Len Doherty wrote the best novel you’ve never heard of — in between shifts down the pit
Sheffield’s working-class hero and ‘The Good Lion’
Good afternoon members — and welcome to Thursday’s Tribune.
Today’s story is an absolute cracker. It’s by a young writer called Jack Chadwick, who wrote one of the most popular pieces our sister title The Mill have ever put out. That story, about a long-forgotten working-class author called Jack Hilton, was picked up by the national press and may even lead to the book, Caliban Shrieks, being brought back into print.
His piece for us is just as thrilling, covering a similar topic, but with the story turning out in a very different way. Len Doherty was a working-class author who was feted by the establishment before suddenly withdrawing from the literary scene. He later became a high profile journalist in Sheffield but his career was cut short by a chance encounter with unimaginable horror.
Editor’s note: With all the continuing turmoil in the media industry, it feels like people are finally realising that if they want journalism to survive, they need to start paying for it. But it’s not just about survival — the quality of what we, with your help, are able to produce is important too. Today’s story is a good example. Jack was commissioned to do it three months ago and it took him weeks to put together. We can only do stories this good because we have the support of almost 1,400 paying members. And the more we get, the better The Tribune will be. We’ve paywalled this piece halfway down in the hope that if you enjoy the essay, you might consider paying for our work. Thank you in advance for your support.
Mini-briefing
🌳 A special meeting of Sheffield council to debate Sir Mark Lowcock’s report about the street tree dispute descended into chaos and confusion yesterday. Senior Labour councillors weren’t present for the debate at which it was decided that a plaque commemorating the tree protesters’ fight would be erected in the Town Hall’s foyer. For a good summary of what went on, listen to Lucy Ashton’s report on BBC Radio Sheffield here (fast forward to 1hr 49min).
🗳️ And the fallout from the local elections continues with news in The Star that local Labour councillors fear being purged after Labour HQ took control of selections for 10 key positions. Jobs members are being required to reply for include council leader, deputy leader, chief whip, group chair, secretary and treasurer, as well as committee chairmanships held by Labour members. Some councillors plan to protest by not applying or resigning, they say.
🚆 The train operator TransPennine Express is to be nationalised by the government due to poor service and the high number of cancellations. The company, which operates the routes between Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and Cleethorpes, among others, will now be run by a business on behalf of the government as an “operator of last resort”. Passengers will see no change to the service but the overall aim is to improve its performance, say the BBC.
Things to do
🎻 This weekend marks the start of Music in the Round’s annual Sheffield Chamber Music Festival. Featuring performances from some of the world's best musicians, including Sheffield's brilliant Ensemble 360, the festival takes place in the incomparable setting of the Crucible Playhouse where the audience surrounds the performers on all sides. The programme begins with a launch event on Friday, 12 May and ends on Saturday, 20 May.
🍔 Fingers crossed for good weather on Saturday, 13 May as the seasonal Quayside Market returns to Victoria Quays for its 11th monthly outing. Delicious street food this time comes from among others Pellizco and V or V Grill House, while quality slurps will be provided by the quays’ permanent bars including Dorothy Pax and True Loves. There will also be stalls selling crafts and as always music comes from Cirque de Funk playing an all day DJ set.
⛪ This Sunday, 14 May, join Valerie Bayliss, former chair of the South Yorkshire Victorian Society, for a guided tour around an area which has played a key role in the city’s history: the historic Cathedral quarter. The walk, which begins in front of the Cathedral at 2.30pm, costs £5 and takes around two hours, finishing near Waingate. There are some short sections of cobbles and very steep pavements so the tour is unfortunately not suitable for wheelchairs.
Len Doherty wrote the best novel you’ve never heard of — in between shifts down the pit
By Jack Chadwick
A shuttle bus was boarding outside the transit lounge of Munich Airport when, on a February morning in 1970, passengers heard a scuffle break out at the terminal. Necks craned as shouting gave way to the sound of a skirmish, steel-capped boots hitting concrete. A blast rang out and the commotion moved closer. A man on the bus shouted for those around him to take cover, in an accent somewhere between Glaswegian and South Yorkshire. Columnist Len Doherty was bound for London — like everyone else on the shuttle, he was waiting to board a plane for the second leg of his journey back to Britain from Tel Aviv. His employer, The Sheffield Star, had dispatched him weeks earlier to report on the Israel-Palestine conflict. He could not have guessed the conflict would follow him to the tarmac at Munich.
