What Genius Wrote This?: Tales from my Newspaper Life

By Richard McNeill

A brisk and highly readable account of the author's adventures in journalism, spanning more than half a century. Richard McNeill grew up in South Africa but his career took him from Johannesburg to New York and London, where he spent 20 years on the Daily Express. “As it turned out, becoming an Editor with a capital E was the best thing that never happened to me,” he writes. Instead he enjoyed a life of “enormous satisfaction” as a reporter, foreign correspondent, sub-editor, feature writer, magazine publisher, editorial consultant and celebrity profiler, while also pursuing his passion for typographical design.
Back in South Africa he spent 11 years on the Johannesburg Sunday Times, and later helped produce South Africa’s Daily Sun, the post-apartheid tabloid aimed at the emerging black market, turning it into the country’s biggest-selling daily newspaper. He lives in Lake Michelle, Western Cape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789010435

Book preview

What Genius Wrote This?

Tales from my Newspaper Life

Richard McNeill

Copyright © 2018 Richard McNeill

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1788034 524

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For Rosemary, Fiona, Teresa, Scott, Tom, Caitie and Finlay.

About the Author

Richard McNeill is a South African journalist who has been in the newspaper business more than 50 years as reporter, writer, sub-editor, senior executive, special advisor and design consultant, and has worked in New York, London and Johannesburg. He lives in Lake Michelle, Western Cape.

My thanks to Songiso Ralarala and Ben Viljoen of Media24, Phillip Kgaphola of Tiso Blackstar and Emma Radford of Express Syndication.

Also to Lauren Bailey, Hannah Dakin and Heidi Hurst of Matador for their invaluable help and advice.

Dedicated to the real geniuses, the unsung backroom boys and girls of journalism, without whom the entire news media industry, whether in print or online, would collapse.

Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

1. LIVING DANGEROUSLY

2. BACK STORY

3. CONNECTIONS

4. RADIO DAYS

5. STAR STRUCK

6. GEMSTONE COWBOYS

7. SHARPEVILLE AND AFTERWARDS

8. ITCHY FEET

9. NEW YORK, NEW YORK

10. OUT FOR THE COUNT

11. LOUW AND LOWER

12. LOVELY RITA ON THE LINE

13. VILLAGE PEOPLE

14. THE BOYS IN THE BACKROOM

15. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MR PRESIDENT

16. LONDON CALLING

17. THE SUB ALSO RISES

18. MANCHESTER ANYONE?

19. HELLO FLEET STREET

20. DOWN THE HOLE PLEASE!

21. THE MOUSE RACE

22. HEADLINE GRABBERS

23. JAMESON’S RAID

24. BASINGSTOKE REDISCOVERED

25. THE CURSE OF KING TUT

26. SAVILE UNRAVELLED

27. CARRY ON KELVIN

28. THE COURT OF WARD

29. THE BUGGERATION FACTOR

30. GOODBYE FLEET STREET

31. RETURN OF THE NATIVE

32. THE RATTLE OF ZIMMERS

33. ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

34. BEYOND OUR KEN

35. CAT AND MOUSE

36. THE WISDOM OF SOL

37. STIRRING THE POT

38. SOUND AND FURY

39. PRESIDENTS AND ELEPHANTS

40. RICH MAN, POOR MAN

41. PREQUELS AND SEQUELS

42. TO BOLDLY GO?

43. BASKET CASES

44. A ‘WORLD’ FIRST

45. THE WHITE HYENA

46. SUN FUN AND DOG’S COCKS

47. TOKOLOSHE AND RIVER SNAKES

48. BEHIND THE HEADLINES

49. EX AFRICA SEMPER ETC ETC

50. THE NEW SUNERGY

51. MAIN MAN DOWN

52. THE SHORT REIGN OF MR X

53. FAMOUS LAST WORDS

END NOTES

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is a mostly a story about the 50 and more years I spent amid the clutter and clatter and comedy and drama and exhilaration that working for newspapers means – or used to mean.

It begins in the era of Remington typewriters, noisy copy boys, and the smell of hot metal, wet paper, ink and paraffin of a bygone technology, and ends in the sanitary, smoke-free newsrooms of today, humming with computers and the tapping of keyboards, and people thumbing their smartphones – like as not, uploading news to a website.

It’s a story told as I remember it, much of it from the trenches and below the parapet of an aggressively self-centred profession – although there were times when I stuck my head up and got cut down. I’ve tried to leave out the boring bits. But for any unforced errors, I make this advance apology.

