A Day Like Today. John Humphrys
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not set out when I interview someone to have an argument – even if it’s with a politician. But I cannot deny that I enjoy arguing. Nor would I deny that I approach people in power – all of them – with a pretty strong dose of scepticism. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is for others to judge, but either way it’s not my fault. And I have that on pretty good authority. Aristotle is quoted as having said: ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.’ If he was right it must surely mean that our parents are bound to have a profound influence on us – one way or another.
A few years ago one of our leading universities offered me the chance to become ‘Professor’ Humphrys: a very tempting prospect for a grammar-school boy whose single academic achievement had been a handful of O levels. I even managed to fail woodwork. My father never quite forgave me for that. I accepted the university’s offer immediately but imposed one condition: I would close down the department in my first week. The offer was withdrawn. The department was (what else?) media studies.
Maybe my response had been a bit childish and maybe I’m wrong about the value of a media studies degree. I’m sure that many bright young people have left university with them and gone on to great things. I’m equally sure that they would have succeeded without a media studies degree. I simply do not believe that you can learn to be a journalist. I’m with that late, great reporter Nicholas Tomalin who said the only qualities essential for success as a journalist are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability. Tomalin wrote in a pre-digital age and he would have been forced to add to that list today the ability to understand and navigate the world of social media. I would add insatiable curiosity, and something else: a good journalist needs, in my book, to be contumacious.
Not a word, I concede, that one hears every day but it’s been around a long time and apparently we have St Benedict to thank for it. He applied it to people who ‘stubbornly or wilfully resist authority’. The punishment for it 1,500 years ago was excommunication – which is fair enough I suppose if you are in the business of founding the greatest monastery in history. You can’t have monks calling into question the supreme authority of the Catholic Church, can you? Equally, in my rather more humble view, you can’t have journalists who do the opposite: who accept supreme authority without questioning it. Or any other kind of authority for that matter. And that is not something you can learn. You are either contumacious or you are not. I am, and I have my father, George, to thank. Or to blame.
He was born into a working-class family in Cardiff in what we would now call a slum but was pretty standard housing for people like them in the early years of the last century: a tiny back-to-back terraced house with an outdoor lavatory and a tin bath in front of the fire. He was, by all accounts, a bright and rather wilful child who loved reading and running. But his disobedience was to cost him his eyesight.
Like most youngsters in those pre-vaccine days he caught measles – a particularly bad dose – and my grandmother was told that on no account was she to let him out of the house. He was to be kept in a bedroom with the curtains drawn. The next day she had to go shopping, leaving him in the house alone with strict orders to stay put. Obviously he didn’t. It was a glorious winter’s day – bright sunshine after some heavy snowfalls – and there were snowballs to be thrown and snowmen to be built. The temptation was too great for him. The sun reflected off the snow and that, coupled with the poor nutrition common in working-class families at that time, did massive damage to his optic nerve. For the next couple of years he was blind. His education effectively ended when he was twelve.
Gradually his sight began to recover enough for him to get an apprenticeship and he became a French polisher. He got a job with the firm where he’d served his apprenticeship and, confident of a steady income, promptly proposed to my mother. She accepted. The job lasted barely a week. My father took great exception to something the foreman had said to him, punched him on the nose and he was out on his ear. The dole was not an option – he was far too proud to take what he called ‘charity’ anyway – so he set about building up his own business.
There were always people in the richer parts of Cardiff who wanted a table or a piano polished and, one way and another, he made enough money to keep hearth and home together – with my mother doing the neighbours’ hair in the kitchen and me doing a paper round before school and my older brother making deliveries for the local grocer. We also tramped the streets of the posher suburbs sticking little circulars through letter boxes advertising Dad’s services. I’ve never been sure if it was worth the effort but at least it gave me an idea of how the other half lived.
Obviously we didn’t get paid for it but there was some compensation. I carried two bags – one for the leaflets and the other for any apples hanging temptingly near the garden walls. It’s always puzzled me that my friends and I would not have dreamed of stealing apples from a shop but I think we must have seen scrumping as a victimless crime. And anyway there were always far more apples than the posh people could possibly eat. Or so we reasoned. I also made a modest income from our own neighbours: selling them little bundles of mint door to door which I picked from the backyard where it grew in the ashes thrown out from the coal fires. Twopence for a small bunch: an extra penny for a bigger one. I always sold out. That was where my entrepreneurial career began and ended.
We were told endlessly what was wrong and what was right, and not just by our parents. For those of us who went to Sunday school, the vicar reinforced the message. There was a clear line of authority running through our tight little community, with the vicar and perhaps also the GP at the top. Perhaps it was a small-scale reflection of the wider world, in an age when we deferred to figures in authority, when elites told us what our responsibilities were.
My father had an abiding dislike and distrust of the clergy mostly, I think, because they thought they were a cut above ordinary people like him. That can probably be traced to an experience he had as a young man when he was staying with his aunt at her little cottage in a Somerset village, not long after the First World War. They were about to sit down for lunch when the door burst open and the vicar strode in. Without so much as a by-your-leave or a ‘Good morning’ he demanded to know why my great-aunt had not been at the morning service. She did a little bob and stammered an apology. She tried to explain that she seldom had visitors and that she’d been preparing lunch for her nephew whom she hadn’t seen for a year and who had come from a long way away. She said she would be sure to turn up for evensong. He was having none of it. He did not even glance at my father but barked at his auntie: ‘See that you do and don’t let it happen again!’ Then he turned on his heel and left.
Instinctive deference – unearned deference – is dying if not dead. Its defenders say it has taken respect with it but I doubt that. Over the years I have received countless letters (invariably letters) blaming me and my ilk but I suspect we were reacting to, rather than creating, a change in attitudes to authority. Richard Hoggart, who was one of Britain’s most respected cultural critics, thought that attitudes to authority, whether religious or lay, really began to change at the end of the last war – when the soldiers came home and the women, who’d been forced to work in the factories, decided they didn’t want to go back to the old ways.
I behaved according to the rules of my community when I was growing up, but I think (perhaps thanks to my father) it instilled in me not just deference to authority but a questioning attitude to it too. I don’t like being defined or told what to do, whoever is in charge. I even have a thing about wearing identity tags at work. Once, during the Gulf War, when BBC security was at its tightest, I was rushing to the studio with a few minutes to spare and a man in a peaked cap stopped me at the door.
‘You can’t go in there,’ he told me sternly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re not wearing your ID.’
‘But you know who I am and I’m on air in two minutes.’
‘Sorry. No ID, no admission.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘you do the bloody programme.’
Mercifully, he gave in. Yes, I know I was being petulant and he was just doing his job but I thought at the time I was striking