, she added quickly that my early attempts to grow a beard might hold up the wedding march for a spell. I’m not sure if she had a full 17 years in mind, even if Norfolk prognostications do tend to wander on a bit. But it did take a fair while for the beard to find respectability.

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PALMY DAYS – a fortune-teller on Yarmouth’s Pleasure Beach scrutinises the Skipper lifeline… and gives me a nasty turn.


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The biggest scoop of my coastal career resulted from exemplary tidiness. My desk was a mess, with or without a teddy bear minder, but I always wore a tie and washed behind my ears. That made me a natural choice to go downstairs to the front counter to meet members of the public carrying hot snippets of news, a potato looking uncannily like Rolf Harris or an invitation to attend the annual meeting of Petroleum Wives. One sunny afternoon I answered the call to confront a disgruntled holidaymaker… A coloured man from Bolton claimed he had been told to leave his hotel near the seafront, along with his white wife, as a result of “complaints from other guests”. He said the whole sorry business was racially motivated and deserved to be exposed. A major story, and it was decided to keep it as an exclusive for the weekly paper rather than share it with our Eastern Daily Press colleagues on the floor above. I organised a photograph of the Bolton couple in a nearby park, bypassing staff cameraman Les Gould, who was duty bound to serve both papers, and calling on his freelance photographer son, Ivan instead. I chased key figures in the local holiday trade, civic and political leaders, other guests prepared to talk at the establishment concerned and the hotelier at the heart of all the allegations. There was a case to answer and my carefullyconstructed scoop ran under banner headlines on the front page of the Yarmouth Mercury. It didn’t take a fortune-teller to predict another top-level ‘debate’ between weekly editor Wilfred Bunting and daily paper chief reporter Joe Harrison. The climate was distinctly frosty for some weeks. I looked for a teddy bear to hide behind and told myself it could be safer following football and cricket.

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NEWS TEDLINES – I had to write up the bear facts after winning this giant companion at a Yarmouth hospital fete.


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Learning trade on weekly treadmill ike many young reporters at the time, I treated my arrival at city headquarters as due recognition of burgeoning talent and burning ambition. The Sixties were still swinging as I entered the portals of the Redwell Street empire. But I had to slow down to tea-dance mode before they’d let me loose in the disco.

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FRONT COUNTER GIRLS at the Redwell Street local newspaper headquarters in Norwich, opened in 1959.


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There were no immediate vacancies on either daily or evening sports desks, and so I spent nine months learning enough steps to become a useful subeditor on the Norwich Mercury Series of weekly papers. It was a valuable gestation period, writing headlines, correcting grammar and spelling, shaping stories and preparing full pages for the hot-metal presses clattering away at the rear of this imposing building in the parish of St Andrew. Although I yearned for regular sporting dramas, this concentration on funerals and flower shows, retirements and rates precepts, speech days and speed limits, marriages and Mothers’ Union meetings reminded me how ‘ordinary’ folk and ‘ordinary’ events were at the heart of all our provincial productions. A ready feel for words, allied to a sense of humour honed on instant responses to juice-extracting colleagues in my Yarmouth office days, meant the most mundane of stories could offer a cheerful challenge. We had a weekly competition for the most inspired wedding headline, something a bit more uplifting than the usual round of ‘Honeymoon in Suffolk’, ‘Colleagues gave cutlery’, ‘Bride’s mother made dresses’ and ‘Couple met in canteen’. We waited in vain for ‘Seething bride for Little Snoring man’, ‘Teachers to live in Scole’, ‘Thatcher wed in Stratton Strawless’ and ‘Miss from Diss envelops postman’. I got highly excited over the prospect of ‘Father marries his son’ – he was a vicar, you see, and officiated at the family ceremony – but that was ruled out on the grounds of poor taste and being rather misleading. I fared no better with the dairy farmer’s daughter who had an impressive bouquet. ‘Bride carried friesians’ got a few chuckles but didn’t make the society page of the Dereham and Fakenham Times. I recall one report form sent in by a village correspondent telling us ‘the union was consummated in the vestry’ while another highlighted the bride’s confectioner uncle who apparently ‘laid on the buffet’. Considerable care had to be taken at our end when it came to avoiding double entendres over vicars, organs, matrons of honour and honeymoons on the Broads. Funeral reports could hold their dangers as well … I still grimace over a misprint which led to a prominent and well respected character taking the salute for having ‘loved in the same village all his life’. Fortunately, his widow saw the amusing side and didn’t demand an apology. (Just as well, really, in case it was changed to ‘livid’ this time.)

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THE WEEKLY BRIGADE. Norwich Mercury Series staff and sub-editors getting down to business in the 1960s. Back row: (l to r) Cliff Butler, editor; Don Gay; Jimmy Reeve, picture editor. Front (l to r) Basil Brownless; Don Stanley; Cecil Riseborough, sports editor. Chief sub-editor Reg Hardy, a steady but affable Yorkshireman, gradually singled me out to come up with a light touch for certain stories. This responsibility, he felt, might ensure full attention to duty for a fair part of the shift. I obliged with ‘a proud mealstone’ for a long-serving school cook, ‘plan ratified’ for a council rodent operative and ‘Securiclaw’ to mark round-the-clock protection for prize exhibits at a Norwich cat show. Reg confided later how he and his colleagues had been mightily impressed a year or so before I arrived on reading my headline on the Yarmouth Mercury sports page over the report of a showbiz football match in which comedian Bernie Winters had shone – ‘Winter’s B, jinking jester, notches three in goals fiesta’. So that formed my poetic passport to the magic land of Mercury subs!


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This was a world of paste pots, pencils, scissors, rulers, piles of paper and spikes, and a brand of camaraderie that kept the general climate amiable despite long hours of churning out columns for six broadsheet weekly newspapers, including one for the city itself. Cliff Butler, editor of the series for 20 years, smiled paternally and offered scholarly advice from his special corner. Deputy Don Stanley remained on active service among the trays of copy. Picture editor Jimmy Reeve, a former Navy man awash with yarns, and sports editor Cecil Riseborough, a diminutive figure invariably peeping through pipe smoke and brushing away ash, stood out as other genial seniors anxious to encourage a young newcomer. “It isn’t spectacular in here, but it will be a good grounding for you” confided Jimmy one day, as he sized up two more fete pictures for the North Norfolk News. Having worked on three different weekly papers, at Thetford, Dereham and Yarmouth, I appreciated the ‘treadmill’ conditions in which our news providers operated. Many had to serve several masters, sending stories and pictures to the daily and evening papers – and also the Pink ‘Un soccer special – before getting round to us. There were many occasions when the door to our room should have been marked ‘poor relations’. But whenever I felt like groaning at the injustice of it all, in would come a bulging parcel of Beccles and Bungay Journal copy. Chief reporter Gerald Lawson was a legend in the Waveney Valley, a prodigious chronicler who knew everyone in the area and everything going on. He subbed his own stories, meticulously prepared and unfailingly accurate, so they simply needed headlines and thanks for old-fashioned virtues. His Pedlar column to fill the back page surely belonged to the golden age of provincial essayists. He could write reams after a short break in Scotland where he happened to bump into a half-cousin of the man who used to look after the war memorial in Bungay… I retain the warmest affection for weekly papers and those who keep them going. Nine months as a Mercury sub did far more than add a useful line to my list of credentials. They taught me to respect news – and the people who make it – at all levels, at all times. A useful lesson before I embarked on a decade of trying to make sense of sport in general and professional soccer in particular.

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Royal opening’s pigeon flypast arly fixtures on the sports desk suggested someone might have been rather economical with the truth when advising me about likely rations of excitement and glamour.

