Dear Western Mail,
We’ve been together 30 years. More than half my life. In that time, I’ve written more than 2,000 columns for you. But this is the last one. We are parting on warm terms as I head for a new adventure at BBC Wales. And I want to devote this final column to telling you what you’ve meant to me and what you’ve done for me.
I had designs on you from an early age, creating my own version of the national newspaper of Wales in primary school. My Classroom Gazette brought fellow pupils thrilling exclusives from the frontline of sponsored spelling contests and netball matches against Tonypandy Juniors. On Sundays I attempted to read Katherine Whitehorn in The Observer, dreaming of having a column like hers to muse wittily on the issues of the day.
Read more: Award-winning Western Mail columnist Carolyn Hitt is appointed Editor of BBC Radio Wales and Sport
Once a year you allowed children to realise their journalistic ambitions by inviting them to enter your St David’s Day Schools Competition, which I did with the kind of fanatical zeal athletes apply to Olympic finals. Success in this could lead to great things. After all, the legendary Elaine Morgan had made her first appearance in print as a schoolgirl by winning the Western Mail Essay Competition.
But I never won. I felt particularly robbed when my cartoon didn’t make the final of the Under 11s art contest because frankly the winner was impressionistic rubbish while I was proudly channelling the spirit of Gren. There was a consolation, however. And one that ultimately proved more pivotal than triumphing in the competition.
I was so miffed with the failure of my drawing I wanted it back so my father rang and asked if we could collect it. Arriving at the original Thomson House we were offered an impromptu tour of the building. Wide-eyed, I drank in every detail. The longest newsroom in Europe. The clatter of typewriters. The rumble of the rolling presses. The noisy, busy glamour of it all. I was mesmerised.
And 13 years later I was back. After university, I’d trained in Newcastle, where seeing my first by-line - on a story about wildcats terrorising pensioners in their back gardens - had made me feel like I’d won the Pulitzer Prize. A traineeship on the Neath Guardian and the Merthyr Express followed, before I came to you as your youngest sub-editor.
First task was to edit the letters’ page – both an initiation test and a role fraught with editorial pitfalls. In this pre-social media era, the postbag was a receptacle for every shade of Welsh opinion. It was quite a spectrum, ranging from lengthy academic missives from movers and shakers to the green-inked rantings of complete weirdos.
But in contrast to many of today’s keyboard warriors at least they wrote under their real names. Well, most of the time. I soon wised up to the mischief of one of our most regular correspondents Mr Huw Janus.
And after a year of coping with other people’s copy you allowed me to create my own – a weekly column. It felt a huge and daunting privilege. Here was I, in my early 20s voicing my opinion alongside such giant figures in Welsh life as broadcaster Patrick Hannan and academic Meic Stephens.
Even when I left you to switch to broadcasting in 1998, you ensured I kept the column. I never took the honour of having this platform for granted. Some of the most impressive wordsmiths have written for the Western Mail – including Ian Fleming, Gwyn Thomas and the brilliant journalist Gareth Jones who reported from Hitler’s plane in 1933.
You gave suffragette Lady Rhondda a platform to write about the fight for the vote and in the 1960s a column to Oscar-nominated actress Rachel Roberts, who would file her copy from the home in Portofino she shared with husband Rex Harrison.
And as the chronicler of Welsh rugby since the first international ever played, you shaped the sport as well as reflected it – from Old Stager in the 1920s to the reign of JBG Thomas through the 60s and 70s. So imagine how it felt when you asked me to write about rugby in 1999 as the World Cup came to Cardiff.
Old Stager and JBG would have been side-stepping in their graves to see the ball thrown to a female but I think they would have approved eventually as we created more inclusive coverage together.
This was brought home to me by the 13-year-old girl in Bala who sent letters saying she too now wanted to write on rugby. Or the elderly ladies who came up to me in a café and said: “Tell me, my dear, do you think Gav will ever be back in a Welsh shirt?” And even the disgruntled chap who sighed: “You’re the reason I now have to take my wife on rugby trips.”
The sports columns brought me camaraderie from Murrayfield to Melbourne. There’s one framed on the wall of Glynneath RFC, another behind the bar of the Welsh pub in Wellington and a pile of them in my first book Wales Play in Red.
The news columns, meanwhile, have been quoted in the Senedd and the House of Lords, but above all they’ve brought so much connection too. In more recent years it could be challenging as anyone who ventures “below the line” into an online comments forum will know. Give me a green-inker over a Dave8694357 any time.
But throughout those 30 years there were so many readers who engaged with warmth and kindness – from the lady who came up to me on the till at Culverhouse Cross M&S just last week to the wonderful Irene Williams of Llangynnor, a regular correspondent who told me she had taken the Western Mail every day since 1948.
We felt as if we knew each other probably because I have overshared over the years… It’s a column that has not only chronicled Welsh life – from devolution to Cool Cymru – but my own. I’ve never needed to keep a diary or indeed get therapy because writing this weekly missive has served both functions.
All the milestones of life are there – the wedding that never was (which happily turned out to be the greatest escape since Steve McQueen got on a motorbike!); the first flat followed by the first house; the journeys of nephews and nieces from tots to teens to adulthood sketched in anecdotes; the friendships traced in adventures and tales of popular culture…even the late ginger cats – Pumpkin and Scully - were in danger of having their own spin-off column at one stage.
And the column helped me shine a light on the darkest times – deeply personal but hopefully with universal resonance. Writing about the loss of my mother and the nature of grief brought a wonderful and comforting response. I still cherish the readers’ letters and emails from that time.
Opening a drawer in my parents’ house, I only discovered several years into writing the column that my Dad had carefully filed every single cutting. Poignantly, it was one of the first signs that his cognitive health was failing when I noticed in the last few years that this routine had stopped.
He was the one who instilled a love of words in me when I was tiny – not to mention the importance of writing well. And each week he cast the uncompromising eye of a former English teacher on my prose. The weekly critique was part of our father-daughter bond.
The column has brought me a Western Mail family too, one that has endured long after I left the staff in 1998. Heartfelt thanks to my former editor Alan Edmunds and current editor Catrin Pascoe and executive editor Wayne Davies for all your encouragement and support. Plus your patience, which at times I’ve stretched like a wayward teen skulking home after curfew as I’ve pushed my Friday deadline from afternoon to the fringes of teatime and beyond. Followed by three texts asking to change a phrase or two.
I’m also grateful for you for not replacing my byline picture since 2009 which has rendered me the Dorian Gray of Welsh journalism and is much cheaper than botox.
But most of all thank you Western Mail and all your readers for the privilege of this platform for 30 years. As someone said: “All good things must come to an end – that’s why they’re called good things, otherwise they’re just ordinary.”
Well for me this has been an extraordinary journey of comment and connection and it’s given me more than you will ever know.
Love,
Carolyn x
Read some of Carolyn's columns
- The extraordinary story of the Welsh LSD ring that supplied the world
- Welsh rugby needs to talk about ditching Delilah - I will never sing it again
- 'We need authentic Welsh voices on screen instead of English actors mangling our accents'
- The lost Welsh rugby heroes who never got to play union for Wales because they were black
- The towering figure in Welsh history whose statues and plaques deserve to be taken down
- The traditional Welsh male voice choir is alive and well – and impervious to cliché
- Bringing back The King, a Wales rugby icon who left the sporting stage too soon
- The day the UK's first hypermarket Carrefour came to Caerphilly
