Shouting in the Street Read online

  For Claire

  ‘He was fated, for many years, to be a defender as well as a crusader; a bruising role where he sometimes felt himself beset on all sides. But Trelford was first and foremost a journalist and an editor: multi-talented, hands-on, a master of sport as well as news, shrewd and decisive. The paper, through his years, may often have been under attack, but it also won many awards and gathered together brilliant teams of writers who kept the flame of Astor alive. And Trelford, at the end, was there to pass The Observer on, unbroken and unbowed.’

  PETER PRESTON, EDITOR OF THE GUARDIAN 1975–95

  ‘Donald is a journalists’ editor. He appreciates good reporting and instantly recognises it when he sees it. And he has another great advantage over rival editors: he can write as well as his staff. He is an expert reporter with a sensitive ear for words and a nose for news that would do credit to a beagle. These gifts are priceless.

  He also managed to lay out the front page and write many of the best headlines himself – something beyond most editors these days – while simultaneously taking bets from the staff on every big race or rugby international. The queue of people outside his office door after first edition, waiting to hand over fivers, was like Russian serfs paying tribute.’

  GAVIN YOUNG, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT FOR THE OBSERVER FROM 1960

  ‘Donald Trelford is regarded by friend and foe as the Harry Houdini of journalism. Bound, gagged and tied to the rails and within seconds of the locomotive wheels, Trelford wriggles free from each succeeding crisis. There has scarcely been a dull month in all his years as editor.’

  PETER MCKAY, DAILY MAIL COLUMNIST, WRITING IN TATLER

  ‘Trelford – the Rocky Marciano of newspaper politics.’

  ALAN WATKINS, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR FOR THE OBSERVER 1976–93

  ‘Donald Trelford has a remarkable capacity for staying upright in a shipwreck.’

  LORD GOODMAN

  ‘Donald feels that being editor of The Observer is an invitation to the cocktail party of life.’

  TATLER

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Chapter 1: Tom

  Chapter 2: Rick

  Chapter 3: Kamuzu

  Chapter 4: David

  Chapter 5: Michael

  Chapter 6: Arnold

  Chapter 7: Lajos

  Chapter 8: Rupert

  Chapter 9: Kenneth

  Chapter 10: Tiny

  Chapter 11: Tootsie

  Chapter 12: Edward

  Chapter 13: Tony

  Chapter 14: Pamella

  Chapter 15: Farzad

  Chapter 16: Muammar

  Chapter 17: Len

  Chapter 18: Stanley

  Chapter 19: Garry

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  I decided to write this book on 29 April 2013, the day I was told I had prostate cancer. Being given such life-changing news naturally provokes dramatic, even melodramatic, thoughts. It was time, I thought, to get it all down before it was too late. I had been badgered for years by family, friends and former colleagues to turn my party-piece jumble of anecdotes into a coherent tale; one friend said I had reached my ‘anecdotage’. Somehow, though, I never got round to it. I used to joke that I was enjoying life too much, living with my new family in the Majorcan sunshine, and didn’t really fancy revisiting times when things were more troubled.

  Many years ago, I received a substantial advance from a publisher for a book about my time as an editor, but I later paid it all back – something practically unheard of, I was told. I informed the publisher that I simply couldn’t be bothered to write the book and couldn’t imagine that anybody would be bothered to read it anyway. The second part may still be true, but I don’t care so much about that now.

  I was also prompted to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) by the birth of a son, Ben, when I was seventy-three – an age at which I had always expected to be dead, not changing nappies in the middle of the night. I realised with a chill, as I stared lovingly into his cot, that I would never know Ben as an adult. Then, three years later, Poppy turned up.

  When she was two, Poppy made an unwelcome contribution to this book. Just as I had completed a chapter of about 20,000 words, mostly about Tiny Rowland, she came into my study to say goodnight. As she sat on my lap, she reached towards the keyboard and tapped a few strokes which, remarkably, ‘disappeared’ the whole chapter. Even computer experts failed to recover it, so I had to rewrite the chapter from memory. I sensed Tiny’s ghostly hand from beyond the grave.

  I thought that, one day, Ben and Poppy might be curious to know what their old dad had been up to in all those years before they were born. The same is probably true of my four older children – Sally, Tim, Paul and Laura – who didn’t see much of me at home when I was working all hours as a journalist – and of my wife Claire, come to that, who only met me four years after I had stopped editing The Observer.

  Even then, after making the decision to write the book, it took almost another three years to get down to it (during which time, thankfully, the cancer has gone away; so far anyway). I had always imagined that I would write in disciplined periods of intense work, like Jeffrey Archer, whom I see when he comes to Majorca to write his books. But Jeffrey doesn’t have to do the school run, or take and collect children from judo or riding lessons, and I imagine he has someone to do his shopping and have the car checked out at the garage. Having two little ones makes it impossible to arrange a regular writing schedule – I have just had to snatch the odd hour here and there when I could, or even the odd few minutes to rewrite a passage or add a story I had just remembered.

