DAILY DRONE
LORD DRONE’S MIGHTY FLEET STREET ORGAN,
THE WORLD’S GREATEST ONLINE NEWSPAPER
CONTACT EDAILYDRONE@GMAIL.COM
WEDNESDAY 24 APRIL 2024
*
QUOTE OF THE DAY
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equal in every sense except that of being equal to us — Lionel Trilling
THE ALTERNATIVE MEDIA DAILY
Our proud motto: We may not be first with the news but we’re always wrong.
BY ROYAL DISAPPOINTMENT
YOUR DAILY DRONE, HERE TO HELP
Our useful guide to
the text-mad idiots who want to be MPs
I think I may have happened upon an idea for much needed Parliamentary reform, writes PAT PRENTICE.
Perhaps, given their propensity for revealing messages etc., prospective MPs should now apply by text to be chosen as candidates. The following necessary qualifications could apply for individual parties ...
TORY: A texted picture of a prick (not a Truss).
REFORM: Candid picture of Nigel Farage.
LABOUR: An image of Sir Keir Starmer dressed as a woman (he won't know the difference).
LIB DEMS: A picture of its leader (if they know who it is, they're a shoo-in).
COMMUNISTS: Picture of an unstuffed ballot box (if they recognise one, they're barred).
INDEPENDENTS: Picture of a flock of sheep.
SNP: Picture of a lochside camper van holiday.
PLAID CYMRU: Picture of the latest embarrassing leak
GREENS: A genuine photograph of an electric car charger anywhere in the countryside
MONSTER RAVING LOONY: None of those listed above sane enough to apply.
The cockup to end all cockups
DATELINE 1980. Something went seriously wrong with the typesetting of this story in the Peterborough Standard. We’re not sure quite what the problem was but you can’t necessarily blame a lack of subs as there were probably enough of them at the time. The bonfire came much later.
The consensus is that it was a computer cock-up … but the memories live on 44 years later
Funny Dud, I thought, funny, another bloody Tory MP’s been caught with his trousers down
Pete: I was in bed last night, just about to drop off, when suddenly, 'tap, tap, tap' at the bloody window — you know who it was?
Dud: Who?
Pete: Bloody Mark Menzies, all chained up, yelling ‘Peter, Peter, l've got in with bad men and I need £5K out of petty cash, please help.’
Pursued by a Bear
Six-second Shakespeare (Beware spoilers)
3 Cymbeline
King of Britain banishes his daughter Innogen's husband, a bloke with the weird name, Posthumus, who then accuses her of being unfaithful and a bit of a tart. She does runner and becomes a page in Roman army as it invades Britain. Everyone puts on some sort of disguise which, being Shakespeare, is a bit of a shaker. Revelations abound and only one person dies (that makes a change). Oh, and two brothers, kidnapped in infancy, turn up. - Solly Quilley
With thanks to Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Can you help Katy?
KATY EASTHILL writes: I’m currently studying a masters in History of Design at the V&A/RCA, for my dissertation. I'm exploring how the introduction of colour printing may have changed the design of the front pages of tabloids, in particular The Sun.
I was reading the Vic Giles obituary on the Daily Drone and a few other articles and it's clear you're very much connected with people that were working in the industry at the time. I would love to speak and interview people that would have experience working during this period. I am looking at 1984-1998 mainly and would love to speak to graphic designers, photographers, typesetters, journalists etc anyone who would have been aware of this technology shift. If you could help me at all reach out to anyone I would be hugely grateful.
If you can help, email Lord Drone at edailydrone@gmail.com
How Eddy hit the Post
EDDY Shah found fame by taking on Fleet Street’s Bolshie printers by opening Today newspaper but it is perhaps forgotten that he opened a second title, The Post.
The paper was based in Warrington and edited by former Daily Express and Star man Lloyd Turner. It lasted just five weeks, closing in December 1988. Shah later admitted that it was a big mistake.
GEORGE DEARSLEY was there at the start.
By Hermione Orliff, our girl who tells it as it is … in fewer words
Celebrating National Haiku Day, poems with a 5-7-5 syllable structure:
Hey, it’s Haiku time
Just 17 syllables
But no need to rhyme
Residents of Vatican City each drink 74 litres of wine a year, research finds.
A 202 million-year-old fossil found on beach in Somerset believed to come from largest ever marine reptile, Ichthyosaur. It was longer than two buses.
Daily Beast, inferior online newspaper, plans ‘aggressive coverage’ of royals in bid to ‘show up ink-stained Brits’, says Axios.
More than half (57%) of Americans say they’d feel better if they got more sleep, according to Gallup. Just 26% get eight hours kip, down from 59% in 1942. Stress blamed.
Beijing half marathon chiefs probe allegations that Kenya and Ethiopia athletes intentionally let China’s He Jie win.
