A Final Grain of Truth by Jack Webster Extract

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Jack Webster has had a lifetime of adventure as a respected and highly-commended journalist, meeting the rich and famous and experiencing what the world has to offer. From his upbringing in rural Aberdeenshire – where he survived a serious heart condition and had to overcome a debilitating stammer – to a glittering career which took him all over the world, it has been an incredible journey and a life well lived.

Now, to complete his autobiographical trilogy, A Final Grain of Truth brings his story up to date, reliving magical encounters with incredible people like Charlie Chaplin, Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Field Marshal Montgomery, Barnes Wallis, Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame), Hitler’s friend and mentor Dr Ernst Hanfstaengl, Christine Keeler, oil billionaire Paul Getty and a host of others as he reflects on his work, his life and his own remarkable story.

Full of wonderful anecdotes and written with style and panache, A Final Grain of Truth is entertaining, heartwarming and full of enlightening insights and reflections culled from a life rich with experience.

B+W trimmed size 226 x 155mm HB

2009 – Doctor Webster, I presume!

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A FINAL GRAIN OF TRUTH

A Final Grain of Truth.indd 1 09/09/2013 09:53:58

Also by Jack Webster:

THE DONSGORDON STRACHAN

‘TIS BETTER TO TRAVELALASTAIR MACLEAN: A LIFE

FAMOUS SHIPS AND THE CLYDETHE FLYING SCOTS

THE EXPRESS YEARS: A GOLDEN DECADEIN THE DRIVING SEATTHE HERALD YEARSWEBSTER’S WORLD

FROM DALI TO BURRELLTHE REO STAKIS STORY

GRAINS OF TRUTHJACK WEBSTER’S ABERDEEN

Films (television and video):

WEBSTER’S ROUPAS TIME GOES BY

NORTHERN LIGHTSWEBSTER GOES WEST

THE GLORY OF GOTHENBURGJOHN BROWN: THE MAN WHO DREW A LEGEND

WALKING BACK TO HAPPINESS



JACK WEBSTER


First published 2013by Black & White Publishing Ltd

29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 13 14 15 16

ISBN: 978 1 84502 710 0

Copyright © Jack Webster 2013

The right of Jack Webster to be identified as the authorof this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, withoutpermission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, NewtonmorePrinted and bound by ScandBook AB, Sweden


CONTENTS

1 A Sticky Start 1 2 An Editor at Sixteen 6 3 Giants of Journalism 11 4 An Evening with Monty 16 5 Four Weddings and a Funeral? 20 6 Towards the Daily Express 22 7 The End of an Empire 24 8 The Manuel Murders 26 9 I’m On My Way 2910 Matt Busby’s Big Night 3311 A Week with Muhammad Ali 3712 Seeking Charlie Chaplin 4213 Good Old Winnie! 4614 An Invitation from Paul Getty 4915 The Genius of Barnes Wallis 5116 Heading for the Big Apple 5517 “Dief” Goes Missing 6718 Fifty Years of Forbes 7119 The Man Who Drew a Legend 7420 The Road to Honeyneuk 7821 A Mother at Death’s Door 8422 Discovering Grassic Gibbon 8723 My First Stage Play 9124 A Book at Last 9425 A Grain of Truth 10226 Webster’s Roup on TV 10627 Enter Alistair MacLean 109


28 Eden’s Decline 11329 The Duchess Was A What? 11730 The Cruelty of Fate and In Court with Bader 12231 I Meet Hitler’s Friend 12732 Boothby: The Great Orator 13733 A Wasted Talent 14434 Writers I Have Known 14635 Maud Girl Hits the Heights 16136 Lorna Heads for Hollywood 16737 From Burns to Oscar Wilde 17138 The Horror of Lockerbie 17639 The Northern Lights 18040 Would You Believe It? 18841 Scotland the What? 19042 Sad End for Tchaikovsky 19343 In Love with Julie and The Wit of Dorothy Parker 19744 My Dream of Beverly Hills 20145 So Who Shot JR Ewing? 20846 With Morecambe and Wise 21347 The Hell of Northern Ireland 21848 Alone with Christine Keeler 22349 Bertie Forbes Comes Home 22850 On the Floor of the Senate 23351 What of Charles and Camilla? 23652 Drama at the Express 23953 Lifting the Lid 24754 Those Early Memories and 100 Years of Maud School 25255 An Octogenarian? 25856 Where Did We Come From and Whatever Happened to Society? 26457 My Day with Mrs Thatcher 26858 And Finally – The Queen 27159 London’s Delight 27360 Let’s Grasp This Life 277


For Ayliffe


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WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

