Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Journalist and Editor Michael Clayton worked his way up from local newspapers to BBC war correspondent, with radio and magazine experience inbetween. From the sharp end of the action in Vietnam, to the violence of the Troubles in Belfast and the tragedy of the East Pakistan revolt, Clayton is well placed to compare the varying challenges of journalism on different media platforms. The rivalry between the BBC and ITV, the bravery of war cameramen, dealing on assignment with corrupt officials, the TV preference for close-to-the action film as opposed to insightful reports of the effects of conflict: Clayton has experienced it all over a 70-year career. His insights into the ethos of the BBC, the colourful characters he reported and filmed alongside, and his resulting views of humanity, war and crime – Clayton's autobiography in journalism is honest, wry and full of insight.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 379
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
i
MY LIFE IN THE NEWS
From Village Fete to the Front Line
MICHAEL CLAYTON
iiiiiivTo Marilyn who made this book possible
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I have endeavoured to describe my life in this memoir of 20th century journalism because every field in which I worked has been changed profoundly by the digital revolution. War is a recurrent theme in my story; it intruded on my childhood during WW2, during my teens as a National Serviceman, and it dominated my years as a news reporter for the BBC.
The whiff of printing ink in a newspaper office, a press reporter’s desperate search for a telephone box, and a television crew sending filmed reports home in tins, are among so many features of journalistic life which have disappeared. Perhaps the ‘romance of journalism’ was always a myth, but I certainly believed in it when I set out.
I started my career by calling on local paper offices on my bicycle. After many miles of pedalling far from my home in Bournemouth, I gained an apprenticeship as a reporter on an excellent weekly paper, the New Milton Advertiser and its sister paper, the Lymington Times. They were owned by the Curry family who worked apprentices hard, and paid them little, but to whom I owe immense gratitude for the thorough training I received.
It was a route to reporting in Fleet Street, and then to BBC national and international reporting in radio and television. I began reporting flower shows and local courts, and progressed to the Vietnam War, and conflicts in the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, plus Iceland’s ‘Cod War’ and disasters ranging from Aberfan to rail and air crashes.2
My former colleague, and now justifiably an eminence in BBC news, John Simpson, referred to my performance as a war zone reporter in his book We Chose to Speak of War and Strife.
Simpson says Michael Clayton was a ‘tall, elegant, idiosyncratic figure …. who first won fame in Britain by having the courage to show how scared he was during the various firefights he got himself into. At that stage viewers were still used to the clipped, impersonal style of the Second World War, and a man who insisted on thrusting himself in the way of danger while being clearly scared stiff was something altogether new and distinctly admirable’.
Simpson, a distinguished author as well as broadcasting legend, was generous in his assessment. I think it was borne out of my coverage of the Cambodian War which produced a very high casualty rate among journalists. I had the closest shaves of my career in Cambodia, causing me on one occasion to perform a notably fearful report lying down after our car had been shot up by North Vietnamese. The trauma of an exceptionally narrow escape caused my veteran cameraman to suddenly abandon me and return to London, soon to be replaced by another crew to work with me in further Cambodian scrapes.
Perhaps I made some contribution to news bulletins’ depictions of war correspondents under fire, but it was entirely spontaneous, and it seemed to earn the sympathy of many viewers who wrote to me. On the whole I took the view that the news bulletin was not a theatre to show the correspondent performing feats of courage, but should concentrate on telling the story. I suspect brave World War 2 reporters winced under fire too, but they were reporting for radio only and could not be seen at moment of danger.
I admire today’s media reporters covering the appalling Russian invasion of neighbouring Ukraine. They are all at grave risk, and they are often working in conditions of considerable discomfort and difficulty. I am glad the role of the war reporter is far better recognised in TV offices than it was in my day. They often have local interpreters, production back up teams, protective helmets and flak jackets, and far better communications than we enjoyed. 3Nevertheless they are working in peril of their lives, and they are continuing the vital tradition of telling the world in words and pictures what is happening on battle fronts.
I followed a path to the top in TV war reporting which is virtually impossible today without the university or college education which I lacked. The internet and digital technology have cut costs and speeded up the transmission of news. But is it fair to ask whether higher educational and technological standards have vastly improved the quality of writing in the press, or level of reporting on television and radio?
My ‘university’, as an apprentice reporter on an excellent local newspaper, taught me first-hand a great deal about the law, local government, and politics. My ‘exams’ occurred every time my reports were published. Disgruntled readers did not only write letters to their local newspaper, but called in at only too accessible offices in New Milton. ‘Get it right!’ was the message drummed into me day after day. I still quake when I recall referring to a local family as Mr and Mrs Softer, when the use of a phonetic check would have established their name was in fact Foster. I owe the Editor a deep debt for not firing me over that one!
