He was the nation's top TV inquisitor for
40 years, yet never told his own story. Now Michael Parkinson has written his autobiography and for the first time shone a spotlight on his life. Roger Ratcliffe reports on Parky's earliest days as a Yorkshire journalist.
40 years, yet never told his own story. Now Michael Parkinson has written his autobiography and for the first time shone a spotlight on his life. Roger Ratcliffe reports on Parky's earliest days as a Yorkshire journalist.
It is a little-known fact about Michael Parkinson that although he has made a career out of interviewing every living legend – the Fred Astaires, Bette Davises and Jimmy Stewarts of Hollywood and the Paul McCartneys, Michael Caines and Judi Denches of Britain – he actually learned his craft by writing about dead people.
These were not A-list celebrities. For a start, the term had yet to be coined in the 1950s, when he was a cub reporter whose patch centred on the pit villages on the north-east side of Barnsley.
No, the deceased were usually from ordinary mining families, names he had to collect almost every day by interrupting a grave-digger he would find hard at work in a local cemetery.
Parky has been lauded for his relaxed interviewing style on TV, so it's hard to resist saying that he learned this by perfecting a good graveside manner.
Certainly, it was his job to obtain a lot of stories for the South Yorkshire Times, which he joined in 1951 at the age of 16, by those visits to the council cemetery at Royston.
There he would find a small, soft-spoken gravedigger called Bob Ellerker, who was slightly bent through working in such confined spaces. Ellerker was always the first to hear of any local deaths and had the names and addresses ready on a piece of paper tucked into his overalls.
Often accompanying Parkinson on these visits was another teenage reporter named Don Booker, who worked for rival weekly newspaper, the Barnsley Chronicle. "Anybody died overnight, Bob?" they would shout into the grave, and Ellerker stopped digging. Sometimes he shouted the details back, or if he knew a bit more about the dead person, he climbed up his small ladder to talk to the boys. Later, they would visit the homes of families to gather more information for the obituaries. In those days, there were few chapels of rest, so they usually found the deceased laid out behind a clothes-horse, and the bereaved invited them to view the corpse before they left.
Parkinson was the son of a pit deputy and was brought up in the village of Cudworth, four miles from the bright lights of downtown Barnsley.
He was two years old when they moved there, in the days when the rent for one of their three-bedroom corporation semis on the Darfield Road estate ranged from 10 shillings and eightpence to 11 shillings and sixpence a week. The house had an air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden.
An early picture of him show a self-possessed and almost impossibly dapper little boy.
His mother is said to have been a marvellous knitter who designed Fair Isle patterns especially for the apple of her eye. Such a turnout at that age might have seemed a bit excessive in the Home Counties.
On a Yorkshire pit estate it must have looked uncanny.
Young Michael probably got away with it among people of his age because he was talented at the two things that mattered to boys of that time, football and cricket.
He became the leader of his gang. Not because he was the toughest; he was the only one who owned his own cricket bat.
He was noted for his batsmanship at Shaw Lane Cricket Club and one season was selected for Barnsley's first team when another promising youngster was still making his way in the second team. His name was Geoff Boycott.
At Barnsley Grammar School, Michael's writing talents were identified and appreciated by fellow pupils. He charged them threepence a time to do their essays and managed as many as five in one night. But he loathed the place and later said his real education happened at The Rock, his local cinema, and on the terraces at Oakwell where his beloved Barnsley played. The player in red he worshiped most was Skinner Normanton, a man who was later to become more famous through his appearances in Michael's Sunday Times column than he ever was during his playing days.
One of Michael's best friends at school recalled that his pal never seemed settled there and lacking academic gifts, apart from English, was something of the form clown. Michael himself says that all school did was put on hold the career which he ought to have started at the age of 11.
As a trainee on the Mexborough-based South Yorkshire Times, with a grand salary of 25 shillings a week, he had to report village news in Cudworth, Royston and Grimethorpe, which coincided with Don Booker's patch for the Chronicle.
They met on Parkinson's first day as a reporter. Booker drove a BSA 250 motorcycle, while Parkinson's transport was just a drop-handlebar pushbike, and found themselves collecting paragraphs of local news on the same circuit of Darby and Joan Clubs, Mothers' Unions and pigeon fanciers.
Don Booker recalls how they became friends and, although supposed to be rival reporters, for a lot of the time, Parkinson rode pillion on Booker's BSA.
When they saw the 1952 Humphrey Bogart film Deadline – USA in which Bogart played a tough newspaper editor, they started dressing like him, buying white trenchcoats and going to Westnedge's outfitters in Royston to find trilby hats with wide rims they could bend just like Bogart's.
The problem was, their hats blew off the moment they set off on the motorbike, so they solved the problem by attaching a chin strap made of knicker elastic. Parkinson insists the elastic came from a pair of his aunty's old knickers.
Parkinson's first job every morning was to cycle from Cudworth over to Grimethorpe to collect the previous day's stories from his immediate boss, a dapper ex-Army man named Stan Bristow. He then cycled up to the railway station at Royston and put the copy on a train to his head office in Mexborough.
