It was a hot afternoon in August when I arrived in Liverpool, sweating in my newly puchased suit as I lugged my bags up the hill behind Lime Street station to the boarding house where I would be staying. After three years at university I was about to start my first job — as a trainee reporter. In the weeks that followed I would be writing about fires and traffic accidents, tramping around decaying council estates, phoning the airport at regular intervals for updates on the weather and getting rid of people who had the audacity to turn up at the office asking to speak to a journalist.

After a while I got my first press card, which would have been a proud moment had it not been for the word “TEMPORARY” printed on it in capital letters. Fortunately, people didn’t ask to see it very often, though on one assignment a police inspector chuckled sarcastically and asked how soon the paper would be rid of me.

The year was 1968 and Liverpool presented itself to the world as the “City of Change and Challenge”. It was certainly changing, and the challenge was that it was mostly changing for the worse. The signs of decay were inescapable. Temples of trade and commerce from the previous century — stone-fronted edifices that dotted the city centre — struggled to maintain an illusion of grandeur. Imposing Georgian terraces, once providing homes for the city’s wealthier families were now crumbling and in multiple occupancy. Elsewhere, slum clearance had created vast tracts of derelict land and abandoned properties often burned down before they could be demolished. 

It was obvious that great wealth had once passed through the city — though most of it had ended up somewhere else. Starting in the 18th century, Liverpool had developed into a major port mainly because of its location at the mouth of the River Mersey. The port had also spawned land-based maritime industries — shipbuilding on the opposite side of the river and more obscure trades such as rope-making — but mostly it served as a staging post. In the 19th century, it was the place where bales of cotton produced by slaves on the other side of the Atlantic were unloaded by countless dock workers for onward transport to the Lancashire textile mills.

By the late 1960s, though, the port was shrinking. One by one the evocatively named South Docks — Canning, Albert, Salthouse, Wapping, Kings, Queens, Coburg, Brunswick, Toxteth and Herculaneum — once the livelihood of thousands, were gradually abandoned. The new Seaforth Container Terminal a few miles north of the city centre could do all their work. Huge cranes, controlled by one man, unloaded cargoes tons at a time. After a brief stop on the quayside, the sealed containers would speed away by road and rail, their contents unseen, untouched by dockers’ hands. Air travel was taking its toll on the port too: a few years later the last of the great transatlantic liners, the Empress of Canada and the Empress of England, sailed from the Pier Head, never to return.

Because of its decline, Merseyside was officially known as a Development Area — which meant there were generous government grants for firms setting up new factories. New industries came but went almost as quickly. It was an opportunity that any sharp business mind could spot a mile off: take the money and (after a decent interval) run.

And the people? Well, it was their fault for being where they were no longer needed and for living in damp houses with rats and bad plumbing. The stubborn ones stayed but thousands left, transported to the outlying colonies of Netherley, Halewood, Kirkby, Runcorn or Skelmersdale ... to new houses in wide streets where they would not be obliged to speak to the neighbours or be visited by relatives quite so often, where mothers could get plenty of healthy exercise trudging to the shops or get a suntan waiting for a bus. Back in the city their old homes were knocked down. Acre upon acre stood empty, waiting for the second coming of the Industrial Revolution. Eventually grass grew and the council dug it up to plant official council grass.

Adversity, though, had not destroyed Liverpool’s soul. It had two of the country’s top football teams and culturally it was a vibrant place. The Beatles were its most famous sons but it also produced poets — Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten — and a seemingly endless supply of entertainers, among them Cilla Black and the comedian Ken Dodd.

One person who embodied what Liverpool was about— probably more than anyone else —was Arthur Dooley, a self-taught sculptor whose work brought him fame but no fortune. Dooley was a kind of lovable eccentric, pot-bellied, fond of a drink, hopeless at managing his money and the archetype of a bolshie Scouser.