New golf club in Palm Beach, Florida, charges $350,000 to join. Chicken feed! Shell Bay in Miami Beach wants $1.35 million. Long waiting lists, too.
Synchronised swimmers perform in giant tank in Covent Garden Piazza to publicise Paris Olympics.
WFH has really buggered commercial property market. A 44-storey office block in St Louis sells for $3.6 million. It cost $205 million in 2006 — a 98% plunge.
Avocado is a name derived from the Aztec word ahuacacacacahuahatl or ‘testicle tree’, a consultant etymologist writes, apropos of fuck all.
Samsung reclaims status as world’s top smartphone seller over Apple whose sales in China are hit by competition from the homegrown companies such as Xiaomi.
Congestion charge? What a joke. According to Transport for London, foreign embassies owe a total of £145 million in unpaid £15 penalties.
Yet more BBC job stats: 5,244 journos (doesn’t include 433 presenters); 367 orchestra and singers; 186 in comms/PR; 331 in Haitch Arr.
Tesla cutting global workforce by 10% amid cooling demand for EVs and ‘unexpected delay’ to new Cybertruck.
Barcelona is so fed up with tourists that civic chiefs have removed a bus route to a popular park from Google and Apple Maps, says the Guardian.
And the exotic names of lady journos keep coming: Sarah Royce-Greenshill, Ginnie Chadwyck-Healey, Natasha Tomalin-Hall, Jess Cartner-Morley, Charlotte Horsfall-Page, Sophie Zeldin-O’Neill, Ysenda Maxtone Graham.
Pissed off with your tax bill? Spare a thought for US businessman and TV personality Mark Cuban. He’s just shelled out $288 million.
‘Just sort of wandering around’ is most popular holiday activity say 53% of respondents in survey; going to bars is 1%. Obvs they didn’t ‘just sort of wander‘ around Benidorm’s bars.
Roués R Us members vote for Fantasy of Year. Winner: Being locked in room with both Liz Truss and Angela Rayner.
Old batteries fall from outer space through roof of house in Naples, Florida. NASA collects debris and confirms it’s from International Space Station.
Comic book featuring Superman’s first adventure sells for record $6 million.
Angela Rayner defends having boob job: ‘They looked like two boiled eggs in socks,’ she moans.
It’s official: dung beetles are (surprise) biggest defecators in animal world, experts reveal. Queens of pee: cicadas.
New PM Liz Truss’s reaction to Queen’s death (‘Why me? Why now?’), revealed in new memoir, eerie reminder of the Great Great Ancoats Stone Sub Disaster.
Robin Hood has been played by 30 actors in films and on telly since Robert Frazer first took a bow (see what I just did there?) in 1912, research reveals.
Sports hacks vote for Cliché of Season. Outrageous Dummy, Wicked Deflection, Sniping/Mazy Run (especially applied to scrum halves) and He’s on Fire figure highly. But winner is…They’ve Literally Got a Mountain to Climb Now.
ON OTHER PAGES
Alan Smith
ALAN SMITH, a former Daily Express sports sub in the 1960s has died aged 90.
He later became deputy sports editor on The People, and Man of the People columnist. His funeral has taken place.
News in Brief
Newsnight deputy editor Becky Emmett is joining ITV News amid an overhaul of the BBC programme. Emmett will be head of ITVX for ITV News. (Press Gazette)
Andrea Davies, former group managing director of TI Media, has joined the board of National World as an independent non-executive director. (National World)
The long-delayed full inquest into the 2019 death of Jeremy Kyle Show guest Stephen Dymond will take place in September, a coroner has said at a pre-inquest hearing. (Maldon Standard via PA)
Former Reach editor-in-chief Lloyd Embley has joined a digital PR and campaigns agency that has undergone a management buyout. (Press Gazette)
Journalists at Scottish broadcaster STV have postponed a planned strike pending talks resuming between management and the NUJ. The scheduled strike on 1 May is currently still planned. One strike day has already taken place over pay.
