Rudman's city: Way to go for a master of sharp and pithy prose

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Bob Gilmore was judging the annual university student newspaper journalism awards the first time I met him. It was in the final stages of the dinner and just as I was shaking the Auckland Star legend's hand, my overtired editor, who was doing the introduction, subsided under the table.

Gilmore began to chat on as though nothing had happened. It was my first encounter with a senior journalist and I was impressed with his relaxed response.

On Wednesday, Robert John Gilmore, aged 86, made his grand exit in much the same way. Dead sober though, I hasten to add. Out for a lunchtime stroll in Takapuna, his ailing heart gave up as he passed his local doctor's rooms.

For a man of the short, sharp and pithy paragraph, it was the way to go. More to the point, it was, says son Simon, the way he wanted to go.

Gilmore's last published gem was a letter in this newspaper a month ago as the world readied itself for the Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan.

Always with an eye for the local angle and for the obscure, he pointed out that the first invasion of that country in 1842 was on the initiative of the Governor-General of India, Lord Auckland, who did it out of "sheer boredom", backing up his information with quotes from the diary of Auckland's sister.

It was just the sort of quirky item that Gilmore used in his popular Give and Take column from its birth in the Auckland Star in 1968 through to his retirement in 1980.

When I joined the Star in the mid-1970s he was part of a team of gun newspaper writers unmatched elsewhere in the country. With the cult of television personalities still in its infancy, the Star's team of star writers - Gilmore, Noel Holmes, Pat Booth, Jack Leigh, Des Mahoney, Michael Brett and others - were household names.

My sometime colleague Warwick Roger speaks of him as a mentor. To me he was not so much the teacher as an example of what was possible in this trade.

Trade was Gilmore's word. He hated the snobbish efforts of some to turn journalism into one of the so-called professions.

For those of us just wanting to write, Gilmore was proof positive that to succeed in New Zealand journalism, you didn't necessarily have to clamber up the management ladder, or desert to the better-paid pastures of public relations.

To be sure, Gilmore did not live on his salary alone. When I got there he was unrivalled king of the "rats" as well. "Ratting" was the practice of rifling through the carbon copies of stories to be published, seeking goodies to sell to overseas newspapers.

It was a perk of seniority, and Gilmore had some of the best - Time magazine was one, London's Daily Express another. He got the Express job by being first. In the late 1950s he heard from a colleague that the then Express stringer had died in the South Island in a plane crash.

"That's a good job for someone," he said, and immediately cabled the Express that their man was dead and could he have the job. He got it.

It was a good earner, as I discovered one week when he asked me to fill in for him. I managed to beat up a brawl in a visiting British warship into a near mutiny, which got the Poms very excited, and impressed Gilmore greatly, although we did sweat it for a while when the Express showed signs of jetting its gun reporters in from London to take over the yarn.

Ratting was tolerated by the editors - most of whom had done it themselves - which did save Gilmore the time he passed on a world scoop about an Auckland mother without a womb who had given birth.

Unbeknown to him, the Star at the last moment held its scoop back for a day.

The outcome? It hit London and the world a day before Aucklanders read of it.

One thing I did purloin from Gilmore was his simple modus operandi: "Never ask, never get."

He never barged in, claiming some God-given right to know as a member of the Fourth Estate. His approach was to charm information out of people. That, and by being genuinely interested in the people he spoke to and by being polite.

This softly-softly approach led to some of the most revealing and insightful personality profiles I have read.

His political views were certainly not mine. We enjoyed having each other on. I remember him taking me to the old Auckland Club one time gleefully to show off a baton hanging above the bar which had been used by special police to beat wharfies in 1951 or during the Depression or whenever.

I seem to remember getting my own back by engineering him into a meeting with Jim Anderton and leaving them to it.

We last spoke a couple of weeks ago. He was seeking elaboration of some journalistic scandal or other. I left him happy.