I joined The Sunday Times in 1965 and Harry Evans arrived shortly after. The paper was changing from an old-fashioned, Tory-orientated newspaper into a dynamic exposure paper, and he was a breath of fresh air.
The Insight team got going and you were seconded there when things got interesting. The idea was to tell people what was really going on. Evans’s role in that was absolute confidence in everybody working for him. He encouraged people to stretch themselves and never stinted on cost.
Before we get around to revealing the names of the murderers, I think I’d better anticipate some of the criticism that my colleagues in the journalism game might throw at me. You know, that helpful constructive criticism on the lines of ‘here’s another old-fart-looking-back-at-the-Golden-Age-of-journalism-that-never-really-existed’. Let’s pre-empt that. More by luck than skill I spent most of my 60 years in journalism in, yes, the Golden Age, and the comparison I have to make is between that age and what passes for journalism today.
I started as a copyboy for David McNichol senior on the old Daily Telegraph. Remarkably, for a columnist who spent his later years as a bon viveur, McNichol kept me busy running down Castlereagh Street to the greasy Greeks to bring him back a double hamburger with egg (on which he seemed to thrive). I got my break on the Northern Star in Lismore as a cadet reporter, doing what I have since termed ‘public service journalism’: keeping the people of Lismore informed of what was going on around them - CWA meetings, town council meetings, swimming carnivals, speeches by the mayor, interviews with the sergeant of police. This was great training. You have to get the names right, or your readers will stop you in the street the next day to complain.
Suffer the Children covers the scandal of the drug Thalidomide, which was sold around the world as a cure for morning sickness but instead produced thousands of deformed babies.
The book expands on the famous articles written by the Sunday Times‘ Insight team into the drug and the shocking lapses in its testing. At the time, it wasn’t necessary to test new drugs in pregnant animals before their administration to humans, although some large drug companies would do tests on rats if the drugs were to be recommended for use by pregnant women.
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