A Communist and a devout Catholic, he had left school at 14 and got a job as a welder at Cammell Laird’s shipyard in Birkenhead. The welding skills proved useful later because his sculptures were mostly made from scrap metal. One of them, which I passed every day travelling to and from work, was a 12-foot sculpture outside a church in Toxteth, a multi-ethnic district of the city. It was said to have caused much controversy when first unveiled in 1967: a black metal and fibreglass figure of ambiguous ethnicity attached to the side of the church. Dooley had titled it “The Resurrection of Christ” but it immediately became known as “The Black Christ”.

Most of his commissioned work was for churches though he later sculpted a tribute to the Beatles near the site of the famous Cavern Club where the group performed in their early days (the club tself had since been compulsorily purchased and demolished to make way for a project that never materialised). Dooley’s sculpture consisted of a Madonna, not with the baby Jesus, but with four small infants: John, Paul, George and Ringo. Considering that John Lennon had once claimed the Beatles were more popular than Jesus and that rock music was replacing Christianity, the sculpture might have been seen as sacreligious but it soon became a tourist attraction.

Another of Dooley's works, which proved too subversive to be completed, was a memorial marking the hundredth anniversary of the Manchester Martyrs — three Irish republicans executed for murder in 1867 after killing a police officer (apparently unintentionally). The sculpture had been commissioned by the Connolly Association — named in honour of James Connolly, a republican executed by the British in 1916 for his part in Ireland’s Easter Rising. The sculpture project was eventually abandoned amid political objections but a small mock-up of Dooley’s design survives.

Dooley's model for the Manchester Martyrs sculpture

In the 1970s he designed a monument dedicated to the 534 British volunteers from the International Brigade who had died fighting fascism in Spain. Located in Glasgow, it carries an inscription saying “Better to die on your feet than live forever on your knees.”

In an unusual protest in 1968 Dooley and two other artists rode through the city centre on horseback and up the steps of the Walker Art Gallery. They were complaining about a lack of local artists in its collection and the high fees charged by another gallery for putting on exhibitions. He also objected to questions on the 1971 census form and his public refusal to fill it in resulted in him being fined.

Liverpool at the time had two daily newspapers — the Daily Post, published in the mornings, and an evening paper, the Echo. They were not competitors, though: they had separate editors but both belonged to the same company and shared the same reporting staff. Almost-identical versions of some stories appeared in both papers, but with a different headline and intro: as a trainee I often had the task of rewriting the first paragraph to make recycling less obvious to readers.

There was a tray in the newsroom where we had to leave a carbon copy of all our typed stories. Every so often a stranger from outside the office would come and take them away. At that point I discovered we were not only working for two daily newspapers but also the BBC. The mystery visitor was taking our stories to BBC Radio Merseyside to supplement its news bulletins. As a reward for providing this service our salaries allegedly included a couple of pounds bonus every month.

It wasn’t long before I got my first chance to do some campaigning journalism... well, after a fashion. It was a campaign about milk bottles. “Billy Bottle” — personified in a drawing of a milk bottle with a smiling face — was a collaborative creation by the news editor and the boss of a local diary which happened to be a valued advertiser. The dairy was beset by a shortage of bottles: too many of them were not being returned and it was costing a lot in replacements. My role in this was to encourage readers to return their bottles promptly. I had to produce daily reports on the numbers of stray bottles returned, with human interest touches about schoolchildren finding long-lost bottles, and so on. Judging by the files in the cuttings library, this bottle crisis — and the Echo’s campaign that accompanied it — was a regular event.

Learning on the job at a provincial newspaper was the usual route into journalism and several companies had training schemes specifically for graduates. The Mirror Group had one based at a paper in Plymouth and the Thomson Organisation, publisher of The Times and the Sunday Times, had another at several regional papers it owned.

The Post & Echo’s scheme had a good reputation within the industry — its most celebrated former trainee at the time was Peter Preston, editor of The Guardian. The first few weeks were pretty brutal, though, and three trainees who started shortly after me were sacked or left. One of them, who later became a successful TV producer, found it a “neanderthal” place to work. During the first six months trainees could be dumped at any time. Those who lasted that long were invited to sign up for a further two years, during which they would not be allowed to leave.

