Chapter 23: My youthful writing

Writing as a compulsion

Let’s go back a bit and return to my youth…

I’ve always loved writing. In my teens I would often write letters to friends and members of my family living away from my hometown, Charlton, Victoria, Australia. I assume that none of these missives still exist.

I also earned a few pounds (before the decimal change to dollars) from magazines that paid for letters that were published.  

This photo was taken when I was about four, tapping away at my father’s typewriter. I have no idea what I was writing as it was not kept for posterity.

I have a near-complete file of letters and diaries sent to my mother in Melbourne after my wife Rosemary and I moved to London. They are an entertaining, sometimes very embarrassing, read.

I am told that I am a reasonably good story teller, but I’ve never claimed to be a great writer because my vocabulary is sadly lacking. I have huge admiration for an ex-BBC friend who writes wonderfully and has me reaching for the dictionary when I come across some of the words he uses. I always discover that he has chosen precisely the correct and best word to describe a situation. Another ex-BBC friend is an outstanding writer and he leaves me thinking “I wish I could write like that”.

That said, I repeat that I continue to enjoy writing at whatever level of skill and will admit that it is a compulsion. Nothing that I wrote in my very early days seems to have survived. However, when I began my printing apprenticeship with the family newspaper, the Charlton Tribune, I did contribute occasional small news items. My first by-lined article was published in the Tribune in 1956 when I was 18 and had returned from a scout jamboree at Wonga Park on the outskirts of Melbourne:

That was my second scout jamboree. The first was in Sydney in 1952 with my lifetime mate, Ron Winsall, and the late Graeme Crossley, tragically killed in a car crash in his twenties. Here we are about to set out from Charlton on a very long and tedious steam train journey to Sydney:

I probably wrote an account of the first jamboree, but if so, it didn’t make it into the Charlton Tribune. However, there was this mention before the event in the Tribune of November 14, 1952:

My printing apprenticeship was completed with the Shepparton News in Shepparton Victoria. On taking some rubbish to the tip at the neighbouring town of Mooroopna, I was shocked to see that the occupants were a large family of Aborigines. This prompted me to write the following article that was published in the Shepp News, as it was widely known. I was then aged 19:

As this chapter began with the use of words, let me fill the remaining space with this offering from my time when I was teaching television news at the London College of Printing after leaving the BBC:

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