Abstract
The writer died at the age of 54 in October 1952, having collapsed shortly after making the final speech, on behalf of the press, at the Labour Party Conference in Morecambe. Such was his stature as an industrial correspondent and, subsequently, diarist that, unlike the oft-suggested malicious verdict on the death three years later of the fledgling film star James Dean, Mackay's demise could not be hailed as a great career move. The few remaining journalists who can remember him insist he had so much more to contribute and this anthology of his columns, hurried into print by his employers, confirms their view.
Born into a working class family in Wick, Mackay left school at 14 and was employed in a pharmacy for three years before volunteering for the Army, despite being a year under the official recruitment age. He drifted into journalism during four years in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), sending sketches from the trenches to the John O'Groat Journal, then completed an ex-serviceman's course at London University before progressing via the London staff of the Western Morning News to the News Chronicle. Along the way, encouraged by a formidable mother who managed to amass a library of 3,000 books, he obtained the vast knowledge upon which his writing career was built.
The breadth and depth of this self-education constantly emerges in the 70-plus essays collected here and wittily illustrated by the great Vicky. Indeed, Mackay's distinctive, conversational style and wide-ranging subject matter resulted in him on occasion using knowledge like a club, battering the reader so relentlessly with literary and other learned references that admiration is at times tempered by a feeling of deep inferiority.
In an essay about Sherlock Holmes, for example, he admits to mentioning frequently in his writings Holmes, Shakespeare and Shaw, while also now and then “making passing reference” to Socrates, Pascal and the Great McGonagall. He explains: “… the newspaper columnist can no more get rid of Shakespeare, Shaw and Sherlock than the Ancient Mariner could shake off the albatross or Mr Dick could forget King Charles’ head.” Later in the piece he evokes within a few lines Danny Kaye, Hitler, Karl Marx, Mrs Nickleby (a favourite name to drop), Dr Johnson and Lionel Hale, the playwright best known at the time for broadcasting on radio's Round Britain Quiz.
But if the senses are besieged by such scholarship showboating, they are still unable to resist Mackay in full flow, veering erratically across the social profile of the post-war years both at home and abroad, from Wick revisited to the White House, from music hall to the movies, from Dublin (more literary references that you could shake a shillelagh at) to Chicago and Switzerland to Finland, where he observed that among the dozens of hard drinks to be found, there was one “known as yellow-vin [that] is guaranteed to make a rabbit sit up and spit in a bulldog's face”. As for Switzerland, he claimed that “one golden morning over a flagon of raspberry brandy” he and colleagues founded a secret society “with one aim – the flattening out of Switzerland”.
Often funny enough in print to make one laugh out loud, Mackay was, according to an introductory profile to this book written by his paper's editor, R J Cruikshank, humorous and roguish company in life with an irrepressible sense of fantasy. “Devoted women tidied him up but never cured his fantasy,” recalled Cruikshank, patiently trying to comprehend such behaviour as eating daffodils and setting fire to his own hair (“which didn't change its colour much, it being already a kind of charred crimson”).
Such successors at the top of the columnists’ tree, such as Bill (“Cassandra”) Connor and Keith Waterhouse, themselves men of similar mischievous temperament, would have approved, even if these accomplished showmen might have considered setting fire to their own hair – a minor blaze where Connor was concerned – an eccentric step too far. It should also be noted, as Michael Leapman was quick to spot, that there are more pages listed in the index to The Real Mackay under the heading “Drink” than any other subject.
At his best, Mackay was, and remains, compelling. Here he is musing on “how contact with the famous affects us all”, recalling how he “paid double for a bedroom at the Black Boy, Nottingham, when they told me that Don Bradman was the last man in”, and still awestruck by “that great day in Whitehall Place when I hailed a cab and when it stopped, Bernard Shaw stepped out and I stepped in”.
His piece on the inefficiency of customs officers, which resonates today (if one substitutes border control personnel as the target), begins: “After three weeks of compulsory clean living and high thinking on the snowy slopes of one of the better-class Alps it was somewhat shattering to my self-esteem to find myself confronted at Dover with a Treasury proclamation warning me of the dire fate that would befall me if I tried to smuggle any musk rats into the United Kingdom.”
Born on April 24, Mackay subsequently claimed it was April 23, a date shared with such luminaries as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Turner, Ethelred the Unready and Shirley Temple (me, too, co-incidentally), commenting: “What sort of man would I be to let a mere 24 hours stand between me and Shakespeare?” Mackay was, writes Cruikshank, “essentially one of those men who are bringers of happiness”. It's a similar evaluation to that of Denry Machin in Arnold Bennett's The Card: “He's identified,” said the speaker, “with the great cause of cheering us all up.”