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A stewards’ inquiry into the result of the 3.15 race at Pontefract, or a horse bolting before the start of the 4.05 at Yarmouth, had to satisfy my lust for instant drama. A cut-and-thrust struggle at the top of the Norwich Cribbage League, or an inquest into the number of local pigeons blown off course on their way home from Boulogne, were top candidates for my headline-writing flair. Then came an endless stream of labels to stick on tenpin bowling, table tennis, hockey and darts results and positions. Just a few of the more tantalising ingredients on the Eastern Evening News sporting menu six nights a week – plus the rich bonus of piecing together latest soccer details with the Pink’Un on a Saturday afternoon. All good grist to the Norfolk mill, but I yearned to sort out the wheat from the chaff in top arenas like Carrow Road. But just as I had to wait for a vacancy on the sports staff – I nipped in when Frank Shipp sailed on – so was my patience tested by the reluctance of a seasoned scribe to vacate the perch from which he observed how often Canaries could flutter to deceive. Dick Scales kept me hanging in for a couple of campaigns before taking a post outside journalism. He warned me that writing constantly about Norwich City’s affairs could be a draining experience, not least because it was simply impossible to keep on the right side of players, managers, directors, referees and supporters at the same time. “You won’t always get thanked for trying to be honest” he added, a line that came back to haunt me on many occasions during the seven seasons I spent recording the ups and downs of an outfit where paranoia over press criticism often became too ingrained for comfort.


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BRUCE ROBINSON – kindly and encouraging colleague on the soccer reporting beat. Bruce Robinson, my first colleague on the Carrow Road reporting beat as he plied his trade for the Eastern Daily Press, was already well-versed in the vagaries of such a calling. He had kicked off in 1960, covering a Boxing Day clash in the snow at Mansfield ‘because no-one else wanted to do it’. A clear pointer to me not to get carried away with any notion that this job had to be the epitome of beer and skittles. A kindly, encouraging character who brought a studious approach to the frenetic world of professional football, Bruce confided years later how he always considered me rather ill at ease with a game I wanted to be a freewheeling entertainment rather than a moneyloaded business. A perceptive assessment from a good friend. It’s worth emphasising here the paternal role played by sports editor Ted Bell as I geared up for a drastic change of lifestyle. He fed my enthusiasms rather than dwell on obvious shortcomings, but also pointed out potential potholes on the reporting road ahead. Ted, a gifted all-rounder at work and play, had covered City’s affairs and witnessed at first hand how contrasting fortunes could make such an impact on club and public alike. The crisis of 1957 all but put Norwich City out of existence, while glorious FA Cup exploits two years later took the Canaries to the very threshold of Wembley Stadium. Now they

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were aiming to reach Division One for the first time under a no-nonsense manager called Ron Saunders. “He eats young reporters for breakfast” said Ted with his customary smile, but levering a bit more foreboding into his tone than usual.

TED BELL – gifted sports editor who played the paternal role. I guess the assumption was that if I could withstand an early examination by the hard man from Birkenhead – and he wasn’t too heavily into Norfolk dialect or humour as far as I knew – then away-day tickets to the splendours of Millwall, Carlisle, Swindon and Cardiff would be in order. Just as I contemplated such heady pleasures, we had to leave our cosy press dug-out at Redwell Street and move into new headquarters on an elevated site in Rouen Road. Now was the time to put to the test that stirring battle cry which had boomed across the office whenever something went wrong: “It’ll all come right in the new building!” I recall a suggestion box to catch as many ideas as possible for a name to go with our upheaval. With that traditional journalistic mixture of cynicism, irreverence and dark humour, Smug Towers, Ruin Road and Eastern Daily Depress were added to the collection after a lively session in the Wild Man snug. My


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proposal for Font of Knowledge (or Norwich) was dismissed as being too clever by half – and so Prospect House was officially opened in 1970. The weekend of the big switch was meticulously planned like a military manoeuvre. All linotype machines were taken out of the Redwell Street premises after the Pink’Un was finished on Saturday night and set up in time to print the Eastern Daily Press on Monday. Princess Alexandra found time for a chat with the sports staff when she opened our new headquarters in April. My colleague Colin Bevan, on a short-term stay from the general reporters’ room was putting his back into a big pile of results. “What are those?” inquired the royal visitor. “Pigeons, ma’am” replied Colin, without a hint of the heavy sigh normally associated with such a chore. I told the princess I did my share but hoped for a flighty future dominated by Canaries. Her nod and smile indicated she had some idea what this featherbrained scribe was on about.

ROYAL TOUR – Princess Alexandra watches Colin Bevan at work at the sports desk as I look on during the big opening day at Prospect House in 1970. 130


‘I’m a reporter – not a supporter!’ ardly a fair fight – the scrawny lad from Beeston up against the hard man from Birkenhead. But I survived, notepad, pencil and principles largely intact, after four years of regular buffeting, occasional bullying and one period of complete banishment.

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My debut on the Norwich City reporting scene coincided with the arrival of Ron Saunders, City’s tenth manager since the war and by far the highest paid in the club’s history. He had carved out a reputation as an uncompromising centre-forward in playing days with Gillingham, Portsmouth, Watford and Charlton. He had cut his managerial teeth on tough and unglamorous tasks at Yeovil and Oxford United, showing the sort of unyielding qualities the Canaries felt they needed at this time. A strict disciplinarian, he nailed up his working man’s creed immediately on booking in at Carrow Road during the summer of 1969. Our first proper conversation, him stripped to the waist and flexing muscles and me fiddling with a loose tie and mopping anxious brow, made it clear what sort of relationship he wanted. “I don’t expect you to keep going on about past glories, especially that FA Cup run ten years ago. That’s history… I’m here to write a new chapter of success, and I’ll do it my way.” A proud boast and stark warning rolled into one. Sweeping changes didn’t end at putting players through a training mangle that wrung out enough sweat to sink the River End. It wasn’t long before this nononsense boss saw fit to tamper with sacred Canary ideology on the terraces in the name of progress. On The Ball, City!, the anthem destined to strike naked fear into opponents with such spellbinding force during that blessed cup run in 1959, was suddenly dismissed as a bit of a dirge. I mustered the temerity to suggest to Mr Saunders later in his reign that he hadn’t heard it sweep across


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the pitch with heart rending fervour simply because his teams and their style never inspired it.

STRIPPED FOR ACTION on the training beat, Ron Saunders spared no feelings before the start of a new Norwich City season. He despised what he saw as smart-alec replies or any kind of droll observation at the expense of his tactics or personnel. He never came to terms with my Norfolk asides. I stood firm regarding the distinction between reflecting public opinion and trying to sway it. “I’m a reporter, not a supporter” was my line liable to push him to the fringes of apoplexy. He made little allowance for such individual freedoms when it came to getting close to his well-drilled ranks. He threw a fiercely protective shield around his charges, especially as complaints hardened over an ultra-caution approach to away fixtures. If there were any brickbats to be hurled about, he’d see to that in the privacy of the dressing-room. He plotted a deliberate course towards some kind of ogre figure he deemed necessary to shake up the weak-hearted. At times that meant the manager resented any sort of outside judgement on what he was striving to achieve on thin resources. My genuine efforts to be fair – and I constantly told him how I lived and worked among many die-hard supporters – scarcely made an impression. Our differ-

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ences of opinion boiled over into open warfare after an article criticising one of his key players, forward Peter Silvester. “For Pete’s sake, goals must come!” ran the headline over my considered piece in the Eastern Evening News on Ron’s first Carrow Road signing. I refused to apologise after a heated debate on the team bus – and took the clear hint to disembark at Newmarket.

