McCullin Page #4

And they were cutting them to pieces with machetes on the way down,

as they were fleeing from us.

And we caught up with them.

There was goodness in Mike Hoare,

but there wasn't much goodness in what he stood for, really.

He was there for the adventure and the money.

There was one mercenary Rhodesian and I was sleeping in the same room

and he had a whole box of stuff and I said, "Where did you get that?"

He said, "I've just blown the bank in town but there was no money in it, unfortunately."

Halfway through the night, I heard gunfire

and I woke up in a great sweat.

This Rhodesian had got drunk and shot these two African boys,

who were doing all the laundry and the cooking

for these mercenaries for breakfast.

I remember looking at one of these poor black boys,

he was about 12 years old and his eyes were open.

And I looked at the mercenary and he said, "They asked for it.

"I found a weapon on them." Which wasn't true.

You know, some of these mercenaries,

they just had a lust for killing Africans.

HE MOANS:

I hated them in the end.

GUNSHOT/HE SHOUTS

When I came away from these atrocities, I kept thinking,

"How am I going to get through this?"

I love what I'm doing, I love photography but, you know,

this other stuff is really too awful to live with, you know.

And sometimes people used to say to me, "Do you have nightmares?"

I would say, "No.

"Only in the daytime, when my eyes are open and I'm awake

"and my memory is, you know, on full alert."

So when I see... I love photography,

I love being in my darkroom, but even my darkroom is a haunted place.

I go in there with the red light and it's like being in a womb

and I play that music, which is only classical music,

it somehow pleases me, but at the same moment,

it takes me down and down and down to where I don't want to go.

It's like as if I'm drowning in a very deep ocean...

..and I'm trying to get back to the top again to see the daylight.

So, you know, I don't just take photographs. I think.

CLASSICAL MUSIC:

I would come back to Finsbury Park,

because unfortunately,

I was still living in quite poor circumstances with my new wife.

And then, when there were odd days when I had nothing to do,

I would go to the Wimpy bar and hang out with the same tribe, you know.

And then they would say, "Where have you been lately?"

I'd say, "I've been to the Congo with the mercenaries."

And they would try to humour me...

..but basically, they were almost putting me down,

as if I was living in a Walter Mitty world.

I did about four and a half years on the Observer

and things were beginning to slow down for me and I could also...

I started getting the taste and the need

to do much bigger, you know, international stories.

And a friend of mine called David King,

who worked at the Sunday Times, said to me,

"Why don't you come and join us?

"Why don't you come and do some work for us? I'll give you work."

So I did and he sent me off to the Mississippi.

BLUES MUSIC:

It was an amazing part of the world, the Mississippi.

They had the sharecroppers,

the black people who brought in the cotton,

living in shacks and sheds, and then you had New Orleans,

where we basically, we arrived in New Orleans and it was amazing to see.

And there was a Ku Klux Klan rally one night.

It was like Hollywood.

There was the big fire cross burning,

these rather hateful people in these ridiculous kind of outfits,

smoking huge cigars and basically

saying, "Welcome," but, you know, at the same time intimidating us.

I managed to, you know, get a few pictures, which David King,

when I came back, put together.

You know, you can take amazing pictures,

but you still need to have them presented

in a way that the public can accept them and understand them.

That was my first assignment for the Sunday Times.

Roy Thompson was not a journalist himself,

but he was the best friend journalism ever had.

He was very proud of his newspapers

and he was so proud of their independence,

he had a card printed which he carried in his pocket.

So when Roy Thompson was attacked,

"Why are you papers publishing this?"

or, "Why are you putting these war photographs in the colour magazine?

"We advertisers don't like it."

He would pause and take out of his pocket a little card

and it said, it was a kind of oath he'd made, you know,

"The newspapers that I control will always be independent

"and will run professionally and I do not interfere in them."

So he would put the card back in his pocket and would say,

"You wouldn't expect me to go against my own word, would you?"

I was very privileged because I worked on the colour magazine,

which was directly associated with the Sunday Times newspaper.

And I had equally wonderful people there

who allowed me to just disappear and come back several weeks later

and on top of all that, allow me to edit my own material.

He knew he had the confidence that if he did his part

and took his photographs and reported with integrity

and accuracy and with a sense of composition,

that it wasn't going to be interfered with

or rejected because of some other concerns.

He trusted me and so it meant that I would try that much harder

for people who gave me this wonderful freedom.

So Roy Thomson, backing his editors,

was crucial to the career of Don McCullin.

MUSIC:
"Tin Soldier" by The Small Faces

The '60s were packed with opportunities

if you wanted to go to war.

# I am a little tin soldier that wants to jump into your fire... #

Israeli soldiers, fresh from street fighting,

snapped one another at the Wailing Wall.

Pictures for girlfriends, or people from Tel Aviv.

# All I need is treat me like a man

# Cos I ain't no child... #

If they think that I've come back happy,

they know that I've got something ghastly to show.

And if I've got something ghastly to show,

it means that I'm trying to get the message over to people

that even though I like being in a war and I like being there

because it's a great adventure for me,

my duty is to be there for a reason, not just to have a bloody good time.

I covered the battle of the citadel of Hue,

which was the biggest battle I'd ever been in.

I mean, I wouldn't like to go through a year without being in a war.

And it went on for two weeks

and that was really the beginning of real madness.

I'm getting a bit bad, really,

because I'm looking forward to doing two wars a year

and if I start looking forward to doing two or even more a year,

I'm not going to survive.

CLASSICAL MUSIC:

GUNFIRE:

Sleeping next to dead bodies.

Looking at men who had been run over by tanks

and looked like Persian carpets in the road.

People with their brains hanging out.

Living under tables and sleeping in rat-infested rooms.

It was like, basically, going into total madness and insanity.

I stood for two weeks in that battle,

watching dozens and dozens of American soldiers being killed

and wounded and being dragged towards me.

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