By 11am, he and Booker would be sitting in the station buffet, having ginger pudding with custard and a pot of tea while they traded paragraphs of local news.
The stories were not all mundane. Sometimes there was some exciting news event to report. One that still shines out after all these years was a fire at a terrace house next to the coking plant at Monkton Colliery.
Children were collecting "bunny wood" – the material for their November 5 bonfires – but it was common practice to steal other people's wood from back yards.
So one family had the idea of storing it in their front room with almost disastrous consequences. A toddler got up in the middle of the night and put a match to it, the house burning to the ground and the family lucky to escape.
Another came from a parish council meeting at Grimethorpe, where a plan to give a facelift to a local park was being discussed. One councillor, who had been to Venice, suggested the park's small lake would look good with the addition of a gondola. Another councillor, not to be outdone, said they might as well have two gondolas and breed them. He thought they were ducks.
After a couple of years, Parkinson passed his driving test but didn't have a car. Booker still had L-plates but had bought a 1946 Standard Flying Eight, so the two would drive around in his car.
Their friendship was interrupted when Parkinson went off to do his National Service, eventually being commissioned as a captain and working as a press officer at Suez. Booker stayed in Yorkshire, an eardrum having been "blown up" when he had his army medical. When Parkinson returned to civilian life, he wasn't too struck by the kind of reporter's money being offered to someone from the officer class. For a time he worked nights in a bottle factory where his colleagues were mostly women.
After a few months, Parkinson moved to work for an evening newspaper in Doncaster, where he met his future wife, Mary Heneghan, on a bus. She wore a red duffel coat, and he thought she had a face he "could look
at forever".
His leg-up into the big league came with the offer of a job at the Manchester Guardian. But by now print journalism, even at the top level, was no longer enough. He craved to be a face recognised in the street from television and he got work interviewing on a weekend
ITV programme.
Fleet Street came calling in the shape of the Daily Express where he was advised by colleague Nancy Banks-Smith never to go into television. He ignored her and started taking that side of his career seriously at the start of the Sixties – even though by that time he had a newspaper job which many journalists would have died for – a sports column in the Sunday Times with his own picture by-line.
He moved to Granada as a producer and performer, then on to London Weekend and never looked back. When his show Parkinson started in the early Seventies, broadcast straight after Match of the Day, the chat show was an unknown quantity on this side of the Atlantic.
Some people even wondered if a journalist sitting talking to somebody famous could actually be regarded as an entertainment programme. But Michael Parkinson's judgment of what people wanted was right. Among the celebs who were to line up to be interviewed by him was Lauren Bacall, the widow of Humphrey Bogart. It is not known if he told her that he once rode around the pit villages of South Yorkshire on the back of a motorbike, dressed like her late-husband.
But with the trademark trilby held on with knicker elastic.
Parky: My Autobiography is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £20. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free
on 0800 0153232 or online at www. yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is £2.75.
Michael Parkinson is the guest at the next Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch on October 9 at The Majestic Hotel, Harrogate.
These were not A-list celebrities. For a start, the term had yet to be coined in the 1950s, when he was a cub reporter whose patch centred on the pit villages on the north-east side of Barnsley.
No, the deceased were usually from ordinary mining families, names he had to collect almost every day by interrupting a grave-digger he would find hard at work in a local cemetery.
Parky has been lauded for his relaxed interviewing style on TV, so it's hard to resist saying that he learned this by perfecting a good graveside manner.
Certainly, it was his job to obtain a lot of stories for the South Yorkshire Times, which he joined in 1951 at the age of 16, by those visits to the council cemetery at Royston.
There he would find a small, soft-spoken gravedigger called Bob Ellerker, who was slightly bent through working in such confined spaces. Ellerker was always the first to hear of any local deaths and had the names and addresses ready on a piece of paper tucked into his overalls.
Often accompanying Parkinson on these visits was another teenage reporter named Don Booker, who worked for rival weekly newspaper, the Barnsley Chronicle. "Anybody died overnight, Bob?" they would shout into the grave, and Ellerker stopped digging. Sometimes he shouted the details back, or if he knew a bit more about the dead person, he climbed up his small ladder to talk to the boys. Later, they would visit the homes of families to gather more information for the obituaries. In those days, there were few chapels of rest, so they usually found the deceased laid out behind a clothes-horse, and the bereaved invited them to view the corpse before they left.
Parkinson was the son of a pit deputy and was brought up in the village of Cudworth, four miles from the bright lights of downtown Barnsley.
He was two years old when they moved there, in the days when the rent for one of their three-bedroom corporation semis on the Darfield Road estate ranged from 10 shillings and eightpence to 11 shillings and sixpence a week. The house had an air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden.
An early picture of him show a self-possessed and almost impossibly dapper little boy.
His mother is said to have been a marvellous knitter who designed Fair Isle patterns especially for the apple of her eye. Such a turnout at that age might have seemed a bit excessive in the Home Counties.
On a Yorkshire pit estate it must have looked uncanny.
Young Michael probably got away with it among people of his age because he was talented at the two things that mattered to boys of that time, football and cricket.
He became the leader of his gang. Not because he was the toughest; he was the only one who owned his own cricket bat.
