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David Hands: how I got into journalism

When anyone stands down from an occupation which has taken up the last forty or so years of a life, I wonder how many try to analyse what it was that led towards that occupation. After all, there are so many influences that can point the way – those of a parent, a teacher, a friend, even a careers advisory bureau for those of us who, heading towards the end of formal education, remained uncertain how to earn an honest crust.

Rugby was always on my horizon, though in what shape or form I could not, as a teenager, have said. I’d been lucky at home to always have a rugby ball to play with since the family lived about half a mile from Salisbury Rugby Club and my father, being the club treasurer, was also the keeper of the balls (the clubhouse was little more than a place to change into playing gear and, not infrequently, was broken into). It was my habit, aged 10 or 11, when the weather was bad, to practise kicking down the hallway until the sad day when I launched a tentative drop-kick which, remarkably, took off and shattered the glass in the front door.

A few years later, now playing at the rarified heights of Salisbury’s third XV, I discovered a way of getting my name into the local weekly paper. The Salisbury Journal’s sports writer would cast a benevolent eye over the first team’s activities on a Saturday afternoon and then grab hold of any third-XV player as we trudged back from our pitch to discover who had done what in that game. I had a decent memory for the scorers (there often weren’t that many) and, because no-one else had volunteered, I had become the goal-kicker so there was always a decent chance for me to feature in the paper.

Moving on another few years and entering my third and final year at university, I was still no nearer a decision on what job to apply for. Hence a visit to the careers service who, after due consideration, thought I might be right for publishing or radio so why not start out as a journalist. My only thought was that I wouldn’t follow in my father’s footsteps – he was a quantity surveyor and my head for figures was never good – so it was worth a shot. I offered my services to the university paper, a weekly product, claiming to know something about sport and among the tasks they set me was a series on the university’s sporting captains.

Now these were people who were good at what they did (as opposed to my rugby-playing friends in Salisbury) and I learned a lot about motivation. Among those I interviewed was the captain of the women’s cricket team and a remark she made as I was leaving has stayed with me. “You know,” she said, “you’re the first person who has taken us seriously.” Hard to believe  now, when the standard of women’s sport is so high – as I write, Rachael Blackmore has just become the first woman to win Cheltenham’s Champion Hurdle – but this was 1968 and cricket was still leading the way for women who enjoyed the traditional team sports.

For one reason and another, I acquired the taste for writing. I met a man who knew a man who could introduce me to the editor of an evening paper in Wales and he agreed to take me on, particularly if I could learn how to write shorthand before starting. He did warn me, though, that university graduates were not universally popular in regional journalism. “They come in thinking that, because they have a degree, they know it all,” he said. “Whereas a local sixth former we can mould into a decent reporter, get some good habits learned before he or she has the chance to pick up bad ones.” So I kept my head down, learned on the job and angled my way into the good books of the paper’s sports editor.

Working in Wales, of course, meant that rugby was never far away. All the young men on the paper would spend a year in a district office which also meant regular attendance at that district’s rugby club. In my case, it was Abertillery, then a first-class club which had produced international players and whose ground remains one of the most natural amphitheatres for sport. There I learned how to build relationships with players, become immune to threats (when whatever I had written had not gone down too well), file running copy for the Saturday football paper, all the basic groundwork for a career in sports journalism.

David Hands, Rugby correspondent, The Times 1982–2010

Memory added on July 3, 2021

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