The Kirkby corruption scandal was the biggest story the Free Press had uncovered at that point — and we devoted five of the paper's ten pages to reporting it. As far as we were concerned, holding the powerful to account was an essential part of journalism but others were not so sure. Several of the people we spoke to in the course of the investigation had advised against publishing, including some who urged us to simply hand our information to the police. It seemed extraordinary that they were questioning the public's right to know but we suspected the same idea — that it was a matter for the police and nobody else — would surface again once the story was published, so we included a note of explanation ...

“The police were in Kirkby a couple of years ago when £6,000 disappeared from the Labour Club. Nothing happened. A few weeks ago they were called in to investigate the outrageous use of hired vehicles by Knowsley Architect’s Department. But they were not concerned with why the architect had spent £56,000 hiring vans. Instead, they wanted to find the man who was spotted moving his furniture in them …

“The Free Press is not interested in doing police work. Locking up bent politicians will change very little. Whether or not our rulers are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ makes very little difference to most of us. They are still there …

“But the real justification for our story is this: it’s true, it happened, it affects the people of Kirkby, and they have a right to know about it. Kirkby people will be paying for Tower Hill, the ski slope and all the rest for years. And our story puts the record straight. Kirkby has a ‘bad name’. In lots of ways it’s a bloody awful place. But that’s not the fault of the people who live there. The people to blame are people like those in our story. The people who built it.”

We were also aware of murmurings from readers who thought the Free Press focused too much on exposés. The criticism came mostly in conversation, but we later published a letter which shows the usual lines of argument. Its sender was Rick Walker, a supporter of the paper who helped with distribution and sometimes wrote articles:

“I don’t think it would be unfair to say that there has always been a section of the Free Press’s faithful readership which has been concerned that the paper displays some of the tendencies of the gutter press. For example, the last few issues have had a number of sensational headlines, and the paper has always tended to treat occasional serious issues frivolously.

“Many of the stories in the paper rely on corruption, on scandals. In other words they rely on the breaking of rules. Now of course I recognise the value in this, that people who read about Dirty Tricks may come to the general conclusion about things like the distribution of power in society. But in the end it must be made clear that the rules themselves (even if strictly adhered to) are grossly unfair. And sometimes the Freep’s coverage of almost incomprehensible fiddles seems self-indulgent.

“Obviously examples of dark dealings will always go down well with Free Press readers because we can all agree broadly about what is wrong in existing society. The disagreements start when we talk about how we can change it and which direction(s) we want to go in …”

The letter went on to propose “articles on experiments in self help and mutual aid, in short: building the community”. Most critics were less specific though they mostly talked about giving more coverage to “struggles”.

Rick's accusation of self-indulgence stung but we had to admit there was some truth in it. Investigative reporting gave us a lot of job satisfaction and journalistically it was very gratifying to have nurtured the Kirkby story through to publication. The downside, though, was that it led to a four-month gap between issues of the paper while we worked on the story — and irregular publication meant we were less able to engage with grassroots activity. One simple illustration of that was the page listing forthcoming events. Events that would have been worth listing often came and went before we could publicise them. A similar thing was happening with stories written early in the production cycle. After hoding on to them for weeks we then wasted time having to go back and check for new developments as the publication date approached.

Readers, we decided, would be better served by publishing the Free Press once a month, on the dot, and investigations would no longer be allowed to hold up an issue to the detriment of everything else.

Monthly publication had actually been our intention from the beginning but, as we had quickly discovered, achieving it took more than willpower. The biggest obstacle was that two weeks of each production cycle were spent collating and distributing the paper rather than starting work on the next issue. If we could off-load that part of the operation we would have more time to focus on the paper's content.

The local printer we were using had a sheet-fed press — which meant that the paper came back to us as stacks of flat sheets which we had to fold and collate by hand. The obvious solution was to switch to a printer with reel-fed press that could fold and collate as it printed. On Merseyside, most presses of that kind were owned by the Post & Echo or its offshoots. The printers of the Catholic Pictorial, which was based in Liverpool and not part of the Post & Echo empire, were willing to do it demanded a letter of indemnity promising to compensate for any legal action that might result.

While mulling that over, we got a cheaper quote from a printer in the south of England who already handled several “risky” publications and didn't ask for an indemnity. We thought it best to have negatives of the pages made in Liverpool and send them to him, rather than the original artwork, in case they got lost in transit. The Catholic Pictorial's printers helpfully agreed to make the negatives (this time without asking for an indemnity) but stopped after a couple of issues because of a story about abortion which upset them.