On starting, we were given a 12-month schedule assigning us to different editorial departments for a few weeks at a time. We were also sent to learn learn touch typing at a secretarial college and were dragged into the office on Saturday mornings for shorthand lessons.

During our stints as reporters the chief sub-editor collected carbon copies of our original unedited stories and returned them periodically with comments. It soon became clear from this that what the chief sub liked was not necessarily what the news desk liked. I remember one occasion when the night news editor phoned me at home to deliver a bollocking over the intro to one of my stories. “No, no, no, Mister Whitaker,” he said. “This won’t do at all.” The story duly appeared next day with a different start. I was then expecting a second bollocking from the chief sub when he got around to reading my original version but it came back with just a two-word comment. It said: “Nice intro”.

During our initial training we also spent eight weeks on a journalism course in Darlington. There were four of us from the Post & Echo plus about a dozen from other papers. Our chief instructor had previously worked for The Times, though we were not particularly impressed to learn he had only been its agricultural correspondent.

We had formal classes in newspaper law and practised our interview techniques at mock news conferences where the instructor pretended to be a spokesperson. There were also daily shorthand classes, and by the end my shorthand was almost as fast as scribbling in longhand. Achieving useful speeds with Pitman’s shorthand needed a lot of practice and I abandoned it shortly afterwards because I was mostly doing sub-editing and had no need for it.;

The reporting part of the Darlington course also included several outside visits. One took us to the site of the Beamish open-air museum where there was nothing much to see because it hadn’t been constructed yet. Another visit, to a police dog training school, proved more interesting — though for the wrong reasons. To liven things up, one of the group brought a bottle of aniseed oil which he sprinkled down the back of our instructor’s coat as we went in, hoping the smell of it would distract the dogs from their tasks.

The plan failed, though, and when a sniffer dog was brought into the room he ignored all of us, including our aniseed-scented instructor and headed for a cupboard at the back. The police then opened the cupboard door to reveal a block of cannabis resin the size of half a pound of butter.

The twist in this tale came next day when we handed in our reports about the clever police dogs and the instructor informed us we had all missed “the real story”. The police, he told us, were “not above using subterfuge” in showing off the dogs’ skills. He had made this discovery, he said, after arriving home and finding “traces of aniseed in various places”.

For the reporting exercises everyone in the class had the same information to work from, and it was interesting to see the similarities and differences in each other’s reports. It was then that we noticed how, without any collusion, the four of us from the Post & Echo were coming up with remarkably similar reports — similar intros, the same choice of angles to focus on, etc. We had been working at the Post & Echo for only a few months but unconsciously we had already developed a clear idea of the papers’ expectations. That might be seen as a sign that our training was working but I found it a more than a bit disconcerting: were we also learning to fit the news into some kind of pre-determined mould?

Back in the office fro Darlington, the training schedule introduced me to sub-editing. My first shift began with a six-word instruction from the chief sub as he handed me a reporter’s typewritten story: “Make whatever changes you consider necessary.” It sounded empowering but it was also baffling. How on earth was I supposed to decide what to change?

In practice, though, it was mainly a matter of checking reporters’ copy for spelling and grammar, marking it up with instructions for the compositors and, most of the time, cutting it to fit the allocated space in a page. This applied especially to freelance reporters. Unlike the salaried staff reporters, they were paid according to the number of words they got into the paper. As a result, their reports tended to include a lot of superfluous words which the subs sought to cut out

Sub-editors working on the news pages sat around a large table with the chief sub at one end, planning pages, handing out reporters’ copy to be subbed, checking it afterwards and then placing it in a wire basket. Periodically he would shout “COPY!” and a messenger would empty the basket, pack the copy into a cylindrical canister then insert the canister into a Lamson tube which would whisk it up to the composing room on the floor above. Shortly afterwards there would be a loud thud as the empty canister returned via the tube from the composing room.

These tubes, which used air pressure to propel the canisters, were a normal feature of newspaper offices at the time. Occasionally a canister would become stuck in a tube — in which case the system would be turned off and men with rods would arrive to clear the blockage.

