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  Alf ’s boy got a job on the Christchurch Times shortly after the war. A local weekly newspaper is the single best training-ground there has ever been for a journalist because they have very few staff and only one press day, so a young hack has to cope with everything from town hall meetings to football reports to minor and major crime. ‘Death knocks’ are also an important rite of passage for most young reporters on any decent local paper; the news editor would scan his paper’s death notices in search of bodies to turn into stories and send the office junior out to knock on the dead man’s door. They tend not to answer but their next of kin do. It can be tough, walking up and pressing a doorbell knowing you are intruding upon grief, but it is also great experience of how to cope with a difficult situation and emerge from an address with a notebook full of quotes from which to construct a story. English would speak ‘to the widow and his children, I learned to relate to people in grief. I was surprised that people were so grateful. But I learned how to handle difficult circumstances. It’s a wonderful sort of grooming school, finishing school really, how to relate to people.’

  Chris Rees was a friend of English’s from their days together as fourteen-year-old Sea Cadets at the end of the war, and Rees was set on a job as an electrician until his friend infected him with his enthusiasm for the words trade. ‘Any little thing at all got the same level of commitment, even the shipping forecast,’ Rees told the author. ‘He put his whole being into the job. I think that’s why he became so successful.’7

  English moved to a big local daily on the south coast and then on to Fleet Street in 1951. ‘He got a job on the Daily Mirror by the age of twenty, by lying about his age,’ said Rees. ‘He added a year because you had to be twenty-one in those days before they’d hire you.’8 And so a dapper young man who’d somehow managed to dodge his compulsory eighteen-month national service arrived on Fleet Street as a seasoned operator with four years’ worth of wear on his reporting shoes before the university boys had even hung up their books.

  Esmond’s cousin Cecil Harmsworth King was in charge of the public company that owned the Mirror at the time (he didn’t own it himself – he had been a senior manager when Bunny sold it off in the early 1930s when it began to fail as a picture paper on account of every paper printing photographs by then). King had refocused the paper and aimed it at the working-class market and, with the help of Welsh editorial genius Hugh Cudlipp, the Mirror would go on to sell almost 5.3 million copies a day – a world record. Cousin Cecil’s downmarket Daily Mirror, however, horrified the snobbish Harmsworths, according to King. His extended family were ‘desperately anxious’ to conceal their humble beginnings. ‘Popular newspapers were the source of their wealth, their power and their titles but they did not want to be reminded of this.’9

  By the time David English was starting his career, Cecil King’s Daily Mirror was the mightiest working-class paper of the day, in the same way Beaverbrook’s Express dominated the middle-class market. And the Mirror was always hiring (and firing).

  Tony Burton was another young reporter making his way in Fleet Street at the time. Burton and a reporter friend, Des Lyons, were sick of living in a flea-pit boarding house so, one day in the early 1950s, they decided to find somewhere nicer to live. They went to look at two empty beds in a two-bedroom flat in Dulwich, south London – two beds to a room. Another young hack was already living there.

  ‘My first memory of David English was him sitting down with drumsticks and banging away “bum bum bum, bum bum” on a coffee table in front of the fireplace,’ Burton told the author. ‘His charm got you immediately.’10 English was ‘a bit of a dandy, a Teddy Boy’ who cared about his appearance and always made sure he had nicely cut hair. The flatmates became close friends. And, boys being boys, they liked to meet girls.

  ‘English wasn’t much of a drinker but he loved to dance and one day he insisted that we go dancing at the Hammersmith Palais,’ said Burton. ‘Des was reluctant but he drove us there in his clapped-out Austin Seven; one of the doors had to be held closed. While we danced with various young ladies, disgruntled Des just sat drinking. And when we gallantly decided we would escort two young ladies home he reluctantly agreed to take us. David and I sat in the back with a pretty girl on each of our laps and kept calling him “chauffeur” in a lordly fashion while directing him which way to go. Crossing Barnes Common we ordered him to stop so that we could continue “getting to know” the girls. As we strolled into the bushes, Des took off, giving us a two-finger salute.’11 They thumbed a lift home in the rain off the actor Richard Attenborough, who was passing by in his Rolls-Royce, recalled Burton, after a late-night radio gig.

