Ah, Dick, you whipped out your colt 45 and blazed away, words zipping as the tale unfolds…
I was enthralled. I laughed out loud while reading (most unusual) and nearly cried as sobering and sad words spilled from the pages too.
I always knew Dick spent time in Fleet Street on a new newspaper which hit the world in a blaze of tabloid hype and steamy stories. It ‘s a world I knew nothing about, other than the scandals that have trundled from the news with a regularity over the last couple of decades, leading to a massive tightening of regulations.
I knew Dick when I was young – being a ‘Thames barge boy’ – when he used to come aboard my spritsail barge home, the May Flower, to help out! Dick later sailed as mate aboard the mighty sprittie, Cambria as no. 2 to the inimitable Bob Roberts. I didn’t reacquaint until years later.
Now, I know what he was up to. Dick learnt his craft with the Dundee Courier at their offices by Fetter Lane – the building remains with its painted advert above and can be clearly seen from a bus.
He was soon having a rollicking good time as he sloshed his alcoholic way through the miasma of Fleet Street’s news desks and pub floors. As a news hound, he chased’ news’ and the people behind them, insinuating himself easily into the cracks in the stories.
What couldn’t be had from the coal face was made up … but the paper’s readership from the start lapped it up, gullible to the very core!
He names characters without a care: truth cannot be challenged. It silences detractors … something I’ve learnt.
Big press names rolled off the pages. ‘Huge people’ discussed by the media talking heads and tut tutters. Wow, he knew them in the work place. Now we do too…
A bloody good read Dick, which I quaffed with equal eagerness with a beer or two whilst keeping cool afloat this summer.
Not a sailing book, but written by an amusing and characterful sailor.
Available from Amazon:
Guttersnipe: A tabloid hack’s Fleet Street memoir: Amazon.co.uk: Durham, Dick: 9781717766960: Books
Read it and be lifted.