After a year moving around the various editorial sections I was happy to settle as a sub-editor in the features department. Features subs generally had more scope than the news subs because they took charge of individual pages, seeing them through from the arrival of the copy and the layout to the final page proof. The experience this gave me was to prove very useful later for the Free Press, though I was unaware of it at the time.

At first the work was new and interesting but I was gradually getting a clearer picture of how the paper was run — and it didn't look pretty. For a start, there was the proprietor and his whims. Sir Alick Jeans, who relished the triple title of Joint Chairman, Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief was a minor Beaverbrook, a knight among the great Press barons, and the third generation of his family running newspapers in Liverpool.

When wearing his Editor-in-Chief hat he directed policy, regularly attended editorial conferences and sometimes gave direct instructions. One (which he later reversed) was a rule that industrial action by trade unions should not be mentioned in advance of it happening— for fear his papers would be thought to encourage it.

Sir Alick spent his holidays in Portugal — then under the authoritarian rule of Antonio Salazar. When Salazar died in 1968 the Daily Post attempted to describe him as a dictator but Sir Alick intervened and the word “benevolent” was inserted before “dictator”.

The only time I actually met Sir Alick was in the wood-panelled boardroom for my job interview which lasted only a few minutes. He explained the graduate training scheme, I showed him a few copies of Redbrick, the student newspaper I had edited at Birmingham University and then, after remarking that his papers found trainees “somewhat indigestible”, he offered me a job.

A few years before I joined there had been an embarrassing but comical incident which resulted in Sir Alick producing a news report himself. The city’s two top football teams, Liverpool and Everton, were playing each other in an important match and the plan was to launch a coloured rocket from the office roof whenever a goal was scored: red for Liverpool and blue for Everton. Unfortunately, one of the rockets ended up in the air-conditioning system and the fire brigade had to be called. Sir Alick then assumed responsibility for reporting what had happened, dictating it to as journalist sitting at a typewriter, but his report was badly in need of editing and staff were left nervously wondering if they could make any changes without him noticing.

Not surprisingly, there were times when people connected with Sir Alick got preferential treatment in his newspapers: obscure business friends received long, glowing obituaries while weddings of their sons and daughters were celebrated with large photographs. It was not always clear whether these things were done at Sir Alick’s behest or on the initiative of subordinates aiming to please him. On one occasion he had met a senior staff member in the street on his way to the office and, apparently by way of making conversation, remarked that he had seen a beautiful sunrise near his home that morning. At dawn the next day a Post & Echo photographer waited vainly in the rain for a rising sun to show through the clouds.

Overall, though, Sir Alick’s influence was probably less important than the way his papers viewed their relationship with the city. The important thing, trainees were repeatedly told, was not to rock the boat. Journalists from the national press could come to Liverpool, stir things up by writing about sensitive issues and then disappear back to London with no particular consequences. Provincial newspapers, on the other hand, had to tread more softly and try to coexist with their local community.

Up to a point, it was a reasonable argument but it had also become an excuse for the papers to absolve themselves from the watchdog role that is part of the essence of journalism. The other problem was that this effort to coexist was not so much with the local community as a whole but with the city’s establishment. The result was a cosy and uncritical relationship with businesses, local politicians and the police.

Another part of that was a sort of Liverpudlian patriotism that required a suspension of critical faculties. In the face of economic decline, the Post and Echo adopted a boomtown mentality revelling in plans for new office blocks, shopping centres and motorways. Even the most improbable ideas could get an airing on the front page — like a scheme to hold the Olympic Games on a giant raft anchored in the Mersey. Every hint of a brighter tomorrow, no matter how slight, was dutifully recorded. Liverpool’s International Airport (“international” because of the service to Dublin and a few package holiday flights) was a regular favourite. The airport was struggling to attract business, mainly because of its proximity to the much larger airport in Manchester. But the arrival of any plane diverted to Liverpool from Manchester by bad weather was sure to make the news, usually with a headline like “BOOST FOR AIRPORT”.