The narrative of my career could easily have been: Give me the news and I will make people want to read it. Cue the front page, that window on the soul of every newspaper, but particularly a tabloid one. Even in this increasingly digital age it’s where success or failure of the printed product happens.

My story veers untidily between New York, London and Johannesburg. I was incredibly lucky to work for almost 20 years in the journalistic crucible that was the London Daily Express in the 1960s, a career experience unrivalled for its time and indeed any time. Fortune smiled again when I returned to South Africa, to a senior job on the Tertius Myburgh Sunday Times in the 1980s, when the paper was at its professional best, but later also for the chance to shape a whole new paper, Daily Sun, and help turn it into a roaring success.

With hindsight, making Editor with a capital E was the best thing that never happened to me. I’ve probably enhanced the reputations of one or two of that ilk, however. Newspaper design has been my enduring passion, but all-round journalism has taken me into environmental activism, crime reporting, feature writing, speech writing, magazine and book production, not to mention editorial consulting, and given me a life of enormous satisfaction.

Officially my working career began on 1 February 1958 on The Star in Johannesburg and came full circle on 31 March 2014 on Daily Sun in Johannesburg. When I finally unclicked my Bic – ballpoint technology, at least, has never changed – a member of the Sun staff asked me rather disingenuously: So, what else have you done?

Well, for him and anyone else who wants to know … THIS.

Richard McNeill

Lake Michelle

January 2018

1.

LIVING DANGEROUSLY

In my early days in Fleet Street I was, for a mercifully short time, caption writer on the Daily Express. Far from being a position of prestige and influence, the job was the lowest of the low. It meant no extra money, and I quickly learned that it was also something of a poisoned chalice. It seemed to be designed, Kafka-esque, in such a way that every obstacle that could prevent anyone doing it efficiently was deployed.

I was seated at a desk in splendid isolation in a windowless room while all around me photographers rushed in and out with their pre-digital rolls of film and wet prints, which art desk men sized and cropped for the night’s edition.

At some point – before it was snatched away to be processed – I would be shown a picture and if I was lucky the photographer would explain who was in it. My job then was to discover, with a deadline pressing, details of the story it illustrated and the size that it was to appear, and then write a caption which had not only to fit perfectly in 10-point Square Gothic (counting each character) but also avoid repeating any information which was already in the introduction to the story or in the headline.

In order to complete this near-Herculean labour in time I had to move among the sub-editors to discover which one had dealt with the story and beg some details from them. In the circumstances, the odds of being told by busy subs to get lost were extremely high,

That meant I had to wait for galley proofs of the story to arrive from the composing room, so that the caption was often the last copy to be sent for the page and risked an explosion from Morris Benett, the formidable production editor and a man for whom, when roused, every second word was an expletive. It was the art desk men who most feared his wrath. One of them told me sourly he had named his dog Benett so I can kick him when I go home.

At times I wondered what on earth possessed me to join this mad, mad world of journalism. Today these working conditions would be unacceptable – maybe even legally actionable. In the 21st century a mild rebuke or inappropriate language from a senior journalist to a junior can result in career-limiting disciplinary hearings in the HR department.

Nobody would wish for a return to the bad old practices of the 1960s. But since the computer and digital revolutions, a lot of mojo seems to have gone out of the newspaper game. When a furious night editor, waving an offending piece of copy, cried What fucking genius wrote this? we laughed. And we laughed even louder when the guilty party shot back: This fucking genius!

But the offender could have been sacked on the spot if the error was bad enough. Those deemed to have transgressed heard the dreaded words: Clear your desk and collect a week’s wages from the night cashiers! No written warnings, no fancy labour hearings.

We lived dangerously, but by God we learned our craft!

2.

BACK STORY

The idea of becoming a journalist took root early in my life. It had been dancing around in the back of my mind since the age of about nine, when I picked up the local newspaper and read the reports of a notorious murder case. The trial of two local rich boys for the murder of 18-year-old good-time girl Jacoba Bubbles Schroeder had scandalised the strait-laced suburbs of Johannesburg in 1949 and our afternoon paper, The Star, gave the case blanket coverage. I used to spread each edition on the living room floor of our house in Greenside and read every salacious detail.

In the end the rich boys were acquitted, the reports stopped and Schroeder’s murder remains a mystery to this day. But looking back, a seed was sown. From then on I read every newspaper I could get my hands on. Indeed, when I came to cover the courts for The Star as a young reporter 10 years later, I found I had a very good idea how to do it without having it spelled out for me. I must have unconsciously absorbed the technique from those reports of the Schroeder trial.