The title of this book alone would tell you, if you didn’t already know, that something must have come before. And indeed it did. I first ventured into this territory well over thirty years ago, when I was at the height of a career in journalism, working as a features writer with the Scottish Daily Express and coming into contact with some of the most fascinating personalities of the twentieth century. In my earlier days I had presumed to write a so-called autobiog-raphy when my life had scarcely begun. Needless to say, it got nowhere. But there is a time for everything and, gradually, as my career developed, it dawned on me that there might now be a book in all this, with so many intriguing tales to tell. So I jotted down the names of my interviewees over the years, wove their stories into the fabric of my own life, including a childhood in rural Aber-deenshire, and presented the manuscript to a publisher. I called it A Grain of Truth and on Guy Fawkes Day of 1981 it saw the light of day. Hooray! It did remarkably well in the bookshops but that seemed like the end of my personal memoirs. Several years later however it happened to be read by the chairman of Collins, the publishers in London, a prominent Scot called Ian Chapman, who promptly bought it up for his paperback company, Fontana. But as part of the deal he insisted that I write another one in similar vein, this time a second hardback to be called Another Grain of Truth. That appeared in 1988 and went to Fontana paperback in the following year. But even that was not the end. The up-and-coming B&W publishing company in Edinburgh wanted to combine the two books in one omnibus volume, which



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took us into the 1990s. Twenty-odd years after the second Grain, by which time I had written seventeen books and lived a great deal more, it occurred to me that there might be a case for A Final Grain of Truth. This would be a wrap-up of my life’s experience, now viewed from the greater distance of my eighties. I don’t feel that age and still travel the world as if I had never been there before. Inevitably there are some stories which will have a familiar ring for those who know my writing. But if it is true that wisdom comes with age then perhaps there will be a fresh slant, as I view my life from a broader perspective. One criticism of those two earlier books was that I told the stories objectively and revealed very little about myself. It was fair com-ment. So, putting self-consciousness aside, I have opened up a little on what I feel and think about the people and the world around me. Happily, Campbell Brown and his Black & White Publishing company have shown the same enthusiasm as they did all those years ago. But whatever the results, as you accompany me on this final journey I hope you will find enough interest and entertain-ment to feel that your time has not been wasted.


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CHAPTER ONE

A STICKY START

That summer of 1947 remains in the memory as by far the most glorious of my lifetime, days of heavenly blue skies and golden sunshine that seemed to go on forever. You could have closed your eyes and thought it was California, then opened them to find you were still in the Aberdeenshire district of Buchan, where the gods are seldom so generous. Less welcome, however, that phenomenal summer was in sharp contrast to my prevailing mood, as I lay weak and limp from the effects of a heart condition and pondered the fact that life was not exactly a bowl of cherries. Out of school at fourteen, it was not long before I found the world closing in on that dream of a life beyond my native Buchan, the name given to the rural area of North-east Scotland which runs eastward from the rivers Deveron and Ythan, with the Moray Firth to the north and the great North Sea to the east. Not that I was unhappy in my village of Maud – it lies twenty-eight miles to the north of Aberdeen – where I was born on the morning of Wednes-day, 8 July 1931. On the contrary, I was passionately fond of the place. As a community of just a few hundred people, it lay at the heart of the Aberdeenshire cattle country and could claim to have the biggest weekly livestock market in Britain, rivalled only by that Oxfordshire town which gave us the nursery rhyme about “Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross!” The fact that my father, John Webster, was the auctioneer in charge of that cattle-mart complex took me close to the rural life of Buchan, with its long tradition of turning the natural medioc-rity of its soil into some of the finest cattle country in Britain. That process, in turn, had produced its own brand of common sense,



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hard-working, honest, decent folk whose efforts had so ennobled them that they came to personify the very salt of that earth upon which they had toiled. These were my people, including my own father and mother, both bred from small-farming backgrounds just a few miles from Maud. So why could I so love the native corner yet show such little interest in my farming heritage? It was a huge disappointment to my father that his only child was not inclined to become the latest in a long line of farming John Websters, seven of whom were buried in one Buchan churchyard! There is, of course, no accounting for the permutation of genes, producing such vast differences even within the same family. But the power of genetics is beyond doubt nevertheless. I must therefore look for an answer in my mother’s family, which can at least give us a clue. For into the fabric of her farming background comes a rather extraordinary man, her grandfather. Gavin Greig, the forester’s son from the Parkhill estate, near Dyce, was himself a product of rural Buchan but, more to the point, he was a brilliant academic and musi-cian, destined for widespread fame as the result of a folksong col-lection declared by many to be the greatest of its kind in the world. Gavin Greig was said to have traced his ancestors in two dif-ferent directions, one of which connected him to the same family as Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns, and the other to the national composer of Norway, Edvard Grieg. Edvard Grieg’s great-grandfather was a Buchan man, Alexander Greig (note the different spelling), who grew up on the farm of Mosstown of Cairnbulg, near Fraserburgh, but accepted the offer of a fellow Aberdonian to work in his British Consul’s office in Bergen. In time, Alexander himself became the Consul and was followed in that role by his son and grandson. Through the generations, they used to cross in a little boat from Norway to Fraserburgh twice a year for the sole purpose of attending Communion in the local church. Can you imagine it today? The change of spelling seemed to arise because the continental pronunciation of Greig sounded unpleasantly like “Grige”. So by transposing the vowels they at least came a step nearer to the Scot-tish pronunciation of “Greg”.


