Professional writer - from 1953......

A Professional Writer? (From 1953 onwards!)


When did I first decide that I wanted to be a writer? Probably when I was about fourteen and my essays were praised by Mr Edwin Day, my English teacher at the Northgate School. We always enjoy what we are good at – and I found that I really enjoyed writing the weekly English essay. Mr Day said (I thought seriously but he may not have been) that I was undoubtedly destined to become a journalist.

Certainly for most of my last two years at the Northgate school, had I been asked what I wanted to do on leaving school, I would have answered ‘I’d like to be a journalist’. I say most of my last two years because during my final term a careers officer from the Education Authority visited the school to address us school-leavers. The only thing that I can remember of his talk was that he would like to send to Siberia all English teachers who told kids who were good at writing essays that they could become journalists. Aspiring journalists would have to go up to London, he told us, where they would find themselves competing for trainee jobs with university graduates and, if they did manage to get a job, it would be several years before they received enough pay to live on in London.

He very successfully shattered my dreams. It didn’t even occur to me to consider the possibility that the local newspapers – the East Anglian Daily Times and the Ipswich Evening Star – might take trainees. Nor did the careers officer bother to tell us. I gave up thinking about what I wanted to do when I left school. Like most of my contemporaries I simply decided to ‘look for a job’.

The job that I found was that of junior clerk/trainee sanitary inspector with Ipswich County Borough Council. World War II interrupted my training. I served in the Royal Artillery from 2nd September 1939 till 23rd April 1946. On leaving the army I married Heather, the girl I had met and fallen in love with on the day war broke out, and picked up my interrupted career. I qualified as a Sanitary Inspector and found employment with Gipping Rural District Council, a rural authority just northwest of Ipswich. We moved into a council owned bungalow in Barham, about halfway between Ipswich and Needham Market, the RDC’s headquarters.

Here our lives were again interrupted. Heather developed tuberculosis and spent two years, from 1948 till 1950, in Nayland British Legion Sanatorium near Colchester. During that time I began to think again about writing. Could I perhaps become a spare-time freelance? I thought that perhaps I could, but I had no idea how to go about it. I tried to write a couple of short stories but I only had to read them through myself to realize that they were awful.

I confided my frustrated ambitions to Heather. Always practical, she found an advert for a correspondence course for freelance writers that promised to return the fee if, by the time students had completed their course, they hadn’t earned that amount. They probably depended on a number of students failing to complete! In fact, I don’t think that I did – but I certainly did earn their fee within a year of ‘signing on!’

It really was a good course. I learnt a great deal about the practicalities of preparing and submitting a manuscript, about writing, a least in the first instance, about subjects with which I was personally familiar and about which I felt strongly, about market research, and about always writing with a particular publication in mind. ‘Homework’ was submitted as to an editor. Spelling and grammatical errors were meticulously pointed out. I was advised to shorten my paragraphs and my sentences; lessons that I have never forgotten even though I fear I sometimes ignore them!

Begin each article or story with a sentence that will attract the reader’s attention. Leave the reader, at the bottom of each page, eager to turn over and read what follows. Read your effort aloud when it has been completed. If it sounds all right it may possibly be all right. If it doesn’t sound right you can be quite sure that it isn’t.

I had lots of rejections, but, with Heather’s encouragement, I persevered. In 1953 my first article was published! It was in Men Only (a very different publication from the one of the same name sometimes seen on the top shelf of newsagents’ shops today!) Entitled Sanitary Man, it was a light-hearted feature in about 1,000 words about the trials and tribulations of a Sanitary Inspector. I was paid five guineas (five pounds five shillings or £5.25) for it. This may seem a trivial sum but 56 years ago it had the spending power of about £100 today.

I gradually increased my output. A subject in which I came to specialise was hot and cold water supply and drainage. Over the years I have written a number of commercially successful books (two of which ran to two editions) on these subjects, and the equivalent sections of several part works and manuals. I have also written innumerable articles on these subjects in various publications aimed at the householder. For many years I replied to ‘plumbing queries’ from readers of Do-it-yourself magazine.

My spare-time career as a ‘plumbing consultant’ began when Heather’s dad, a carpenter who worked all his life in the building trade, decided that his hot water storage tank needed cleaning out. It was a square, galvanised steel tank (you rarely see them nowadays) with a bolted-on hand-hole cover on one side. He turned off the stop-cock on his rising main, ran the hot taps until they ceased to flow, and proceeded to undo the bolts on the hand-hole cover.

