Receiving a Legg-up
Dorset Life’s longest serving contributor, Roger Guttridge, recalls the school essay that became his first article 50 years ago
Published in June ’18
Fiddleford was a long way from Fleet Street in every sense, but as the inaugural issue of the antecedent of this magazine rolled off the presses, opportunity knocked for a North Dorset teenager. It was 1968, A-levels were done and almost dusted and the allegedly ‘best days of my life’ were over. I had thoughts about a writing career but no idea how to go about it. When Dorset the County Magazine hit the streets, I saw my chance. Delving into my schoolbooks, I pulled out a local history project completed the previous year. Without a thought about the length or literary limitations of this overgrown school essay, I typed out my 5000-word history of smuggling in Dorset virtually word for word and mailed it to the editor. Such was my crash-landing on Planet Journalism and, more interestingly, my unsuspecting arrival into the crazy world of Rodney Legg – a world characterised by enterprise and eccentricity, initiative and inefficiency, crusading and chaos in roughly equal helpings.
Roger S Guttridge in 1970, just a year after his Dorset Yearbook article was published
Rodney’s reply politely informed me that the article was too long, too general and he was sorry but at this stage he did not have the funds to pay for contributions. But if I penned an article about my own smuggling ancestors, he would publish it. In a year when Apollo 8 astronauts orbited the moon ahead of the first landing a few months later, this was one small step for a Dorset magazine editor but a giant leap for a would-be scribe from the Blackmore Vale.
I was by then living under the same Fiddleford roof as my maternal grandfather, Jim Ridout, who was delighted to be re-interviewed about our legendary forebear, Roger Ridout. Jim had heard the stories from his grandfather, William Ridout, in the late 19th century. These tales formed the meat of the article, which appeared in the Winter 1968 issue of Dorset… under the headline ‘My ancestor was the smuggler of Fiddleford Mill’. The article is a collector’s item in another way, as it carried the byline ‘Roger S. Guttridge’. I only used my middle initial once more (in the 1968-69 Dorset Year Book) before deciding it was a trifle pretentious.
Rodney was as good as his word; he didn’t pay me a penny. But I was not unhappy. He had given me a much-needed Legg-up into journalism and the article led indirectly to my appointment as a trainee reporter on the Western Gazette. It also led to my first foray into book-writing. At a party in Wimborne a decade later, host Bill Hoade introduced me to a fellow guest. It was Rodney Legg, now not just a magazine editor but a prolific author and publisher of his own and other people’s books through his Dorset Publishing Company. Once again I seized my chance. Thanking him for publishing my first article ten years earlier, I told him I was now again researching my smuggling ancestors and could I interest him in publishing a book about them. His reply was the reverse of his response all those years before. ‘Not a book on your ancestors,’ he said, ‘but if you can expand it into a history of smuggling in Dorset, I’ll publish it.’
Roger (no S) Guttridge in 1983 with his Dorset Smugglers book.
This was all the incentive I needed. After several years’ additional research, I completed my 70,000-word manuscript and delivered it to the former school building at Wincanton that Rodney shared with his printers. My second publishing Legg-up was underway. It was early August 1982 and Rodney said my book would be out for Christmas. He just didn’t say which Christmas. By the summer of 1983 there was still no sign of publication. Then, with a second festive season looming, Rodney suddenly informed me that he’d like to get it out by Christmas but it was touch and go.
Not wishing to see another opportunity pass us by, I offered to help. After finishing work at the Echo’s Poole office each day, I drove to Wincanton to help paste text and pictures onto the pages and do any other chores that needed doing. The book eventually appeared two weeks before Christmas – too late to make the most of the book trade’s seasonal boom. But in true Legg style, Rodney offset this drawback with a corresponding masterstroke: he suggested I offer the Echo free serialisation rights. This was declined, so instead I approached my former employers. The Western Gazette was printed in two broadsheet sections then, and for six weeks in December 1983 and January 1984, extracts from Dorset Smugglers occupied the front page of the inner section. The book flew off the shelves – 1000 copies sold in the first two weeks alone.
My first article for Dorset… remained my only contribution in the 22 years until I became freelance in 1990. By then Rodney had sold the magazine to John Newth, who later merged it with a so-called rival to become Dorset Life – The Dorset Magazine. Rodney continued to write for the magazine and our paths crossed many more times before his untimely death from cancer in 2011. It was never less than entertaining. I vividly recall a Dorset Life contributors’ lunch at Plumber Manor. The rest of us diligently obeyed the ‘smart-casual’ dress code but Rodney strolled in looking as if he’d come hotfoot from clearing a few Blackmore Vale rights of way with his trusty secateurs, which, perhaps he had.