PETER SILVESTER, who was Ron Saunders’ first signing at Carrow Road, leads the training pack as they jump to it on the slopes of Mousehold. Still a few miles to go to get to Blackpool, so I caught a bus to Cambridge, boarded a train to Lancashire and arrived at the seaside hotel a few minutes before the official Norwich City party. I waited in the foyer to ask Ron if they had enjoyed a good journey. I’m still surprised I was fit enough to take my place in the reporters’ box the following day. We went weeks without discussing club activities in any depth. I picked up team news by phone, fully aware that the manager was listening in the event of my providing any well-chosen comments about his selection. I was banished from the Carrow Road boardroom after home games while general access to players and officials was blocked. It made my job difficult but I became even more determined to write it as I saw it. Ironically, players I did bump into away


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from the ground were largely sympathetic to my cause – but they daren’t tell the manager so. Peter Silvester told me 30 years later, at a happy reunion of the promotion-winning squad of 1972, that he and his wife (pregnant at the time) did not take serious exception to that notorious article which saw me forced to make fresh travel plans to Blackpool. Ron did mellow a little towards me, not least when it became clear his paradeground methods could reap rewards. Even so, he remained suspicious of me in particular and reporters in general. There was more than a hint of ‘I told you so!’ behind the smile and clenched fist on the night of April 24, 1972 when City won 2:1 at Orient to clinch promotion to Division One for the first time. They made sure of the championship at Watford in the rain the following Saturday with a 1:1 draw. The end certainly justified the means for the hard man from Birkenhead. Yes, he transformed a club with a Second Division complex into title material inside three seasons. He also paved the way to Wembley for the first time in the club’s history with his brand of true grit fashioned on the testing slopes of Mousehold on the city’s outskirts. He regarded briar patches as inevitable before the chance came to sniff the roses. He believed piles of graft could compensate for limitations in skill. In short, he banked on sweat and dedication rather than the cheque book. I admired his achievements, particularly as his path to glory was dotted with austerity signs. He stands tall in Norwich City history as a manager who made plenty out of little. For all that, he should have accepted an automatic right for sports reporters to honestly reflect their own opinions and the feelings of thousands of spectators at a match where artistry and ambition surrendered all too blatantly to stifling caution. There were plenty of games like that before the promotion sun came out. He didn’t get on much better with chairman Arthur South, and a prolonged battle between “two hard men” came to a head in November, 1973. Ron Saunders wrote out his resignation an hour after a 3:1 home defeat by Everton. He moved to Manchester City, as widely predicted, and then to Aston Villa. It was there that he banished me from a post-match conference when the Canaries paid a visit. He didn’t like some of the things I’d written on his departure from Norfolk. “You didn’t go a lot on some of the things I wrote when you were there” I offered, as a parting shot. I didn’t hang around to see if he smiled.

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Bondwagon hits colourful trail alk about a game of two halves! Ron Saunders, dour and dogmatic, stepped aside for John Bond, all colour and controversy, midway through my stint as a fearless scribe covering the fortunes or otherwise of Norwich City Football Club.

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Such a contrast in styles, especially towards an ever-hungry publicity machine, often caused me to wonder if this was the same club pursuing the same goals in the same sport. One Fleet Street veteran, who had seen more soccer managers come and go than I’d eaten late breakfasts, suggested a few months into Bond’s reign that drastic surgery could be the answer. “If you could melt down those two and mix the steel and organisation of one with the flair and flamboyance of the other, reckon that’d produce just about the perfect boss.” Bond courted the media shamelessly. He wanted the limelight as badly as any of his players, but often needed protecting from this non-stop passion to oblige. Cynical operators chasing juicy headlines for the national tabloids made him a regular target. He seemed genuinely shocked when they held him out to dry. Big John wore his heart on his sleeve, not least when his side fell below expectations or a hapless referee made the sort of debatable decisions officials are bound to deliver as a matter of course. The after-match scrum demanded another hefty push of the ‘Bondwagon’ towards most inflammable quotes of the day. I lost count of the number of times the Canary manager dived head first into water hot enough to attract the attention of top FA officials. I devised a weekend format designed to restore a measure of calm and balance to a scene dominated by regular doses of Saturday teatime fever. With the dust settled and main agitators returned to the capital, I then asked Mr Bond for his more considered opinions on a quiet Sunday afternoon. This might


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spell a much more reasoned digest for local Monday morning readers, but such a pragmatic approach backfired occasionally when my editorial lords and masters seriously questioned decisions to ignore most of the manufactured nonsense decorating Sunday’s national back pages! Perhaps the clearest example of Norwich’s so-helpful boss being set up for a fall came on the eve of the 1975 League Cup Final at Wembley against Aston Villa, managed by none other than Ron ‘actions-speak-louder-than-words’ Saunders. Two seasons before, he had taken the Canaries to their first Wembley appearance in the same competition. They lost by the only goal to Spurs and were widely dismissed as country bores better suited to a gruelling relegation struggle. A beaming Bond was easily persuaded by a notorious tabloid teaser to pledge it wouldn’t happen again. This Norwich side would throw caution to the wind and show boring old Ron how adventure brings its own rewards. Villa won by the only goal in another instantly forgettable showpiece. For me, highlight of the day was the sight of a white-suited John Bond strutting down the team’s hotel stairs like a nimble-footed John Wayne to rouse deflated troops and deflect them towards Talk of the Town for an audience with his favourite singer, Lena Martell. He could turn on the style – and it counted most when human frailties were cruelly exposed – but there was never enough consistency or order in reactions to lift him into the management elite.

JOHN BOND – wore his heart on his sleeve.

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Certainly, Carrow Road became a far more colourful and welcome place under the Bond banner. His Canaries soon unpeeled that well-stuck label for being boring travellers. However, racy headlines and a reputation for cigar-and-champagne living in a modest abode could not hide basic flaws on and off the pitch before he followed his predecessor in seeking Maine Road success at Manchester City. Ironically, both former Carrow Road overseers, so different in approach, found that challenge too daunting at a bigger club where man management took up far too much time.

KEN BROWN – a perfect foil at Carrow Road. John Bond’s faithful henchman, the ever-cheerful Ken Brown, was a perfect foil during their Norwich years together. He mended fences his impulsive colleague trampled down. He consoled and then rebuilt the confidence of a player pilloried in public, explained carefully to a waiting reporter what had really been meant by that comment about “barmy pensioners who run the game” and generally picked up all the litter of discontent and rumour strewn around the place. Useful training for the day he took over as his old friend outgrew the Norfolk stage. Ken was the ideal No.2. The fact he survived seven


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years as No. 1 – and led Norwich to an overdue first Wembley success in 1985 – underlined plenty of genuine qualities to go with that easy-going manner and infectious sense of humour.

GEOFFREY WATLING – in the hot-seat before Sir Arthur. John Bond enjoyed a mainly happy relationship with chairman Sir Arthur South and other directors during his Carrow Road years, although there was plenty of political intrigue going on in the boardroom. This exploded into the open in April, 1976 when Sir Arthur and previous chairman Geoffrey Watling became embroiled in violent verbal exchanges in front of me and other local newspaper colleagues. A complex affair, with Sir Arthur’s private life trawled out for public inspection by national tabloid tormentors, but he survived to carry on trying to make some sense of an increasingly volatile business. Although I continued to keep a close eye on Carrow Road affairs, and resumed regular links as a match summariser when BBC Radio Norfolk arrived, my fulltime involvement ended before the 1980s came out of the dug-out. Frankly, I’d had enough of football for breakfast, dinner, tea and supper – even if it had been a rich and varied diet.

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Set ‘em alight on the night! teasing quiz question from the 1970s – what do Carrow Road, Old Trafford and Rackheath Village Hall have in common? Right on cue comes the answer – they all attract performers with a flair for theatricals.

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PANTOMIME FUN at Rackheath Village Hall as the cast of Witch Woolydrawers line up for festive action. Regular scriptwriter Ted Bell is on the extreme right brushing up his lines. As I pose with hat and pipe, I realise time is short to learn mine before curtain up.


