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Five of the Greatest Stories Ever Told

It’s that time of year: shorts, flip-flops … and lists.

 

They are in every newspaper and magazine you open. Saturday’s Times alone had two – 50 autumn cultural highlights and nine bad habits that ruin marriages.

 

Often they concern books and films: The top 100 best-sellers of the past 50 years (Sunday Times magazine); six books you can read in a day (Economist); the 100 greatest films of all time (the Telegraph).

 

Here on the Daily Drone, we are determined not to be listless, even if we are paid-up members of His Lordship’s Can’t Be Arsed Club.

 

So, for your delight and delectation, we today publish our list of The Greatest Stories Ever Told* (between 1974 and 2009).

 

5 Harrods bombing

This was not the deadliest or the most politically significant outrage carried out by the IRA on the British mainland. But it is in our list because on that December day in 1983, the Daily Express lost one of its own.

 

Philip Geddes, 24, who was learning his trade as a reporter on the William Hickey column, happened to be in the Knightsbridge store when he heard of the police alert and went to investigate.

 

The bomb, containing 25lb of explosives, was left in a car parked in Hans Crescent, at the side of Harrods. It was on a timer and exploded at 1.21pm. The blast killed three police officers and three bystanders, one of whom was Geddes.

 

The bomb injured 90 and damaged support for the IRA because of the civilian casualties. Its so-called Army Council admitted that IRA members had exploded the bomb but claimed that it had not authorised the attack.

 

The Philip  Geddes Memorial Trust was set up in 1984 and each year since has awarded prizes to the most promising journalism students at Oxford University. Geddes studied at St Edmund Hall, where a tree and a plaque in the gardens commemorate his life.

 

4 Intruder at the Queen’s bedside

Who wouldn’t like to have been a fly on the wall as reporter Norman Luck’s police contacts pitched him the story of Palace intruder Michael Fagan?

 

Luck: “So let me get this straight. Fagan climbs over the Palace wall and nobody spots him?”

 

Scotland Yard Detective: “Right. He did trigger an alarm, though.”

 

Luck: “And that brought the police running?”

 

Detective: “Well, no. They thought the alarm was playing up, so they switched it off.”

 

Luck: “What did Fagan do next?”

 

Detective: “He shinned up a drainpipe on to the Palace roof, took off his shoes and socks and climbed in through an open window.”

 

Luck: “So now he’s inside Buckingham Palace, what does he do?”

 

Detective: “He wanders around. He has a look at a stamp collection that belonged to George V, then he sits on a throne.”

 

Luck: “A throne? You’re making this up.”

 

Detective: “No, honest, Norman. He set off more alarms but the plods assumed there was a glitch and switched them off again.”

 

Luck: “And then he’s in the Queen’s bedroom?”

 

Detective: “Yes, quite by chance. Apparently, he didn’t believe it could be her room because it wasn’t grand enough. When he pulled back the curtains around her bed, there was the Monarch, sound asleep.”

 

Luck: “But she woke up?”

 

Detective: “Yes, Fagan was holding a piece of a glass ashtray he had smashed. He’d cut himself.”

 

Luck: “Did she scream?”

 

Detective: “No, she pressed an alarm bell but the copper outside her room had gone off shift. So she phoned for help but no one turned up. Then the Queen attracted the attention of a passing chambermaid and they got Fagan into a pantry by offering him a cigarette. A footman who had been walking the royal corgis turned up and kept him talking util help arrived.”

 

Luck: “They’re not going to believe this in the office.”

 

They did, eventually. Daily Express Editor Christopher Ward insisted that Luck stand up the story from other sources, which he did. Ward then printed the astonishing tale.

 

When the first edition hit the streets, Kelvin MacKenzie, by now Editor of the Sun, called the backbench of the Daily Express, where he had been Night Editor, and said: “F*** me, you finally got a real story.”

 

Fagan, a petty crook, was never charged over that Palace affair. It was classed as trespass, a civil offence. But he was charged with stealing wine from Prince Charles’s room during a previous intrusion. The charge was dropped when he went into a psychiatric hospital.

 

Home Secretary William Whitelaw offered his resignation but Margaret Thatcher refused to accept it. The scandal led to wholesale changes in the Royal Family’s protection.

 

3 We find Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs

Ronnie Biggs was part of the gang that carried out one of the most fabled capers in British criminal history.

 

The Great Train Robbery in August, 1963, netted £2.61 million (£69 million in today’s money) when the gang halted a Royal Mail train from Glasgow to London at Ledburn, Buckinghamshire, by tampering with signals.

 

In the course of the robbery, they attacked the train driver, Jack Mills, with a metal bar. He never fully recovered from his injuries.

 

Biggs was a bit-part player in the heist but was jailed for 30 years along with most of the gang members. But in 1965 he climbed over the wall of Wandsworth Prison and fled to Australia and from there to Brazil.

 

It was a great escape … but not great enough.