He was noted for his batsmanship at Shaw Lane Cricket Club and one season was selected for Barnsley's first team when another promising youngster was still making his way in the second team. His name was Geoff Boycott.
At Barnsley Grammar School, Michael's writing talents were identified and appreciated by fellow pupils. He charged them threepence a time to do their essays and managed as many as five in one night. But he loathed the place and later said his real education happened at The Rock, his local cinema, and on the terraces at Oakwell where his beloved Barnsley played. The player in red he worshiped most was Skinner Normanton, a man who was later to become more famous through his appearances in Michael's Sunday Times column than he ever was during his playing days.
One of Michael's best friends at school recalled that his pal never seemed settled there and lacking academic gifts, apart from English, was something of the form clown. Michael himself says that all school did was put on hold the career which he ought to have started at the age of 11.
As a trainee on the Mexborough-based South Yorkshire Times, with a grand salary of 25 shillings a week, he had to report village news in Cudworth, Royston and Grimethorpe, which coincided with Don Booker's patch for the Chronicle.
They met on Parkinson's first day as a reporter. Booker drove a BSA 250 motorcycle, while Parkinson's transport was just a drop-handlebar pushbike, and found themselves collecting paragraphs of local news on the same circuit of Darby and Joan Clubs, Mothers' Unions and pigeon fanciers.
Don Booker recalls how they became friends and, although supposed to be rival reporters, for a lot of the time, Parkinson rode pillion on Booker's BSA.
When they saw the 1952 Humphrey Bogart film Deadline – USA in which Bogart played a tough newspaper editor, they started dressing like him, buying white trenchcoats and going to Westnedge's outfitters in Royston to find trilby hats with wide rims they could bend just like Bogart's.
The problem was, their hats blew off the moment they set off on the motorbike, so they solved the problem by attaching a chin strap made of knicker elastic. Parkinson insists the elastic came from a pair of his aunty's old knickers.
Parkinson's first job every morning was to cycle from Cudworth over to Grimethorpe to collect the previous day's stories from his immediate boss, a dapper ex-Army man named Stan Bristow. He then cycled up to the railway station at Royston and put the copy on a train to his head office in Mexborough.
By 11am, he and Booker would be sitting in the station buffet, having ginger pudding with custard and a pot of tea while they traded paragraphs of local news.
The stories were not all mundane. Sometimes there was some exciting news event to report. One that still shines out after all these years was a fire at a terrace house next to the coking plant at Monkton Colliery.
Children were collecting "bunny wood" – the material for their November 5 bonfires – but it was common practice to steal other people's wood from back yards.
So one family had the idea of storing it in their front room with almost disastrous consequences. A toddler got up in the middle of the night and put a match to it, the house burning to the ground and the family lucky to escape.
Another came from a parish council meeting at Grimethorpe, where a plan to give a facelift to a local park was being discussed. One councillor, who had been to Venice, suggested the park's small lake would look good with the addition of a gondola. Another councillor, not to be outdone, said they might as well have two gondolas and breed them. He thought they were ducks.
After a couple of years, Parkinson passed his driving test but didn't have a car. Booker still had L-plates but had bought a 1946 Standard Flying Eight, so the two would drive around in his car.
Their friendship was interrupted when Parkinson went off to do his National Service, eventually being commissioned as a captain and working as a press officer at Suez. Booker stayed in Yorkshire, an eardrum having been "blown up" when he had his army medical. When Parkinson returned to civilian life, he wasn't too struck by the kind of reporter's money being offered to someone from the officer class. For a time he worked nights in a bottle factory where his colleagues were mostly women.
After a few months, Parkinson moved to work for an evening newspaper in Doncaster, where he met his future wife, Mary Heneghan, on a bus. She wore a red duffel coat, and he thought she had a face he "could look
at forever".
His leg-up into the big league came with the offer of a job at the Manchester Guardian. But by now print journalism, even at the top level, was no longer enough. He craved to be a face recognised in the street from television and he got work interviewing on a weekend
ITV programme.
Fleet Street came calling in the shape of the Daily Express where he was advised by colleague Nancy Banks-Smith never to go into television. He ignored her and started taking that side of his career seriously at the start of the Sixties – even though by that time he had a newspaper job which many journalists would have died for – a sports column in the Sunday Times with his own picture by-line.
He moved to Granada as a producer and performer, then on to London Weekend and never looked back. When his show Parkinson started in the early Seventies, broadcast straight after Match of the Day, the chat show was an unknown quantity on this side of the Atlantic.
Some people even wondered if a journalist sitting talking to somebody famous could actually be regarded as an entertainment programme. But Michael Parkinson's judgment of what people wanted was right. Among the celebs who were to line up to be interviewed by him was Lauren Bacall, the widow of Humphrey Bogart. It is not known if he told her that he once rode around the pit villages of South Yorkshire on the back of a motorbike, dressed like her late-husband.
But with the trademark trilby held on with knicker elastic.
Parky: My Autobiography is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £20. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free
on 0800 0153232 or online at www. yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is £2.75.
Michael Parkinson is the guest at the next Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch on October 9 at The Majestic Hotel, Harrogate.
No comments:
Post a Comment