Bill Hagerty, who edited the British Journalism Review for a decade from 2002, died on December 26. He had been closely involved with the magazine for most of its 36 years and was one of only three editors. He joined the editorial board in 1998, chaired it from 2012 until his 80th birthday in 2019, and then accepted the post of chairman emeritus. He never retired from journalism. He never tired of it either.
When Bill Hagerty got his first job on the Walthamstow Post at £3 5s a (£3.25) week in 1955, it was as a result of writing to all the local newspapers within travelling distance of his family home in Ilford, just to the east of London. Astonishing as it seems, there were about 30 of them close enough to allow a 16-year-old lad to live at home. He was the oldest boy of three and he gave his mum 10 bob (50p) a week from his wages for his keep.
He couldn’t believe his luck. The Post was the only newspaper to offer him an interview, they liked the look of the lad, and he happily agreed to start Monday week, ahead of his O-level results (five passes required for the job; five passes optimistically anticipated). He came home from his first day, radiant with the thrill of it all, and told his mother Doris at the door: “I love it!” That was something that never left him. He loved it until the day he died. He loved every day of it – well, almost. You don’t get to enter and vacate numerous editors’ chairs without a few bad days.
That remarkable record, the 70 years that Bill spent in journalism, encompasses the post-war history of the newspaper trade. It took Bill from what he termed “community journalism”, the day-to-day business of local newspapers in a London suburb – Walthamstow then had three weekly titles in fierce competition with each other – to the editorship of three Fleet Street newspapers, Sunday Today, The People and the Daily Mirror (albeit, this last in an interim capacity). And a host of other significant jobs during nearly half a century in regular employment in national newspapers, nearly half with the Mirror Group. It also spanned the glamorous heyday of popular journalism, the go-anywhere do-anything years when nobody had ever heard of the word “budget”, nobody ever said “we can’t afford that”, and sweet as you like, Bill the showbiz editor was first class out of Heathrow, straight off to Hollywood or, come to that, Timbuktu, to interview the golden greats of yesteryear.
And it was, too, a career lifetime that featured probably the greatest gear change that journalism has ever undergone. Or ever will. It started with young Bill catching a trolleybus from the office to the printers, carrying a precious packet with the subbed and laid-out copy of that week’s edition to hand over personally to the head honcho at the press for conversion into newsprint by a process we called “hot metal”. By his life’s conclusion last Boxing Day, the whole caboodle of news gathering and its dissemination had been so condensed that international immediacy could now be achieved, thanks to the extraordinary introduction of digital magic, with just one single swipe.
Bill embraced change. Of course he did; he was a journalist, he liked anything that was new or newsy. Oh, he cursed technology with the rest of the world when it didn’t work and he knew what to value in the old ways of doing things
A showbiz smile in the 1970s from the man who interviewed The Platters (Right) as an 18-year-old in 1957
and, of course, he was hopelessly romantic about the rough and tumble of the glory days of old Fleet Street. Who wouldn’t be? They were great days. It was called working for your living, yet most of them working there couldn’t believe they were being paid to do it. You worked hard mostly, but you could get fun out of anything, even a feature about a plague of rats in Lincolnshire, which detained Bill on one occasion. It wasn’t all showbiz but you could always get laughs out of it afterwards because you played hard, too.
Thursday night used to be known as “The Night of Magic” in the New Fetter Lane Mirror pub, the White Hart – as nobody ever called “The Stab” (in the back). They had lock-ins and sing-songs and the pianists (there were a few) would give it a go on the joanna; they even bought a syndicate greyhound and called it “The Night of Magic”. They had lots and lots to drink (not only on Thursdays) and most of them had probably been out to lunch beforehand as well. The greyhound’s history is unrecorded, but quite a few marriages splintered.
There was a particular culture at the Mirror, as there was on the other blats (cf Damon Runyan). It went from the Mirror after the madness of the Robert Maxwell years. It went from the rest of EC4 and its environs with the diaspora that went with new technology. The onset of a new century brought a new sobriety and the unthinkable happened: the question “red or white?” became instead “still or sparkling?”.
But the digital revolution brought with it practical changes to the news business that were not always all for the better. What Bill Hagerty felt was missing from the instantaneous journalism of the first quarter of this century was the training instilled by the sort of reporting he pursued as a youngster. He was also rightly concerned about how the decline of local newspapers has led to so much malfeasance going unreported. And he thought – surely, also quite correctly – that journalism wasn’t quite the fun that it used to be. Even so, he got what pleasure was to be had during his working autumn: he curated his own perfect job as a theatre and film critic and he became a pundit on the press, pontificating when appropriate about how things weren’t as good as they used to be.