  One night, the flatmates decided to have a party in their flat and it proved to be an event that perfectly illustrated David English’s tenacity, a vital trait in any reporter. Des was a mean razzmatazz piano player, and English ordered a piano. ‘They couldn’t get the fucking thing up the stairs so he got some sort of a crane and they brought it in through the window!’ said Burton. ‘This was so typical of David English – other people would just have given up. But no, he decided he’d got to have that piano so Des could play at the party.’ He also demonstrated his guile by getting girls to come to the party. ‘David put a notice up at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand where the Tiller Girls were dancing, inviting all the girls round to this party. And a bunch of them came!’12

  The Tiller Girls were a famous high-kicking dance troupe at the time, and one would later become Mrs English (though Irene Mainwood wasn’t actually at that party). ‘I shared a bedroom with David to which he brought Irene for a sleepover,’ said Burton. ‘She said her first memory of me was a hairy arm emerging from the bedclothes to find and light a cigarette.’13

  They married in the early 1950s on the south coast and English would remain tethered to Irene his whole life. But his career was on rockier ground. ‘David didn’t get on with the Mirror’s news editor Ken Hord – nobody got on with Ken Hord,’ said Burton. ‘And David’s connection to the Mirror was actually above the news editor, and I think Hord resented that.’14 Worst of all, the news editor didn’t like the youngster’s socks. ‘I won’t have reporters wearing white socks,’ he told him, ‘go home and change.’ Hord put a note on the newsroom notice board saying he’d been forced to discipline a young reporter for not being dressed well enough to represent the Daily Mirror and ‘any more sartorial aberrations by this man will result in dismissal and anyone else who indulges in sartorial aberrations will be fired as well’.15

  English soaked up Hord’s abuse for a couple of years, then quit, thinking he’d find another staff gig elsewhere. He didn’t, and he was forced to freelance. Initially, English and Burton set up their own press agency, but it soon failed. So Burton joined the Mirror up in Birmingham and English worked for a now defunct left-wing Sunday paper called Reynolds News for a while and was soon up to mischief in search of a scoop.

  Bags full of post, back in the day, would be just dumped off trains and left on the platforms at railway stations unguarded until someone from the Royal Mail came along and took the bags away to be sorted. Maybe English’s news editor had seen the fat bags of mail himself at Euston station on his way into work, but anyway, he suggested his most enthusiastic young reporter should go ‘and steal a mailbag, they’re just lying about, bring it back to the office. Nobody will stop you.’16 It would be a front page for sure.

  The young hack lined up his body just like they did in the movies, scooped up a fat bag of letters and scurried off up the platform towards the taxi rank trying to look innocent . . . maybe working out his intro on the way. If he got back to the office, triumphant, he could rummage through a few letters and add in some great detail. ‘The mail that didn’t make it through.’

  English was a nice, newly married middle-class boy from the seaside and a great reporter . . . but he was a crap thief. Likewise, poor Reg Coote, the photographer assigned to the tale, was twenty years older and carrying a heavy camera. English and Coot
e must have looked curious thieves to the pair of bored inspectors who spent their lives watching humanity hurry through Euston station. It was a criminal act big enough to make the Reuters news wire in September 1952 when David and Reg stood up in court a little while later. ‘English was about to enter a taxi when the officials ran toward him. At that moment there was a flash from Coote’s camera. English explained it was a stunt “to prove that mails at mainline stations were not properly guarded” and added, “This incident has now proved to us we were wrong.”’ The magistrate said it was ‘a silly thing to do’ and dismissed the case.17

  English soon joined the Daily Sketch and rose rapidly through the ranks of the paper’s pared-down staff to become the assistant editor in charge of Features. Vere Harmsworth, the future third Lord Rothermere, became his friend but not his boss; Vere didn’t work in editorial – his father wouldn’t let him anywhere near those dirty hacks. The Sketch was a good little paper, if never in the Daily Mirror’s league. The snobbish, upward-facing side of the Harmsworth clan were never comfortable in what they saw as the rough end of the market. But at least the Sketch wasn’t dragging its heavy past into the future like her big sister the Daily Mail.

