Hot lead and dog’s cocks
If you’re a journalist of a certain vintage you will enjoy this gossipy memoir of a veteran newspaperman. It’s like pulling up a stool in The Liz — the famous old journo watering hole in Johannesburg — lighting up a cigarette and settling in for an evening of reminiscing. Subtitled Tales from my Newspaper Life it recounts the 50-odd years McNeill spent in the journalism trenches in South Africa, New York and in Fleet St in London. The title comes from the clamour of the newsroom: “When a furious night editor, waving an offending piece of copy, cried ‘What fucking genius wrote this?’ we laughed. And we laughed even louder when the guilty party shot back ‘This fucking genius!’ ”
McNeill’s ambition to become a journalist took root early, specifically in 1949 when South Africa was in thrall to the trial of two rich boys for the murder of so-called “good time girl” Bubbles Schroeder. Every afternoon the nine-year-old McNeill would spread out the pages of The Star and read every detail. From then on he consumed every newspaper he could. When he became a court reporter himself 10 years later, he found he had absorbed the technique from the coverage of the Schroeder trial.
Old-school technique stood him in good stead for half a century, culminating in his pioneering work back in South Africa, on the wildly successful Daily Sun alongside the colossus Deon du Plessis. One of their trademarks was to put an exclamation mark at the end of nearly every headline; “A dog’s cock is what we called it in Fleet Street. No imagination needed to realise why.”
I’d like to have read more of the binrooting and phone-hacking practices of tabloid journalists, but there are plenty of entertaining anecdotes here: renting a room in Greenwich Village from a former boxer and finding Jack Dempsey and James Cagney in the living room one night; lunches at the Daily Express with celebrities like John Cleese (“A bit intense”) and Jeffrey Archer; visiting Jimmy Savile in his depressing flat years before his outing as a paedophile and once persuading a young Cyril Ramaphosa to sing a snatch of Louis Armstrong’s A Kiss to Build a Dream On during an interview — “a light, velvety tenor”.
Reporter, foreign correspondent, subeditor, feature writer, magazine publisher, editorial consultant and celebrity profiler, MacNeill describes his life’s work thus: “The narrative of my career could easily have been: Give me the news and I will make people want to read it.” ● L S. Michele Magwood
@michelemagwood