Free Going Up by Frederic Raphael

lunch at White’s, and abused one of the secretaries for making a mess of his copy. When she was reduced to tears, one of the subs turned to Randolph and said, in his oikish treble, ‘Know your trouble, Churchill? Your name begins with C, H in Who’s Who and S, H in what’s what.’
    The core staff of the Sunday Express was composed of men (there were no females in the newsroom) of a kind I had never met before. In 1950, popular journalism was an activity for artisans, rarely for graduates, never for first-class minds. Brocky and Bernard Harris, the sandy, blue-eyed, pipe-smoking chief feature writer, supplied most of the copy that bulked out the dummy edition of the paper, which grew fatter as the week progressed. Many-hatted in his roles as diplomatic correspondent, industrial correspondent, naval correspondent or Sunday Express reporters (the plural suggested that the Beaver had unlimited, ubiquitous resources), Brocky rarely stayed long in the office. He had no use for cyclostyled hand-outs from ministries or advertisers.
    We were regularly on our way by taxi to confront politicians orbusinessmen. While other journalists waited in the proper place for the man of the moment, Brocky found his way to the back door and whoever might be coming out of it. Few escaped his mild, prehensile greeting, ‘Oh, Sir Bernard … Alan Brockbank, Sunday Express …’ The Sir Bernard most regularly in the news in the 1950s was Sir Bernard Docker, the chairman of both BSA and Daimler motors. He and his ex-showgirl wife Norah were notorious, but not wholly unpopular, for flaunting their wealth in a time of austerity. Their Daimler was covered with gold stars and was said to have gold bumpers. The couple’s flagrant ability to gild lilies was at once scandalous and entertaining. While his lady revelled in her notoriety, Sir Bernard was never seen to smile.
    Persistent but never nasty, Brocky was adept at accompanying whatever absconding mogul it might be to his waiting black Humber or Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire (the cad’s Rolls-Royce, deemed luxurious on account of its ‘fluid flywheel’, whatever that was). Brocky could hold open a car door, with implacable courtesy, in such a way that his victim could not contrive to get inside before he had answered just a couple of questions. He always had a small point he wanted to clarify and, oh, one very last thing he wanted to be sure he had got right. After the publication of an annual report with one or two things in it that Brocky didn’t quite follow, we surprised Billy Butlin, the holiday camp king, at the back exit from one of the Nissen huts that augmented the BEA terminal at Heathrow. In the face of my master’s gentle inquisition, little Billy spilled enough beans to furnish us with an exclusive.
    We had liquid sessions in a pub near Transport House with Herbert Morrison, another little man, at once cocky and shifty, his glass eye less elusive than the good one. What I heard from his lips was enough to rend from end to end my naïve notions of socialist solidarity, but memory’s sieve has not retained exactly what he said about Stafford Cripps or ‘Nye’ or the recently retired Ernie Bevin, whose post as Foreign Secretary Morrison occupied long enough only to establish his incompetence to hold it.Bevin’s reputation has been glorified by his civil service mandarins. The lecherous Ernie’s working-class anti-Semitism was an easy fit with that of The Office’s ‘camel corps’ of Arabists. The dockers’ leader took easily to ex officio presumption: Lady Diana Cooper reported, without surprise or outrage, how Bevin had pressed fat kisses on her at an embasssy reception in Paris. Morrison’s great achievement was domestic: he was the prime mover of the Festival of Britain. He urged us to go and have a look at what was happening on the South Bank.
    Since the Beaver was not known to be dogmatically hostile to the Festival of Britain, Brocky deputed me to visit the dusty site.