Derek Jameson

Derek Jameson (29 November 1929 – 12 September 2012) was an English tabloid journalist and broadcaster. He began his career in the media in 1944 as a messenger at Reuters and worked his way up to become the editor of several British tabloid newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s.

Later, he was a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 2 for nearly a decade and a half, including an on-air partnership with his third wife Ellen. When his profile was at its highest, he was described by Auberon Waugh as "the second most famous man in Britain after Prince Charles."

Early life

Born in Hackney, London, the son of laundry worker Elsie Elaine Ruth Jameson (whom, until the age of 8, he believed to be his elder sister) and an unidentified father, Jameson was illegitimate and grew up in a private children's home alongside his mother, where conditions were poor and five children shared the same bug-ridden bed. Although Jameson never learned his father's identity, visits — at the behest of his mother — to a kosher butcher shop where the "tall blond butcher would invariably shell out a few shillings" led Jameson to assume this man to be his father.

The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History (2011) states that Jameson had "one Jewish parent"; whether this refers to his mother or the man he assumed was his father is unspecified. The journalist Henry Porter, in Lies, Damned Lies and Some Exclusives (1984), states of Jameson: "Derek Jameson was born within the smell of Hackney marshes to an Irish mother and a Jewish father who disappeared shortly after he was conceived."

As a child, Jameson was evacuated from London to Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, during the Second World War. His formal education included a period at a borstal; his youthful activities had included shoplifting.

Career

Fleet Street

His career began in Fleet Street, as a messenger boy at Reuters, and he became a trainee reporter in 1946. That year he became a member of the Communist Party, and acquired the nickname of the "red menace" as a result.