Owl, Pickwick, and Waverley Pen

It seems an age since Nigel Jarrett worked on a Welsh weekly newspaper. In fact, it is. Here he bathes in nostalgia

Jack Salter was someone about whom one could write a book but not someone you could write a book about – if you see what I mean.

It’s the way you say it. ‘About’ is a preposition, and, according to Jack Salter, a preposition was not the thing to end a sentence with. Mr Salter – I never called him Jack – was my editor at a weekly newspaper called the Free Press of Monmouthshire, otherwise known as the Pontypool Free Press  or, in its circulation’s polar reaches, simply the Press (well, there was none other). At its first appearance in 1859, it was the Pontypool Free Press and Herald of the Hills.

For reasons as obscure then as now, Jack Salter sometimes referred to himself as Mr Salt-yew-ayter. It sounded like something hexa-syllabic out of Dickens. He lived in Usk and on pay day brought his black poodle to the office, where it remained lassoed to his chair.

This was not animal cruelty: pay day at the Free Press required only brief attendance in order that wages could be distributed like Maundy money. Once imbursed, the staff of four were free to go.

It was hardly a perk: we’d spent at least two evenings of the week reporting on meetings of one sort or another as well as having ran the touchline with a notebook the previous Saturday afternoon at some rugby ground littered with bits of knee-cap and dislodged teeth.

On pay day, Mr Saltyewayter was often the first to leave – with his pooch.

Dickensian

The Free Press office on Clarence Corner might have been imagined as the home of a firm of solicitors, which, if not called  Dodson & Fogg, reminded one of the Dickensian inhabitants of a workplace constructed from wood, leather, and squeaking oilcloth.

In the file room, as if it were his permanent abode, lodged Reg Nichols, a local historian, who committed far more heinous solecisms than allowing a preposition to dangle unloved at the end of a sentence.

Reg was an eccentric ‘bookman’ whose writings derived from file-room scouring were full of ‘propositions of a far-reaching character’ rather than ‘far-reaching propositions’.

The principle of writing five words when two would do was something we reporters farther down the corridor were being taught to undermine, except at funerals, which we attended in order to collect the names of mourners and resist the temptation to make a modest, nay embarrassing, attendance populous.

I can’t stop myself from referring to Jack Salter as Mr Salter. The owner of the Free Press was Mrs Tilly Hughes, but no-one called her Tilly; nor did any of us know what Tilly stood for. She was always Mrs Hughes, the portly widow of the deceased owner, Henry Hughes.

The title Henry Hughes Newspapers Ltd was as impressive as a funeral report whose ‘Others Present’ might, had temptation been given into, included R. Reagan, A. Jackson, G. Ford, and other occupants of the White House; though for obvious reasons not D.D Eisenhower.

A larger-than-life personality is one from whom you, being only as-large-as-life, poach characteristics in order that one day you might expand in estimation.

Mr Salter sat in his own room, connected by an open doorway to the newsroom. Neither was much bigger than a phone box. In summer, he would despatch one of us to the café opposite for a can of four-syllable ‘Koa-kak-oal-a’; if deadline was approaching, he would declare his mild exasperation thus: ‘Eleven fifty-five in the forenoon and not a whore in the house washed!’; and, typically, ‘Now, Mr – I forget your name – where’s that story about the cat that sleeps with a bulldog owned by the chap who’s in the Guinness Book of Records for eating the most chipolatas in ten minutes?’

He often called me Mr Murgatroyd.

Pontypool RFC

How many times on other newspapers have I passed off those idiosyncrasies as my own? One I couldn’t unload was his ad hoc exhortation when reporting on home games at Pontypool RFC: ‘Give it to Cheney!’ He meant the ball, when the Pooler boys weren’t making much headway.

This was long after the free-scoring Ray Cheney had moved to Newport RFC, then Cardiff.

In the late 1960s, one of my Free Press reporter colleagues was Adrian Hearn, the Pontypool full-back.

Mr Saltyewayter did nothing to disabuse enquirers of the notion that, for Pontypool’s away games, Adrian ran on to the field with a notebook and a draper’s pencil stub in the pocket of his shorts.

When you’re thin on lore, any story will do.

Jack would always try to get Usk into a headline, reminiscent of the sub-editor on another paper dealing with a report about a trapeze artist crashing into a circus audience in Lancashire who came up with Bolton Audience Fallen Into.

Though we were the same age, I learned a lot from Adrian, who’d started in journalism a few years before me and knew all the tricks, such as being aware of when the coroner at an inquest was about to say something daft but newsworthy.

We reporters never strayed far outside the Eastern Valley of what everyone then knew as Gwent (short for Monmouthshire before Monmouthshire’s ‘green and pleasant land’ became a unitary authority sharing a border with England at the bottom of the River Wye).

Mr Salter once sent me – on a  pay day! –  to a Welsh transport Press conference at a hotel in the Vale of Glamorgan. The BBC representative, eyeing my lapel badge, asked me what was ‘free’ about the Free Press. He didn’t really want to know. I was able to counter immediately with ‘Experience’. Thanks, Adrian.

It was a tranquil locale, a vale different from my valley and where the only sound likely to have disturbed the peace would have been the loquacious voice of Gwyn Thomas, sounding off at the garden gate.

Reg Nichols illustrated a curious aspect of life at the Free Press: the unsolicited approval of people like him, learned if circumlocutory, for people like us, overworked, unlettered and no strangers to drudgery.