Those who warmly welcomed the digital revolution in journalism, did not foresee that it would soon imperil newspaper in print form, and broadcasting news. Many younger people nowadays do not buy newspapers. They rely on social media on the internet for their news, which is too often wildly inaccurate. They peer at their smart phones instead of reading a printed page.
Newspaper circulations have fallen, hitting hard the local and national press, while the BBC and other main TV outlets are under considerable pressure from streaming services provided by Netflix, Amazon and others. Licence fee income is under threat.
TV news bulletins today rely heavily on a battery of correspondents described as ‘editors’ specialising in different subjects. Much of the news film is streamed in from sources all over the world. It still calls for courageous reporters in battlefields. But it is fair to question whether the bulletins are more entertaining and informative than in the past? 4
The machine-like 24-hour rolling news bulletins run by the BBC, ITV and Sky, can produce a turn-off effect for viewers. Attempts are made by the TV giants to produce feature material as well, but they have to compete with current affair programmes on the main channels.
Whether or not you believe journalistic standards are higher since the digital world hit the press and media, I can assure you that the old-time Fleet Street and broadcasting outlets were far more fun for the reporter. There was a buccaneering element in a newsman’s life which is eroded by today’s need to spend hours staring at screens in on-line research for a news story.
I am sure there is still fun to be had in journalism, but the special flavour of reporting in Britain’s earlier postwar years is worth recalling and recording.
When I entered Fleet Street, newspapers were kings of the printed world. Circulations were soaring; most railway commuters buried their heads in evening papers on their way home from work. The London Evening News where I worked, proudly proclaimed it had the world’s largest evening paper circulation, well over a million copies. The competing Evening Standard and Star papers provided widely varied alternatives.
The Fleet Street reporter, having received a chit from the news desk, called out to the copy boys who ran round the office with pieces of news copy: ‘Boy get me a tenner!’ Armed with this cash advance on expenses, the newshound could rush out of the office to his car, or hail a taxi, and race to the scene of a breaking news story. There were few parking regulations, no security cameras, and no mobile phones. Getting the story back to the office meant dictating from a phone box, or paying a shopkeeper to use his phone.
Most morning and evening papers were centred around Fleet Street, and each paper’s staff gathered in their own favourite pub. London was greyer, grimier, and more full of street crime, hold-ups and bank raids, than today when money is transported on-line.
Of course it all had to go, but I have sought to document one journalist’s turbulent life in newspapers, magazines and broadcasting in an era which has disappeared, and will never return.
Chapter One
DESERT DRAMA
I am standing in a desert. It is uncomfortably hot, although it is a dry heat which is doing my sinuses some good. Everything else in my environment threatens to do me a great deal of harm.
I am not alone, and any minute I fear I shall be shot or taken prisoner: King Hussein of Jordan’s armoured vehicles and tanks form a wide outer ring of vehicles facing inwards, with guns trained on the centre. Shimmering in the heat haze in the centre are two large passenger aircraft: a Pan American Boeing 747 and a Swissair Douglas DC-8.
These aircraft, carrying nearly 300 passengers and 30 crew between them, have been hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
I can see some of the PFLP commandos roaring across the desert in a couple of jeeps. Some of the hijackers are standing up, with their head-dresses streaming, and all brandish rifles or machine guns.
At such a moment it is commonplace that one’s entire life flashes before you. I am not getting the full-life treatment, but certainly my career as a reporter is recalled in a fraction of a second. I marvel that recording local events on a weekly newspaper in Hampshire has so quickly resulted in my attempt to report this potentially lethal drama for the rest of the world. 6
My best asset is that I am accompanied by the best BBC TV news crew in the business: cameraman Bernard Hesketh and his young, and equally brave sound recordist, Barry Lanchester.
As if filming a traffic incident at home, Bernard says calmly: ‘Better get on with it. I don’t think we’ve got a lot of time. Keep talking and I’ll pan off you to get in as much of the scene as I can; we’ll try to do it all in one take.’
So I stand with my back to the aircraft, and the imminent threat of the commandos approaching, and begin declaiming a piece to camera with as much passion, and as many facts, as I can muster.
Sometimes I am talking to the camera; other times I seem to be hovering above, looking down at myself performing this ridiculous charade, and wondering how I can keep it going…
‘I think that’s it. They’re probably coming to get us,’ says Bernard conversationally, stopping his camera, and peering over my shoulder.
He is such a professional that he insisted we brought two taxis from Amman. He unclips his roll of film, hands it to Barry who jumps into a taxi and promises the driver a big tip to get to Amman airport at top speed.
