Poets of Fleet Street

Ted Harriott

Description

Peer Confesses,Bishop Undresses,Torso Wrapped in Rug,Girl Guide Throttled,Baronet Bottled,J.P. Goes to Jug.Fleet Street is perhaps hardly a place you would associate with poetry, but when Ted Harriott and John Bull started asking around, they were surprised by how many 'closet poets' they unearthed among their newspaper colleagues. Some, like Michael Gabbert, John Pudney and Paul Dehn (from whose poem 'Gutter Press' this stanza is taken), found their subjects close to hand; others, like John Arlott and Denis Botterill, looked to the cricket pitch and the natural world for their inspiration.This collection of poetry was first published in 1969 as a privately circulated pamphlet. The poets featured include cricket commentator, wine connoisseur and Guardian writer John Arlott, Denis Botterill (London man for the Yorkshire Post), Daily Herald film critic and Goldfinger screenwriter Paul Dehn, Michael Gabbert (News of the World), feature-writer Charles Hamblett, Anthony Hunter of the Sunday Dispatch, Evening Standard film critic Philip Oakes, war correspondent Derek Patmore, Daily Express book critic John Pudney, Daily Mirror chief sub Sydney Tremayne, and Press Club habitue Sir John Waller.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 04 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909183094
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
POETS OF FLEET STREET
Edited by
Ted Harriott and John Bull



Publisher Information
First published as a privately circulated poetry collection in 1969
This edition published in 2013 by
Chaplin Books
1 Eliza Place
Gosport PO12 4UN
Tel: [phone]
www.chaplinbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Ted Harriott and John Bull
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in the contents.



Introduction
“Fleet Street poets! Are there any?” That was the incredulous reaction of one writer to whom we mentioned our plans for this anthology. And to anyone who has been in any of the pubs of the newsmen’s village - from The Stab in the Back to Auntie’s - when the beer is flowing and the voices beginning to roar, there is much to justify the incredulity.
Having been in them all, frequently, we sometimes feel the same and there’s nothing to reinforce those doubts more than the sight of a well-known village elder, tankard in one hand, launching forth into ‘At Flores in the Azores, Sir Richard Grenville lay’ and with a particular flourish delivering the ensuing line ‘And half my men are sick’.
It must be equally difficult to persuade a Cabinet minister, who has been mauled by the vinegar brigade, a bereaved wife of a national figure, the centre of some scandal or even an unsuccessful con man, of the poetic nature of the keepers of the nation’s conscience.
Fleet Street has been its own worst propagandist in all this, contributing very largely to the public image which represents all newspaper men as cold-eyed, heartless destroyers.
Hollywood and the publicists of the Daily Mirror have added an element to the image with their representations of fearless moralists tilting, with courage - and usually success - at the windmills of corruption, vice and gangsterism in the Publish and Be Damned spirit.
Of course, there are many different types in Fleet Street and most are far from fearless. Some have courage. Most have some sort of talent with words or some special ability to track down facts. Many have a conception of the truth and there are several who shed tears and even have wives and children they care about. But poets?
The editor of the first newspaper one of us ever worked for heard of his underling’s poetic leanings and immediately shook his head. “I’d keep quiet about it if you ever get another job. They don’t like poets in this game,” he said. He immediately regaled the rest of the staff with gems from his fund of anecdotes about poets. The one of us concerned promptly went underground with his verses and is only now cautiously poking out antennae to detect whether the coast is clear.
Yet if you have ever sat in the loneliness of a newspaper office on ‘late stop’ when the machines are idle and the heat has gone out of the rush to get the next day’s issue to the trains and planes that take it to every corner of our islands, you will probably have second thoughts about dismissing the existence of poets in Fleet Street.
After the adrenalin-filled tension of the deadline moments and the awful inquests of errors discovered too late, you feel like someone high on drugs, with heightened awareness and perception as the quiet of the small hours closes in. These are moments for poets.
There are others. There must be. For in our search we found any number of secret scribblers lurking in the most unexpected places.
As the well-respected poet/journalist Sydney Tremayne wrote in answer to our approach to him: “A Daily Mirror chief sub writing poetry must be good for a guffaw.” Mr Tremayne was chief sub-editor of the Daily Mirror for many years. And there must be another couple of guffaws in the thought that the News of the World nurtured at least three verse writers.
There are many different sorts of poets in Fleet Street, even leaving aside the poets of the pints. Some, it seems, are journalists who write poetry, others are poets who make, or made, a living from journalism. But I’m sure each in their many styles has his validity.
None, of course, could make any more valid comment on journalism and journalists than did the First Lady of Fleet Street, the late and sorely missed Nancy Spain. Her best comment was her endearingly confused and contradictory life. The puckishness of her wit, her nose-thumbing iconoclasm, her vitality and, most of all, her heart endeared her to all journalists, principally, we suspect, because she summed up for them in herself what the whole brawling business is about.
She did it, too, in words in an oddly moving poem that prefaced her last, posthumously published, book, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way . She wrote:
Where did I lose it? Somewhere along the way
In the gay grimy gutters of the world, The Street,
Where nine-day wonders last only a day
Before they sink unnoticed in the Fleet?
Yes, I ran grinning then because I knew so much
(Unprintable, of course) which News Boys shout
Rustproof and galvanised because in touch
With all the lads whose lust is finding out.
Ambition lost but innocence intact
Here I am, battered to my bleeding knees,
Feeling eighteen but forty-six in fact,
Finding I still react to every breath,
Finding in spite of all I know that I still care,
That after all these years I’ve no defence,
Proving that life is something we can share,
Our only sin a bored indifference.
No-one could be indifferent to Nancy. And for their varied reasons for being and the ways in which they express them, few could be indifferent to our contributors and what they have to say in the heated, deadline moments of the editions or in the quiet of reposeful times, when they write something that is nearer to the raw insides of them. And none could accuse our contributors of that bored indifference either.
That is our excuse, if excuse is needed, for this book. To those we have left out we can only apologise.
This collection was first published in 1969 as a privately circulated pamphlet. In bringing it out in this new edition, we took the decision to leave this Introduction, and the information about the poets themselves, unchanged - apart from changing the tenses here and there to reflect the fact that contributors have subsequently moved on.
Ted Harriott and John Bull



John Arlott
There is no category into which John Arlott fits, nor any it seems into which he doesn’t. He was best known, of course, for his broadcasting brilliance as a cricket commentator. In Fleet Street he was admired for his wise and kindly words in the Guardian . He was particularly proud of his position as President of the Cricketers’ Association. But certainly all this, taken with his books of poetry and his other works about cheese and wine, would stamp him as a humanitarian who cared about the old values. Born in 1914, he lived in Alresford, Hampshire and began his working life as a clerk in a mental hospital. From 1934 to 1945 he was a policeman and a detective. But he always felt ashamed of his one major arrest while sleuthing. Just as, in his later achievement in sharing his delight in the most English of games, he must have felt the greatest pride.
To John Berry Hobbs On His Seventieth Birthday
(December 16, 1952)
There falls across this one December day
The light remembered from those suns of June
That you reflected in the summer play
Of perfect strokes across the afternoon
No yeoman ever walked his household land
More sure of step or more secure of lease
Than you, accustomed and unhurried, trod
Your small, yet mighty, manor of the crease.
The game the Wealden rustics handed down
Through growing skill became, in you, a part
Of sense; and ripened to a style that showed
Their country sport matured to balanced art.
There was a wisdom so informed your bat