Harry's game

HARRY Diamond is one of Scotland's more colourful characters - a journalist who turned to the neighbouring career of public relations, first with the Scottish Gas Board and then, most spectacularly, with Glasgow City Council.

He guided the city's publicity machine through those vital years of creating a new image, crystallised in that brainwave of a slogan, Glasgow's Miles Better.

But Harry Diamond had a habit of hitting the headlines himself, arising from an eccentricity of behaviour which is rare and refreshing in this age of drab uniformity. It was not, of course, entirely the product of unconscious humour. Harry could spot a good gimmick on the distant horizon and had the knack of exploiting it to the full.

With his father registered as a Russian alien, the first discovery about Harry is that his name was not Diamond at all. He should have been Harry Chatzkind but, in the well-worn tradition of foreigners taking on the first pronouncable name the immigration officer could think of, his father was given Diamond, from the fascia board of a nearby shop.

But that was not all. Until Harry was 18 he celebrated the wrong birthday, only discovering the real date when he joined the army! It was not until his mother died that he found her name was Millie, not Minnie - and his father, who was always known as Joe, was really Julius. To complete the family confusion, Harry himself is really Henry.

All of that, however, fits in with the persona of a free-ranging character who has never avoided an expletive if it embellished his meaning. As he drove home one rain-swept night, his car broke down yet again. As Harry stood kicking and swearing at it in disgust, he dropped the keys into the hand of a passing stranger - and told him the car was his!

At a prestigious dinner in London, Harry was due to be the last of seven speakers. But the night was late. And as the red-breasted master of ceremonies announced stentoriously that Mr Diamond would now give his address, the bold Harry stood up and said: ``My address is 9 George Square, Glasgow'' - and sat down to tumultuous applause.

But through the tomfoolery ran a serious streak. No fool Harry, but a keen observer of the human condition, not least of his masters at Glasgow City Council. In the devastation of widowhood, and now retired, he has been writing his autobiography, from which we publish these excerpts, guaranteed to fascinate and amuse . . .

THREE people dominated the affairs of Glasgow City Council during my years there - Dick Dynes, Jean McFadden, and Pat Lally - and they all had a hearty dislike of each other, which did nothing for the harmony and unity of the Labour group or its image among the citizenry.

All were leaders of the council; able, strong-minded people who enjoyed their power. I had my run-ins with them but our disagreements were never very serious. I just stood quietly and let them rebuke me for some imagined transgression or omission on my part.

Dynes had a tendency to rant but didn't take long to cool down. McFadden could be irritatingly querulous and Lally was quiet but deadly serious.

Dick Dynes and Pat Lally lost their seats in an election in 1977, undoubtedly because of internal and public disenchantment with their frequent squabbles. Dynes disappeared without trace, which was a disappointment to many people, including myself. He could enliven any debate and was a formidable opponent. He could dish it out, and take it too, but to be rejected by the electorate was apparently just too much for him.

He came into my office a few weeks after his defeat in 1977 and never set foot in the City Chambers again. He died of a heart attack in October 1994.

Lally worked quietly and persistently in the political backwoods and made a comeback to the council in 1980. Six years later he took the leadership from his arch-rival, Jean McFadden. She got it back in 1992 and lost it again to Lally in 1994.

The reform of local government again in 1995 created an interesting situation when Mrs McFadden, a resilient and persistent lady, was elected convener of the new City of Glasgow Council, narrowly beating Lally and putting Jean in the running for the post of Lord Provost in 1996, when the council took over the running of the city.

Jean's elevation to the post was by no means automatic, as was proved by a meeting of the Labour group on March 18 when Pat won the post of first citizen by 52 votes to 25 over Jean, which convincingly confirms the old saying that you can't tell the result of an election until the votes are counted.

Mrs McFadden did, however, retain the post of convener (or chairman) of the Labour group which was traditionally held by the leader of the council but the perceived wisdom now is that the convener of the group should be impartial, like the Speaker of the House of Commons. My only comment on that is ``Ay, that'll be right''.

