David Bazell pays tribute to the writer, playwright and latterly Flying Post contributor Paddy Broughton who died recently.
I found myself buying his newspaper, reading Orwell and finding out about Beckett and Auden. My bookshelves were scanned for titles that now needed urgent reading. I resolved to buy Christopher Bigley’s biography on Arthur Miller and, after many years, perhaps again take up membership of the NUJ (National Union of Journalists), the only organisation he had ever joined.
Paddy Broughton had died. The newspaper journalist, playwright, long-serving Northcott Theatre press officer in the Seventies and Eighties, sports writer and newspaper columnist. The Derby County football supporter, connoisseur of fine ales, and thoroughly decent, inspiring and most amusing man I have ever known.
I felt a responsibility, which seems to persist, to tread known paths now that my friend of 35 years couldn’t.
He nursed neither anger nor resentment in his life. The brushwork of his conversation and writing never resorted to the yard broom. The effect could be cutting yet he was never destructive. As in his conversation, his published words were most often like the man in front of you - offered more than thrust. I thought I never knew Paddy so apparently angry as in a recent Flying Post article, but then I might have known that, faced with any unjust war, he would protest or fight back, just as he tried against prostate cancer which attacked him shortly after moving with his wife Jenny from the city a couple of years ago to be near their son and daughter in Cardiff.
At his funeral, his grandchildren let it be known that they looked up to him for what he knew but he never looked down to them for what they didn’t. Exactly. And it was not just family who benefited from this disposition. Clever, serious and competent as he could be, Paddy had a fine sense of humour. He could debunk the pompous and laugh like a drain at the ridiculous.
Paddy’s grasp of the literary world, and of current affairs, seemed to border on the astounding. Starting his journalistic career on the old Derbyshire Advertiser, he went on to be a very good newspaperman, editing both the former Exeter Weekly News and East Devon News. Before that, and a period with the Express & Echo, he immersed himself in another love of his -- the theatre. He freelanced writing plays with works produced at the Bush Theatre in London, Liverpool Playhouse and Off Broadway. He was persuaded by the then director of the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, Jane Howell, to ‘fill in’ as press officer for a couple of months and stayed for fifteen years.
He completed National Service -- in the same unit as Michael Parkinson -- and after a stint at the Gloucestershire Echo based in Cheltenham he became the Croydon Advertiser Group’s youngster ever editor when he took over the chair at the Epsom & Leatherhead Advertiser. He was the author of small book ‘The Duel of Doctor Hennis 1833’ -- the Irishman who was a hero to many people at the time of the cholera outbreak in Exeter in 1832 and the victim of Devon’s last duel, at Haldon Racecourse. I believe Paddy was at the time of his death also co-writing a book about the increasing use by government and other major bodies of euphemisms to obscure something unpleasant or embarrassing.
It was of course Paddy who was special. A vast knowledge of books and current events always ensured interesting conversation but it was his sense of fair play, probably borne of his newspaper training, that was the more attractive. He strongly believed the invasion of Iraq was unjust and voted with his feet in a London march. Closer to home, he kept in touch with a man convicted of murder who continued throughout a number of years to protest his innocence. Paddy went further and kept up a regular correspondence with the man and agreed to participate in a television programme which would give the case the wider hearing he thought was justified. This petered out but the point is Paddy Broughton tried. He kept asking questions because, like all journalists brought up the right way, he wanted the five W’s answered.
Generous in spirit, Paddy Broughton would also put his hand into his pocket without a moments thought. We used to look out for books for each other, resulting in hours of sideways contortion on the lower reaches of old bookshop shelves, down Fore Street, in the Arcade, charity shops, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and the world famous Town of Books on English-Welsh border at Hay-on-Wye.
Paddy would not want accolades. His heart was too big to allow an ego space within him. Nor did he want any dreary hymns when the time came for him to fall off his perch, as he put it. In an article published in the ‘Flying Post’ a few years back, he drew up a top ten of music to be played when his time came, and told me just before he died that his sentiments had not changed though he might dispense with Gracie Fields trilling ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’ and have Bing Crosby singing ‘I’ll be Seeing You.’
He achieved one of his goals before the end, going to the site of the Normandy Beaches. He dearly wanted to make it to this September to celebrate his golden wedding anniversary with his wife Jenny, a former Exeter magistrate for many of the 35 years the couple spent in the city.
Jenny, as an actress, met Paddy at the Derby Playhouse. She chose a poem from a book Paddy was reading just before his death: ‘The Poetry of Railways’ by Frederick Thomas. Under Exeter St Davids -- Paddy knew it well -- and the Arrivals and Departures section, was this:
At the Station.
Not ‘if we part’ but when; not ‘when’ but now;
Soon you will not be able to reach my hand,
I’ll not be sure if tears are in your eyes.
This day was bound to come, you will allow,
This hour of the day why do you stand
So alone and motionless while the minute dies?
When there are two and one must go away
There’s much to feel and think, but what to say?