Geoffrey Goodman
Geoffrey George Goodman
He was close to leading left-wing politicians including Harold Wilson, Frank Cousins, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot. He briefly served as an economic adviser to Wilson in 1975. After retiring from the Daily Mirror, Goodman was the founding editor of the quarterly British Journalism Review in 1989, and remained its editor until 2002.
In 2020,
Early life and career
He was born in Stockport, Cheshire (now Greater Manchester), and was the only child of Edythe (née Bowman)[3] and Michael Goodman, whose Jewish parents had emigrated to Britain from Poland and Russia.[4] His father spent long periods unemployed, and the family moved to Camden Town, London, in 1935 in an attempt to change their situation.[5] Goodman was influenced in his choice of becoming a political journalist by overhearing current affairs being discussed in the local dairy, and a shopkeeper reporting that the newspapers refused to print stories about the Prince of Wales with Wallis Simpson, "despite most of us knowing exactly what is going on".[6]
After adding a year to his age, he enlisted at the beginning of the Second World War.[7] An RAF pilot during his war service (1941–46),[8] he ended the war as a Flight Lieutenant flying Mosquito planes on photography missions.[3] Goodman studied at the London School of Economics under Harold Laski.[9] In January 1947, he married Margit Freudenbergova, who as a child just before the war had been on the final train of the Kindertransport, a means of rescuing Jewish children from Czechoslovakia.[10] The couple had a son and a daughter.[1]
Early career in journalism
After the end of hostilities, he briefly worked on the
For the News Chronicle, following the 1954 docks strike, he visited all the workplaces over a three-week period. He discovered "astonishing inefficiencies, poor management bordering on the absurd, corrupt trade union practices and a bewildered workforce".[13] Arthur Deakin, the leader of the TGWU, read the articles by the journalist before publication at Goodman's own insistence, and thought the articles were "scandalous inventions".[13] Goodman supported the decision of editor Michael Curtis to oppose the Suez intervention, a stance which split the paper's staff.[14] Slightly later though, until his close friend Michael Foot, he was unconvinced by unilateralism when CND first emerged.[15] Goodman wrote about the socioeconomic makeup of the small town of Sellafield in 1959, around the UK's first nuclear power station.[16]
At the Herald, Sun and the Mirror
After the closure of the News Chronicle in 1959, he joined the
From July 1975 to August 1976, he headed a counter-inflationary unit for the Labour government. The Awkward Warrior, Goodman's biography of trade union leader and politician Frank Cousins, appeared in 1979.
In 1984,
Goodman threatened to resign unless given an undertaking that it would not happen again. Such an assurance was also given to his colleagues
Later years
Geoffrey Goodman was the founding editor of the quarterly British Journalism Review (BJR), which he edited from 1989 to 2002.[1] In his first editorial he wrote that "the business is now subject to a contagious outbreak of squalid, banal, lazy and cowardly journalism whose only qualification is that it helps to make newspaper publishers (and some journalists) rich."[23] His later articles for the BJR considered such issues as the role of journalism in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.[24] After ceasing to be editor of the BJR in 2002, he became chairman and later emeritus chairman of its board.[25]
A memoir From Bevan to Blair: Fifty Years Reporting from the Political Frontline was published in 2003. In its account of the Wilson and Callaghan governments, the later volume is free, according to Dominic Wring, of the kind of "score settling" common to memoirs covering this period.[26]
When interviewed by Dan Carrier on 3 February 2011, he was asked about how the role of the Press had changed over his lifetime. While conceding that the amount of information available had greatly increased, "what we do not have is the depth of knowledge, and this translates into a lack of understanding about key current issues. In the old days you had time to reflect. This does not exist now, because of the urge to be first with a scoop, no matter how weak and spurious that scoop is".[6]
In 1998, Goodman was appointed a
Goodman was interviewed by National Life Stories (C467/16) in 2008 for the 'Oral History of the British Press' collection held by the British Library.[29]
Royal Commission on the Press
Goodman's papers relating to the
References
- ^ a b c d e Mike Molloy, "Obituary: Geoffrey Goodman", theguardian.com, 6 September 2013.
- ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 14 June 2020.
- ^ a b "Obituary: Geoffrey Goodman", telegraph.co.uk, 8 September 2013.
- ^ a b c Dennis Kavanagh, "Geoffrey Goodman: Industrial and political journalist respected and admired by Left and Right", The Independent, 6 September 2013. The Guardian and Daily Telegraph obituaries indicate that Goodman's grandparents only came from Russia.
- ^ a b Illtyd Harrington, "Hopes and defeats beneath the red standard", Camden New Journal, 16 October 2003.
- ^ a b c Carrier, Dan (3 February 2011). "Feature: Interview - Geoffrey Goodman talks to Dan Carrier". Islington Tribune. Retrieved 16 July 2011.
- ^ Some sources, such as Dennis Kavanagh's obituary for The Independent and the Dennis Griffiths' Encyclopedia of the British Press cited below, erroneously give his year of birth as 1921.
- ^ a b c "Geoffrey Goodman Papers 1970? - 1979", University of Warwick Library page.
- ^ a b Dennis Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the British Press 1422–1992, London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 268.
- ^ "Fleet Street legend Goodman dies at 92[sic]" Archived 9 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine, Jewish News, 6 September 2013.
- ^ Guardian contributor profile page.
- ^ Ian Aitken, "Geoffrey Goodman took me under his wing", theguardian.com. 6 September 2013.
- ^ a b David Kynaston, Family Britain, 1951–1957, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010 [2009], p. 432.
- ^ Geoffrey Goodman "Suez and Fleet Street", BBC News, 1 November 2006
- ^ Kenneth O. Morgan Michael Foot: A Life, London: HarperCollins, 2007, p. 203.
- ^ Goodman, Geoffrey (17 January 1959). "Brave new world". New Statesman. Retrieved 16 July 2011.
- ^ "Six of the best with Geoffrey Goodman: 'My story helped bring an end to the Vietnam war'", Press Gazette, 5 December 2012
- ^ Geoffrey Goodman "Epic Journey", British Journalism Review, 17:4, December 2006, pp. 95–96, 95.
- ^ a b c Geoffrey Goodman "Foot – at the door" Archived 6 September 2013 at archive.today, British Journalism Review, 11:4, 2000, pp. 70–71.
- ^ John Pilger, Heroes, London: Vintage, 2001 [1986], p. 552.
- ^ Francis Beckett and David Hencke, Marching to the Fault Line, London: Constable & Robinson, 2009, p. 114.
- ^ Leapman, Michael (9 October 2007). "Terence Lancaster". The Independent. Retrieved 17 February 2017.
- ^ Cited by Roy Greenslade, "Geoffrey Goodman, the 'proper gent' who campaigned to improve journalism", theguardian.com (blog), 9 September 2013.
- ^ Goodman, Geoffrey (1999). "Too many Truths". British Journalism Review, 10:2. Archived from the original on 24 December 2012. Retrieved 7 September 2013.
- ^ "Geoffrey Goodman", Comment is Free website.
- ^ Dominic Wring, "Book Review: From Bevan to Blair: Fifty Years’ Reporting from the Political Front Line", Journalism, 6:2, 2005, pp. 249–50, 249.
- ^ "Former Daily Mirror industrial editor Geoffrey Goodman dies aged 92", Press Gazette, 6 September 2013.
- ^ "Geoffrey Goodman, Esq, CBE Authorised Biography", Debrett's.
- ^ National Life Stories, 'Goodman, Geoffrey (1 of 9) National Life Stories Collection: 'Oral History of the British Press', The British Library Board, 2008. Retrieved 7 October 2017.
- ^ Goodman, Geoffrey. "Geoffrey Goodman Papers 1970? - 1979". Retrieved 16 July 2011.