The Echo in particular radiated jollity and cheerfulness from its vallium-impregnated paper. The Echo was obsessed with happy news and invited readers to send in stories about nice things that happened to them. These were used as space fillers with a drawing of the sun and a headline saying “BRIGHT SPOT”. One regular page aimed at women readers actually carried the slogan: “The page that lifts you out of yourself”. Feeling down in the dumps? Cheer yourself up with a new dress. Or how about this: a musical box disguised as a thatched cottage — just the thing to brighten a bare window sill. Day after day, women were told how enjoyable it is to go shopping and how much easier their housework would be if only they bought this or that gadget. The message was simple: forget your problems, spending money will make you happy. It certainly made the advertisers happy and at Christmas the Echo merrily reported hearing “the jingle of cash registers” in the shops.

At the centre of this was the diminutive but larger-than-life figure of George Cregeen, news editor of both papers who later went on to edit the Echo. Brusque, opinionated and domineering, he also had a column in the Daily Post writing what the editor hailed as “good old-fashioned reactionary stuff”. Cregeen soon became my least-favourite journalist and his dislike of me verged on paranoia. I was rather flattered, years after leaving the paper, to hear from former colleagues that he was still fuming about me.

I began to wonder who really wanted to read the Echo’s brand of candy-floss journalism and concluded that most people probably bought the paper for the racing results or place-the-ball contests. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines. One day all Post and Echo journalists received a letter, sent anonymously to their home address. Duplicated in red ink, it complained about the way the papers were run and urged staff to take some action. It became known in the office as “The Red Letter”.

I was eager to talk with the person who had sent the letter but there was no obvious way of contacting them. It had undoubtedly come from one of the Post & Echo journalists and, since nothing of the kind had happened before, it seemed the sender was probably someone who had joined the staff recently. Mulling over the possible suspects, I realised there was one person — a trainee called Rob Rohrer — who appeared to have a perfect alibi. The letters all carried a Liverpool postmark and Rob was clearly not in a position to have posted them: he had been doing a stint in the London office at the time, as part of his training. There was a simple explanation, though. As I found out later, his wife — staying behind in Liverpool — had posted the letters for him.

During the next few weeks I got to know Rob better. He and another trainee, Chris Oxley, were working in their spare time for the Mersey People, a small paper published locally by the Labour Party and distributed in the Labour clubs. Alongside predictable articles celebrating the work of Labour councillors and MPs it had hard-hitting reports on local employers, notably the Dock Board, on harassment of tenants by landlords and the arrests of several black people who claimed the police had planted drugs on them. Rob and Chris invited me to help and although I was not very enthusiastic about the Labour party connection I did so for a couple of issues.

In the meantime we were discussing how to stir things up at the Post & Echo, and we hit on the idea of a guerrilla publication that would act as a sort of watchdog, poke fun at the editors and management, and appear whenever we had enough material to fill it.

The first Pak-o-Lies, a single sheet of nasty yellow paper (yellow journalism, get it?), dealt mainly with the Post and Echo’s undeclared financial interest behind its campaign to save the Liverpool Inner Motorway project. One of the planners’ dreams of the early 1960s had been to construct a motorway on stilts, circling the city centre. By the end of 1970, however, the rationale for building it — based on over-optimistic assumptions about economic growth — had largely disappeared and, at an expected cost of £22 million a mile, it was about to be abandoned as too expensive.

It emerged that management, editors and selected writers at the Post & Echo had held a meeting to discuss the threatened road. The result was a full page article in the Daily Post with the alarming headline: “FAIL TO BUILD THIS ROAD AND THE CITY WILL DECAY”. A leader column pronounced: “The inner motorway and associated works must go ahead, even if it means pruning the money off other departments” — which presumably meant cuts to housing, education and welfare services.

The article cited every reason (except one) in favour of the motorway and not a single reason against. The unmentioned argument in its favour was that it would be a boon for the Post & Echo’s delivery vans. In anticipation of that, the company was preparing to build a new office and printing works at a site with easy access to the motorway. “The building is within the line of the proposed urban motorway, to which all principal traffic routes in the city centre will be linked,” the company had said when announcing the plans. It had also highlighted its need to move to a new building in a letter to the council: “The traffic factor alone may make removal urgent,” it said.