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It seemed perfectly natural to spend much of my leisure time away from the antics of professional footballers as a homely enthusiast on stage with colleagues and friends ready to risk reputations, test poor memories and prove that the art of coarse acting had a few memorable scenes to go. I returned to the greasepaint nearly a decade after captivating Thetford audiences as a lisping, lecherous icon of Ancient Greek fashion, short on toga but long on innuendo, in the Festival Players’ production of Rape of the Belt. Here was a chance to show how rich promise could be transformed into dramatic consistency. Well, Rackheath Players provided a remarkably tolerant base for my disparate talents (make that desperate on at least two occasions), fully accepting how all-rounders are bound to find some material more to their liking than others. I made a useful old-tyme musical hall chairman, banging the gavel on time, gently mocking artists and audiences in turn and bravely forcing down the occasional pint of best bitter. I relished the licence to be silly and to drop ad libs all over the place in pantomime romps where it could be boasted proudly that one performance bore little resemblance to the next. Then came ‘serious plays’ in all their structured glory… I found the chasm too wide between free-spirit arenas and strict rehearsal rooms for proper thespians. To their credit, Ted and Bunny Bell, our long-serving inspirational leaders on and off stage, loved to ring the cast changes and set up bold challenges. Ted, writer, musician, producer and performer, brought the same gentle coaxing qualities to this village temple of culture as he displayed throughout his years as benevolent sports editor on the local paper. He could persuade you to reach for parts many others would be happy to see left hidden. Press colleague Colin Bevan shared with me a general reluctance to show how well we knew our lines until a few hours before the curtain went up. Such confidence was not always matched by other cast members despite regular reassurances over convivial post-drama drinks at local watering-holes, The Green Man and Sole and Heel. “It’ll be all right on the night!” we chorused before going into one of those off-the-cuff routines designed to prove our artistic instincts were ready for anything. We walked a tightrope several times in Boeing Boeing, a madcap comedy ringing with the sound of doors opening and shutting, quick-fire exchanges and frantic ruses to keep air hostess protagonists apart. The girls worked wonders to prevent

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us landing in the wrong scene, or even the wrong act, and we were scared enough to hide away to polish up our prose and cues after a turbulent opening flight. My two most outstanding moments on stage at Rackheath both involved old friend David Long, commonly known as Tosh. He’s still going strong in a variety of demanding roles in North Norfolk productions. We were teamed together in Madame Tic-Tac, a thriller in which I played a small-time gangster destined for an untidy end. Tosh curtailed my James Cagney-meets-a-cockneysparrer cameo with a well-directed bullet. I breathed my last with some glee as those left standing had two more acts in which to thicken the plot. Then, halfway through the run – ‘Must end Saturday’ some wag added to the notice at the door on Wednesday – my demise almost turned into an act of instant cremation. As I slumped to the floor and the curtains shuddered, a box of matches in my trousers pocket caught fire. “He’s not dead!” yelled a spellbound lad in the front row. “I saw him move!” I may have twitched as the curtains swished but that had nothing on the “get-‘em-off!” drama played out in the wings when I did the resurrection shuffle and shed all inhibitions to get rid of a truly hazardous prop. Act two of my embarrassing saga arrived as I appeared as Count de Moret in The Noble Spaniard, a comedy by W. Somerset Maugham, from the French by Grenet-Dancourt. (My Norfolk accent was no barrier to multi-cultural swagger). Suddenly, it was “alors, alors!” as my aristocratic mind went blank in mid-sentence. I sought some kind of refuge in a tasteful pirouette towards the edge of proceeding where sat the ever-alert Tosh on prompting duty. A broad grin couldn’t disguise my rising panic as he proffered the next line to salvage a floundering career. It didn’t ring a bell, so I bought a few seconds by pretending not to hear, leaning over and uttering in a wildly exaggerated French accent “PARRRR-DON?” The audience guffawed and applauded, seemingly convinced this little interlude came naturally from the script. I bowed, winked at Tosh, recovered my place in dramatic history and gave thanks for the great escape.


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A TENSE TABLEAU from Rackheath Players’ production of The Noble Spaniard, featuring (left to right) Evelyn Hooton, Malcolm Cooper, Margaret Canfor, Keith Skipper, Cherry Cooper, Bunny Bell and Bill Grant. Yes, Rackheath Players could offer a perfect foil to all those over-paid, underachieving prima donnas masquerading as clean-limbed, sporting role models on the glittering national soccer stage. We needed no prompting to pitch into our world of make-believe where fluffed lines, forgotten entrances and flimsy plots merely added to the fun. There’s no substitute for village hall enthusiasm. Not even when your mind goes completely blank.

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Loyal gentlemen of the press don’t think the label ‘role model’ was in circulation during my decade as a journalist based in Norwich. A lingering affection for the best traditions of our provincial trade made it more likely to look up to ‘the gentlemen of the press’. I admired most of those singled out for such grandiose salutes – and none more so than Eric Fowler.

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ERIC FOWLER – delighted readers for 35 years as Jonathan Mardle, essayist supreme.


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Like the majority of his generation, Eric came back from the Second World War to resume a newspaper career with renewed relish. He spent over three years in India before being demobbed in 1946 with the rank of captain. He returned to the Eastern Daily Press and his home city to delight a wide and devoted readership for the next 35 years as Jonathan Mardle, essayist supreme. Wednesday morning articles penned under that colourful pseudonym dipped in proud local ink cast Eric as one of the most able and authoritative craftsmen to work for the paper. He was an expert on Norfolk dialect, speaking and writing it with native resource and humour, and collections of his essays were also published in book form. In his introduction to Wednesday Mornings, a rich selection produced in 1956, Norfolk scholar and writer Ralph Ketton Cremer said: “In this transitional period of our local history we are fortunate that a writer with so lively a perception of scene and circumstance is observing and recording it all”. Made an MBE in 1968 for services to journalism, Eric retired from the newspaper staff six years later, an occasion marked by city and county at a unique gathering in Norwich, a ‘function of honour’ when leaders of local life paid warm tributes to his work. The Wednesday Mardles survived this watershed and he continued to warm his followers until the autumn of 1981. “What appeals to me most about East Anglia is the people. They are happy to live here and they are proud of it. They’ve got roots” he wrote, just before he died that year. Eric was also a regular lead writer for the EDP, enlivening many a dull if important subject with a delightfully crisp turn of phrase. He was not above consulting much younger characters around the office and I recall several late-evening chats as he attempted to put Carrow Road boardroom antics into some kind of reasonable perspective. Eric had painted memorable pictures of the Canaries’ epic FA Cup exploits in 1959 and continued to bring a measured editorial judgement on club affairs, especially when directors insisted on claiming more headlines than the players. We enjoyed numerous diversions dissecting our local dialect, my burgeoning interest in this strand of our heritage pushed towards a passion by Eric’s undoubted scholarship and readiness to share. He had been a close friend of Sidney Grapes, the homespun humorist from Potter Heigham whose Boy John Letters written in the Norfolk vernacular were a popular feature of the paper from 1946 until his death in 1958. Eric orchestrated their publication in two eager-awaited booklets, The Boy John with a yellow cover and The Boy

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John Again with blue, and also contributed his own telling volumes on Broad Norfolk to a growing stock of literary gems. They continue at the heart of the campaign to prove dialect delights still have a place in a hi-tech, high-pressure, high-tempo era. On a good day, I would thank Eric Fowler for paving my path to the wonderful world of local newspapers. On a bad day, I could easily blame him for another relentless round of cheerless chores. His visit to Hamond’s Grammar School in Swaffham in the year before I left clearly gave headmaster Major Besley a good idea as to what to do with me. Eric’s inspiring mardle, aimed at likely fodder for the provincial press trenches, prompted an immediate suggestion that I would like to drop a line to the Norfolk News Company offering my services to the joined-up writing cause. My spelling, grammar and punctuation must have shown signs of real promise as I was invited for an interview in the big city and offered a job as long as A level results in English and History came up to scratch. For all his star billing, Eric duly acknowledged qualities running through other members of the EDP Norwich team during that engrossing post-war era. Loyal pressmen like literary editor Mervyn Payne, who was also chairman of Taverham Magistrates; military correspondent and young reporters’ training officer Ralph Gray; picture editor, golf enthusiast and Eric’s main drinking companion at the Festival House Terry Hutson; chief photographer Don Rudd, whose permanently furrowed brow belied a lively sense of humour; chainsmoking music critic George Usher; agricultural editor and journalists’ union stalwart John Baker; softly-spoken night news editor Dick Castley; experienced columnists Rex Beaumont and Bob Walker. Just a few ‘gentlemen of the press’ who enhanced a company’s reputation for clarity and integrity. Of course, I owed much to the guidance and friendship of sports editor Ted Bell for sharpening my specialist interests deep into the 1970s. There are two other outstanding personalities on my main ‘thank you’ list, affection scarcely dimmed by admission that I was scared of them both! Alfred Jenner rose from apprentice reporter to general manager of Eastern Counties Newspapers in a career interrupted by four years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Alfred could totally disarm young reporters with a steely look – but it was amazing how much he knew about you, be it lack of a shorthand note or a love of dialect and darts. He forgave many of my shortcomings to ease a route to the sports desk.