Pat Lally had the highest public profile when I retired in 1991. He led the council during the Garden Festival year, Culture year, the bid for the title of City of Architecture and Design in 1999, and is credited with ensuring that the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall was built before the end of Culture year in 1990. As the Lord Provost, Pat now had a further opportunity to make an impact on the life of the city.

All Lord Provosts complain about the burden of office but they don't like to leave it behind just the same.

Sir William Gray, a lawyer, lent dignity and authority to the post and worked hard to attract Civil Service departments and jobs to the city in the early 1970s.

Bob Gray was amiable enough but tended towards the pompous; Susan Baird was friendly, photogenic, and good-humoured, most of the time anyway, and I was particularly impressed with her performance when I accompanied her and husband George to Israel in 1990.

Michael Kelly was educated and manipulative, a formidable combination. He was also very lucky that certain things happened during his term of office that enabled him to show how clever he was.

Although he didn't devise the Miles Better campaign, he certainly knew how to use it. Holding a ``Miles Better'' umbrella over the Queen during a visit to Glasgow was an inspired piece of showmanship. He was also politically astute.

The ill-fated marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1981 put Michael in a quandary. Glasgow had to give the royal couple a wedding present but the ruling Labour group, who had elected him Lord Provost, didn't approve of giving royalty expensive gifts.

``We had to give the couple a gift worthy of them, which reflected well on the city and which didn't anger the Labour group and get the city a lot of bad publicity,'' he told me later.

Benevolent forces were obviously on Michael's side. Not long before, a Glasgow GP, Dr Anne Gilmore, had come to him to ask what help he could give to set up the new Glasgow hospice. Michael said he would think about it.

Then he had a brainwave. He phoned the Queen's private secretary and asked if a hospice named after the Prince and Princess of Wales would be acceptable as a wedding gift from the city. Royal approval quickly followed.

Michael phoned Anne Gilmore, who could by then hardly reject the idea. That day in 1981, when my story of the gift appeared in Britain's news media, a Buckingham Palace spokeswoman was quoted as saying: ``It's a marvellous present. The Prince and Princess of Wales approve enormously that the money is going to such a good cause.''

The council gave the hospice three adjoining buildings in Carlton Place, Glasgow, but funds were urgently needed to convert them. In December 1983, I went to Sir Hugh Fraser, who had inherited the store group from his father and was a trustee of the Fraser Foundation, and asked if he could help.

He picked up the phone to call his friend David Walton, chairman of Scottish Metropolitan Properties and a founder trustee of the Isadore and David Walton Charitable Trust.

``Harry Diamond is in my office looking for money for the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice,'' Fraser said. ``I'll give #50,000 if you give the same.''

``It's a deal,'' said David Walton.

I vividly recall that day worrying about the gas bill in my pocket!

Councillors are drawn from various

levels of society. Some are conscientious and honest, some devious, some ineffectual, some witless, some unemployed and some unemployable.

Inevitably, we had nicknames in the best Damon Runyon tradition for many of them. Some of the more memorable names were the Six Dollar Man (a play on the television series The Six Million Dollar Man), Crazy Horse, The Budgie, Yogi Bear, Miss Piggy, and Lazarus. One councillor whose favourite reading matter was ``pull ring to open'' was known as The Tank and a large lady councillor was known as Queen Kong.

Some councillors and the officials whose departments they oversee have a good working relationship. Others don't. Councillors have a tendency to want to show their authority, especially if they are nonentities outside the town hall, as so many of them are.

Often there seems to be a love-hate relationship between councillors and officials. I think this is because elected members have to appoint officials to jobs paying a lot more than the politicians can ever aspire to. This makes them jealous so as soon as they appoint a well-paid official they immediately try to make him look incompetent.

The politician will, of course, plead that he or she is merely making sure the council gets value for the taxpayers' money. But I don't see it that way.

``THE Prime Minister's fly is open,'' I whispered to my companion as Winston Churchill passed us in the House of Commons corridors. ``I think we should tell him.''

``You tell him; you're young and brash,'' said my friend. I padded quietly after the great man, hummed and hawed and coughed until he eventually turned round to see what all the row was about.