Immediately jets of water poured out into my mother-in-law’s kitchen. My father-in-law hadn’t realized that you can’t drain the hot water system from the hot water taps. You have to drain it either from a drain-cock beside the boiler or one under the hot water storage tank or cylinder.

I realized that if a thoroughly experienced and practical man like my father-in-law hadn’t realized that, lots of other people would be equally ignorant. I wrote an article in a 1000 words, with one or two line drawings, on ‘How your hot water system works’ and sold it to Practical Householder for three guineas (£3.15) That was the very beginning. I had learned plumbing theory as a sanitary inspector and I learnt more as I went along! Doing some research I realized that there wasn’t on the market a single easily readable book on domestic plumbing. I can’t remember when it was that I determined to fill that gap – but fill it I undoubtedly did*!

I used to claim, with some justification, that while there were lots of people who knew more about plumbing than I did, and a few people (I was reluctant to make this admission!) who could write better than I could, at that time there was no-one in Britain – possibly no-one in the world – who could write better about plumbing than I did!

I began my spare-time freelance writing career in 1953, the year that our older son was born. The urge to record the first precious months of our son’s life inspired us to spend a great deal of money (£10 I believe) on a much better camera than the Box Brownies that we possessed. After reading borrowed books on photography we also invested in a basic enlarger, a developing tank and other equipment to enable us to develop and print our own photographs. We both became competent amateur photographers. This, of course, was half a century away from the age of digital cameras!

It was Heather who realized how easily freelance writing and amateur photography could be combined. We had the perfect photographic model. I wrote an article Sleeping Babes about the challenges and rewards of photographing sleeping babies, illustrated by photographs of our infant son sleeping in his pram, in his cot surrounded by teddy bear and other impedimenta, and in his carrycot on the beach at Felixstowe. I sold it to an amateur photographic magazine.

Heather had an aversion to feeding bottles. When, on medical advice she abandoned breast-feeding, we weaned our son directly onto drinking from a plastic mug. We took a photo of him at eleven months, in his high chair, drinking from a glass. The parental hand, ready to grab that glass if necessary, was just out of the picture! That, together with an article ‘Why bother with a bottle’ we sold to Better Health, a publication of the Health Education Council, a national body promoting healthy living. We didn’t, of course, part with the copyright of either our articles or our pictures (that correspondence course had dealt very thoroughly with the differences between copyright, reproduction right (for photographs) and first British serial right (for articles). Years later we sold both those lots of pictures, with rather different articles, to Mother and Baby. s

I submitted an article about sanitary inspectors’ salaries to Municipal Engineering, a weekly local government publication dealing mainly with what today is called ‘Environmental Health’. It was accepted. I followed up with another article on a slightly different subject (that was another lesson I had learnt from that course – follow up your successes). That too was accepted. The editor, Denys Hamilton, wrote me a very encouraging letter telling me that he liked my writing style and inviting me to be their ‘Establishment Correspondent’, writing regular articles about salaries and conditions of service. Needless to say, I agreed with alacrity.

Prior to local government reorganisation in 1974 every district and borough council employed a Medical Officer of Health who each year prepared an Annual Report on the general health of his district. Copies of those reports were sent to Municipal Engineering. These were sent on to me, together with any other official reports from local authorities, with a request that I would comment on items that might be of interest to sanitary inspectors. These were published weekly under the title Minute on the Minutes.

Heather and I soon realized that in those reports there was also material of interest to nurses, midwives and health visitors. Between us we gathered that material together, rewrote it and submitted it to the Nursing Times, the official organ of the Royal College of Nursing. This too became a fairly regular feature.

Our second son was born at the very end of 1955. We now had two photographic models

As our sons grew older we decided that we needed to take an annual holiday. Contrary to popular belief, not all local government officers are ‘highly paid’. Heather had had to sell her engagement ring to raise the money for the deposit on the bungalow that we were buying. She was the epitome of the ‘thrifty housewife’, baking her own cakes, mending and altering clothes, doing the weekly wash without a washing machine! However we had two growing children, a mortgage to pay off and a car to keep on the road. What money we had to spare went towards the reduction of our mortgage debt. Our savings were very small.

Camping was the only kind of holiday that we could afford but, after taking a camping holiday for a couple of years, we decided that it was the only kind of holiday that we wanted. As a result of the radical surgery that she had had for her pulmonary tuberculosis, Heather was never very robust. She had to rest every day, she couldn’t walk far or fast, or carry heavy loads. She was never an ‘out-door girl’. Yet she took to camping like a duck to water, lying down in the back of our estate car on long journeys, helping erect the tents and cooking – often in wind and rain – on a small and temperamental bottled gas cooker, coping with the, at times, equally temperamental kids, and sleeping in a sleeping bag on an inflatable mattress.

