Remembering Bill Tidy

The death on March 11 [2023] of one of the Daily Mirror’s cartoon geniuses – BILL TIDY, MBE – gives us a chance to revisit one of his greatest creations, The Fosdyke Saga.

You can read Donald Zec’s marvellous introduction to the Fosdykes in the reproduction, right, of Page 13 of the Mirror of Friday, February 26 1971.

Bill’s obituary from The Guardian is posted elsewhere on this site.

A charming record of a village and our late Queen

JOURNALISTS never really retire, and that’s true of our Life President, David Thompson. He’s had more comebacks than Frank Sinatra.

He has recently completed his “last ever publication”. He says he means it this time…

His tour de force for Capel St Mary Parish Council was completed last December, and the Capel Reporter went to every home and business in his village in Suffolk.

The 20-page newspaper explores the long relationship between individual villagers and the village as a whole and Queen Elizabeth II.

An increase in new housing has seen the village expand, and the print run for this publication was 1,500. That allowed for extra copies for those featured in the newspaper, for copies on display in the surgery, library, three churches, community centre and for general publicity. [And in the pub? Ed]

We’re always glad of the chance to carry images of our late and loved Queen Elizabeth on this website, and she beams out from the Capel Reporter cover page, featured above.

You can read the whole of David’s fascinating piece of village and Royal history in the post on Member’s Noticeboard. Just click on the drop-down menu above.

What do you know about the Yorks?

AUTHOR and biographer ANDREW LOWNIE is writing a joint biography of the Duke and Duchess of York and would love to talk to anyone, on or off the record, who has stories about them.

If you can help with his research, you can email him here: lownie@globalnet.co.uk, or you can phone his office: 020 7222 7574.

(Pic: Thanks to MIRRORPIX. )

Stonehouse revisited

The current ITV series about the John Stonehouse scandal presents an opportunity to review the whole affair. Former Sunday Mirror editor Peter Thompson sent us this extract from his book Cudlipp’s Circus, and says: “It was a big story for the Mirror and we beat everybody day after day.” The graphic (Daily Mirror, August 7, 1976) is a marvellous creation by the late, great Bob Williams, whose unique work graced the Mirror’s pages for many years. (Illustration and Stonehouse portrait ©Mirrorpix.)

  How the Daily Mirror  exposed Stonehouse’s disappearing act

ON November 21, 1974 John Stonehouse, the Labour MP for Walsall North and a former Postmaster-General, went missing in the sea off the Fountainbleu Hotel at Miami Beach. He had left his clothes in a beachside kiosk, telling the female attendant he was going for a swim. Although he walked off in bathing trunks, no one, not even the hotel’s two lifeguards, had seen him enter the water. As Stonehouse was described by a friend as a strong swimmer and the tide was a long way out at the time, American police were not prepared to list him as ‘presumed drowned’.

Richard Stott and Nick Davies turned up the facts that the forty-nine-year-old MP’s business interests were collapsing, that he was short of ready cash and had recently taken out four life insurance policies under which his beneficiaries would receive £120,000 provided he died within seven years. All the evidence suggested he had run away to start a new life somewhere else, perhaps with his attractive secretary Sheila Buckley, who was known to have stayed in his Westminster flat.

Our coverage of the Stonehouse riddle provoked an angry response from his wife, Barbara, who rang me on the Mirror night desk in the middle of the drama. ‘My husband is dead,’ she said. ‘How dare you suggest he’s still alive.’ I said there were several mystifying things about his disappearance that needed to be cleared up. ‘Oh God,’ she sighed. ‘This wouldn’t have happened in Hugh Cudlipp’s time.’

On December 16 we led the paper on STONEHOUSE SECURITY SENSATION in which Stott disclosed suspicious links between the missing MP and Czech Intelligence. Terry Lancaster received a call from one of Harold Wilson’s aides, who said it had been decided not to deny the story because of the Government’s special relationship with the Mirror, but we should take careful note of the fact that in terms of security Stonehouse was regarded as ‘absolutely clean’.

The next day the Mirror revealed that Stonehouse had been named as one of Czech Intelligence’s contact on the strength of information from the defector Josef Frolik, a revelation that provoked Harold Wilson to tell the House of Commons that Stonehouse was neither a Czech spy nor a CIA agent. It was time the Press stopped asking ‘far-fetched questions’ about his death, he said, and gave his family ‘a little decent privacy and understanding’.

Down in Melbourne that same day Detective Sergeant John Coffey, head of the Victoria Police fraud squad, was inquiring into the activities of a man calling himself Joseph Markham. The police had started watching Markham after a bank clerk reported he was behaving suspiciously. The clerk had helped him bank some cash and then, in his lunch break, was surprised to see the same man enter another bank where, he discovered, he was using the name Donald Mildoon. DS Coffey learned that Markham/Mildoon was collecting his mail over the counter at the Bank of New Zealand. For the next few days Coffey intercepted his letters before returning them to the bank. They were addressed to ‘My Dear Dums’ or ‘Dearest Dums’ and were signed ‘S’ or ‘Sheila’.

The first letter was written on December 13, the day the Mirror reported the existence of the insurance policies on his life. It read: ‘The rags are hounding. I have come away for everybody’s sake. This is all because of my friend’s death, which seems incredible. My boyfriend is away at the moment and I have heard the most dreadful things about him from his former wife.’