Bernard methodically folds his large wooden tripod and packs his camera gear, while I turn to face the dust cloud of the commando jeeps now heading our way.
*****
The Palestinian aircraft hijacking drama on 6 September, 1970, was the closest I got to a world-wide TV news scoop in my eight years with the BBC. By sheer chance I happened to be the only British TV reporter with a crew in Amman at the time. I was attempting to report growing civil strife between the Jordanians and Palestinians occupying huge refugee camps since leaving the Israeli occupied West Bank of the Jordan River after the Six Day War in 1967.
ITN as usual had arrived in Amman first: their reporter Gerald Seymour had produced reports already broadcast, and ITN decided it was safe for him to go home on the day I arrived. Gerry Seymour 7used his TV reporting life as fodder for his hugely successful second career as a thriller writer.
For once, the BBC’s slow decision-making process on the foreign desk paid dividends, because soon the hijackings were underway, and I was jolting in a taxi across the desert to Dawson’s Field, a former RAF desert airstrip. We gained a tip from the British Embassy that this could be the hijack scene.
I had only assimilated a few facts from my short-wave radio before we left Amman: the PFLP planted explosives under the aircraft after their armed hijackers on board had forced the pilots to land during the night in the desert, using flares and vehicle headlights to light the strip.
They were demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners from the West in exchange for the bewildered airline passengers now perilously held hostage in sweltering desert heat.
After our film was more or less safely on its way to Amman with Barry Lanchester in the second taxi, Bernard Hesketh and I waited for the arrival of the Palestinian commandos, speeding towards us in a cloud of dust in two small armoured cars. Their head-dresses swirled in the wind; they waved their rifles in the air as they approached. Hesketh stood there as calmly as if waiting for a number eleven bus in London; I took my cue from him, and tried to show similar outward calm, although my stomach was churning wildly; it seemed likely I had made my last ever piece to camera.
The PFLP boys screeched to a halt, and ordered us to follow them in our taxi. I was surprised to see several uniformed air hostesses in the vehicle with the hijackers, apparently laughing and joking. Was this a brave attempt to create a relationship with the hijackers which might ward off mass murder, I wondered?
The armoured cars led us right up to the boarding steps of one of the hijacked aircraft.
‘So which TV company are you from?’ asked a bland, young man in a fawn suit and sunglasses, speaking in perfect English.
When I explained, he replied: ‘Ah, Michael Clayton of the BBC? Yes, I heard you the other night on the World Service from Amman, a bit confusing, but not bad, not bad at all.’ 8
I thanked him for his mixed compliment, but our cordial chat was interrupted by two heavily scarfed hijackers who demanded in heavily accented English that we hand over our film and cameras. They poked automatic weapons in our chest to emphasise the point. Hesketh went through a pantomime of emptying his camera of a roll of unused film, handing it over gravely.
I was left to wander about, and walked to the foot of the landing steps to see an air stewardess looking down from the plane’s open door.
‘We’re from the BBC,’ I shouted. ‘Are you OK?’
‘It’s getting very hot, but we’re OK so far,’ she shouted back. Then she ducked back inside, apparently at the order of a hijacker.
After a further chat with the sunglass smoothie, Hesketh and I were graciously advised we could go, and our empty camera was returned. We gave humble thanks and sped off in our taxi, exulting that thanks to Hesketh and Lanchester, and good editing in London, my lengthy stand-upper in the desert was the BBC exclusive lead story in the UK bulletins that night, also used by NBC in the US, and widely distributed throughout the world.
Our end of the story was temporarily eclipsed when the Palestinians tried hijacking an Israeli El Al flight from Amsterdam to London, only to be foiled by armed stewards and belligerent passengers. One hijacker was shot dead, but his partner, female terrorist Leila Khaled was taken prisoner and turned over to police in London.
Jordan became top of the news again when the Palestinians succeeded in hijacking a BOAC VC-10 flight on its way from Bahrain to London. Airport security checking was virtually non-existent in those days, and no-one thought to clamp down extra security after the first hijackings, although another Pan Am flight had been hijacked, then landed in Cairo and blown up after the passengers were released.
The arrival of a British plane in Jordan brought Fleet Street’s finest, and some BBC ‘reinforcements’ to the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman where the crew and I were staying. Michael Blakey 9arrived for BBC TV, and Michael Elkins for radio, plus the hasty appearance of my friend and rival in Cambodia and other hot-spots, Michael Nicholson, desperately keen to ‘catch up’ for ITN; a plethora of Michaels. I was not overjoyed to see them on ‘my’ story.
