CHAPTER TWELVE – BRISTOL, CARY GRANT AND MARRIAGE

 

Bristol is rightly one of the most famous cities in Britain with its long sea-faring history and aviation heritage.

 

But when I met a fellow reporter on a National Union of Journalists weekend and heard about a possible opening on the Western Daily Press, I had no knowledge of this metropolis, which was to play such a major part in my life, apart from a half-remembered pioneering BBC 2 fly-on-the-wall documentary, The Newcomers, based on a young couple, their new home and the birth of their twins.

 

It was only later that I discovered that the star of the programme, A.C.H. Smith, was a feature writer on the Western Daily Press and a colleague there of the illustrious playwright Tom Stoppard.

 

I was interviewed for the reporter’s job by Norman Walters, Country News Editor of both the Western Daily Press and the larger Bristol Evening Post, and shortly afterwards received a letter from editor Eric Price confirming my appointment to start in late August, 1964, with the arrangement of a room in a B&B - Commercial House, in Brigstocke Road, St Pauls’, which took in journalists.

 

I planned to travel to Bristol on the Sunday before my first Monday, but with typical procrastination I had yet to write up the minutes of the South London NUJ chapel (branch) for which I was clerk, so my ever-supportive brother, Hugh, volunteered to drive me in my Mini to the West Country.

 

He said he would go back home by train – which involved travelling to Paddington and then crossing London by tube to Charing Cross to travel on the Dartford Loop Line back to New Eltham.

 

He drove as I wrote and by the time we reached Bristol, the minutes were completed and I gave them to him to post the next day and dropped him off at Temple Meads station.

 

It was just recently that I discovered from one of my father’s letters in the archive that Hugh got back to London only to miss his connection at Charing Cross and had to be picked up and driven home – so my start in Bristol had the effect of inconveniencing the whole of the family.

 

I meanwhile drove back to the B&B in Brigstocke Road, where I had earlier dropped my suitcase, only to find the door locked and the landlady and lodgers, including a soon-to-be colleague, Tony Snow, nowhere to be seen.

 

Sitting in my rapidly-cooling Mini in a darkening street a long way from home and the bosom of my family, I suddenly felt quite vulnerable and this uncomfortable feeling was not helped when a large black man knocked on the steamed-up window of my car.

 

I wound down the window, wondering if my last moment had come, but this kind individual just wanted to find out if I was all right. I was, but I was even better when Tony and the landlady, Mrs Aish, returned from a nearby pub – her surname of course led to my father addressing later missives to Aisha!

 

My letter of appointment from editor Eric Price had said I would be permanently based in Bristol, so perhaps I should not have been surprised to find myself a week or so later in Cheltenham, where the newspaper was starting a circulation drive.

 

It was the same Regency spa town where in 2006 with Nige I would help organise a successful PR promotion campaign for the Big Sleep Hotel on behalf of Cosmo Fry of the chocolate dynasty and his backers, including Hollywood legend John Malkovich.

 

My colleagues in 1964 were reporter Bert Reavley and photographer Graham Kilsby, who welcomed me with open arms and were eager to introduce me to the delights of their newspaper patch.

 

Bert, who was hopelessly in love with a statuesque beautiful showgirl, Kim - I once memorably saw her dance at the Sea Club in Monte Carlo - went on to Fleet Street and then to the United States, settling in Florida.

 

There in 1996 he founded the Mavrix celebrity news photo agency – some might call them paparazzi, but 21st century newspapers and TV stations could not be without them.

 

Following his too early death in 2011, Mavrix has been run by his daughter, Chola, and her husband, and boasts an online image database of more than half a million images and thousands of video clips.

 

Graham meanwhile was dating Kim’s equally lovely sister. Jackie, a fashion model on the catwalk at Cheltenham’s Cavendish House, but his real love was aircraft and music and the latter took him with his guitar to Nashville, where he was both singer and song-writer

 

Later he was to move to Houston, Texas, but re-enter my world on a visit just after Christmas, 1987, telling me of his dream for a Bristol aviation museum, which seemed to me an obvious idea which the city fathers had ignored and could turn into a campaign for the Western Daily Press, of which by now I was assistant editor.

 

In the next few months I formed the initial committee for the Bristol Aero Collection, but it was to be another 30 years before the £19 million Aerospace Bristol museum was officially opened at Filton, near Bristol, in October, 2017, with Princess Anne as the patron and displaying the last British Airways Concorde to fly as well as many other reminders of the city’s aeronautical heritage.

