Describing a friend

PETER Kennedy - or simply PK to many in the newsroom - was the very definition of an old-school journo.

He'd cut his teeth as a cub reporter on the Solihull News in the early 1960s and by the time I started my own traineeship almost 50 years later he was back on his old patch having seemingly seen almost everything during a career in newspapers and BBC Radio.

Having someone of this experience sat opposite you was a rare thing in this era of the local press, most others from my particular cohort of trainees usually shared a desk with a senior who'd started a year to 18 months before them. 

Peter was in many ways the sort of reporter who if I'd really stopped and thought about it would have persuaded me that there was no way I was cut out for the profession; he was fearless in his questions, shameless in his anecdotes and would wash down his lunch with a mini bottle of wine.

Frankly I should have been terrified but strangely having this imposing industry veteran sat opposite me always gave me confidence that the apparent impossibility of filling that week's edition could be overcome.

Peter for his part clearly still loved being in the newsroom, it didn't matter if it was a parish council spat or some parochial planning row he'd roll up his shirt sleeves and chisel a tune out of the keyboard which often left it bleeping in distress.

Stopping to lever a line or two from his shorthand notebook he would regularly read back a particularly juicy morsel of a quote.

"We might try to lure it out with a rat on a stick," he declared, during work on a particularly stonking tale about an alligator snapping turtle being dragged from the depths of Earlswood Lakes.

At this point, perhaps catching a glimpse of my smile, he would chortle and often rub his hands together before launching an assault on the next paragraph; fingers falling from height on individual keys as if there was still an old manual typewriter in front of him.

Technology was not, it is fair to say, his forte. He once described the internet browser Mozilla Firefox as sounding like a girl he used to know and the metallic chirrup of a mobile phone somewhere in the office was novel enough to have him rhythmically wobbling his head as if one of his favourite jazz bands had struck up a beat.

But when it came to the more traditional reporting - sniffing out a story, buffing its edges - Peter was peerless.

I was never quite sure whether he had a peculiar knack for unearthing particularly classic local paper tales or whether it was his rich radio voice and natural talent as a raconteur which turned them into classics of the genre even as he briefed our newsletter on what had come in.

I recall  a story about a slightly bungled robbery at the local labour club, in which a cashbox exploded its consignment of coloured dye and a thief was left trailing his arm out of the window of the getaway car, spraying vivid purple liquid as it raced from the scene. In an instant a fairly routine appeal from the local CID inspector had been transformed into an Only Fools and Horses-style farce.

If the tales of lovelorn peacocks, bikers' severed ears and the village's vicar's pledge to "jump for Jesus" were public proof of Peter's love of a good yarn, perhaps better still were the wide range of accounts from his earlier career.

These he would often bring to the after lunch lull, usually launched with the phrase "did I ever tell you?" You could always twig if it was going to be a particularly good one if the chair was edged back from the desk. Like a good wine, certain stories it seemed should be given room to breathe.

And perhaps then he'd regale you with the time, as a young hack, he was sent to collect the names of mourners from a local funeral only to get uproariously drunk with the mayor's chauffeur, or maybe the occasion he answered the phone to an incensed David Niven who was very keen to inform the world he was definitely "not dead".

Other tales invoked night-time summons from IRA chiefs during his posting to Northern Ireland or an embarrassing incident involving Geoffrey Howe's dog outside of Downing Street. 

His eyes would often widen in the telling as if he himself couldn't quite believe what he was hearing, he would nod vigorously along to the narrative and with the punchline would come the same mischievous chortle. A hand rub. And then back to the next bit of copy.

I don't want to overly romanticise the fuggy, perhaps thuggish newsrooms where Peter started his career. Some editors were obviously tyrants and if local titles were so much closer to communities they served, there was at the same time an often distressing distance to their dealings with bereaved or traumatised people.

Unlike me Peter would obviously graduate to reporting on bigger stages and he recalled to me once how one boss, I think at the BBC, would spur the workforce on with an almost militaristic insistence that theirs was "work of national importance."

Often it was. Peter was quite possibly the first reporter on the scene at the Birmingham pub bombings and his assessment of what he'd seen in the hours that came after were testament to the brutality of some of what he'd had to cover.

I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have had the courage to see through some of the assignments expected in that line of work, which is perhaps why I've been wary of too much criticism for the ways in which those who did processed them. 

It should be noted also that his often black humour extended far beyond the stories he'd covered, I recall him cheerfully asking if I was "enjoying my day out" as we marched through Coventry on our way to yet another of the company's persistently popular redundancy exercises. On another occasion he turned his story of a visit to A&E into an almost farcical account of having to use a running machine wearing an oxygen mask.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from that period - and it feels important in often polarised times - that you needn't be like someone to like them.

I feel sad that ten years ago it would have been a given that Peter would have had a tribute piece in the paper where he started and ended his career, but sadly that title is no longer with us and the options to publicly mark the passage of people who played a part in their local community is all too limited.

But perhaps a few notes here are more fitting - obits as they're known in the trade can sometimes be horribly stilted and wary of humour. 

A 250-word piece for the trade press would at best resort to that most awful of phrases - "he was a real character" - and go no further. It's phrase that often hints at complication without attempting to put them into context. 

What does that mean in reality? Someone announced with a wicked grin and in a tone tailor-made for the Today programme that it was as "cold as a witch's tit in here", perhaps. A card-carrying Conservative who described himself as a bit of a mongrel.

Like a rather more ribald Doctor Who, I always thought Peter was the living embodiment of the belief that there was "no point being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes."

He'd always leave the office in coat and cap - an attempt, he once told me, to appear working class - with a signature sign-off of "see you anon." And I won't now, not again. But his stories, both those that made it into print and those which understandably didn't, shall certainly stay with me.