Nicholson, the most forceful of the TV war groupies, made his presence felt literally next morning when we were among a large, excitable group of hacks at a bizarre press conference called by the hijackers at Dawson’s Field. The Palestinian bosses had a keen sense of theatre: they scratched lines in the desert sand, made the press keep behind one line, and members of the hijacked plane crews and selected passengers keep some distance behind another line, with the planes in the background.
We shouted questions across the gap, and they replied on a loud hailer. A PFLP officer gave us a stentorian speech on the Palestinian cause, which he claimed justified risking the lives of several hundred innocent men, women and children passengers.
It was splendid television, and it was not long before the demarcation lines became blurred, as TV crews surged forward to nab individuals for ‘exclusive’ interviews. Nicholson was interviewing a pilot when I pushed in with my crew, and he responded by some judicious kicks to my shins below camera level while I interjected with BBC questions.
Fearless, enterprising and a genuine believer that what he was doing actually mattered, Nicholson has made a distinguished life-time career out of war reporting, and I much admire his skills and fortitude. But I remonstrated with him after Dawson’s Field that proper war correspondents worthy of the name did not kick the shins of colleagues just to get a few more minutes on the telly.
Nicholson laughed it off, and he was to be a good companion in further adventures, notably crossing wildest Tanzania to the Ugandan border when Idi Amin was in power.
As I said in a BBC 2 Timewatch reconstruction of the Jordan hijackings, broadcast in 2007, I especially admired the coolness of the British pilot of the BOAC flight. Despite the stress and danger of landing his airliner safely in the desert in the dark, he 10behaved at the press conference like a middle-aged Englishman merely irritated at being interrupted while gardening.
I was pleased to learn later that good old BBC radio had fully used a spare sound tape I had included in our package in which I had been able to indulge in descriptive comment. It was a link with my former journalistic life as a ‘words man’ which I still found more compelling than scribbling terse TV scripts confined to those aspects of the story for which we had the pictures.
The Jordan hijackings story developed a plot worthy of a fiction thriller: most passengers were released, but arrived at the Intercontinental Hotel just before Jordan’s King Hussein launched his army in a bitter struggle with the Palestinians. The PFLP kept some male passengers as bargain hostages at another venue in Amman.
The press and most passengers, including the women and children, were all trapped at the Intercontinental while shot and shell raged in the streets outside, sometimes holing the hotel and smashing its windows. My bedroom acquired a jagged port-hole, fortunately when I was elsewhere, and I slept thereafter on the floor in the corridor for a few hours each night, using a spare mattress as a token barrier against further gunfire.
All the hijacked passengers in the hotel were flown out in a Red Cross-arranged truce, amazed that the press and TV hacks voluntarily remained behind in the shattered hotel. By then I was extremely tired of living on cold scratch meals from the Intercontinental’s kitchen bereft of fresh food and power, and not only was I missing my family, but the early foxhunting season was now in full swing at home. I had undertaken to write regular hunting reports for The Field in the season ahead, and I learned later that, tongue in cheek, that august sporting magazine published a short piece apologising to its readers for the absence of its hunting correspondent who was currently ‘trapped under gunfire in war torn Amman’.
Now operating among a competitive mob of ‘colleagues’, I concentrated on surviving a situation which seemed to promise the further excitement of a direct hit on the beleaguered press. 11
American, French, German and British TV crews amused themselves concocting stirring pieces to camera in the hotel lobby while the Army provided plenty of gunfire a few yards from the doors. Soon we were all running out of film, and increasingly frustrated by our inability to send anything home.
Press reporters typed away on the portables in the corridors, but they could not dictate their stories: Amman’s phone land lines were down, and radio telephones were in the future.
One afternoon the Jordanian Army operated a brief truce, and I was among several reporters who walked out of the hotel grounds into streets littered with cartridge cases, amid empty buildings with gaping windows and holed walls. Hussein’s army had been ruthless in driving from the capital the Palestinian guests who had presumptuously sought to take over the country which had given them sanctuary from the West Bank, albeit in the squalor of crowded, insanitary camps which had been for too long tolerated by the world in general.
I was talking to a group of soldiers outside the hotel when I heard that all-too-familiar pop-pop of incoming AK47 rifle fire, and I dropped to the ground with the same instinct I had developed in a gruelling tour in Vietnam that spring.
The incoming fire continued, apparently from a sniper in an upper window opposite. I jumped over an ornamental bush and ran on all fours to the hotel lobby, where I flung myself behind a pillar. I hardly cared that my knees and hands were bleeding from glass splinters all over the hotel’s bullet shattered frontage.
Although there were joint operations to save water, and share the Intercontinental’s shrinking supply of tinned foods, the media mob could not maintain solidarity for long.