The New York Times has ended a probe into who leaked details of an unaired episode of The Daily podcast about the Israel-Gaza war after it was unable to come to a definitive conclusion. Staff have been told they need "to maintain confidentiality during the reporting and editing process". (The Daily Beast)
Mehdi Hasan's new outlet Zeteo has officially launched (after weeks of a soft launch). Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein and ex-CNBC chief Washington correspondent John Harwood are among the first contributors. Press Gazette spoke with Hasan last month about his plans for the publisher. (Zeteo)
Almost two years on, UK authorities have responded to a Council of Europe alert about then-Home Secretary Priti Patel's trip to Rwanda which the Guardian, FT and Mirror were allegedly blocked from attending. (Press Gazette)
The Atlantic has announced it has reached one million subscriptions and is now profitable. It said revenue is up more than 10% year-on-year and subscriptions were up 14% in the past year. (The Atlantic)
Metro has paid tribute to its parenting columnist Sarah Whiteley, who died earlier this month aged 39. She was a regular freelance for the site for the past two years. (Metro)
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has hired Hannah Summers as a full-time family court reporter in what it says is a first for the UK. Summers will lead TBIJ's Family Court Files investigative series for the next two years. (TBIJ)
Petrol bombs were reportedly thrown at the media after an Easter Monday commemoration event in Derry. The NUJ said: "Photographers and reporters are entitled to report on such events without without threat or intimidation." (Belfast Telegraph)
Update: A judge has denied a bid by News Group Newspapers to hold an initial trial on whether hacking claims being brought against it by Prince Harry and others are being brought too late. The judge said this would delay the overall trial too much and that it can be heard in January together with everything else. (Press Gazette)
California non-profit news outlet Cal Matters, which has 72 staff and around $12.5m in philanthropic funding, has bought The Markup, a non-profit site focused on tech and data privacy investigations with its own 28 staff and $5m in funding. (Axios)
Inside story behind the shock arrest of Ulster
MP Jeffrey Donaldson
(Plus one fact we cannot reveal)
The arrest of Sir Jeffery Donaldson MP, has rocked Northern Ireland politics and led to his resignation as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party.
ALAN FRAME has the facts behind the arrest of Donaldson and his wife in a dawn raid on their home in County Down on March 28. The alleged offences are sexual in nature.
More than that we cannot reveal but the story is nonetheless fascinating.
ONLY IN THE DRONE
Our top columnists
The graves of Parr and Ellison and (inset) how close they are
Coincidences are rarely funny: more likely unsettling, moving even. Take Private John Parr, 5ft 3ins and only 17. He was killed near Mons on August 21, 1914, the first British casualty of the First World War, and was buried at Belgium’s St Symphorien military cemetery, probably by the Germans.
Four years on, after many millions of deaths, the ebb and flow of war had brought the fighting back to Mons. The armistice had been signed and was due to take effect at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. At 9.30 am a sniper claimed the life of Private George Ellison, a veteran of six major battles. He was the last British soldier to be killed and he, too, was buried at St Symphorian.
It was only later, when officials started to catalogue the graves, that it was realised that the two men had been randomly interred just a few paces apart.
The coincidence doesn’t end there, though. Private George Lawrence Price, a Canadian, was the last British Empire soldier to be killed — at 10.58am. His grave is, by chance, a short distance away from Parr and Ellison.
Why we weren’t ready for Eddy
Only here for the Behan
Irish writer Brendan Behan was once invited to Oxford to take part in a debate about the difference between prose and poetry.
His opponent spoke for almost two hours. Behan rose to his feet and promised to be brief. He recited an old Dublin rhyme.
There was a young fella named Rollocks
Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks.
As he walked on the strand
With a girl by the hand
The water came up to his ankles.
"That," declared Behan, "is prose. But if the tide had been in it would have been poetry."
DRONE TV
Fleet Street history in 18 minutes
Palaces of the Press
This pic of the Daily Express building in Manchester was posted on Facebook by Pat Wooding.
The photo, probably taken in the 1950s, was spotted by Nick Jenkins who commented: ‘At least the Express building is still there — unlike the fine old Mail building on Deansgate. The DX offices have been converted into flats.
Nick has written a fascinating account of ‘newspaper palaces’ for the British Journalism Review. READ IT HERE
By George, it’s our George starring as, er, Boy George (pity about the moustache)
By GEORGE DEARSLEY
It’s April 1984 and I’m squashed with several other Fleet Street journos in a doorway yards from the Libyan Embassy in St. James Square, where a day earlier WPC Yvonne Fletcher was fatally wounded by an unknown gunman.
The adrenaline is pumping. Could we also be shot? We’ve just had a row with television’s bouffant newsman Michael Cole who tried to push in and was roundly told to Foxtrot Oscar and find his own doorstep.
Suddenly a colleague hands me a message from the Daily Star newsdesk ordering me to go to another location. I’m excited. Have we been given some secret information about the Met Officer’s murder? It could be a front page story.
I’m whisked away in a black cab to the address … which turns out to be a top beautician’s salon. Apparently Boy George has just launched a new make-up range and because we share the same name I’m to be made up like the androgynous singer.
I was fuming to miss out on the world’s top news story. When the woman wanted to shave off my moustache I adamantly refused. The stunt made nearly a full page.
And two years later when I left the paper my colleagues framed it as a leaving gift. Looking back, maybe I should have been Karma (Chameleon) and lost the tache.
Proof that crime is nothing new
If you think crime today is bad and getting worse you might find reassurance from this front page of the Daily Sketch from December 1945.
