It is your first week as a press officer. What could go wrong? Steve Watkins recalls his baptism of fire in a pre-gentrified East End in the early 1990s.
by Steve Watkins
I was greeted in my first week as a council press officer with a local newspaper headline screaming: ‘Butchers of Bow.’
I remember feeling quite sick looking at the two-deck headline that filled three quarters of the front page with the subhead ‘Pet deer face slaughter to make way for flower garden.’
“Something to get your teeth into,” laughed my boss who closed his door on my troubles leaving me with the phone ringing off the hook.
I answered more than 15 calls that day fuelled by the East London Advertiser’s (ELA) salacious steroid inflated story about the potential fate of a herd of local deer.
Finding them a new home was never really in doubt but a line in a council report mentioned the possibility of culling. Oh deer.
The media smelt blood, and the story rumbled on for more than a year involving numerous articles, letters, petitions, heated council meetings and the involvement of the Press Complaints Commission.
The ELA doggedly refused to let go of its prized bone or the belief that the deer were heading anywhere but the abattoir. It dedicated the following week’s entire letters page to local outpourings of indignation and rage.
The newspaper’s appetite for the deer was matched by the taciturn councillor Eric Flounders who chaired the local parks committee.
Brickbats bounced off councillor Flounders with impunity as he waged a gloriously acerbic war in the local newspapers and letters’ pages calling the story ‘sensationalist drivel’ and ill-informed readers the ‘Bambi Brigade.’
The ELA was full of self-righteous fury comparing him to Saddam Hussain and polled readers on whether local councillors should be culled instead of the deer.
Eric was great fun to work with, a dream for newspapers looking for a good quote, and a constant worry to the more conservative minded members of the communications team.
An earlier spate with a local resident and then TV soap star resulted in Eric describing him as having all the acting ability of a finger-bob puppet, while a local church that ignored planning rules was told that the council had greater authority than God in the matter.
He was painted as the barbarian at the gate for ordering the demolition of Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture House and vouched it was middle-aged women and not the ‘drug crazed hippies from darkest Hackney’ that were stealing plants from the park.
His quarterly column in the Bow Bugle featured choice headlines including A horror story for Christmas, Life is not all cucumber sandwiches with the mayor, and Intimate secrets of the bathroom pedal bin where he rallied against the ‘anti-social nincompoops’ who left household refuse in carrier bags.
He was, despite all the fire and brimstone, an articulate and genuinely committed local politician who saw no reason to be anyone but himself.
The deer crisis cantered on in the background and was a valuable lesson in crisis management. The importance of keeping calm, staying on message, and retaining both a sense of humour and perspective as the local press gleefully stoked the flames.
It matched the intensity of more serious stories I was later involved in Tower Hamlets including the election of the UK’s first far right councillor and the IRA bombing in Docklands.
The deer predictably found a new home, the ELA crowed about how it had saved the day, and I had my fill of venison for a lifetime.
And Eric? He sailed off into the sunset after retiring as Head of PR for Cunard but not before a final broadside to the community he served calling them the ‘most relentless whingers on earth.’
Steve Watkins is Media And Communications Manager at London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust
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Image via Steve Watkins