A French TV crew achieved a deal through their Amman embassy to leave the city, and drive down to the Gulf of Aqaba to escape the country – and scoop the world with their film.
They left amid grim silence from the remaining press and TV crews, but only 24 hours later there was a storm of ribald laughter and applause as the dejected three-man French crew returned with a Jordanian military escort. 12
They had been turned back on the road to the Gulf, and refused exit.
Meanwhile, we had arranged a mass media escape from Amman, operating through the American, British and other embassies.
Amusingly, the French were not included in this arrangement, and we were even more entertained as they protested loudly to various diplomatic and Red Cross staff who arrived with one khaki-coloured bus to take us to the airport. Eventually the French were allowed on board too, and the bus set off through a burning, shattered Amman which we were sternly forbidden to film.
A Jordanian Army officer warned us we could come under fire at any time, and I was among those not ashamed to shelter behind my typewriter case held against the windows.
We reached a deserted terminal building in Amman airport to be told there was no chance of a plane arriving until next day. Palestinian commandos were said to be intermittently mortaring the far end of the runway area.
A few Arab embassy children were in our escape group, and several of us used this as an excuse to break into the terminal’s small buffet kitchen, raiding its meagre stock, and boiling up pots of soup on electric stoves which were working. With chocolate forced from slot machines we produced a ‘feast’ for everyone, and then spent a desperately uncomfortable night trying to sleep on wooden slatted seats in the terminal’s austere waiting area.
A Jordanian passenger plane braved the airport’s possible hazards to arrive next morning, and amid cheers we took off for Beirut airport where I was surprised to find the BBC operating with unusual efficiency. A back-up team of news staff organised a runway switch to a London plane just about to take off, and there was a special reception at Heathrow to whisk me to Television Centre, although I found time to give a radio interview to my old friends in Broadcasting House before I left the airport.
In those days editing yards of film and laying a sound track was a laborious process. The film editors did a magnificently swift ‘pull together’ of the film in what appeared to be a logical order, 13and on the 6pm news I gave an unscripted introduction, unshaven and in the same filthy shirt and slacks I had been wearing for days, before producing a live commentary under the film report. I am glad to say they gave full credit in the bulletin to Bernard Hesketh and Barry Lanchester, who produced marvellous footage. Bernard played a great part in helping the film editors achieve some sort of chronology and priority of shots chosen.
It was rough and ready editing, but it had genuine news immediacy, and it filled virtually all the bulletin. Perhaps in a small, clumsy way it contributed something to the growing trend towards ‘live’ coverage from the heart of the action, which satellite technology would soon make far more possible.
Afterwards I was expecting to be asked to produce a more polished job for the main nine o’clock news, but they had recorded the whole item on video-tape and the editors liked the rough version enough to reproduce it in full again that night, although I remained in full desert kit to read a more updated introductory script.
Despite imbibing frequent cups of terrible BBC coffee, I was visibly wilting by then. The Editor of TV News, Desmond Wilcox, a decent man but often a somewhat remote figure, thanked me for the work, and bestowed his own chauffeur-driven car for my trip home to Blackheath where my wife was waiting with our infant daughter and son. The home news was that son Marcus had a nasty cold which had prevented the family coming to the airport to join other BBC families. We were awoken from exhausted sleep soon after midnight by continuous ringing of our phone. A pert Canadian lady apologised, but said she had my number from her BBC colleagues, and would I mind giving an interview down the line to CBC? I asked grumpily how much they were paying.
‘It’s a reciprocal arrangement with the BBC’, she said.
‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘What a joy to be a BBC staff man.’
I gave the interview, sitting in the dark on the edge of the bed, while the rest of the family waited for the so often absent husband and father to finish the latest unprofitable aberration demanded by his ridiculous job.14
I received a modest BBC bonus of £250 – for the Amman stint – some of which I spent on a badly-needed new hunter. I named this apparently workmanlike gelding Hijack.
Unfortunately, I was ‘had’: Hijack was not a sound horse, incapable of turning out regularly in the hunting field. Fortunately I had insured him to the hilt. When he was put down I received full recompense which enabled me to buy one of the most exciting horses I ever had the privilege of riding – the great Foxford who was to be instrumental in totally changing my life.
Chapter Two
CHILD OF WAR
Although the stresses and strains on our parents and their friends grew grievously, the Second World War was mostly an exciting, stimulating time for young boyhood if you were sublimely lucky enough to be brought up in a suburb of Bournemouth, one of Hitler’s lowest priority targets in the world.
