Mail Men Page 19
When Thatcher challenged Ted Heath for the Tory leadership in 1975, the Mail was the only paper that said – out loud – that she was going to win. The number-one Mailman couldn’t stand Heath, and Heath loathed David English in return. The pair even had a bust-up at a lunch in Room One over the lack of uncritical support for the Government by the supposedly Tory Daily Mail, Heath objecting to the fact that the Mail had on occasion actually agreed that the striking miners of the 1970s did have a legitimate grievance. And when the Mail editor asked Heath exactly how he thought the paper could help his government, Heath ‘curtly responded’ that English could start by sacking parliamentary sketch-writer Andrew Alexander, ‘whose views, [Heath] snapped, were completely negative’. Heath was never invited again.15
Mail readers born into working-class families but who now found themselves part of the easily outraged centre of British society could maybe – with a little gentle persuasion – become Tories too, just like David English, and hurl the Labour Party of their parents’ generation into the abyss. ‘We supported her for many reasons,’ said English, ‘maybe because she was a woman. But she had new ideas and the Tory party needed new ideas.’16
Vere Harmsworth – the toff who liked to call himself a ‘nobleman’ – backed his editor’s support for Thatcher but, just like Lynda, Vere didn’t seem to like Thatcher much at all. Some thought Vere suspected that Thatcher’s favourite newspaperman was always likely to be Rupert Murdoch, and Thatcher would gain far more from the Mail ’s backing than the Mail would. When she was invited to Northcliffe House for a similar lunch to the one Vere gave Ted Heath, Vere stood her up – he was on a plane to Paris. Thatcher became, arguably, the woman who would make the single biggest impact upon Fleet Street – and, indeed, kill the street off as a place of work for a multitude of journalists – in 1986 when she’d help Rupert Murdoch smash the print unions.
The Daily Mail ’s exciting, invigorating and hugely demanding new editor had to find any way he could to make his ‘compact’ newspaper stand apart from those filthy tabloids at the newsagents, and one way of staying a step or two upmarket from the ‘red-tops’ was to have a healthy supply of foreign news in his newspaper. Which was great for David English; as a former Washington correspondent and ex-foreign editor of the Daily Express he adored news from overseas anyway. And the Holy Grail for any foreign correspondent after the Second World War was to find a living, breathing Nazi who had somehow managed to evade the hangman’s noose – or their own cyanide pill – when they lost the war.
At the end of 1972 Brian Freemantle, the fresh Mail ’s first foreign editor, was enjoying a rare and well-earned Friday off. It had been a tough couple of years for Freemantle and all the other Mailmen and Femails who’d brought the paper back from the brink; the Mail would never now become a withered appendage of the Daily Express. So Freemantle was at home in bed in Southampton on the south coast with a delicious long weekend ahead; he planned a nice lunch and a drink or two with Mrs Freemantle out in the countryside after she got back from a strange job she’d been called out on at the last moment. Maureen Freemantle was a freelance make-up artist and had gone to help out on an unusual top secret TV shoot that was being filmed locally . . . far away from the loose lips of the London media set.
As the Mail ’s former foreign editor, and now novelist, told the author at a café in London’s Sloane Square forty years after the event – enjoying every delicious detail more so even than sips from his wine glass – it was not going to be the relaxing day away from the office he had hoped for.
Mrs Freemantle, he explained, had laid out her equipment in front of the TV studio’s dressing-room mirror. It had been an early start, and groggy Maureen nearly spilled her brushes when six Nazi stormtroopers stomped into the local television network’s make-up room. They had all the attire, the black SS outfits and the death’s-head daggers, and Maureen could see that the wardrobe department had done a sterling job. She loved a good war film but for this commission, unusually in her line of work, she hadn’t been given a shooting script and none of the other girls knew what it was all about either.
‘Wow, this looks terrific!’ she said to her Nazi as he sat in her make-up chair. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Oh, it’s top secret,’ the actor replied. ‘We’re doing an advert for Sunday night.’
Out came Maureen’s brushes. ‘Ooh really, what for?’ she said through a cloud of powder.
