Which College, Sir?
We Danced on Our Desks, Chapter 4
Early one evening in 1963 as I lay in the bath, my transistor radio played an odd new pop single whose bleating harmonica, stop-start beat and rather droney vocal duet seemed to hover on the edge of comedy.
Back then, the BBC didn’t yet have anything so vulgar as deejays, only the same middle-aged announcers who read the News and the Shipping Forecast. ‘“Love Me Do,”’said this one in a tone of lofty amusement, ‘from the Beatles.’
He’s right, I thought: was there ever a more godawful name?
In common with just about everyone over 20, my colleagues on the Hunts Post dismissed them as a passing fad along with every other ‘beat group’ but Cliff Richard’s sleek and respectful Shadows.
Dave Wakefield the senior reporter, a rabid Dixieland jazz fan, called them ‘loud’ and ‘scruffy.’ The sports editor, John Clark, mocked the lyric of the follow-up single that took them to number one, ‘Please Please Me’. ‘“Come on, come on, come on?” Load of bollocks, isn’t it!’
Everything changed after their second album, With The Beatles, its cover four polo-necked faces half in shadow like soulful art students or denizens of the Parisian Left Bank.
Suddenly Pop music was no longer working class and for gullible teenagers only. Even the stern manageress of the Post’s small-ads department learned to tell John Lennon from Paul McCartney and conceded that all four Beatles had ‘sensitive faces.’
Newspapers stopped putting ‘Pop’ inside quotation-marks like something they preferred not to handle without rubber gloves.
When the Rolling Stones made the once-outrageous Beatle cut look like short back and sides, the length of young men’s hair became the burning topic of the day. My own was nowhere near Mick Jagger level - both my forehead and collar clearly visible - yet even the amiable chief reporter, Clive Brown, took to pointing a finger at me and, like a sergeant-major, barking ‘Haircut!’
As Beatlemania spread from Britain across Europe, the Hunts Post suddenly remembered it was supposed to be training me for the Proficiency Certificate of the National Council for the Training of Journalists. To take this before the end of my traineeship I would have to follow the Council’s three-year course in one year and hope to scrape through its exams in law, local government and newspaper practice.
This, finally, exposed me to further education: Fridays on day-release at Peterborough Technical College, attending lectures on law and local government with fellow trainees from papers like the Ely Standard, the Spalding Journal, the Stamford Mercury and the Kings Lynn News and Advertiser.
At least I could make the 60-mile round trip in my ivory-white Mini, my transistor radio on its rear window-ledge. As I drove back on the foggy evening of 22 November, the Hollies’ ‘Stay’ suddenly cut off and a voice with a strange hollowness about it said, ‘We have just heard that President Kennedy has been shot…’
I took the greater part of the exam with my classmates in a church hall in Stamford, Lincolnshire, but the paper on local government in a room by myself at Peterborough Tech. As I’d followed only a third of that course, the National Council For The Training of Journalists had agreed that my tutor could set me some questions based on what I’d learned so far.
I was one of the few members of his class to have turned in regular homework, so he simply gave me my last three essays to do again, even letting me use a typewriter. I rattled them out almost verbatim and got 98 percent.
Nonetheless, being me, I expected to have failed the overall exam. When we all turned up at the Tech for our results, the principal beckoned me aside; I assumed he wanted to break it to me gently how poor mine had been, but he said I’d got the highest mark in the country and would receive a prize for outstanding results.
It was a book-token for 30 shillings (£1.50.), presented by the editor of the Slough Observer. I wrote and told my father about it, enclosing the little front-page story about me in the Hunts Post, but received no reply.
My almost obligatory next step, only 16 miles to the south-east, was the evening Cambridge Daily News which had recently been rebranded the Cambridge News and gone tabloid. With my Proficiency Test result and plastic binder full of bylined articles, I pretty much walked in.
At my leaving party from the Post, the editor F.J. Johnson presented me with a ballpoint pen and observed somewhat ambiguously that I’d been ‘an ornament to the staff.’
