Peter Bromhead: The Screws of the World

Cartoon / Peter Bromhead

While not shedding any tears over the demise of the News of the World, I am still sorry to see a historic newspaper ruthlessly executed by the "Dirty Digger" - as Private Eye aptly describes Rupert Murdoch.

In my youth, the raison d'etre of the then broadsheet was to provide prurient copy for its readers, recording the salacious detail of divorce cases - hence the newspaper's nickname, "The Screws of the World".

Divorce scandals were written up in all their meaty glory, including the naming of dastardly co-respondents caught by private detectives in "compromising situations".

If you wanted a divorce in the immediate postwar years, the swiftest solution was to employ a snoop to photograph your naughty spouse in flagrante delicto.

The risk in such proceedings was not the court process, but the grisly prospect that your personal life would end up in the News of the World, providing readers with their weekly dose of gob-smacking lubricity to accompany the breakfast toast and marmalade.

The broadsheet also specialised in pushing moral boundaries by publishing extracts from so-called "steamy novels" such as Forever Amber by the late Kathleen Winsor.

The newspaper's contents seem tame by today's standards, but in the 1940s it didn't take much titillation to slake the average reader's thirst for lewdness.

I came close to scandal in the newspaper while at naval school.

I was tall for my age and appeared older than I was - thanks to naval uniform - and I have to confess to indulging in a momentary frolic with the charming, lonely wife of an absentee RAF officer, who I met on my annual school holidays.

Comforting the lonely lady became embarrassing for me when the celebrated scandal sheet called my superiors sniffing for information, having got wind that London lawyers were serving papers on a cadet named as a party to divorce proceedings.

The very idea of the school's name and a pupil being emblazoned in the divorce columns of the Sunday newspaper provoked the authorities into instant action and I was swiftly dispatched to Portsmouth to join a warship for three months "sea training," thus postponing the inevitable consequences for all parties involved.

Fortunately, on returning to Britain, the proceedings had been dropped, saving my fragile reputation from being media-minced in the traditional manner.

Thank heavens cellphones and hacking hadn't been invented back then - otherwise I'd have been a goner.