14 December 2023 , 22:37
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You can’t beat news in a newspaper, goes the oldest slogan in the business. Unless, I would add, it’s a column that informs, entertains and even makes you laugh. The column is the news brought to life.
I’ve been trying to do it in the Daily Mirror for a quarter of a century, conscious that I’m just the latest in a long line of writers, all of them more distinguished than me.
The tradition began in 1917, not long after the birth of the paper 120 years ago, with Caradoc Evans, a charismatic Welsh-speaker who left school at 14 and after menial jobs moved to London to work as a draper’s apprentice. He was determined to write, and attended classes at the St Pancras Working Men’s College before finding work as a journalist with the Mirror.
Evans the Pen became a controversial novelist, known as “the best hated man in Wales” for his campaign against poverty, meanness and religious hypocrisy – a skill honed during four years a newspaperman. His most famous – and best-remembered – successor was William Connor, who wrote a column two or three times a week under the pen name of Cassandra – a mythical Greek character fated to know the future but cursed never to be believed.
Hated: Caradoc Evans (Wales Online)He started at the remarkably young – for a columnist – age of 25 in 1935, and continued until February 1967, a stint broken only by service in the Second World War. Connor returned from the Army in 1946, restarting his column with the immortal intro: “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...”
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He never disguised his strong left-wing opinions, and clashed with both Winston Churchill and Ernie Bevin during the war, most notoriously with his March 1942 caption “Don’t waste petrol, it costs lives” on a Philip Zec cartoon of a torpedoed sailor with an oil-smeared face holding grimly to a life raft. The wartime premier was furious, and threatened to close down the Daily Mirror – something the Luftwaffe never did – but relented with a severe reprimand.
Connor, knighted by Harold Wilson in 1966, set a standard that no other columnist could reach. He died young, aged 57, after developing diabetes that forced him to retire.
The unenviable task of replacing him fell to another young writer, Keith Waterhouse, a working-class lad from Hunslet, Leeds, who started out on the Yorkshire Evening Post.
Campaigner: Keith Waterhouse (Daily Mirror)He joined the Mirror as a 23-year-old reporter in 1952, campaigning against what was then known as the colour bar in Britain and abuses committed by British troops in Kenya – for which the King has only just expressed “deep sorrow.” Waterhouse left to become a highly successful screenplay writer and novelist. His Billy Liar, 1959, was a screen hit with Tom Courtenay in the title role.
But the lure of journalism was too great and he returned to the Mirror as a columnist, first on the magazine and then the main paper in 1970. His column appeared twice a week for the next 16 years, ending only when corrupt tycoon Robert Maxwell bought the paper. He moved “across the street” to another title, and died in 2009, aged 80, a few years after being voted most admired columnist by his fellow-writers.
But the Mirror was also a pioneer in giving a voice to women. The legendary Marjorie Proops, born in Surrey in 1911, daughter of a publican who later moved to London, was a grammar-school girl who excelled at English. She became a journalist in 1939, and her first job was fashion correspondent of the Mirror before taking over the paper’s “problem page.”
Dear Marje: Marjorie Proops (Fremantle Media/REX/Shutterstock)Her Dear Marje column quickly became a firm favourite, propelling her to radio stardom on the show Just A Minute. Proops continued writing, campaigning for causes such as better treatment for rape victims, until her death aged 85 in 1996. She was possibly the longest-serving columnist in newspaper history.
It is little-remembered now, but controversial TV celebrity Ann Robinson was also a columnist with the Mirror in the 1980s, under the pseudonym the Wednesday Witch” in which she honed her waspish style. A minor royal scandal occurred in November 1982, when she identified Diana Princess of Wales’s anorexia. Her scoop cost her her job, after the Palace complained to the editor of the day.
At least she carried on the fine Mirror tradition of writing to please the readers, not the Establishment, a torch picked up by today’s columnists, headed by my hard-hitting Scouse colleague, writer Brian Reade.
Justice: Brian Reade (Daily Mirror)He’s been contributing his “frank, fearless and funny” weekly column since 1994, winning many awards on the way. It does what it says on the tin, as politicians and many others in public life have found to their embarrassment. No phoney Tory escapes the lash of his invective.
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Brian’s greatest and most successful campaign was for truth and justice for the families of victims of the Hillsborough tragedy of 1986, which he witnessed personally.
A lifelong Liverpool fan, he devoted years to the task of bringing to book the authorities who failed fans that fateful April day. His powerful use of words to right wrongs is a common thread in the work of Mirror columnists, whether in politics, business, health, sport or other fields.
It is sustained today by Kevin Maguire, Darren Lewis, Polly Hudson, Ros Wynne-Jones, Val Savage, Siobhan McNally and Jessica Boulton – each bringing to the paper’s coverage a gimlet eye for what’s behind the news. Caradoc Evans would be proud of his century-old legacy. And Cassandra could finally be vindicated for saying: “I told you so.”