Paul Berriff: A life in pictures

Paul Berriff began his life in photography as a teenager. Now after a career as a globe-trotting film-maker, he is back to his first love - in Yorkshire Michael Hickling reports

Paul Berriff has a sense of fun. His wife Hilary has an instinct for animals and can’t resist the waifs and strays that turn up on her doorstep. Add the two together and the answer’s a penguin in the kitchen.

On Hilary’s birthday Paul came into the house and announced her present had just been delivered in the porch. She opened the door in anticipation and there stood a penguin, on its own, looking hopeful.

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“It just came inside and I followed,” she says. “I was a bit nonplussed. I thought it might need feeding but I didn’t know what to give it. Fortunately I remembered I’d got a tin of sardines in tomato sauce in the cupboard. Then the children started complaining it was smelly.”

She was pondering what the next step might be when her husband came clean. The truth was that the penguin had been obliged to leave its home in a tiny zoo down by the river in Knaresborough and was bound for a new one in Bridlington. Paul was on assignment to cover the move for television news.

“Wife’s prezzie’s a penguin” would have been a great headline had it been true. Stories are what Paul’s life has been all about and he has the knack of finding himself in the right place at the right time when something big is about to break.

On the morning of 9/11 he was working on a film about mistreated animals not far from the World Trade Center. When the first plane struck, he switched his camera from dogs to firemen as the terrible events unfolded.

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On this occasion he was too close to the action. As the south tower collapsed he was knocked unconscious, loaded into an ambulance and despatched to hospital.

Being on the spot is how he got started. One day at the beginning of the 1960s he was walking up the Headrow in Leeds when a car went out of control and crashed through the window of the Schofields department store, taking several other people with it.

Paul had his camera with him, got his pictures and ran down to the offices of the Yorkshire Evening Post in Albion Street where he had recently begun his working life as a 16 year-old copy boy.

Up to that point he also had ambitions to be a reporter and was taking shorthand a typing lessons. The reception his crash pictures received in the office led him to opt for the another route. It turned out the driver of the car, who had blacked out, was a staff photographer on the Evening Post where there was now a slot available for a keen youngster.

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The paper sent him to their sister paper in Doncaster and here, like any other hopeful journalist, he made friends with the people who could be useful – policemen, firemen, ambulance drivers.

It also included the manager of the Gaumont cinema who put on live acts respectable folk had never heard of – such as a young person’s beat combo coming on their first tour. But for some reason the Rolling Stones were a big hit amongst a new Doncaster audience made up of what were now known as teenagers.

And then there was Little Richard and Roy Orbison and Marianne Faithfull. These and all the others who came to play the Gaumont, would go after the show with the cinema manager to parties at Paul Berriff’s flat.

Neighbours’ complaints about noise led to the discovery that the police officers who should have been responding to them were at the parties as well. In the kerfuffle that followed, Paul’s office drafted him out of Doncaster and back to Leeds. His mum had to come and fetch him.

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Serendipity has played a part in his success. But it’s probably even more to do with that old Gary Player maxim that the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Ordered to get shots of the Beatles one night at the ABC in Huddersfield, Paul showed up in the middle of the afternoon and waited on his own in the auditorium. It was the day after Love Me Do had been released and unexpectedly the Beatles also showed up early to run through that number and a few others.

Relaxing off-duty, they lounged in the stalls like a bunch of mates at the afternoon matinee and on the way back to his newspaper office Paul knew he’d got in the bag a selection of enchanting pictures that would become classics. Some are now on permanent display at the Beatles museum in Liverpool.

Moving on to the BBC’s staff in Leeds he was called out in the middle of the night to a fire at the General Infirmary. It was all over and in the can before the next photographer arrived on the scene and asked, “What’s happened?” Paul replied, “You’ve missed it.” It was his father Dougie who worked for the Yorkshire Post.

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After switching to London to work for Nationwide and Panorma, he set up his own production company in Hessle near Hull. Driven by adrenaline, he specialised in spending extensive periods alongside people doing adventurous jobs, especially Yorkshire lifeboatment.

So as not to miss a single aspect of their lives, nor any of their rescue call-outs, Paul moved house to live next door to the lifeboat station in Bridlington.

On the Humber he helped set up the Humber Rescue boat and did many missions with them. He’s still a trustee of the charity.

Filming more rescue teams, this time on the RAF helicopters at Lossiemouth where he spent a year, he was in pole position to be the first newsman on the scene for the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster in the North Sea in July 1988. Later he was injured in one of the helicopters which crashed.

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And these are only some of the stories. “I’ve tasted frontline drama at it’s best and worst,” says Paul. “I always seem to be in the wrong place at the right time.

“It’s odd. There are certain people who never cop for a call, take my father on the Yorkshire Post for instamce. Yet every time I go out, things start falling around me. I suppose it’s because I like to be involved when things are kicking off.”

Now 64, he’s located himself where the action isn’t. He lives in a pretty period cottage in an unspoilt market town in North Yorkshire. Bedale is charming and sedate, the last place in the world where things are going to kick off big-time, but he points out that he’s only minutes from the A1 and the East Coast mainline. These can hurry him to the centre of big stories as required.

He certainly doesn’t want to retire just yet, the job is in his blood. But he has grown restless at how bureaucratic television has become and the length of time it takes to get a decision out of commissioning editors.

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Caution seems to be the watchword these days and where once upon a time a good idea would have been waved through after a presentation on the back of a fag packet, bosses now ask for several pages of outline, explaining in detail precisely what they are going to see for their money.

“It’s ten per cent filming and 90 per cent admimnistration,” Paul grumbles. “Everything has to be done as a co-production with the Americans. It’s a very slow process.”

For that reason, he has gone back to his first loves - stills photography and Yorkshire - and he’s won a competition for a lovely shot of a snowbound Yorkshire coast at Staithes.

Some of his early work in the backstreets of Leeds in the early Sixties could easily be mistaken for the 1930s, but for the give-away of a mini packed at the kerb.

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This time traveller impression is also present in his latest work. A recent black and white shot of the train shed on the North York Moors railway, with shafts of light creating a striking luminous effect, could have come out of the pages of Picture Post in the 1940s.

Working for that magazine, or for Paris Match as a photo-journalist, would have been his ideal job he says.

This winner of 17 awards, including a Bafta, has no hestitation in identifying his trickiest assignment. “Being sent to the miners’ welfare late on Saturday nights to get the results of the darts competition and then getting all of 20 names, left to right, correct for the caption. If you can do that you can do anything.

“I’ve been all over. I’ve done all that. Now I want to do photographs round here once again. I love Yorkshire. It’s the best county in the best country in the world. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

www.paulberiff.com

Paul is opening a new exhibition of his work at Lockwoods Restaurant in North Street, Ripon on Wednesday 2nd March from 7pm.