‘Well, we had to do it here in a provincial television studio because it would’ve leaked if we’d done it in London.’ Maureen started to prepare the SS man’s face, a little powder here, a little black pencil to help bring out the evil inherent in those dark eyes: ‘What would have leaked?’
‘Well, don’t tell anybody,’ whispered the fake Nazi, ‘but it’s an advert for the Daily Express. They’ve found Martin Bormann in Latin America.’
Now, no newspaper has yet managed to find a Nazi mass-murderer reclining on a beach in South America sipping a Bacardi, and Bormann was just about the biggest Nazi fish there was left to find: the Führer’s Private Secretary, no less. Nailing one of Hitler’s henchmen and bringing him back to face justice was every foreign editor’s fantasy. Imagine the circulation boost that could bring! Equally, every foreign editor’s worst nightmare was to find that the enemy – another newspaper, the Express, say – had found a Nazi mass-murderer reclining on a beach sipping a Bacardi.
‘Really? Ooh, that’s nice, dear,’ said the wife of the Daily Mail ’s foreign editor with a dash of powder. The guy looked the part and he’d pass for an SS murderer for the cameras, no trouble at all. ‘I’m just nipping out to the loo,’ she said. There was a row of telephones on the wall outside.
Mr Freemantle was still in bed, enjoying his Friday off, having worked the previous Sunday so his deputy could have a Sunday away from Fleet Street. The phone rang.
‘Uhh,’ he grunted. ‘Yes?’
‘I think you’re fired,’ Maureen said.
‘Uh? Why?’
‘The Express have found Martin Bormann in Latin America . . .’
Brian Freemantle, the foreign editor who had failed, hung up the phone on his wife . . . and called the editor who had failed. ‘It’s the only time I have ever spoken to an editor when I was stark naked. I got David English at home and I screamed down the phone: “The Express have got Martin Bormann!”’
‘Where?!’
Silence.
‘Fuck knows! I don’t know. I don’t know. Somewhere in Latin America, obviously.’
Freemantle phoned the Mail ’s US bureau chief, Dermot Purgavie, in Costello’s bar, Manhattan, and ordered him to ‘round everyone up! I want you all in South America. Now!’
‘You what?’ replied Purgavie. ‘Whereabouts in South America?’
Silence.
As Freemantle explained, years later, he was still standing naked with his telephone in his hand at his Southampton home. Purgavie on the other end of the line stood – on the other side of the Atlantic in a bar – with a glass in his hand.
‘Fuck knows!’ Freemantle told Purgavie. ‘I don’t know. Go to Buenos Aires! That’s a hub. Buenos Aires. That’ll do.’
‘I sent everybody and their dog to Buenos Aires. Got a load of people in the office and we began ringing all the stringers from Colombia down to Patagonia trying to get any sort of reaction . . . we were like a fucking tsunami going through South America.’
The Daily Express still had the best foreign staff in Fleet Street, and they even had their own man in Argentina for just this sort of eventuality. ‘Dermot gets to Buenos Aires and the Express had a guy there then called Jack Conlan, whom he knew.’
Purgavie called Conlan and said: ‘Hello, Jack.’
‘Hey, Dermot,’ Jack replied. ‘What’s up?’
‘Well, it had to happen I suppose, didn’t it, eh?’
As Freemantle explained, the confused Express correspondent at first had no idea why Purgavie had called or even what the hell the chief Mailma
n in the States was going on about, but soon realized he was being pumped for information.
‘Yeah . . .’ said Jack, ‘I guess it did . . . ?’
‘Yeah, we’ve got a big thing going,’ said Dermot, ‘but I just thought I’d give you a call.’
The two ace reporters danced around the subject of runaway Nazis in general and Martin Bormann in particular. Purgavie put the phone down, getting nowhere, because there was nowhere to get to – the Daily Express never did find Martin Bormann. But the Express did have a slightly dodgy book by a man who said he had found Hitler’s most trusted henchman. The only information the Mail had was from Maureen Freemantle’s fake Nazi in a Southampton TV studio. Nothing more. Then, after speaking to Mailman Purgavie, the Express reporter in Argentina thought that the Daily Mail had the scoop of the seventies. He called his foreign desk back in London: ‘The Mail have found Martin fucking Bormann!’