We camped on England’s south coast, in the Forest of Dean, among the Welsh Mountains (where we were washed off Arenig Fawr in wind and rain!) in the Scottish Highlands and on the cliffs of John o’ Groats. The year after that, it was inevitable that we should camp near Land’s End, with the Scilly Isles visible from our tent doorway. Having tried Cornwall and loved it, we camped there several years before at last venturing abroad.

Every year, on returning from our holiday, we would look at our photographs and notes and I would reckon on writing and selling at least one article about our holiday to a camping or general interest magazine, thus making a worth-while contribution to the cost of the holiday.

I continued this practice when we ventured abroad. Our very first overseas camping holiday was to a small camping site at Champex-sur-lac, high in the Swiss Alps, near the Great St Bernard Pass. The following year we camped in Italy’s beautiful Aosta Valley, in the Italian Alps. Then, for two years we camped in Austria, first in the Vorarlberg and then in Tyrol. Finally we returned for one more holiday in the Aosta Valley. Once again, each holiday yielded at least one article.

The boys had grown up and had left home. Heather and I took two more tented camping holidays in Britain, one in Sussex and one on the Scottish borders. On our own, camping was losing some of its attractions. We bought a Toyota motor-caravan. After one holiday with it touring Wales and the West Country we ventured abroad again. We headed for the Italian Lakes but, when we reached them, we found the weather unbearably hot. A great thing about a motor-caravan is its mobility. We headed for the high mountains, thence to Switzerland and on to Germany’s Black Forest where we spent several happy days. It was good to find, both there and in earlier holidays in Austria, that I hadn’t entirely forgotten the German that I had learned nearly fifty years earlier as a POW.

As well as the specialist camping and caravan publications, I discovered ‘Doctor on Holiday’ a free magazine distributed by one of the big drug manufacturing companies. They were in the market – and paid well! – for light-hearted well-written articles about overseas holidays, aimed at the medical profession,. SAGA too, specialising in services for the no-longer-young, welcomed an illustrated article about motor-caravanning for the newly retired!

In 1980 Heather and I made our most ambitious foray overseas. We decided we’d visit Yugoslavia. It was the year in which Marshal Tito died. Yugoslavia was as yet untroubled by civil war.

We took three days to reach our destination, stopping for the first night at a campsite beside the Rhine at Worms and the second night just on the Austrian side of the Austrian/Yugoslav frontier. The next day we crossed the frontier, received a friendly welcome from the border guards and drove on, by-passing Lubliana, to camp beside Lake Bled, where Tito used to spend his holidays. The next day we pressed on to the Adriatic Coast. This proved to be every bit as beautiful, and the people every bit as welcoming to English visitors, as we had hoped.

We camped at a well-appointed site on the shore of the Adriatic and continued our journey southward past Split to historic Dubrovnik, and on to Cilipi where at that time, folk singers and dancers from the whole of Yugoslavia – Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Bosnians – gave a display every Sunday to admiring visitors. Travelling inland we visited Mostar, photographing its famous pack-horse bridge, soon destined to be destroyed in a bloody and totally unnecessary tribal conflict. We went on to Sarajevo and to Jajitse where Tito had managed to summon an all-Yugoslav Parliament in the midst of the Nazi occupation.

It was a wonderful holiday in a beautiful and hospitable country. We travelled without restriction wherever we wished to go, speaking freely to whomsoever we chose. We visited Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and Mosques where the faithful worshipped freely. The Police were unobtrusive and we saw no signs of oppression, racial or sectarian tension that might have justified civil war. It was, for Heather and I, a source of many photographs and an inspiration for many articles.

1980 was the year in which I took early retirement from the Council’s service. As my army service counted as full-time local government service I had completed the 40 years that entitled me to a pension of half my salary. Very welcome – but it was only half, and it would be another six years before I could claim my government retirement pension! My mortgage had been paid off nearly ten years earlier but my regular income from freelance writing had reduced. Local Government reorganisation had dealt a blow to such publications as Municipal Engineering. Whereas every week a copy had been sold to each one of the former five authorities in the Tendring Peninsula, only one was sold to the new Tendring District Council. This was happening nation-wide. Municipal Engineering folded! Local authorities no longer employed a Medical Officer of Health producing an Annual report. Our small but steady income from Municipal Engineering and Nursing Times disappeared overnight. Do-it-yourself magazine was taken over by Practical Householder, and another source of income was removed.