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ALFRED JENNER – rose from apprentice reporter to general manager. Peter Roberts, a no-nonsense Welshman who settled in Norfolk after the last war, made a bold mark as editor in turn of the football Pink’Un, Eastern Evening News and Eastern Daily Press. He presided over record circulations, in the case of his beloved EDP from 64,000 to 91,000. He knew the vagaries and pitfalls of sports reporting, especially on the Norwich City beat, and was just as ready to defend his staff against what he deemed unwarranted interference as he was to chide them for falling below his own demanding standards.

PETER ROBERTS – presided over record circulations.

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Pranksters cheer up City travels he relationship was bound to be a tricky one at times. A full-time reporter anxious to be as impartial and honest as possible had to accept how professional sportsmen’s careers could flourish or founder on the strength of certain views and headlines. I took my job seriously, with all its pains and privileges, pitfalls and pleasures, for the best part of a testing decade, always reminding myself that well-paid and mollycoddled top-flight footballers also had families and feelings.

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Of course, some performers took criticism better than others – a few seemed totally immune – but I encountered little animosity among Norwich City’s playing ranks over the way I tried to make sense of a succession of roller-coaster seasons. I worked overtime to avoid handing out ‘great’ and ‘hero’ labels. It became obvious after just a few stints in the press box that last week’s dazzling winner could be this Saturday’s weakest link. Much safer to award sensible marks for endeavour, consistency and character rather than fall into those trapdoors marked ‘fantastic’ or ‘diabolical’. Local scribes were still encouraged in the 1970s to concentrate on providing their own opinions rather than leaning on fatuous after-match quotes hurled around like confetti by managers, players, referees, directors and guest ‘experts’ with a neat line in self-advertising. Even then, though, alarming signs of a brazen new era of commercialism with a showbiz flavour began to mock the game’s best traditions and those who lauded them. I recognised the end of an era, and my own love affair with the game, when sponsors lined up on the pitch before kick-off to wave to the crowd and shiny new cars went on a lap of honour to bring fresh meaning to taking corners and short-range drives.


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Long trips up and down the country with Canaries seeking league or cup success brought several cheerful diversions alongside the serious business of pitch battles. I recall unlikely hotel adventures inspired by captain Duncan Forbes, Trevor Hockey, prankster-in-chief of my reporting era, and a player who must remain nameless just in case he’s still wandering up and down the corridors of a Midlands establishment looking for his allotted room… With his long hair, headband and piratical beard, Mr Hockey arrived from Sheffield United, ‘a Blade without a razor’, to stiffen Norwich resolve to beat relegation at the end of the 1972-3 campaign. His buccaneering swagger in midfield was matched by a penchant for plundering as many chuckles as possible from japes at the expense of unsuspecting colleagues. His greatest triumph featured another newcomer to the club who received an urgent call from reception at that Midlands hotel. While he was away attempting to follow the babble of a Canary pretending to be an insurance agent on the phone, Hockey’s Furniture Removals sprang into action with a drastic rearranging programme. On his return to the room our hapless victim of the hoax call could only assume he was in the wrong place… and wandered off in search of his rightful quarters. Titters grew into guffaws and then descended into helpless laughter when he approached reception to check the number of his room. Trevor Hockey, youngest player to taste action on all 92 Football League grounds, died tragically of a heart attack while playing a five-a-side game on April 1st, 1987. He was only 43. His Canary career was a short but effective one. As well as helping to lift the relegation threat, he lit up many a dull hour waiting to be filled before the whistle went for action. I nearly missed an evening fixture at Aston Villa when he duped me into placing the index finger of either hand on to a table in a hotel foyer while he carefully balanced a full pint of beer on them. If I looked closely into the bottom of the glass, surely I could see little worms trying to float to the top… I peered. The players filed out to catch the bus. I couldn’t move without running the risk of tipping a pint of best bitter all over the place. Eventually, a hotel porter noticed my plight and took pity. I arrived at Villa Park by taxi just in time for the start. Duncan Forbes, an inspiring leader on and off the pitch, honed his no-nonsense defensive skills and stentorian tones with Craiglea Thistle, in his native Scotland, and Colchester before moving to Norwich in 1968. “The best £10,000

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investment this club ever made!” was his own thundering assessment of that switch from one part of East Anglia to another. A 30-year involvement with the Canaries as player, promotions supremo, chief scout and colourful ambassador suggests he might have been erring on the modest side.

HEADY DAYS – Duncan Forbes shows typical determination as Norwich City take off in the First Division against Everton at Carrow Road on August 12th, 1972. The Canaries’ first fixture in what was then the top flight ended in a 1-1 draw, Jimmy Bone scoring the home goal. He rolled up his sleeves and led the club to Division One and Wembley for the first time as Ron Saunders’ standard bearer, synonymous with raw meat, and then, much to the surprise of many pundits, continued to flourish under the more liberal and fanciful regime of John Bond. Old jokes about “more bookings than Fred Pontin” afforded Big Dunc regular chances to emphasise he was never sent off in his entire Canary career. One of the most familiar voices


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CALLING THE SHOTS – I join Duncan Forbes for target practice at a fete held alongside a cricket match at Beetley in the summer of 1987. Duncan was guesting for a Radio Norfolk XI.


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in Norfolk, rising above the din at Anfield, Highbury and Old Trafford, also charmed total strangers at hotel receptions in Blackburn, Stoke and Sheffield. One of Duncan’s favourite ploys was to convince people they had met before, picking up the conversation from where they had left off. “So, how’s the boy getting on at his new job? And how did you enjoy that holiday abroad?” I was amazed how many times it worked. Several colleagues were highly impressed at the number of friends he had collected around the country. Unlike a lot of football club humour, it was quirky, often funny and totally without malice. Other highlights on the road included the day I was mistaken for the referee by home supporters after a game at Hull. Fortunately, the official had enjoyed a good outing and they wanted an autograph as a happy memento. We got lost somewhere around the Pennines on the way to Burnley, and a local refused to shed light on our darkness because “you’ll probably beat us today”. I compered an impromptu This Is Your Life production for popular bus driver Tony in the hotel a couple of nights before the 1975 League Cup Final. Canaries playing the roles of long-lost relatives and friends rather overdid the emotional reunion bit. Dear old Tony was buried under a mass of bodies just as if he’d scored a dramatic late winner at Wembley.

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Guinea’s apple a mild response y sports desk colleagues, sharing the highs and lows of an era looking for follow-ups to national World Cup glories of 1966 and Norwich City FA Cup marvels of 1959, were a team of colourful contrasts. Some resembled solid Norfolk anchors dropped into a churning sea of challenge and change. Others preferred to go bobbing with the tide, embracing new technology and tastes with genuine relish.

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A passionate West Ham supporter with a sharp line in patter designed to make you think twice before responding, Peter March was my main mentor when it came to filling pages as quickly and effectively as possible. Now soaking up the retirement sun in Spain, he could hold court, organise, write headlines, sip coffee and answer the telephone all at the same time. His waspish wit stung regularly as I crept in gingerly after a demanding session the night before… “Skipper, if you come in much later you’ll have the rare pleasure of meeting yourself on the way home!” The blow would be softened by an immediate reviving cup of tea and a revelation that the Lingfield and Sandown race cards had been sorted out for me. Peter’s high-speed mardling and cheerful disposition sat intriguingly alongside the stolid stance of our older colleague on the Eastern Evening News, the redoubtable Sid Steward. A squat, rotund figure with a first-class degree in muttering and moaning, Sid had no time for young know-alls who hadn’t a clue why Rule 4 applied to all bets after a stewards’ inquiry at Yarmouth Races. I fell at the first hurdle at that one, and it took five blatant cigarette bribes to get a reasonable explanation out of the cantankerous old devil! Eventually, I accepted his quaint little ways – like dropping three inches of fag-ash over a pile of darts results and screwing up yet another sheet of paper and cursing


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loudly because a headline wouldn’t fit – and saw him as a true beacon of oldfashioned journalism. He responded by elevating me to “old chum!” status when I bought him a gin and tonic at the Christmas pub get-together.