‘Where?!’
Silence.
‘Fuck knows!’
The Bormann story bounced back and forth, back and forth – feeding back upon itself like a transatlantic phone call down a bad line – and the Express soon went into panic mode, as its foreign editor, Stewart Steven, was actually constructing a story about Bormann at that very moment from an entirely inaccurate book by writer Ladislas Farago. ‘So now the Daily Express, who know they haven’t got him really – they only have this crap book – they think the Daily Mail have got the real thing!’ chuckled Freemantle. ‘And this whole thing compounded itself and went round and round and round.’
Startled and afraid they’d been scooped, the Daily Express scrapped their TV ad and rushed the publication forward from the Monday to the Saturday, hoping they could get the revelation into print before their number-one enemy, the Daily Mail. And the Mail ’s top team, of course, still thought the Express had their hands on the chief living Nazi. ‘In the office of the Daily Mail as we waited for the first editions to land,’ said Freemantle, ‘we were literally gripped by diarrhoea. All of us. And we got a copy of the Express. And we read the intro on the Express story, it read something like: “Usually reliable sources last night claimed that Martin Bormann had been found in Buenos Aires . . .” And we knew it was a phoney. It made the Daily Express look ridiculous.’17
The ‘usually reliable source’, it seemed, was only the half conversation between Mailman Dermot Purgavie and the Express’s man in Argentina. It was a symptom of the Daily Express’s ever-steepening decline, and the story itself is illustrative of the insanity that grips Fleet Street whenever there’s a sniff of a ‘world exclusive’. ‘But can you imagine that? What were the chances of the wife of the foreign editor of the Mail getting told the Daily Express had found Martin Bormann by an actor in a Southampton TV studio?’
The boring truth was that Bormann never did make it to sip that Bacardi on a beach in Argentina or anywhere else. After escaping from the Führer’s bunker in May 1945, he’d bitten into a cyanide pill rather than be captured by the Soviets and was buried in a shallow grave beside a Berlin rail track. DNA tests on a corpse found years later confirmed the skeleton was his – complete with shards of glass in its teeth from the lethal capsule.
There was an afterword to the Bormann saga, though, that was to deliver David English another vital cog for his Daily Mail machine. The architect of the Express’s Bormann yarn was Stewart Steven – born Stefan Cohn in Hamburg, the son of a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany with his family and arrived in Britain before the Second World War – and, despite what was viewed by many on Fleet Street as a catastrophic cock-up, Steven’s career was far from over. He was soon poached by English and would become his deputy on the Mail and then the successful editor of the Mail on Sunday, before ending his career as editor of the Rothermere-owned Evening Standard. What’s more, though, the defection of one of its most important players to the Mail was symptomatic of the Express’s decline and it also revealed another English modus operandi: stealing talent from the Daily Express was a great way of undermining the enemy; whether or not English actually required their services on the Mail was often a side issue. He’d always find something for them to do.
It also revealed how important overseas stories were to the 1970s Daily Mail. A reader of the print edition of the Mail today would search in vain for regular space set aside for foreign news, but David English loved to splash on a good foreign story.
Even better than a good foreign story was a good showbiz tale with a foreign twist, as Anthea Disney found out when she was sent to the south of France early in English’s reign to cover Mick Jagger’s wedding to pregnant Nicaraguan beauty Bianca Pérez. ‘It was in the days of communicating by Telex,’ Disney told the author. ‘And I went to some awful little Telex office and sent a message back to Brian Freemantle saying something like: “Daily Mirror has five reporters, The Sun has eight, even the Telegraph has two. You have me. What to do?”’ The young reporter, her skin now returned to its natural shade, waited and watched the technicians hovering over their machines, bemused by the shifty-looking Fleet Street horde that had descended on their pretty little seaside town. ‘And then the answer came back, it was just two words . . . “Walk Tall”.’ So she did. ‘I got the story, of course I got the bloody story. But that was pure David English.’18
The root of the man was in reporting. David English was a great newspaper hack, ‘an operator’ in Fleet Street parlance. ‘All good editors should be envious of their reporters,’ English said, ‘because they are sent to the ringside of history and have the opportunity to bring human drama to life.’
