Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsAppendicesI remember nothing of the first year except the vitality of the whole scene, therewhere Fleet Street meets the Strand. Marvellous. And the dynamism of G. B.Harrison, and Professor Jacob Isaacs - drooling poetry. And of course theJournalism Room, but the journalism students hadn’t much in common. Life wasbeyond.Practical Journalism? It appeared to be simply one afternoon a week. A kindlygnome [F. J. Mansfield, of The Times] hunched over a table on a rostrum, talking.I don’t think he ever asked us to write anything. Nobody did, except G. B.Harrison. Nothing this gnome said sank in, for me. None of it seemed to relate inany way to my employment experience, first on a printing trade paper, then on twopainfully down-market fashion magazines, plus a smattering of freelancing thatdid, at least once, hit the Sunday Times.By the first summer vacation (1935) I was nevertheless sufficiently switched onto turn a war film experience in a Devon village into a cynical 800 words rejectedby the Daily Herald and re-submitted instantly to the News Chronicle. Nextmorning there it was, all over the leader page. Doubtless it did me no harm when Iappeared with this apple for the teacher, at Tom Clarke’s first appearance in theJournalism Room that October. I was shrewd enough not to show it to my fellowstudents, and I’d signed it simply ’by a war baby.’That room was alive from then on. There was work to do. TC [Tom Clarke]started by driving it home that everything, but everything, in a newspaper is news.Ads, births, marriages, and deaths, even editorial opinion. The lot. I don’t think anyof us had thought that way before. We began to devour newspapers. Tom requiredus to report him and his professional friends he introduced [to speak and lecture tous] We were regularly assigned to Bow Street Police court. He marked anddiscussed it all.The death of King George V in the Summer of 36 brought the chance forbroader activity. ’We’ll cover this funeral’, said TC. He appointed me news editorand others, no doubt, to more erudite roles. But he knew what he was up to. I wasin heaven. As news editor I deployed all available hands, covering the routebeginning to end. Some I kept back to sub, and write headlines. One, assigned toAldwych, got the best scoop. The cross on the Imperial Crown toppled on thecoffin as it passed.I got my Diploma and G.B. Harrison steered me to a job on the Daily Telegraph,running a readers’ fund to get a new organ for Westminster Abbey, for EdwardVIII’s coronation. But the King abdicated, the story died, and the Abbeyswallowed up the Rothschild cheques and little old ladies’ postal orders.My fairy godmother G.B. Harrison (who was editing the first PenguinShakespeare) fluttered the wires again to say Allen Lane of Penguin Books hadgone solo with his great new venture and needed a secretary. It wasn’t journalism,but I knew it was news. Look at it now! I was the first woman to be hired. He’dleft the Bodley Head for a small top room in Great Portland Street. After a fewmonths, I quit, lured back to King’s to be Assistant to the Director of PracticalJournalism. Tom Clarke’s approach drastically needed a Girl Friday.Heaven knows what I thought up for the students to cover. Tom conned a streamof big names to come and talk about their working lives: Webb Miller, Americancorrespondent straight from the Spanish Civil War; Hilde Marchant, ex-Hull DailyMail telephonist brought to the Daily Express by Lord Beaverbrook. She’d chasedMrs. Simpson and the King down to the South of France. A.J. Cummings - News300MOD100051471