my story


Malcolm Race looks back on starting out as a local journalist in the 1940s


Stories of war, heroism and censorship


I


t was on an August day in 1942 that, as a rather nervous 16-year-old, fresh out of Middlesbrough High


School, I first entered the grey stone headquarters of the Gazette in the centre of the town. I was to begin a job as a junior reporter at a princely wage of 15 shillings (75 pence) a week. Little did I realise that I would still be there 47 years later. The paper had adapted to wartime conditions. All the heavy machinery, including 26 Linotype machines, each weighing almost a tonne, had been transferred to the basement in case of air raids, involving moving 100 tonnes of paper to make way.


The head office reporting staff consisted of the chief reporter, two seniors and two juniors, of whom I was to become one.


The size of the paper and number of pages had been reduced and even the title cut back from North Eastern Evening Gazette to Evening Gazette (it is now simply The Gazette). This meant stories had to be condensed. The intro was expected to include what, where and when, which sometimes led to lengthy first sentences of up to eighty words. Most copy was handwritten in pencil. You became popular with the subs if they could read your writing. Words such as kids and cops were taboo, considered slang. In addition to the daily round of courts, inquests, meetings and so on there were gallantry awards, casualties, prisoner of war repatriations and air raid reports.


The day I started, the Gazette was allowed by the censor to publish details of Middlesbrough’s most devastating air raid, which had occurred the previous month. There were stories of


tragedy and heroism, like that of the doctor who, in the middle of the raid, had climbed a drainpipe to the roof in his pyjamas to tackle incendiary bombs, using the girdle of his dressing gown to haul up buckets of water. Three weeks before I


arrived, at lunchtime on August bank holiday Monday, a lone German raider had dropped bombs on Middlesbrough railway station. Later, the chief photographer, Teddy


Baxter, told me how he had been in the canteen on the top floor of the Gazette building and had seen the bombs fall and rushed in his car to the scene. He took some very dramatic photographs which were later widely circulated – but was reprimanded by the transport manager because he had driven along a road covered in shattered glass from the explosions that had punctured his tyres, which were difficult to replace in wartime. It was some time before the censor


allowed details to be published. Readers became accustomed to seeing headlines announcing that ‘a north- east town’ had been bombed.


“


Courts were still ‘police courts’ and the chief constable himself would regularly prosecute cases in Middlesbrough, with officers of varying ranks doing duty at outlying courts. Court cases had a wartime


flavour. Defendants were prosecuted: for wasting electricity (one man had left an electric fire burning in a storeroom for four- and-a-half hours on a Sunday); for wasting


Six bananas and two lemons were auctioned over three nights at the Empire Theatre to support ‘the national war effort’


food (a woman was fined after mouldy bread and teacakes were found in her back yard); and for wasting petrol (a North Yorkshire farmer was fined for using petrol to go to the races and told he should have gone by bus). There were fines for breaching the blackout and failing to turn up for Home Guard or fire- watching duties, or for absenteeism from essential work. One of the oddest stories I can recall


was the auction of six bananas and two lemons over three nights at the town’s Empire Theatre, the proceeds going to ‘the national war effort’. After two years I was called up and


spent three and a half years in the army, including a year and a half working on an army magazine, Parade, in Cairo before returning to the Gazette in 1948 – but that is another story.


theJournalist | 21


Malcolm Race in Cairo in 1947


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