Ann Leslie, the paper’s award-winning foreign correspondent, would call the Daily Mail in London to file her story from some faraway hotspot with mortar shells and fighter jets screeching overhead. But the call, invariably, would not be fed through to the foreign desk or the copy takers – it would be the actual editor himself who would pick up the call and let out a mischievous giggle before shouting down the crackly line: ‘So, tell me, what’s going on, I want to know everything!’
‘Not just the story I’d be filing, but my adventures with drunken Kalashnikov-draped thugs, cross-eyed secret policemen, local tarts, the whole colourful, if often deadly, galère of characters who adorn the world’s troublespots,’ she wrote in the Daily Mail after English’s death in 1998.
He adored the sheer fun, the crazy derring-do of foreign corresponding – because that’s where he’d made his name – and deeply envied those in his employ, like me, who were out on the road, which he had long left, but continued yearning for. I was there when the Berlin Wall fell and, after having worked for days with no more than a few hours’ sleep, I rang him to complain about how exhausted I was. ‘Listen, my darling, you have an immense privilege to be there at a moment of history. In fact, you should be paying me for the privilege, not me paying you!’ I could only agree. (And I half-expected David, being David, to send me his bill.) He was mischievous, brilliant, funny, dangerously charming, and intensely loyal and generous-hearted to those he trusted.19
Perhaps David English’s favourite kind of story of all was a foreign scoop mixed up with a bit of mischief, a good old-fashioned Fleet Street stunt – preferably with him orchestrating the whole thing. As his favourite foreign reporter Ann Leslie said, the Mail ’s editor still itched to be out there on the road and he’d jump on a plane whenever he felt he could. In the spring of 1975, for example, as Saigon was about to fall into the hands of the Vietcong, the US had convinced the whole world that once American forces had gone, the communist troops arriving from the north would seek retribution on the locals who’d been the Americans’ hosts. It was feared that the Vietcong would show little mercy to abandoned babies in orphanages, especially those born to Vietnamese women who’d had sex with US soldiers. These babies were fairly obvious, as some were black and others were clearly Caucasian. US forces were actually airlifting children out while the British Government dithered about what, if anything, to do.
‘I saw a paragraph about a
priest in the Midlands somewhere,’ said Brian Freemantle, ‘who’d appealed for someone to get orphans out of a particular orphanage he had in Vietnam. And I said to David, “Let’s see if I can rent an aircraft and get the kids out.” And he said, “You’ll never do it. I bet you five pounds you can’t.” Then, of course, he claimed the credit for it when it worked.’
Within a few days, English told his readers of their plan on the front page of the paper by saying the Mail would offer a ‘raft of hope’ through these deep ‘seas of despair’. ‘The big problem was getting an aircraft, because we were going into a war zone,’ said Freemantle. ‘British Airways wouldn’t do it. British Midland did it in the end. But they said, “Yeah, you can have the plane and you can have the crew but our insurance won’t cover it.” So I insured it through a syndicate at Lloyds of London. I can’t remember now exactly how much it cost, but it was an astronomical sum of money.’20
Vere’s managers must have winced when they got the bill, but they wrote the cheque. Yet there was still a problem: the Mailman on the ground in Saigon, defence correspondent Angus MacPherson, had found only sixteen orphans, not the 150 he’d been asked to find, and it would likely take at least two years to get the official clearance for them to leave Vietnam. The Vietcong might well be due in three weeks or so but the Mailman’s editor was due in three days. MacPherson and aid workers frantically scoured the city for orphan babies to fill the plane and, eventually, they rounded up ninety-nine. Twenty or so weren’t technically ‘babies’ – they were aged between five and fourteen – and many, it turned out, weren’t even orphans. They had simply been left at orphanages temporarily by their parents who thought they’d be safer there.
Next came those pesky exit visas. The paper asked the British consul general in Saigon, Rex Hunt, for help. ‘There was no doubt that I was being used,’ Hunt said. ‘I could guess what the Daily Mail would say about the Foreign Office if we didn’t help. But I thought it was for the good of the children.’