The WGLC having a glass or two of luncheon in 2017: From left, Dick Dismore, Alastair McIntyre, David Eliades, Alan Frame, Terry Manners, Roger Watkins, the late Ashley Walton and Pat Pilton

Tomorrow the World’s Greatest Lunch Club will convene for our first full slap-up of the year. It will be the 96th time we have sat down together to eat, drink and, as the chairman puts it, “talk bollocks”.

 

We shall be four at a quiet corner table in a Covent Garden brasserie. Once, it would have been at Joe Allen in Exeter Street, a favourite haunt for Daily Express journalists and theatrical types alike, until Robert De Niro bought the entire city block.

 

The restaurant, a green awning the only giveaway to its existence, moved from its dive bar setting to new premises just round the corner. But it was never quite the same and the prices went up and the quality went down and we decamped to Wellington Street.

 

We should be six tomorrow but infirmity has prevented two from joining us. The rest are walking wounded and sooner or later, there will be some desultory talk of ailments – prostates, deafness, aching joints, the usual stuff.

 

It won’t last long, though. Depressing conversation is not tolerated. We prefer laughter to gloom, tall tales to misery memoirs, recollections of Fleet Street triumphs to the inevitable and far too frequent disasters.

 

That is what age brings, not wisdom but a carefully curated backstory that paints us all in a more heroic light than is strictly true.

 

All six of us are solid, long-time friends. It is a friendship forged in the furnace of the Back and Middle benches at the Daily Express in the Eighties. If we were kids, or perhaps soldiers (or Apaches, of course), we’d be blood brothers.

 

The fact that our friendship has endured deep into the following century is largely down to two men.

 

The first is Roger Watkins, former chief sub, night editor and assistant editor of this parish. It was he who formed the WGLC along with the late and much missed Craig Orr.

 

Roger, the club’s informal chairman (if a vote were necessary, we would vote not to hold votes), realised that the ties that bind are sometimes gossamer and even good friends can drift apart.

 

He set out to ensure it didn’t happen to us. I am grateful for his phone call inviting me to join and I imagine that goes for the others, too.

 

The second key figure is our own Lord Drone. Bingo (to his friends) has played his part in two ways: Most importantly, by founding his mighty Fleet Street organ the Daily Drone – widely acknowledged as the World’s Greatest Website – and keeping it going as a source of wit, whimsy and reminiscence for 20 years.

 

Some of us in the WGLC clambered on board to swab the decks and splice the mainbrace (mostly the latter). Three of us became so-called columnists. How the Drone can afford us remains a mystery. He must be a man with deep pockets. (And short arms – Ed.)

 

I suspect that both our female columnists, Helena Handcart and Hermione Orliff, also have discreet links to the WGLC. But their amusing snippets contain so many mysterious coded items that it could just as easily be GCHQ.

 

The Daily Drone goes from strength to strength. Its focus varies from the glory days of Fleet Street and particularly the Daily Express, which WGLC members enjoyed to the full, to the gory nowadays when once-proud newspapers are enduring a living death.

 

But Bingo’s other significant contribution goes right back to the mid-Seventies when his anarchic antics helped finally to switch the mood at the Daily Express from post-war gloom to The Times They Are a-Changin’.

 

He helped to make the Express newsroom a place of fun and laughter, though the work still got done, fast and professionally, when the big stories broke.

 

Bingo adopted the persona of a P G Wodehouse character, complete with ridiculous toff’s accent, braying laugh, bow-tie and monocle. Other fans of the Wooster novels joined in and the subs’ desk was never the same again.

 

It wasn’t to everyone’s taste. The older subs, raised during the war, disciplined and with a healthy respect for authority, were aghast. But it was the changing of the guard. The Boomers were taking over, with Drone in the vanguard.

 

Who can forget a bemused Arthur Firth looking across the subs’ table and asking: “Why are they all wearing monocles?” They weren’t, of course; most of them had simply taken the little plastic discs from the centre of the telephone dials and stuck those in their eye sockets. But it was enough to unnerve the editor.

 

Some took exception to the japes. Chief foreign sub Jack Atkinson, a humourless Ulsterman with a collection of guns, threatened Lord Drone with grievous bodily harm.

 

Editor Christopher Ward ordered an investigation into who was planting satirical bulletins, purporting to be his critiques of the paper, in the locked notice board outside his office.

 

No culprit was ever unearthed but I think I know who it was.

 

A night lawyer, who shall be nameless, was snoozing in his chair one night when he was rudely awakened by the sound of a duck call quacking next to his ear. Lord Drone was chased around the office and fisticuffs almost ensued.

 

Craig Orr, then night editor, had to request that the late chief sub (Drone, inevitably) come out from under his desk( pictured) – “please, just until the edition’s gone.”

 

A lesser talent than Drone couldn’t have got away with it. But he was one of Fleet Street’s finest sub-editors and his bosses knew it. So he was (mostly) indulged in his silly ass circus.

 

I was reminded of all this while reading an obituary in The Times last week of Mark Herbert, described as a larger than life chief sub-editor on the sports desk, who has died aged 62.

 

Those passing the desk between 1986 and 2016 “might have been forgiven for thinking that a party was in full swing”, the obit said.

 

Herbert wore flamboyant shirts (Drone a bowtie and monocle); Herbert’s sports desk “often descended into a cacophonous menagerie… after he instituted a parrot noise when a hapless colleague repeated a previously proffered observation” (Drone had his duck call).

 

The two might have got on famously. But perhaps not on the same paper.

 

Anyway, tomorrow we shall raise a glass to both Lord Drone, for 20 glorious years at the helm of his mischief-making news site, and to chairman Watkins, for providing the glue that held our band of brothers together.

 

*****

 

My latest grandson’s primary school reception class visited our local fire station the other day. We received a picture of him hanging on to a hose (with a firefighter) as it sprayed water at an imaginary blaze.

 

At the end of the visit, they were asked: “Has anyone got a question?” Oliver’s hand shot up.

 

“Yes, young man, what do you want to ask?”

 

“Can I press the nee-naw button?”

 

Doh!

 

*****

 

We have all witnessed moments like this in Fleet Street.

 

The editor of the Daily Mirror was looking for something to lighten the mood of a page containing one of the big stories of the day – a rail dispute, important but dull.

 

Jack Nener, whom Donald Zec describes as “flamboyantly Welsh, snowy haired and irascible”, approached the picture desk where Simon Clyne, the picture editor, was on a call and failed to notice him.

 

Nener, who had gout, “was shifting impatiently from one throbbing foot to the other,” writes Zec in his memoir Put the Knife in Gently.

 

Finally, Clyne sensed his boss’s presence. “Is there something you want, Jack?” he inquired.

 

“Yes, there is!” Nener said. “I want some tits to go with the rail strike.”

 

Wouldn’t happen now, of course. You’d be up before Human Remains.

 

*****

 

Sad to hear of the death of Joe Saumarez Smith, especially at the tragically young age of 53. I recall finding him in the third floor lobby of the Blackfriars building beside the lifts with his boss Peter Oborne, wagering £50 a time on whether the next person to step out would be a man or a woman.

 

My old friend Geoff Compton, of this parish, remembers a similar incident. He too was in the same lobby when Saumarez Smith proposed a £50 bet on which set of lift doors would open first.

 

“Being extremely relaxed after a long lunch, I took him on… and won. He paid up without demur, like the blue-blooded gent wot he was,” says Compton.

 

*****

 

“I loathe writing. On the other hand, I’m a great believer in money.” – S J Perelman

 

 

RICHARD DISMORE

 

18 February 2025