The Bishop of Fleet Street

Modern Britons know better than to pack up their troubles in their old kit-bags. Instead, more than 130,000 suffering souls each year write, telephone or wire their woes to the cockney-sharp Daily Mirror (circ. 4,723,131) or its scandal-breathing sister, the Sunday Pictorial (5,709,893). Encouraged by occasional black-boxed invitations in both tabloids (DON'T WORRY ON YOUR OWN), Mirror readers address their problems to one Philip Wright, while the Pictorial asks the woebegone to confide in its John Noble.

In fact, Philip Wright and John Noble are both pseudonyms for a benign, middle-aged (53) troubleshooter with a reassuringly ecclesiastical presence and a real-life surname that rhymes with his stock in trade: Leslie Arthur Burt Hubble, otherwise known to Fleet Street colleagues as "The Bishop."

Help for Helpmeets. Under Bishop Hubble's avuncular eye, readers' outpourings are efficiently dissected by a 48-man journalistic rescue squad which includes a full-time lawyer, four experts who handle nothing but housing questions, four others who deal only in installment-buying problems, two marital-relations counselors, a specialist in servicemen's affairs. On call are two Harley Street physicians who are retained to advise readers with medical ills to see their doctors.

As the second largest department (after news) on either paper, Hubble's bureau boasts that it is the biggest of its kind in the world; with the combined weekly readership of 30,368,000 claimed by the Mirror and Pictorial, it undoubtedly also draws on the world's deepest reserves of untapped anguish. "Nothing," says Hubble, "is too large or too small for us to undertake to help." The bureau gives advice to unwed mothers, frigid wives and suspicious husbands, wrestles with material problems ranging from rent boosts to phony reducing pills, publishes scores of pictures and vital statistics of missing persons each year so that helpful readers may help restore runaway spouses to heartbroken helpmeets. In addition to its domestic clientele, the service last year got appeals for help from 49 foreign countries.

Refunds for Readers. Better than 99% of the letters received by the bureau never make the headlines, but get individual confidential replies from Hubble's experts. Hubble himself specializes in "human" cases, i.e., those that sound like good newspaper copy, spends three or four days each week on the personal investigations that have made John Noble the Pictorial's best-known byline.

Last week, after Hubble and a reporter-photographer team drove 347 miles to investigate a 60-year-old woman's complaint that she had been bilked out of her $22.40 down payment on a prefabricated garage, a Pictorial story reported that a "Pic Watchdog" had tracked down the promoter, extracted refunds for 20 other victims. Another Pictorial expose, in last week's London edition, was based on readers' complaints that they had been shortchanged on a two-week tour of Italy promoted by a former Indian army brigadier named Jalawar Singh Garewal. The Page One headline: BALONEY, BRIGADIER !

"Hello, Love." Leslie Hubble, who has been married 31 years (no children), runs the papers' far-flung readers' service from London's Kemsley House, where his musty office is decorated with postcard trophies of his favorite off-duty pastime--visiting cathedrals. The antithesis of hooch-soaked Miss Lonelyhearts, the wretched male troubleshooter* of Nathanael West's novel, plump Leslie Hubble is a meticulous reporter and devoted do-gooder who works 6 1/2 days a week at his job, sometimes spends months ferreting out a story.

A lifelong newsman, whose family for the past 107 years has had a City of London monopoly on reporting news from small city courts, Hubble was first assigned to grapple with readers' problems in wartime, when he ran a serviceman's gripe column in the armed-forces paper, Union Jack. So successful was the column that at war's end, when the Union Jack's editor, a bright young Fleet Streeter named Hugh Cudlipp (now editorial director for the Mirror group) returned as editor of the Pictorial, he persuaded Hubble to run the readers' service bureau for the Mirror and Pictorial. Hubble's eye for a good story soon turned the bureau into one of the papers' best news sources, and made it so popular with readers that the Mirror and Pictorial are Britain's only mass-circulation dailies which do not resort to circulation-building giveaway contests.

The kind of sob story that most endears Hubble to readers was handed to him not long ago by a housewife who complained that her husband had not spoken to her for ten years--even though she had borne him two children in that time. A Mirror-Pictorial team whisked the couple off to a quiet country inn and spent hours pleading with the husband. The outcome was splashed across the Pictorial's back page. The finale. "Shyly, he turned to his wife and said: 'Hello, love.' Tears of joy filled her eyes. Tenderly he took her hand and said: 'Come into the garden. It's going to be fine from now on.' "

*Into whose "New York Post-Dispatch" office each day came "more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.