SPORTING MOMENTS: Slow swimming… schmoozing… & the great Peter Jones

A few days by the seaside in a decent hotel, on expenses, with merely a soupcon of unexacting work? Great. I mean, how taxing could it be to report on swimming, even if it was my first ‘away’ gig in my first Fleet Street job?

My new employers – The Exchange Telegraph Sports News Agency (whose teleprinter clicked away with the football results on BBC Grandstand and ITV’s World Of Sport) – were paying me very nearly 50 per cent more than the Eastern Daily Press had seen fit to give me for my Norwich City prose.

ExTel (as they were referred to in the news industry) expected me to cover any and every sport, not just football. And before packing me off to Scarborough for the national swimming championships, an old hand gave me what seemed very useful and encouraging advice. He said: “Make friends with Pat Besford, the Daily Telegraph swimming correspondent, who knows everyone and everything.”

So, when I checked into the hotel the night before the Championships, I asked whether Pat Besford had arrived yet. The receptionist looked at her files (no computers yet) and said: “Ah yes. Room 123. They’re both in the bar at the moment.”

How was I supposed to know Pat was short for Patricia? It was a mistake anybody might have made. So, in those circumstances, did she need to be quite so offended when I assumed that her partner, a Daily Mirror journalist, was the “Mr Besford” I thought I was looking for? Did she really need to behave like Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell?

The next day, I avoided La Besford at breakfast – easily achieved because her table was wreathed in menthol cigarette smoke – and got myself to the swimming pool at 9am for the 10am kick-off. Err, splash-off. Whatever.

It would give me plenty of time to collect my accreditation and to check that the ExTel phone was working. My plan then was, you know, to schmooze a few officials, other journalists, competitors and coaches.

There were no other journalists at the pool, which shocked me. Not even anyone from the Press Association, who were theoretically ExTel’s rivals but, in practice, often colluded.

The officials were all busy. The coaches – men and women in club tracksuits – were too harassed for small talk and the only competitors about were very young girls in swimsuits and tracky tops. Even in those long-ago days, eons before #MeToo, I wasn’t daft enough to approach any of them and subject them to my schmoozing.

But the phone worked. The office told me they wanted: considerably more than a soupcon, it transpired.

Eventually, with me still the only reporter in the Press seats, the swimming started. It looked, um, very slow. There was some noisy support from parents and team-mates in the public seats for a short moment, and then … nothing. Just the plip-plop of swimming. Really slow swimming.

I looked at the events list. I probably should have done that a lot earlier. But, anyway, this was the women’s 800m.

I flipped the events list shut and looked at the front cover and confirmed what I remembered from my rudimentary prep. This was the Amateur Swimming Association’s short-course championships – which meant it was in a 25-metre pool, exactly half the length of an Olympic-sized pool.

Some quick maths. These girls in the pool would each have to do 32 lengths. That explained the leaden pace. It was, really, really slow.

I flipped the events list open again and looked properly at the first events. There were 12 heats of the 800 metres. More maths: there would be a total of 384 lengths. Jeez. What on earth would I write about? And how was I supposed to discover the results of all the heats? Would they be announced, or would I have to make a note of who finished first, second and third? Was the first three enough?

“Hello,” said a cheery voice from over my shoulder. “I’m Peter Jones. BBC”

“Hi. Mick Dennis. Extel. The new boy. Relieved to see another journalist. Where is everybody?”

I cannot have done a very good job of disguising my fearfulness, because this urbane, charming, top professional pulled out the chair next to mine, sat down and – putting aside whatever he had been planning to do in the next ten minutes or so – gently took me under his wing, as it were, without for a millisecond patronising me or making me feel I was anything other than his equal. Which, of course, I was not.

He explained that, because the 800m was such a long, tiring swim, there would be no races other than the heats: no subsequent rounds and no final. The winner, runner-up and third-placed competitors would be determined by noting the fastest three times in the heats. The heats had been organised according to the times competitors had recorded at other galas – with the quickest swimmers in the last heat, the next fastest eight in the penultimate heat, and so on.

“What we are watching,” my new mentor explained, “are the slowest of the slow. They have no chance of being on the podium. Which is why, in truth, we are not watching them; only their mums and dads are.”

He also clarified other stuff. The organisers would produce typed-out results; there was no need to try and keep one’s own record of the heats. But there would also be public announcements about any records and so on, and it was always a good idea to listen to these announcements and take “a bit of a note.”

The Press Association reporter would turn up fairly soon. But almost none of the other journalists would bother until the evening session, when there would be some real action and some stories.

“Now. Tea or coffee? Let’s pop down to the media room (such as it is) and see if the kettle is on.” I could have kissed him.

Over coffee downstairs, “Jonesy” explained that he had only travelled up that morning and had come straight to the pool to meet the BBC engineers who expected to show up pretty soon.

I had a question and felt emboldened to ask it. “What do you think the big story is likely to be today?”

“Same as it always is at the moment in swimming,” he said: “Sharron Davies will win every race she’s in and will produce performances the like of which British swimming has never seen before. One of the other journos will be able to put it into context for you.”

I told Peter Jones about my brush with “Lady Bracknell”. He responded with a story about Anita Lonsbrough, an Olympic gold medallist who was now the swimming correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph and a buddy of Ms Besford/Bracknell.

“Two years ago, at the Montreal Olympics, Anita was my co-commentator for the final of the 200m breaststroke. David Wilkie was favourite, and a win would make him Britain’s first swimming gold medallist since Anita herself, 16 years previously.

“There were two false starts, which in those days meant that if there was a third, by anyone at all, the swimmer who made the third false start would be disqualified. So it was a really difficult choice for Wilkie. Did he try to get a flier, or play safe but risk one of the others getting a lead on him?

“Anyway, I describe the race. Wilkie wins. I bring in Anita by saying, ‘That was such a tense situation after the two false starts. What drama.’ Anita told the BBC’s listening audience, ‘Yes. Very tense. A really good response from David.’

“So we take the TV audio feed of an interview with Wilkie. There are some more races. We do a wrap-up bit. We leave the pool. We go for a meal. We start to unwind. I say to Anita, over a glass of something, ‘That was incredible when there were those false starts before the Wilkie race.’ And she says, ‘The same thing happened to me in Rome at my Olympics. Two German girls – one was the world record holder, and the other the Olympic record holder – were on the blocks and each false-started. But I thought, if they’re going to play those games, I am going to show them!’

“I didn’t have the heart to ask her why it had not occurred to her to tell our listeners.”

Thinking about the start of my Fleet Street career now, in retirement, Jonesy’s anecdote seems a tad ungallant, out of character for him. But I realised then that he was putting me further at ease: nudging me into realising that if I kept my wits about me and relied on my own news-sense, I had nothing to fear about dealing with famous sports people.

As the next few years unfolded, Anita Lonsbrough became a valued friend, and so did Pat Besford (remarkably, given my graceless behaviour at our first meeting). But eventually I moved on from ExTel and never again covered swimming. I saw quite a lot of Jonesy, though, at football matches. I cherished his company.

He was badly affected by being in the BBC radio commentary position at the Hillsborough tragedy. That was not why he died the following year, but the grimly eloquent words he found from deep in his soul to describe the events at one of football’s blackest days were played to mourners at his own memorial service at All Souls Church in London’s West End, just a long throw-in away from the BBC’s Broadcasting House.

I don’t suppose he ever realised quite how important his gentle kindness was to me at the heat-declared, women’s 800 metres, at the 1978 ASA Short-Course Championships.