Nicknamed Bullet, journalist Stuart McCartney was at the heart of the biggest stories of our time

SEVENTY years ago next week, a boy of 15 got his first job in journalism, with the Evening Citizen in Glasgow. No-one could know it then, but this was the beginning of a remarkable career that would take him all over Britain and as far afield as Brazil, not to mention several World Cups: a crowded career in which he had more exclusives and front-page splash headlines than any journalist probably has a right to expect.

This, then, is the career of Stuart McCartney, forever known – to bosses, colleagues, cops, and rivals on other newspapers – as ‘Bullet’. He worked for the Citizen, then the Scottish Daily Mail, then the Scottish Daily Express, then the Daily Star. He witnessed the death sentence being passed on two men; he went to Rio and became friendly with Ronnie Biggs, the charismatic Great Train Robber who was on the run from Wandsworth prison via a time in Australia.

Stuart was fortunate to have his time as a reporter when circulations, editorial budgets and staffs were huge. At one time the Scottish Daily Express, where he rose to become Chief Reporter, had, across the country, no fewer than 133 reporters, feature writers, sportswriters, photographers and newsdesk personnel. They weren’t as huge, though as the rivalry with other newspapers. Stories abound of the lengths to which reporters would go to protect their exclusives; it was not unknown for a newspaper to hire a group of heavies in order to keep the opposition’s paws off whoever it was the paper wanted kept under wraps.

The Express years were Stuart McCartney’s glory years, as evidenced by a large box of newspaper cuttings he has in his possession. “Do you want to see what a million words look like?” is how he refers to it, at first. “This was given me when I left the Express, but to be honest I’ve never even glanced in it. Never been tempted”.

The files cover every story he ever wrote for the Express: all the human interest stories, all the court cases, all the industrial stories he did. There’s a hefty scrapbook containing his Daily Mail stories and

some of his earlier Express ones. There are copies of the Daily Star, too, together with envelopes containing letters and photographs. A million words, a million memories.

Stuart’s dad was Bob McCartney, a Detective Chief Inspector with the City of Glasgow Police, who oversaw the busy citycentre division. “I wasn’t good at school but had wanted to join the police cadets”, Stuart says. “I was too young to join them and my father said I would need to get a job”. He landed an interview by Willie Steen, news editor of the Citizen, and he started as a copyboy. “My wage was 24 and eightpence a week, less than £1.25”.

He did errands for executives and reporters, running up and down the stairs of the Albion Street building. “Go and get the chief sub”, someone would command. Or: “Go and get my tobacco”.

AS copyboys do, he graduated to writing stories. One, framed on Stuart’s wall today, and yellowing with age, showed his youthful flair: a report, written in the style of the poet William McGonagall, about a horse called Trigger that had bolted from its owner, still with the cart attached.

Stuart was 16 when, thanks to his father, he became the last journalist to see the

Stone of Destiny, which had been seized by an enterprising group of students in 1950 and which was now lying on a pallet on the floor at Turnbull Street police station, and was about to be returned to Westminster Abbey.

“Give it a pat, if you like”, said McCartney snr. It was too good an opportunity to resist. He couldn’t tell his newsdesk that he’d been allowed to touch the hallowed stone, though as an adult he would come to have excellent police contacts, partly from his dad’s status but mostly because he knew how to use his contacts and retain their trust.

Stuart learned the rudiments of journalism, including shorthand and typing, and became a reporter, covering every type of story for the Citizen. It was here, aged 18, that he got his nickname: speeding out of the office to report on a nearby fire, his boss, Jimmy Brough, commented, “Christ, that boy’s like a bullet”. The name stuck.

In time, after a spell in the army in Germany, he joined the reporting staff of the Scottish Daily Mail, in Glasgow, opting for a job there because the Citizen wouldn’t stump up the extra £1 a week he needed to cover his mortgage for a house in Garrowhill. Any rise would have disrupted the paper’s salary structure.

He heard there was a vacancy at the Mail and landed a job that came with a rise of £3 or £4. He covered all sorts of human interest stories; their headlines include ‘Boy climbs out of hospital in his pyjamas’ and ‘Boy who waited a day for his mother’. But bigger stories awaited.

