The newsroom was packed with characters in the 1970s.
One, Jack Allcock, a curmudgeonly sub who became the Comet’s showpage editor, so intrigued me that I later researched his chequered life and turned it into a stage play, Jack Allcock’s Sponge.

The object of the title was the grim alternative to loo paper tucked behind a pipe in the filthy toilet of his filthy flat, an item which – incredibly – rare visitors to the maisonette were also expected to use!
Let me try to give you a flavour, if that’s not an unfortunate word, of the man.

One afternoon, after a particularly long liquid lunch in the Druid’s Head in the Market Place, he returned to the newsroom to discover that a new telephone had been fitted on his desk.

All well and good, but it turned out to be a shared party-line with features editor June Sampson, whose desk was right at the opposite end of the office.

She, it transpired, had the all-important button which determined whether or not Jack got an outside line.

So steamed up did Jack become about this perceived slight that a large pool of water formed around his feet.

On another occasion – again after lunch – he became so enraged about something or other that he walked up to the newsdesk and delivered a right hook to the then news editor, Steve Pinn.

To Steve’s great credit he didn’t retaliate.

I suppose these days such actions would result in tribunals and inquiries, or quite possibly a court case.

Somehow such incidents seemed part and parcel of life back then.
Characters, even impossible characters like the late and unlamented Jack Allcock, were tolerated with wry amusement.

They did, after all, provide many of the stories exchanged in the Comet’s various Market Place watering holes – in the early 1970s the long-defunct Old Crown, by the mid-1970s The Griffin and by the late-1970s The Druid’s Head, where Harry Henson – now 80 and still going strong – pulled the pints of Courage Best and Directors.

Tim Harrison