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The Best Of Vincent Mulchrone
A lifetime of wit and observation of the folly and splendour of his fellow humans by the Daily Mail’s finest reporter.
ISBN: 978-0-9558238-1-7
Publisher’s notes by Revel Barker
Journey’s end by Paddy Mulchrone
Mulchrone – pure Flook by Ian Skidmore
Lord Rothermere on Mulchrone by Vere Harmsworth
What makes us special by Vincent Mulchrone
This book can be purchased, with free worldwide delivery,
from the
Book Depository
The grape and the grain
By Revel Barker
Thirty years ago, just after leukaemia had got him at the ridiculously unfair age of 54, the Daily Mail published a book of (some of) Vincent Mulchrone’s best work. It can’t have been an easy task to choose the contents.
At the time, in an age that was almost certainly witnessing British – and therefore the world’s – journalism at its best, Mulchrone stood as the supreme practitioner.
Now we have republished the book.
At the suggestion of his sons, Martin, Paddy and Michael, and with the ready consent of the Mail (as copyright holders) royalties will be donated to Leukaemia Research at Great Ormond Street.
It’s a book that should be on the shelves of everybody in journalism, past, present, and future.
And if you have children or grandchildren even remotely connected with our black art, you should buy it for them, because it should be on their bookshelves, too.
Anybody who is interested in the history of the sixties and seventies (you know… if you can remember it, you weren’t there) should want to read it for the unique Mulchrone take on events like the Eichmann trial, the deaths of Churchill and Pandit Nehru, Francis Chichester’s return home, Willie Hamilton and the royals, insights into the lives of Charlie Chaplin, Maurice Chevalier, Mother Teresa and even the real Mademoiselle from Armentieres.
Plus that unforgettable intro on the morning of the 1966 World Cup.
Not many journalists have penned a paragraph that became a classic joke, that was repeated (and still is) by stand-up comics as if it were their own – and that is still resurrected by back-benches every time England plays Germany as if it were a suddenly inspired and original thought.
But Mulchrone did.
 Vincent Mulchrone couldn’t travel home by train to West Byfleet without An Adventure (as his son Paddy recounts, below). He couldn’t even produce children without this most natural act turning into A Story.
That happened, so he told me, like this.
When Vincent proposed to Louie (Marie-Louise Katrina Bogues), on Bangor Pier in Ulster, she told him the tragic news that she would be unable to bear him children because of a crushed fallopian tube following a riding accident in which she was crushed beneath a horse.
Vincent said that wasn’t a problem – it was she that he loved – and they married anyway. A few years later they returned to Holywood, Co. Down for Christmas and on Christmas eve, 1954, her dad Paddy Bogues, a pawnbroker and JP, asked gently what was happening about grandchildren.
Vincent told him: ‘We’re trying… but no luck yet.’
Father-in-law said: ‘Come with me, son, and I’ll show you the way babies are made!’
He took him out for a couple of pints of the black stuff, then sent Vincent and Louie upstairs with a bottle of Moet and a bottle of Bushmills Black Label.
Vincent half-protested that this was contrary to the best medical advice, but on the other hand he was never one to refuse a drink….
On September 23rd, 1955, Martin was born in London and the couple returned to Northern Ireland that Christmas to show off the newborn child.
Paddy said proudly: ‘Didn’t I tell you, Vincent…?’
And Vincent said: ‘Aye. Great joke. It caused a lot of amusement in Fleet Street.’
On Christmas eve, Paddy Bogues took him out again for a couple of pints then produced another two bottles of precisely the same labels as the previous year and packed the young couple upstairs.
And on September 23rd, 1956, baby Patrick was born – in Belfast, where Louie had gone because Vincent was in Israel on a job.
And they say never mix the grape with the grain…
They didn’t go to Ireland for Christmas after that.
As Vincent told his father-in-law: ‘A joke’s a joke, Paddy, but bollocks to the complete pantomime.’
