Field of Fire: The Tour de France of '87 and the Rise and Fall of ANC-Halfords by Connor Jeff

Author:Connor, Jeff [Connor, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
Published: 2012-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

6

THE BFG

Hey, man, you don’t talk to the colonel. Well, you listen to him.

Photojournalist, Apocalypse Now

I HAD A Capper of my very own at the Daily Star offices in Manchester. If Capper could be considered overweight, quite bald, aggressive and at times very rude, so could his spitting image in Ancoats Street. Ray Mills, the Star deputy editor, was a rough, tough Northerner who revelled in being obnoxious and uncultured. We knew him as ‘Docker’ (often striking about something or striking someone), ‘Dark Satanic’ (Mills) or ‘Biffo’. Of the three noms de plume, Mills preferred Biffo, as he saw that as a term of endearment for a character who was pugnacious, a bit of a hard man but sort of nice with it. Mills later realised that ‘Biffo’ stood for ‘Big Ignorant Fucker from Oldham’. When he fell from a ladder at home, his nickname was changed to ‘Biffol’ (‘Big Ignorant Fucker Fell Off Ladder’) and suddenly he preferred to be known as Docker, or ‘BFG’, after Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant.

One night when I was in the paper’s composing room, the back page was late and by way of a reprimand he came out with his favourite line when giving a bollocking: ‘I’m gonna cut your balls off with a rusty saw.’ I liked him.

Like Capper, he was a big man with a big heart, but Mills had his weaknesses. He had a habit of sleeping in his office after a night’s boozing. (By way of a change, the Star assistant editor, another legend in his own lunchtime, would regularly fall asleep during the morning conference and we would simply tiptoe past him and leave him to it.) And Mills, rather than going to the WC, preferred to pee into his office waste bin, which precipitated a strike by the cleaning staff.

Cleaners, mainly ladies, had a hard time in national newspapers in those days and dreaded some of their early-morning jobs. When I was on the Northern Daily Mirror in the mid-’60s, Mike Terry, the editor at the time, was another who liked to pee in his office bin. One day when a cleaner arrived to do his office she found no Terry but his glass eye. His monument to some German shrapnel in France during D-Day was leering at her from his desk. I’m not suggesting that Capper was in that class of hedonism – unlike Mills and Terry, he drank very little – but their general demeanour, their views on life and how to deal with staff were amazingly similar.

When I went out to get a mid-race report from Capper at Tulle, after Stage 11 of the Tour, I found myself squashed under a café umbrella with him on the town’s boulevard as he drank wine I had paid for and smoked cigarettes I had bought for him. It was an excellent interview, but most of the time I had to stop myself from saying, ‘Have you got a twin brother who works at the Daily Star?’

Capper,

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