Olden Life: Wh0 was Blackie the donkey?
Britain’s tabloid newspapers are a shadow of what they used to be, struggling to compete with online behemoths like Facebook and Twitter.
Back in the 1980s it was a different story. Rupert Murdoch had tamed the print unions, new technology had cut printing costs, and so ‘red top’ papers such as the Sun and the Star could afford to splash their cash on spectacular stunts. And the greatest stunt of all was their dramatic rescue of Blackie the donkey.
The Sunday Express broke the story, beneath the immortal headline ‘Poor El Condenado [Condemned One] Waits For His Fat Killer’. The story concerned a Shrove Tuesday festival, the Peropalo, in a Spanish village called Villanueva de la Vera, during which the fattest man in the village rode around on a donkey until the poor creature collapsed beneath him.
During the previous festival, reported the paper, the donkey had sadly died.
Nowadays, our cash-strapped tabloids would have to make do with a why-ohwhy piece about wicked Spaniards by a deskbound hack stuck in Blighty, but back in 1987 Fleet Street’s finest could afford to go one better. Both the Sun and the Daily Star sent two of their top reporters to Spain, to save that year’s El Condenado – a blameless beast called El Negro, aka Blackie.
The Sun’s Hugh Whittow got there first and bought El Negro from a Spanish farmer. ‘We Save Blackie,’ splashed their front page. ‘Savage peasants planned to crush the helpless animal to death – but we snatched Blackie to safety.’ Yet unfortunately for Whittow, and his fearsome editor, Kelvin Mackenzie, the Star’s Don Mackay paid off Blackie’s Spanish keeper and snaffled him from under their unsuspecting noses. ‘Gotcha!’ ran the Star’s headline.
With the help p of heroic RSPCA activist Vicki Moore, Blackie was shipped back to Plymouth, where he was greeted on the quayside by a huge press pack, all clamouring for a photo. Renamed Blackie Star, as a tribute to his saviours, he ended up in a donkey sanctuary in Sidmouth, run by Elisabeth Svendsen (pictured), the animal-rights campaigner who’d brought the story to public attention. It was worthy of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.
A few years later, as a young reporter I worked on a story with Don Mackay and was suitably impressed to discover he was the hard-bitten hack who’d pulled off this priceless coup. However, Mackay was reluctant to discuss it – and it was easy to see why. His campaigning journalism had helped to save a British citizen, Mirza Tahir Hussain, from death row in Pakistan. He was loath to be remembered for a silly story about a Spanish donkey.
Mackay’s fears were justified. When he died, in 2017, it was Blackie, not Hussain, who dominated the obituaries. Yet that was really no bad thing. The Blackie-thedonkey saga was tabloid journalism at its very best: absurd, cheeky and irreverent – and all in a good cause. Even Whittow didn’t come out of it too badly – he ended up as editor of the Daily Express.
Thanks to the rumbustious red tops, Blackie spent a peaceful retirement in Sidmouth, dying in 1993 of natural causes. Elisabeth Svendsen received the MBE for her valiant efforts. She died in 2011. Her donkey sanctuary is still going strong.