Aged five when it started, I enjoyed a ‘good war’, until one afternoon in a news cinema in 1944 I experienced a devastating revelation of what the horror of Nazi domination had meant on the European continent only 30 miles or so across the Channel from Bournemouth’s tranquil but fenced-off sea-front. The images remain crystal clear today, reinforced by the Holocaust films I have seen since. My childhood illusion that I lived in a world of reason was shattered beyond repair. No matter how shocking, nothing I experienced later as a reporter in Vietnam and the Middle East was of any surprise, having absorbed the deepest, darkest horror of the Holocaust at the age of ten.
In the red-brick classrooms of Hillview Road Primary School, most of us welcomed the excitements of lessons being interrupted for instruction in donning gas-masks. I can still smell the rubber, and recall giggling helplessly as my vision was blotted out by my breath causing the Perspex window to be misted up. 16
It was possible to make very rude noises by blowing on the rubber of the gas-mask, much to the annoyance of our teacher, Miss Wilkinson, a tall slim maiden lady who taught us to read and write with admirable dedication and skill amid wartime difficulties.
There were further interruptions while we were shepherded to newly-built air-raid shelters, erected in the playgrounds in white brick lined with sandbags. We took for granted the immense effort of grown-ups in throwing up such defences all around us.
Outside school I played war games endlessly with my best friend, Geoffrey Northover, who lived in a house with a garden adjoining the far end of ours. We became such friends that our fathers made a small gate in the garden fence, and thereafter I achieved the company of Geoffrey, his sister Ann and groups of friends who played endlessly in the Northovers’ garden, amid increasing areas of home-grown vegetables. ‘Dig for Victory’ was the first of a welter of war-time slogans which all helped to make life even more interesting.
At the bottom of our garden my father, and Geoffrey Northover’s father, a Post Officer worker named Dick, dug a home-made shelter. It was a six feet deep, rectangular hole in the ground, covered with cast iron sheets laid on struts. It had seats of planks, and a small cupboard containing water bottles and packets of crisps. We children thought it was heavenly, and we were dying to use it in a real air-raid. The shelter would have been useless in a direct hit, but would have been some defence against ‘blast’ we were told by our parents. I longed to experience ‘blast’, but it never seemed to arrive in our garden.
We heard sirens soon after war’s outbreak, but the phoney war period was somewhat disappointing for us. We were kitted out in toy tin hats, carried rudimentary home-made wooden rifles, and spent much of our playtime running about the garden, pointing these at the sky shouting ‘ah-ah-ah-ah-ah….’ to simulate the sound of automatic weapons.
Soon we were shouting at real German airplanes. The Battle of Britain, fought over the south coast skies, produced occasional dog-fights over the Bournemouth suburbs and the surrounding Dorset countryside. 17
For six and seven-year-old boys it was wonderful because the aerial combat took place in daylight.
On one occasion Geoffrey and I were trapped in his house, while his parents were out, and with not slightest thought for our own safety we gazed delightedly from an upper window at RAF fighters diving from the sky in combat with Germans. We heard the planes firing as they dived.
‘Look, look, there’s a Nazi!’ we screamed with excitement, as we saw, or thought we saw, a plane bearing the German cross on its wings.
News of such encounters was either ignored, or only vaguely referred to in press and radio, bound by the requirements of war-time security, but word of mouth ‘news’ about the war on the home front spread rapidly, despite the new posters warning that ‘careless talk costs lives’. We were aware, but blithely unconcerned, about the increasing government poster campaigns.
I wondered about the latter slogan for some time, and failed to understand it until I heard on the radio about the risk of talking to spies, or even more mysteriously ‘fifth columnists’. It seemed to mean that anything remotely German was to be abhorred. My mother found a ‘Made in Germany’ label on a mechanical toy in a Bournemouth department store, and took it to an assistant who hastily apologised for selling such appalling pre-war stock.
Somehow we heard of planes brought down locally after the Battle of Britain aerial dog-fights. One morning we cycled several miles westwards into the green Dorset countryside which lapped our estate.
Near the village of Kinson small, excited groups of people were pointing down one lane. We rounded a bend and to our intense excitement we saw a German Messerschmidt lodged in a cottage front garden, its nose buried in the lawn, and its tail sticking high in the air.
There were no police or Air Raid Wardens present, and we joined other little boys collecting fragments of grey metal broken off the crashed plane. We took them home and kept them in precious caches of souvenirs in our bedrooms, alongside models of Spitfires, 18Hurricanes, Blenheim bombers, and German aircraft which were especially popular for swapping in the school playground. I recall gaining a battered model of a Messerschmidt in return for a huge pile of conkers I had carefully collected for several days.