``Er ..... excuse me, sir. I know you won't mind me mentioning it to save you some embarrassment, but your fly is open.''

I remember thinking rather irreverently that my suit was in better condition than the Prime Minister's, but this was a very special occasion for me. I had taken my best suit to London to create the right kind of impression. This was a time when I thought Members of Parliament were important people.

Mr Churchill stared at me, looked down, and said in that slow, commanding voice that had thrilled and inspired millions throughout the war: ``My boy, there is no harm in leaving open the door of the cage when the bird is dead.''

I hurried back to my colleague to report this piece of Churchilliana and before I knew it I was in the bar of the Mother of Parliaments telling the story to an ever-widening audience. Eventually, I think there were more Members of Parliament in the bar than in the debating chamber.

I was in the bar for a fortnight, being plied with whisky and I never did send a story back to my paper, the Glasgow Herald. Maybe that was why I was never sent to Parliament again. Not by the Herald anyway.

Maybe it was unsophisticated but I always felt slightly awed at the thought of walking among the ghosts of people like Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Asquith, and Lloyd George.

If I was brash that day in 1952 I certainly wasn't on that autumn day of 1944 when I walked through an old oak door on the third floor of a building in Buchanan Street and became the youngest reporter in the history of the then-Glasgow Herald, the oldest English-language daily newspaper in the world.

I was 17, pale-faced, skinny and wore a brown velour hat with a wide brim, like a refugee from an old Hollywood gangster film. The world was consumed with indifference at my elevation from telephone clerk and editorial messenger.

The war in Europe was going well for the Allied Forces and Prime Minister Churchill, before he was defeated in the 1945 General Election, was in Quebec talking with President Franklin D Roosevelt about a master plan to defeat Japan.

Another event took place in 1944 which caused no great excitement at the time but about which millions of words have been written since. Sir William Burrell, a Glasgow ship-owner, gave the bulk of his art collection to the city.

DOROTHY Henderson, a well-rounded, good-humoured but determined lady, started something which dramatically changed the face of Glasgow, won her a number of environmental awards and helped me immeasurably to tell the world about the ``new Glasgow''.

One evening in 1974 she went to a meeting to hear about improvement grants available from Glasgow City Council. She went home and told a friend, Mrs Angela Petrie, another owner-occupier in their grim, soot-blackened, unattractive block of tenement flats in the West End of the city. The two women rounded up all the other 109 owner-occupiers in the block and formed Woodlands Residents' Association. They gained a grant of #36,000, had the building stone-cleaned and, to their surprise, it came up a gleaming honey colour.

They also had doors made for the closes (common entries), cleaned up gardens and back courts and when they were finished they found they had created an architectural jewel.

People in nearby tenements blocks and from property for miles around came to see what Dorothy and Angela had achieved and embarked on similar improvements on their own properties.

In the years that followed, most of Glasgow's tenement buildings were stone-cleaned and refurbished. When the city's business houses saw what the householders had done they did the same with their own buildings. The city council also cleaned its properties, including the City Chambers, and Glasgow was no longer the depressing, soot-blackened city of yesteryear.

When new hotels, office blocks, sports centres, walkways alongside the River Clyde, shopping centres, an extension to the Mitchell Library, a new transport museum and other projects were built, the stories of how they all came about were written up for the news media at home and abroad.

Gradually it dawned on the world that something interesting was happening to Glasgow. Behind the press releases lay an army of people who had been working for years to enhance the quality of life in the city, politicians, developers, architects, builders, artists, musicians, dreamers, people with ideas and no money and people with money and no ideas - and people who just wanted to get their names in the papers.

So out of this bubbling cauldron of endeavour and determination and enthusiasm and self-interest and arrogance emerged a product that was well worth projecting.

IT is ironic that, in April 1981, when I was working 12 or more hours a day to promote Glasgow, I also helped Dundee to get some of the worst publicity in its history.

The Labour-controlled city council had created considerable anguish for Jews and non-Jews alike by twinning with the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Nablus, flying the flag of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the city chambers and sending Lord Provost Gowans and some councillors on a courtesy visit.

