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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 Slim1931-2014JOHN 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 leather-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 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. 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
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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