McCullin Page #2

And I was like a fish out of water really,

because I couldn't speak the language.

And whilst we were in Paris, I saw somebody reading a newspaper.

It was a photograph of an East German soldier

jumping over some barbed wire, which was only, at that stage,

separating them from the West.

Of course, the story had been building up,

potentially been building up.

I looked at this photograph, it was a memorable picture.

And I said to her, "When we get back to England,"

knowing I only had 70 in my savings account,

"would you mind if I went to Berlin?"

And she said, "Of course I don't mind."

- NEWSREEL:

- The East Germans don't seem to have girders enough

to plug every hole.

When a soldier's attention is diverted by others,

a hole is cut in the barbed wire,

and Khrushchev's face is slapped again.

I rang the Observer newspaper, and they said,

"We're not interested in you going."

And I said, "Well, I bought the ticket." There was no commission.

So, I got near to a place called Friedrichstrasse,

which was the centre of all the problem.

The Americans were facing the Russians.

There were tanks facing each other.

At that stage, in Friedrichstrasse,

they were actually building the beginnings of the Berlin Wall.

This was really the right place to be.

- NEWSREEL:

- Camera crews are harassed by reflecting mirrors

held by East German police.

Water hoses are played on equipment.

Nevertheless, our reporters are able to come up with remarkable pictures,

despite these hazards.

My camera equipment wasn't very good, actually.

I had a camera I had bought during my time in the air force.

It was totally the wrong shape

to give me the kind of pictures that I needed.

But, nevertheless, I stretched the use of this camera, kneeling down

and holding it up high and doing all kinds of funny things with it.

By the time that I'd been there a few days,

that wall went up pretty fast. And people could not escape.

And I looked at East German soldiers

leaning out of buildings on the other side of the wall, with binoculars.

And looking right at me. And I thought,

"They can't hurt me, because they're over there and I'm here."

It was very exciting, it was at the heightened part of the Cold War

where the Russians were quite prepared

to make a stand against the West, and vice versa.

What it really comes down to is that I was sitting on top of

the most important news story in the world.

And it was my decision,

this intuition that took me there in the first place.

So, I was beginning to show signs of having a brain

that was functioning in the right direction.

I came back to England with the film

and got it processed in the Observer's darkroom.

And they saw the pictures and they ran half a page of my story.

The story was then entered into the news category

for the News Pictures of the Year. And I won this award.

And the Observer gave me a contract after that.

So, I started getting better jobs at the Observer.

I started going to all kinds of political rallies and things.

I would go to the East End of London

and photograph disturbances with Oswald Mosley, situations like that.

It was a developing and an expanding situation

for the early part of my career.

- NEWSREEL:

- The tinderbox that is Cyprus threatens to erupt

into a full-scale war.

Greek students demonstrate against British and US proposals

that a force of NATO troops help maintain a truce on the island

until differences between Greeks and Turks can be resolved.

I walked into the Observer office one day, and the editor said to me,

"How would you consider covering the civil war for us in Cyprus?"

And at that point in my life, I wasn't ready.

And I felt that, when I think about those words, I think,

I must have been levitating. I felt as if I was rising off the ground.

I knew that the second door was opening.

- NEWSREEL:

- The terror of civil war struck Cyprus in December.

On Boxing Day, the British came in to stop the bloodshed.

So, I thought, I'm going to do my best here.

And I'm going to make an impression. This is my big chance.

So, I went to the Turkish community.

And they were surrounded by the Greeks.

I managed to slip past the roadblocks and get in.

I could hear gunfire.

That was the first time I had heard, in my life, hostile gunfire.

And then, suddenly, out of the cinema burst a man with a machine gun,

and he had a raincoat on and a flat hat.

And he looked like something like a Sicilian Mafioso bandit.

And then people ran out with mattresses on their heads,

women and children, as if a mattress would stop a bullet.

And this was my baptism of war.

I had to assess very quickly what was going on,

where the fire was coming from.

As the day wore on, we were trapped in these empty streets.

There were groups of fighters, Turkish defenders.

And funny, curious things caught my eye.

I could remember a group of men behind barricades.

It was almost like the Spanish Civil War, really.

And by the barricade, there were men with an ill-assorted bunch of weapons

and old, almost muskety-looking kind of museum pieces.

But standing near this group of men was a beautiful dog.

I thought, "Why is it that these things come to you,

"when you should be thinking about more serious things?"

But to be truthful, these little things sometimes tell you

much more about a story than the obvious things.

So, I think what I'm getting down to here is,

we're talking about sensitivity.

What I had to realise at the time, I was learning a new trade.

I was learning about the price of humanity and its sufferings.

- NEWSREEL:

- Now, four months later, the armed forces of both sides

are still defying the UN's attempts to keep the peace.

And the Cyprus situation is as dangerous and complex as ever.

The UN is powerless to do anything

that would really help restore law and order.

I saw a whole village trying to evacuate, they were being attacked,

to somewhere with more safety, like a school building.

And there was this one old lady, who was lame, and she had two sticks.

And she really couldn't get those legs moving.

And there was a British soldier trying to coax her along,

persuade her to hurry up before she'd probably lose her life.

And I was with a friend of mine, I said, "This is ridiculous."

I took one picture of the soldier and the old lady,

and I put my cameras down.

And I scooped this old lady up in my arms.

It was like scooping up some rag doll that had fallen from a child's pram.

I just ran and ran with her. I don't know why I did it.

But I didn't really want to see that old lady shot down and killed.

And I went back to my position as a photographer, and I carried on.

But it made me feel good.

I it made me feel as if I wasn't just there as a voyeur

that was enjoying other people's misery and possible deaths.

It's a very fine line.

I've been constantly accused of taking terrible pictures

and people saying, "Did you ever help anyone?"

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