The third son, Mike was born in July, 1960, and if you really want the details the conception can probably be traced back to the fond return of a long distance reporter from a royal tour at a time when they lasted fully two or three months.
But it may explain why Vincent thereafter took to drinking his Moet in the mornings – in the comparative safety of the downstairs Harrow or, when delayed by intro-writing activities, an hour or so later in El V.
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Journey’s end
By Paddy Mulchrone
Home time for Vincent Mulchrone was a moveable feast. Less moveable... more feast.
It mostly involved a swiftish one at the back ’Arrer, a bus across Waterloo Bridge, a tincture at The Drum on the railway station concourse and a 40-minute rattle to the West Byfleet Hotel, from where he would ring the sainted Louie to join him for a G&T.
(She was not averse to sticking three bairns in dressing gowns in the back of the car to effect the pick-up... even if it DID involve us sitting there for half an hour while thirsts were properly slaked.)
This particular Friday was different. ‘You WILL be home at 7.30pm and you WILL be sober...’ she barked in her best Belfast brogue.
The Poinsots from Paris were visiting, she was cooking and he was entertaining... an equation concentrated by the fact that he had the lingo and she didn’t. The Poinsots had no English.
He left the office a happy man... happier still to report from Waterloo that not only was he sober and without drink, but the Portsmouth-bound 6.48 had no buffet car. He’d be in at 7.30 and ready to join battle with les Frogs.
Less than a mile out of Waterloo and the train shudders to a halt. Mulchrone sits there. No drink. And now no fags. There’s clearly a problem somewhere on the line, but what to do in an age long before mobile phones?
Not surprisingly, another train heading in the opposite direction pulls up and halts alongside.
Not just any train – it is the express from Portsmouth. Not just any carriage, either – it’s the buffet car.
And right opposite Mulchrone’s door window, the opaque, slide-apart quarterlight behind the buffet counter.
The reporter’s challenge: adapt and overcome. Vincent dropped the door window, hammered on the window opposite and inquired of the buffet car attendant if he had any non-tipped Senior Service on board.
‘Certainly sir,’ was the reply. And then the fateful words: ’Will there be anything else…?’
Well, says Mulchrone, since you’re there, and we’re going nowhere, a large scotch would be nice. He inquired of his fellow passengers in first class. It was drinks all round, for a solid 40 minutes.
When he finally tumbled off the train at West Byfleet, a fizzing Louie exclaimed: ‘You HAVE been to the pub!’
And as the train without a buffet car pulled out of the station, he started to reply: ‘No dear, I haven’t. It’s just that...’
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Mulchrone: pure Flook
By Ian Skidmore
Newspapermen don’t come much better than Vincent Mulchrone, a friend since weekly paper days. The last time we met before his too early death, I had been hired by the Brewers’ Society to argue the case for Sunday opening of pubs in Wales. A cause close to my heart.
The most graphic way to illustrate the anomalies, it seemed to me, was to hire a coach and get my friend Robin Wills, the manager of the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester, to make a massive, extravagant picnic because Robin did extravagance better than anyone I knew, as befitted a tobacco company heir.
I would invite Fleet Street’s finest to join me in a tour of the Welsh border, visiting pubs. Pubs where you could get a drink in the snug, but not the lounge, the bar but not the dining room, and – in one case where the boundary between England and Wales ran through the centre of the pub – on the left hand side of the bar but not the right.
Mulchrone was first on my list.
Late in the afternoon we left the main party and settled down to have a comfortable drink in the Crown in Denbigh, which had never closed in living memory. It was there that Vince told me the story of the time he hired a man to wear a Flook suit at a seaside promotion by the Daily Mail.
Flook was a very popular furry bear, star of the paper’s cartoons page. Vince said he found a reluctant candidate at the town’s labour exchange.
‘A fiver,’ Vince wheedled, ‘just for a morning’s walk on the sands.’
