Skegness Magazine

SMALL FISH, BIG POND
(My life as a young teenage reporter)
I was 12-years-old and in my Auntie Gladys’s kitchen when she asked me the sort of question I imagine all aunties ask their nephews at that age: “What do you want to do when you leave school?”
“A reporter,” I replied without hesitation” Oh, yes, she said,” adding, obviously having misheard, “On the railway?”
“No, Auntie,” I said with a sigh. “A RE-porter – on a newspaper.”
She gave me a withering look which would have said, in today’s language: Fat Chance.
My auntie had a point for having little confidence in my ambition. I was being educated at a Secondary Modern School, having failed the 11-plus exam and being marked down as an academic failure. I had worked it out for myself that those leaving the grammar school, when the time came for me to apply for a job, would surely have a better chance of selection for a journalist‘s post. I had to work out a different approach.
There were not usually many local newspapers to choose from in small towns in the 1950s, or even today for that matter. But we were fortunate at Skegness, on the Lincolnshire coast. The resort had two weekly newspapers, and the competition between them was fierce
Despite my lack of school attainments, which had not improved on leaving its confines at the age of 15, I did have one or two things going for me. One was that, having had no mother since the age of six months, I had become a wartime evacuee at the age of three, Hitler’s timeliness in invading Poland allowing me to escape being sent to a local children’s home.
In fact, I was the youngest of 300 evacuees from Grimsby, with a foster mother determined to fight for my welfare and additional support from the woman chair of the local urban district council, who had been the evacuation billeting officer. How could I fail?!
At some point during the three years leading up to leaving school, I had run my own newspaper: Hopper’s Gazette. With the help of a friend, we managed to produce about five copies, publishing what we considered interesting titbits of school and local gossip.
We set the cover charge of our newspaper at one penny, but not one copy sold. So we gave them away. Publication ceased because my friend and I squabbled over who should draw the lines on sheets of paper with a pencil and ruler, to aid neat writing.
In the run-up to school leaving, I first tried the newspaper with the largest circulation and saw the “no vacancies for you” sign in his eyes before he uttered the words. The “Fat Chance” assessment of my aunt Gladys was proving discouragingly correct.
I was already thinking that journalism was out of my league when I entered the office of the Skegness News, this time accompanied by my foster mother, whom I also called Auntie. There, in a tiny editorial office in the centre of a printing works, sat the editor, surrounded by wads of paper of all types and piles of newspapers on the floor, obviously stacked up wherever he could put them.
While Mr Stanley Major was not the tidiest of men (much like myself), he was a warm and unique human being, as I was to discover later. For one thing he was chairman of the local RNLI lifeboat committee. How I wish I had known then what I know now, as a result of historical family research, I would have loved to have told him that my great, great grandfather, Fewson Hopper, was coxswain of the Spurn (Humber) lifeboat for 12 years in the mid-19th century.
To cut an interview story short, Mr Major – Mr Stanley, as I came to know him – told me straight that he had no vacancy for a reporter, but he expected one of his reporters to leave in a year’s time. He suggested that if I worked in the printing works for a year, he would consider me as a replacement. It was a fair offer, and I took it.
I was so keen to start that I left school on a Friday and reported for work the following Monday, two weeks after my 15th birthday.
So began what turned out to be the best part of a year as an odd job boy in the company’s printing shop. There was a wide variety of tasks to be carried out: cleaning printing machines, packing parcels of paper for the post, cleaning the clinker out of the coke-fuelled central heating boiler.
My introduction to newspapers was via delivery of the Nottingham Post, waiting for what was known as the Bush machine to add late horse racing results and stop-press news, before distributing copies to holidaymakers on the coastal caravan sites. I also delivered to hotels copies of the weekly newspaper I was hoping to work for.
After 10 months I was being busy in the printing works, wearing a brown overall, when Lieutenant Commander RN (retired) Stanley Major tapped me on the shoulder and said: “Come into my office, you are going to be a reporter now.” This out-of-the-blue statement took me completely by surprise I continued all day in the nervously wearing my brown overall.
It was five weeks before my 16th birthday, and I think I must have impressed my new boss by the handwritten reports he had allowed me to do, in the intervening period, on Skegness Town FC matches at the Burgh Road ground.
If I had ever thought that, because of my age, I would have been given a slow and gradual introduction to the world of newspaper journalism, I was soon shown to be mistaken. Within weeks I was covering courts, council meetings, weddings, funerals and all the extra activities of a seaside resort in full swing.
As a teenage reporter of small stature, I knew I was a small fish in a big pond, but it didn’t feel like that. The world had just opened up to me; all I had to do was say “Press” and identify myself, to be admitted to events and meetings normally requiring admission fees or membership. Reporting without experience the knowledge of shorthand at first, was hard work; not nine-to-five either, but working several nights a week. I loved every minute, because I was doing the job I had set my heart on.
Early on in my career, Mr Stanley told me a joke-type story with a moral and a purpose. It went something like this: A reporter was sent to cover the story of a building on fire in the centre of town. When he returned to his office, he sat reading a newspaper until his editor asked why him he was not writing the story. “There is no point,” the reporter replied, “everybody was there.”
During my four years with the Skegness News, I covered many major events, but I will start with my first front page lead story – something every journalist remembers. It involved a local police hunt for a man suspected of murdering a woman in the Midlands.
We broke the exclusive story a couple of days later. Some of the newspapers were sold in a shop attached to the printing works and fronting on the main street. I cringe now as I remember watching people buying a copy and looking at the front page. When my wife and I visited Skegness a few years ago, I told her this story. Her reply was typically blunt: “Well, you would do that that now”!

Written by, and copyright of, Peter Hopper, Ipswich

We are indebted to Peter Hopper for sharing his Skegness memories with us. Peter was a journalist for the Skegness News in the 1950s and reported on the Dambusters Filmed in Skegness news story.