The Cambridge News occupied a modern glass-fronted building on Newmarket Road and it felt like real progress to be there, climbing up and down contemporary staircases and hearing teleprinters chatter out the national and international news the paper carried on its front page
The massive downside was being IN Cambridge rather than AT Cambridge. Each day, I had the university all around me, the castellated walls of honey-coloured stone, the medieval archways into beautiful gardens, the punts swarming on the River Cam, the glimpses through leaded casements into softly-lit libraries, the stacks of bicycles everywhere – yet could be no part of any of it.
Worse, I would sometimes be mistaken for an undergraduate. It happened most painfully when I visited Arthur Shepherd, the lovely menswear shop in Trinity Street to buy a pair of the cavalry twill trousers with plain, sloping cuffs I’d longed for since they’d been in a Town magazine fashion-spread.
They cost six guineas (£6.40) but as I reached for my wallet, the assistant opened a ledger and asked ‘Which college, Sir?’ In those pre-credit card days, the name of any Cambridge seat of learning was a sufficient guarantor and he was about to put the trousers on the slate.
Despite the Cambridge News’s superior working conditions (including the first sandwich-vending machine I ever saw) it was not a happy place. The news editor, Eddie Duller, had a puggy face, glasses and bog-brush hair, and regarded all his reporters as incorrigible skivers whatever their level of productivity. As for his news-editing skills, the office saying had it right: ‘Outlook over Cambridge – Duller.’
With weary resignation, I heard from my new colleagues about the broad, sunlit highway from the university to Fleet Street; how every year the nationals sent teams to recruit the brightest stars of the student newspaper, Varsity, and Granta magazine. Classy new undergraduate publications were always springing up, like New Cambridge, modelled on the New Statesman, with contributors clearly marked for fame like Clive James and Germaine Greer.
Just as clearly, they were not destined for the tabloid Daily Mirror or Daily Sketch but the ‘quality’ Sunday broadsheets. I had once thought The Observer the most hopelessly desirable of these, thanks to Kenneth Tynan’s play-reviews - but no longer.
A couple of years earlier, the Canadian press baron Roy Thomson had purchased the stuffiest of them, The Sunday Times, and effected a complete transformation. The paper now buzzed with innovations like a separate Review section which paid fortunes to serialise the memoirs of politicians, and an ‘investigative’ unit called Insight which had revealed the full seamy depths of the Profumo Scandal.
Thomson’s latest coup had been to sign up the Queen’s brother-in-law Lord Snowdon, a photographer before he married Princess Margaret, as a ‘creative consultant.’
Less sure footed, it seemed, was the introduction of a ‘colour supplement’, a glossy version of newsprint supplements commonplace all over North America. The first issue contained a photograph of a new young fashion model named Jean Shrimpton by a new young photographer named David Bailey which caused such outrage among the Sunday Times’s traditional readership that it published an apology the next week.
Despite the stir it created, it had failed to attract significant advertising and was losing so much money that Fleet Street commentators dubbed it ‘Thomson’s Folly’, but its proprietor insisted it would be persevered with.
One Sunday, leafing through the paper, I spotted a familiar name: an entire half-page, headed ‘Atticus’, bore the signature Nicholas Tomalin. It seemed to be a gossip column but, rather than bitty paragraphs, was entirely about Victorian canals. ‘Atticus’ was in Latin script with the ‘u’ looking like a ‘v’. Oh, that blend of the light-hearted and erudite only Cambridge could give!
Another familiar name came up during a rare social interaction between our pipe-puffing editor, Keith Whetstone, and a group of reporters including me. On a nearby desk lay a handout from Granada TV about What The Papers Say with a photograph of Harold Evans – still the only ‘provincial’ editor to present the programme – studying a front page sceptically through his round spectacles.
‘Yes, he’s making quite a name for himself,’ Whetstone conceded rather grudgingly. ‘People are saying that if he doesn’t slow down, he’s going to burn himself out.’
I soon realised that, just as surely as I wasn’t going to Fleet Street, I wasn’t going anywhere on the Cambridge News. The two jobs on the paper I coveted, theatre or film critic, had long been held by much older men who showed no inclination to move.
A few months earIier, I’d started going out with a young woman from the Cambridgeshire ‘County set’, the realm of fox hunting and Young Conservatives and double-barrelled surnames, whose family lived in a country house large enough to be called a grange.