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From the same generation, Gavin Greig was writing plays and composing music in the same folk tradition that intrigued Edvard Grieg across that short strip of water to Norway. My grandmother, Edith Greig, the first of Gavin’s nine children to be born and the last one to die, told me of her father leaving by train one day to attend a piano recital by Grieg. She thought his destination was Edinburgh. But, in a more respectful age, he did not intrude upon the privacy of his distant cousin to introduce himself. Can’t you imagine what a story that would have made in today’s world of rampant publicity? By the age of twenty-two Gavin Greig was out of Aberdeen Uni-versity and into a headmaster’s chair in the parish of New Deer, where he remained till his premature death in 1914. So this family legend filtered into my childhood of the 1930s, not only through my grandmother, who lived into her nineties, but from the many witnesses who were still around to tell me what a remarkable man my great-grandfather had been. The Robert Burns connection arose from the fact that the poet’s paternal family was not from Ayrshire, as is generally assumed, but from the farm of Clochnahill, near Stonehaven, which is still an active farm to this day. His father, William, a major influence in his son’s life, was the only one of the family ever to leave the North-east. He went south to look for work as a gardener and landed in Edinburgh, where he helped to lay out that parkland known as The Meadows, in the shadow of the famous castle. He then went westward to look for more work and landed by chance in Alloway, where his son Robert was born. I suspect that if someone had told him he would build with his own hands a little cottage that one day would rival the great Edinburgh Castle as a tourist attraction in Scotland, he simply wouldn’t have believed it, would he? Through his mother’s side, Gavin Greig managed to trace his roots back to that farm of Clochnahill. So that trawl through my mother’s background gives a pos-sible explanation of the kind of child she herself had produced. Whereas my father lived for farming alone, ruggedly blunt and



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down-to-earth, my warm and lively mother, always ready for fun, embraced the finer points of life as well, not least the world of music, which came to her almost exclusively from Broadcasting House in London. As for so many people in saner times, the wire-less was her lifeline. In the whole of her rural existence she never saw an opera or attended an orchestral concert, yet she would waltz through her housework on a wave of melody, unbelievably well versed on every word and note – and cherishing the dream that should have made her a ballet dancer. Her taste in music and composers ranged from Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Puccini and Dvorak to George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Ivor Novello, with Victor Sylvester thrown in for perfect rhythm and Fred Astaire for the subtle majesty of his dancing. If our family was not familiar with orchestral concert or opera house, we did at least have access to Hollywood, via the fourteen-mile drive to Peterhead on a Saturday night. Lost in the scented atmosphere of the Playhouse or the Regal, I would absorb the magic of Beverly Hills, with its palm-lined streets and sophisticated ladies, entranced by the clowning of Charlie Chaplin, the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the skating of Sonja Henie, the voice of Deanna Durbin, the athleticism of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and the sheer craft of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, Spen-cer Tracy, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo and so many more. Now that we have touched on the unexpected genetic back-ground of my mother, with its hint of Robert Burns and Edvard Grieg, is it any wonder she dreamed of a more romantic life? For her, alas, it was all too late. For me, lying in that pathetic state of 1947, with a weakened heart and a bad stammer, it seemed no more likely, though I did have one driving ambition which had engaged me since I was a little boy. When asked, I always said I wanted to be “a reporter”. A reporter? Where did that come from? I have often wondered if, subconsciously, the child mind sensed that writing was a possible escape to a more glamorous world. From the silver screen could Humphrey Bogart in his belted raincoat and


