‘A public urinal where ministers and officials queued up to leak’

Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million of us readers — knew the writings of Chapman Pincher. His frequent scoops, mostly defence- or intelligence-related, sometimes political, scientific or medical, were unusually well-sourced and headline-grabbing. Now, aged 100, he has written his autobiography. He writes as directly and vividly as ever.

After an enjoyable Darlington childhood, he progressed through grammar school to King’s College, London, where he won prizes for zoology and botany and published research papers as an undergraduate.  He became a teacher and got into freelance journalism via the Farmer & Stockbreeder.  A scientific future beckoned but the second world war intervened and he found himself in the army as a weapons specialist. Knowledge and contacts gained there enabled him to freelance incognito for the Express while still serving, taking a permanent job the day after he was demobbed.

He retired from Fleet Street in 1979, becoming one of the outstanding journalists of the second half of the century. He was successful partly because he was atypical: a non-smoker, never in debt (not even a mortgage), never drunk, a lone wolf who avoided El Vino’s and bibulous colleagues on the grounds that his time was better spent cultivating contacts. In this he was as assiduous as he was ruthless in exploiting and careful in protecting them. Refused offers of editorial advancement, he methodically preserved everything he wrote and now has 38 volumes of cuttings at home.

He is no kiss-and-tell merchant, however, and is discreet about his private life — although he does remark, while informing us that his second wife left him, that ‘any man who makes merry with the lower half of my wife can also have the half that eats.’