PETER MARCH, a high-speed mardler with a cheerful disposition and waspish wit. Sid’s spidery handwriting spelt constant conflict with linotype press operators in the works who couldn’t decipher some of his words. On one uproarious occasion, on the eve of a new summer season, Sid’s good-luck message to all came out as: “May the sun shine bright and your bowels run right”. Deliberate sabotage was suspected somewhere among a smirking band of playing rivals. They had their own theories as to how this homely scribe became a leading figure on the city’s sports reporting circuit. One claimed Sid was a fire-watcher on the roof of the old London Street press building during the Second World War. He had dropped in one night to lend a hand when manpower was stretched and he kept up the habit until they took him on.

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I first encountered Sid (by telephone only) when I contributed a Dereham darts match of the week to his Saturday night round-up in the early 1960s. It was fun to resume this flighty format on my Norwich rounds and I also found time to play at league level for my Lakenham local, the Pheasant Cock. We propped up the table – and the bar – most of the time, but I found these diversions highly therapeutic after long days in the office. The March-Skipper playing combination took to the road for impromptu darts combat on Friday evenings. Wicklewood Cherry Tree and Thurton George and Dragon were our favourite watering-holes. It was at the latter we sampled real Norfolk hospitality. An endearing little character called Guinea, a very useful performer, soon took up our challenges. We bought him pints of mild when he landed the winning double. Then fortune smiled the other way – and we were rewarded with fruit from his deep jacket pocket. The Battle of Guinea’s Apple soon became part of sports desk folklore. My long-term companions on the night shift when I switched to the Eastern Daily Press as assistant sports editor could both point to impressive playing careers before picking up the pen. Bryan Stevens, like his father before him, kept wicket for Norfolk, so it was only natural that he should place cricket correspondent on top of his job description file. Jack Cushion, a remarkably versatile left-hander, shone at golf, cricket, darts and a few other pursuits when his all-round spirit came out to play. I spent many a golden day with Bryan as he covered Norfolk’s fluctuating fortunes at Lakenham cricket ground, often from his vantage point in the thatched scorebox. My digs just over the fence meant I could check conditions before travelling a matter of yards to follow the action. While Bryan took tea in one of the ‘jousting tents’ set up beyond the boundary for important folk like county members and sponsors, I found convivial company over a pint of beer and a quart of gossip in the big white marquee. Lakenham’s green acres in the middle of houses, roads and traffic could lift the spirits even on a wet day. I mourned with many others when ‘progress’ decreed Norfolk headquarters should move to Horsford on the outskirts of the city. Perhaps aversion to change had something to do with my decision to end fulltime connections with local newspapers in 1979. Sports editor Ted Bell, such a calming influence over the years, moved to another department and I felt uneasy under the new regime. I had become increasingly disillusioned with


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SKIPPER’S COMING! The sports staff reception committee prepare a warm welcome for a new colleague in the late 1960s. On target with their snowballs are, from left to right: Sid ‘Bullseye’ Steward, Ted ‘Hotshot’ Bell, Dick ‘Deadly’ Scales, Bruce ‘Fireaway’ Robinson and Peter ‘Beware the Ides’ March.


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professional sport in general and football in particular as commercial dragons bit deeper into traditional virtues. Revolution was in the air over newspaper production while I really wanted to stay faithful to the age of scissors and paste pots. This strange mixture of cynicism, romanticism and stoicism was too heady for comfort. Time to give thanks, take a break and wait for the next chapter to unfold.

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Good old days of village fun hile misgivings grew over the way professional sport could destroy so many long-cherished strands of affection, I found regular solace at grass-roots level on my Norfolk rounds. Even when I was mainly preoccupied with Norwich City’s soccer fortunes, there had to be time to run the rule over those who played for fun and favour rather than fame and fortune.

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I continued to turn my modest arm for Caister Cricket Club, renewing acquaintance with countless old friends and picturesque country grounds. My revived darts career brought a few prize doubles in homely city pubs soon to be afforded trendy coats of paint, converted into more offices or cruelly bulldozed into local history. As we supped pints of bitter and tucked into baked potatoes running with butter on certain back-street premises, it didn’t take too much imagination to hear the Last Post sounding at closing-time. Sunday league football was comparatively new but catching on at a rapid rate. My ‘credentials’ as a learned scribe fully able to pinpoint Canary strengths and failings up and down the country earned overtures to pick up the managerial reins with Norwich club Pegasus. Incentive bonuses included lengthy selection meetings up the corner at Thorpe King’s Head as my hosts Peter and Stella Gooch performed generous topping-up ceremonies to ensure maximum concentration on teams for the weekend. Although the Pegasus playing ranks featured several close friends – and my brother Colin – I didn’t shy away from tough decisions. A tidy record over three enthralling seasons suggested my systems and tactical ideas had some merit. Occasionally, the format was thrown into disarray by the failure of a player or two to surface in time for kick-off after a cheerful night before. Twice I came


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out of a retirement dating back to 1955 – following an embarrassingly heavy defeat for Hamond’s Grammar School under-13s against some massive brutes from Gaywood Park at King’s Lynn – to prove how reading the game from a safe distance is far more important than beating opponents with silky skills, breathtaking speed or one-touch bravado. Loke United were Norwich League kingpins at this time, and I recall with deep pleasure filling a reporter’s notebook with their exciting exploits in reaching the final of the FA Sunday Cup. Success along this new national trail gave Norfolk sport a big boost. Although Loke fell at the last hurdle, they inspired several others to make an impact on the competition. I booked up for a few more bus rides to far-flung corners of Essex and other foreign fields.

SWARDESTON PLAYERS, officials and supporters in festive mood before another exciting round in the Haig National Village Cricket Competition.

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Local cricketers followed suit with a series of brave sorties into fresh areas of combat. Norwich outfits Wanderers and Barleycorns made telling marks on national knockout contests, but battlers from Bradfield and Swardeston collected even more plaudits for their colourful progress in the Haig National Village stakes. Clashes against each other in the mid-1970s were merely rousing rehearsals for epic showdowns in parts of the country where Norfolk resolve and inspiration had not ventured before. I relished the biggest rural uprising for many a summer as Swardeston hit the road to reach nerve-tingling latter stages of the Haig competition. Under the towering influence of captain Peter Thomas, fiery opening bowler and hardhitting batsman, the village team’s run elevated them into the senior club ranks in Norfolk. Players and officials know how much they owe to supporters who cheered them all the way. It all came to life at Audley End in Essex, on a sunswept Sunday afternoon. The lovely country house provided a perfect backcloth for the Swardeston faithful strung out along the riverbank like Red Indians who’d found a new reservation. For several weekends after that, Swardeston, birthplace of Edith Cavell four miles south-west of Norwich, was turned into a ghost village as cricketers played Pied Piper to an old-fashioned community spirit we feared had been bowled out. It reminded me so much of outings to Dereham on August Bank Holiday Monday in the 1950s for the Mid-Norfolk Shield final, ranking alongside our annual trip to the seaside as a summer ritual for parish sharing. The big tent where old men’s memories mingled with tobacco smoke, and youngsters clutched bottles and straws outside. Yes, the Swardeston campaign revived golden memories of Norfolk village life when it took individuality as the key to collective pride during years after the Second World War. From thatcher to shepherd, lay preacher to fastest bowler in the local cricket team, and chapel organist to the best pub singer, they all did it for their own satisfaction which was heightened and sweetened by gratitude and praise from their neighbours. With more than a passing nod towards those good old days, I used my privileged position on the local press to organise and publicise an annual Evergreens cricket fixture for those anxious to defy the passing seasons. Farmer Eddie Symonds set a useful example – keeping wicket for Rackheath into his 80th year! But it wasn’t simple nostalgia or downright cussedness that kept him


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and other old-stagers going well beyond the call of summer duty. They stayed steadfastly loyal to a game they loved despite obvious pressures for changes at all levels. They represented that old-fashioned amateur spirit being drained out of so much sport by commercial greed and a win-at-all-costs attitude. They helped see me through a final batch of full-time newspaper rounds too often beset by cynical thoughts and reluctant actions.