Kinson boys told us lurid, and possibly fictitious, stories that the pilot had parachuted down nearby, and had been captured by local farm workers armed with pitch-forks. However, such dramas did take place, and we were frequently reminded that someone ‘over there’ was trying to kill us in our own home town.
Bournemouth suffered far less than nearby Southampton and Portsmouth from enemy air-raids, but when Hitler’s bombing campaign changed after the Battle of Britain, Bournemouth suffered sporadic night-time raids. One night I awoke when our bungalow shook alarmingly after a German land mine was dropped in Winton, largely destroying a local school – a pity it was not mine, I reflected wryly. There were one or two bomb sites in Bournemouth by the end of the war, but nothing compared with the devastation of London and many of our industrial cities.
‘They drop bombs here when they’ve got a few left on their way back to Germany after trying to hit the factories inland,’ my mother told me. She made me an ‘air raid suit’, a warm, brown garment of trousers, top and a pointed hood, with a long zip down the front. Thus attired I was rushed down the garden path to the new air-raid shelter, sometimes having to be dragged down the steps because I wanted to see the new night-time phenomenon of search-lights piercing the skies. It was especially exciting when I heard the drone of bombers somewhere over-head.
In the shelter we would meet the Northover family, and join in night-time picnics which were jolly for the children, but must have been tiring and stressful for our parents. My luck held out because my father, as a qualified electrician, was drafted into a ‘reserved occupation’, ship-building work in Southampton. He cycled from home six days a week, usually before dawn, to join train-loads of workers travelling 30 miles each way from Bournemouth station to Southampton docks. In winter he would return after dark, tired out, 19and often facing an interrupted night caused by the air-raids which I was enjoying so much.
Often his daily rail journey was delayed by the effects of overnight bombing on the docks, and sometimes the train was stopped in the New Forest by enemy air-raids, the men spilling out onto the track and into the heathland until the all-clear.
Once my mother took us to Southampton to join my father for a midday ‘dinner’ in a local café, a rare alternative to sandwiches packed by my mother. We waited outside metal gates at the docks until the workers appeared on the other side, penned in a mass against the gate. A whistle sounded, the gates swung open, and the mass of men and women poured out. My father, grimy in overalls and smelling vaguely of machinery and oil, emerged from the crowd, and joined us for a deplorable greasy spoon meal in the crowded café. I was not too young to realise with a pang that his war was no fun at all. He said very little about his work in Southampton, but I heard him quietly remark to my mother that the complicated wiring in the submarines they were fitting out was ‘absolute hell’.
At home my father served as an Air Raid Warden, and for a while had to pound along Western Avenue during winter nights. He was supposed to shout the famous slogan ‘Put that bloody light out’ if a chink showed in the blackout, but I never heard him raise his voice.
One Sunday morning I accompanied him to a hilarious session learning to use stirrup pumps to put out incendiary bombs. It was conducted by my school headmaster, Mr Eaton, whose manner and diction was remarkably similar to Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army.
I recall that the simulated incendiary bomb burnt down a small shed completely because the stirrup pumps were not employed effectively by my father and other men. Mr Eaton, tall, bespectacled and loud voiced, grew redder and redder, and nearly collapsed with indignation. I thought it was the best live comedy show I had seen for a long time. 20
Whatever his discomforts and stresses, my father was with us throughout the war, and did not undergo the rigours and risks of battle. I knew that most of my friends’ fathers were in the Forces, away from home. Some never came back, or returned shattered, but a significant number undoubtedly had a ‘good war,’ and returned with new vigour to start businesses and careers.
My father, with his undemonstrative, non-ambitious attitude to work and life, endured his war-time routine stoically. It did not widen his horizons noticeably; he was only too glad to return to a peace-time job in Bournemouth at the end of the war, similar to his pre-war role.
My mother, with a far more highly strung nature, increasingly found the war irksome and wearing. She worked before marriage as a highly proficient shorthand-typist; now she was drafted to a dreary war ministry office in Boscombe, and later in the war when released she undertook temporary work cleaning a local public house to help our meagre budget. In the grim winter of 1943 she succumbed to a near fatal bout of pneumonia. With hospital beds full, she was nursed at home by daily visits from our excellent veteran family doctor, and a health visitor. As usual I was shielded from the worst news, but it was the most worrying event so far in my childhood, and I was deeply relieved when my mother rallied and recovered, despite the absence of penicillin and other drugs.
Soon after the war she worked for some years as a telephonist for the ‘Blower’, the bookmaking fraternity’s private information service, conveying by phone the betting prices from tic-tac men on racecourses to off-racecourse bookies. It was a hectic afternoon’s work against the clock, but my mother enjoyed the company of her ‘Blower’ team in a Bournemouth office, and made friends among local bookmakers who were sometimes remarkably generous in seasonal presents of Christmas fare which were highly welcome during postwar austerity.
