The press
Silly season monsters
Paul Johnson
The anticlimax which inevitably follows a one-horse election has brought the sil- ly season on early this summer. The Government's ill-advised decision to hold a 'quick kill' debate on hanging has provided the occasion. Most of the people who run the media are confirmed anti-hangers, many of them fanatics, and the presenta- tion of the arguments has been overwhelm- ingly one-sided, as one would have ex- pected. Yesterday's men have been tumbl- ing over themselves to regurgitate the aboli- tionist arguments: thus Roy Jenkins was resurrected in the Sunday Times and Sir Robert Mark re-emerged in the Observer. The hanging issue abounds in stock silly season characters, good for a re-hash at any time of year. The Sunday Mirror contrived to manage two; on page five it had the daughter of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged, telling us about 'My Amazing Affair with George Best — then I Told him my Awful Secret'. Five pages later, Ludovic Kennedy was compiling a three-page `dossier' on people hanged by mistake: 'Why the Ghost of Timothy Evans Still Haunts Us All' and so- forth. All predic- table stuff.
Readers, I suspect, are perhaps more in- terested in those who got away with it, and by a remarkable coincidence the greatest of them all, Dr Bodkin Adams, died last week aged 84. Adams was acquitted of murder in 1957 but nevertheless struck off the register by the GMC. He was readmitted in 1961 but the Home Office never returned his licence to dispense dangerous drugs. Despite the verdict in his favour, few believ- ed he was innocent and as the years passed doubts were often expressed in print for the simple reason that he was carelessly thought to be dead. But the doctor was not dead and had a sharp eye for the prospects of a libel action. At the New Statesman in the 1960s we were caught out criticising the Bank of England's handling of a sterling crisis, saying the Governor's treatment of the ailing pound 'had a touch of the Bodkin Adams about it'. He sued instantly and though we made a prompt apology it still cost us, as I remember, £500.
Anyway he is definitely dead now, and the Mail on Sunday had its own three-page 'dossier' on the doctor's activities among Eastbourne's aged rich. According to this, Adams had been the beneficiary of 132 wills Over his period of practice of 35 years. The Police had investigated the deaths of 400 of his patients and had exhumed the bodies of two of the few women Adams had not been able to persuade to be cremated. They had prepared cases on the deaths of nine Patients and had evidence that he had Murdered many others — one of the policemen involved in the case now says he thinks the figure should be 25. But Adams was charged with only one murder and, thanks largely to the ineptitude of the then Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, who prosecuted, the jury acquitted him after retiring for only 45 minutes. Buller, one of the originals for Widmerpool in Anthony Powell's The Music of Time saga, was looking forward to destroying Adams in cross-examination; he was completely thrown when Adams declined to take the stand, as was his right. So the doctor not only escaped the noose but lived to sue, grabbit and sue again.
Another famous silly season figure who died recently — indeed, you might calf him the unconscious inventor of the silly season — was Alex Campbell of Inverawe. 1 learnt this from my favourite newspaper in all the world, which is (to give it its full title) the Inverness Courier and General Advertiser for the Counties of Inverness, Ross, Cromarty, Nairn, Moray, Sutherland & Caithness. I have always loved old-style provincial newspapers, my ideal in the old days being the Cork Examiner, which specialised in verbatim court transcripts, in- cluding pure nuggets of Somerville and Ross dialogue. But the Cork Examiner has long since modernised and improved itself, as have virtually all provincial journals, becoming in the process pale versions of their metropolitan sisters.
One genuine exception, however, is the Inverness Courier, a splendidly traditional weekly which I look forward to buying whenever I go up to the Highlands to walk. Needless to say, it is not so vulgar as to carry news on its front page or indeed on any except one dignified inside page, which begins with a measured leading article and then goes on to deal with lighting-up times, tides, church appointments, scout and guide activities, the weather and local sport. It has absolutely none of the vices of the
modern newspaper and is, I should say, totally accurate and reliable. 1 am told it is regarded as a 'potential goldmine' and that many press groups and tycoons have sought to buy it. But the family which owns it refuses to sell and nobly intends to keep things as they are.
Among the delights of the Courier are its orotund and detailed obituaries of Highland worthies, especially those it describes as 'a fine exponent of the piper's art'. The obituary of Alex Campbell noted that he was for 61 years the local correspondent of the Inverness Courier in Fort Augustus on Loch Ness. Among other things, Campbell was water-bailiff for the owners of the Loch Ness fishings and intimately acquainted with all the moods of that immense, deep, dark and sinister lake. In May 1933, at the depth of the Depression, he sent to the Courier the first report of a vast and strange creature being seen in Loch Ness. Then the editor of the Courier, in subbing the copy, christened it 'the Monster'. The report was taken up by the national press, and the ex- peditions sent up to find the Monster that summer became the first silly season story. The Loch Ness Monster has never been found or even satisfactorily photographed. But it is still hunted ardently by people from all over the world — the Japanese brought a submarine for this purpose in the 1970s — and, real or imaginary, it has done a hell of a lot of good for the pockets of Fort Augustus and Drumnadrochit.
There are some cynics in the area who say that Campbell, a famous anecdotalist and story-teller, produced the Monster oppor- tunely at a time when there was not much demand for boats on the loch. It is certainly true that, not long afterwards, the bailiff of Loch Moran, a great stretch of water nearer the west coast, which is even darker, deeper and more sinister than Loch Ness — some say it is the deepest lake in Europe — sighted a huge creature of his own. But the Loch Morar Monster never became as popular as Loch Ness's, and I've never heard of anyone hunting it. So to Alex Campbell, then, belongs the credit of in- augurating a cherished Fleet Street tradition whereby, during the dog days, pseudo- events are sensationalised. This year's monsters, of conrse, will bear names like Kinnock, Hattersley, Meacher at al.
'Thai art expert is a lithe.'
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