SCOOP'S SCOOP

Although he made much of his scorn for the press and its workings, Evelyn was by nature competitive and by his own lights did his best to do a good job. In this he was not as incompetent as he liked to make out, the Mail running over sixty of his cables between 24 August and 20 November 1935. Desperate for copy, he and Patrick hired a couple of professional informants to keep them supplied with stories, but as industrious as their two spies were, neither Waugh nor Balfour quite dared to relay to London a report that twenty-four Japanese officers had landed secretly and were proceeding towards the Ogaden, or that a mutiny among the boy scouts had been put down single-handedly by the eleven-year-old Duke of Harar armed with a machine gun. (As Balfour cynically observed in his account of the war, "If you were conscientious you searched for some confirmation of such fantasies before telegraphing them to London. If you were not you telegraphed them to New York as they were.")

During the rest of his time in Abyssinia, Evelyn succeeded once more in getting hold of an important story, but this time it was the paper's fault, not his, that it was never used. Count Vinci, as a reward for the Mail's support, gave exclusively to Waugh advance warning that he was intending to withdraw his staff and leave the country. This was crucially significant information, infallibly indicating that Italy was at last preparing to invade. Knowing that the wireless operators would have no compunction in making his scoop available to any hack prepared to pay, Evelyn hit on the cunning expedient of transmitting his copy in Latin. Unfortunately the sub-editor in London who received it, assuming it was some kind of incomprehensible joke, spiked the story.

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