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Final edition full of thanks hey told me so often I’d be carried out in a box it seemed downright impertinent to walk away on a warm June day in 1979. There was genuine surprise at my departure from the fast-changing newspaper world after 17 years of filling columns, over a decade of them specialising in the vagaries of sport. But I’d gone stale, lost faith in a new regime at the top and felt a spell of glorious uncertainty could spice up my career.

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I nursed no ambitions to leave Norfolk, so options were limited for a non-driving, chain-smoking, book-loving bearded bachelor with “good feel for words” as a main reference. Eleventh-hour overtures to be found a roving commission around my beloved county as a feature-writer – a sort of updated version of Jonathan Mardle – were rejected through “lack of resources” and because “that might send out wrong signals to other disenchanted journalists”. My well-aired disappointment may have had something to do with a marked lack of leading editorial figures at my farewell presentation. There were wildly-inflated rumours that I would use the occasion to castigate all and sundry for forcing me into exile… In fact, I doled out generous praise to the vast majority of colleagues involved in various aspects of newspaper production. I had many good friends in advertising and promotion departments, in areas where giant presses whirred, the canteen refuge for night-shift staff and, most notably, in the works where hotmetal habits were giving way to new technology. I thanked publicly all those who had helped me along the way since those first tentative steps towards telephone and typewriter at Thetford in the autumn of 1962. One or two rude awakenings for a country boy fresh from the classroom as a town was prodded from its Norfolk slumbers by a dramatic influx of fresh industries and new people.


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A microcosm, perhaps, of how my county would be challenged by change in the second half of the 20th century. A stint at Dereham offered an eagerly-taken chance to maintain close links with my family roots while the charabanc to Yarmouth arrived just as gas and oil exploration began to vie with holidaymakers and summer shows for top billing. My Norwich years were dominated by the Canaries’ rollercoaster fortunes under the contrasting management styles of hard man Ron Saunders and flamboyant John Bond. I felt privileged to follow the club to soccer’s top flight, the old First Division, and to Wembley for the first time. The fact there were as many boardroom bust-ups as dramas on the pitch during my seasons as a Carrow Road scribe merely tested a growing collection of colourful adjectives!

LAST EDITION – Keith Skipper with farewell gifts and colleagues as he leaves the newspaper world. Bob Walker, editor of the Eastern Evening News, makes the presentations. Looking on are (left to right) Peter March, Bryan Stevens, Clive Harris, Keith Peel, Richard Futter, Peter Franzen and Peter Bright.

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My farewell performance also included a firm pledge to stay true to the written word wherever the rest of my working life might lead. Happily, I’ve been able to keep that promise, not least with these reflections on my rounds as a Norfolk newshound. Too much good raw material to waste and a genuine affection for most of the folk and episodes inspiring it. I enjoyed a splendid vantage point at the heart of local life. It would have been churlish not to record some measure of appreciation. So what to do with my new-found freedom? I played more cricket and went strawberry-picking for a couple of weeks (not at the same time, because it makes batting and bowling even more difficult for an average performer). I did miss the office banter and regular discipline imposed on a naturally wayward character. I slept in late on wet days and caught early trains to Derby, London and Manchester on fine ones to confirm I didn’t want to move out of Norfolk even for potentially lucrative posts on offer from prestigious publications. A blossoming friendship with Dick Condon, a genial Irishman who transformed fortunes at Norwich Theatre Royal with his entrepreneurial flair and magnetic personality, heralded a brief return to newspapers. We started our own, christened it Encore and turned a cheerful spotlight on local entertainment with special emphasis on Dick’s rich and varied menu at the city emporium. I led a small team of writers and contributors, organised page lay-outs, composed editorials and catchy headlines and brought the whole venture to fruition at the printers in Halesworth. Rupert Murdoch himself could not have exercised more individual influence on the press stage. Dick’s impressive standing in the show business world immediately opened a multitude of theatrical doors. For example, Warren Mitchell, then at his peak as the bigoted Alf Garnett on television, won the plum role of Willie Loman in the National Theatre production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. It was booked for a pre-West End run in Norwich and Dick masterminded an exclusive interview for me at the actor’s Highgate home in London. He agreed to find time for me in a hectic schedule “because Dick Condon is a wonderful man”. I also spent a few weeks working for the Great Yarmouth Press Agency, run by photographer Bryan Colton (a former newspaper colleague) and John Myatt, for many years a familiar face and voice on local television. Trying to land stories with the national media was extremely hard work, especially when the


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HOW THEY’LL MISS THAT sartorial elegance! The jacket (below) represented the high point of fashion on the sports desk – but the material eventually wore thin. On the other hand (left), I did cut a dapper figure on the stage with Rackheath Players. Pity I didn’t dress like that for work!

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tabloids demanded saucy angles that simply weren’t there. This was the summer of the greenfly invasion and we waited anxiously for ladybirds to fly in and clean up the Golden Mile. That made a good yarn for more ecologically-minded papers. This short-term return to coastal delights had a sting in the tail. A telephone call to the bar of the Star Hotel interrupted a goodbye drink and mardle with a host of old friends. One of the leading lights in the campaign to bring local radio to Norfolk wondered if I might be interested in applying for a post. After all, they understood I knew how to pronounce Happisburgh, Costessey, Postwick, Hautbois and Alburgh. First link in a new chain destined to stretch over the next 15 years. Time to swap the pen for the microphone. A chance to turn up the volume for Norfolk. Now, where did I put that spare accumulator?


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Late Extra! Read all about it! NORFOLK JOURNALIST IN QUOTES SCANDAL ere are a few comments and anecdotes, some flattering, some honest and a few bordering on the scurrilous, willingly provided by old colleagues and evergreen acquaintances met along the newspaper trail. If one pressman is worth 20 volunteers, this roll call must be priceless:

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ALFRED JENNER (editorial executive at my first interview for a job at Redwell Street in 1962): “Single-minded determination to dew diffrunt – to succeed against the grain – exemplifies the deep-seated Norfolk character of our Skip. I recall him revealing how as a pupil he had to study for his A levels in the quiet spot behind the TV set while the rest of the family watched from the front.”

JIM WILSON (former head of Anglia Television news, former chairman of Norfolk Police Authority – and my first boss at Thetford in 1962): “Despite a baptism of London ‘overspill’, Keith has truly inherited the mantle of Jonathan Mardle and Sidney Grapes……. Norfolk and proud of it!”

JOHN KITSON (Thetford colleague at my first office and a fellow paying guest at 6 Station Road): “Journalism apart, his spell at Thetford saw him as something of a theatrical legend in his own young lifetime.”


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CHARLES SHARP (chief reporter at Dereham office): “Keith arrived here with a label attached: ‘A raw nugget of a Norfolk lad – not our usual kind of recruit to journalism – but he has a talent that might respond to some judicious polishing.’ Thank the Lord, we didn’t polish too hard and remove the characteristics that were to endear him to the reading public.” DAVID WAKEFIELD (colleague at Yarmouth office, fellow cricketer and member of Captain Boyton’s Benefit Band): “His jokes are to comedy what Danny La Rue is to Rugby League…”

BRUCE ROBINSON (fellow newshound on the Norwich City football reporting trail): “As a journalist, the words ‘No Comment’ never once passed his lips.” PETER MARCH (Sports desk colleague and darts partner in local pubs): “Long liquid lunches separated his mornings from even later nights. But Skip survived by constantly producing some of the best sports writing in provincial journalism.” DUNCAN FORBES (former Norwich City captain): “He once described me as belligerent – and then told me to look it up!”

DAVID STRINGER (former Norwich City defender and manager): “He was always a fair reporter – and regularly praised my performances!”

JOHN BOND (former Norwich City manager): “I think he appreciated me after Ron Saunders!”

KEVIN KEELAN (former Canary goalkeeper): “Skip was the worst card player by a mile on the team bus. Very popular, though.” FRANK GORDON (friend and colleague in Norwich office): “Media legend Skipper was never at a loss for words. In fact, he was so generous with his talent that he would often employ ten words when one would have done.”