A man shot dead in a Glasgow railway station and bandits escape during a ‘fantastic chase’ in Leatherhead. Yes, that’s Leatherhead in quiet, leafy Surrey.
The tabloid Sketch was founded in Manchester in 1909 by Sir Edward Hulton. It was owned by a subsidiary of the Berrys' Allied Newspapers from 1928. The company was renamed Kemsley Newspapers in 1937 when William Berry, Lord Camrose, withdrew to concentrate his efforts on The Daily Telegraph.
The paper, which supported the Conservatives, struggled through the 1950s and 1960s, never managing to compete successfully with the Daily Mirror, and on Tuesday 11 May 1971 it closed and merged with the Daily Mail.
Pub fun with Mad George and Big Julie the stripper
Where there’s a will there’s a wayzgoose
Maundy Thursday was a popular day in the old Fleet Street calendar. Papers were not published on Good Friday so everyone got a day off on the Thursday. Trips to the seaside in charabancs were the order of the day and drink played an important part. Such an outing was known as a wayzgoose.
Three former Express hacks revived the tradition by meeting for lunch at a lakeside pub near Lincoln. Chris Williams, on day release from Glasgow, joined Roger Watkins and Terry Manners, who was in fine form after a couple of schooners of Malbec and R.White’s.
How Sefton Delmer of the Express fought Nazis with Black Propaganda
Expressman Sefton Delmer created Black Propaganda on behalf of the wartime British government and used fake news to fight the Nazi regime.
Through postcards, court documents, and pirate radio programs, Delmer and the rest of the secret service infiltrated the minds of the German people, using violence, sex, and death in their stories to subtly break down the morale of the Nazis. So, who was Sefton Delmer? And why was he the only man who could have become the true master of Black Propaganda? His story is told in a new book How to Win an Information War.
What possessed Dearsley of The Sun to dress up as a woman?Pursuit of a good story of course
POETRY CORNER
The Splash Sub and other verses by Pat Prentice
MAXWELL: Banana skins? Coffin wedged in a plane’s hold? Sorry, this
is the REAL truth about Captain Bob
Larger than life, and in death
Truth about the old rogue’s death (it’s totally bananas)
In praise of the Cheshire Cheese, a Pedigree pub
if ever there was one
The Express may not be first with the news but it’s always wrong
Now where have we heard that slogan before? Hint: See top of page
GET TATCHELL!
Dacre’s order to reporter Hall
By-election candidate Peter Tatchell needed to be neutralised by the Daily Mail. Not only was he standing for Labour in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election but he was also — horror of horrors — a homosexual.
Paul Dacre, then the paper’s news editor, knew the man to bring him down — freelance reporter ALLAN HALL. Consequently Tatchell lost the Labour seat and Liberal Simon Hughes won by a landslide. It also gained Hall won a six-month contract with the Mail.
Paranoid, Kelvin? Not our Joe, he’s a creative soul who writes poems
Who can ever forget Kelvin MacKenzie’s loud welcome to our beloved Stone Sub, poet and spiritual dreamer, Joe Neal, pictured, one night back in the day, when he popped his head around the yellowing door of the Express newsroom, at the start of his shift, writes TERRY MANNERS.
“Eh Joe,” Kelvin shouted from the backbench, “how’s yer paranoia?” Joe’s head disappeared, quick as a flash. He had encountered a typical Kelvin welcome, straight out of the talented hack’s book of quick quips, somewhere on the page with “It’s a reverse ferret!” But really, I mean, didn’t our Backbench superhero Kelvin, soon to be Editor of the Sun, realise that he was speaking to a much-loved, tender and creative soul who carried a world of hills, rivers and seas around with him on his shoulders and not just a chip as some thought?
The reason I say this is that I came across some of Joe’s poems this week … and was quite moved by the depth and feeling of some of them. Here is an extract from one: ‘The Savage Sea.’ It won first prize at the ‘Write by the Sea’ International Poetry Competition in Wexford, Ireland. Perhaps Kelvin in a quiet moment, reflecting on life, might find comfort and enjoyment in it. I loved the stuff ...
We carve to heel and catch the wind
while green-flash light parts curtain mist
and schooner judders past the rock’s grim
grin; the warning buoy lets out its whistle
sigh – annunciation of our own
significance, of others whom we mourn.
COCK-UP FOR THE CUP Express football ticket competition that went from bad to worse (no change there then…)
Expressman CHRIS GILL remembers a Daily Express World Cup tickets competition when everything that could go wrong did go wrong but was disaster averted?
The Daily Drone is published, financed and edited by Alastair ‘Bingo’ McIntyre with contributions from the veteran journalists of old Fleet Street, London’s boulevard of broken dreams, Manchester and points North. Dedicated to scribblers everywhere.
©Lord Drone, Whom God Preserve 2005-2024