Just 40 years ago, on April 6th, 1967, the greatest newspaper columnist of his time, Bill Connor, died from diabetes and self-imposed overwork at the age of 58. For 32 years he had written his stimulating, and often outrageous, column in the Daily Mirror under the pen-name Cassandra writes Wesley Boyd.
Shortly before his death he wrote: "I have been on Fleet Street for 30 years and I have never laughed so much. There is no other job like it, so preposterous, so wildly improbable. The task which we impudently assume is to chronicle the whole pageant of life, to record the passing show and then, with unforgivable brazenness to draw conclusions, to give a verdict and to point the moral."
In recording the passing show Bill was forced out of his job by Churchill's wartime Cabinet for criticising the complacency and incompetence of ministers, lost the most expensive libel action of the day, and was knighted in 1966. Not a bad career for the twin son of a civil servant, William Henry Connor, from Limavady, Co Derry, who conducted the choir at the Presbyterian Church near his new home at Islington in London. Each year he took his family to the Derry seaside resort of Portstewart for their summer holiday. Bill left school at 17 and he got his first real job - writing advertising copy - from the Irish entrepreneur C.O. Stanley, who was then managing director of Arks Publicity in London.
From advertising he moved to the Daily Mirror in 1935. He was interviewed by the legendary editor Guy Bartholomew. "Can you write a column?" Bart inquired. "I don't know," said Bill. "I've never tried." "Start now!" said the editor. And he did, creating what was to become the most influential column in British journalism. He was given a free rein and wrote about everything from having herrings for breakfast to the rise of Nazi Germany. Before the war he went to Germany frequently and the Nazis did not like what he wrote. During his last visit he was arrested by the Gestapo and put on the black list of people who were to be shot when the Germans invaded Britain.
After the war started Bill was soon attracting the ire of Churchill and his ministers. He attacked the stupidity and complacency of some ministers and generals who thought it was more important for Home Guard soldiers to be supplied with regulation ties rather than rifles and bullets. Another target was the home secretary, Herbert Morrison, who had closed the Communist paper, the Daily Worker; Bill pointed out the Russians were fighting for the Allies and called Morrison "the well-known chief censor and public turnkey". He accused Ministers of playing musical chairs for cabinet posts. "The trouble with this particular game," he wrote " is that it is being played to a funeral march. Ours."
Another column dealt with an confidential exchange of notes between Churchill and his war minister, Anthony Eden. Churchill was reported to have returned a memo from Eden on the situation in the near east with a sharp note saying: "As far as I can see you have used every cliché in the book except 'God is Love' and 'Please adjust your dress before leaving'." The sustained criticism from the Mirror was too much for the government to tolerate at a critical stage of the war. The paper's bosses were summoned to the Home Office in March 1942 and Morrison told them the cabinet had decided that if they overstepped the mark again they would be closed down for a long time.
The decision was debated at Westminster. In the House of Lords, Lord Simon said the articles which aroused most offence were written under the nom-de-plume Cassandra. "I do not need to remind those of your lordships who maintain a memory of the Greek tragedians that Cassandra came to a very sticky end," he added.
It was time for Bill to leave Fleet Street. In his valedictory column he wrote that he could not and would not change his policy: "Mr Morrison can have my pen - but not my conscience. Mr Morrison can have my silence - but not my self-respect." Bill, now aged 33, joined the Army and was soon on board a troop ship bound for North Africa. An old colleague from the Mirror, Hugh Cudlipp, was a colonel with the British Army Newspaper Unit which published a paper, the Union Jack, for troops fighting their way up through Italy. He managed to get Bill transferred to the unit in Naples and they produced the paper until the war ended.
Bill rejoined the Mirror in 1946 and resumed his column with the words:
"As I was saying before I was interrupted. . ." His next major battle was fought in open court. The American pianist Liberace, with his accoutrements of candelabra, rhinestones, dazzling suits and permanent simpering smile, arrived in London by special train to a hysterical reception to begin a British tour. Cassandra was not impressed by the world's highest paid performer. He described him as "this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love." Liberace sued for libel.
"On my word of God, on my mother's health, which is so dear to me," he told the jury, "this article only means one thing, that I am a homosexual." The jury accepted his denial (untrue, it later transpired) and awarded him £8,000 in damages plus £27,000 costs, the most expensive penalty in British legal history at the time.
Undismayed, Bill was soon on his way to the Indian Ocean to observe the testing of Britain's second hydrogen bomb at Christmas Island. It was, he reported, "a dress rehearsal for the death of the world". A year before his own death he went to Buckingham Palace to receive a knighthood for services to journalism. In the pubs of Fleet Street many a glass, my own included, was raised to toast the jovial Sir William Neil Connor.