Alongside the folding and collating we were also doing the distribution to shops and various individuals who sold copies at work. There were several volunteers who helped but even so it was very time-consuming. We were only supplying newsagents that had agreed to take it and outside the city centre they were thinly spread. We could easily end up driving miles to a shop that was selling no more than half a dozen copies.

The alternative to that was to put the Free Press in the hands of a commercial distributor. There would clearly be benefits but we had resisted the idea until then because it added a layer of vulnerability. We were mindful that the London magazine, Time Out, had found themselves with thousands of unsold copies on their hands when W H Smith refused to distribute a particular issue.

W H Smith had a near-monopoly on distribution and for years had refused to handle Private Eye, so we assumed they wouldn't be interested in distributing the Free Press. However, we discovered that Liverpool had five small wholesalers who distributed Sunday newspapers in the suburbs, each covering a different area. The owner of one of these firms turned out to be a Free Press reader and agreed to include it in his Sunday deliveries. Three of the others agreed too, though one who had taken 500 copies later returned them saying none had been sold.

This was never going to be a complete solution because the Sunday distributors only worked in the suburbs. We would still have to to the city centre deliveries ourselves, but that was relatively easy. However, using distributors in the areas that were more difficult to serve would give us a lot of new outlets and, hopefully, a substantial rise in circulation. On that basis we increased our print order from 4,000 copies to 10,000.

A change of direction

Alongside these changes in production and distribution we introduced several new features to broaden the paper's coverage. We expanded the listings section to include contributed columns on rock groups, folk clubs, beer and pubs, etc, with an emphasis on grassroots culture. It included a series of profiles of local buskers.

We also sought to address two specific requests from readers. One was a call for more "positive" news — what ordinary people were doing to sort out their problems. In response to that, we started a regular feature with short news items under the heading “Local Action”. The first one reported a free riding school being set up for children on a council estate, a petition against heavy lorries, and two tenants suing their landlord.

The centre pages of the Free Press were the usual place for longer articles needing detailed research. Up to that point we had written almost all of them ourselves but we decided to open up the slot to contributors from outside who had knowledge of particular topics. This was partly to reduce our own workload but also, again, to broaden the coverage. We kicked it off with a three-part series by Andy Wiggans who had been researching the political history of soccer. His articles described how what had once been banned as a “worthless” and “subversive” mob sport was institutionalised and given rules by the public schools; how it later became accepted by governments “as a means of recruiting troops, boosting morale at home and national prestige abroad,” and how it became commercialised. The motif for the series was a picture of the England team giving Nazi salutes at the start of an international with Germany in the 1930s.

Readers were also urging us to introduce “debate” into the paper but we wanted to avoid the usual left-versus-right arguments and did not want to get bogged down in theoretical discussions about Marxism, Leninism and the like. We thought it would be more useful to provocative raise questions about traditional left-wing ideas, but from a leftist standpoint. The idea was to raise a new topic every other month, with replies published in the intervening months.

The title we chose for the series was “Offensive” — and it offended more people than we had bargained for. This was about the “Lump” — a system in the building industry where workers were technically self-employed sub-contractors. It had been much criticised as being anti-trade union as well as leading to both shoddy construction and dangerous working conditions. The article's author was a former buidling worker who examined arguments used in the left’s campaign against the Lump campaign and suggested it had not servved the best interests of building workers.

Although we made clear the purpose of the "Offensive" series was to encourage debate and not to promote any particular point of view the reaction was disappointing. The Lump article brought only two letters from readers — one agreeing, one disagreeing — and several building workers who normally sold the paper at work decided not to sell it. Others told us they would rather ignore the article than reply. Altogether, we lost about 400 sales as a result of the article (though we did regain them a couple of months later, after a lot of effort to repair our relationship).

'Some people won't like it'

To publicise the paper’s re-appearance as a monthly we produced posters showing a photo of the Queen looking miserable, with the slogan: “Liverpool Free Press goes monthly in November — some people won’t like it”. The council certainly didn't like it and threatened to prosecute us if we failed to remove the posters that were decorating lamp-posts and bus stops. By the time their letter arrived, though, council workers had already removed most of them.

