Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life. Keith Floyd
it didn’t say ‘by Keith Floyd’ but I took it home to my mum and said, ‘I wrote that!’
After a couple of weeks of really just hanging around and not doing very much at all I was put onto what they called the Duty Desk. You were given a list of numbers of the Police, the Ambulance Service, the hospitals, all of whom had a press helpline. You would ring them up every hour and say, ‘Hello, this is the Evening Post, has anything happened?’ and they would say, ‘Well, there was a crash at Cribbs Causeway,’ or, A woman was found floating in the docks, apparently having committed suicide,’ or ‘There’s been a murder on Bristol Downs,’ or something like that. With that information I would go to the News Editor and if it was an insignificant story he might give it to me to write, or if it was an important story he could give it to a senior reporter to write.
Sometimes I would be allowed to go with the senior reporter to see what he did and how he did it, which was really exciting. I remember from one of the helplines I discovered that the steelworks were on strike. The Editor told me to ring up and find out what was going on, so I phoned up the union representative and said, This is the Evening Post, can you tell me what is going on?’ and he said, ‘Well because we haven’t been paid properly we’re going on strike and this will disrupt things for as long as it takes.’ I reported this verbally to the News Editor, who said, ‘Well that’s OK, you can write that story.’ All these stories start with the word ‘today’. Today 600 steelworkers went on strike for better working conditions. A spokesman said…’ (you always have a spokesman and never a name and if you haven’t got a spokesman you invent one).
Digressing a bit, I remember one occasion I was sent out to the scene of a stabbing. I didn’t know what you had to do at the scene of a stabbing, there was nothing there. So I went back to my News Editor and said, ‘Well I went there but what do I do now?’ He said, ‘Well, who did you speak to?’ I said, ‘Nobody.’ He said, ‘Yes you did, you spoke to a passer by.’ I said, ‘No I didn’t.’ He said, ‘Yes you did, I’m telling you, you spoke to a passer by who said…’
Anyway, I’m typing out my story about the steel strike slowly and painfully, although I have already improved quite a lot at the old two-finger typing over six or seven weeks, when I’m aware that the words I’m typing are being spoken by somebody. I look up and there is a senior reporter behind me reading out exactly what I’m typing, down a phone. This was one of Bristol’s celebrated journalist characters called Joe Gallagher and he was the Chief Crime Writer for the Bristol Evening Post and also what’s called a ‘stringer’ or a correspondent for the London Evening Standard or the Daily Express, so whatever stories he sold to them he got a fee from them. He was dictating my story and was going to get paid for it. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘I’ve sold it to the Standard, dear boy, you ought to get into that.’ ‘Well how do I do that?’ I asked. ‘You speak to me because I handle these things.’
So Joe and I became quite good friends. He was a small, bespectacled, pugnacious, slightly balding Irishman who always wore flamboyant waistcoats and a trilby hat. I have no idea how old he would have been because I was seventeen and everybody was very old to me. Over time I also got to know his great buddy, a Yorkshireman who was the Sports Editor, Bob Cooper. Joe and Bob were inseparable and were up to all sorts of scams, really dyed-in-the-wool ex-Fleet Street professionals of the old school. They made themselves an absolute fortune on the paper because they invented a game called ‘Spot the Ball’. This shows a photograph of a man kicking a football and you have to mark with a cross on the picture where you think the thing was. People had to send in, I can’t remember, two shillings or something like that to have a go and win fifty or a hundred pounds. This thing really took off and the management of the paper was totally unconcerned and hadn’t seen it as anything more than a bit of fun, completely unaware that Joe and Bob were making an absolute fortune. They were doing nothing illegal or wrong, it’s just that it was their business and the paper let them print it because they thought it was good for the readers. They didn’t realise that these blokes suddenly became very, very rich. Once the paper saw how rich they had become they thought, ‘Hold on a minute, we want to be having some of this.’ As far as I know they were obliged to buy out Joe and Bob, who both promptly retired. Joe, with all this money, went off to Portugal to buy a restaurant. But that’s another story.
By now I was quite well integrated in the paper and even Farnsworth was taking me a bit more seriously and giving me more jobs. I was enjoying it very much. I soon realised we also had a morning paper called the Western Daily Press. When I joined the Evening Post, the Western Daily Press still had advertisements on the front page like The Times. Suddenly like a whirlwind a former Daily Express man came down to take over the paper and revolutionise it (it was a broadsheet paper in those days) and turn it into a campaigning, go-getting, sleaze-busting, hot, bright, brand-new newspaper. This, of course, shocked all the old hands who had been working on it for years because it really was a genteel paper that never looked for trouble and simply reported nice news. This was exciting to me because Eric Price, who had come to take over the Western Daily Press, had actually worked under the great editor Arthur Christiansen, so to me he was a hero. But he was like a film star newspaper editor: he didn’t actually have an eyeshield but I swear to God he had one really. He would march up and down with his waistcoat undone, shouting, ‘What the hell’s going on! Where’s my story, I need this now! Get off your arses!’ He was like a god to me and I contrived to meet him in the pub that we used to go to across the road in between editions (called the White Hart, I think). ‘Who are you, lad?’ he asked. ‘I’m Floyd, sir.’ I plucked up courage and asked, ‘Would it be OK if I came in and worked at night?’ because all the morning papers worked in the night. He said, ‘Yes you can.’ There was a lovely old-fashioned News Editor then on the Western Daily Press called Norman Rich, a gentle old man who was approaching retirement. He was such a gentleman that he wouldn’t say he hated Eric Price and the new paper. He would say he was ‘disappointed by the change and was looking forward to retiring’ because this wasn’t his style of journalism at all. So after I finished at 5.30, when the last edition of the Evening Post went out, I would go to the pub for a couple of hours and then come back and hang around the reporters’ room, unpaid because I enjoyed it so much, at night. In between I would talk to Norman when there wasn’t much to do and he would tell me tales of the old days of journalism. I learnt a huge amount from this kindly man and also from the Country Editor of the Western Daily Press, whose name, sadly, I forget. He too was on the verge of retirement and hated the way things were going. But seeing that I was excited about the way the paper was headed, clearly getting on very well with Eric Price, who was an authoritarian, albeit gifted, editor, known to hire and fire at the drop of a hat, he said, ‘I can see you’re doing very well here, lad, but I want to tell you something. As you climb up the ladder be careful who you tread on because you never know who you may meet on the way down.’ I have never forgotten that.
Anyway, after a while on the daytime paper covering little stories such as charily fund-raising events or the presentation of a wheelchair or a guide dog, the evenings were eminently more exciting. One night Eric said, ‘Right, there are prostitutes living in normal houses down in St Paul’s. Go down and see how many you can find and then we’ll expose them.’ I would go on vice patrol and all sorts of exciting things like that. It was often after midnight before I finished on the paper and I would go to this eccentric coffee bar which was full of strange, bearded, artistic, intellectual beatniks and hang out in there until about two in the morning. Then from virtually the city centre of Bristol I would walk five miles home every night because I never had enough money for a taxi. My pay at the time was £4 7s 6d a week. I spent most of it on beer in the interludes between press running and on bus fares in the mornings and I gave my mother a pound a week for my lodging, paid for my lunches and went out one night a week for a bowl of spaghetti bolognese and six half pints of lager and ten Nelson cigarettes, and walked home again! But what I was doing, of course, although I didn’t realise it at the time, was burning the candle at both ends. It wasn’t doing me a lot of good and I was extremely tired. I was unaware of my tiredness, I was on a roll and thought the whole thing extremely exciting.
Little by little I go to know some of the other journalists and quite a lot of them took