It is highly likely that anyone around in 1977 remembers that year as the Silver Jubilee of the late Queen Elizabeth II. To me, however, it is far more memorable than Her Maj visiting Holyhead, where I had the great pleasure of being the district reporter for the North Wales Chronicle.
In Spring of that year I had returned to journalism, after more than two years taking a break in the world of entertainment, and Marion and I, with our girls, had moved from Essex to Anglesey to begin a major new chapter in our already hectic life.
There were three major events in my life that sunny summer.
The most important was in the July when Marion and I got married on the seventh day of that seventh month in the 77th year of the 20th century.
The second event came when Marion and I bought our first house together – a delightful cottage on Holyhead Mountain. There was a glorious view from the garden of South Stack lighthouse.
The third memorable event was more journalistic than personal.
I got a call from a contact to say there was a ruckus at the port where the Dublin ferry was due to depart and the person I causing it was the man renowned for playing Lawrence of Arabia – Irish hellraiser Peter O’Toole.
After a quick call to a local freelance photographer, telling him to get to the port as fast as possible, I headed straight there myself.
I arrived just in time to meet the man himself coming out of the harbourmaster’s office with the harbourmaster himself.
The actor was only a couple of inches taller than me yet he seemed to be a giant as I trotted alongside him heading into town.
It is rarely I have had to do an interview on the run but at least Mr O’Toole was quite happy to tell me what had happened.
He said he had arrived early for the ferry and, after checking the departure time, he decided to go into town. He arrived back with, as he believed, five minutes to spare only to find the gangplank was already raised and a crew member was closing the gap in the deck rail.
“I told him to lower the gangplank, ” the actor said, “only for the cheeky sod to tell me I was too late. He said the gangplank was pulled up 10 minutes before sailing and to lower it now would make the ferry late.
“I told him the captain would just have to open the throttle a bit more and just then I realised the boat was pulling away so I called out: ‘Come back, I haven’t finished talking to you’.”
By now we had reached the bottom of the slope where a large black car was parked and the actor turned to me, shook my hand and said: “Now I must go, I have a plane to catch.”
With that he got into the car and my brief link with fame departed.
The harbourmaster was still there so I asked him for his side of the story.
He confirmed what the actor had told me and also told me Mr O’Toole was a regular passenger on the ferry to Dublin and the port authority had authorised him to secure a flight for the actor from a nearby private airfield.
I went back to the office and filed the story. The next morning I contacted the actor’s agent and he told me that the plane had arrived in time for him to be at the port when the ferry got in.
The agent said that when the ferry docked the same crewman lowered the gangland and Peter O’Toole said to him: “As I was saying when you so rudely sailed away . . .”
PS: I checked in with the grandmaster a few weeks later and he told me that the actor continued to use the ferry and had “forgiven” the crewman, accepting that he had just been doing his job.
Robin's Nest 