So you thought 'scribes' only existed in the Bible? I have news for you! They also exist in the flesh, here on earth, outside the pages of the Holy Book.
It's what the older Fleet Street [London] journalists used to call each other.
It's an esoteric name, of course; so esoteric, in fact, that as good a novelist as Evelyn Waugh (whose intimate revelations about how journalists operate are amusingly recorded in the novel, Scoop, did not seem to know it. Well, he didn't use it in his book, if I recall correctly.
I myself chanced upon it by accident. It was in 1957, and hundreds of foreign journalists had descended on Ghana, to cover the independence of the first of Britain's colonies in Africa to obtain its independence.
The Information Services Department of the new nation, headed by the impeccably knowledgeable ex-journalist, Jimmy Moxon, had laid on a couple of brand-new luxurious buses to take the journalists from their hotel (the Ambassador Hotel) to the various venues where ceremonies were taking place to mark the handover of power.
Covering the ceremonies for the first media organ for which I ever worked, New Nation Magazine, I noticed that the white, foreign journalists were accorded the privilege of being taken to the venues of ceremonies before the notables - such as the Duchess of Kent and ~ Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah - arrived.
Forced to look for taxis to take me to the same ceremonies and thereby arrive there late, I one day boldly put my "Press" badge around my neck and summoned the courage to board one of the buses that carried the white men.
No-one ejected me! So I got into conversation with some of the journalists. Names I had been coming across when I read London newspapers were revealed to me when I shyly asked the foreign hacks. One of these was John Redfern of the London Daily Express.
Although the Daily Express was known to be an arch-imperialist newspaper, I found Mr Redfern very polite and chatty. Because the photographers in the group always put their cameras in camera cases and stowed them safely under the seats of the bus, I couldn't tell which of the journalists was a cameraman and who was a writer.
So, encouraged by Mr Redfern's friendliness, I asked him directly: "What do you do, please?"
"I'm a scribe," he answered laconically. He was good enough to point to the other "scribes" - Anthony Mann from, I think, the Daily Telegraph was one of those he pointed out to me. Having been a "junior journalist" for less than six months, my seeing journalists in the flesh whose dispatches I had read from Hungary, Poland, Egypt and other centres of hot news in those days, was quite intoxicating.
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What wouldn't I give to become a "scribe" who travelled to foreign countries, at a newspaper's expense, to write about them! (I told myself secretly).
I suppressed the quiet thought that arose in my mind that, perhaps, covering foreign countries could be a "dangerous" thing to do, seeing that "foreign correspondents" usually went to countries where wars were taking place. Indeed, in 1957, the Ghana story was the only one in the world that could be properly called a "happy" story. Cyprus (war); Kenya (war); Hungary (rebellion) and Poland (rebellion) were the other centres of foreign news!
Well, it took me a relatively few years to become a "foreign correspondent" myself. I started off with nearby Togo (don't laugh!) where I went to investigate juju practitioners and their powers, for Drum Magazine. [Drum Ghana Edition August 1962; Nigerian Edition September 1962]
It was a story I loved doing, as all my observations were illustrated by an ace cameraman called Christian Gbagbo, with marvellous action pictures. I was bowled over when the editor-in-chief of Drum at the time, Sir Tom Hokinson (former editor of the world-famous picture magazine, Picture Post [published in London] wrote to say that the story was "the best story we've ever had in Drum! " Not a bad start for a budding "foreign correspondent", eh?
