Cassandra Of The. “Mirror”

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32252, 21 March 1970, Page 4

Cassandra Of The. “Mirror”

Cassandra. Reflections In a Mirror. By Robert Connor. Cassell. 185 pp. William Connor wrote the Cassandra column in the London “Daily Mirror” for 32 years. He had a tremendous personal following, for despite the versatility of his pen, he was never pompous or pretentious. He could be uproariously funny, deeply moving or even profoundly irritating, but most of his readers thotight of him with regard and affection. They cotild identify themselves with him—-he spoke their language, understood their fears and problems, was their champion. He died, Sir William Connor (knighted for services to journalism) three years ago, a victim of diabetes and over-work and now his eldest son has ' written his biography. Robert Connor is an advertising TV producer and copy writer. Whilst he has obviously inherited some of his father’s literary flair, the highlights pf the book are all Cassandra’s with quotations from some of the best of his writings. William Connor’s life story and selected anecdotes are interesting too. Bom in 1909, the son of an Ulster-bom civil servant, he began his writing career producing advertising copy for a publicity firm. He joined the “Daily Mirror” in 1935 and within a very short time was writing the Cassandra column, the live letters column, and was also at various times military correspondent, aeronautical correspondent and cat correspondent. His main work was the Cassandra column and right from the start the column bore the stamp of a man who wrote about what he personally believed in. It was a personal cplumn bearing the full imprint of his feelings and emotions. William Connor was intensely interested in food and bis cookery columns were often very funny. Boiled British cabbage he described as: “something lower than ex-army blankets stolen by dispossessed Goanese dosshouse-keepers who used them to cover busted down

henhouses in the'. slum district • of Karachi, found them useless, threw them in anger into the Indus, '.where they were recovered by convicted beachcombers with grappling irons, who cut them in strips with, shears and stewed them in sheep dip before they- were sold to dying beggars." William Connor travelled extensively and interviewed many of. the leading personalities of the day. A piece about Liberace led td a celebrated libel case, which was more noted for its humour and classic displays of advocacy than for its finer points of Jaw. He interviewed Marilyn Monroe, describing her as “the glint in- every man's eye.” watched the exploding of Britain's second hydrogen bomb on Christmas Island in 1957 and then wrote: “It was a dress rehearsal for the death of the world." He attended the trial of Adolf Eichman—“Compared with him Genghis Khan was a welfare worker," but it was the death of Sir Winston Churchill which inspired what are probably his most famous words: “The last frail-petal of one of the great red roses of old England falls. And the sword sleeps in the scabbard." His son offers plentv of information about his professional life, friends and colleagues and the exhausting, exacting way of life he lived and there are glimpses of his private life—he was married with three children—and special emphasis on his enjoyment of the pleasures of the Buckinghamshire countryside around his home. Mr George Brown contributes a complimentary foreword but one is left wondering Whether a son is the best person to write his father’s life story. Robert Connor at times seems adulatorv out of a sense of duty and yet in an attempt to balance the scales is almost patronising in his effort to appear fair. The Cassandra column certainly revolutionised popular journalism in Britain and inspired many imitators but feu have found their way into their readers’ hearts as Robert Connor did.