Coffey went to the reading room of the British High Commission and scoured copies of the Daily Mirror for stories about anyone called Markham or Mildoon. ‘We first of all came up with the name of Lord Lucan, who at that stage was front page news,’ he says. ‘Then we found a reference to John Stonehouse, the MP missing off Miami Beach. I thought, “Christ, this is it. Bloody hell, we’ve got ourselves an ex-Pom minister”.’

On Christmas Eve we chose the Mirror’s biggest type for STONEHOUSE FOUND ALIVE. The fugitive’s true identity was established after he was arrested at his lodgings in central Melbourne as a suspected illegal immigrant. He was travelling on a passport in the name of Joseph Arthur Markham and had booked into a residential club as Donald Mildoon, taking the names from two deceased constituents. While Stott was dashing to Heathrow to take the first plane to Australia, another reporter broke the news to Barbara Stonehouse. She was, in the words of her daughter Jane, ‘shocked, astonished and absolutely delighted’.

Brought back to London, Stonehouse served three and a half years in prison on charges of fraud and forgery. Two years after his release in 1979 he married Sheila Buckley. Never fully recovered from a series of heart attacks during his prison term, he collapsed and died on the night of April 15, 1988. Was he guilty of betraying his country? Cabinet papers released under the thirty-year rule in 2010 show that a second Czech defector confirmed Josef Frolik’s claims that Stonehouse had indeed supplied information to Czech Intelligence in return for cash payments.

At 10 Downing Street on October 6, 1980, Attorney-General Sir Michael Havers told Margaret Thatcher that ‘he was sure that Mr Stonehouse had been a spy for the Czechoslovaks but he had no evidence which he could put before the jury’. Thatcher agreed with Havers and the Home Secretary William Whitelaw that Stonehouse should not be confronted about the claims nor prosecuted. Ironically, Lord Havers, as he would become thanks to Margaret Thatcher, would one day find himself working for a genuine Czech-born spy – Robert Maxwell.

 

 

All about Ghislaine

Ghislaine Maxwell has been in the news again recently, but in another exclusive to Mirror Pensioner, we can give you the inside track…

‘My name is Ghislaine and I am his daughter. What’s his is mine and what’s mine is his’

   By Peter Thompson, former editor of the Sunday Mirror

Extracted from his updated memoir, Cudlipp’s Circus © 2022.

Cudlipp’s Circus is available on Amazon (Kindle £4.99, hardback £70)

Please click on the link… New extract saved as PDF

Did you get your Mirror Pensioner?

Your autumn Mirror Pensioner magazine should have arrived by now – members only, of course – unless you have moved without letting us know your new address! Please use the Contact Us form if that’s the case, so we can keep our mailing list up to date.

Mirror Pensioner has 12 cracking pages with all the latest about our pension scheme, our finances and our membership.

PLUS, there’s lots of important stuff about our AGM (new date and new venue: Wednesday, October 19, at the St Bride Institute, Bride Lane, EC4Y 8EQ, off Fleet Street), and the Scottish annual meeting (Tuesday, October 25 at The Studio, 67 Hope Street, Glasgow G2 6AE).

PLUS, there’s a look at AMP past and present, and some in-depth analysis of our pension scheme’s annual report.

AND there’s a pithy piece by our former legal advisor GILES ORTON, a nostalgic homage to the Daily Mirror Pop Club, and some warm memories of lives well lived.

Remembering Queen Elizabeth II

Exclusive update from Cudlipp’s Circus

COMING soon to this website –

‘My name is Ghislaine and I am his daughter.  

‘What’s his is mine and what’s mine is his.’

 By Peter Thompson,  former editor of the Sunday Mirror,  extracted from his updated memoir, Cudlipp’s Circus © 2022

 

Remember this bit of AMP history?

ANOTHER gem from Robin Parkin’s archives in France. (Thank you Robin.)

Here’s an early copy of Mirror Pensioner from summer 1999, put together by our founder Tony Boram. It’s pretty basic – eight sides of A4 in black and white, stapled together. But it’s a masterpiece of news and comment.

1999 was an eventful year for the AMP.

We lost Don Wood at the age of only 71. He had retired in 1986. Don was a member of the original “three Musketeers” – the other two were Tony, of course, and Ken Hudgell. They banded together in 1990 to fight Maxwell for our pensions. Pensions lawyer Giles Orton supported them. And we all know what happened… eventually.

That same year saw the arrival of Michael Pickard as independent chairman of Mirror Pensions Trustees.

Alan Burns and Andy Golden were up for election to the trustee board. Alan Burns stepped down only this year!

Ken Hudgell’s AGM report was a bit bad tempered – the outgoing chairman of the trustees (Philip Sheridan) didn’t attend the meeting, and nor, much to Ken’s displeasure, did Mirror Group chairman-elect Victor Blank.

Oh, and Kevin Maxwell was cleared of contempt of court for refusing to answer questions from the DTI inspectors appointed to investigate the 1991 flotation of Mirror Group Newspapers. You can imagine how scathing Tony B was about that!

Takes you back, doesn’t it?