This story started in September last year during a conversation with my niece. I know that my late brother Peter would have been a treasure trove of memories and artefacts of family history, but I never found the time to speak with him specifically about this new strand of storytelling that I was thinking about, before he died three years ago. I regret this. So, when I mentioned to my niece that I recalled an article that he had written for one of the many newspapers that he wrote for, about the days of my father as a bookmaker and his ‘runners’ who collected bets around the small town of Redhill in Surrey, and wondering if he kept any copies of his work, his niece said that she doubted if he had ever saved anything that he reported on. He was a reporter and journalist in the days when there was no digital activity and the only copies of anything he wrote would have been typewritten carbon copies that no newspaper office would have saved. Newspapers would have saved copies of their daily and weekly editions and, because he wrote for several newspapers, it would have been a problem to try and find who he had written for.
Shortly after this conversation, I realised that the best way to try and find any of Peter’s articles would be via the British Newspaper Archive. These archives are held and managed by the British Library in London and all the newspapers they have in their collection have been digitalised. New editions of obscure journals are being added to the collection every week. The collection is vast. I decided to take out a subscription which cost me £99 for the year. It has proved so successful for my research that It does amount to great value for finding records of people that I knew in the 1960’s and 70’s and for the associated social history that it recounts. The Archive site has a fast and efficient search engine and just by inputting my brother’s name, I came across a gold mine that even he would have been impressed by.
This is a preamble for introducing a new category to Instant Cousins. Nearly everything that I write is about the research that I undertake into the family history of my parents and my wife’s parents. I have also written a history of my house and there are other stories that I have written that don’t fit into those categories, but which remain important to me and some of my readers.
My brother, Peter Carver was a newspaper reporter and a political journalist for more than 20 years before he transferred to the arena of public relations which many journalists do or did in past days. Peter was born in 1942 in Redhill and I lived under the same roof as him for the first ten years of my life until 1957. Two momentous things happened that year. My father, who was a licenced turf accountant, decided to move into a new trade. He wanted to become a publican, and he found a small hotel and pub in Bexhill on Sea in Sussex the tenancy of which he purchased from the brewers, and this meant that he would take the whole family with him. Well, perhaps not the whole family. My father planned to transfer the betting business and our house to my eldest brother. An older sister had decided to pursue a career in nursing in London and she moved into a hospital’s nurse’s accommodation. Another older sister was working as a typist and had become engaged to be married so she stayed in Redhill until her marriage the following year. I and my two younger brothers were the only siblings to move to our new home in Bexhill. This left Peter who at the age of 15 was coming to the end of his school life. He had only one ambition.
At the age of 13 Peter won an essay competition that, from my memory, was a perfectly crafted piece of prose that was answering the question of how he anticipated the future. It was one item of Peter that was retained for ever by my parents in a scrapbook because they were quite proud of this achievement. Which is surprising because my mother was never in favour of further education and believed that we were all better off pursuing work and earning money.
Peter’s ambition was to become a newspaper reporter. There is no easy way of doing this because, when you think about it, how many advertisements have there ever been for a newspaper reporter? He made an appointment to see an editor at the Croydon Advertiser. Croydon is a large town to the south of London, a short journey up from Redhill and the Advertiser was the parent company of smaller local editions such as the Beckenham and Penge Advertiser.
The story that I recall, and which I suspect that his family might be able to add to, was that he was asking for the Croydon Advertiser to give him a job because he really wanted to become a reporter. At such a young age, the editor tried to put him off. Peter persisted with his request and the Advertiser decided to take him on as a cub reporter for a weekly wage of ten shillings per week, which even for 1957 was a low wage. The idea was to put him off. Peter succeeded and became a regular reporter for the Advertiser. He eventually became a senior reporter for the Beckenham and Penge Advertiser which covered a strange corridor of South London.
This was a reason why we shared the same roof for only ten years of our lives. I went to Bexhill with my parents and younger brothers while Peter stayed in Redhill lodging with our older brother.
At the age of 15 this was his apprenticeship into journalism and in the mid 1960’s he landed a job that every reporter would dream of. He became a lobby correspondent in the House of Commons, and he worked for a press agency in Fleet Street that syndicated his weekly political overviews to several different provincial newspapers that could not afford to have a permanent parliamentary correspondent. He worked there for more than a decade. He had arrived in achieving his ambition.
It is in this arena of his writing career that I have discovered many of the articles that he wrote, giving readers in those years an overview of what was happening in politics and trying to show what the implications might be for them. For readers today, these articles are a gold mine of political social history and worthy of research to show how well he wrote and to compare the topics of his day with the life that we lead in Britain today.
Even when Peter was writing about something close to him or his family past, it would reflect on the implications for society when parliament was looking to change the way the public went about their social lives, probably in the same way that parliament does today.
Next week I shall start this new series of reflections on Peter Carver’s writing history, with some background into an article that he wrote about Woodrow Wyatt’s attempt to change entirely, the way in which the betting public had their flutter.