Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life. Keith Floyd
shirt and dark glasses and smoked Gauloises. Farnsworth hated him. This bloke didn’t write any news at all. The Editor had decreed that the Western Daily Press would have an arts page. This of course was anathema to Gordon, who thought newspapers should be full of news, not art; and not only that, it wasn’t even his paper – it was the Western Daily Press so this bloke was responsible to Eric Price, but much to Gordon Farnsworth’s annoyance he would work in the office during the Evening Post’s hours (it was the same newsroom for both papers). He and a man called Anthony Smith used to write a brilliantly funny column in the Western Daily Press called ‘Brennus and Berlinus’. The Western Daily Press was the most unlikely venue for this incredibly funny, witty, highly intelligent comedy piece (they would also cover what was on at the theatre etc.). ‘Brennus and Berlinus’ had to be, as far as I am concerned, the forerunner or the seeds of a very famous play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead because this man with whom I played cricket, with his long black hair, hooked nose, scraggy face, black jacket, dark glasses and Gauloises was none other than Tom Stoppard!
In, I think, the typesetting department was someone else who became outrageously famous. He was called Charles Wood and he wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade. There was another man on the paper lurking around there called Derek Robinson who wrote, amongst other things, The C’rec’ Way to Speak Bris’l, which was a parody on the way they speak in Bristol, and The Goshawk Squadron, and other wonderful books about the First World War. Then there was a man who wrote A Day in the Life of Joe Egg, a play about a paraplegic boy. The whole place was swarming with these people who were already brilliant but we didn’t know they were going to be as famous as they became.
The best piece I ever wrote was under the guidance of the Assistant News Editor, Jack Powell, a lovely, gentle chap and a very experienced journalist. They sent me off to do a story on Cyril Fletcher opening the new gas showroom in Queen’s Road in Bristol. I came back and I said, Today[!] comedian Cyril Fletcher, sporting a carnation and a red bow tie, opened the new Gas Board showroom in [wherever it was]’. Jack said, ‘No he didn’t. I tell you what he did: “Today comedian Cyril Fletcher, dashingly dressed in a red bow tie and sporting a carnation, quipping merrily, opened Mr Therm’s new home in Queen’s Road, Clifton, Bristol.” It’s the way of putting it. Mr Therm’s new home, not the gas showroom.’ Gordon Farnsworth said, ‘That’s jolly well done,’ but I didn’t tell him that it was actually Jack who told me how to write it. Through that I learnt to look at words in a different way but still get the same information from them.
So I was on a crest but I felt that Gordon Farnsworth was waiting for me to fall in some way. I don’t think he approved of the fact that I went to the pub quite so frequently. I don’t think he approved of the idea that I hung out with the older, experienced senior reporters and I think he was suspicious of my relationship with the Editor. And the fall did come. One of the important things to remember about the Bristol Evening Post was that Gordon Farnsworth was forever saying, This is a family newspaper,’ and every bit of local news had to be included. In fact, when the paper was founded it was created by the citizens of Bristol. Under the banner of the Bristol Evening Post it said: The paper that all Bristol asked for and helped to create’. They recognised that the citizens of Bristol felt they had a stake in the paper. Absolutely anything that went on in Bristol, the paper had to be there.
Anyhow, I was sent one day to a hotel to cover a reception at which the Rotary Club were to present a load of wheelchairs from money they had raised for disabled people. Apparently there was to be a lunch as well, and all I had to do was list the names of the important people who had made donations and who the recipients were, and go back and write a very simple story. Once again the story would start ‘Today…’ as all stories did: Today, Mrs George McWhatters, wife of the chairman of Harvey’s Wine Merchants, presented three wheelchairs to so and so.’ I went back, filed my story and thought no more about it, until a couple of days later Gordon Farnsworth came up to me, screaming with rage. ‘You’re a disgrace, an absolute bloody disgrace. I’ve had Mrs McWhatters on the phone. They said you went to the reception, you had lunch and you had their wine and you didn’t even bother to write the story.’ I said, ‘I didn’t have lunch, I didn’t know I could have lunch, and I did write the story.’ ‘No you didn’t! You are fired?’ And he went off to see the Editor to complain about me and that was it!
