As a journalist George Negus could always inveigle his way in for the interview, no matter how famous the person or how difficult the task.
George led with his forehead, followed closely by his moustache: and then his boisterous voice.
On TV he used a microphone like a cricket bat, always holding it way out front above a thrusting leg, like a top-class batsman. No surprise, really, because — two years in a row — George was in the Queensland schoolboys’ team that won the Australian championship.
I first noticed George’s ability to charm and entice people back in 1964 when I turned up to take out a lovely girl, Denise, on a long-arranged date.
I’d been introduced to this young kindergarten teacher by my mate, Davis Cup tennis player Kenny Fletcher. This was my first proper date since my red-headed girlfriend rang me up on Wednesday afternoon May 18, 1960 – at eight minutes to three in the afternoon – to say she didn’t want to see me anymore.
(Don’t worry, I’m over it.)
Since then, Fletch had been urging me to get a new girlfriend and forget about the redhead. He’d say: “That was more than three years ago!” And he’d frown: “You’re 22 now Hughie … you’re proving hard to place!”
Fletch knew the kindergarten teacher because her parents played cards every Friday night with his parents, Norm and Ethel.
We were Annerley boys and Denise’s family lived in the next suburb towards town, Dutton Park. Their weatherboard home was up on tall stumps at the front because it overlooked the huge cemetery that ran down the hill all the way to the murky banks of the brown Brisbane River.
I’d taken her for a hit of tennis at nearby Fairfield after being introduced in Caloundra and we seemed to get on well.
So I’d asked her out on this date.
When I arrived, rearing to go, she invited me in – as girls always did back in the 1960s – to meet her parents.
To my shock, when I entered the lounge room there was a third person there.
A handsome, strongly-built bloke my age with fair hair – rather like mine – entertaining her father with stories of cricket derring-do.
His name was George Negus and he greeted me with a robust handshake and a steady, almost aggressive, gaze deep into the eyes.
No one said what he was doing there in that lounge room.
But I could guess.
“Oh, that’s just George being George,” Denise said as we left the three of them in her house to go out on our date.
“You never know when or where George is going to pop up!”
I was not reassured … because George was there again entertaining the clearly fascinated parents when I turned up to take Denise with four other girls to the 1964 Beatles concert at Brisbane’s Festival Hall.
George was very, very interested to hear that I’d got six free tickets just because I was a journalist.
So, I explained that journalists could get in anywhere for free, whenever they liked, because everyone wanted good publicity. And I related how I’d recently interviewed the Police Commissioner, Mr Frank Bischoff, for an article about the incredible growth of night sport in Brisbane.
I told them I couldn’t understand why Mr Bischoff kept talking about drive-in theatres instead of lit tennis and netball courts: “Yes, those drive-in movie theatres Hughie,” our Police Commissioner said, “they have sure brought a lot of night sport to Brisbane eh?”
What was he on about?
George tried to bring the conversation back to the century he had scored that weekend in A Grade cricket for Wests, but I completely gazumped him with my story about having a sit-down lunch with the entire West Indian cricket team at the Bellevue Hotel before the Tied Test in Brisbane.
Just the West Indian cricket team and me!
“I’m going to become a journalist,” George suddenly blurted out, as if he’d kept the secret for far too long.
I said he was too late.
“I’ve been a cadet reporter for four years and I still don’t understand it – and you’re a school teacher with all those holidays. How are you going to become a journalist?”
George didn’t hesitate: “I’m going to go to Fleet Street,” he announced, “the home of journalism. I will start there.” And he swung towards Denise’s mother and father for confirmation and I could tell they were mightily impressed.
So, George had gazumped my gazump.
But worse was to come.
Another sporting champion like George, John Newcombe from Sydney, arrived in town to stay with Kenny Fletcher’s family at 524 Ipswich Road, Annerley.
Newk was tall, handsome, confident, and destined to become a star. (He and Fletch later teamed up to win the Wimbledon Doubles in 1966.) And, believe it or not, Newk also took our girlfriend out on a date.
Fletch revealed this bit of inside information to me, and added: “You’d better make your move, Hughie, you haven’t even kissed her yet.”
Now, you have to picture the romantic scene for this particular part of the story.
Denise and I are sitting at the top of the long, long set of front steps down to the street overlooking all the head-stones and dark low bushes and tall trees of the massive Dutton Park Cemetery … and I pose the big question:
“Are you OK?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Denise sighs. “I just don’t know … there’s just no nice blokes around.”
I’m shocked.