 

Back in Cheltenham in 1964 the circulation drive provided everything I had dreamed of - chasing stories from dawn to dusk, poring through the opposition Cheltenham Echo evening newspaper over tea and cakes each afternoon, trusting that we had not been scooped, and getting to know all the best pubs in the evening.

 

But I almost made my own headlines, with my choice of a basement flat in the town – I liked it, but my mother on her only visit with my father remarked that there was a smell of what seemed like gas in the place.

 

I, of course, was focussed on news-gathering and foolishly ignored her words, which I recalled the following year, when I heard that a subsequent tenant had been found dead with carbon-monoxide poisoning – my guardian angel had obviously been working overtime to spare me.  

 

My exciting time in Cheltenham was all-too brief and I returned to Bristol head office in Silver Street and my small rented room in Brigstocke Road in the care of landlady Mrs Aish.

 

And it was her who knocked on my bedroom door one Sunday morning, when I was due to start the early shift, with the cry, worthy of a Victorian melodrama – “Murder, Mr Gibbs, murder!”

 

It turned out that the security man at the office had telephoned with a message to me that the manager of Yeo Brothers & Paull camping shop in Victoria Street had been found that morning battered to death with a brick, his killer having finished him off by throttling him with one of the tent ropes and then calmly washing his hands in a bottle of milk before walking out and disappearing into the midst of Saturday afternoon strollers.

 

My father, of course, summed up this heinous crime in a subsequent postcard as “Murder within tent.”

 

After being told again that I would be permanently based in Bristol, maybe it was inevitable that a few weeks later I should find myself in Yeovil, tasked to open up North Dorset for a yet-to-be-appointed new reporter by building contacts and discovering the timetables for courts and council meetings.

 

It proved a fruitful patch, as it included the towns of Shaftesbury, Gillingham and Sturminster Newton, and of course I was expected by Norman Walters and the Western Daily Press news editor, Norman Rich, to supply a good flow of stories, not just swan around chatting to people.

 

Again my district days came swiftly to an end and I returned to Bristol, where I was to remain for the next 29 years – I suppose that is pretty permanent.

 

Back at Commercial House Mrs Aish moved me towards the top of the building into a small room which had been converted from a larger one by the simple expedient of building a partition wall down the centre, finishing in the middle of a sash window.

 

My next door neighbours were a group of Irish labourers, who used to come back late in the evening after a heavy session at the pub, sometimes even later than me returning from the night shift, and crash about their room before falling into bed.

 

However they also had the iron constitution to wake up early, throw up their window - and mine by association – and head off to work. On one memorable morning I woke to find a dusting of snow on my pillow.

 

It was perhaps the encouragement I needed to find a place of my own, renting a flat with my erstwhile colleague from Cheltenham, Bert Reavley, near the Fry’s chocolate factory in Keynsham – spelt K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M as generations of Radio Luxembourg listeners learned courtesy of the pools guru Horace Batchelor.

 

As a young journalist it was an exciting and endlessly entertaining time, including such magic moments as my review of Bob Dylan’s ill-received concert at the Colston Hall in 1966, which led him to throw the newspaper across his hotel room, and a firm handshake with soon-to-be Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979 as I showed her round the newsroom on her pre-General Election tour of the West Country.

 

There was also my hurried interview with Hollywood legend Cary Grant (Archibald Leach during his Bristol boyhood) as he tried to avoid me en route to his new bride, Dyan Cannon, waiting in his suite at the then Royal Hotel on College Green.

 

He told me to “Buzz off”, Eric Price put the story on Page One and the star telephoned me the next morning to praise the report and offer an exclusive interview on his next visit – but this was never to materialise.

 

But I was feted with another Page One story, a letter telling me to leave the star and his bride alone and a cartoon by our resident artist Rex Newbury, with the cleaning ladies saying – “I know, Mr Gibbs, but who’s this Cary Grant?”

 

During my first four years, I returned initially every fortnight to New Eltham, bringing my mother a present of dirty washing and leaving with washed and neatly-ironed laundry, plus a boxful of her never-to-be-forgotten mince pies, which I used to ration until they could be replenished.

 

I would often arrive home at around 4am, after the long pre-motorway drive from Bristol following the end of my night shift, and my father, always an early riser, would be there to greet me with bacon, egg and debates.

 

Whether it was long hair or the inadequacies of modern music compared to his beloved jazz of the Twenties and Thirties, the discussions would rise in intensity and volume until my mother came downstairs to intervene with the admonishment – “Will you let that boy go to bed!”

 

My mother told me many years later that he valued this sparky interaction with me as we were so much alike in many ways and had wept when in 1964 I had left for Bristol and the wider world, saying: “It will never be the same.”