 

Biggs was found in 1974 by Daily Express reporter Colin Mackenzie, who cut his teeth on the William Hickey column and was perhaps more at home on gossip or sport pages than on news pages.

 

Mackenzie got his invaluable tip from a friend’s son, who had been backpacking in South America and told him: “I’ve seen someone you would love to meet.”

 

He was dispatched to Rio de Janeiro and when he got there, he found Biggs not just ready to talk but prepared to give himself up to the British Embassy there. He was low on cash and the bronzed beauties and sun-kissed beaches of Brazil were beginning to pall.

 

After nine years on the run, Ronnie wanted to come home.

 

Reporter Mike O’Flaherty and photographer Bill Lovelace were also on the story with Mackenzie in Rio. Look in the archives and you’ll find a picture of the three of them playing poker with Biggs in his flat. Biggs wears a benign smile, the others look like a band of cutthroats.

 

“That night,” O’Flaherty wrote later, “I cleaned Ronald Arthur Biggs, Great Train Robber extraordinaire, out of every cruzeiro he possessed as well as taking Bill and Colin to the proverbial cleaners.

 

“At the end of the session, Bill turned to me and said: ‘ You lucky devil, but I really feel you ought to return your winnings to Her Majesty the Queen.’”

 

The Express trio also milked the old lag for every detail, every anecdote he could recall of his time on the run. He coughed it all on the promise of £35,000 for his story.

 

Their task of was complicated by two factors. The first was that Express Editor Ian McColl had decided to tell police of Mackenzie’s scoop. He had recently splashed the paper on the discovery in Buenos Aires of Nazi bigshot Martin Bormann.

 

A trifle embarrassingly, “Bormann” turned out to be an innocent Argentine schoolteacher. And McColl did not want to risk a repeat of that little misjudgement.

 

So Chief Superintendent Jack Slipper of Scotland Yard was on a plane to Brazil with instructions to bring Biggs back to Britain to face justice. His mission literally went tits up when it emerged that one of Biggs’s Brazilian girlfriends, go-go dancer Raimunda de Castro, was pregnant with his child. Under Brazilian law, the parent of a Brazilian child, even though unborn, cannot be extradited.

 

The second complication was that the rest of Fleet Street was catching up. It was only a matter of time before they came knocking. Mike O’Flaherty again: “When Fleet Street eventually found our apartment and kicked the door in (did they say they smelt gas?), Bill [Lovelace] laid into the invaders with great aplomb and, with my meagre help, repelled them.

 

“In true journalistic style, we ended up having a drink with them in a downstairs bar five minutes later.”

 

Biggs remained free for another 30 years and finally came home to face the music of his own accord. Colin Mackenzie joined the Daily Mail and worked for Nigel Dempster on the diary, then became the paper’s racing correspondent.

 

He wrote a memoir, which he wanted to call There’s an Awful Lot of Copy in Brazil, but his daughter told him no one would know what copy was, so it was published as Pressing My Luck.

 

2 Falklands conflict

On April 2, 1982, Argentine troops invaded the Falkland Islands by amphibious landings. They attacked an empty Royal Marines base, then moved on Government House in Port Stanley. Initially, they met fierce resistance from the garrison of 68 marines but the Governor, Rex Hunt, ordered his men, much to their disgust, to lay down their arms.

 

Margaret Thatcher formed a war Cabinet on April 6 but by then, the nuclear submarine Conqueror and the aircraft carriers Invincible and Hermes were already on their way to the South Atlantic.

 

The task force comprised 123 ships, 43 of them Royal Navy vessels. The 62 merchant ships requisitioned included the Queen Elizabeth 2 which, instead of its usual well-heeled passengers, was carrying the 5th Infantry Brigade.

 

It was an impressive display of post-imperial power but there were deep and genuine concerns over whether we could win a war at the other end of the world. The Americans at the time thought not. Certainly it would be impossible now.

 

But on June 14, after a series of ferocious battles on the high ground that ringed Stanley, the commander of the Argentine garrison, Brigadier General Mario Menéndez, surrendered to Major General Jeremy Moore, who commanded the British land forces.

 

The conflict saw 255 British Servicemen killed and almost 800 wounded. Argentina lost 649 troops with nearly 1,200 wounded. But as with all wars, it was the stories within the story that brought it to life for newspaper readers.

 

The first of these was the sinking of the Sheffield. The Type 42 destroyer was hit on May 4 by an Exocet missile fired from an Argentinian warplane. The strike killed 20 crewmen and seriously injured 24. It was the first Royal Navy ship to be sunk in action since the Second World war.

 

The sombre announcement was relayed to the London Press Club, where reporters and sub-editors were enjoying a drink after the first edition had gone. The mood changed instantly and the journalists put down their pints and headed for the door. For once, there were no stragglers. The country now knew it was in a war.