But before journalism took hold of my life, I had to get another youthful ambition out of my system – becoming a jazz musician. The school I attended, Parktown Boys High in Johannesburg, was where that ambition eventually played itself out.

Parktown was a solid government secondary establishment with a good educational record, which had a cadet detachment affiliated to the Transvaal Scottish regiment. Every Thursday, rain or shine, the entire school turned out in khaki shirts and shorts, with polished epaulette badges, to be marched up and down the main rugby field shouldering ancient and heavy but harmless Boer War carbines.

To escape all this square-bashing some boys managed to get themselves into the artillery squad, which fired blanks from real field guns which were trucked to the school by the regiment in the morning and removed again at lunchtime. These lads once distinguished themselves by firing a tennis ball at the flagpole in front of Helpmekaar Hoer Meisieskool across the road, and actually hitting it. No meisie was harmed, fortunately, but painful retribution for the squad followed.

My parade-ground escape route was into the ranks of the military band which was not much cop in the military sense, and not much of a band either. There was a much more efficient bugle band, but during my tenure as Warrant Officer of this motley group of brass and woodwind we managed to master only a single tune, and then only badly – a doleful march called When Jesus Comes. I can still whistle it today if pressed.

But I learned to play the cornet after a fashion and this fuelled my teenage passion for big band swing, begun when I began collecting Glenn Miller 78rpm records a couple of years earlier. I eventually bought a trumpet of my own and with a small group of enthusiasts, we formed a band consisting of two trumpets, two clarinets, trombone, piano, guitar, bass and drums.

We got hold of the sheet music of two genuine Miller arrangements and with careful practice we actually could render recognisable, at least, versions of two of his band’s 1940s hits, Tuxedo Junction and Pennsylvania 6-5000. Our little band guested at Parktown’s 1955 matric dance and made such an impression we were asked to play at our sister school’s dance the following week.

At this event, one of the Parktown Girls’ mothers, unaware of our limitations, hired us to play at her daughter’s birthday party, which was to be held at the school. I don’t know what was in the mind of our leader, Lester Braun, the other trumpeter, in accepting this gig, but on the night we duly turned up and took to the stage to an enthusiastic welcome from the girl and her guests.

We played Tuxedo Junction. Wild applause. We played Pennsylvania 6-500, which had a tricky bell which had to be rung at the end of every verse. Even wilder applause. Then – er – that was it. Those of us who could, including Lester, disappeared from the stage clutching our instruments.

Not so poor Ricky Matthews, the drummer, who was left alone to dismantle his kit and had to face the fury of the girl’s mother, and indeed the catcalls of the rest of the audience. Ricky, who went on to signal success in the advertising world in London, always reckoned this to be the worst moment of his life.

I was also embarrassed by the experience, and with Elvis Presley and Bill Haley beginning to storm the pop charts, I came to the conclusion that jazz trumpeting was fast becoming a yesterday opportunity. And I had no desire to play guitar, the only trendy instrument then – or since.

My years growing up in Johannesburg were innocent and carefree enough in our suburban bubble. My childhood pal Brian Searle-Tripp lived three houses away, and we did everything together, on occasions quite competitively.

Aged nine or ten we attended St Columba’s Presbyterian Church in Parkview, not out of any budding religious feeling, but to count the smiles we received from the minister’s daughter, Ann Jones, during the morning service.

Naturally, I claimed I got more smiles than Brian, though I’m bound to say he made the tally somewhat differently. Ann’s father, Rev Emlyn Jones, was a cousin of Richard Jenkins (aka Burton) and had something of the Welsh actor’s mesmerising voice and theatrical presence. He was very popular in Presbyterian circles. Ann too had a quality about her which might, in later times, have prompted a comparison with the late Princess Diana. Perhaps charisma ran in the family.

Our romantic aspirations culminated one night in the darkened garden of her father’s manse when Ann was persuaded to allow Brian and me each to give her a peck on the cheek. I’m not sure who felt more awkward.

Brian and I soon abandoned churchgoing and turned to other mischiefs. Once, on holiday together in Amanzimtoti on the south coast, we said to each other for no particular reason: Let’s be Canadians! For the next fortnight, we had girls falling over us, mesmerised by our phoney swagger and even phonier accents. My mother even played along with this deception, writing me a letter from Johannesburg with a Winnipeg address I was able to flash about. Those were the days when mothers wrote letters to their sons on holiday, and the Post Office delivered