One, from September 1960, concerned a widower of 52 who had eloped with a pretty, 18-year-old, window dresser. The couple were from St Ives, in Cornwall; together with a photographer, Stuart tracked them down to Easdale, near Oban. “We are looking forward to our lives together”, the man told him. “We don’t care if people’s tongues start wagging. Let them”. A photograph showed the man hiding his face behind a folded newspaper.

“My dad arrested some criminals who were later hanged”, Stuart says. “I don’t suppose there are too many people who can say they have seen the sentence of death passed on two men. I saw that, as a reporter. It’s an experience that stays with you, even after all these years; you remember the silence as the judge put on a black tricorn and read out the sentence, which ends, ‘which is pronounced for doom’. I’ll always remember that”.

Both of these capital murder verdicts took place within 14 days of each other, in November 1960. The first, at the High Court in Glasgow, was Anthony Miller, who was found guilty of the capital murder of a middle-aged man in Queen’s Park recreation ground (a younger accused was convicted of non-capital murder); the other, at the High Court in Dumfries, was Robert Dickson, a 24-year-old keeper at the lighthouse on Little Ross island, on the Solway Firth, who was sentenced to hang for the murder of a 64-year-old relief keeper. “The last secret”, ran the front-page headline. “Victim’s wife not told husband murdered”.

Miller was hanged on December 22, at Barlinnie, despite his father campaigning for a reprieve; Dickson, however, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

Another big story saw Stuart and a photographer head up to the Crinan canal, where an earl who had left his wife, the

cover the 1978 World Cup, in Argentina, and gave him a friendship with Ronnie Biggs, with whom he spent a week in Rio in April 1979.

“We got on really well”, Stuart says. “He was a clever, intelligent man, Ronnie. We got on like a house on fire”. He produces a typewritten memo, on Hotel Trocadero stationery, in which are summarised his conversations with Biggs. In them, Biggs described Bruce Reynolds as the mastermind behind the August 1963 train robbery. “My biggest tickle was £400 and I got nicked for that”, the memo quotes Biggs as saying. He “drank well, but was always careful”.

There are a couple of photographs of Biggs and Bullet together. On the back of one Biggs wrote: “For me old mate, Bullet. They say best men are moulded out of faults, and, for the most, become much more the better for being a little bad. I like it!”

STUART also produces a couple of neatly typed letters from Biggs in 1980, in which he relates some of his adventures. One letter, dated January 24, says: “I bet you’re all freezing your bloody bollocks off over there! Ha Ha. In Rio the sun’s shining fit to f----- bust! Why, only yesterday, I was swimming, knocking back beer on the beach and looking hungrily at a bevy of light-brown bodies …. God, Bullet, the girls are going topless over here now! You’d go mad if you could see it!”

One letter, in July, remarks: “We’re all in good health, screwing vigorously, and not feeling the pinch of the 100% plus inflation. I’ve been doing some nice hustling of late so my bank balance is looking quite healthy, for a change.”

Biggs finally returned to this country in 2001 and was released from prison on compassionate grounds in 2009. He died in December 2013, aged 84.

“I really liked Ronnie and he really liked me”, Stuart says. “I liked him so much in fact that when the time came for me to go home, I gave him all the money I had on me. He was touched and he even gave me a receipt. I flew all the way back to Britain with not a penny on me”. The receipt, written by Biggs in Stuart’s old notebook, reads: “To Bullet from Ron Biggs. Rio de Janeiro. April 1979”.

“I’ve had a great career and a great life”, Bullet says now. And he has indeed has those. On the wall is a framed copy of the Evening Citizen, the first day he joined – Monday, August 7, 1950. The splash headline is from the Korean War: “U.S. advance slowed down’. A column on the right-hand edge is blank apart from the signature of various editors he worked with. Next to it is a framed letter from Daily Star editor Brian Hitchen, on Stuart’s retiral in February 1993. “Working with you has always been a tremendous pleasure,” he writes. “You are a distinguished journalist and I know that whenever you are on the case nothing goes wrong.”

But if Bullet has one regret, it’s this: that he never followed his father into the police force. “I would like to have done that”, he says, wistful just for a moment.