Created Journalist Laureate at the London Press Club Ball, 2023, with Doug Wills, Bill’s wife the journalist Liz Vercoe and Alastair Campbell
Back in Walthamstow in the 50s, there were weddings and funerals and robberies and burglaries to be reported, police calls to see what might make a line and courts to cover. Sometimes there were those dreaded death calls: the knock on the front door, the solemn face, the condolences, “…and is there, by any chance, a recent photograph of the late lamented..?” Bill didn’t get to sleep at night if he’d been beaten by the opposition papers – not on something “sexy”, in today’s parlance, but on a story that came out of the council. It was friendly, though, and – oh and this, too, was so much fun: the Walthamstow carnival, the pubs, the snooker, the live concerts. Petula Clark at the press ball, Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine at the Assembly Hall, Lonnie Donegan even. And the morning after, maybe on the coach with the football team, withstanding the catcalls from the striker you condemned in last week’s edition for missing that shot, or down the market where the stallholders had loads of stories, all material for next week’s “Notebook”.
That was the training he got. That and some typing lessons at night school, which sounds arduous but was actually something of a bonus: the other would-be typists were all young women. As Kim Fletcher* records in The Journalist’s Handbook: An insider’s guide to being a great journalist (2005), a journalism training course, or a degree in media studies, might give an individual confidence, expand his or her horizons and encourage ambitions. It doesn’t turn anyone into the finished product. The National Council for the Training of Journalists, which Fletcher chaired for 20 years until 2024, puts it rather more drily: “Success comes only after much hard work and routine activity.” The Walthamstow Post knew about hard work and also about the NCTJ, even in 1955, and so did Bill Hagerty. He was supposed to go on a course, but it just didn’t happen. In fact, nobody even remembered to ask Bill how many O-levels he got, which was just as well because the answer was three (English language, English literature and art). But it didn’t matter because he was up and running by then, anyway.
And he had what it takes. Not just Nicholas Tomalin’s much-quoted three primary requisites for real success (rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability) but what Tomalin goes on to describe as helpful, but not diagnostic qualities. These are quoted in full in another handbook, Journalism Made Simple (1972) by David Wainwright**, and include, in part, a knack with telephones, trains and petty officials; a good digestion and a steady head; total recall; enough idealism to inspire indignant prose (but not enough to inhibit detached professionalism); … an implacable hatred of spokesmen, administrators, lawyers, public relations men, politicians and all those who would rather pervert words than policies; and the strength to lead a disrupted personal life without going absolutely haywire…” Wainwright’s book, alas, has not stood the test of time and now reads like a museum guide: “A number of British provincial newspapers are now printed using computer typesetting and this new method of composing newspapers and magazines is gaining in popularity…”
Bill gave a series of interviews, telling his life story, for the British Library’s oral history project. There’s a wealth of this material there and it’s rich in detail. He hadn’t forgotten a thing. He never quite mastered shorthand for it to be much use, but he had that total recall. He remembered all the names, all the pubs, the names of the landlords, the journalist friends he made, what they did next and, yes, what journalism (and the pubs) sometimes did to their marriages.
That was the case on Fleet Street as well when he got there, pinching himself probably because he had made it. Reynolds News first, in the process of turning tabloid as the Sunday Citizen (paid £25 a week, £1 over the Fleet Street minimum), then the Daily Sketch (proper Fleet Street; working as a sub on £47pw), and then he met Tony Miles – “you want to come to the Daily Mirror, cock?” (Miles called everyone “cock”). And everything was, unbelievable though it seemed, just exactly like it was talked up to be. Even senior management, when it came his way, was a job to enjoy. Who wouldn’t want to be on the bridge of the ship when there’s a crisis on? Reacting quickly, taking decisions – maybe not always the right ones, but not being frightened of taking them – that was what being an editor meant to Bill. But really it was all about the thrill of it, just being there, just journalism.
Cover caricature by the cartoonist and author Martin Rowson.
*Kim Fletcher is, among other things, editor of the BJR and was, arguably, my last boss on Fleet Street.
**David Wainwright (1929 -1998) was, among other things, chief leader writer during 22 years on the London Evening News. He published 19 books and was, in 1968, my first boss on Fleet Street.