 

We all took one man – a wounded soldier – to our hearts. Simon Weston, of the Welsh Guards, was aboard the Sir Galahad, a Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship when it was bombed by Argentine fighters at Bluff Cove. It was carrying ammunition, phosphorus bombs and thousands of gallons of diesel and petrol.

 

The Welsh Guards lost 48 killed and 97 wounded. Weston suffered 46 per cent burns. He was unrecognisable when he arrived back in Britain, even to his mother. As he was wheeled past, she turned to his grandmother and said: “Look at that poor boy!”

 

“I cried out, ‘Mam, it’s me!’” Weston said later.

 

People admire Weston. He became a hero without firing a shot in anger. He faced the future without self-pity, always positive. Weston endured years of painful skin grafts, worked inspirationally for charity and eventually married and had three children. He was awarded the OBE and the CBE.

 

On the battlefield, other heroes were emerging. Sergeant Ian McKay, of 3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, earned the Victoria Cross posthumously for leading a platoon that stormed a machinegun post during the battle of Mount Longdon. Express photographer Tom Smith was with 3 Para as they engaged the Argentine forces defending the approach to Port Stanley.

 

Colonel H Jones, Commanding Officer of 2 Para, also won a posthumous VC for charging enemy trenches in the battle of Goose Green. It was an immensely brave act but some of his men thought it reckless and stupid. They believed his job was to lead by directing tactics, not to engage in heroics.

 

1 Death of Diana, Princess of Wales

I never encountered another story that triggered such an outpouring of grief as Diana’s death in a Paris car crash produced.

 

The entire nation mourned her. She was revered for her beauty, her style and fashion, her open refusal to tolerate Charles’s affair with Camilla and her compassion, revealed in her shrewd choice of causes and charities.

 

Who doesn’t remember her embracing a child with AIDS at a time when it was widely believed that the disease could be passed on by bodily contact? Or the picture of her strolling across ground that, until recently, had been sown with mines, her only protection a Perspex shield on her face?

 

Diana had an unerring instinct for public relations and seemingly an umbilical cord to the consciousness of the British public.

 

So when she was killed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris on August 31, 1997, it was as though everyone in the country had lost someone close and dear. People began to lay flowers outside her home, Kensington Palace. Eventually there were said to be 60 million of them, including bouquets from ex-husband Charles and their two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.

 

Diana’s tragedy contained all the necessary elements for a blockbuster story: Sex, drugs, conspiracy and scandal. The Princess of Wales was holidaying with her lover, Dodi Fayed, son of the Harrods owner Mohamed al-Fayed, who also owned the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

 

They wanted to escape the attentions of the paparazzi and were driven at speed from the hotel by Henri Paul, acting security manager of the Ritz. Paul had been drinking pastis in the hotel bar and traces of prescription drugs were found in his blood.

 

He lost control of the car and it smashed into a concrete pillar on a bend in the tunnel. The couple were not wearing seatbelts and died along with Paul.

 

I had passed through the same tunnel hours before on my way home from a holiday in South-West France. The following morning my wife shook me awake to tell me: “Dick, Princess Diana is dead.”

 

I thought at first she was joking, but when I realised she wasn’t, pulled some clothes on and made a beeline for the office. I walked in to find Dave Harbord, who was night editing the paper, almost 24 hours after he had turned up for his shift – an astonishing effort by a great journalist.

 

Diana’s funeral took place on September 6 and was written almost solely by Ross Benson, who watched it on TV and then proceeded to fill page after page with running copy. Another extraordinary achievement.

 

Diana, who arguably  had a finer aristocratic pedigree than the Windsors, was buried on an island in a lake within the grounds of her brother Earl Spencer’s family seat, Althorp House, in Northamptonshire. Spencer used his eulogy to castigate the Royal Family and pledged to support Diana’s devastated sons.

 

Mohamed al-Fayed accused MI6 and the Duke of Edinburgh of planning her death.

 

*E&oe

 

Footnote: I had to stop somewhere. So Lockerbie, 9/11, the King’s Cross Tube fire, the Herald of Free Enterprise sinking, the Charles and Camilla tapes, the Jeremy Thorpe scandal and the John Stonehouse affair will have to wait for another bank holiday.

 

You might think some of them deserve a place in the top five. But it’s my list so you’ll have to lump it.

 

*****

 

I am growing a little weary of the notion that the so-called hospitality industry is on its knees. I took my two sons down to my local during the bank holiday weekend and two and a half pints of lager cost me £18.

 

We didn’t have so much as a packet of pork scratchings with the beer. I thought the barman might have overcharged me, so I checked the drinks menu. But it was right – £7.20 a pint. How can anyone afford to spend the whole evening there?

 

*****

 

“You’re looking a wee bit depressed.”

 

“Aye, well, I had to have my dog put down.”

 

“Oh, no! Was he mad?”

 

“Well, he was none too pleased about it.” – Chic Murray.



RICHARD DISMORE


27 August 2024