REWRITING THE BARD

Not only did I share a typewriter with Tom Stoppard I had to cut his copy too

By JOHN SMITH, ex Daily Mirror and Sunday People where he wrote under the name Plain John Smith

The recent death of Tom Stoppard took me back to the days when he and I shared a typewriter.

In case this conjures up a misleading picture of myself and the great playwright hunched together collaborating on some new theatrical masterpiece I should explain that it happened more than 60 years ago when Tom and I were aspiring young reporters on the Bristol Evening World.

In the paper’s ill-equipped newsroom, with its ancient candlestick telephones and scarred, scrub-topped tables there was a daily scramble to bag one of the few available Remingtons. As there were not enough of these battered machines, I often ended up sharing one with Tom.

At the dawn of the Swinging Sixties, Bristol was a fiercely competitive newspaper city with a morning paper, the Western Daily Press and two evening papers, the Bristol Evening World and the Bristol Evening Post.

It became a magnet for ambitious journalists en route to Fleet Street, but it was the brash and breezy Evening World that seemed to attract the more colourful characters. They included a twinkle-toed feature writer called Hilton Tims, who lightened proceedings by periodically mounting one of the litter-strewn tables to tap dance and sing Powder Your Face With Sunshine, plus a pugnacious Glaswegian called Charlie Wilson, a former Royal Marine, whose rough and ready demeanour proved no barrier to a knighthood and editorship of The Times in later life.

On to this eclectic stage swept Tom Stoppard. In a pre-Beatle era when barbers knew only short back and sides, his curly, tousled hair was shockingly long and shaggy. He wore a long ex-Army greatcoat and an even longer, flamboyantly wrapped multi-coloured knitted scarf that dangled almost to the ground. With his dark, glowering Slavic looks, the man was straight out of Dr. Zhivago.

While most of us poorly paid reporters gathered in the nearby Assize Courts pub drinking halves of bitter, the brooding Mr.Stoppard enjoyed the more esoteric company of actors from the Bristol Old Vic. It was rumoured that he drank wine.

So it was that Tom was hunched reclusively in a corner of the reporters’ room on slow news day,  guarding one of the rare working typewriters and pecking out the paper’s around-the-town diary column.

Suddenly the news editor, Reg Eason, a man of erratic temperament who had reached Olympic standard in Throwing the Typewriter, sprang to life.

A road repair workman drilling on Park Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, had cut through a gas main. There was an explosion and a huge crater had opened up. The front wheels of a teetering double decker bus had become lodged in this crevasse. Some passengers had been injured and rush-hour traffic was approaching gridlock.

In the great scheme of things this unfortunate event may not rank as sensational. But for the Bristol Evening World, fast approaching the deadline for the noon edition, it ranked for drama alongside the Titanic.

Reporters scattered from the newsroom like the Red Arrows. Reg Eason, red faced with excitement, looked urgently over at Tom Stoppard who was still languidly chronicling the previous night’s activities of local luminaries. 

Hard news was not normally Stoppard’s domain. Besides doing the Diary he was also the theatre critic. Many a hapless juggler at the local variety theatre, valiantly trying to survive the dying days of music hall, had been advised of the inadequacy of his performance by one of Tom’s lacerating reviews that frequently made the famous Kenneth Tynan’s withering critiques positively benign. 

But this was an emergency: BRISTOL BUS IN HORROR PLUNGE!

“Colour, Mr. Stoppard,” barked Reg Eason. “Get up to Park Street and bring me bags of colour.”

Stoppard, in his Cossack overcoat and Dr. Who scarf, disappeared moodily through the door like Heathcliff going on a reluctant blind date.

For the next 90 minutes I sat in the office, frantically pulling together and constructing a splash story from the flurry of accounts phoned in by reporters.

With less than 30 minutes to deadline I spotted the agitated figure of Ernie Averis, the chief sub, striding towards me. His well worn cardigan flapped behind him and his glowing pipe puffed smoke like an overworked tugboat.

“Can you make some sense of this,” he snapped, thrusting a thick wad of copy towards me. “All I need is 12 crisp paragraphs for a sidebar and there are enough words here to wallpaper the bloody Mansion House.!”

It was Stoppard’s colour story, dictated from the site of the crash. No one could say he hadn’t done a thorough job. Indeed, he had even managed to interview the unfortunate workman whose drilling had caused the chaos.

Unfortunately such salient facts were immersed in a torrent of lyrical prose,  taking in everything from hovering blue skies to the banks of flowers that provided such an ironically peaceful backdrop to this rush hour tragedy. 

Along the way were musings on the human condition, reminders that fate controls our every moment and some erudite philosophising on the twist of karma that had so explosively brought together drill and gas pipe.

”Can you cut out the crap and knock this into shape,” pleaded the harassed chief sub.

So, surrounded by overflowing ash trays, hastily abandoned canteen mugs and half eaten cheese rolls I sat down to rewrite Tom Stoppard.

Mr. Averis, meantime, stumped back to the subs’ room, despairingly clutching his forehead and wailing: “God save us from reporters who think they’re bloody poets!”

8 January 2026