A Sticky StArt

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felt hat have put an idea into my innocent head? In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, the men returning from the forces had to get their jobs back. Newsprint was so scarce that the papers were ridiculously small. But there I lay, more in hope than expecta-tion, writing my pathetic little notes to every editor in Scotland. And there they sat, dictating their bleak replies that were nothing if not consistent. My father was insisting that, if farming was not my choice, then I had better think of banking or something more useful than newspapers. Surely not banking? He sent me to sit the entrance exam which, uncharacteristically, was one of the few I had ever passed. Worse still, in due course I received word to start as a clerk at the North of Scotland Bank in the nearby town of Turriff on Monday, 15 March 1948. Remember the date. The will to live can so easily ebb away. Was there no way out of this? As a last resort, I put myself in the hands of an uncertain Providence; and from that point onwards I would never again scoff at the power of prayer! For two extraordinary things happened. After those months in bed, my ailing heart (a mitril stenosis) showed an amazing sign of improvement, due, it seemed, to the healing power of youth. And secondly, there came a phone call from Turriff. No, not from the dreaded North of Scotland Bank. This was the Turriff Advertiser. The what? I didn’t even know such a paper had come into existence. It must have been the only one in Scotland I hadn’t written to. Well, they needed a boy to assist the editor – and they had heard of “a loon Webster fae Maud who was pestering every newspaper in Scotland for a job”. Would I come for an interview? On the very next day I became the first-ever junior reporter on the Turriff Advertiser, due to start on a significant date – the follow-ing Monday, 15 March 1948! At last the gods had come on my side. On that Monday morning I hastily passed the door of that very bank which might have sealed forever my dream of becoming a journalist. Instead, a hundred yards further along High Street, I entered the world of newspapers, with whatever joys or sorrows that profession might hold.


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CHAPTER TWO

AN EDITOR AT SIXTEEN

The Turriff Advertiser was owned by old Willie Peters and his deli-cate son Bob, both printers not journalists, who had simply added a small weekly newspaper to their main activity of commercial printing. They had one Linotype machine, operated by Norman Murdoch and the rest was achieved by the old-fashioned practice of picking individual letters from alphabetical boxes, much as we did when we were children, and forming them into words before inking them on to paper. As I recall it, the neighbouring Huntly Express was produced entirely by this method. In other words, the Willie Peters of this world had scarcely progressed beyond the founding Willie Caxton of five hundred years earlier. On my first day Willie appeared, complete with his inseparable hat and pipe, removing the latter just long enough to say, “We didna speak aboot pey.” Pay? Who cared about pay? What did money matter when you were on the cloud nine of realising your life’s ambition? “We’ll just see what you’re worth at the end o’ the week,” concluded Willie. That seemed fair – until the end of the week, when Willie assessed my worth at £1.10s (£1.50p in today’s money). I was already commit-ted to £1.15s a week for digs with Mrs Anderson at 31 Woodlands Crescent. With a few uncomplimentary words about this “damnt tippence-ha’penny bugger o’ a job,” my father coughed up ten shil-lings a week (50p) which covered my digs and the bus fare home at the weekend, leaving enough for a bag of sweeties. Matters changed within ten weeks, however, when the editor, a wee mannie from London with the impressive name of Ronald Scott Hutton but with no real interest in Turriff, was sacked. Willie


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Peters (no fool he) spotted an opportunity for further financial pru-dence. He could appoint the editorial dogsbody as acting editor of his Turriff Advertiser – and get two for the price of one. Brilliant. Within weeks I had gone from the depths of depression to the heights of the impossible dream. It didn’t matter that old Willie had now reassessed my newfound worth at a mere £2 a week. At the age of sixteen, I sat in the editor’s chair, put my feet up on the desk, puffed on an imaginary cigar and sent my lackeys in all directions to collect the big news of Turriff. Of course there was only me, so I returned from fantasy and for the next two and a half years went running upstairs and down-stairs like Wee Willie Winkie to collect the news of Turriff which might, on a good week, amount to a whist drive and a meeting of the Women’s Rural Institute. Oh, and there was a massive appetite for deaths. In fact I came to the conclusion that deaths were really the life and soul of the Turriff Advertiser. Post-war Turriff was a bustling little town of 3,000 people, to my surprise much given to gambling and illicit affairs. It could boast one of Scotland’s finest agricultural shows but gained its greatest attention – worldwide, in fact – after David Lloyd George, Chan-cellor of the Exchequer, introduced National Insurance in 1911. A local farmer, Robbie Paterson of Lendrum, refused to pay the new tax and one of his cows was impounded in lieu of his payments. Rural folk are slow to rouse but when the poor beast was paraded for public sale in the town square, they came in force to create a riot, pelting policemen with divots and rotten eggs and setting Robbie’s white cow free to run. It was one of those local incidents which fires public imagination and the story of the Turra Coo made headlines in every country of the world. When the animal was recaptured and taken for a more orderly sale in Aberdeen, local farmers clubbed together, bought the cow and presented it back to Robbie Paterson, in appreciation of the stand he had taken on behalf of them all. Four thousand people turned out for the presentation, when Turriff Brass Band played “Jock o’ Hazledene” and the Turra Coo was handed over by