The offending poster

A complaint from one of Liverpool's MPs, Eric Ogden, provided welcome additional publicity. Prominent members of his constituency Labour Party were trying to unseat him and Ogden sought to present himself as a political “moderate” threatened by a bunch of extremists (one of whom was a former Lord Mayor and another a magistrate). Prompted by that, we took a close look at his parliamentary record in an article headed “Eric Ogden MP: who does he serve?” It was based almost entirely on his speeches in parliament as recorded by Hansard but Ogden was furious. “I seek not the protection of this House,” he told the Commons, “but its judgment as to the truth or falsehood of this article.” He claimed the article was a breach of parliamentary privilege and the Speaker duly referred it to the House of Commons' Privileges Committee. We first heard about it on the radio.

The article about Ogden (click to enlarge)

We were baffled as to why Ogden thought our article was in breach of parliamentary privilege, since all we had done was criticise his lacklustre performance. Nevertheless, a few days after Ogden made his complaint we received a letter from Mr C Boulton, the clerk of the Privileges Committee. He thoughtfully enclosed a booklet giving hints on preparing our defence. Truth, it said, was no defence. And it was doubtful if “fair comment” was a defence either; it had never been a successful defence in the past, though there could always be a first time. “However,” it added cheerfully, “there has never been any doubt that ‘fair comment’ can be raised by way of mitigation of the offence.”

Offenders, we discovered, could be summoned to grovel in parliament and be told off by the Speaker. Those who preferred to grovel by letter might be allowed to do so but anyone who refused to apologise was liable to be marched off to the Clock Tower by the Serjeant-at-Arms, and detained there until parliament was dissolved for a general election. We told our readers: “In these circumstances, we have decided to let the committee get on with the ‘trial’ by themselves. We do not propose to waste our time providing evidence in our defence, since this would almost certainly be ‘irrelevant’. Nor have we yet been given any good reason why we should apologise for the article.”

The Privileges Committee met surprisingly quickly and — no less surprising — refused to even consider Ogden’s complaint. In effect, he had been asking them to decide whether the article was defamatory or not, and they advised that in future MPs who thought they had been libelled should sue through the courts instead of bothering the committee. Of course, Ogden didn’t sue but there were repercussions at a Labour club in his constituency: a member there who had regularly sold about 70 copies of the Free Press suddenly stopped selling them.

We had occasionally received letters from solicitors threatening legal action over stories that allegedly defamed someone. They mostly followed a standard formula, demanding an immediate retraction and apology, while reserving the right to sue if we failed to comply. We saw this mainly as a scare tactic and judged that the complainers were unlikely ever to pursue the case in court: libel actions were notoriously expensive and even if the complainer was awarded damages and legal costs we were not in a position to pay anything.

Our usual reaction was to treat letters from solicitors in the same way as letters from ordinary readers — and publish them. We wanted litigiously-minded people to see there was nothing to be gained by paying lawyers to complain on their behalf. A secondary effect of this was that if often made the solicitors themselves look bad. The local firms dealt mainly with crimes, divorces and property transactions and their lack of expertise in defamation law was sometimes obvious from their letters. One letter even used the word “liable” when it meant to say “libel”.

E Rex, the courtroom tyrannosaurus

It was a different matter, though, when we crossed swords with E Rex Makin. He was the city’s best-known solicitor and the owner of a Rolls-Royce with his intitials on its number plates: “1 ERM”. His clients over the years included Beatles manager Brian Epstein, comedian Ken Dodd, Liverpool football manager Bill Shankly and, later, families of the Hillsborough victims. To describe his performances in court as lively would be an understatement and he had a knack of coming up with quotable phrases which got his name into media reports and no doubt helped to attract new clients.

Our run-in with Makin arose from a series of articles called “The oil sheikhs of Liverpool”, about a period in the 1960s when fortunes could be made by getting the council's permission to open petrol stations at profitable locations. Several councillors had been suspected at the time of using their influence to help would-be owners to get permission and one of them, a Labour councillor accused a taking a bribe in that connection, had been defended — successfully — by Makin.

We noted in passing that a trust fund for Makin’s children held shares in another petrol station, run by a different Labour councillor. The mention was incidental and there was no suggestion Makin or his trust fund had been involved in malpractice. (The offending article is here.)

Makin was furious and sent a long, blustering letter threatening to sue. It was marked: “Not for publication” and we published it, with a detailed reply, in our next issue.