  This book is not an autobiography. It wasn’t even meant to be about me, or at least not mainly so. But, after completing most of the book, I began to feel, rightly or wrongly, that readers might want to know who I was and what I had been doing in the twenty-eight years before I joined The Observer. So I introduced two chapters at the start about my family and some friends who’d had a strong influence on me at school and university. Really, however, this book is a portrait in action of some interesting people I got to know well, mainly through my three decades on The Observer or through my other, mostly sporting interests. Nearly all of them are more significant people than me. And I suppose something of my own personality may come through in the way I tell their stories and report on my dealings with them.

  I started off thinking I would write about these major figures in my life in the style of a series of Observer profiles, but I found that I kept wandering off the central theme as one story reminded me of another. If the chronology seems rather jumbled at times, I’m sorry, but the memories of an old man can be a bit like that.

  Readers of the chapter on Tiny Rowland, for example, may be surprised when Saul Bellow and the Queen turn up, or that the comic figure of Kenneth Williams intrudes into a chapter on David Astor. The chapter on Pamella Bordes was a late addition because I concluded that, if I were to omit that brief but heavily publicised episode in my life, some readers might wonder if I had something to hide.

  I should admit that I was also impelled to write by some published accounts of my time at The Observer, especially about my relations with Lonrho and the paper’s handling of the Harrods affair. Some of these accounts were not only inaccurate but malicious, sometimes quite ridiculous. I have not responded before to even the most outrageous of them. I thought it was time now to put the record straight.

  The title of the book came to me after an incident in London on one of my
occasional visits. I usually stay at the Garrick Club, and when I leave I pull my hand luggage through the streets of Covent Garden towards Embankment station on the way to Victoria, the Gatwick Express and the return flight to Majorca, where we have had a finca on the side of a mountain since 2003.

  This route takes me past Zimbabwe House on the Strand, which is looking almost as run-down these days as the country it represents. I have some history, as they say, with President Mugabe, as will become clear within this book. Every time I passed the building I would utter a profane imprecation against the old monster.

  On one such occasion, however, I had failed to notice that a policeman was right behind me (Charing Cross police station is just across the road). After hearing my cry, the policeman stopped me and asked me what I was doing. I explained to this young black man about Zimbabwe and Mugabe without getting any feeling that he knew or cared what I was talking about. Finally, he said in a patient though slightly exasperated tone: ‘That’s all very well, sir, but we can’t have elderly gentlemen shouting in the street, now can we?’

  CHAPTER 1

  TOM

  My father was born in the Aged Mineworkers’ Home at Shincliffe, County Durham. I always fancied writing that sentence: having written it, however, I can see that it doesn’t make much sense. How could a baby have been born in an Aged Mineworkers’ Home? The answer, it turns out, is that my heavily pregnant grandmother had been caught short on a visit to friends in a neighbouring mining village and had been forced to throw herself on the mercy of the nearest place offering nursing care.

  Her husband, Samuel Trelford, had left school at the age of ten because his father had decided to emigrate to Pennsylvania in search of work in the coal mines over there. By the time the family had sailed across the Atlantic, however, my great-grandmother had discovered she was pregnant again, so they decided to sail back home for the birth. Had this not happened, they would have settled in the United States and I would never have existed. On such tiny chances can human life depend.

  When they returned, my grandfather didn’t resume his interrupted schooling. Instead, he was sent down the mine at Tow Law (I still have his miner’s lamp in my study). He gave up mining when he was in his early twenties. Even so, he coughed his way through life with what was thought to be asthma but which turned out, at a post-mortem after his death at the age of eighty, to be the dreaded miners’ lung disease.

  He opened a bicycle shop, of which I have an aged photo, in the pit village of Esh Winning. He taught himself to play the organ from an instruction book and became the local chapel organist. He was a voracious reader, always found ransacking the local library. I still have his marked copy of Julius Caesar dated 1906.

  He studied languages, including Welsh (for no obvious reason, as far as I can tell, except that he liked the sound of it), which he would recite to me when I was a child. He would also take me on his knee and show me the effects of different sources of light on a Leonardo da Vinci painting. How he learned these things I don’t know.

  Grandad Trelford was to become a substitute father to me during the Second World War – for the first eight years of my life, in fact – and continued to be a strong presence throughout my period of growing up, urging me to make the most of the education he had never had. Because of our close ties, I was given compassionate leave from the RAF to attend his funeral.

  Samuel Trelford doubtless lived a life of unblemished probity, but one curious incident raised a question about this. An Observer reader, having seen me on television, sent a photograph of her late father, pointing out that he had a distinct resemblance to me. I was inclined to send a polite, ‘what a coincidence’ sort of reply, until I studied the photograph more closely and saw the address on the letter.

  It was from Consett, the mining village next to where Sam Trelford had been brought up, and the family likeness was certainly uncanny. I sent the letter and photograph on to my father. When he didn’t respond after a couple of weeks I rang him about it. After a pause he said reluctantly: ‘All I can say is that my father had a bicycle.’