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a popular New Deer farmer, Archie Campbell, father of a famous North-east poetess of the future, Flora Garry. When I was in Turriff there were still many witnesses to the notorious event, including a local auctioneer, Bertie Reid. As a boy, Bertie had been the orra-loon at Lendrum, looking after the famous cow, but when I asked for his abiding memory of the creature he didn’t hesitate. “She was a damned puir milker,” he said. In that post-war period of austerity we were still in the grip of food rationing and general scarcity, lamenting that nothing was as good as before the war. In fact “The War” became the great divide of our lives. During that war there was no possibility of overseas travel for civilians and even in those post-war years the severe limit on the currency you could take out of the country made it a doubt-ful venture. Nevertheless, with my fascination for glamorous cities like Paris, I decided to take my first trip abroad in 1949, though how I managed it on that wage of £2 a week from old Willie Peters I cannot understand. With a friend from Turriff – and still short of my eighteenth birth-day – I set out on the great adventure, by train from Aberdeen, through London to Newhaven, across the Channel and into that great French capital, which remains one of my favourite cities to this day. No fancy hotels, just a bed and breakfast but an entrée to the great wide spaces of Paris – from the focal point of the Arc de Triomphe, up the Eiffel Tower, down the Champs-Élysées to Place de La Concorde, along Pigalle and up to the heights of Montmartre. What a city this was. The money stretched to the famous Folies Bergère, where I listened to the great Josephine Baker. In the immediate aftermath of that war, in which Nazi jackboots had pounded the Champs-Élysées, Paris still managed to retain an atmosphere of long ago. Even the traditional prostitute, complete with fur cape and ciga-rette holder, still lingered seductively in doorways (a fair fascina-tion to a loon fae Maud!), and you would not have been surprised to round a corner and come face to face with F. Scott Fitzgerald or even the dwarfish figure of Toulouse-Lautrec, however long gone.


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Other legends were still a possibility; Ernest Hemingway was alive, as were Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf; Noel Coward might still come from London to hold a rendezvous with his friend Cole Porter. Full of fantasies, I was now heading for the Longchamp Race-course to see the famous Grand Prix de Paris. There, I had my old Box Brownie camera poised for pictures when who came suddenly into the lens but the most glamorous star from Hollywood. I looked up to find myself face to face with Rita Hayworth no less, linked into the arm of Prince Aly Khan who, I discovered, had become her husband on the previous day. I snapped the honeymoon couple, smiled appreciatively and couldn’t believe my luck. So this was Paris, wonderful Paris. More than sixty years later I made my way to the cinema, attracted by the title of Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris. This came from Woody’s own expe-rience of the great city, a little after me, in which he carried the imagination of our mutual fantasies into the reality of film. And yes, delightfully, he was meeting up with all those legends, from Hemingway and Cole Porter to Scott Fitzgerald and Toulouse-Lautrec. Now I didn’t feel so ridiculous after all. Reluctantly, l left the magic of Paris and returned to the no-nonsense world of Turriff where, by the late 1940s, we had not seen a new car since before the war. But suddenly there was a brand new model parked in the town’s High Street and crowds gathered round just for the novelty of touching it. It was a Jowett Javelin, all streamlined and gleaming. As I approached my nineteenth birthday, old Willie Peters put his head round the door once more, still with hat and pipe in place, to reveal his latest calculation of financial genius. After two and a half years he was now obliged to pay me £3 a week. But he had a proposition. Since income tax began at £3 and I would lose one shilling from my new wage, there was surely a better way to do it. If he paid me only £2.19s, I would lose nothing – and he would gain a shilling! I refrained from a round of applause. But it was surely time to move on. With experience behind me, I



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was now ready for the next step, which in those days meant the nearest daily paper. That was the Press and Journal in Aberdeen, at that time owned by Lord Kemsley in London, but with a fascinating history which made it one of the oldest daily newspapers in the world.


