GAY: Nancy with Gilbert Harding

THE FEW big name newspaper writers around today rarely switch newspapers and few households have ever heard of them … not like back in the heyday of Fleet Street, when many were so well known they were worth their weight in gold to boost circulation.

Now it’s the TV announcers; presenters and even PR people who make the headlines, the page one blurbs and help boost circulations for other reasons such as scandals or divorces — Huw Edwards and Phillip Schofield to name but two. And moving jobs is largely to top up their pensions at start-ups such as GB News.

One star writer much in demand from the 1940/50s was Nancy Spain of the Express, who seemed to pop up everywhere, bridging the gap between newspapers and TV.

She was loved by the public, Beaverbrook and Noel Coward, who said after she died in a plane crash on her way to Aintree races in 1964: “It is cruel that all that gaiety, intelligence and vitality should be snuffed out when so many bores and horrors are left living.”

Nancy, whose lifestyle made headline news, was anything but a bore. She dressed in men’s clothes; had a string of female lovers and could be found most nights in the notorious Gateway Club for Lesbians in the King’s Road.

She even faked a romance with TV star Gilbert Harding, himself gay, to protect her public image and at one time shared a house with her female lover, rally driver Sheila Van Damm and her two sons, one of whom was rumoured to be Nancy’s own.



The Gateway Club

Probably not true, but during the war years, Nancy had embarked on a brief affair with a Free French officer which resulted in an ectopic pregnancy. An emergency operation saved her life but left her unable to have children, it was later said.

For a while she lived with the editor of She magazine, Joan Werner and was also rumoured to have had an affair with Marlene Dietrich at the same time.

Nancy, granddaughter of Isabella Beeton, who wrote the historic cookbooks, bridged the divide between newspapers and TV with ease, appearing on BBC TV’s What’s My Line? and Juke Box Jury as well as writing fiction books and a column for the Express, where she started as a junior reporter.

According to the Guardian she was one of the 50 best female crime thriller writers of all time, “writing with a unique style that marries the acid wit of Dorothy Parker with the intricacy of plotting worthy of Agatha Christie.” What a compliment.

Nancy would do anything for Beaverbrook. She said of him: “I adored him on sight. His quickness, his humour, his generosity, are so much greater than any other human being’s that for days after one has left the charmed atmosphere around him, everyone else seems exhausted and dull.

“Five minutes with the Lord and adrenalin courses through the veins. Fifteen and I can move mountains. Four hours, the length of a happy dinner party, and I long to mark them with a white stone or a little crock of gold.”

Beaver wasn’t slow to manipulate her adoration and used Nancy in his battles with writer Evelyn Waugh. The two men hated each other. Waugh was top of the Beaver’s blacklist of people who were banned from appearing in his newspapers. He called this the whitelist, to put people off the scent of believing he had a censorship list at all. But everyone knew about his blacklist.

They had a history. Waugh was taken on by Beaverbrook as a rookie reporter in May 1927, and given various stories to cover — but nothing he wrote found its way into print and he was sacked after five weeks.

During their later battles the writer successfully sued the Express owner twice. Beaverbrook sued Waugh in return for using the title of Waugh’s best-selling novel Scoop in the Express type style. It had to be changed on reprints.

Beaverbrook was angry that he was portrayed badly in the book, which tells about circulation battles between two rival newspapers The Beast and The Brute. The fictional chairman of the Beast is Lord Copper, identified with the Beaver, as reporters cover a war in the fictional African country of Ishmalia.

His character is so fearsome that his obsequious foreign editor, Mr Salter, can never openly disagree with him, always answering “Up to a point, Lord Copper” in place of “yes” or “no”*.

Beaverbook dragged his chief literary critic Nancy into his disputes with Waugh and on one occasion she was awarded costs in a libel case with him. The ding dongs went on for months and the public was enthralled.

Naturally, as Beaverbrook’s shadow hung over Nancy, Waugh’s books, which got rave views in the Press, got bad reviews from her and other Express critics.

She even began her review of Love Among the Ruins by telling the reader that she “yawned her way through it in half an hour.”

*The immortal phrase “Up to a point” Lord Copper, was a favourite of our very own Drone Editor Alastair McIntyre, of course … and our ears rang with it in the Express newsroom as he led his journo chums with his very own Evelyn Waugh banter over our wonderful years together.

*****

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

In September 1940, Bill Knott, Chief Sub of the Daily Express who had been on a break, was hurrying back to the Lubyanka as the red skies of the Blitz hung over Fleet Street. St Paul’s was ablaze as he made his way to the entrance and the safety of the basement. At that moment he saw a parachute descending on the building, and being a First World War veteran naturally assumed it was a German paratrooper.

