Roy of the Provos

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March 2021

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Thirty years ago I retired, purposely and conscientiously, from Fleet Street. I wanted to do some travelling while I was still fit enough to enjoy it. I’d already written and sold a novel, I could write more (after all, writing was the thing I was supposedly good at); I would write a movie.

When I got bored, I could always go back to reporting for newspapers, something I had started doing while still at school.

Best of all, my boss had increased my pension so that, in theory, it would kick in in three years’ time. (I didn’t know, then, that he would steal it.)

I couldn’t go back to newspapers now, even if I wanted to. I don’t understand them, and they wouldn’t understand me. I am a relic of the Good Old Days of newspapers: the days were good for circulations and also good for journalists, who had mobility, crossing The Street at the drop of a hat (or, more likely, the drop of a grand in the back pocket). They crossed The Street from the Mirror to the Express or Mail, and often back again.

And they (we) wouldn’t give a toss about anybody’s personal politics or religion, so long as they didn’t try to preach about it.

Which is why I find it disingenuous of modern journalists (and readers) who find it weird that Roy Greenslade – target of the month – is being excoriated for keeping his political sympathies quiet “because I had a mortgage to pay”.

I worked with Greenslade for a number of years; as a Friday and Saturday casual employee on the Sunday Mirror (he was doing a degree in politics at Sussex) he often subbed my copy which, in those days could have been about Northern Ireland or the security services. We never discussed politics except about those affecting the editorial floor, and if anybody had asked I would have described him as an extreme left-winger: in our (very conservative) environment I thought him a bit of a Trot.

In that view I was wrong: Roy’s sympathies were far more extreme, belonging to a group so small that – if you didn’t count the number of Special Branch infiltrators – probably wouldn’t have had a three-figure membership.

After graduating he joined the Daily Star (“tits, roll-yer-own, and QPR”) then moved to the Daily Express. He went from there to the Sun, as features editor, helping organise the strike-breaking move of Murdoch newspapers to Wapping. And thence was transferred to The Times, where he became managing editor.

And it was while he was there that Robert Maxwell first heard his name – possibly because Roy’s wife, the fragrant Noreen Taylor, a good feature writer who had become a Maxwell favourite, would have mentioned him.

At the time, Maxwell was becoming exasperated by his Daily Mirror editor, Richard Stott, who insisted that a newspaper could have only one editor and ignored the proprietor’s attempts to influence editorial judgement. He toyed with the idea of appointing the Thatcherite Charlie Wilson, then uncomfortable as editor of The Times. Convinced by his aides that it would not be a good move, he appointed Charlie as managing director of the Mirror Group, and brought in Roy as editor, instead.

Trust me on this: Maxwell never asked either of them about their politics or their mortgages.

Trust me, also on this: while he was editor of the Daily Mirror Roy didn’t try to influence the Mirror’s politic stance – which, in any case, was already calling for “Troops out” of Northern Ireland.

There was no Republican stance in the Mirror papers, nor any support for the IRA. Roy put an Ulster Protestant in charge of the Irish news coverage.

What he did, in fact, was something far worse from a reader’s point of view: he published a photo in a Spot The Ball competition that had never had a ball on it.

About ten years later he confessed what everybody in the Mirror building knew: “On behalf of my proprietor Robert Maxwell I fixed a game offering a million pounds to anyone who could spot the ball and ensured that no-one won. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.″

He left the Daily Mirror and became “consultant editor” at both The Times and Today.

Do we think that anybody asked about his politics or his mortgage – he and Noreen had a house in County Donegal – then? Or when, in 2003, he was appointed Professor of Journalism at City, University of London (where he lectured on newspaper ethics)?

The memory of him at the Mirror was only that he had made the newspaper too serious, and therefore boring, losing readers who expected fun among the usually dull news of the day.

The truth is – and people have been asking me the wrong question for more than a week – that Roy Greenslade was a good journalist, but not necessarily a good editor.

You may abhor his politics, now that he exposed how evil they happened or still happen, to be, and we can understand why he kept them to himself – even though the Belfast office knew all about his close friendship with IRA members to the extent that Noreen was known, across the water, as Noraid, and Greenslade as Greenslime.

But if we – as journalists above all others presumably do – believe in freedom of both speech and expression we have to go along with the phrase misattributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

I just wish that Roy hadn’t said it.

 

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Old school ties…

October 2021

When IPC was planning to relaunch the Daily Herald as the Sun (“The newspaper born of the age we live in” – zippy sub-head: credit Hugh Cudlipp) it put out a call for ambitious young reporters and Paul Callan, 25, working in the London office of the Yorkshire Post, trolled along to Drury Lane for an interview with news-editor-designate John Graham who wore a woollen cardigan, checked shirt, and a knitted tie.

JG: Where were you educated?

PC: Public school… er… Eton actually.*

JG: But this will be a trade union newspaper. We’re not looking for public school types.

PC: Oh, I don’t know about that: Cecil King went to Winchester.

JG: Cecil King? But he’s the governor! You’re not applying for his job, are you?

PC: Not at this interview. No.

He didn’t get the job. He phoned me (I was in the Leeds, head office, of the Yorkshire Evening Post) and told me to play up the grammar school background and, a couple of days later, replacing my packet of 20 Dunhill king-size with a packet of ten Embassy, sat waiting for my interview.

The news-editor-designate (the paper was still at planning stage) had changed. In slid Barrie Harding, straight off the plane from the Mirror New York bureau. Dark blue suit, silk tie, silk socks and Gucci shoes.

