Paper tiger?

Funny how your past catches up with you.

A tiny scrap of paper falls out of a dusty book and suddenly I am confronted with the inauspicious start to my journalistic career, way back in 1964. 

Scrawled under the headline ‘Articles published’ is a list of my first eight pieces to make it into print. But the most significant ones did not bear my byline. For good reason.

I was supplying schoolboy sports report to the Surrey Herald. On 12 March 1964 I covered an Athletics match between St Georges, Weybridge and the Salesian College. More were

to follow in May and June.And they all had one thing in common. I only ever reported on sports events where my school, St Georges,  lost. Staff and pupils were puzzled as to why the local paper seemed to have a down on the school, but I was not about going to enlighten them. What a rapscallion!

I hated the school and this was one way to get my own back. I had wanted to take up a job as a cub reporter at the paper, but my dad made me go back to school to do A-levels. As an 11+, day boy who lived in a council house, I was on the lowest rung of the pecking order at a Catholic school with pretensions. 

As it happens I did better than expected, including at sport – I even won my ‘school colours’ for completing a marathon. Eventually I got into Sussex University where my copy was published =in the student newspaper WinePress. It would be a decade filled with multiple jobs before I emerged as a full-time journalist on the East London Advertiser.

I may have started out as a sports reporter, but it was never where I wanted to end up. I was into more serious stuff – politics, plannings, social issues. I may have got front page lead in four of my first five weeks but I did resent the apparent freedom of sports reporters to write with their hearts, shamelessly adding colour to their copy. Nonetheless I have always admired their extraordinary ability to absorb facts and figures and regurgitate them at will, even across different disciplines. Listening to them on radio TV can be enthralling, even the inevitable ‘ColemanBalls’ dutifully recorded by Private Eye.

I see from my slip of paper that I also contributed to the school magazine. Looking back I fancied myself as quite the literary type. I was writing poetry and produced and performed a sketch show with my Sixth Form mates. I was active in both the Debating and the St Vincent de Paul Society, and briefly ‘managed’ Satan’s Disciples a great little blues band formed by more talented schoolmates. Perhaps I was not as antisocial as I liked to imagine. 

Maybe my foray into sports reporting was an aberration. However it was hardly the most appropriate debut for someone who would later claim to be the champion of ethical journalism as Director of the MediaWise Trust.