Former crime reporter John Weeks, who spent 30 years at the Daily Telegraph in the 1960s to 1980s, has died aged 86.
Here his daughter Tracey Weeks recalls some memorable moments from his time at the paper.
The Telegraph’s crime correspondent Tom Sandrock, along with his deputy (who was my father) John Weeks, mainly operated from the press office at the bottom of Scotland Yard and rarely went to The Telegraph’s Fleet Street offices. This was their main contact point where they could follow up leads and where they filed copy to their news desks.
I visited Dad many times in the press office. There was a centre table covered in papers, newspapers, pens and notebooks, with a few scattered chairs. Open-fronted telephone booths lined the back wall and along one side – labelled with the dailies: Telegraph, Express, Mail, Mirror etc. They had direct lines to the newsdesks.
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I recall on one occasion my father had been working on a drugs story and the pharmacist had carefully spelt out a long-winded medical name. Dad was filing his copy and, as a joke, he said to the copy-taker: “usual spelling”.
Without hesitating, the man actually correctly spelt the name of the drug.
Sandrock and Dad relied on their memories while pursuing stories – they could hardly get out notebooks while talking to the likes of the Kray twins. A lot, or should I say most, of their work was done in pubs, and I remember reading somewhere that it was my father who worked out that the average crime reporter drank eight pints per day. For charity they would have a dry January and I do recall Dad would lose a stone every time – nothing to do with cutting down on food but simply giving up booze for a month.
When it came to police contacts, Sandrock would focus on the senior officers, and my father – who was also the best judge of character I have ever met – concentrated on the juniors. It worked quite well for the pair of them as one had a good memory for names and the other for faces. I suspect it was Dad who remembered the faces as for years he called a member of the Flying Squad Dave, and only found out on the officer’s leaving do that his name was Reg. Dad asked him why he hadn’t corrected him, to which he replied he rather liked the name Dave.
My father was in the last intake for National Service in the early 1960s. He was a local reporter at the time, having rejected his jeweller father’s wish for him to become a diamond cutter. The RAF needed a cook and a secretary – so Dad became a cook, and a fellow inmate, a trained chef at The Savoy, naturally became the general’s secretary.
He married my mother, Val, hoping that they would be posted to Cyprus – only to discover that married men couldn’t be sent abroad. They had met when they were both local reporters on rival newspapers. When I joined Dad’s paper, the Loughton Gazette I worked with his former editor John Yates and others who always talked about how it was better to be big cogs in small wheels rather than the other way around. My father steered his career around in the big wheel – in the fast lane.
We had many late nights, Dad and I, often up till two to three am, discussing my copy. He patiently explained why the pie and mash shop couldn’t possibly have appeared at the magistrates’ court – there was no room for it.
Hard news stories are easier to write, ie the facts just fall into place – once you have the intro. When I was struggling to find that order I remember Dad saying: “if someone in the pub asks you what story you’ve been working on, what you tell them in a sentence is your intro.”
One year Dad was covering the National Police Conference where the guest was Liverpudlian Ken Dodd. Apparently the comedian was backstage two hours before he was due on, tuning into conversations, themes, policies and strategies being discussed – along with various individuals and their contributions, including my father. When Dodd eventually came on he asked the audience: “So is John Weeks really here?”
It was the golden era of crime reporting. Once a deadline had passed and the reporter had got the splash, they would share the story with the other crime reporters. Dad would pass it on to Owen Summers (Express) and Jack McEachran (Mirror) in particular.
Sandrock and my father covered over 165 bomb attacks. Dad once told me that one time he was following a tip-off about a bomb in London. Desperate to be the first reporter on the scene, Dad thought he would be clever and nipped up several back streets till he came across the bomb squad and other officers who had sealed off the area.
“So where’s the bomb?” he asked one of the police guards.
“Right there,” he replied, pointing to an object just yards in front of him.
Dad made a hasty retreat.
It wasn’t just the reporters who would go to any lengths to get their story – the news photographers were just as eager. As police vans (with darkened windows) transported criminals to and from the Old Bailey they would be flashing cameras in the hope they’d be lucky in snapping the accused. A Telegraph photographer ‘friend’ of Dad’s actually pushed him into the road, forcing the van to screech to a halt, so he could shoot as many photos as he could in the few extra minutes he’d gained.
One reporter would stay in court waiting for the jury to return, then he would alert the others, who would be drinking in the pub opposite, when the verdict came through.
“Why are the police all over the airfield?” Mum asked Dad one Sunday afternoon in 1969, as she watched hundreds of officers probing North Weald Aerodrome.
“Very funny,” he replied joining her at the window. “Wow, I thought you were joking!”
After making a few calls, my father made his way across to the full-scale search party – looking for kidnap victim Muriel McKay. It was Britain’s first kidnapping case (with a £1m ransom demand) and an early example of mistaken identity. The real target was media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s wife. Mrs Mckay’s body was never found.
And who could forget the James Bond-style killing in London when a man was jabbed with a poisoned pellet fired through the tip of an umbrella. I was with Dad when the story broke. We were waiting for news on the condition of the victim and a police statement on what had happened. Dad was doing the rounds when he asked me quietly if I’d seen anyone leaving the property. I confirmed that two men had gone up a side street. Quick as a flash, Dad shot up the road in hot pursuit of the two men. In his youth my father had sprinted for Essex, which obviously stood him in good stead for chasing leads. The two men Dad was pursuing turned out to be scientist contacts that he had nurtured – and no-one else knew about.
When he left The Telegraph, my father joined the Police Federation to edit their magazine.
John Weeks died on 2nd May, 2024. He leaves three children, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
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