‘Deck-chairs?’ the man asked suspiciously. ‘I couldn’t give out deck-chairs. It’s me back and I can’t stand heat.’
‘It’s not the bloody Sahara,’ Vince said. ‘And we’ll throw in a water bottle. All you’ve got to do is be nice to a few kids.’
The man’s eyes blazed with panic. ‘It’s not Father Christmas, is it? I couldn’t do Father Christmas; not again. I ’ad to do it three years ago. Horrible it was. I give out the wrong parcels and a little girl hit me wiv a bleeding train.’
‘It’s mid-summer,’ Vince told him. ‘You don’t have Father Christmas in summer.’
‘They had me in September that year,’ the man countered. ‘I wouldn’t have to give anything out, would I?’
‘Lollipops. In a tray,’ Vince told him quickly. ‘Round your neck. When you’ve given the last one out you’ve finished.’
‘They wouldn’t have to sit on my knees, would they? I couldn’t have kids sitting on my knee. They all have wet drawers, you know. It’s the excitement.’
But he was weakening. ‘How many lollipops?’
‘Fifty.’
He made up his mind. ‘OK!’ he said. ‘But not a word to this lot. I don’t want to lose me amchoor status. And no sitting on bleeding knees,’ he warned. ‘I ain’t ’aving a conviction for that. Definite.’
‘Flook has no knees.’
When they got to the Entertainments Shed on the prom and he saw the Flook outfit, the little man changed his mind. ‘I’m not getting into that bleedin’ thing,’ he said. ‘It’s horrible.’
He agreed when Vince doubled the fee but not even the lure of a third fiver, which Vince had to give him to put on the plastic head, would induce him to remove his cap.
The incessant electronic barking of Flook obviously unnerved him, Vince told me. With a sudden, desperate jerk, the little man tore himself away from the grips of a circulation man and, banging and dipping his plastic head, shot through the hut door and out into the Great World.
Colliding almost at once with a group of holiday-makers, he tumbled and rolled down the promenade steps to the beach where the weight of his head sent his feet shooting into the air. In a moment he was up and running, little gauntleted hands waving wildly as he struggled to unfasten the head. Zigzagging across the beach, terrifying holiday-makers.
‘Look at him!’ a circulation man fumed. ‘He’s ruining the whole bloody thing, leaping about like that. He should be walking slowly, chatting up the children.’
From that day many readers of the Daily Mail were able to get instant obedience from their young by threatening them that Flook was coming. He emptied that beach faster than rain, or even a deck chair attendant. At first the children had been delighted. You could hear a concerted shout of ‘OOOOOH’ all over the front as a horde of children threw away the spades with which they had been burying their fathers and made for Flook. No doubt it was the lollipops that attracted them, for the trail of red toffee that charted his progress down the beach soon became a line of struggling, laughing children. But the mood changed dramatically when, brought to bay at last, the little man turned on his pursuers and started throwing lollipops at their heads.
‘It’s all wrong,’ said the man from the circulation department pettishly. ‘There should be only one lollipop to each child. That little girl has been hit twice.’
Vince said he admired the man’s aim: he could not see and was directed solely by sound. Under the circumstances Vince thought he put up a creditable performance. Even when the last lollipop was discharged the man in the Flook suit fought on, hurling pebbles and even rocks of a respectable size. When he finally put the children to flight and sent parents scuttling for the protection of the promenade wall, the little man stood for a moment whimpering, a lonely figure on a deserted beach.
He threw himself down on the sand, kicking at the air as he struggled to pull off his head which by now was dented badly. Finally, he scrambled to his feet, skidding in the wet sand at the sea’s edge. Soon he was paddling, if you could so describe his nervous leaps and surges, as the water washed first round his ankles, then his legs, his little furry thighs and finally his middle as he floated further out to sea.
