Thursday, August 28, 2008
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JOY OF A PENNY DELIGHTFUL

By Keith Newbery - Friday, April 4, 2008
THIS ISLAND LIFE
WE all have our heroes. Mine include, in no particular order, John Betjeman, John Wayne and William Connor.
The first two everyone has heard of; the third is well known to those who take pleasure from seeing the written word deployed by a master.
He wrote a regular column in the Daily Mirror under the name of Cassandra until his death 40 years ago and I was reminded of the great man when the County Press featured an interview recently with Anne Springman.
She was secretary to a succession of managing editors at the newspaper at the time Connor was in his pomp. She even typed the statement to counsel used in the famous libel action Liberace took out against the columnist and the Mirror in the fifties.
Mrs Springman said: “Bill Connor was one of the real columnists. There’s not many people of that quality now.”
I beg to differ. There’s nobody remotely of that quality now. Forget your Waterhouses, your Littlejohns and your Will Selfs. They’re not worthy of refilling Bill Connor’s fountain pen.
He first came to my attention when I was about 14. We always used to take the Mirror at our house (there were few working-class families who didn’t in those days).
One morning it didn’t flop on to the doormat as usual, and my father wondered why. “I had to cancel it,” said my mother. “It’s that Cass-andra. Some of the things he writes frighten me — but I can’t help reading it.”
Can any newspaper columnist ever have received a greater accolade? Even at that age I knew I wanted to be a journalist, so it seemed sensible to study the doyen of his craft.
He died in 1967 at the grievously young age of 57 and a couple of years later somebody loaned me a copy of his book, Cassandra At His Finest And Funniest. I never gave it back, and you can see what remains of it in the photograph on this page.
I read it and read it and read it — and I still read it. As you can see, it is now held together by duct tape and the cover has long gone. But the words have come thundering down the years and have lost none of their ability to move, shock, amuse and concern.
Connor wrote articles full of foreboding about the detonation of the first atom bomb, he reported on the Nuremberg trials with a cold fury and he made excoriating observations about the guilt he felt the nation should share over the execution of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in this country.
Yet the following day he could have you chortling over your cornflakes as he chuntered on about the best strategy to adopt when attempting to annoy people by sending them inappropriate Christmas cards.
He was said to be a perfectionist and would follow his column from the moment it left his typewriter to the minute the presses began to roll — and woe betide any sub-editor rash enough to alter even a comma.
I can quote whole sections of the book verbatim and I roll certain phrases around my tongue, savouring the quality and drawing every last piece of pleasure out of them.
When my daughter, Sam, saw the tatty state of my Cassandra book recently she decided enough was enough and ordered me another copy on Amazon. She acquired it for the princely sum of 1p plus £2.75 postage.
The insult of it!
The callous cheapening of a wonderful talent. One penny for the collected works of a master wordsmith.
If you harbour ambitions to enter journalism (there must be something they can give you for it) or simply appreciate the written word at its most delicately honed and regally inspired, then get yourself off to Amazon.
There’s a bargain to be had.

DID WE REALLY LOOK LIKE THAT?
FROM next week this column will be starting a new feature called The Fashions That Time Forgot. The idea is to embarrass all the dads and even granddads on the Island who thought evidence of their days of perms, flares and sideburns had been consigned to distant memory or the photo album in the attic.
Ransack your homes and send me group photographs taken in the sixties and seventies. They could be sports teams, works outings, annual dinners, school photos — anything that shows how we used to look and dress when we thought it was the height of chic and style.
Original photographs can be sent to The Editor, IW County Press, 123 Pyle St, Newport, IW, PO30 1ST. They will be scanned and returned.
Or you can e-mail them to editor@iwcp2.demon.co.uk marked FAO Alan Marriott.
Include as many names as you can then sit back and enjoy the strangulated cries of mortification when your nearest and dearest open page 2 of the Weekender in the weeks to come.