A second Pak-o-Lies told how the Echo had given the Post Office a free advertisement in an effort to get postal workers back quickly after a strike, and how a story exposing phoney money-off offers on Ajax cleaning powder had been suppressed. There were also snippets showing the absurdity of what passed for news. On one occasion, when Liverpool and Everton were playing against each other for a place in the FA Cup Final, the Echo printed a gigantic headline on its front page saying “RIROLELNEVOVOPET”. Readers were invited to turn to page 21 where the paper informed them that the strange word was an anagram combining “Liverpool” and “Everton” — “It’s the Merseyside mixture for March 27 with Wembley as the prize.”

The cost of producing Pak-o-Lies was minimal. A friend of ours, Derek Massey, had a small litho press at a workshop on the Dock Road and agreed to print it. Copies were given away free outside the Post and Echo building by friends who didn’t work there and had been briefed to act dumb if anyone asked questions. The effect was astonishing. For days it was the main topic of conversation in the office. Some of the printers worked with copies sticking out of their apron pockets and waved them cheekily at the Echo’s editor. Nothing much changed as a result, though the ridiculous “bright spot” feature was dropped after Pak-o-Lies poked fun at it.

The first issue of Pak-o-Lies.
Click the image to see more.

Meanwhile, Rob’s work for the Echo had brought him into contact with the Marine Ladies’ Club, a keep-fit class based at a church hall in Tuebrook, a working class part of the city. It was the sort of keep-fit class that can only be found in a place like Liverpool: the members’ exercises included frequent marches to the Town Hall to lobby their local councillors.

The women told Rob they wanted to start a local newspaper. They had plenty of ideas but little know-how, so Rob and I decided to help get it off the ground. Editorial meetings took place in the church hall on Tuesdays after the keep-fit sessions ended. There were about a dozen women at first and several men joined later. The vicar came along too and offered his services as editor. On being told that there was no need for an editor, he shook his head in disbelief and went away.

The resulting paper, the Tuebrook Bugle, attracted national publicity on television when it first appeared. In those days the idea that anyone could start up a newspaper without a great deal of money and machinery was still new to a lot of people. One man asked: “Don’t you have to get permission?” Rob and I knew that publishing was basically a very simple business and wanted to knock away the mystique. We organised lessons in writing and preparing copy for the printers, sizing up pictures and laying out pages, and brought in several other journalists to help with the teaching.

Judging by the Bugle’s sales, copies were going to almost every household in the district and there was plenty of advertising from the local shops. It was an excellent paper of its kind, full of reports and pictures of activities around Tuebrook and lots of outspoken comment. But it had limitations. It dealt mainly with life away from work — a paper for residents rather than workers. And its scope was restricted to a small part of the city.

In the wake of Pak-o-Lies, and while we were still helping with the Bugle, the idea for the Liverpool Free Press emerged. In a way it was a natural development. Pak-o-Lies had been entirely about the Post and Echo and was intended for employees there but we were surprised at the response from outside. For instance, the issue describing how the Post & Echo had tried to get the postal strikers back to work early was circulated in the sorting offices. Altogether, 2,000 copies of the second Pak-o-Lies were distributed — about ten times the size of its intended audience: the Post and Echo’s employees. This encouraged us to think there would be demand for a publication offering similar stories about the city more widely, rather than just its media.

Meanwhile, Rob and I were gradually withdrawing from the Tuebrook Bugle. Its front page always carried the slogan: “Written by the people for the people”, though in the beginning that was more a declaration of intent than a statement of fact. Rob and I did a lot of the work at first, but we believed it should eventually be produced entirely by residents of Tuebrook — and neither Rob nor I lived in the district. We saw our role as teaching people how to do it and our aim all along was to pull out once their team seemed capable of of running it themselves.

At the time, the Bugle committee seemed unhappy about us leaving, thinking we were abandoning them to start a rival paper. We told them there was no need for us to stay any longer and assured them the Free Press would be a different kind of paper, not a competitor.

Staff of the Tuebrook Bugle demonstrating against the Liverpool Echo