I thought, ‘No, this isn’t fair and it isn’t actually the case at all. I did write the story but where it’s gone I don’t know.’ So I went down to the sub-editors’ department and spoke to Ernie Avery. He said yes, he’d seen the story but he’d spiked it because he didn’t feel it was very interesting and he didn’t have room for it. So I went to the Editor and said, ‘Look, this is the case, I didn’t not write the story, I’ve been incorrectly dismissed and this isn’t at all fair.’ So anyway Gordon, a big, brash Yorkshireman who always found it very hard to be criticised or to be wrong, actually did a very kind thing and took me out for fish and chips and a pot of tea! He said, ‘I’m sorry about that, lad,’ in his lovely Yorkshire accent. ‘Sorry about that, but you know, you’ve got to take it a bit easier. You’re working in the day and at night, and quite frankly I think you’re overdoing it.’ I didn’t think I was overdoing it at all. I was in a trance, I so loved working there that I was drugged by the whole thing – by the noise of the presses, by the smell of the ink and the hot metal, by the clatter of the typewriters, by the shouting of the reporters, by the ringing of the telephones, by the hustle and the bustle and the whole thing.
Two weeks after the first complaint Gordon said I could go to the Bath and West Show, a big agricultural show in the West Country, which in those days was held in a place called Ashton Park, within Bristol itself. I believe it now has a permanent home somewhere near Shepton Mallet. My job was simply to collect the results of best heifer, best flower arrangement, and all that sort of thing – a pretty easy job – and then phone the results back to the office. There was a press tent, which was great fun, and it was there that I discovered Tuborg lager. I evidently must have had quite a few, because I recall being woken up by the huge size twelve boot of Gordon Farnsworth, who had made just one concession to the hot weather. He had taken off his jacket but was still wearing his tightly buttoned waistcoat, collar and tie. He sat down beside me and said, ‘Come on, lad, you can’t be falling asleep on duty.’ We got chatting and he asked me what my hobbies were. I explained to him that I was in the process of restoring a 1934 or 1935 Austin 7 Saloon which I had bought for £5. Every Sunday, on my day off, I would fiddle with it in some way or another. I would regrind the valves or put in new bushes in the steering department (I can’t remember any of the technicalities of it now, it was nearly forty years ago). I was quite obsessed by this car, and there I was sitting on the grass at Ashton Park, telling Gordon this story.
A few days later, back in the office, he said to me, ‘How would you like to write a feature about your hobby?’ I was so excited and I wrote all about it, and at the age of seventeen I had a full-page feature with a byline ‘by Keith Floyd’ in the Bristol Evening Post. Things got better and better and I was then given a commission, a job to go to Stratford-upon-Avon, where a group of enthusiasts and volunteers were cleaning out and restoring the Stratford-upon-Avon canal. I started, again, inventing lines, things like ‘Mr Smith, the Director of Operations, said, “We’ll get this canal open or we’ll die in the attempt,” ’ which of course, he didn’t say at all, but it sounded better than what he had really said. I thought it was quite good journalism but they phoned to complain. I couldn’t understand that. All I was trying to do was convey their enthusiasm, but there I was, in trouble yet again! The paper did print the story, however, and it was my second byline in a month. People began to look at me rather suspiciously, wondering how I was apparently succeeding so well against the odds. Certainly the other young, temporary reporters who were just waiting to go to university were not getting anything like the breaks I was getting but that was really because, I think, although Gordon was a gruff old fucker, he really was on my side, and he wouldn’t give these boys jobs because he didn’t feel that they were at all serious. He felt that they were just killing time before university, which was something he did not approve of. I wasn’t paid any extra for these stories – they all came within my weekly salary.
Then I was given, for reasons