When local freelance photographer Pat Mantle passed away in August, few realised the incredible career he had enjoyed working as a press ‘snapper’ during some of London’s most exciting times
AS working families across the UK picked up the Daily Worker from their doormats, or parted with threepenny bits at newsstands on Tuesday December 31st, 1957, a young man’s face, tinged with apprehension, beamed up at them. Beneath the headline ‘ONLY TEN SECONDS TO ZERO’, a 17-year-old stood next to a model of Sputnik 3 at the Schoolboys’ Own exhibition in Westminster, ready to be launched into outer space. His name was Pat Mantle.
Pat, who passed away on August 22nd in West Cork, took thousands of photos of local events during his last years in Ireland.
One of the most loved members of the Ballydehob community, his trademark Nikon camera was ‘ever ready’ at weddings, communions, and confirmations, often snapping away for a ‘ridiculously small’ fee. ‘He considered it an honour to be chosen as official photographer,’ recalled his close friend Noel Coakley.
Although naturally quiet, he wasn’t slow in pushing himself forward when in pursuit of a picture worthy to be published, according to Noel.
He’d develop photos in his dark room on a Monday, and take them into Skibbereen on Tuesday, so they’d appear in The Southern Star on Thursday. However, there’s a side to him that people perhaps know little, or nothing, about. For many years, Pat was a regular photographer for a British daily newspaper.
Comic duo Morecambe and Wise filming ‘The Intelligence Men’It all began in the summer of 1958, as he related in a report of his adventures for the Daily Worker (February 18th 1959). He was ‘thumbing it’ across Europe – getting a kick out of ‘roughing it’ at youth hostels in France, Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium, finishing up outside the Soviet Pavilion in Brussels.
Pat was offered plenty of lifts, commenting: ‘The nearer you are to the so-called upper-class holiday resorts [on the French Riviera] the meaner the motorists get!’ One driver, who took him from Lyon to Cannes, used a cine camera while driving at 70mph – ‘too fast to take photos properly’.
One of Pat’s first celebrity shots captured model Mandy Rice-Davies inside an Austin Seven Countryman at the 1960 Earls Court motor show. But the photo was rejected by the Daily Worker, perhaps because its communist readership would not appreciate her ‘middle-class’ double-barrelled surname. When Mandy was identified as a friend of Christine Keeler during the 1961 Profumo affair, Pat presented the photo again, and the paper immediately published it.
Women’s Singles Champion Billie-Jean King triumphing over a forlorn looking Ann Jones in 1967.Seven other exotic snaps from a holiday in the Soviet Union occupy half a page in the August 21st, 1965 edition of the Daily Worker. Among them, a close-up of four elderly women sitting on a bench to have ‘a nice friendly gossip’ while out shopping; two girls ‘hesitating before getting their bikinis wet’ at the Black Sea resort of Sochi; and children of workers playing in the sun on a tea plantation. Pat was drawn by all things Russian, at one time owning a Lada car, recalled Coakley.
Back in England, expeditions to Pinewood Studios in 1964-65 brought him face-to-face with famous TV stars, notably comic duo Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise who were making The Intelligence Men, their first film; and ‘little man’ Norman Wisdom, who played gormless Norman Pitkin in The Early Bird (1965). He experienced horror in the ‘dark cave’ and ‘vast petrified jungle’ on the set at Shepperton Studios, where Dr Who had to confront the Daleks (Daily Worker, April 3rd, 1965 p3).
Pinewood Studios, 1964; Pat’s protrait of Muhammad Ali, taken in 1966A distinctive trait of his photographs was intense atmosphere, as conveyed in his shots of a jazz band playing one Sunday dinner time in February 1964 at the ‘Tally Ho’ pub in Kentish Town, London – you can almost hear the wailing saxophones and the wild drumbeats, taste the beer, smell the spiralling cigarette smoke.
Increasingly, Pat focused on sport. His close-ups of tackles, misdirected headers, and goalkeepers’ acrobatic saves at the Den and Craven Cottage featured in the Monday editions for years.
In 1964 he won the Daily Worker’s ‘Sports Photographer of the Year’ award for three original pictures. One featured Alan Simpson crossing the line and beating the British national 1,500 metre record at White City. A second showed prize boxers Billy Walker and Terry Downes playing football in the fields of Essex. The last, taken through an observation port, depicted diver Brenda Lockhart in the first national swimming and diving championships held at Crystal Palace Sports Centre.
In 1966, Pat met and photographed world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, ‘squaring up’ to fight his great adversary, Henry Cooper, and England’s World Cup team training at their Roehampton ground. Next year, he was in prime position at Wimbledon to witness Ladies Singles Champion Billie-Jean King raising her silver salver, and snapped cricket legends Colin Cowdrey and Geoff Boycott padding up.
Industrial disputes during the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s also provided welcome opportunities for Pat, a committed Marxist. The story goes that in 1968 he dressed as a woman to get into the Ford factory during the women’s equal pay strike. When the images were used in the film Made in Dagenham (2010), Pat was ‘over the moon’.
In 1977 he was instrumental in having charges brought against Arthur Scargill – of obstructing a police officer during a strike – dismissed.
The photographs Pat took for his paper, the Morning Star, were deemed ‘vital’ because they showed the Yorkshire miners’ president being pushed from behind.
After moving to Dunmanway, because his mother Mollie was from Mount Kid, near Ballydehob, he regularly travelled back and forth to Britain on work assignments, said Coakley. Autumn 1995 took him to Brighton to cover the TUC and Labour Party conferences. In 2002 he photographed Dr Aleida Guevara March, daughter of the Cuban revolutionary Che, speaking in Cork.
Returning to London in 2013, Pat was ‘chuffed’ to be awarded lifetime membership of the National Union of Journalists – rare for a photographer.
Conditions of employment have certainly changed since he began his career. In today’s digital age, camera phones enable reporters to take their own photos – though many editors frown on the demise of the photographer’s skilled role. Pat really missed being able to develop the pictures himself, admitted Coakley.
Pat Mantle’s adventures took him from Centre Court to the Black Sea, from Pinewood Studios to Red Square; he met countless film stars and sports legends along the way. He would go on clicking and clicking. It all turned out to be every bit as exhilarating as if he’d been a Sputnik astronaut himself.
• Thanks to Noel Coakley for sharing his memories of Pat.