I was working on a new plumbing book and had had a substantial ‘advance’ from the publisher. It would be another year though before royalties started to roll in! I badly needed another source of income if I were to retain our living standard!

Another source arrived, virtually on cue! Essex County Newspapers needed a freelance Advertising Feature Writer working from home. I knew that I could do it. I had, after all, been extolling the qualities of the District Council for nearly seven years! I applied, was interviewed, gave an example of my capabilities, and was offered the job. I would be paid by the hour counting in travelling time, interview time and ‘writing up’ time. There was a car mileage allowance. There was a basic minimum weekly payment (a retainer) that I would be paid whether or not I was given work to do, and I would be paid that minimum amount for up to three weeks holiday a year.


I applied for the job as a pat-time freelance advertising feature writer with Essex County Newspapers. Could I take photographs and had I a reliable camera? I could and I had. By that time I was using a Pentax SLR. Mostly, it was explained, I would be asked to take ‘mug shots’ of whomever I was interviewing. My completed work could be handed in to the Clacton Gazette office in Jackson Road from whence it would go to Colchester on the daily ‘copy run’.

It was challenging work but it was work that I thoroughly enjoyed. I would receive a phone call asking for 200, or 500 or 1,000 words on this, that or the other business (depending on how much advertising space had been bought!). Sometimes, particularly as Christmas approached, I would be asked to produce a more general article. I did one, I recall, on ‘The Origins of Christmas’. More often though it would be about the joys of shopping in Frinton’s Connaught Avenue, Clacton’s Old Road, Holland-on-Sea or some similar area. At my interview I was told that I would normally have a week to complete any particular job. That rarely happened. More often it was a case of, ‘Can you get it to me by tomorrow please?’

I gained an insight into practically every form of enterprise that there is. I learned (and wrote about as though I was an expert!) about activities of which I had been totally ignorant. The electronics age was in its infancy and I wrote about fax machines, videos and video recorders, computers and computer software (I was producing my work on a manual typewriter!). I wrote about hairdressers, discount clothing stores, undertakers, shipping agents and used car salesmen. It was fascinating stuff. I think that I was pretty good at it. There was a car bodywork specialist, a Dutch immigrant, in Dovercourt who told the ad. salesman, ‘That (censored) Ernest! He wrote things about my business that I hadn’t realized!’

Often I took photos and handed the film in with my copy to be processed. Once, I remember, I had to interview and photograph a local beauty queen. This interview took place in a small staff room above the hairdressers where she worked. She was a pleasant enough young woman and, as one would expect, very personable. ‘Would you like to take a photo now?’ she asked. ‘Yes, if that’s OK with you’, I replied. I was a little startled when she got up from her chair and started to pull her dress over her head. All was well. She had come prepared with a bikini on underneath. It was my one essay into ‘glamour photography’. My efforts were quite good enough for an ad. feature in a local paper. They’d have never made it into a glossy magazine though!

I also found myself writing advertising features for a monthly publication called Look East, the purpose of which was to encourage East Anglian enterprise. The editor preferred longer paragraphs and a rather less ‘chatty’ style than the one I used with the local newspapers. That was fine. I could ‘do serious’. I was a professional writer, or if you prefer, a ‘reliable hack’.

I began my advertising feature-writing career a few weeks before Heather and I made our visit to Yugoslavia. On our return there was a letter, from Essex County Newspapers on the doormat. They were launching a free newspaper The Coastal Express in the Tendring District, a companion to the existing Colchester Express. Would I like to write every week a ‘chat and comment’ column, Tendring Topics, for it, similar to Tucker’s Topics, a column written by retired Essex County Newspapers staff journalist Bill Tucker in the Colchester paper?

Of course I would. My very first contribution was, I recall, a fairly hard-hitting story about Walton’s crumbling Naze and about how local and national politicians were very good at coming to our district to be photographed surveying the fast-vanishing cliffs, but not quite so good at doing anything about them. Nearly thirty years later the politicians still turn up for a ‘photo opportunity’ from time to time – and still do nothing about them.

When, in 1986, I reached the age of 65 and drew my state pension, I gave up advertising feature writing. I was a little tired, not so much of being ‘economical with the truth’ but perhaps of sometimes being a little over-generous with it! Anyway I preferred to get out while I was still wanted, rather than carry on until I wasn’t. I continued writing Tendring Topics though.

