Brilliant writer Akass wrote two columns for Goldsmith’s new mag — and trousered £36,000
Columnist Jon Akass had a lot to thank Jimmy Goldsmith for. I mean A LOT.
Akass, a sublime writer, was labouring on Larry Lamb’s Sun for £24,000 a year when he received a better offer.
Goldsmith had set up a news magazine called Now! His editor, Tony Shrimsley, brother of Bernard (of this parish) offered Akass £36,000 a year to jump ship and join the new paper.
Akass had tried to wring a bit extra from Lamb. But Lamb, a blunt, intimidating Yorkshireman who thought nothing of spending £200 on a bottle of wine, rebuffed him. As it turned out, he would regret it.
Akass joined Now! on April 16, 1981. Days later, its circulation moribund, its losses mounting, the magazine closed.
Goldsmith was a hard-nosed tycoon but a man of his word. He paid off all his journalists precisely according to the terms of their contracts. Akass walked out with £36,000 in the bank. He had filed two columns.
Soon afterwards, Lamb offered him his old job back – at his new salary. Talk about win-win!
Akass had joined the old Daily Herald in 1956 and stayed when it became Hugh Cudlipp’s IPC Sun in 1964. He was part of a stable of writers that included Nancy Banks-Smith, who wrote on television, and Clement Freud, who had a cookery column that invariably veered off into surreal whimsy.
He stayed on too when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper and turned it into a very different beast with Lamb as its editor. Akass was a fine reporter as well as a brilliant colour writer and made his name covering such colossal stories as the Munich air disaster, which killed many of the “Busby Babes” of Manchester United.
He was 24 at the time and working in Manchester for the Daily Herald. He went out into the streets as the story broke and talked to shocked citizens. He described how he stopped to buy a newspaper and the seller asked him: “How many do you want?”
Why would I need more than one? he thought. Then he read the story and realised.
“The crash, in the eyes of Manchester, was a disaster equal to the outbreak of war, or the sinking of an ocean liner, or the death of a monarch.”
A city weeps, the headline read. And the piece earned Akass a job in London.
He wrote a column from America; he covered the trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem; he reported on mercenaries fighting in Katanga in the Belgian Congo; he interviewed singer Juliette Greco (a pipe smoker, he revealed); and he quizzed the footballing genius who was Jimmy Greaves.
The questions were shrewd and intelligent and the writing pithy, witty and wise.
Perhaps his most emotional writing – angry, sorrowful and despairing at times – was from the Welsh pit village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, where in 1966 a black avalanche of coal slurry slid down the mountain and consumed the school, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
Akass witnessed the desperate, unrelenting search for their bodies, full of admiration for the men who treated the tiny corpses with reverence and respect.
Later, he watched – and recorded every detail – as the children were buried in two trenches, each about 75 yards long.
The following year he was in the Sinai desert as the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours raged. The range and power of his reporting is astonishing.
Akass stayed with Lamb’s Sun until it suddenly became Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun. MacKenzie wanted rid of him, preferably without the need for a huge payout.
He called Akass in and told him his column was crap and chucked it in the bin, according to writer Colin Dunne who was on the paper at the time.
Akass, who called the new editor MacFrenzy – the name was common currency, so it may not be an Akass original – left and crossed the road to the Daily Express.
I cannot say that I knew Akass, even after he joined the Express. He was a character I saw in the pub sometimes, a forbidding figure with a dodgy comb-over, the rest of his hair hanging lank over his ears and collar.
He wore a drinker’s scowl that seemed to say: “I am engaged in the act of suicide by gin and I’d be obliged if you’d f**k off and leave me alone to get on with it.”
Akass had an extraordinary capacity for drink. Sometimes – while out on a cheeky slope, say – one would see him in the Old Bell on a bar stool. His tall glass would contain the slices of lemon from his previous drinks.
There might be four of them, which doesn’t seem so much until you consider that he drank trebles.
He was putting off the evil hour when he had to go back to the Black Lubyanka and write. But when it could wait no longer he sat down at his typewriter and crafted a column that was anything but “crap”.
Once, at a party conference, events overtook his column and it was unusable. “He had to write another one. And he was in no state to do so,” wrote his friend Norman Frisby.
“As he staggered off into another room, Walter Terry, the distinguished political editor, discussed the possibility of someone else writing it in Jon’s name.
“Half an hour later Jon came rocking through the door with another column that was even better than the first. He really could do it drunk or sober.”
Richard Littlejohn, the brilliant Daily Mail columnist, recalled in a piece for the British Journalism Review being taken to the Old Bell for a celebratory Guinness after writing his first column for the Evening Standard.
“Two men had beaten us to it,” he wrote. “In the corner sat George Gale and Jon Akass, two masters of the columnist’s craft, sucking treble gins, clearly in recovery mode.
“My Standard colleague, Tony Maguire, nudged me and indicated the grand old men. ‘Look carefully,’ he said. ‘That’s your future’.”
Akass, whose first name was actually John, was born in Bedford and went to Bedford Modern School, now an independent fee-paying school (£17,751 a year). Coincidentally, this was the same school that former Daily Express editor Sir Nicholas Lloyd attended, though by my reckoning they were not quite contemporaries.
Lloyd was his editor when Akass, a chain smoker as well as a ferocious drinker, died of cancer in 1990, aged 56.
Many of the stories related above come from a book put together and self-published by his brother-in-law, John Fitzgerald. It is part biography and part a ragbag of fond recollections, memorabilia and journalistic legend. It also contains many of his best columns, still funny, warm, human and readable.
If you want a copy, go to lulu.com
FOOTNOTE: The book reveals that on one of his first newspapers, the Lincolnshire Echo, he was friends with three other young, ambitious journalists. They were known as The Gang of Four.
Norman Frisby was one and he wrote for the Express before going into television. Frank Palmer, the Daily Mirror’s man in the East Midlands for 20 years, was another Akass pal. And the third? Why, it’s our old friend Tony Fowler, who joined the Express as a sub and rose to be northern editor.
However hard I try, I cannot picture him as a gang member, even one as benign as this lot.
*****
As I browsed the best seller lists in Saturday’s Times, hoping to find the name of my old friend Rory Clements (formerly of this parish), I suddenly noticed something extraordinary.
Of the top ten best selling paperback fiction books, eight were written by women. In the hardback fiction list, not a single book was written by a male author.
What’s going on? I wondered. Have men stopped writing? Perhaps they’ve just stopped writing well? Or has the sisterhood now so completely taken over the publishing industry that men are shut out?
Then I noticed something else strange. No fewer than four of the women writers in the paperback bestsellers list – that’s half of them, remember – write fantasy novels.
Some have been made into TV series and others are optioned, such as Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series, which Amazon MGM Studios wants to put on screen.
Come on, boys. Keep up. Castles, dragons, witches. That’s what’s selling now.
*****
If you haven’t watched Virdee, the newish BBC crime series set in Bradford’s Asian community, take it from me, you must.
The protagonist, Harry Virdee (Staz Nair) is a British Sikh detective who treads a fine line between crook and copper. With his good looks and cool overcoat, he reminds me of an Indian Luther.
It is beautifully acted. One story line concerns the tensions in Virdee’s family caused by his marriage to a Pakistani woman.
It must have been a nightmare for the casting director to find so many actors who could do a convincing Bradford accent. But he, or they, have pulled it off. Everyone’s pitch perfect.
I feel a blockbuster coming on.
*****
“English life, while very pleasant, is rather bland. I expected kindness and gentility and I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth.” – S J Perelman
RICHARD DISMORE
25 February 2025