The circulation man must have had a sticky few moments on the phone calling out a lifeboat to a man in a bearskin. When he came back he wore the air of a man who has known suffering. ‘They wanted to know, if they tow it in, do they get salvage money?’ he said.
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Vere on Vincent
By Vere Harmsworth
VINCENT MULCHRONE spent almost all his professional life on the Daily Mail but there was hardly a newspaper in Fleet Street which did not print an appreciation of him or which was not represented at his funeral by fellow journalists – and rivals – who were his friends. He had no enemies. It is hard to think of a journalist whose death would bring such an overwhelming and personal response, from Buckingham Palace and The Times to the Morley Observer and the Suffolk Free Press. Letters poured into the Daily Mail, whose columns he lit up for nearly thirty years, from readers who thought of him as their friend in print and to all those who knew and loved him personally in Yorkshire, in Ireland and in journalism the world over. There was no envy in journalists’ admiration for Vincent. They knew he was a great reporter. They took pleasure in his pleasure in what magic can be made with the English language, in spite of the hurdles and the deadlines that newspapers impose.
His gifts were humour and humanity relieved by a certain sharpness, even acidity, which restrained his writing from being sentimental. He delighted in people of every kind except the pompous and the self-important, to whom he could be merciless.
He loved human foibles, the contrariness of the rural Irish, for example, and the earthy realism of Yorkshire’s industrial West Riding, both of which he combined in his own character. He loved the weird saga of the giant Denby Dale pie, or the customers who bought the local in their Irish village rather than let it be changed by a stranger, or the Pakistani immigrant on Skye who was more Gaelic than the Scots. He was pleased at being a fairly terrible golfer – his ambition he said was a handicap of 16 and a waistline twice as much. He regarded golf as an excuse for a long walk with a friend.
With all his personal magnetism, which caused people to gather round him in any bar, he was modest, gentle and brave. His modesty made him uneasy when paid a compliment, because his work, however brilliant, never quite satisfied him. He was gentle and unfailingly courteous to the people whose triumphs or disasters he reported and he was always ready to help a less experienced reporter competing in covering the same story. His bravery was deeply hidden by his humour. After serving in one war as an RAF pilot, he covered other wars as human events. When his illness struck him, he said to a close friend: ‘I know what it is, but I don’t want to know when.’ He was too polite, too sensitive to embarrassment ever to refer to it among his colleagues.
Vincent will always be remembered as a writer who did more to popularise the Royal Family than a hundred purveyors of sycophantic prose. On royal travels and state occasions his eye was alert not for the pomp and ceremony but for human detail. He liked them as human beings, as well as admiring them as professionals who did a taxing job with style and dedication, and he wanted others to share that knowledge. He once devoted 1,000 words to a royal ticking off for Prince Philip. He explained why he had such a reputation for abrasiveness with the Press and advised him: ‘Stay as sweet as you are – and just as difficult,’ adding: ‘Why should he change? We won’t.’
Perhaps his favourite story of unpompous royal behaviour was the royal cocktail party for the Press at which a photographer, seeing the Queen coming to talk to him, dropped his glass on the carpet and later, when it was time to take the pictures, found that again and again his flash failed to go off. ‘Just not your day, is it, Mr Reed?’ murmured the Queen as she swept regally past. There was also an opening of the Ideal Home Exhibition by Princess Alexandra, at which Vincent found himself being passed a brightly coloured plastic brush which had been presented to the Princess by an eager exhibitor as an unscheduled gift. Months later at a palace party, she asked him with a smile if he’d still got the brush. Why, he asked, would she like it back?
He felt in some ways, paradoxically, that he was a failure as a writer because he confined his talents to daily journalism, which is read, crumpled up and thrown away. It did not occur to him that what he achieved could only be accumulated over the years through daily written journalism, a more direct and immediate communication from writer to reader than either books, on one hand, or television, on the other. He took tremendous pride in his craft but he simply did not know how good he was.