COLIN BEVAN (friend and colleague at work and play): “What memorable times we shared…pigeon notes dropping on the sports desk, dramatic lines dropping on the stage at Rackheath Village Hall and Skipper dropping the editorial soccer team in it by failing to understand how to spring the offside trap. Droppings all the way, really.”

170


TONY CLARKE (Norwich office colleague and long-time friend): “His purple prose put poetry into the prosaic.”

BOY JIMMA (Norfolk comedian): “He ent no athlete but he dew run on.”


171

Index of photographs 5

GORLESTON LANDMARKS

91

JIM WILSON

12

GORLESTON LANDMARKS

92

JOHN KITSON

14

SUMMER PARADE

ENCOURAGING REVIEW

16

MAESTRO OF MIRTH

OLD TYME DANCING

18

OFFICE OUTING

103

ICY GRIP

21

GENTLER GOING

106

BUSTLING DEREHAM

23

BANK HOLIDAY BIKERS

109

LESLIE ALLWOOD

25

BAND OF HOPE

112

NOEL BOSTON

26

COURT WARBLING

113

ON THE BALL

31

PALMY DAYS

117

SUMMER

33

NEWS TEDLINES

119

STALWART PERFORMER

34

FRONT COUNTER GIRLS

121

INFORMAL STYLE

36

THE WEEKLY BRIGADE

123

FOND FAREWELL

38

BRUCE ROBINSON

126

MAIDENS ON MARCH

41

TED BELL

127

READY TO RELAX

43

ROYAL TOUR

128

VICTIM OF A JAPE

46

STRIPPED FOR ACTION

130

FRED NICHOLSON

49

PETER SILVESTER

131

ROLE MODEL

51

JOHN BOND

134

TROUBLE IN STORE

54

KEN BROWN

135

TOP FLIGHT

56

GEOFFREY WATLING

136

DEREHAM’S FINEST

61

PANTOMIME FUN

137

BISHOP BONNER’S COTTAGES

63

A TENSE TABLEAU

140

PROUD MUM ETHEL BATTELLEY

67

ERIC FOWLER

141

COLOURFUL STALLS AND CHARACTERS

ALFRED JENNER

144

70

PETER ROBERTS

144

LACONS BREWERY

71

HEADY DAYS

147

LES GOULD

75

CALLING THE SHOTS

149

BRIDGE OF SIGHS

78

PETER MARCH

152

PARTY PIECE

79

SKIPPER’S COMING!

155

MILESTONE CHEERS

81

SWARDESTON PLAYERS

158

PETER BAGSHAW

84

LAST EDITION

162

BOB BAGSHAW

85

HOW THEY’LL MISS THAT

164

STANLEY BAGSHAW

87

GORLESTON LANDMARKS

90

CHARLIE CATCHPOLE

97 102


173

Other titles from Thorogood CONFESSIONS OF A COUNTRY BOY

Keith Skipper £8.99 paperback, ISBN 1 85418 246 3 Published October 2002 Memories of a Norfolk childhood fifty years ago: this is broadcaster and humorist Keith Skipper in his richest vein, sharp and witty, affectionate and funny. As he says himself “Distance may lend enchantment, but my country childhood has inspired much more than rampant nostalgia. I relish every chance to extol the virtues of a golden age when… life was quieter, slower, simpler…” “He delights our days and does so much for Norfolk”

Malcolm Bradbury

IN SEARCH OF SECRET NORFOLK

A souvenir and guide Robert Leader £9.99 paperback, ISBN 1 85418 372 9 Published 2006 A lavishly illustrated companion to the heritage and beauty of Norfolk, one of England’s most visited counties. Robert Leader looks at Norfolk’s great Norman castles and abbeys, its guildhalls and mediaeval wool churches and stately homes, and the great families who helped to shape it all. He also follows the course of the counties rivers and captures the charms of the fishing villages, fenlands and wide-sky beaches.

TIMPSON’S NORFOLK NOTEBOOK

A personal survey of a rather special county John Timpson £9.99 paperback, ISBN 1 85418 200 3 Published 2002 A collection of writer and broadcaster John Timpson’s best writing about Norfolk, its ancient and subtle landscapes, places with strange tales to tell, remarkable and eccentric people and old legends and traditions.

IN SEARCH OF SECRET SUFFOLK

A souvenir and guide Robert Leader £8.99 paperback, ISBN 1 85418 209 9 Published 2004 A delightful book of discovery which explores the heritage and subtle landscape of Suffolk. Lavishly illustrated, it follows the course of each of Suffolk's rivers and looks at the towns, villages, stately homes and churches that grew up in their valleys. Robert Leader also charts the medieval history and tradition of the once great abbeys, castles and guildhalls.

POISON FARM: A MURDER UNMASKED

David Williams £8.99 paperback, ISBN 1 85418 259 5 Published April 2004 “One of the most amazing murder mysteries ever.” Daily Mail “A classic whodunnit... wealth, sex, scandal and murder in a quiet leafy village.” Eastern Daily Press “Reads like a Miss Marple mystery.” Radio Suffolk A true crime story: investigative journalist David Williams unravels the 60-year old mystery of who murdered wealthy Suffolk business-man and womaniser William Murfitt.

FRONTIER COUNTRY

A walk around the Essex borders Brian Mooney. Illustrated with maps and pictures by Jon Harris £8.99 paperback, ISBN 1 85418 214 5 Published June 2004 Journalist Brian Mooney and artist Jon Harris walk all the way round the borders of Essex, exploring the land and people, charms, secrets and surprises of Essex’s frontier country. Starting in Waltham Abbey, their walk takes them into old Essex and along the Thames to the marshes and rivers along the eastern seaboard and then back along the Suffolk borders to Hertfordshire. Their account is instructive and amusing and interleaves historical and architectural information with vivid encounters with those who live and work in Essex. “The authors’ unusual journey reveals just how much there is to treasure in Essex.” Simon Jenkins, columnist and former Editor of The Times

BETTY’S WARTIME DIARY 1939-45

Edited by Nicholas Webley £9.99 paperback, ISBN 1 85418 221 8 Published August 2002 “…a woman who readers will surely love to meet.” This England magazine The Second World War diary of a Norfolk seamstress. Here, the great events of those years are viewed from the country: privation relieved by poaching, upheaval as thousands of bright young US servicemen ‘invade’ East Anglia, quiet heroes and small-time rural villains. Funny, touching and unaffectedly vivid. “Makes unique reading… I am finding it fascinating” David Croft, co-writer and producer of BBC’s hit comedy series ‘Dad’s Army’

A TASTE OF WARTIME BRITAIN

Edited by Nicholas Webley £9.99 paperback, ISBN 1 85418 213 7 Published September 2003 A vivid and evocative collection of eye-witness accounts, diaries, reportage and scraps of memory from people who lived through the dark days of World War II. Lavishly illustrated throughout with newspaper pictures and personal photos, the book shows what life was like for millions of ordinary people throughout the war, men, women, children, soldiers, civilians. It brilliantly captures the sights, the smells and sounds and voices of a country at war. “The wonderful stories… bring all the memories flooding back.” David Croft, OBE, co-writer and co-producer of BBC’s ‘Dad’s Army’

IN WAR AND PEACE – THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DAPHNE PEARSON GC

£17.99 hardback, ISBN 1 85418 211 0 Published 2002 Daphne Pearson, born in 1911, was the first woman to be given the George Cross, awarded for acts of courage in circumstances of extreme danger. This is the inspiring biography of a very courageous and remarkable woman.

JELLIED EELS AND ZEPPELINS

Witness to a vanished age Edited by Sue Taylor £8.99 paperback, ISBN 1 85418 248 X Published 2003 As every year goes by the number of people able to give a first hand account of day-to-day life in the early part of the last century naturally diminishes. The small but telling detail disappears. Ethel May Elvin was born in 1906; she recalls her father's account of standing sentry at Queen Victoria’s funeral, the privations and small pleasures of a working-class Edwardian childhood, growing up through the First World War and surviving the Second. Anyone intrigued by the small events of history, how the majority actually lived day-to-day, will find this a unique and fascinating book.

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