Glamorous

Everyone then thought journalism an admirable or glamorous vocation, especially those soi-disant writers desperate for accommodation in the public prints – or ‘blats’ as Reg called them (I had to look that up).

Jack Salter’s ‘Saltyewayter’ and other coinings possibly disguised a frustrated neologist. He claimed to have composed a famous advertising couplet: ‘It comes as a boon and a blessing to men/The owl, the pickwick, the Waverley pen’.

He was unforthcoming about the details. In the absence of a magnum opus, or any substantial opus at all, it must have ranked as an achievement. Largesse was not in the gift of Henry Hughes Newspapers Ltd, so it wouldn’t have surprised him if a ‘not inconsiderable emolument’, as Reg Nichols might have described it, appeared in his bank account.

He invariably reviewed the annual play staged by West Mon Grammar School, according a vast number of column inches to drama performed by inaudible boys in ill-fitting doublet and hose.

We had our uses: encouraging a Great War veteran on his golden wedding anniversary to open up about Mametz Wood after a lifetime – according to his voluble spouse – of suppressing memories as though they were a hydra-headed tin of something more unsettling than worms;  and correcting a town councillor who’d just described in public a female adversary as ‘erotic’ when he meant ‘erratic’. (The Pitman’s shorthand hieroglyph for both words is basically the same, its distinguishing dot a case of mere pencil pressure and re-positioning.)

I could transcribe Saltyewayteran shorthand without its author’s help, in the same way that on a different – daily – newspaper I would later be able to de-code the impeccable shorthand of my colleague Eynon Hammett. Which reminds me: not all the arcana of newspapers is known to newspaper people themselves.

Readers of the Sunday Express’s Welsh Rugby Union premier league table, as then was, were as ignorant as the paper’s sports desk of who’d compiled it – namely, Eynon’s young teenage son.

Fleet Street

Those were the days when provincial journalists in Wales were often handed freelance assignments by Fleet Street drongoes who thought you could board a bus in Cwmbran and be in Machynlleth in twenty minutes to investigate a steep rise in the price of beefsteak.

The Express received Hammett Senior’s handiwork and saw that it was good, but didn’t see that it was the handiwork of Hammett Junior. Those were also the days when you might receive a £30 cheque from the Daily Mirror simply for dispelling a rumour that local boy Roy Jenkins, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, had worn velvet-lined gloves when attending Pentwyn Primary School.

‘Bygone Days was a popular Free Press feature. They were the bygone days of Jack Salter’s youth; Reg Nichols’s too.

The bygone days Reg was deep-mining in the file room were so bygone as to be almost unrecognisable and, over Reg’s half-moon glasses, barely decipherable.

The days of the Free Press I’m recalling here are themselves bygone.

They were paper days, print days. They’ve given way to plurality of view. Where once the only published drama critic in the upper Eastern Valley was the editor of the Free Press, there are now critics aplenty of all sorts, with an outlet on the internet. This might be thought the supreme example of a mixed blessing.

In any case, the Free Press version of the sacrosanct printed word has been more or less abandoned by those who once bought and read it, often in spite of themselves and their better instincts.

Journalists have always held an unjustifiably high opinion of themselves.

Did I enjoy life at the Free Press? It had its moments.

Where does all this predicated wistfulness sit in The Matter of Wales? Jack Salter’s Free Press did an amateurish survey of the Welsh language in its circulation area, discovering that only a family in Pontnewydd and a couple in Varteg, near Blaenavon, regarded Welsh as their first language. A dozen speakers max.

Welsh

It was nonsense, of course; it may have been three dozen. But the paper never printed a word of Welsh in my era.

Its earlier readers would have found that odd: at the turn of the century, uproar greeted the appointment of an English-speaking incumbent at St Cadoc’s Church at Trevethin, a mile up Penygarn Hill from Pontypool town centre. That its pages significantly reflected what went on in the evolution of a monoglot Welsh industrial valley before coal mining and other heavy industries began to decline, and before computers arrived, is also debatable.

That valley, it should be said, had a burgeoning new town at its southern extremity, full of English immigrants who’d become Welsh overnight but not, except in a few cases later on, Welsh-speaking.

Ours was mainly passive journalism, in which reporters waited for things to happen. With neither the resources nor the inclination for investigating what would otherwise remain uncovered, it didn’t matter that Welsh affairs, or affairs placed in a Wales context, were left untouched.

Most other affairs were too.

Those hills, of which the original Free Press was the titular herald, were nevertheless bryniau Cymru and closer to Welsh traditions than to English.

An eventually editionised and computerised Free Press went on to be taken over and subsumed, but that doesn’t concern me. The future, like the past, is another country.

Nigel Jarrett is a former newspaperman and a double prizewinner: the Rhys Davies award and the inaugural Templar Shorts award, both for short fiction. He’s had eight books published, including in 2023 his fourth story collection, Five Go to Switzerland. In March 2024, his second poetry collection, Gwyriad, was published by Cockatrice Books. He took part in last year’s Hay Winter Festival with other leading Welsh writers at an event organised by Parthian, his first publisher. He writes and reviews for Jazz Journal and Acumen poetry magazine, among several others, and was formerly chief music critic of the South Wales Argus. His Never Lost for Words: Selected Essays is due to be published this year. He lives in Abergavenny.