  One Daily Sketch reporter was Barry Norman, who later became famous as a presenter and film reviewer. ‘David English sent me off to cover the war in Cyprus when I was very young,’ Norman told the author. ‘And I wrote a pretty crappy piece and he rewrote it beautifully for me. It was a very good read but it didn’t bear a very strong resemblance to the facts I’d put in my far duller story. The Sketch was a bit like that, though, as a paper – never let the facts get in the way of a good story.’18

  He was an excellent features editor but the executive path bored young David English and he longed to get back on the road. So in 1959 he flew to New York to work for the ailing Sketch’s struggling sister paper the Sunday Dispatch. English was back where he wanted to be, ‘at the ring side of history’.19 And he was having fun. On one occasion he tested out a new drug that was supposed to stop people getting drunk on a collection of twins. One twin took the pill, the other didn’t. The experiment soon dissolved into drunken brawls that spilled out into the street. The fun didn’t last for long though; the Sunday Dispatch was getting battered by Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express in the same way the Sketch was being battered by the Mirror, in its market, and Esmond closed it in June 1961.

  English and his wife Irene wanted to stay in the US and English had a strong reputation as a good operator, so he soon found a job on the Daily Express in New York. He had a reputation as a ruthless competitor with gimlet eyes but he also showed a human side. When a reporter on a rival publication, for instance, was too petrified to go and see a giant worm – several feet long – that a man kept as a pet in his apartment, it could have been an easy scoop for English, seeing as the competition was too scared to even knock on the man’s door. Yet both reporters lied to their bosses, saying the Peruvian monster wasn’t home. He also began to pen a column of American miscellany that was viewed as a huge success.

  There were two David Englishes, politically, in this early part of his career: the one who sailed to the United States listing to the left and the one who returned listing to the right. David English had started out – just like Grandpa Alf – as a Socialist and had even been an official for the National Union of Journalists, while his wife Irene was in the performers’ union Equity. But then they began to be pushed to the right by America’s free market and all the lovely stuff it could provide for even the average person – from cars as big as boats to refrigerators as big as tombs. By 1963 the former NUJ man even helped create a strike-breaking newspaper when all the other papers disappeared off the streets after the print workers walked out.

  It proved to be a great learning experience for the future editor: he learned what happened if he fused the efforts of American and British journalists, and it also taught him about getting the paper printed beyond the reach of the strikers and how to do dodgy distribution deals with – as English told the tale – a Mafia don who controlled the drivers’ union. ‘I went to see a man called Waxy Gordon,’ English reminisced three decades later. ‘He had some office on Broadway. Anyway, we did a deal which of course virtually took away all the profits, but allowed us to go on producing the paper.’20

  There’s a problem with the precise truth and accuracy of this anecdote, though. In actual fact, the real-life mobster Waxey Gordon was long gone from the Mafia scene by then21 – he’d died in Alcatraz prison a decade before – and, maybe, English was embellishing a story for effect. A fictional Waxey, however, did appear on TV in the mob series The Untouchables shortly before English’s paper appeared. All the newspapers came back after four months and the paper, like Waxey, melted away.

  Then David English suffered the curse of many a top reporter after almost five years in the States with the Daily Express: he got promoted. The Express called him home in 1965 to become foreign editor, hoping some of his natural chutzpah might rub off on the rest of the staff. One of those infected by English’s natural exuberance for the newspaper trade was Louis Kirby, who would later become his long-term deputy editor on the Daily Mail. ‘The first time I saw David English,’ wrote Kirby, ‘was on a Daily Express cinema advertisement: the very picture of a powerful foreign editor, issuing instructions, shouting down the phones “Write it! Write it!”’22

  It wasn’t just the sky in England that seemed so lead-lined on English’s return; post-war Britain was a grey and drab, drizzly, cold-water and outside-loo kinda place – dragging the weight of her past into the future like horsemeat. The British Empire had long ago expired, though many clung – some still cling – to the corpse, but Queen Elizabeth II embodied a fraction of the importance of Queen Victoria.