The Lord Provost and his colleagues demonstrated their razor-sharp intellect and awareness of the rightness of things by presenting the mayor of Nablus with a bottle of whisky he couldn't drink because he was a Muslim - and a kilt he couldn't wear because his legs had been amputated after an extremist bomb attack on his car.

One of the prime movers in the ``love-in'' with the PLO was the young secretary of Dundee Labour Party, Mr George Galloway, who 13 years later, as MP for Glasgow Hillhead, created considerable anguish in the Labour Party by going to Baghdad and appearing on Iraqi state television with the butcher of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, to salute his ``courage, power and indefatigability''.

The flagrant disregard by the city council of the feelings of most people in Dundee, and a great many outside it, prompted the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council to stage a protest in Dundee. Among those invited was Mr Greville Janner, QC, MP, who was also president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

I wrote a story about the impending visit [Harry had become honorary propagandist of the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council] and sent it to all the major news media. Mindless vandals chose the day of the visit to cover the walls of Dundee Synagogue with swastikas and other anti-Semitic slogans, escalating what might have been an ordinary news story into an event of international interest.

In the weeks that followed, wide coverage was given to Dundee's indiscretion, one journalist writing that it was the city of jute, journalism,

and jackasses.

Greville Janner wrote to say: ``Thanks for all you are doing to ensure the Dundee episode will provide a sufficiently nasty shock to the people concerned, at least to minimise the chance of a repetition elsewhere.''

I'm glad my Labour masters in Glasgow didn't know what I was doing, otherwise my local government career might have been cut dramatically short.

A GLASGOW advertising man, John Struthers, and his 14-year-old son, Mark, were doodling on sheets of paper on a flight to London, trying to devise a campaign slogan for their native city. Page after page was discarded as they wrote things like ``Glasgow. Tops for you''.......``Get to know Glasgow''.......``Grow with Glasgow''.......``The Glasgow Smile''. Still they hadn't quite got it when they reached London.

Then, on the train from the airport to the city, John wrote ``Glasgow's Miles Better''. When they got home that night, they substituted a smiling face for the letter ``o''. And so was born the slogan.

Struthers took his idea to Lord Provost Michael Kelly, who had the wit and foresight to see its possibilities. He persuaded the council to put up #150,000 towards a full-scale promotional campaign for the city. The business community put up #200,000.

The Glasgow's Miles Better campaign, which started in 1983, was one of the best promotions ever mounted by a British city, recognised with awards at the International Film and Television Festival in New York.

No opportunity to spread the word was overlooked. Holidaymakers flying out of Glasgow had the stickers on their luggage in a variety of languages. People like Jimmy Savile and Lulu were recruited for promotions - and, of course, the Queen was pictured with Michael Kelly under that ``Miles Better'' umbrella.

At one point, John Struthers devised an advertisement to put on Edinburgh buses during the Festival - but was refused permission by the city transport authority.

``It was planned to spend about #2000 on this exercise but Edinburgh's refusal was reported worldwide and Glasgow received millions of pounds worth of publicity for nothing,'' Struthers said. ``I was even quoted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal!''

Michael Kelly launched the campaign nationally with a breakfast at the London Savoy, with a guest-list which included Billy Connolly.

``Mr Connolly was being what he considered amusing for the benefit of the crowd in a reception area when I approached him quietly at Michael Kelly's request,'' Struthers said.

```Would you mind taking your place at the top table, Mr Connolly, so that we can get started?' I asked. Mr Connolly looked me up and down and said in a voice that carried to Carlisle: `Whooo are yooo? F*** off.'

``A few self-conscious titters broke out at this brilliant riposte. Mr Connolly had obviously been misled by my immaculate appearance. I put my hand under his armpit, assisted him to a nearby wall and whispered in his ear in the idiom which he apparently understood best: `Listen pal, ah'm a Glasgow man an' all and if you talk to me like that again I'll rip yer scruffy f*****g heid aff and fling it to all yer admirers out there. Get the message, son?'

``Mr Connolly was taken aback, abashed and nonplussed. He went in for breakfast.''

Can You Get My Name in The Papers? by Harry Diamond will be published by Neil Wilson on Thursday, priced #12.99.