  • • •

  My father, Tom, was born in 1911; my youngest son Ben was born in 2011. By an odd coincidence, my mother was born in 1914 and my daughter Poppy was born in 2014. When my father was eight, he nearly perished in an epidemic of diphtheria at the end of the First World War (another example of the tiny chances on which human life depends). In his early teens, his education was interrupted by the General Strike, which closed all the schools. Instead, one of his teachers taught him to play golf – a pastime that became an obsession until he was over eighty – and he never went back to school.

  His father, badly shaken by his own experience underground, would not allow him to become a miner, even if he had wanted to. So, when he was seventeen, he was directed to work in a Coventry car factory and went to live on his own in the Midlands city, 200 miles away from home. This was Norman Tebbit’s famous injunction to the unemployed – ‘get on your bike’ – put into action. He was given digs in King William Street, next to Coventry City’s football ground, and developed a loyalty to the club and a love of football that he passed on to his son.

  I sometimes wonder if my obsession with sport derives from my father’s accidental placement next to a football ground in 1929. Being a lonely bachelor in a strange city, he had little else to do, except for playing billiards and snooker at the local Methodist boys’ club – another obsession he passed on to his son.

  Tom found factory life not to his liking, however, and soon got a job as a van delivery driver instead. His parents came to live in Coventry and my grandfather started a business called Trelford’s Teas, selling a variety of exotic brands door-to-door from a van with the company’s name on the side. Tom had kept in touch with my mother, Doris Gilchrist, whose family came from the same Durham mining village of Esh Winning, and in 1935 they were married.

  Unfortunately for them, his old jalopy of a car broke down after the wedding and they had to spend their honeymoon with my father’s religious and strictly teetotal parents. His mother, to adapt a phrase from P. G. Wodehouse, would never be mistaken for a ray of sunshine. The new bride later recalled how she had brought her a cup of tea in bed on the first morning and said: ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be coming down for a few days.’ My mother replied: ‘Why ever not?’ Her new mother-in-law explained: ‘Well, think of the shame.’

  The Trelfords didn’t approve of the marriage, thinking my father had married beneath him. My mother came from a rough family of coal miners of mixed Irish and Scottish descent who liked a drink and, even worse, were not church- or chapel-goers. Her father had been a drover from the Scottish Borders before he went down the mines. Her mother’s family, the Ryans, were Irish, and had worked as servants in Dublin Castle. Because her own mother had died young, my grandmother had brought up her younger brothers and sisters and never went to school herself, so she couldn’t read or write.

  • • •

  Some years later, when my name became known, I had a letter from someone in Northern Ireland pointing out that the Trelford side of the family also had Irish connections. The Trelfords, in fact, are commemorated in a stained-glass window in the Anglican cathedral in Belfast, which I went to see. Until then I had known nothing of this branch of the family. I also discovered a Trelford Street in Belfast named after a prominent figure called Robert Trelford.

  Evidently a couple of Trelford brothers had crossed to the north of Ireland with ‘King Billy’s Army’ – the army that King William of Orange sent to defeat the deposed James II at the end of the seventeenth century. They appear to have stayed on as landowners, one of them moving to the south, from where some of his descendants emigrated to Canada (there is a concentration of Trelfords in Ontario) and one to Texas in the United States. One brother had stayed in the Belfast area, presumably the ancestor of Robert Trelford. (In fact, nearly all the male Belfast Trelfords seem to have been called Robert, back to 1720.)

  My eldest son,
Tim, once opened the door at our house in Wimbledon to find a stranger on the doorstep. ‘My name’s Tim Trelford,’ said the stranger. ‘So’s mine,’ said my son. The visitor was from Texas and had tracked us down.

  • • •

  My Gilchrist grandparents went on to have twelve children, two of whom died in infancy. My grandmother told me that for ten years she never ventured beyond her garden gate. They had met when he had driven cattle down from the Borders to Durham and then gone with his colleagues to the seaside at Seaton Carew. When she was in her nineties, my grandmother reminisced to me about that sunny afternoon in 1901 with a faraway look in her eyes: ‘He and his friends dashed past us into the water. He was burned to a golden colour by the sun. He looked like a god.’

  My mother was the first girl from their mining village to get a scholarship to Durham County High School for Girls – an honour that meant nothing to her illiterate parents. She used to get up at five o’clock in the morning to cadge the sixpenny bus fare to Durham from her brothers, who were putting on their hobnailed boots to go down the pits. Eventually she was made to give up school to go and help one of her sisters in domestic service near London. The sister couldn’t cook and my mother had to go and take over in the kitchen.

  My Gilchrist grandfather was a bit of a rebel. He had once been jailed overnight during the General Strike after joining a gang that threw the Bishop of Durham into the River Wear for preaching a sermon in which he told the miners to go back to work. He had a reputation as a troublemaker and the only work he could get was as a shot-firer, a dangerous job that in those days involved going down with a canary and one of his sons into unexplored areas of a mine, some of them just two or three feet high, to see if they were safe enough from gas leaks to bring them into use.