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Cassandra
At His Finest And Funniest
By William Neil Connor
ISBN: 978-0-9558238-2-4
Free delivery worldwide from The Book Depository
The greatest company in the world by Bill Connor
About Cassandra by Hugh Cudlipp
Bill Connor was born in Derry and educated at a local elementary school in Muswell Hill; he was rejected by the Royal Navy because of his poor eyesight.
He found work as a copywriter for J Walter Thompson, where he was credited with writing the famous ‘clean round the bend’ line for Harpic. After six years there he was recruited by H G Bartholomew – ‘Bart’ – to bring what was described as his ‘polished-up barrack-room style of writing’ to the Daily Mirror.
Possibly the most pithy piece he ever wrote was a single line beneath a now famous cartoon drawn by his friend Philip Zec, who Connor had introduced to the paper.
“The price of petrol has been increased by one penny.” – Official
Churchill considered it treacherous. ‘It is a pity,’ he said, ‘that so able a writer should show himself so dominated by malevolence.’ Herbert Morrison described the cartoon and caption as wicked. The wartime government debated closing down the paper as being unpatriotic, but eventually decided to let it off with a severe reprimand.
Connor joined the army to prove his patriotism, famously returning to the Fleet Street fray with the words: ‘As I was saying when I was interrupted…’
His friend Hugh Cudlipp said: ‘Cassandra disagrees with almost everything the Mirror stands for. He is armed with intolerance, bigotry, and irascibility. But the Mirror would be a duller place without him.’
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The greatest company in the world
By Bill Connor (Cassandra)
I have been on Fleet Street for thirty years and I have never laughed so much. There is no other job like it, so preposterous, so wildly improbable. The task which we impudently assume is to chronicle the whole pageant of life, to record the passing show and then, with unforgivable brazenness, to draw conclusions, to give a verdict and to point the moral. Damn and bless our bloody eyes.
I would never advise anybody to come to Fleet Street. Learning this trade is like learning high diving – minus the water. But I wouldn’t have missed it for all the treasures of Araby. The man who when he was asked what it was like to be in the First World War said: ‘Oh, the noise, and oh, the people!’ You can say the same thing about Fleet Street – ‘Oh, the noise, and oh, the people!’
You can get used to the noise but I’ve never got used to the people. The lovely nuts. The gorgeous crackpots. And all those wonderful, generous, self-derisive folk who spend their lives making dirty great black marks on miles and miles of white paper. Newspaper people are the greatest company in the world. They know but they will never learn. Fleet Street is a pavement where the manhole covers are missing. The aspirants who walk down it are warned by notices which say: caution – men working. They stride on and in a trice are below ground. I know. I’ve done it.
Fleet Street is snakes and ladders. Fleet Street is the greasy pole with the old duck pond waiting scummily below if you fall off. I know. I’ve done it. Fleet Street is the slippery slide with the banana skin laid there for all to see. And the saints and sinners go marching on until bingo we all fall down. I know. I’ve done it.
The way to get on in Fleet Street is never let it be known what you want to do. Hide Ambition’s dark face. Never ascend the heights.
The newspaper business, especially in Fleet Street, is over-shadowed by an angry towering mountain with the summit lost in the eternal hostile snows. Way down in the warm valleys below the foothills, life in the print business can be serene and relaxed. The place is stuffed with bee-loud glades where the idle, as well as the able, the incompetent as well as the efficient can relax. The vegetation is thick and the great warm fronds provide shade for those who wish to lie down in the noonday sun. Reporters, sub-editors, feature men and sports writers can all have a relatively pleasant time and, if they wish, can make love to the secretary birds under the kindly foliage.
A little farther up the mountain, the foothills begin and the humming birds are no longer seen. The flowers are still bright, but there is a freshness in the air that old journalists suspect and young ones too often relish. Above the foothills you can see the sky between the trees.
Still farther up, the foliage begins to diminish. There is a nip in the air and old hands shake their heads. The conifers grow shorter and more stunted. The undergrowth thins out. Bushes take the place of trees, and there is little cover under which to hide. But the eager beavers press on. Like young wild pigs they grunt and bolt around, sniffing the freshening wind.
Far below in the valley there were flowers and berries and fruits to be found. Here there is little. Nor is the bark of the trees edible. But still rooting and snorting, the ambitious porkers press on. It is the charge of the Gadarene Swine in reverse – upwards instead of downwards – to disaster.
Above the bushes comes the scree. Above the scree come the boulders. Above the boulders, the snow line. The ambitious journalists have thinned out now. Some are exhausted. Others are killed by their fellows. But here and there a burly brute with a red gleam in a beady angry eye that indicates the fevered image of the Editor’s Chair, still scrambles and scrabbles upwards.
I call them to come back. But it is too late, and as I stumble down the mountain to the softer climes below, I see the last of the Go-Getters, the I-Believe-In-Me mob, struggling ever upwards. Little black dots slowly ascending the North Col.