Here she is, being courted by me, by John Newcombe, and by George Negus and two of those three were later to be officially named Australian Male Sex Symbols! (I’ll let you guess which two.)
The third and final time Denise and I went out I drove her home at midnight.
We were sitting in my grey Sunbeam Alpine sports car, chatting, when there was an urgent knock-knock-knock on my window, on the cemetery side. Stupidly, I wound the window down and there in my face was a massive unshaven man waving a brown bottle in his right hand.
“Drive me to town,” he slurred.
I said OK go around and get in the other side.
As he went behind the car, I gunned the engine and took off and we didn’t return until the coast was well and truly clear.
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The next time I saw Denise was in London in 1966.
It was on a double date with her and her husband, George Negus, who sat tightly squeezed together in the back of my red sports car.
Like scores of Aussie journalists, George had been unable to get a job on Fleet Street. And school teacher wages in London at that time were very low.
I could see things were not going well for them.
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Five years later, in 1971 – after seven years overseas working for newspapers, magazines and Reuters – I returned home and walked into The Australian’s bureau in Brisbane asking for a job.
But George had beaten me there too.
The Australian’s Bureau Chief told me that a bloke called George Negus — after the divorce went through – had come in asking for a job.
“He had no experience, so of course I knocked him back,” said the Bureau Chief. “But George pointed at a chair in the reporters’ room and said ‘who’s sitting there mate?’”
Nobody.
“Well, I’m going to sit there until you need someone … and you can give me whatever it is and I’ll go and do it.”
As luck would have it, there was a large student demonstration that day and so George was dispatched to Queensland University just to keep an eye on things … and he wrote such an exciting story that he was invited back the next day to help out again.
But it didn’t mean he had a job.
Then George charmed his way into a government office, got hold of a document, and broke a story that embarrassed the state administration.
Next thing the police arrived saying that the document was “stolen”.
The Bureau Chief told me he had rung the Editor of The Australian in Sydney to say George might be arrested.
“Arrested!” said Rupert Murdoch’s Editor-in-Chief. “Arrested! Then don’t just stand there talking to me … get him out of town! Send him down here, we need a reporter like him!”
As George himself told an interviewer on TV many decades later: “I conned my way into journalism.”
The two of us continued to remain friendly rivals for the next 50 years: but George was always his usual one step ahead of me.
In the 1970s I knocked back a job on Four Corners and stuck with newspapers, while George took a job on the ABC’s This Day Tonight which led on to TV fame and fortune on 60 Minutes.
Years later, I was on a Meet the Press TV panel with Andrew Peacock as guest. George was following Peacock around for a 60 Minutes election special. So he sat in on the Show.
Afterwards, I pulled George aside in a corridor and asked how I’d gone on television.
George thought for a minute, brushing his moustache with the side of the forefinger of his left hand, poked his intimidating head towards mine, and said loudly: “If I were you Hughie, I’d keep my day job.”
After my childhood memoir Over the Top with Jim became the biggest-selling non-fiction book of 1992, I thought I finally had him.
Soon I was even invited to appear on the same stage as George in Brisbane as a double-act. But George had become even more famous because of his clash on national TV with Margaret Thatcher … so there was standing room only as he grabbed the microphone before I could reach it.
To my surprise George started by telling the crowd how proud he was of my success and how he had always known I would do well.
I was left speechless.
A few years later, the international book publisher Penguin invited me to Maroochydore to talk at their annual sales conference: a coup for any author.
But when I arrived I found that – also speaking that night – was George … because he and his second wife, journalist Kirsty Cockburn, were bringing out a children’s book “Trev the Truck”.
I noted the power of TV as I stood in a dark corner with my wife Helen while hundreds of Penguins gathered in the light around the magic of George Negus.
It turned out George was going to address the Penguin audience from the large stage … while I was told I would be out on the side verandah for anyone who might want to hear me instead of George – even though it was pouring rain out there.
But what could I do?
Then, like Herminius in Horatius Defends the Bridge, up spake brave George Negus.
Grabbing the only microphone, George said he wouldn’t allow them to relegate his long-time rival Hughie to the side verandah. No! We would share the stage, and the glory, together… as in old times.
Thank you for that kindness, George, not many people would do that.
In 2022 George’s family announced he was in a Sydney nursing home with dementia.
So I just wanted to say:
George, you may have forgotten many things, but we all remember you.
Hughie I loved, loved, loved this story. The last line was the best … beautiful xx
Funny story, but sad. I love the way you see humour in unsettling situations.