Brief encounter – Donald Trelford

I re-read Donald Trelford’s memoir at the weekend.

Published in 2017, the former editor of the Observer wrote Shouting In the Street: Adventures and Misadventures of a Fleet Street Survivor after being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2013:

Being given such life-changing news naturally provokes dramatic, even melodramatic, thoughts. It was time, I thought, to get it all down before it was too late.

Sadly he died last week, aged 85, but to give you some idea of the man his fifth child was born in 2011 when he was 72, and his sixth child arrived in 2014 when he was 76. Impressive!

Editor of the Observer for 18 years from 1975 to 1993, Trelford was from the same generation of journalists as Paul Johnson, who also died recently, and Max Hastings (now 77) whose own memoir, Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers, is one of the best on the subject.

Trelford was a Fleet Street editor during a particularly turbulent time, with the industry struggling to modernise and adapt to the new technology that eventually curbed the power of the print unions and some pretty dodgy working practises.

For much of this time he also had to work with 'Tiny' Rowland but that's another story. (See 'Time to set the record straight on the Observer and the Harrods takeover'.)

Trelford left the Observer in 1993 after the paper was bought by the Guardian Media Group. The following year I invited him to take part in a series of events I was organising with a format very similar to BBC1's Question Time.

The venue was the New Theatre at King’s College, London, just off The Strand. With a steeply raked auditorium, theatre style lighting and a good sound system, the production values were quite high. I even commissioned a theme tune to start the 'show'!

Also on the panel that day (Tuesday May 17, 1994) were two MPs, Piers Merchant (Conservative) and Austin Mitchell (Labour).

Chaired by John Hosken (aka 'BBC John, the Mighty Atom', previous guests had included future Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy, John Whittingdale (still a Conservative MP, 29 years later), and Michael White, the Guardian's political editor.

Subsequent panellists included Dr Alan Sked (founder of Ukip), Labour MEP Richard Balfe, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Julian Oswald, and journalist Simon Hoggart so it was quite an eclectic bunch, but given my long-standing interest in Fleet Street Trelford was the booking that probably pleased me most and I was thrilled to meet him, albeit briefly.

He died in Majorca where he, his third wife Claire, and their two young children had lived for more than a decade, with the former editor writing a regular column for the local English language newspaper, the Daily Bulletin.

He also wrote occasional articles for The Oldie. His final piece, 'Snooker's gone to pot', published in August last year, highlighted his growing disillusionment with the game.

Why has this happened? he asked. 'The main reason is that the players have become robotic - skilled workmen rather than artists.' But he also quoted world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan whose explanation was 'simple'. ‘The smoking ban,' said Ronnie, 'killed the clubs.’

Sound familiar?

Anyway, as an outsider who enjoys an affectionate and probably rose-tinted view of the golden age of Fleet Street, I'm sorry we've lost another link with its past.

Talking of which, one of my favourite books is A Short Walk Down Fleet Street by Alan Watkins, which Peter Oborne nominated as 'A book that changed me'.

Me too although when I read it 20 years ago the world Watkins describes had long vanished. It's still a great read though.