A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys

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A Day Like Today: Memoirs - John  Humphrys


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must always be challenged.

       Building a cathedral

      I was still in my early twenties when I was offered a job by the BBC. I remember feeling terribly pleased with myself. I was going to be based in Liverpool, the most exciting beat in Britain for a reporter in those days, with the Beatles and the Cavern club at one end of the news scale and dock strikes at the other. I was to work out of Castle Chambers, an office building in the heart of the city where the north-west Representative of the BBC was based. The Representative (I can never think of him without the capital letter) was a dapper little fellow called Reg. But only to his closest friends. To young pond life like me he was Major H. R. V. Jordan (Retd), JP, BA (Hons) and he was a very grand figure indeed.

      Reg had an extremely large office with a well-stocked cocktail cabinet and two elegant young secretaries. Not one, you will note, but two. Their duties, it is accurate to say, were less than onerous. Reg graced the office a couple of times a week to sign a few letters, and occasionally drove up the coast to Blackpool for lunch with ‘my friend, the mayor of Blackpool’ in his large plum-coloured Jaguar and white cotton driving gloves before returning to his home in The Wirral.

      They were still building the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool when I arrived, the largest religious building in Britain, and the longest cathedral in the world. One of my first assignments was to make a film about its construction. It was a massive project, started some years before I was born. I interviewed one of the stonemasons who had been working on it all his life. Young as I was, and trying to make my way in the exciting world of journalism, I pitied the poor chap. Rooted to one place, always following the same boring routine. There I was, dashing everywhere, never knowing what I might be doing from one day to the next, master of my own timetable and destiny (news editor permitting). And here was this man, turning up at the same time, day after day, week after week, chipping out more stone blocks to lay on the other stone blocks he’d chipped out the day before and so on ad infinitum.

      ‘Don’t you get bored?’ I asked him.

      ‘Why should I?’

      ‘Well, all you’re doing is laying one stone on another year after year.’

      ‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m building a cathedral. What will you leave behind when you die?’

      It was a fair point. Broadcasting disappears into the ether, leaving little trace behind. Those who ply the trade leave no lasting monument. My stonemason was still building his cathedral when I left. By the time it was finished, in 1978, I had become a foreign correspondent.

      Those were the dark ages for television news. There was no such thing as twenty-four-hour news, no satellite feeds or electronic cameras, and no smartphones. If an earthquake or revolution struck somewhere a long way away television news editors did not, as they do today, have their pick of endless footage filmed by eyewitnesses within seconds of it happening. The first thing they reached for was an airline guide. How quickly could we get a reporter and film crew there and, once there, how quickly could we get their film back to London so that it could be processed, edited and on the next news programme? It might be a day. It might be a week – or more. My first big foreign assignment – and, as it turned out, one of my most dangerous – was in the country now called Bangladesh. In those days it was East Pakistan. It took six months to get my most dramatic footage back to London.

      The partition of India in 1947 remains perhaps the darkest stain on the history of the British Empire. For centuries Muslims and Hindus had lived together on the Indian subcontinent relatively peacefully. The creation of Pakistan for the Muslim minority led to a refugee crisis of biblical proportions. Fourteen million people left their homes either to flee violence between Hindus and Muslims or to seek a new home in a new country. At least a million – some estimates are double that figure – died in the violence that broke out. It was, by any historical measure, a shameful betrayal of a great nation and its hopes.

      Pakistan was created out of two regions: one in the west and one in the east. East Pakistan was carved out of Bengal, which was part of India. The Bengali people living there refused to accept their status as Pakistanis. They demanded independence. Instead, they were savagely attacked by the West Pakistan military. Vast numbers died. When I arrived there in December 1971 the country was at war with itself.

      I shot off to the airport with my camera crew to film the destruction, naively believing that the attacks had ended at dawn. They had not. We were filming the wreckage of what remained of the East Pakistan air force and the runway when the bombers with their fighter escorts returned. They had come back to finish the job and – or so it seemed to me in the terrifying hour that followed – to finish us off too. Thank God, there happened to be a fairly deep bomb crater quite close. We made a run for it.

      It struck me then that all those scenes in the movies when fighters fire rockets and machine guns at targets on the ground were about as realistic as kiddies playing at cops and robbers. It’s the noise that instils the fear. Not so much the gunfire and exploding rockets, oddly enough, but the noise of jet engines screaming above your head so close it feels you could reach up and touch them. I have never heard anything like it and nor do I ever want to hear anything like it ever again. I was terrified.

      But we made it to the crater, jumped in and my cameraman started yelling at me: ‘Piece to camera! Do a fucking piece to camera!’

      Was he mad? We were about to die. Why would I want to do a piece to camera, and anyway what was there to say? But he wasn’t mad – just much more experienced and battle-hardened than me. So I did. To this day I have no idea what I said – or, rather, screamed.

      I learned a few things about myself and my trade as a result of that little episode. The first is that it is never wise to assume the bombers will not return to finish the job. The second is that it’s not a bad idea if you’re entering a battlefield to wear something a bit more protective than sun cream. And the third is that reporters have a different set of priorities from real people.

      Pathetic? Yes, with the benefit of half a century in this trade I suppose it is. But it’s not enough to know you have good pictures. What matters is that they must be better than anyone else’s. And that explains what happened next.

      I was back in my hotel room wondering how the hell we were going to get our film to London


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