CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Fortune Teller Was Right

My luck did not continue much longer though, as I had not been back in Melbourne that long before I found out that I was in trouble with the United Press for having left my assigned area without permission. I admit that this was the wrong thing to do, but I had reached a point where I was totally exhausted from reporting on the war pretty much non-stop for three years. I had been to virtually every possible war front, on land, sea, and in the air, and felt that I needed to stop and get the stability from being at home for a while with my family.

However, I was soon receiving cables from New York, asking me about my actions, and they made it very clear that they wanted me to get back to India as soon as possible. Personally I thought that I was better off in Melbourne—I could get back to areas with which I was better acquainted and had so much success in the past. I made the point to them that the main offensive seemed to be coming from the South West Pacific, but all of my arguments proved to be fruitless.

At the same time I received a number of job offers, which although were quite tempting, I turned down as they did not fit with my future plans. One of them unexpectedly came from Sir Keith Murdoch, who invited Marie and I for Sunday lunch up at his country house in a district just outside of Melbourne. He sent a car to pick us up and take to his house, where we had a lovely lunch together with him and his wife. We all got on very well together, and it was not until after lunch that Sir Keith Murdoch suggested that I should stay in Australia, and sign a contract with him. I told him straight away, though, that my future sights were set on London as a place to settle and work.

The New York office was still pressing me to get back to India. They told me they were appointing a new Far Eastern manager, with whom they wanted me to work, whose name was Miles Vaughan. I had no inclination at all to return to India, as there was so much trouble and political unrest, so it was with great reluctance that I eventually agreed to go back. For my return, I took one of the few airplanes that had started to run from Perth to Colombo. The United Press paid for my flight, but it cost a terrific amount of money in those days—I think about three hundred and seventy-five pounds. So it was now sometime in October 1944 that I found myself back in India, which was quite in line with what that fortune teller had originally told me on my first visit. He had also sadly been correct in saying that John Morris would not return.

By this time our newly appointed Far Eastern manager, Miles Vaughan, should have arrived, but there was no sign of him in New Delhi. I learnt through word of mouth that he was in Calcutta, and so I flew there to meet him. I found him to be a short little man with a rasping voice. My visit to Calcutta at that time also coincided with the All India Newspaper Editors Conference that was meeting in The Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta. So I seized that as an opportunity to circulate a letter between all of these editors to introduce our new Far Eastern manager on behalf of the United Press.

This turned out to be a very useful move, as Miles Vaughan soon made it known to me that his chief endeavour in India would be to sell the United Press service, rather than do any more war coverage. He also made it plain to me that I was to help spearhead a new promotion of the United Press service in India. This was quite a fearsome job, because I knew that for some years the United Press had been trying to get established here, but without much success. I made a proposal to Miles Vaughan that if I managed to get a service started in India, by selling it to the Times of India, which was the largest newspaper in the country, that he would promise me a transfer back to London. He said, “Boy if you sell to the Times of India, you get the top brick off the chimney! You can have anything you want!” That was enough incentive for me, and I was determined to succeed so that I could return home.

I told Miles Vaughan that I was going to Bombay, because that was the logical place to start a news service, as it was the cable head for India. In Bombay I booked into the Greens Hotel, which was a sort of adjunct to the best hotel in Bombay, the Taj Mahal. When I arrived there, the very first person that I talked to was an American by the name of Mike Chaflin, who was in the film distribution business. He was the most humorous character, bespectacled and slightly balding, with a very dry sense of humour. When I told him that I worked for the United Press we became friends straight away. Another person who I met was a chief petty officer in the American Navy, whose name was McNamany. He was in charge of a radio monitoring station that they had just established outside of Bombay. The Americans had a number of these stations in various parts of Asia, where they could pick up all the short wave broadcasts from almost anywhere in the world. This little chief PO, who I nicknamed “The Admiral,” told me that they listened all the time to the United Press broadcasts from the United States. I mention these two people, because they both played a vital part in the programme that I followed in Bombay during the ensuing weeks.

A few days after arriving in Bombay, my best hopes were nearly shattered when I found out that our leading competitors in the United States, The Associated Press, had already established an office in Bombay, and worst of all it was in the building occupied by the Times of India. That seemed to doom any effort of mine to establish the United Press. I had to quickly find an office in which to establish ourselves, but after searching the city it seemed that almost every available space had been taken, by either the army, navy, or government agency. The Associated Press office in the Times of India building was a very tiny little room, but this had at least given them a start and a great advantage over us. I told Mike Chaflin about this situation, and he said, “Well boy, why don’t you take a room in the Taj?” The Taj being the Taj Mahal Hotel, and together we went across to see the manager.