  Mr & Mrs English wanted to bring home some of that American sparkle, that freshness, a lifestyle from the dominant world power, a place where it was perfectly acceptable to beam a big smile and say ‘Have a nice day’ – even if you really didn’t mean it. ‘As he climbed the journalistic ladder he and Irene moved from a modest home in Orpington to an upmarket house in Chislehurst where he would throw terrific parties, sometimes with David in charge of a roulette wheel,’ said Tony Burton. ‘What a host. When visiting I would be taking a shower and he would hand in a martini for me to drink while soaping up.’23

  The Englishes had always aimed to become independently wealthy, added Burton. ‘David was determined to make enough money outside of Fleet Street so he could afford to say “fuck you” and walk away if he had to,’ he told the author. ‘So he and Irene set up a laundrette business, and they made a lot of money. Irene was a very elegant, beautiful lady. And the joke at the time was that Irene – who was actually running this laundrette business – cricked her back carrying all the little coins from the machines to the bank each day.’24

  English also turned his entrepreneurial flair to what he knew best: the newspaper trade, by setting up a free local newspaper business in south London. ‘The little paper was doing okay,’ added Burton. ‘Then English got a call from Rupert Murdoch, who had just arrived from Aussieland and was starting to make his moves in England. “I wanna buy your little newspaper,” Murdoch told him. “No thanks,” English replied, “it’s not for sale.” “Look,” said Murdoch, “you know I’ve got loads of money. If you don’t sell it to me, I’ll set up a competing paper and knock you out of the ring.”

  ‘And English, being a realist, said, “Well, how much will you pay?” And it was a decent amount – he wasn’t being screwed, it was a fair amount. So, rather than get into a fight with Murdoch, he said, “Okay.” But he didn’t like being intimidated like that, as you can imagine, but that was his first encounter with Rupert Murdoch.’25

  After his spell as a newspaper proprietor and a few years as the Daily Express’s foreign editor, everybody who was at least half a hack knew David English should be the editor of the Daily Express as it continued its domination of the middle-class mass market. He
was, by far, the paper’s most talented executive, yet when Beaverbrook’s son sacked the editor, another man got the chair. Beaverbrook had only been dead a year or so, and his feckless playboy son, also called Max Aitken, was seemingly set on steering the Express off a cliff. Ann Leslie was a junior Express hack at the time. She had fallen into journalism while working out what to do with her life after Oxford University and it was English who made her realize journalism was her calling. As she told the Independent:

  He had a slightly spivvy, gossipy and manipulative charm – but if he lost faith in you, a terrifying coldness. I, like many of his staff, was both thoroughly alarmed and thoroughly exhilarated by him. I became a foreign correspondent largely because he had unshakeable faith in me – when others, understandably, didn’t. He sent me on a story in Guyana and I blew it. The macho thugs on the foreign desk jeered: ‘We told you so, David. Girlies can’t hack it!’ When I wanted to run the New York bureau the then editor refused on the grounds that ‘You can’t have a WOMAN running a bureau!’ David would say, ‘When I’m editor, you can run any bureau you want.’ I realised that he would never become editor because the proprietor was Sir Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook’s son, who only knew and cared about power boats and women. When I resigned I was summoned to Aitken’s office to explain why. Among my reasons was that his decision not to make English editor would eventually prove to be the downfall of the Express. And I was right.26

  David English was made associate editor instead in 1967, a creature in the strange middling ranks, under the editor himself yet senior to department heads – often a clutch of highly ambitious hacks who would happily headbutt a rival to death if it would win them a Sunday shift on the rota to actually edit the paper. By 1969, the drive to be an editor by the age of forty was racing up to meet him – English was thirty-nine – and down by the river at Associated Newspapers, his pal Vere’s power was increasing.