London Calling – Frank McNally on the joys of a forgotten education

It’s not every day you learn something new about your life, especially under the heading of educational qualifications.

But I had that strange experience recently when reading about someone who was “a graduate of the London School of Journalism”. Which sounded quite impressive at first, until a shock realisation dawned – so was I!

This is not the sort of thing that should take one by surprise in middle age. And yet it did.

How the oversight arose is that, back in the mist-covered 1980s, as I now remembered, I enrolled in a correspondence course with said school, having seen an ad for it somewhere.

To ‘er’ is human – Frank McNally on the scourge of rhotic imperialism

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Hacked Off – Frank McNally on the trail of Hackball, King of the Beggars

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Training session – Frank McNally on the Irish-American cyclist who set a (train) track record

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Light-ball Moment – Frank McNally on discos, donkeys, and learning Latin

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I was a reluctant civil servant at the time, several years into a life sentence but still planning an escape attempt, despite the surrounding crocodile-infested moat that was the Irish economy then.

I didn’t expect the LSJ to get me out, especially via a correspondence course, which sounded a bit desperate even by 1980s standards.

But if nothing else, it would get me used to writing for strangers. So I bought a £75 postal order – the suspiciously modest fee for such a prestigious-sounding institution – and posted it off to 19 Hertford Street, London.

For all I knew, this address could have been somebody’s bedsit. I half imagined the person at the other end to be like the racing tipster in Flann O’Brien’s The Hard Life, who for a small fee would forward details of a horse guaranteed to romp home at generous odds next time out.

In any case, a few days later, my first assignment arrived on impressively headed paper. Thereafter, for some months, I was an LSJ student.

My tutor was a man named Underwood – a Fleet Street retiree, I think. I never found out if he was anything to the famous typewriter manufacturers. But he seemed a gentlemanly sort. And despite never meeting in person, we got on well.

Not only was he consistently encouraging, he had the charming habit of praising my work to the detriment – however mildly expressed – of other students. I could almost hear him sigh on occasion as he discussed the latest pile of exercises he had marked. “Whereas yours . . . ”, he would continue, perking up, before detailing my virtues at delightful length.

In one of the last letters, which since my epiphany I have extracted from the bottom of a box full of old documents, diaries, and dead spiders, he wrote this: “As I may have implied in previous letters, you are now ready to embark on a full-time journalistic career, and you would learn more in a week in any newspaper office than you could do in a month of Sundays from me.”

That was premature, it turned out. The course did launch me on a precarious freelance career. But it took several months of Sundays before I saw the inside of a newspaper office, never mind being allowed to stay for a week by security.

I must have an LSJ diploma somewhere but I can’t find it now. And I had never thought of it as a qualification I could use, although it may have helped me talk my way onto another course – a one-year MA in journalism in Dublin City University – eventually. That completed the jail break. I had started digging my tunnel in the Department of Social Welfare, Townsend Street, and several years later, to my great surprise, came up only metres away, in The Irish Times.

Anyway, thanks to the miraculous technology of intervening decades, I can now instantly consult various online archives and find, for example, the LSJ being recommended in the Irish Independent in 1974. “I mistrust correspondence courses on principle,” wrote a journalist then, “but one of the most successful and professional writers I know swears by the course she took [with the school], which cost her £20. Never were twenty smackers better spent, she now says”.

I wonder who that was? In the meantime, I also see that my fellow alumni included the late Rory O'Connor, an RTÉ producer and writer who studied there in person in the 1940s and, as revealed years later, then got his father (an old IRA man) to swing an interview with the Irish Press.

He must have been in the school around the same time as Yehuda Avner, a former Israeli ambassador to Ireland in the 1980s and another LSJ man.

Among the many technologies that were unimaginable when I was posting exercises to London was Google.

Belatedly celebrating my graduation this week, I looked up "19 Hertford Street" on Google Earth. It's a stately building, I'm glad to see, but the school of journalism has long since moved out. It's now the Mayfair Islamic Centre.