I wrote Tendring Topics week after week (never missing an issue for sickness or holidays) for nearly twenty-three years. Editors came and editors went. The Coastal Express changed its name a couple of times but Tendring Topics carried on, generating a gratifying amount of positive feed-back from its readers. In all my writing activities I had Heather’s full support and help. It was she who took and relayed to me the many phone messages that I received. She was always full of new ideas. Except for my strictly technical plumbing books, she read every word that I wrote before I submitted it. Occasionally she would say, ‘Are you quite sure about that?’ or ‘That’s going to upset an awful lot of people’. I always heeded her advice and took another look at anything she queried. She was usually right!

One day in the spring of 2003, there was another letter from Essex County Newspapers on the doormat. It was from a new editor. It was quite brief. There had been a change of editorial policy and, with immediate effect, Tendring Topics would no longer be required. I won’t pretend that I wasn’t deeply offended by that abrupt dismissal. So were a great many regular readers who wrote to the Editor to protest.

In fact though, I would anyway have probably had to give up my column a few months later. I hope though that I would have ended my association a little more graciously than that editor had! Heather was becoming increasingly disabled and needed more and more of my help with household tasks. Finally she fell and broke her hip – and never fully recovered. For two years she was almost totally disabled and I was her sole carer. During that time I was all but totally oblivious of the world around me and decided that I would never write again. Tendring Topics, and virtually all my other writing, had been done in partnership. Whatever happened, things could never again be the same.

Heather’s life came to an end on 12th July 2009. I can’t exaggerate the gap that her death left in my life. We had been married 60 years and had known each other for 67. Since 3rd September 1939, the day we first met, to the present, I do not think that a single day has passed without her being at some time or another in my mind.

My sons and grandchildren did their best to help me fill that gap. I haven’t written for money since 2003, but I have resumed writing – perhaps writing more than I have ever done before. One grandson organised the Flickr web site www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea on which I have posted over 300 family and other photos – the number grows! The other provided me first with a blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and finally with a web site www.ernesthall.net on both of which I post every week Tendring Topics…..on line.

The original Tendring Topics consisted of between about 500 and 1,000 words every week. The on line version usually runs to nearer 2,000 and is often illustrated with photographs! On my website, you can find out ‘about me’ (a brief autobiography), a large collection of photographs, and the typescript of a number of sermons that I preached at Clacton’s Christ Church United reformed Church some years ago when I would occasionally stand in for the Minister there.

With the help of my sons I have paid visits to my granddaughter in Sheffield, from whence I have been introduced to the Peak District for the first time; to my younger grandson who lives and works in Brussels, and have seen something of Belgium, including the field of the Battle of Waterloo; and to Zittau in Germany where I was a prisoner of war for the final eighteen months of World War II, and where I now have good friends.

All of these visits provided me with opportunities to take photos and to write material for my blogspot and articles for non-paying publication. After my first visit to Zittau I wrote a long article of over 7,000 words entitled Return to Zittau about my return to Zittau as a free man after over 60 years. I am very pleased that that has now been translated into German and made into a glossy illustrated booklet that is on sale (at 5 euros) in Visitors’ Centres in Zittau. Proceeds from its sales go towards the upkeep of a 500 year old textile artefact in the history of which I am believed to have inadvertently played a minor part as a POW.

Also, of course, I am writing this autobiography for the benefit of my sons, grandchildren and friends. It now totals over 70,000 words.

All the time I am wishing that Heather were still with me, sharing my experiences and my satisfactions. Sometimes I feel that she is standing just behind me, looking over my shoulder at what I am typing. How I wish that that were so!



*My commercially successful books on domestic plumbing include:

’Home Plumbing’, Newnes Technical Books 1977

‘Teach Yourself - Plumbing in the House’, Hodder and Stoughton 1981
‘Second edition of above, published as ‘Teach Yourself – Plumbing’ 1985

‘Home Plumbing Questions and Answers’, Newnes Technical Books 1984

‘Plumbing – Tricks of the Trade’, Pelham Books 1981

‘The David & Charles Manual of Home Plumbing’, David & Charles,
First Edition 1982 Second Edition 1992

Plus the plumbing sections of:

‘The New Home Owner Manual’, Butterworth

‘The Which Encyclopaedia of the Home’, The Consumer Association

‘The St. Michael Do-It-Yourself Manual’, Marks & Spencer

‘The Readers Digest complete DIY Manual’, Readers Digest

‘The Readers Digest, How to Fix Just about Anything’, Readers Digest