Doherty was crouching by the open doors of the shuttle as an object flew in overhead. For seconds, he desperately jabbed his legs at the projectile in the hopes of manoeuvring it back out. “I tried to kick the bomb out but I could not reach it.” After the blast, it took superhuman resolve for the wounded columnist to heave an even worse-off little girl away from the wreckage and carry her as far as he could before finally crumpling from exhaustion. Columnist and child were taken to the same emergency room, where he saw nurses weep at the sight of her, “badly injured in the chest.”
Doherty somehow managed to file a first-hand account of the terrorist attack from his hospital bed before he was finally put under for treatment. It appeared in The Times the next morning. A highly celebrated columnist, in the Sixties he became perhaps the only journalist from a regional masthead to cover conflicts abroad. Algerian independence, the Vietnam War, Israel-Palestine — Doherty’s column, Vulcan, passed news on all to the people of South Yorkshire. He’d recognised the sound of the first blast at the airport as that of a grenade because of his time in Vietnam. But nothing he’d seen nor heard anywhere else would leave an indent as deep or devastating as from that day in Munich.
The bomb killed a couple instantly. Eleven other passengers including Doherty and the little girl were seriously injured. Calling the wounds ‘life-changing’ would be an understatement, they would prove life-ending for Doherty. The guilt he felt from not being able to volley the grenade back out of the bus ultimately led to his suicide, thirteen years later, aged just fifty-three. While the physical injuries made any kind of mental recovery a tall order, it was his troubled early life that had made any such a return to normalcy impossible for the man. And especially because ‘normal’ had never been straightforward for Len. He was a brilliant but difficult bloke, with a personality marked more by early hardship than later success. His colleagues at The Star were in awe of him, “sensitive, proud and talented ... in turns brilliant and then incredibly melancholy,” remembers one former reporter; “a manic depressive” who “sought salvation” in the pubs around the Star’s old Telegraph House offices.
Doherty had always been out of place. His columns for The Star were not his first choice of written medium: he'd produced three excellent novels in the Fifties, despite the arduous demands of his then- day job — down the mines. He'd worked in pits since he was seventeen, and was always deeply proud of this first calling, especially as the pivot to journalism relegated him to an office of “fokkin' graduates.” While he respected and could get on with many of his colleagues at The Star, the middle-class trimmings of the average journalist grated on the rough and ready Len.
Doherty shared an office with one Byron Rogers, who was twelve years his junior. In the younger man's words, Rogers never knew “which Len” would be sat across from him over their two Imperial typewriters: “the showy Len, the sensitive, the over-emotional, ... the tense, the kind, the bullying, the vulnerable” — a cocky young graduate, Rogers was twenty-three at the start of his stint at the paper, “with no past except childhood.” Len, at the time, was thirty-five, “and had nothing but past, many pasts, each of which had closed behind him, each time with bitterness.”
Doherty’s literary past had slammed shut not long after the publication of his masterpiece third and final novel, The Good Lion. Finished in 1958, the novel opens in the late Forties. Its three-year narrative maps the same period in Len's own life, beginning with his arrival by train in Sheffield, all alone, a lad of seventeen.
The wheels clattered and clicked under his feet, stumbling over points, he was thinking: Come on, train; come on, come on—and his body was tensed forward like a jockey urging on his horse. He thought of that first colliery he had seen, frail and tiny under an overbearing black slag-heap which, as he twisted to look back, had seemed to sprawl away endlessly, smoking in places like smouldering hills. He was looking out for another one and thinking that he liked this noble and austere country in spite of its bleakness.
As worthy as his two earlier works had been, it was The Good Lion that marked Doherty out to many critics “as a successor to D.H. Lawrence.” The novel is filmic, a work of real immersion, shoving readers into the complicated lives of its characters — a cast plucked from Len's own world. These are people who clash with one another because of conflicting life logics, and whose own internal thoughts are just as much a battleground for rival imperatives.
This is especially true of its working-class antihero, Walter Morris: a version of Len or rather, a means of wrestling, on paper, with the contradictions in the author's own character. Walt is quick to anger, and determined to project forcefulness as a means of deflecting from his own cavernous insecurities. The result is a bleak mantra: the imperative to be “a good lion” — to dominate others, to forcibly extract the lion's share from life, for Walt and Walt alone.
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