PERSONAL COLUMN

Fortnightly parts

ALAN JENKINS

The Game in 126 weekly parts; The Book of Life; History of the Second World War . . . This is where I came in, thirty years ago; only then we didn't spend £250,000 on TV commercials to advertise an initial print order of 750,000—we took a page in the Daily Mail and in the Group's other magazines, and thought we were doing fine if we sold 60,000 copies. Also, we never an- nounced the number of parts in advance, so that if we had a flop on our hands the last twelve could be condensed to four, even if it meant (in an alphabetical work) that 'A to M' was three times as long as 'N to Z'.

No doubt the present begetters of part- works have brought them to a respectability which our Grub Street never knew, with true scholarship and sophisticated colour-prin- ting; but at the age of twenty-two I found myself assistant editor of a Household En- cyclopaedia, a Children's Book of Knowledge and I Was There! (personal nar- ratives of the Great War) all at once. In between, I wrote most of an extraordinary work called Women of All Lands, edited by Rosita Forbes, which wasn't very successful, except for one issue which contained a photograph of an Algerian girl with tattooed breasts (extremely daring for those days) which brought hundreds of letters of protest and a few cancelled subscriptions.

Some of our part-works were revisions of old ones that had appeared about ten years before: we used plates of the original edi- tions, 'sweating in' new paragraphs and (when absolutely necessary) new half-tone blocks to save money. We did all our own layout—nobody showed us how—somehow we learnt to mask photographs, draw a diagonal across the back and square up the block to the right size. You could expect to be sacked if you let more than two literal er- rors through.

Sir John Hammerton, known in his day as 'King of the Fortnightly Part', was the direc- tor in charge. Among his claims to fame was the fact that he was the first publisher to charge sevenpence for a fortnightly part. `Sevenpence?' his fellow directors worried. 'But sixpence has always been the price. The public like to pay with a single coin.' If they'll pay sixpence,' the old Scot barked, 'they'll pay sevenpence.' And they did.

We all had to be able to write editorials in Sir John's style—long sentences with plenty of semicolons, Scottish proverbs and quota- tions from his hero, the late Lord Northcliffe. Sometimes we merely brought old editorials up to date, with new opening and closing paragraphs containing topical references.

Because I had worked briefly on a women's magazine, I was given all the fashion and housecraft articles to compile, which I did with the help of the editress of Home Bits—'how to bath Baby in eight pic- tures', and 'first steps in needlework'. I had also been to a university (for the first and last time in Fleet Street my degree came in useful) and therefore had to write most of the 'learned' articles. For years afterwards the Book of Knowledge carried, in subse- quent editions, many of my basic articles on English Literature, Lives of the Great Com- posers, the Kings and Queens of England. By

chance I had another qualification for the job: I knew chunks of the encyclopaedia by heart, because my father had bought me a previous edition, all twelve volumes, from a door-step salesman, and throughout my schooldays I had cribbed my homework out of it. I had imagined, in those innocent days, that it was written by schoolmasters, experts, scientists; not by hacks like me who, turning out 3,000 words a day, dug much of it out of other men's encyclopaedias and submitted the copy for quick blue-pencilling by the managing editor, who was responsible for half-a-dozen other encyclopaedia works simultaneously. Some of our work was literally scissors-and-paste--old paragraphs cut from a previous edition, Cow-pasted and interspersed with new paragraphs of typescript.

Somewhere in the background was an unseen advisory board of educational bigwigs who had presumably discussed and planned the whole work, and written certain link bits, before we, the staff, were ever hired : their names, with lots of letters after them (ro, FZS, MBE, BA, Retd., etc.), appeared at the beginning of Part I and in the ad- vertisements. We, the staff, were hired or fired according to the number of part-works on the stocks. There were three main publishers of part-works then—Odhams, Amalgamated Press and the Daily Ex- press—and usually if one fired you, there was work to be picked up at the other two. In between jobs, it was possible to live in Paris (bed and breakfast 2s 6d a day) to save money.

We were a weird mixture of youth and age. Some of us dated back to long-dead periodicals such as Public Opinion and the St James's Gazette. Others, like me, were filling in time while waiting for the opportunity to be a Young Lion of Fleet Street—a man named Edward Hulton was said to be plan- ning an English answer to Life magazine . . . One man wrote encyclopaedias all day and spent his evenings tutoring for a cor- respondence college; and a wretched youth of eighteen, who had just left school, spent his entire life compiling indexes.

My immediate superior was Jimmy, an ex- officer of World War I who was always called in for the war books. He was my first alcoholic, and taught me one thing about Fleet Street for which I have always been grateful: the pubs open half an hour earlier on the South Bank of the Thames. Every morning, at ten to eleven, Jimmy would cross Blackfriars Bridge from Fleet Street at a smart infantry trot. His boon companion, known as Uncle Osbert, sometimes went with him. We younger ones were not en- couraged to use the same pubs as they did. I once made the mistake of going to Uncle Osbert's pub for lunch, and was able to observe that his midday meal consisted of nine glasses of sherry and a biscuit.

Above Jimmy was the managing editor, a distracted man with a steel ruler and col- oured pencils who was remaking several old part-works at once, taking instant decisions about what was out of date and what wasn't, cutting and filling so that the next unrevised page 'ran on' coherently, at a steady rate of twenty-four pages a day. 'These lampshades

look a bit pass, Jenkins. Cut along to the Electricity Development people and get some free photographs of the latest thing . . . And surely the RAF don't use Handley-Pages any more—check up with the Air Ministry, there's a good chap ...'

We were approaching Munich, and ex- pecting war. We therefore prepared the first six parts of two entirely different books. One was War Illustrated, full of anti-German propaganda,_ photographs of Nuremberg Rallies, potted histories of our own fighting- fit regiments, which would chronicle, week by week, in articles and pictures, the coming war for its duration. The other was I Was There!, a diligently researched anthology of articles, pictures, extracts from Blunden and Graves, the Christmas truces, the Home Front, the photographic riches of the Im- perial War Museum. It was Sir John's psychological triumph. With Munich in the bag, the nation's relief was so great that it was avid for armchair adventure, the reliving of the Great War. I had to run the cor- respondence page, called 'Old Sweats' Cor- ner'. Pretending to be an ex-infantryman, I exchanged letters with men in hospitals, men on the dole who had scarcely known employ- ment since demobilisation, weaving their ex- periences into paragraphs with titles such as 'The Hell of Festubert', reviving the legend of the Angels of Mons, drawing sometimes on my father's tales of the war ... Gradually I came to believe that I had been there.

I Was There! was a roaring success and ran for months. A year later World War II began, or at least a state of hostilities. War Illustrated was hastily dusted off, and I sup- pose it ran until 1945. I wouldn't know. By that time, I really was there.