When I spent weekends there, I didn’t, of course, sleep with her, but was given a little book-lined room that felt just like one ‘in college’. Sometimes I’d pretend it really was.
In Cambridge, she attended a secretarial school for daughters of the County named The Academy whose students constantly benefited from the university’s huge male majority, particularly during the annual May Week of lavish college balls. During the preceding week, it held its own ‘May Ball’ to which suitable young men from the better colleges were invited, so giving every Academian a choice of potential escorts to the real things.
I attended the one in May, 1965, and found it so oppressive that I wandered away from the scenes of revelry and loitered beside an open window. The Academy overlooked the Cam on one of its narrowest stretches and directly opposite was Magdalene College, ablaze with light and looking stunning.
One of its leaded casements was open and I could see right into a student bedroom whose male occupant was there in bed. After a moment, he got up and closed his window, then lay down again, pulling the covers up to his chin. Whoever he was and whatever he was studying, I would have given my soul to change places with him.
England’s County sets in 1965 functioned little differently from in 1865 and a daughter who reached the age of 20, as this one recently had, without acquiring a fiancé was considered a social failure. When I discovered champagne was already waiting in her parents’ fridge for the moment when we announced our engagement, I decided my only option was flight.
In those days, job-opportunities for provincial journalists were listed in the grandiosely-named World’s Press News, a mere half-page of unenticing small-ads like ‘Romford Recorder requires general reporter, courts, councils, good note [i.e. shorthand] essential. Above union rate for right man.’ But the first time I looked there, concerned only with finding something as far as possible from the champagne in the fridge, what should I read but:
Reporter/drama critic wanted, Northern Despatch. Apply, Arnold Hadwin, Editor, Priestgate, Darlington, Co Durham
Jack Amos, the Cambridge News’s chief sub, filled me in on the Northern Despatch – although I was going to apply anyway. ‘It’s the Northern Echo’s evening stablemate. You know … the Northern Echo. Edited by Harold Evans, who does What The Papers Say on TV.’
‘But isn’t the Northern Echo an evening?’ I asked.
‘No – big, big morning, the Echo. Circulates all through County Durham, Teesside, Tyneside and Northumberland, as far south as York and almost up to Scotland The Despatch is just for Darlington. Nice town though,’ he added consolingly.
The train journey to Darlington took me for the first time into the real North, as opposed to half-way house Huntingdonshire, recognisable when all the brickwork I could see through my window started turning dark red.
On arrival, the first thing I saw was a plinth with a life-sized replica of Locomotion Number One, the steam engine that pulled the world’s first passenger train, from Darlington to Stockton-on-Tees in the 1820s.
The Northern Despatch’s – and Northern Echo’s - headquarters was a redbrick building occupying a whole block of central Darlington. You entered through a high ceilinged front office like a bank but the only way to the editorial departments was a narrow, winding staircase past churchy stained glass windows.
The Despatch’s editor, Arnold Hadwin, was a small, wiry man who looked as if he might once have been an Olympic sprinter. He talked to me standing at a big window outside which the North stretched far and wide and redbricked in the smoggy sunshine.
My result in the Proficiency Test evidently still carried great weight. ‘Well, I should very much like to have you, Mr Norman,’ he said after a few minutes, ‘provided we can come to terms.’
‘I was going to ask for £25 a week,’ I said. Mr Hadwin winced and replied that it was ‘out of the question’. £21 almost was but for the top boy in the country, not quite. It still felt like a fortune.
That July, I drove the almost 200 miles back to Darlington in my underpowered Mini with big Jaguars flashing their headlights officiously behind me; progressively more intimidated as I reached Northamptonshire, then Nottinghamshire then Yorkshire and saw steadily multiplying factory-chimneys and rows of giant cooling-towers.
The evening of my first day on the Northern Despatch, I was sent to review the cabaret at the Fiesta Club, close to Bank Top station and Locomotion Number One. The main attraction was an obscure singer named Gerry Dorsey, soon to be renamed Engelbert Humperdinck and become internationally famous, at one moment outselling the Beatles.
For his first song, ‘Dancing In The Street’, the Fiesta’s ropey house band started too slowly and as he turned to them and hissed ‘A little bit faster,’ I thought ‘What the hell have I done?’
We Danced on our Desks is available from Mensch Publishing here.