The Taj Mahal Hotel stands on the waterfront of Bombay, looking out over what is called the “Gateway of India,” an archway built in red sandstone right on the sea front. It has been the archway through which all of the rulers of India, including the British Emperors, had arrived when they first set foot on Indian soil. The Taj Mahal manager explained that every single room was booked, and that the only room still available was the Princess Suite. The Princess Suite was a suite of circular rooms built in a turret on one corner of the hotel, looking out on the gateway of India, and was most luxurious. It consisted of a separate sitting room, bedroom, and bathroom. The bath was sunk into the floor, with great big silver plated dolphins that gushed out torrents of water into a white alabaster bath. In the bedroom there was a circular divan, and mosquito nets ran up to the ceiling forming a sort of a regal throne. All these things frightened me off, as I assumed it would be too expensive, but Mike Chaflin persuaded me to take it. He said, “Take it boy, think big! Talk big! Get in here and you’ve got an address.” So it was on the spur of the moment that I agreed to take the suite, and in November 1944 the United Press office was established in the Taj Mahal Hotel.

The next thing to think about was our communications. We had to get radio reception for our United Press newscasts from San Francisco and London, and I had no equipment at my disposal. I asked Miles Vaughan, who had by now arrived in New Delhi, to send me an assistant, and he very promptly sent me a young man by the name of John Hlavacek. He took up residence with me in the Taj Mahal Hotel, and together we scoured Bombay to get all the materials that we needed to get a news service started. None of these things were easy to obtain, and included: carbon paper; copy paper; a typewriter and above all, a radio receiver. We let this be known to the little American chief petty officer, and he got for us what was called a Hellschreiber Short Wave Receiver, which was very powerful.

John Hlavacek and I carried this between us up to the post master general in Bombay, and in no time at all we were receiving United Press broadcasts. Then we had to make an arrangement with the Indian Telegraph to distribute the news over their landlines, so that it could be sent as far as New Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, and Ahmadabad. It seemed to me that anywhere in India was at least two thousand miles from anywhere else; it was no easy task to distribute a news service over such a vast area, and it took us some weeks to get it established. However, we eventually succeeded. The Indian Government would provide our radio reception over the receiver that had been given to us by the American CPO, which we would then collect from the post office in Bombay and bring back to the Taj Mahal Hotel, from where we would re-write it and distribute it to the various potential clients.

During Christmas 1944, I made my first contact with Sir Francis Lowe, who was the rather redoubtable editor of the Times of India. Sir Francis was very well respected in the newspaper world, and I sent him an invitation for him and his wife to join me in the Taj Mahal Hotel. He turned out to be a very nice gentleman, and his wife was terribly excited at being a guest in the Princess Room. They were most interested to hear about the United Press, Marie, and how we had left Singapore, and by the end of the evening we were all on very friendly terms.

A day or two later I went to see Sir Francis Lowe in his office, and put it to him fairly and squarely that United Press had promised me that if I was able to sell a news service to him, that I would be granted a transfer to London. For a moment or two he just sat there and looked at me, and then suddenly burst into a hearty laugh, and said, “Well that’s a type of sales talk I never heard before!” He said that if I sent him a trial service, then he would see how it went. So I sent him a trial service of the United Press News for about three weeks, after which time he wrote me a letter to say that the Times of India would become a subscriber. The first part of my objective had then been achieved, and the United Press had gotten their first foothold into the Indian news service.

The United Press affairs were going ahead very well indeed, and I had another assistant sent to me called Stuart Hensley. I think it was sometime in early February 1945 that Miles Vaughan came to New Delhi and installed himself in the Greens Hotel with Stuart Hensley—there was no room for him in the Princess Suite, which was now a hive of activity as our service got underway. I anticipated that once we had sold to the Times of India, all the other English language newspapers would also want to take our service. It was now our task to distribute the service to other parts of India, which was a very difficult thing to do because the Indian posts and telegraphs were not always that reliable. In India, communications could be damaged by the extreme weather experienced in a monsoon, or even by a stray elephant knocking down the landlines. We made good progress though, and became well known in Bombay, and were even the subject of a feature in a weekly magazine called Forum.

One of the most interesting characters I came across during this time was an Indian called Jamnadas Dwarkadas. He was a huge man with grey hair cropped very short who wore a voluminous dhoti, which is an Indian robe of a pale beige colour. He came to the Taj Mahal Hotel and sat himself down on one of our low divans, and I was rather surprised that as he sat down a big fold of his dhoti seemed to hit the floor with a thump, and I wondered what it was that had hit the deck. Jamnadas Dwarkadas was one of the leading men on the Bombay Cotton Exchange, and the reason for his visit was that he wanted me to get him the opening quotation of the cotton price on the New York commodity market.

