National Storytelling Week: Brian’s Story

To celebrate National Storytelling Week, we sat down with one of our customers to hear about his amazing life in journalism. Read Brian’s incredible story here.

National Storytelling Week happens this year from 30^th January to 6^th February. Founded by registered charity The Society for Storytelling, it’s a week that encourages people to read stories aloud, tell their own, and to generally delight in the amazing journeys that stories can take us all on.

At Bluebird Care, our carers hear incredible stories from our customers each and every day. So to celebrate National Storytelling Week, we decided to speak to one of them – a professional storyteller himself, with a long and rich history writing for one of the country’s most well-known newspapers.

This is Brian’s story.

Humble beginnings

“I worked at The Times, starting as a messenger at the age of 15 in February 1947, then I worked on the front door taking visitors to journalists. I met quite a lot of famous people doing that. Then I moved into the photographic library and in the November I worked with a photographer who was doing the throne room shots of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Philip. My job was to bring the glass negatives back to the office from Buckingham Palace. I asked “shall I take a taxi?” and my boss said “I don’t think they’ll stand for that” so I took them back to the office by train on the underground! It’s unbelievable when I think about it. Why I was chosen I do not know!

“When I moved on I worked in the creature library for a bit and I helped David Attenborough with a book, and another man called Peter Fleming, who was the brother of Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books. During the war Peter was the one who set up the resistance for if we were invaded. He helped build all these tunnels along the coast with rifles in them. Fascinating chap.

"I must have been doing the right things because I was put into the picture department which was run by a Mr Bogarde, who was the father of a top British film star of the time, Dirk Bogarde. He was like the Michael Caine of his day.

“My first journalist work was the weekly edition of the Times which was sent abroad. It was really a compendium of stories. I picked my own front page, which I enjoyed. Eventually I realised I was doing journalist work but I wasn’t being paid journalist money. I was quite ambitious you see. So I was offered a job at the centre of information – a place which no longer exists. It did all government publications and posters. I worked on a number of books about choice of careers. The one I always remember because it amused me so much was ‘How to Become a Mastic Asphalt Spreader’.”

Changing Times

“The thing about newspapers though is they’re like football clubs. When one editor goes, the new editor brings in his lot. So when the Times changed editors, I was offered the position of assistant feature editor. By this time, I was around 30, and working six days a week on the features page. The only day we didn’t publish was Sunday. The editor was friendly with a lot of quite famous photographers. I remember trying to get David Gower the cricketer to take pictures for us because I knew he was interested in photography. But he wouldn’t do it because we didn’t pay.

“From there I moved to the newsroom and worked with a chap called Michael Cutlet, the son of a very famous Fleet Street editor called Percy Cutlet. The senior editor at that time was William Rees-Mogg, [current House of Commons leader] Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father. He would bring Jacob to editorial conferences when he was aged about I would think 13 or 14. He would say “Papa, you missed a good story there!” He was unbelievable, even at that age.

“Eventually I got to what they call on newspapers the back bench. That’s where everything is done really. It’s where you decide what you’re going to lead the paper on’ the photographs you’re going to use, all that stuff. The editor would have a conference at 6 o’clock in the evening and go through the list and say ‘yes, yes, no, no.’ A lot of people were afraid for their job so if he liked something they wouldn’t challenge it. By this time I had confidence in myself and would say ‘this is rubbish, we don’t want to do this’ and would take it to the editor. Not every time would he agree, but sometimes he’d say ‘that’s a good idea, go away and show me how it will look.’”

A marvellous job

“By the time I got to around 50, [Rupert] Murdoch came in and he brought in friends and relatives in quite lofty positions. By then they’d gotten rid of compositors and started using computers. I have to tell you, it was a marvellous job. I could go to work at four o’clock in the afternoon and leave at one o’clock in the morning, and I was finished. I had a new day. That hadn’t been the case before. Every day I enjoyed it, and I still had my love of newspapers.

“I decided to leave The Times when Murdoch took over our pension funds. I resigned on the Friday and became a freelancer on the Monday, working as many days as I wanted. I did that for about five years before I retired when I was 65. They were very kind to me, they even gave me a dinner and I invited 16 of my favourite journalists. They didn’t all work at The Times, by that time I’d made a lot of friends. At that time in Fleet Street every paper had its own pub. So if you wanted to meet someone from another paper, you’d just go to their pub!

“I have two grandsons and a granddaughter, and my granddaughter decided to take after me and go into journalism. She got a journalism degree and she’s now in television and has worked on a lot of programs, including Would I Lie To You on the production side. She must be talented because she’s never been out of work since she left uni. Like me she’s met and worked with a lot of famous people. So you could say we’ve kept it in the family!”

Life after retirement