BH: Do you specialise in anything?

Me (I was 19): Yes, in finding and reporting news stories. And in what the editor calls light features.

BH: But it’s not as if you even went to public school…

(Harding’s stint in the seat at the Sun was so brief that he was probably on his way back to NYC before I had found Callan at the bar of the Wig & Pen.)

Paul was in high spirits. Not to worry, he said, because evening paper men were the salt of the earth, the lifeblood of news. All that the dailies did was follow up the stuff from the evenings and print it a day late. Yes, the evenings were where we should (both) proudly stay.

“I for example, have just been offered a job on the Evening Standard Londoners Diary at a salary I simply couldn’t refuse. By the way, can you lend me a fiver?”

That fiver, never returned of course, would be worth a bit more than 90 quid today. Imagine asking a colleague at a bar to loan you that amount of ready money. I had to resist the temptation to recover the debt from the collection plate after Callan’s memorial service at St Bride’s.

*Even though I know that once, when passing through Rugby on a train with David Bradbury, Paul read the name on the platform and said: “Hang on… I think I may have been at school here,” I often wondered – never asked – whether his Sun interview was the first time Paul, somewhat mistakenly in that case, had mentioned Eton as his alma mater.

Years later Magnus Linklater, who had employed Paul at the Standard, and had staffed the Diary mainly with his fellow Old Etonians, told me that a mutual friend had recently become a father and had already put down his son’s name for Eton.

“He told me ‘same house as Callan’… ha-ha!” reported Magnus.

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Wherefore art thou, Captain Bob?

5 November 2001, the Independent

Did he jump or was he pushed? The question surfaced again the other day when a friend's teenage daughter told me they had been discussing it at school.

In the glossy eateries that have succeeded Fleet Street it will doubtless be discussed more widely today, the tenth anniversary of his death. You surely hadn't forgotten why we remember to celebrate the fifth of November...?

The point of doing Maxwelliana in the sixth form rather than, say, learning the structure of a sentence, is beyond me (except, of course, that it's easier to teach) but if they are going to tackle it at all as an educational project, they are coming at it from the wrong angle.

How long, one wonders, before Maxwell is the subject of an OU doctoral thesis, just as, years ago, was James Bond?

The question is not how he met his death: £520m in debt, he jumped (or, precisely, he lowered himself over the side of the yacht Lady Ghislaine, changed his mind, was unable to pull his vast 23 stones back on board, and then fell into the Atlantic).

Anybody who had thrown him over the rails would have confessed by now, on the basis that thereafter he would never have needed to buy a drink.

But that is not at issue other than by conspiracy theorists who have proof that Cap'n Bob was topped by the CIA, the KGB, Mossad, MI5, the Mafia, or a consortium of all five. Why the Mirror's journalists and printers were omitted from the list escapes me.

No: the issue is not How, but Who.

Or rather, Wherefore art thou, Ian Robert Maxwell? It is a good question, because he was never really sure himself.

I was in his office once when someone mentioned his choice of first name – as Scottish as the other two, but never used.

Well, said the fat man, he had been born Jan Ludwig Hoch, and was always called Jan as a child. Ian was the anglicised version, and he wanted to retain it.

Not quite, said his sister, who happened to be in the room. We never addressed you as Jan. You were actually Ludvik (with a K).

So he should have been Lewis, then: equally Scottish-sounding? – No, said the sister. He wasn't called Ludvik either, nor even Lev (the local Slovakian usage). His family all called him Laiby, after his late grandfather.

Well, it was all a long time ago. But wouldn't you remember what name you had as a child? Especially if it was a name other than your own? Could it be that, whoever Bob Maxwell was, he was someone other than Jan Ludvik – call me Laiby – Hoch?

Towards the end of the Second World War – in which he, or someone, served gallantly – he changed his name several times (Maxwell was merely the latest change).

He appeared as Leslie Jones once, then as Smith and later - inspired, he said, by a packet of cigarettes - as Ivan Du Maurier. Because he was in Intelligence, it would have been vital that he remembered not only the name, but also the persona that went with it. And yet he had forgotten his own childhood name.

With the name-change went changes of appearance. He would appear here as a Polish cavalry officer, here as a French infantryman, in another place as a British squaddie, then again as a paratroop major.

He had a docket from the senior British officer in Paris to say that he could turn up anywhere he liked, in the uniform and rank of his choice, or in civilian clothes, as he wished.

A rare privilege, one might think, for a staff sergeant. In fact I heard that, while engaged to the beautiful French girl who was to become his wife, he never wore the same uniform twice. He married her, incidentally, as Du Maurier.

But what of the uniforms? His children found them in a chest while playing one rainy day and, not surprisingly, felt obliged to try them on.

The surprise was that they were in different sizes – according to son Kevin, quite remarkably different sizes.

Now, a person can change his name easily, his voice less easily and his appearance cosmetically, but his suit size? Well, it's a good trick if you can do it.

Unless, just suppose, Du Maurier, alias Smith and Jones, was not really Jan – or Laiby – Hoch. Or, to put it another way... that Robert Maxwell, once a Member of Parliament, temporarily a swimmer, was not the same ex-soldier who was awarded the Military Cross in the field.

In which case, who was he? Could it be that he was never actually Robert Maxwell at all, merely someone else with the same name?

Now, there's a project for discussion.

The writer was, very briefly, managing director of a Maxwell company.

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