Roger Clarke has known John Slim since 1972, when he joined The Birmingham Post & Mail as a trainee reporter and John was an established feature writer but one who was always ready with help and advice for young journalists and soon the pair became both friends as well as colleagues.

In 2009 the pair started Behind The Arras  which continues to serve amateur theatre as well as the professional stage

A voice of amateur theatre

John Dennis Slim

1931-2014

JOHN SLIM, journalist, theatre critic, poet, writer of limericks, raconteur and the voice of Midlands’ amateur stage for more than a quarter of a century, has died in the Primrose Hospice in Bromsgrove after a short illness. He was 83.

John, who went to St Philip's Grammar School, Edgbaston, started his career in journalism, and theatricals, with the late Sir Norman Wisdom in 1948 when both found themselves students at the Underwood Secretarial College in Union Street, Birmingham.

 John, then 17, was learning shorthand and typing hoping for a career in journalism after completing National Service, while Sir Norman, twice his age, was in panto at the Alexandra Theatre and wanted to use the typewriter in his dressing room to reply to his fans. The pair spent their breaks happily buying each other 2d cups of tea in a nearby café.

Upon completing his National Service in the RAF in 1951 John worked first on the Kidderminster Shuttle, then joined The Birmingham Post & Mail in its Redditch office in 1954 before moving to head office in Birmingham on Bonfire Night, 1965.  There he became a Birmingham Post feature writer where his great love was interviewing people, such as, in his own words: “Alf Tabb, of Kidderminster, who committed his flat cap and stringy frame to riding absurd little bicycles that he made himself and who gave me a demonstration, 60-odd years ago, on a model with four-inch wheels while his purposeful pedalling brought his knees up past his chin; people like Enoch Powell, erstwhile MP for Wolverhampton South-West, back in 1968, straight after his “River of Blood” speech; people like Muhammad Ali, whose leatha picture of John Slimer-fisted career had finally caught up with him and who kept going to sleep on me.”

Anthony Everitt, a former Post Features editor, once said of him: “You could ask him to write a feature about standing on your head in a bucket of manure and he would do it!”. You perhaps need to be a journalist to know what a compliment that really is.

As a journalist John was a stickler for good grammar and usage, hating, for instance, apostrophes appearing just because a word was pluralised, or words used wrongly. These were the building blocks of not only journalism but language and John wanted everyone to know it – in his own gentle style of writing.

John Slim
1931-2014

John had started reviewing professional stage in 1968, in addition to his day job, as is the wont of newspapers, but an event in 1984 was to change his life when the journalist engaged specifically to cover amateur stage took his bow and made his exit stage left, or at least into the night into Colmore Circus for employment elsewhere. John was asked by the then features editor to “look after amateur stage this week” while future coverage was sorted out.

It was still being looked after, and presumably was still being sorted out, some 400 this weeks or so later come 1991 when John took early retirement, a retirement, as far as amateur stage was concerned, which merely meant he worked from home rather than the office and not only continued to review but also wrote two weekly columns, one for the Mail and one for the Post, and also took on editing the national magazine of NODA – the National Operatic and Dramatic Association - a role he continued until 2009 when, coincidentally, reorganisation and cost cutting at BPM saw him retiring from Colmore Circus for a final time.

John was concerned that amateur stage would no longer have an outlet and, as I was running a pub theatre at the time, I suggested a few pages on the theatre’s existing website could be dedicated to amateur stage. That idea was never going to work successfully but the thought had been sown and out of it grew Behind the Arras, a name chosen not because of some great veneration of Shakespeare, or sympathy for Polonius, Ophelia’s father stabbed to death by Hamlet behind the arras, but because it was the only name with thespian leanings we could find that had not been taken!

So John continued to indulge his love of amateur stage for another three years before hanging up his quill at the end of the 2012 season, with another 250 or so reviews under his belt.

He was a well-respected reviewer who always tried to be constructive in criticism and look to give encouragement where he could although he never went easy on productions because they were amateur. His view was that the cast might not be paid but once admission was charged a performance had to give value for money.

He was also a champion of the amateur stage hating the terms amdram and amateur dramatics. To him it was always amateur theatre by people who did not get paid but did it for the love of it. John, incidentally, ventured on to the stage only twice in his career, aged five and seven and decided never again.

GREAT CAR THEFT

One of John’s great attributes was his ability to laugh at himself such as in the case of the great car theft. He had reviewed a play at Lapworth Players and upon leaving the theatre found his car had been stolen. The police were informed and a taxi called to take him to his home in Bromsgrove.

Halfway home he suddenly remembered that he had not been in his own car that evening but his wife’s, so back to Lapworth where the car was sitting in splendid isolation in an empty car park creating a story John delighted in telling, one of many involving him and lost cars. See below

Aside from journalism he also wrote limericks, eight volumes and about 8,000 of them, and has the distinction of being turned down for a forward by Jimmy Cricket for one volume as the comedian who prides himself on scrupulously clean material was uneasy at some of the mildly risqué content – although the comedian did find them clever and funny.

He was also a poet with more than 200 poems in his web anthology Poems That Rhyme Visit the site

John was diagnosed with terminal cancer last September, news he took philosophically saying in his final thoughts: “It's not that I am afraid to go. I'm 82 and I've had a good run, a lot of jolly, happy decades in which I have deployed my insistence on failing to understand any given situation in the knowledge that if everything is not quite hunky-dory it will eventually go away.” 

And finally

“Life goes on. Until eventually it doesn't. 

And that, I think, is all I wanted to say. It's goodbye from me.”

He went into the hospice last week on his 58th wedding anniversary and leaves a wife, Elsa, three daughters and a son and nine grandchildren – and many friends in amateur theatre throughout the Midlands. It was a pleasure and a privilege to have known him.

16-04-14

John Slim's Final Thoughts

 

My kingdom for a car . . .

THE internal combustion engine in all its four-wheeled forms and John Slim had an uneasy relationship, perhaps because of John’s habit of playing fast and loose, or rather lost, with their affections.

His problem was not so much driving a car as finding it, or, as with the case of his wife’s car at Lapworth, remembering which car he was supposed to . . . remember.

For example John parked his car at Birmingham International to go to London and duly took care to note a nearby pole to fix its location.

Upon his return he found the pole, or at least a similar one, but, crucially, in a different part of the car park, and, with no car in sight, he eventually called a taxi to take him home only for his supposed stolen car to be spotted, by the taxi driver, as they drove out of the car park.

Then he was parked in the Kingfisher Shopping Centre in Redditch and called his wife, Elsa from M&S with the news that his car had, once again, been stolen and asked her to pick him up. Elsa duly obliged and as she arrived at the car park saw the “stolen” car happily parked on a different level to the one on which John was convinced it shoud be.

And it was not just the Midlands where John could lose cars. On one occasion visiting his daughter in London he had had to park in a different road to the one where she lived and the next day the car was no longer where he was sure he had parked it . . . perhaps you are noticing a pattern developing here. So the police were called to report yet another theft.

The police duly called back to say that not only had they found the car, in another road to the one in which John thought he had parked it, but would he now please move it.

When John and Elsa went to retrieve the car it was the only vehicle in sight. The street was deserted, almost unheard of in London, except it was the start of the Queen’s Club Tennis Tournament and no parking was allowed in the road that day leaving John's car sticking out proudly like a salutary thumb.

 

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