We became a family of four at the start of war as my father’s immediate elder brother, Oliver Clayton, was divorced from his wife Molly – a comparatively rare event in the 1940s – and his daughter, Nina, came to live with us permanently.21
Only two years older than myself, Nina was a welcome addition to the household, although I did not see it that way at first. My place in the sun as a threesome with my parents was imperiled, but my mother dismissed my whining complaint brusquely and firmly. On this occasion corporal punishment was not employed, but I knew that Nina’s arrival was non-negotiable. Cruelly, I referred to her inaccurately for a few days as our ‘bossy evacuee’, but this earned a stinging ‘clip on the ear’ from my mother’s right hand, and I faced reality.
Rightly, my mother felt my only-child status badly needed changing, and she welcomed the virtual adoption of a daughter of whom she became very fond.
Her new life in our family was far more traumatically unsettling for Nina than perhaps we suspected, but she adapted remarkably well.
The arrival of evacuees from 1940 was another glimpse of war’s reality in peaceful Western Avenue. As a six-year-old I was shaken when we opened our front door one evening to find a large tweedy lady with a weary small boy in tow, clutching paper bags, a small case and gas mask box. He was wearing an identifying brown paper tag, with a name scribbled on it, like a parcel hastily packed. While London and so many other centres were being heavily bombed, the risks of suddenly dumping children in unchecked new homes were irrelevant. Even as a six-year-old I felt a stab of pity for the new breed of evacuees from far away London.
‘Can you take him in?’ the Evacuation Officer gabbled as soon as the door was opened. My mother explained we had only two bedrooms, and both were occupied, but if Nina had not arrived I am sure the little boy would have moved in that night. I went to bed reflecting for a few minutes before sleep on my mother’s reminder that I was ‘one of the lucky little boys who did not have to be an evacuee’. One of our neighbours, an elderly, childless widow, Mrs Ruddle, took in the boy evacuee that night; he stayed for the rest of the war, and returned frequently as a teenager. My mother said he had done a lot to give Molly Ruddle ‘a new lease of life’; she loved the boy and was very kind to him. 22
War intruded more dramatically in our bungalow when suddenly one Sunday lunch-time there arrived four British soldiers in uniform. They were among the thousands rescued across the Channel in the evacuation of Dunkirk at the end of May 1940.
It was typical of the war-time English that we heard few harrowing details of Dunkirk from these soldiers who had just escaped from the horrors of aerial bombardment on the beach, and a hazardous cross-Channel journey in one of the hastily assembled armada of ‘little ships’, some from Poole and other ports near Bournemouth. They chatted away politely throughout lunch before returning to rejoin shattered units to re-make Britain’s Army.
The following Sunday a group of French soldiers who had escaped from the Dunkirk beaches arrived for lunch, and again it was a relaxed social occasion, amazingly unclouded by the blackening threat of Hitler’s invasion of Britain.
My parents and their friends, in the presence of their children, never discussed the likelihood of Britain losing the war. I was of the generation brought up firmly to believe that we lived in the best country in the world, that we were invincible, and that it was only a matter of time before we beat all our foes.
One evening in June 1941 we heard on the BBC Home Service news that Russia had been invaded by Germany. My father said immediately with remarkable prescience: ‘That’s it then. We’re alright now. Hitler will never beat Russia.’
Soon we were giving pennies to war-aid collections to help send munitions and other aid in perilous convoys to ‘Uncle Joe Stalin’. We were sublimely unaware of Uncle Joe’s appalling CV. I recall his friendly smiling face pictured in the News Chronicle, and I felt much reassured that this dear old man in Russia was on our side. The horrors of the Russian campaign remained completely unknown to me and my friends throughout the war. We knew very little about the Japanese war, although gradually the Far East campaign began to seep into the news occasionally.
The only war we understood was the one we were waging with the arch devil Hitler who lived somewhere the other side of 23the Channel. Thanks to him we could not even swim from our beaches any more, and it was entirely his fault we could not buy an ice cream, a fond and distant memory for a child of five at war’s outbreak.
While at play with our wooden guns my friends and I regularly sang our anthem, to the Disney tune:
‘Whistle while you work;
Hitler is a twerp;
Goring’s barmy, so’s his Army,
Whistle while you work.’
Such sentiments were reinforced constantly by the truly brilliant propaganda campaign waged by the war-time government headed by Winston Churchill. The cinemas soon re-opened after a brief closure early in the war, and I became an ardent fan of the superb war films which came to our screens.