Ultimately, one of them makes it. O the Power! O the Glory! But they have still reckoned without the Abominable Snowman – the mysterious yeti, nine foot tall, covered in silky ginger fur with great gorilla-like feet leaving imprints in the dazzling snow. Sooner or later they meet him face to face, and another familiar mountaineer has the millstone of Editorship around his neck and dies the death. And the faithful Sherpas who always knew that one glance from the Abominable Snowman meant disaster were right.
Editors! I seen ’em come. And I seen ’em go. But way up on the mountain overshadowing Fleet Street the Abominable Snowman goes on for ever.
So, young stranger, my advice is don’t come near us. Don’t come in ‘for the water’s warm’. It’s not, it’s hot. It’s also freezing cold and it’s rough too. But it is the best, the finest, the most furious, the most exciting bath of life that anybody could ever take.
But, for Gawd’s sake, mind the plug ’ole.
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About Cassandra
By Hugh Cudlipp
The man who should be writing this is William Neil Connor. He knew his faults, and scarcely suspected his virtues. But they died at the same moment in the same bed at Bart’s Hospital, London, earlier this year, and we’ll have to make do without him. A pity.
For the past two or three years the medicos had re-arranged the internal plumbing and checked the haemorrhages as best they could, but we all knew (except Old Incorruptible himself) that in the early hours of some sad morning, surgery, drugs and the patient’s formidable courage would have to give up the ghost.
The nursing sister in his room at High Wycombe Memorial Hospital, where he started the marathon series of operations and treatments, told me ruefully that she called him ‘Sweet William’. Liberace, for one, would not endorse that tender tribute; arsenic yes, but not old lace.
Cassandra had a predilection for writing in the Last Words about the famous and the infamous. He had a morbid acquaintance with the chap who brings the obituaries up to date at The Times, or so he told me.
Connor phoned me the day before the funeral for Winston Churchill.
‘I have my ticket for St Paul’s. I have hired my morning suit from Moss Bros. I would like to add my two cents’ worth to the Niagara of eulogy. Churchill once called me malevolent, but there is another side to my nature. He said hard things of me, but I am forgiving.’
‘George Bernard Shaw is dead,’ he wrote on an earlier occasion. ‘The great dark gates of death that have been locked against him for so long swung open for a moment at dawn yesterday and the lean, derisive sage looked over his shoulder for a final twinkling trice and was gone.’
His farewell to Joseph Stalin was sombre.
‘He died in his bed. That was the last triumphant, exultant trick of Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili – otherwise Joseph Stalin, the most powerful man in the world…
His seventy-three hideous years have been enough. In his time he did titanic things and the whole world was his chess board. No tyrant ever planned on such a scale, and continents rather than countries were his prey. Probably he was brave. Certainly he was shifty and cruel. His skill in power politics was unsurpassed.
But his purpose was evil and his methods unspeakable. Few men by their death can have given such deep satisfaction to so many.’
For a writer who died at fifty-seven – he was three weeks from fifty-eight – Cassandra exuded a matchless zest for life. He held that no major event should occur in his absence, bereft of his comment in admonition or acclamation.
He was in orbit around the crust of the earth as a fine reporter long before Laika, the Russian dog, was projected into the stratosphere. He watched the Nazi jackboots clumping down the Unter Den Linden in Berlin in 1937, and peered over his spectacles with mounting misgiving at the Nuremberg rallies. He was on H.M.S. Alert, near Christmas Island, when the British tested their H-bomb and sent up that mushroom cloud above the Pacific Ocean – ‘like an oil painting from hell.’ He saw Eichmann in the glass dock at his trial in Israel. ‘I will be in Washington,’ he told me, ‘for the Negro march on the White House.’ He was in Dublin when Roger Casement’s remains were returned to Eire (‘the triumph from the felon’s pit to the national shrine is complete’); and with Pope Paul VI in Nazareth in 1964 (‘you can hear the beating heart of Christianity in this ancient town’).
He’ll be flaming angry now that he won’t be able to write a column about Judgment Day.
Combat and satire were Connor’s specialities. With due respect, the snarling kittens in the late-night TV programmes are still wet behind the ears in comparison, and most of them (certainly David Frost) would be big enough to admit it.
Outwardly he was stubborn, cantankerous, prickly. Except in the benign moments, which were not infrequent, conversation with him was a boisterous affray; as a marathon reader of books and magazines, his mental ammo was abundant. But the explosive verbal combats ended as a rule with the twinkling eyes peering over the steamed-up spectacles.
Inwardly, he was a warm and friendly cove, always pressuring the firm and his friends to be generous to a pensioner or to a journalist who had fallen by the wayside. Hundreds of people up the creek turned to Bill for guidance, even on matrimonial crises. The people he dissected in his writings usually ended up on amicable terms. When the nails were withdrawn and the wounds had slowly healed the people he crucified were forgiving.
Cassandra joined the Services in 1942. He returned to his column on September 23, 1946, with the famous words: ‘As I was saying when I was interrupted, it is a powerful hard thing to please all the people all the time.’
The Cassandra Column, non-stop for thirty years, apart from global hostilities, has now been interrupted again. So far as is known, it will not be resumed this time.
That is precisely why the millions of his followers throughout the English-speaking world will treasure this book of some of his finest and funniest writing
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