Bill Jacobs reflects on career stint in West Midlands

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Despite having felt I had come to the armpit of the universe when I first drove over the Tees Bridge to Hartlepool a year before, and surveyed the Mordor-like landscape of flames and fumes from two chemical works and an oil terminal with a mud-flat nature reserve and nuclear power station, I had come to love living in Hartlepool.

Then, as I sat happily in the rather grand office, a took a phone call from the Birmingham Evening Mail’s chief news editor, Ian Mean.

He asked me if I still wanted the job on the paper I had applied for, but had not got, a year before.

I, of course, said, ‘Yes’, not realising what I had just signed up for.

The Evening Mail was a 12-edition publication selling just shy of 300,000 copies a day, hitting the streets at intervals from 8.30am (‘The Racing’) to 4pm (the Late Final).

And the newsdesk – headed by Ian ‘Mean by name and mean by nature’ – was the most terrifying group of people I had ever come across.

In that atmosphere, among a very competitive set of reporters, young journalists either learned fast or fell by the wayside.

Luckily, I learned quickly and wrote fast.

My day began in bed listening to ‘Ring and Sing and Things’ on the local commercial radio station, where Brummie locals displayed their lack of musical and poetic talent, before a set of police, fire and ambulance calls and then contacting the fearsome newsdesk.

I could be dispatched at a moment’s notice to anything from a murder on the dodgy Castle Vale estate to a special primary school assembly in the genteel suburb of Sutton Coldfield that was my patch.

Jobs I did varied from heading off at 6am with a union rep to collect a sample of polluted water issuing out of a local sewage works into the nearby river, to finding myself at midnight with my foot in the door of the house of a man who had just returned from being bailed after desecrating some military graves in Aldershot.

I removed my foot after he threatened to break it with the door in return for a promise to come and see me later.

To my surprise, he turned up and did a full interview, which made the front page lead of all editions.

I covered a lengthy civil service strike at the Erdington social security office, which required me to know where the union rep and government press officer would be at noon in the days before mobile phones in order to file a story for the main City Final edition deadline at 1pm.

And then there was a dreaded afternoon phone call from Louise, the newsdesk secretary, who said: ‘Bill, I’ve got Ian Mean for you’.

My legs would turn to jelly as I awaited the expected ‘bollocking’, but just occasionally his gruff voice would say: “That front page story you did today. Great job.”

Then I walked on air for two days, especially when I got praised for a tale about the new bank manager of the branch below my office locking his staff out when he left his key at home, when we already had pictures of him in his bowler hat and with his beloved classic Triumph motor bike.

I didn’t mention I only got the story because I was late to work, having fallen back to sleep!

I learnt more from two years there than I did anywhere else and was then ready to take up reporting local government on a politics team of three (yes THREE) at the Coventry Evening Telegraph.

This was another eye-opening experience as the city council was in the middle of a bitter battle between the traditional Labour councillors trying to run the authority and an equal number of Militant Tendency Trotskyites trying not to make it work but create a ‘revolutionary vanguard’ for the fight against Margaret Thatcher.

I watched as the veteran Labour group leader – himself once a left-wing firebrand – negotiated with his Tory opposition counterpart over what would be given to his ward in return for voting the council budget through.

And when I asked a distinctly queasy-looking senior Labour councillor called in to the meeting despite a severe stomach upset why she was there, she replied: “I’ve got the trots in more ways than one.”

But Militants were not all bad – their MP Dave Nellist was a fine contact who once, when told we needed a front page lead at a late stage, said: “Would calling for a General Strike do?”

It did.

While I was there, I got sent outside my normal brief to the 1985 Handsworth riots, as I mentioned before.

And I also picked up reporting the non-football aspects of Coventry City’s 1987 run to winning the FA Cup.

As part of outlining the boost to local pride and the local economy, I used to drop down to the Hen and Chickens pub on the Foleshill Road and chat to England forward Cyril Regis, captain Brian Kilcline and star player Phil Bennett.

You would not get near today’s football stars in such a setting now.

And then, on the day before the cup final, the editor offered me two standing tickets at £6 face value.

So, having been to the quarter and semi-finals, I was there for a bit of Sky Blues history as the club won a cracker of a match 3-2, despite Spurs forward Clive Allen silencing our end with a goal within minutes of the opening whistle.

And the celebrations in the city were something to behold and be part of.

Unforgettable experiences I would never have had in a normal job.

After almost 50 years, Bill has hung up his notepad and pen and is taking up a well-deserved retirement following an illustrious career in journalism, and will be sorely missed by his colleagues and, I am sure, the readers too - but perhaps less so the politicians whose feet he has held to the fire over the years!