We were not unduly worried at first because we didn’t believe the article was defamatory (and a barrister later confirmed our view). Makin seemed to recognise that himself, since he never got around to issuing a writ, but we hadn't anticipated his efforts to undermine the paper in other ways. We discovered he had sent threatening letters to all our distributors, had personally visited several newsagents making similar threats, and had even gone to the trouble of writing to a GP who happened to have copies of the Free Press in his waiting room.

The immediate effect was that two of our three distributors decided to stop handling the paper — and we could hardly blame them. They were getting only a few pounds extra every month from delivering the Free Press and it wasn't worth the risk. Several newsagents who we supplied ourselves also stopped, though two of them said they would start again when there were no references to Makin in the paper.

We tried to laugh it off by producing badges and T-shirts saying: “Rex Makin is innocent, OK”, but the damage was serious. By that stage we had managed to keep to our monthly publication schedules for seven months but his threats to distributors put an end to that because we would once again be spending valuable production time doing all the deliveries ourselves.

Police inquiries and contempt of court

A few months later we were threatened with prosecution for contempt of court. The story concerned a detective in the Serious Crimes Squad whose activities had become the subject of a police inquiry. The detective had helped arrest a well-known criminal on 16 charges of burglary, theft and handling stolen goods. In court, the man on trial sought to discredit the detective by claiming that a safe containing stolen property could be found at the officer’s home. It was a bizarre claim but it turned out to be true and after a four-week trial the man was acquitted on all charges.

The safe, which had been cemented into the inside wall of the officer's garage and hidden behind a freezer, had allegedly been discovered accidentally by his wife. It contained stolen jewellery and pass keys and a pistol which the police described as a replica. At the trial, the prosecution claimed the safe had been "planted" to incriminate the detective — which seemed highly implausible. Someone would have had to sneak into the garage, knock out several bricks, install the safe, clean up the mess and get away without anyone noticing.

The legal question that arose was whether our reporting of this had prejudiced another trial taking place at the time in which the same detective was a prosecution witness. The fuss about possible contempt of court began when someone — presumably connected with a defendant in this later trial — left copies of the Free Press and its the story about the detective lying around the court building. The judge was furious and reported the incident to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The task of investigating our possible contempt fell to the police Commercial Branch — perhaps not an obvious choice but they already had some knowledge of the Free Press, having earlier been assigned to investigate the corruption we had exposed in Kirkby. Four of them turned up in plain clothes one day asking to speak to Steve about the contempt affair. Steve told them he had nothing to say and without more ado they went away.

They then turned their attention to advertisers, newsagents and anyone they could find who had dealings with us — apparently looking for signatures on receipts, cheques, and so on. This added to the alarm caused by Makin’s libel threats, though the actual damage this time was relatively slight: those most likely to be worried by police visiting them about the Free Press had already been scared off by Makin. It did cause extra cash problems for a time when the final cheque from one of our ex-distributors bounced. He said the police had advised him to stop the cheque, though he did pay us later.

The detective with the “planted” safe was suspended from duty shortly after the Free Press story appeared (though he was reinstated some months later). Shortly after that, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided to take no action against the Free Press.

End of the road

Meanwhile financial problems were building up. Our decision to go monthly had been an all-or-bust move in the hope that regular publication and use of commercial distributors would bring a rise in sales. Printing extra copies had raised our costs but sales through the distributors were disappointing, even before two of them were scared off by Makin and the police. An appeal to readers raised several hundred pounds but the financial situation was becoming unsustainable.

Working unpaid for the Free Press was also taking its toll on the core team. Chris, particularly, was worried about debts and left, first to concentrate on freelancing and later to work as a TV producer in London for Panorama, This Week and Dispatches. Rob, with a family to support, had left earlier and begun working for Granada Television. Steve, who had been living for some time on social security benefits, had to give up working for the Free Press when the Department of Employment unexpectedly found him a fulltime job writing news bulletins for the Merseyside Council for Voluntary Service. He found it extremely boring and, like Chris, went off to work in television in London. Derek stayed in Liverpool working as a photojournalist. I spent a couple of years sub-editing at the Mirror in Manchester before moving to London to work for the Sunday Times and, later, the Guardian.

Despite help from several new people the gap between issues was widening again and stories were getting out of date faster than we could publish them. There was no formal decision to close the paper down. It simply fizzled out, with the last issue appearing two months later than scheduled in April 1977.

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