Cub reporter at London Heathrow
It was 1977 and I had just left school wanting to be a journalist. Luckily, there was a tiny classified jobs ad in the Middlesex Chronicle local newspaper about working in a Heathrow newsroom. I couldn’t resist and turned up at the interview with my A Level essays (pretentious rubbish) on the Metaphysical poets. Yes, I was that naive.
Brenard Press (now defunct but a brilliant if tough training ground for many journalists) was the news agency at Heathrow. I started in the newsroom with all the other ‘herberts, taking copy from the real journos working airside interviewing the celebrities, politicos and other famous for 15 minutes Tom, Dick and Harriets.
The newsroom was dirty, cold and had dozens of milk bottles in various stage of putrefaction. It never occurred to the teenage scribes that they should clean the bottles and put them outside.
The eight hour shifts were long and varied, starting at 7am, 9am or 3pm, the latter shift requiring a sprint to catch the last bus home at 11pm. My abiding memory is of a 20 year old hack whose early morning greeting before he filed the first story of the day was: Hello £%*@ now take my copy and don’t type with your feet.
Fortunately, I could touch type. Other essential skills were dictating stories over the phone to the cynical copy takers at the Evening Standard & News, the Daily Mail and Daily Express. You then had to master the telex with its thin, fragile ticker tape snaking from one machine to another. It tore easily.
All of that for £15 a week!
Airside newshound, on the nightshift
I eventually earned an airside pass, which meant I could go through security and meet passengers directly off the aircraft, often with a posse of snappers ( You never called them photographers).
Hard to believe now, but those were gentler days. This was at a time when the press corps at Heathrow had a monopoly, often the first journalists to interview and photograph a Hollywood actor or actress (in those politically incorrect days there was a difference ).
I interviewed Paul, George and Ringo, but never John (to my lasting regret), Frank Sinatra (actually he didn’t say a word and his minder did not like the press), Harold Wilson (he got me thrown out of the VIP Lounge), the Osmonds, JR Ewing (OK, Larry Hagman, complete with Who Shot JR dollar bills), Johan Cruyff and the first Russian footballer to play for Chelsea, way before the Abramovich era, Elton John and Bruce Forsyth (not at the same time).
The reporter’s job had its perils, such as when I was chased by a film star along the corridors of T3 who had brought his latest girlfriend with him, who happened still to be married to a well known TV actor. I also had to outrun an athlete who was not in the mood for an interview.
The photograph made the story, as words alone were not enough. But that was the dilemma, you had to interview in ten minutes or fewer the celebrity, get the story and keep out of the picture, otherwise you got sworn at.
You then ran to the nearest airside phone and read over your copy to the newsroom. There were no mobile phones then and no internet. You had to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Hollywood and Rock Stars you interviewed before you filed the story off the top of your head. You had to be a journalistic Google.
I then became the editor of the Skyport newspaper for Heathrow staff, working with some great people. I got the taste for local reporting and moved on to my next job.