 

In 1966 my return visits became weekly following my burgeoning relationship with Alison, a student nurse at the Hammersmith Hospital, who I had met at a party on the opposite side of London and been immediately smitten.

 

My mother and father welcomed her into their home with their usual generosity and were delighted when our engagement was followed in July, 1968, by our wedding at St Peter’s Church in Peterchurch, Herefordshire, the reception being held at the nearby Fairfield Secondary School, where Alison’s father, Ronald Collett, was headmaster.

 

Our honeymoon a week later was helped in no small measure by my previous appointment as the Western Daily Press air correspondent.

 

It was a post I achieved not because of any knowledge of the industry which had spread the city’s name throughout the world or it must be said any particular interest in aeroplanes – I just happened to be sitting in the newsroom when Eric Price came in and asked for someone to cover a reception at which Air France was to launch its service between Bristol, Paris and Toulouse for the growing Concorde project.

 

My story made the Page One lead under my by-line the next day and Air France were so delighted I was henceforth invited to all their annual Miss World receptions at the Commonwealth Institute in London, where I met the French Concorde test pilot, Andre Turcat, drank copious amounts of Champagne, ate oodles of caviar and smoked salmon and danced the night away with the chaperone-less gorgeous contestants.

 

It also earned me a flight with a civic party on a lumbering Breguet Universel plane to Paris, where our flight was met by a fleet of Cadillacs driven by impassive  chauffeurs, all wearing dark glasses.

 

My first view of the City of Love was from the back seat of one of the limousines alongside Bristol Labour leader Alderman Wally Jenkins as we made our way to the world-famous George V hotel where a suite awaited each of the group.

 

Later the Cadillacs took us to the Lido Club for a front row dinner and show, but the Lord Mayor Alderman Tom Martin was reluctant to leave, even after the outrage of being charged for going to Messieurs toilets, so we watched a repeat performance by the nubile ladies and then at around 2am walked up the Champs Elysee to the hotel, telling our chauffeurs, who had been waiting patiently, that they could go home for the night – what was left of it.

 

A full French breakfast was followed by a tour of Versailles in the ubiquitous Cadillacs and after a suitably lavish lunch in the Eiffel Tower restaurant we were transported back to our less-than-luxury aircraft for the flight home.

 

And of course it was only natural that I should take further advantage of this special relationship for my honeymoon - organising a freebie flight to Paris and on to Tangier.

 

Alison had already arranged a free stay in an apartment block, owned by one of her heart patients at the Hammersmith Hospital, who was half Moroccan. We did however pay for our travel insurance.

 

Waiting for us back in Clevedon was a three-bedroom centrally-heated detached house with sea glimpses, purchased for the princely sum of £3,995 – and looking back now it seems incredible that this was just eight years after I had escaped from my unloved grammar school.

 

The choice of the town which was destined to be my home for the rest of my life was purely accidental – I had only visited it once in my four years in the Bristol area and that for a Western Daily Press Safe Drivers Club rally in the Salthouse car park.

 

I originally wanted to live in Portishead – some ten miles away down the coast – after seeing the new home of one of my newspaper colleagues, Geoff Gunn, built by a Midland-based firm, E. Fletcher.

 

I rang their office to be told that all the houses on the development had been sold, but they were just starting to build in Clevedon, so I headed there to find a muddy site full of JCBs and cement-mixers.

 

But the setting close to the sea wall and alongside green fields with clear views to the Mendip Hills was more than enough to convince me, so I put down a deposit on what would become 16, Wedmore Road.

 

It was only as I was writing this that I discovered that the voice on the telephone which directed me to Clevedon probably belonged to my now great friend, Sue Loder, who was working for the builders’ sales manager – a bit of a coincidence that.

 

The Gibbs newly-weds returned from honeymoon to the just-completed house - already equipped with a New World gas cooker, Hotpoint Iced Diamond fridge and Hotpoint twin-tub washing machine - and it was back to the Western Daily Press for me and off to a new job at the Bristol Children’s Hospital for Alison.

 

My mother and father loved to visit us beside the seaside, where they helped to turn the shell of a newly-completed building into a home, buying a table and chairs and other furnishings to breathe life into it.

 

For them it must have been a bitter-sweet experience, reminding them of the life that might have been theirs in Exmouth had not a world war intervened.

 

My father declared he would love to buy one of the bungalows in the neighbouring road once my mother had finished teaching and on their drive back to London would say with feeling: “Well, Girl, it’s back to the slums,”, although he loved his house in Domonic Drive.

 

Seven years later my mother, at the age of 67, was persuaded to retire and move to Clevedon, within sight of her father’s birthplace in Newport, Monmouthshire, but it was without her Man.