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CHAPTER THREE

GIANTS OF JOURNALISM

Printing had been introduced to Aberdeen in 1621 by a German gentleman called Edward Raban, who ran his bookseller’s busi-ness in Broad Street but also produced books of an astonishingly high artistic standard. There was an attempt at a newspaper in 1657 but the real story began nearly a hundred years later, in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, and the man at the very root of today’s Press and Journal was James Chalmers, whose father was Professor of Divinity at Marischal College. Young Chalmers went off to Oxford University with the intent of following his father’s profession but became intrigued by the art of printing. Gathering up some knowledge and experience of the trade, he returned to Aberdeen, set up his own business in Castle Street and successfully applied for the posts of official printer to both the city and the university. Then came the 1745 Rebellion, when Bonnie Prince Charlie marched south to Derby but was sent into retreat by the dreaded Duke of Cumberland, son of George II, whose royalist troops chased him all the way to Aberdeen. Taking a breather before the final march to Culloden, Butcher Cumberland, as he came to be known, found barracks for his soldiers by commandeering the newly-built but not yet occupied Auld Hoose of Robert Gordon’s, the same building which stands as the focal point of that college today. When he eventually set out for the crucial confrontation, he was followed by James Chalmers, who was to become a rare witness to the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobites at Culloden on 16 April 1746. Within two days Chalmers was back in Aberdeen, churning out a



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news sheet from his Castle Street presses and giving the folk of the North-east their very first notion of a “newspaper”. More signifi-cantly, it gave Chalmers the idea of doing this on a regular basis. In 1748 that became the Aberdeen’s Journal, which held sway for more than a hundred years until it was eventually challenged by an up-and-coming Aberdeen Free Press in 1853, based just a stone’s throw away on Union Street, in what later became the popular family business of Esslemont and Mackintosh. In 1922 they amalga-mated under the compromise of The Press and Journal, based in the Broad Street premises of the Journal, next door to the Town House. Into that great history I took my first nervous steps on Monday, 16 October 1950, achieving what had always been my ambition – to be a reporter on The Press and Journal. Well, here I was and here I would stay for the next ten years, mainly as a reporter but gaining some experience as a sub-editor as well. Within that period I would spend three years as the staff man in my native Buchan area, cover-ing the fishing towns of Peterhead and Fraserburgh, as well as the rural hinterland. On a Friday I would cover the Sheriff Court at Peterhead and encounter justice mixed with comedy. A man from one of the strongly Brethren villages between Peterhead and Fraserburgh faced a fairly serious motoring charge one day. “Don’t you have anyone to represent you?” asked Sheriff Hamil-ton. The accused raised his right hand and said with great convic-tion, “Your Honour, God is my defender.” Whereupon a puzzled sheriff leaned over the bench and said, “My good man, on this occasion I think you might be better to get someone who is better known locally!” More seriously, I covered that most devastating of events, the Great Gale of 31 January 1953 which ravaged so much of Scotland. Nine days later came a second Fraserburgh Lifeboat Disaster, in which six men perished at the mouth of the harbour as we onlook-ers stood in helpless despair. The irony of that tragedy was that the sunny serenity of the day belied the fact that the turmoil of the Great Gale was still boiling in anger a hundred miles out at sea


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and playing havoc with the more predictable rhythms of the waves which overturned the lifeboat. Returning from Buchan to the old Broad Street headquarters of The Press and Journal, I was learning from some of the greatest journalists I would ever encounter. They were men like George Rowntree Harvey, who had worked as a night sub-editor to pay his way through Aberdeen University and had to be ordered home in the early hours of his final exam day to catch some sleep before his big moment. George sought no favours but he emerged with first-class honours and developed into what many claimed to be the finest music and drama critic in British journalism. In London they could not believe that he would scorn the glory of Fleet Street for his preferred choice of Aberdeen. He also became one of the great eccentrics of North-east life. There were men like Andrew Ingram, who had worked on The Times of India with Eric Linklater before returning to his native corner as a giant of journalism – one of so many whose names would never be known to the wider public. In contrast to the rumbustious Andrew there was the introverted Cuthbert Graham, another giant of his craft who attracted my attention for a very special reason. When I first arrived in Broad Street in 1950 I was intrigued by several discoveries, one of which was the fact that I was working in the same small reporters’ room, at the same old desks, as a man who had become a hero of mine. He was there at the back end of the First World War just as I was in the aftermath of the Second. His name then was Leslie Mitchell but he had become better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, regarded by many as Scotland’s finest prose writer. Mitchell had struggled with rejection till the last few years of his very short life, when he received the challenge of a newspaper critic to write about his native North-east of Scotland in the way that Thomas Hardy had written about Wessex. Quietly he took up that challenge and began writing Sunset Song, the first in a memo-rable trilogy which would turn him into a novelist of international repute, under his new name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, just before he died during an ulcer operation. He was not yet thirty-four.