He could penetrate in a flash to the heart of a story in a few deceptively simple words. He wrote of Churchill’s lying-in-state beside the Thames at Westminster Hall: ‘Two rivers run through London tonight and one of them is made of people.’ When objects were thrown at the Queen’s car in Ulster he wrote: ‘A breeze block and a bottle of stout were flung into Irish history here today.’
He loved what he called ‘the most exciting trade in the world.’ When he won one of his awards as a descriptive writer, he wrote, ‘Journalism, like war, is 90 per cent sitting on someone else’s laurels and the rest sheer panic. If, in the panic, you can find words to convey the blood and sweat of the revolution in Oojiboo and, which is frequently more difficult, get them back to a sub-editor who is worried about his train home to Orpington, then you are a reporter and the happiest animal on earth.’ He asked to be remembered, not with miserable faces but with joy, and he deserves that joy as our thanks for having known him and read him.
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What makes us special
By Vincent Mulchrone
It’s like war, of course – 90 per cent sitting on somebody else’s laurels, the rest sheer panic. If, in the panic, you can find the words to convey the blood and sweat of the revolt in Oojiboo, and (which is frequently more difficult) get them back to a sub-editor worried about his train home, then you are a reporter, and the happiest animal on earth.
It is a thrill that lasts clear through to the next issue of the paper. And it is like war in that only the happy moments are retained in the ragbag of memory. The snubs from the great, the terror of not having coped, the other fellow’s scoop, all the group anxieties of the idiot, exacting trade, can be swamped by one good story. Today’s.
‘I’m from the Daily Mail.’ It is a frail laisser-passer, no matter what the name. Few concierges in Beirut have heard of Lord Northcliffe. Yet it has opened doors that would otherwise be barred to one so obviously devoid of any talent but the rough cunning and low-born persistence required of a reporter.
Just now and again the huge improbability of the situation strikes home – and you have to hold hard not to yelp aloud with disbelieving delight. Like – well, like thinking about catching the 6.27 home and fetching up instead, at midnight, 30,000ft above Cyprus, listening to George Brown speculating on Labour’s forthcoming majority. (He was out by 40.)
And, for all that, not even listening properly to Mr Brown. Because, farther up the Prime Minister’s plane, Lord Mountbatten’s stockinged feet were sticking out into the aisle. The sleeping Supremo, haggard with grief, was hitch-hiking like the rest of us to the cremation of his old friend Pandit Nehru... Sensible English serge in Delhi’s dust, no time for food, nothing stronger than Coke at the cable office, sweat dripping on to a notebook crammed with jibberish impressions... There must be an adjective that will bring the first par alive. There must. There is. But where is the bastard?
The news story must be the only human activity which demands that the orgasm comes at the beginning.
The foot-in-door training was useful of its kind, but it didn’t help when a tumbler of whisky and soda crashed at the Queen’s feet on the quarterdeck of Britannia, causing 200 guests to freeze into a Bateman cartoon. The Queen was entertaining the New Zealand press. We Poms volunteered to hold up the bars in case the royal yacht listed, or something. I was performing this serious task with Freddie Reed, the Daily Mirror’s great cameraman, when the Queen happened by and asked us what we were laughing about. My story had been one about drink. She laughed. Freddie laughed so heartily that his glass slipped from his fingers. The lady’s aplomb is proverbial.
She told a story to match. She never even glanced down.
That evening Freddie Reed was the ‘pool’ photographer alone in the foyer of the local theatre, waiting for a ‘one shot’ picture of the Queen. When he pressed the button his flash failed. He stood to attention as she passed, his mind on other things but loyalty. She paused in her stride to say, for his ears alone: ‘Just isn’t your day, is it, Mr Reed?’ I hope I won’t bore my grandchildren with that story. But at least it beats anything I would have had to tell them had I stayed where I started, which was dressing windows for C&A Modes.
