Abstract
I suspect that Cyril Jones received little or no thanks for his years of service as chief reporter of the Eccles and Patricroft Journal. But while many of us then-young hacks lived in terror of him, we also owe Cyril a great debt of gratitude. Because his combination of thinly disguised disdain for our efforts and some good old-fashioned bollockings drummed into us the basic skills of our trade. And not just the need to find out who did what, when, where, how and why.
Cyril tutored us in the art of writing crisp and uncomplicated copy. “I know what it means. You know what it means, but do the poor buggers in Ellesmere St know what it means?” he once asked a young colleague who had foolishly tried to show off by using the word “supine” to describe someone he had interviewed who was lying in a hospital bed.
Cyril and the Eccles Journal, then part of the Tillotson group, publisher of the Bolton Evening News, comes very much to mind when reading Newspapers and PR: A Media Life. Despite its rather uninspiring title, it takes us on a pleasant trip down memory lane. Heath joined the weekly South Avon Mercury as a junior reporter in 1966. No internet in those days of course, no Google. Background checks were carried out by reading leatherbound back copies of your paper or looking through the files – musty cuttings kept in a cabinet.
This was the era of Remington typewriters, carbon paper and smoke-filled newsrooms. When reporters spent weekends covering flower shows and carnivals. When marriages, golden weddings and funerals were the stock-in-trade of weekly papers. As Heath recalls, the marriages were written up from forms filled in by the families. And on the Eccles Journal, at least, golden weddings warranted a long sit-down interview with the happy couple.
Heath reminds us what a nightmare funerals could be as the reporter was expected to detail not just the names of all those present but also, in some cases, the names of the people they were representing. And God help him or her if they missed out or misspelt any name. Evenings were spent covering council and committee meetings desperately looking for a line – any line – that might excite the interest of the reader. And during the day it was off to the local magistrates’ court to listen to hour upon hour of proceedings, enlivened only by the occasional solicitor who, with an eye firmly on the press bench, could serve up the intro the reporter craved.
“And when police entered the home of the accused, they found a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of stolen goods” was my favourite, from a solicitor who handed my colleague a note of what he had said to make sure he hadn’t missed it. A page lead was guaranteed.
In 1971, Heath joined the Bristol Evening Post, a cracking paper in its heyday with a nightly circulation approaching 200,000. Heath covered his North Somerset patch, doubling up as the paper’s shipping correspondent, sating a passion he had nurtured since childhood. And he latched on to a lucrative sideline writing lengthy features for Lloyd’s List.
In April 1973 he witnessed the heartache of families whose loved ones died in the Invicta Airlines disaster when 108 people, mainly West Country women on a shopping and sightseeing trip to Basel, were killed. And he reported the sad decline of Bristol as a major port, due in part at least to the new container ships that found it more cost-effective to use Southampton and Felixstowe.
But it wasn’t until 1989, when Heath found himself covering the Clevedon flower show for the 20th time, that he decided to call it a day. Instead, working from his mother’s back bedroom, he set up what was to become a successful PR company feeding his old colleagues stories about, among other things, holidays and hotels. Of course, the Nigel Heaths are a diminishing breed. So, surprisingly, he makes no complaint about the closures and cutbacks that have hit his old industry so hard.
But we owe them all a vote of thanks, if only for their unstinting role as public watchdogs. Are courts and local councils subjected to the same scrutiny these days? Are local organisations and civic leaders called to account as often as they should be? Do we really know what is going on in our local community? In too many areas, I suspect we do not. Cyril Jones would not approve.
