RIP Charlie Harris. We first met as teenage reporters on police calls at Southgate nick long before Leveson, when the Bill was a Force, not a Service.
We’d sit down in an interview room with the desk sergeant and go through the crime books. Burglary, robbery, TDA. Names, addresses, facts.
We’d walk out agreeing there was nothing exciting, then part and sprint for our cars – his a knackered old Skoda, mine a creaking Cortina Mk1 – to be first to the address that offered the best hope of a decent follow-up.
Whoever parked nearest the nick usually won.
Later, when Charlie took charge at the Borehamwood Times (nee Post), he gathered his nervous staff to ask what they had for a front page lead. Spotting a rape story buried on an inside page he enthusiastically proposed splashing on it until someone pointed out it was a crop report.
The two of us had a memorable visit to New York City when Ground Zero was still smouldering, making new friends in an Irish bar and having a long chat with a cop named Mick McManus.
Then there was the time we humped the newsroom onto the back of a flat-bed lorry and dressed in trench coats and hats for the Barnet Carnival parade. That extra touch of authenticity by filling the desk drawers with beers was probably what won us the best float trophy.
My daughter Zoe’s entire life was mapped out in enthusiastic detail by Charlie, me and a few other friends in The Nelson in Barnet just hours after she was born.
Down the years Charlie was a journalist, teacher and food lover, a teller of stories, a patriot and Chief Constable of the Grammar Police. God help anyone who muddled their apostrophes (apologies to him if I’ve mashed my syntax here).
He was also a lover of Guinness and women, ferocious defender of the freedom of the Press and of the individual. His views on any and every subject turned into a blizzard of Facebook posts.
He also served as president of the Chartered Institute Of Journalists and lectured for the National Council For The Training of Journalists, inspiring thousands of young trainees.
Charlie made friends easily and kept them for life. He had a phenomenal memory for anecdotes of events decades ago that I’d forgotten the following morning.
He spent most of his career in local papers where the bulk of the proper spade work is done – zebra crossings, damp council flats, charity appeals, eccentric one-theme campaigners. All good fun and open all hours, evenings, weekends. Go for a quiet pint in your local and someone will always come up with a, “Have you heard…?”
Bread and butter stuff but sometimes you struck lucky with an armed robbery or murder. The pay was rubbish but it wasn’t a job, it was a lifestyle.
Charlie was just 60, the first of my life-long circle of friends to die. That concentrates the mind.
It was a cruelly early deadline to meet but he did a lot with his time. I hope I do the same.
Our careers trundled along in tandem for quite a few years. Once we were both editors – and the entire staff – of neighbouring free weeklies, me on the Hendon-Edgware Independent, Charlie on the Harrow-Wembley.
As he’d been in journalism a year or so longer than me he kept insisting that he was primus inter pares – first among equals.
He would keep banging on about it and, at the time, it niggled.
Now it sounds like quite a decent epitaph.
Farewell Charlie, first among equals.
Get the beers in.
Charlie wished that donations be made to St Luke’s Hospice, Harrow. His family have set up a JustGiving page: www.justgiving.com/CharlieHarris