Of the two geography mistresses I have had, I prefer the Queen. She it was who took me to the incredible temples of Katmandu, to the chain-mailed horsemen of Kaduna, to the sunset on the Khyber, to the opera in Munich. (When I spent Acts II and III in the basement bar, she made no murmur. Teachers just don’t come like that these days).
No other trade would have paid one to swim at midnight in Alice Springs, or fish Loch Ness for its Monster with a bottle of Malt for bait, or open National Tequila Week (a purely personal fiesta) in Mexico City, or marvel at grey Jerusalem flushing apricot in the dawn.
When the barricade went up in Algiers the thought came, too, that it would be neither sweet nor fitting to die for one’s intro. If I stand up on this balcony I have a great view and, quite possibly a bullet in my left ear. I might get a half-column on Page One. ‘It is with great regret that we announce...’ Am I old enough for a commemoration service in St Bride’s?
Anyway, do they do it for Catholics? But if I go on crouching behind the balcony’s parapet I will see nothing. The Daily Express man, on the other hand, will dash out into the square to save somebody from under a hail of lead. Which is precisely what he did. (I solved my problem by bobbing up and down wearing a look which tried to convey ‘This is a Franco-Algerian affair and I am a British journalist whose first duty is...’)
Deadlines, like fear, heighten perception magically. But, as they heighten, they narrow. A coach-borne tourist knows more of Isfahan than I do. I know the concierge, the man at the cable office, the man at the airport. I can move faster than a tourist, so fast I sometimes don’t know which city I’m waking up in because the hotel bedroom came from the same American mind.
The symbols on the bedside push-buttons have all finally jelled into the same pattern. The lady with the feather duster, the man with the tray of drinks – all walk briskly across buttons from South Bend to Samarkand. Just one extra button – with a geisha, perhaps, or flamenco dancer – might identify the dawn. After a bad night, you might have to wait to identify the breakfast waiter’s language before you are sure you have made it.
Sometimes he is the only man who wants to know you. You are there, as like as not, because something has gone wrong. The press is bad news. You can feel yourself growing the extra skin. This explains, in part at least, why journalists live, and drink, and move together, whether it’s at an Assize pub in the West Country or in a press camp at war. (I think the trickiest spot I was ever in was outside a Welsh court where a popular mayor had been accused of tickling trout. All that saved us was the fact that the press men happened to be as beefy as the locals.)
We also stick together because, by and large, we prefer our own company to that of the prevaricators and liars and self-seeking schemers whose words we affect to take down. Diabolical phonies abound. I have never known one fool a group of journalists. Bluster doesn’t work with us and flattery rarely (though, Heaven knows, we tend to sob at a kind word). Our papers do not pay us to be savage with the weaknesses and foibles of our leaders. But it is our private delight to savage them for the knaves they frequently are, if only to buttress a self-esteem we are losing.
It is a compensation, I suppose, for the times we have had to fawn, or wait someone’s pleasure, or choke on an insult, because the clock was ticking and the deadline never waits. Yet I wouldn’t want to be anything other than a reporter. My friend James Cameron put it better than I could when he wrote:
‘I know with what cavalier disdain even the ostensibly serious aspects of newspapers are regarded by those who never had to try to form a thought at any time, least of all under the pressure of a looming deadline, a thirst, a ringing phone, and an uneasy conscience. It is rather sad that we should ever imagine it otherwise; it is a salutary thing to recognise the inconsequential nature of one’s own accomplishment.’
Inconsequential was never an adjective that could be applied to Cameron’s reporting. But the salutary warning is one we all know. We face it every day, every edition. That is what makes us special. And don’t you try to tell me otherwise.
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We have three other books - about journalism, written by journalists and mainly for journalists - in our small collection, started this year. The are:
- Slip-Up: How Fleet Street Found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard Lost Him, by Anthony Delano
- Forgive Us Our Press Passes, by Ian Skidmore
- Cassandra At His Finest And Funniest.
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