The Boy Who Shot Down an Airship by Michael Frederick Green

His newspaper career took him to the Birmingham Gazette and then The Observer, where he later recalled asking the sports editor: “Why don’t you give some space to the real rugby, the sort played by ordinary blokes like me?” He was always nervous about the actor’s traditional cri de guerre “break a leg”, having once done just that by falling off stage and being ferried to hospital dressed as an 18th-century pirate complete with eye patch and wooden leg. On another occasion he was forced to eat dinner in a Liverpool hotel trouserless after the team had debagged him on the train journey fortunately, his modesty was protected by a trench coat.Īs an amateur thespian, Green developed a keen ear for the absurd, whether on-stage or off. His first big interview with their captain took place during the post-match shower, with Green fully clothed. He resurfaced at the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, where he was assigned to cover the local rugby team, often travelling with the Saints. Having brought them to life, an enormous reel of paper broke, spewed on to the machine room floor and continued doing so until he could locate a mains switch. Meanwhile, Green had joined the Leicester Mercury as a messenger boy, but that came to an abrupt end after he boasted to a colleague that he knew how the huge printing presses in the basement worked.

“In all honesty the first couple of pints after the game were usually to celebrate my survival.” It was in his match-playing days that his understanding of “coarse rugby” evolved. According to one profile he played for “more clubs than Jack Nicklaus”, including Leicester LTC, Leicester Harlequins, and Leicester Thursday. Michael Frederick Green was born in Leicester on Januand educated at Wyggeston Grammar School, where he enjoyed amateur dramatics and even-more amateurish rugby. It was packed with ribald tales such as that of a friend’s tent which collapsed while its occupants were in flagrante, leaving the friend commenting: “It was easier to re-erect the tent than me”, and included chapter headings such as “How to attract women” and “Starting an affair”. The Art of Coarse Sex (1980), subtitled “Or how to love better and die with a beautiful smile on your face”, spoofed the sex-advice manuals that were flooding the market.

The Boy Who Shot Down an Airship by Michael Frederick Green