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The significance of this story is that the journalist who had chal-lenged him towards his destiny, by suggesting what he should write, was none other than the painfully shy Cuthbert Graham, a young man with perception so far beyond his years. Is it any wonder I sat at his feet and coaxed him to tell me all he knew about the man who had also become his close friend? I shall return to Grassic Gibbon later. Another discovery at The Press and Journal was the fact that our national bard, Robert Burns, had visited the old Aberdeen’s Journal office in 1786, during his visit to the North-east to see his relatives at that farm near Stonehaven from which his father had gone south. The third thing that intrigued me about The Press and Journal was that men were allowed to work into their eighties in those days. I’m thinking in particular of old John Sleigh, who had reported on the Tay Bridge Railway Disaster of 1879, when the bridge blew down in a storm and a train took all its passengers to their deaths – and who was still there at the start of the Second World War. I was just too late to know him but the legend lived on. John was a tall, distinguished-looking man, dressed in dark suit, white shirt, black tie and bowler hat, who was perfect for reporting on society occasions on Royal Deeside. On this particular day he was sent to report on the funeral of an aristocratic spinster lady whose real age had never been known. So he had strict instructions to look at the coffin lid, which in those days invariably gave the information. John liked two drams better than one but he was back at the grave in time to hear the minister say, “Earth to earth, dust to dust.” John suddenly remembered he had not checked the coffin lid. What fol-lows is a perfectly true story. Having edged close to the graveside and realised it was too dark to see, he now had no option but to bend down on one knee. With a few drams inside him . . . yes, he toppled over and fell in. Well, you can imagine the stooshie that created on Royal Deeside. But local farmers just nudged each other, winked and said that, as far as they knew, it was the nearest her ladyship had ever been to a man! At least, that’s the sanitised version of what they said.


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The nature of our journalism at Broad Street, Aberdeen, was of course essentially regional, covering that highly distinctive area of North-east Scotland and stretching to the far North and West of the country. But the quality could stand comparison with the very best in Britain, regional or otherwise.


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CHAPTER FOUR

AN EVENING WITH MONTY

Within my ten years at Aberdeen Journals the most memorable encounter came far from our own shores – and in the most unex-pected of circumstances. Along with my good friend and colleague John Lodge, a real character from Yorkshire who graduated from Aberdeen University and came straight into local journalism, I took an interest in what was happening in post-war Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union may have been dominating Eastern Europe with its bleak form of dictatorship, but Stalin had no power over Marshal Tito, who had certainly taken part in the 1917 Revolution but was now establishing a more relaxed form of communism in his own land. In 1953 Tito had become president of Yugoslavia and in that same year John Lodge and I, on our own initiative, decided to see it for ourselves. We travelled by train from Aberdeen to London, en route to Paris once more, where we boarded the Simplon-Orient Express on a Saturday night and arrived in the capital city of Bel-grade on the Monday morning. From there we crossed the Dinaric Alps in an old Pionair aircraft, which came bumping down in a field of grazing cattle and horses, which was all that the beautiful walled city of Dubrovnik could offer as an airport in those days, long before it became a fashionable holiday resort. On our meagre currency allowance we found lodgings and set out to explore this ancient gem of a place, described by Lord Byron as “the Pearl of the Adriatic”. For it was here that Tito entertained foreign guests in his magnificent Villa Sheherazade, owned before the war by a wealthy American and now restored to its capitalist best by the communist dictator.


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When our landlord told us that our new Queen’s sister, Prin-cess Margaret, had been there last week and the current guest was believed to be our own Field Marshal Montgomery, John and I pricked up our ears. Well, it was worth a try. So we approached the formidable gates of the villa and tried to explain to an armed guard that we would like to see the Field Marshal. Not unexpect-edly, he was less than helpful but agreed to pass on our request. There would be a reply at a given hour, so John and I were back at the guard room in good time, fully prepared for the rebuff. To our astonishment, the heavy gates were thrown open and we were marched at bayonet-point down through magnificent gar-dens, sloping towards the Adriatic in an idyllic setting looking its best on a fine September evening. Already we could see the small figure in the familiar black beret, seated by a spacious patio. Montgomery rose to greet us, interested to hear we were journal-ists from Scotland, inviting us to sit at his table and asking what we would like to drink. Before we had time to consider, the teetotal Monty had snapped his fingers at the man in the dark suit and ordered two glasses of vermouth. We had come to interview Monty but, in his own supervised visit, we soon found he was just as interested in what we, with greater freedom of movement, were able to observe. What about the people in their own homes? What were they saying? So our interests were mutual. By now the man in the dark suit had served our vermouth from a silver tray, but instead of withdrawing to his servants’ quarters, to our astonishment, he boldly pulled in a chair and waited for Montgomery to introduce him – as none other than M. Popović, Tito’s Foreign Secretary! No wonder Monty won that vital Battle of El Alamein which turned the Second World War in our favour. As we renewed our discussion, that was the next topic of con-versation. For John and myself this was our first interview with a famous figure and not for the last time I realised how hard it is to fit a legend into the frame of an ordinary-looking human being. Montgomery was just that but it’s what is in the head that counts.



