You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
Nevertheless, my father arranged for me to have an interview with the formidable lady who was a part-owner — the other owners being a London-based chain — of the local afternoon paper, the Express & Echo. She agreed the paper would take me on as an apprentice for five years, not, I suspect, because I was such a promising lad but because there was a manpower, even a boypower, shortage, in the war years. Terms of apprenticeship, or indentures, varied in the different trades and crafts. Under some, in the nineteenth century, the apprentice’s parents paid for his training and upkeep by his master, and others which I came across during my family research forbade dancing, drinking, fornication, even marriage. Of course, it wasn’t that strict for me, although under the union agreement, apprentices started out at a few shillings a week — perhaps $20 in today’s money. And there wasn’t much training because most of the senior reporters were away at the war, and those who remained were old or unfit. We did have an able “district man” who covered rural affairs, but he had the bulbous nose of a drinker, and when he came into the office he often carried a fishing rod and had a collection of flies in his hat. He was not above borrowing a few shillings from a junior if he could, and had a beguiling way of asking: “Would you care to increase my indebtedness to you?”
The paper’s building was in no better shape than the staff. The exterior was black oak Tudor, and the interior a warren of corridors and offices, some of which were braced by two-by-fours, no doubt because when the presses ran the whole place shook. Here, the week after my sixteenth birthday, I joined two other apprentices who, like me, were waiting to enter the forces, and being older left before I did. We worked in what was called the junior reporters’ room, and the chief reporter had a cubicle in the corner. We were required to learn shorthand and typing in our own time, which meant evening classes at a secretarial school. I had no trouble with typing, or rather, I soon learned to type very fast with two fingers, as I am doing now. But my handwriting had always been messy — now it is illegible even to me, unless I print — and I never did learn to write neat shorthand outlines, correctly positioned on the line. I lived in dread of the occasional days when the chief reporter would call one of us into his cubicle and dictate the leading editorial from The Times or The Daily Telegraph which we would then have to read back from our shorthand notes. I survived by reading the editorials every day and memorizing enough to help me over illegible words and sentences in my shorthand.
To emphasize the importance of shorthand, the chief reporter, a kindly old gent we referred to behind his back as Father, liked to tell us the cautionary story — quite true, he insisted — of the young reporter who had the misfortune to be in the assize court in the middle of an important trial when the official reporter making a shorthand record could not continue. The judge — and they were awe-inspiring figures in wig and robes with almost unlimited power in their courtrooms — was under the mistaken impression that all reporters could write shorthand, and he more or less drafted the young reporter into taking the official note. As bad luck would have it, there was a query that afternoon about exactly what had been said just before, and the reporter was asked to read out the disputed passage. When the judge saw the young man was flustered and in difficulties, he instructed him to retire to the chamber adjoining the courtroom, study his notes, and return when he was ready. After an hour, the judge sent his usher to find out what was happening; the usher returned and whispered in his Lordship’s ear; the window to the street was open and the reporter was gone, no doubt having decided that flight was the better part of having to tell the judge that he couldn’t read his notes and incur some imagined but dreadful punishment. The chief reporter supposed that to avoid such humiliation we would be more diligent in our shorthand studies, but it merely persuaded me to resist any and all pressure to take an official note at any time. Eventually, I did learn a sort of bastard shorthand, some as invented by Mr. Pitman and some by me, which served, barely, until I came to Canada where, I discovered to my delight, shorthand was considered an advantage but not a necessity.
The first job of the junior reporters on Monday was to call on each of the movie theatres to pick up publicity handouts on the week’s films, and write brief digests — not reviews. These were a service to readers who wanted to know “what’s on,” and a free advertisement for the theatre. Well, not entirely free because they provided two free press tickets which could be picked up at the box office for each movie program. These not only saved us money, but also provided a little prestige; one felt like a real newspaperman when asking for “the Express and Echo tickets.” There was of course no TV in those days and as the city was full of soldiery who had girlfriends and so required not only entertainment but a warm, dark place in which to snuggle, movies were immensely popular. Each three- or four-hour show included two movies, news, and cartoons, and the program might change in midweek. In the grander palaces, a mighty organ flashing coloured lights would rise from beneath the stage, and the organist would lead a singsong, a popular attraction when the community spirit of wartime was strong. Movie houses were always full, the shows ran continuously, and as it was often necessary to queue and wait for a seat to become vacant, one might enter at any point in a film and remain for the next showing to see what one had missed at the beginning. Film notes were the first thing I wrote for a newspaper.
Reporting funerals was another job for junior reporters, and I covered scores. A paid death notice would appear in the paper, along with announcements of births, weddings and deaths, on the page popularly known as “Hatches, Matches and Dispatches.” No matter how insignificant the departed, if the family so requested the funeral would be reported. After all, this was local news that many would read. I or some other junior would first go to the home to express polite regrets and obtain enough details to write a short and laudatory obituary. At first, I was reluctant to intrude on private grief, but I soon learned, long before Andy Warhol, that everyone wants their few minutes of public attention, and for ordinary families death was one of the few opportunities they had to get their name in the paper. Very often, we reporters were pressed to admire the deceased in a coffin in the front parlor, and invited to borrow any family photo we thought would reproduce well. The next stage was to attend the church and take the names of all the mourners, which provided another lesson; get the spelling right because people can be very touchy about their names, and — horrors — might complain to the editor if it were wrong in the paper. If the family wanted the list of wreaths published with the funeral report they had to pay by the line, but it was the reporter’s job to make a list of names and notes on the “floral tributes.”
Funerals of course soon became boring, but there was sometimes a cash reward. If the undertaker pressed a few shillings into one’s eager hand — almost a week’s pay — one would attach a note to the bottom of the report, “Funeral arrangements by …”. The busiest undertaker in Exeter sixty years ago was H. Bidgood — see how readily the name comes to mind after more than fifty years — and he enriched me considerably. Nobody ever questioned this arrangement, so I suppose it was just an accepted