That was a job that I did not want to do. Because of the previous experience I had in Hong Kong, I knew what a tremendous effort it meant for the United Press. To get that one quotation meant that we would have to have a man on the floor at the New York Cotton Exchange, and as soon as the market opened he would have to phone in with the price to our New York office, who would then transmit it to San Francisco, who would then in turn transmit on our radio broadcast to Bombay. We would have to have someone there at the receiving station to then phone it in. The whole essence of the exercise was speed, and Mr. Jamnadas Dwakadas’ main idea was to get this quotation first, which would mean an awful lot of money to him.

To try and put him off, I told him that it would cost a lot of money, and though I had no real idea how much, I came up with a random figure of at least ten thousand American dollars per month. To my astonishment he stooped down and groped in amongst his dhoti, and produced a great pile of one hundred rupee notes done up in rubber bands and put it on the table, which he said was a deposit. So we embarked on this rather difficult task of getting the opening cotton price for Mr. Jamnadas Dwarkadas, and we were quite successful, though it was not easy. It meant that we had to break off in the middle of very important news bulletins just to get the figures. Mr. Jamnadas Dwarkadas was quite happy though, and continued to pay us ten thousand dollars per month for the service.

In April 1945 we managed to get a big coup for the United Press, and released the news of President Roosevelt’s death before all the other news agencies. John Hlavacek and I were asleep in the Princess Room, when sometime after midnight the telephone rang, and on the other end of the line was the “Admiral,” my American CPO contact. He said, “say we’ve got some big news for you. We’ve just been listing into the UP cast, President Roosevelt is dead.” That was a shock, and my first action was to get John Hlavacek to call the Times of India to see if their paper had been completed for the morning press. I told him to pass the message on to hold the front page, and then in the meantime got down enough details to cover the full gist of the story. It was then that I had to get in touch with one of the military censors, Ross Parker, who was also living in the Taj at the time. I called him up, much to his annoyance, and asked if we could release the story, because it would be on the wire shortly, and he agreed.

I began talking then to the Times of India people, and they found, much to their consternation, that they didn’t have an obituary for President Roosevelt. So I had to sit down and write an obit in the middle of the night. The work I had done with Swan, Culbertson and Fritz, the American stockbrokers in Hong Kong, came in very valuable, and I was able to describe everything that Roosevelt had done in instigating the “New Deal,” and about all the various other things that he had done during his first and second terms as president. All these things came flooding back to me, and I was able to add a little more detail to it, such as that he was the first American president to fly in an aeroplane, and about his polio. From this I managed to put together a respectable obituary. In the meantime, John Hlavacek had gotten things organised, and we had a lot of messenger boys running round to all the newspapers in Bombay delivering the news of President Roosevelt’s death. I am very proud to say that on the following day, nearly all the news in the Times of India was almost solidly United Press news, and most of it was written by Harold Guard.

I think that this sealed the fate of the Associated Press, our greatest American competitors in India, as they were not able to sell their service at all. It was a triumph for the United Press, and it was shortly after this that I got cables from our president Hugh Bailey, as well as Virgil Pinkley, the vice president in Europe, congratulating me on what Bailey called, “an historic coup.” By this time we had gotten things pretty well “ironed-out,” as far as the United Press was concerned, and I thought that it was time to remind Miles Vaughan of the promise he had made me.

I broached the subject with him and he tried to side step it, and said that we still had plenty to do. It was clear to me at this point that he was not going to keep his promise, which made me very angry as I felt that I had delivered my side of our bargain. So I started to make my own plans, and find a way back home to Britain in spite of Miles Vaughan’s reluctance to recognise my achievements. To this day I do not remember exactly how it happened, but somehow I managed to get myself onto an RAF flying boat that was going to back to Britain on April 24th 1945.

I always remember a great feeling of apprehension as we approached home, as they announced in the airplane that we all had to have our vaccination and inoculation certificates ready for the immigration people to inspect. Although I had many vaccinations and inoculations, I did not have any certificates, and so I felt terribly nervous as we landed. I was wearing an American army uniform, and as we went through immigration, a young official saw me and said, “Well there’s no need to ask you if you’ve been inoculated.” He had mistaken me for an American, and so I just said “Sure thing buddy!” I managed to get through, and I was very relieved at last to be back home.