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So we covered his war days then sat intrigued as he casually moved on to more mundane, domestic encounters. “Last weekend when I was visiting Winston he was telling me what he was backing in the St Leger,” he said. Of course, Churchill was enthusiastic about his horses, owning them, backing them; but first-hand accounts like that were new to us. Our wartime leader had stepped out of history to a level of everyday conversation. Then we talked about Lord Kemsley, whose newspaper empire included The Press and Journal and whose daughter Pamela came daily to her Aberdeen office from Aboyne. In an unlikely union, the elegant lady had married the less than elegant but highly aristocratic Marquess of Huntly, head of the Gordon clan, indicating that her money and his title could be the most likely explanation of the marriage. “Kemsley is a good friend of mine,” said Monty. “Do tell him I was passing on my regards.” And with that he bade us goodbye. Lord Kemsley in London was well out of our reach in Aberdeen but back home John and I wondered if Montgomery was really seri-ous about passing on his regards. However, at the risk of sounding foolish, we did as he asked. A few days later, Kemsley had another letter on his desk:

My Dear Kemsley,I was in Yugoslavia the other day and while there I met two young men from the Aberdeen Press of your group, John Lodge and Jack Webster. They asked if they could see me and they came to my villa that evening.

I thought they were both extremely nice young men, very courteous and interested in everything. They told me about their experiences and they had without doubt displayed great initiative in making the journey on a limited amount of currency . . . I told them they were to send you personally my good wishes – and I hope they did so . . .Montgomery of Alamein

That taught us a lesson about paying attention to detail. He was testing us out. Lord Kemsley sent us his letter, which I preserve


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to this day. And when I wrote about it all in The Press and Journal Monty sent me another letter of appreciation. Yes, life was fun at Aberdeen Journals which, of course, incorpo-rates both The Press and Journal and the Evening Express. On occasion I would pass the gates of Robert Gordon’s College and shudder a little at the memory of my inglorious exit. Having been sent there from the village school at the age of twelve, I had failed to reach the required academic standard by the time I was fourteen. Nowa-days, everyone passes on to higher education, even to college or university, sometimes emerging with fancy degrees but still unable to count or spell or punctuate or write a decent English sentence, all of which I had learned at Maud School before I was twelve. In those days, however, I was shown out through that vaulted gateway with tears on my cheeks and the ring of failure in my ears, back home to Maud in total disgrace. It took years to believe that I was not a moron altogether. With that unhappy memory of five years earlier I would cheer myself up by repairing to a nearby cafe which had a quaint little sign saying, “Food, drink and a kind word – 1s.2p” (less than 6p today). I ordered a pie and a cup of tea as my food and drink and, as the waitress turned to go, I said, “And what about the kind word?” She cast around to see if the boss was looking, then said, “Dinna eat that pie!” I did eat the pie and survived. But before we leave that scene can I explode a myth that women were hardly to be found in journalism those sixty years ago and had to fight their way to acceptance. In Aberdeen at least, the editorial floor was joyfully awash with women, prominent by-line names like Ethel Simpson, Helen Fisher, Pearl Murray, Margaret Fleming, Aileen Tough, Margaret McGrath, Muriel Munro and some who escape my fading memory, all welcomed and paid on exactly the same scale as the men.


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Jack Webster has had a lifetime of adventure as a respected and highly-commended journalist, meeting the rich and famous and experiencing what the world has to offer. From his upbringing in rural Aberdeenshire – where he survived a serious heart condition and had to overcome a debilitating stammer – to a glittering career which took him all over the world, it has been an incredible journey and a life well lived.

Now, to complete his autobiographical trilogy, A Final Grain of Truth brings his story up to date, reliving magical encounters with incredible people like Charlie Chaplin, Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Field Marshal Montgomery, Barnes Wallis, Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame), Hitler’s friend and mentor Dr Ernst Hanfstaengl, Christine Keeler, oil billionaire Paul Getty and a host of others as he reflects on his work, his life and his own remarkable story.

Full of wonderful anecdotes and written with style and panache, A Final Grain of Truth is entertaining, heartwarming and full of enlightening insights and reflections culled from a life rich with experience.

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2009 – Doctor Webster, I presume!

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