He ran into the office to round-up his dad’s army, who didn’t believe him and chided him that it was the drink he had consumed. They came out armed with sticks only to find a land mine swinging from the Telegraph wires, yards from the front entrance. The police and the bomb squad were called, and they ordered that the Express should not print that night. Vibration would set off the bomb. It took hours to diffuse, and it was the only night the paper did not print during the entire war.

STEP FORWARD THE REAL JIMMY



Saying farewell to Jimmy, centre with pint ... The Express pack

I came across the cuttings of the Spaghetti House siege back in 1975 the other day and memories of our old friend legendary crime reporter Jimmy Nicholson came to mind, who died in residential care in 2016, aged 89.

Nine workers collecting their wages at the Italian restaurant had been taken hostage by an armed gang that day and spent five days surrounded by police; emergency services and the Press pack as we watched the drama on TV.

I never knew what to really make of Jimmy, who clawed himself up from teaboy on the Batley News to arguably one of the top national crime reporters of all time. When I first met him in the early Seventies, I was amused by his Al Capone gangster speak.

He would sweep into the editorial wearing his black cloak, and black hand-made gothic jacket looking like an extra from a Hammer House of Horror film. He would call the men Big Gun or Big Boy and the women Angel face or Blondie. The man who claimed he had been on more doorsteps than milk bottles, would quickly slip into an imaginary gangster world around him, of which we all became part. Like a stage play, I guess.

He was fun company of course, but as the years wore on, the crime reporter who covered the big cases such as Fred West; The Moors Murders and the Great Train Robbery, seemed to me to morph into a parody of himself and I could never really get to know the real one.

I wondered if he shopped at Sainsbury’s in his cape and what he said to the check-out girls. He was the pretend gangster and even his accent seemed to adopt a sort of mafia style to it.

He was always the joker of course, as so many of our reporters were at the time, like Michael O’Flaherty, Norman Luck and Bob McGowan. But unlike them, I found him a bit of a loner, perhaps I am wrong. One thing was for sure, he knew the mob well — the Krays, the Richardsons, Freddie Foreman. His contacts were excellent and his copy bang on the money.

One of my favourite stories about him was when he fooled fellow hacks covering the crimes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley into believing that MI5 agents had gone undercover on the Moors, dressed as sheep. Our News Desk rang him and blasted him for not picking up the story.

I still get asked how Jimmy got his title The Prince of Darkness. It was during the Spaghetti House siege. One of the hacks had got himself a suite at the Hyde Park Hotel with a balcony overlooking the restaurant and he turned up.

Gallons of drink were being consumed. At 3am one morning, Jimmy walked out onto the balcony and stretched out his arms lifting his cape as it was silhouetted against the neon lights of Knightsbridge. He looked like Dracula and could fly like a bat. The Press pack in the street who saw him nicknamed him that night. It stuck. Even judges and detectives referred to him as The Prince from then on.

Sadly, and I don’t know if this is true, but he hated the nickname as the years rolled on and once even turned up at court in a white suit, to dispel the myth about him. But no luck, he took it to his grave.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Legendary Daily Express editor Ralph Blumenfeld did not like reporters’ names at the head of stories because he did not think newspapermen were news. but Beaverbrook insisted. One night a huge storm engulfed Fleet Street and a huge, spectacular bolt of lightning shot along the sprinklers in the Newsroom. People were scared. Screamed even. Some reporters ran to the scene to do a story but Blumenfeld, surrounded by copy and spikes, shouted: “Stay in your seats no one is interested in us!”

*****

Conflicting views of Lord Beaverbrook are part of our history these days. He appears to have been a bit like Marmite, you loved him or hated him. 

Take renowned historian Professor A.J.P Taylor who wrote a fascinating biography of him: He was surprised by Beaverbrook’s “wisdom and originality” and fell completely under the spell of his “exciting personality”. He said: “I loved him more than any other human being I have met. For me, Max could do no wrong.”

But one Australian newspaper reviewing the book, however, said: “It is a monster of a book … about a monster of a man … he was an inexhaustible liar, an incurably self-indulgent man, a man who terrorised the staff of his newspapers, a man who while fitfully generous … was better known to most of his newspaper staff for his meanness, and a man whose vanity can be measured by his habit of distributing ₤2,500 a year among his women friends to celebrate, not their birthdays but his.”

TERRY MANNERS

29 July 2024