After the China Mail closed in August 1974, my father Jack Spackman was persona non grata, thanks to his leading role in the subsequent fight for a fair settlement for the staff. Overnight, he went from top of the perch as one of Hong Kong’s most renowned investigative journalists to the bottom of the heap.
When he was Financial Editor for the China Mail, he had broken some of the biggest business stories of the day. As the late Kevin Sinclair put it, in his South China Morning Post obituary for Jack, “he may not have known much about the technicalities of high finance, but he was aware totally of what made a good story”.
Sinclair: “When Jack Spackman was made business editor of the China Mail in 1972, friends presented him with a book called How to Bluff Your Way in Finance.
“The gnarled newspaperman was truly grateful; he took the job admitting frankly that he knew absolutely nothing about the subject he was supposed to cover.
“Within a week, there were frank, hard-hitting articles on complex shipping, banking and trade issues in the afternoon tabloid.”
Jack Spackman and Kevin Sinclair in 1987, celebrating Jack’s 20 years in Hong Kong.
He broke the Sime Derby story, the Hon Fat story. The Hin Kong story – names long forgotten, but at the time they were big news. And one day he was handed a photocopy of a cheque for HK$30 million and, with it, the story of his career. It was the Raper-Merlin case.
“I had my own Deep Throat,” Jack said.
“My first investigations on receiving a copy of the cheque started ripples. Within six months the headlines read ‘Writs Fly at Merlin’. The barrister’s room at the Mandarin was bugged – everything hit the fan. Shortly after that Mr Raper was forced to leave the colony.”
For three years after the China Mail industrial dispute, Jack was a hustling freelancer, doing the sort of work to which he’d never put his name. These included editing a host of in-house magazines for some of Hong Kong’s biggest companies. It appeared the lion of local journalism had been tamed.
“I’d been a sportswriter, a layout man, a China watcher, a business journalist. Now they told me I was finished,” he said. “I was described at a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce as ‘That Socialist’.
“That Socialist” Jack Spackman at the forefront of the China Mail fight for a fair go for the staff in 1974.
During those low profile years he also lectured on journalism at Baptist College and edited a computer yearbook, at a time when computers were still huge boxes in air-conditioned rooms run by people who spoke an arcane and highly specialised language.
But they were thin times in the Spackman household. We were barely afloat, and Jack had good reason to fear that his days as a newshound in Hong Kong were over.
That’s when, in 1976, Commercial Radio’s Nick Demuth (or De Mouth, as he was affectionately known) gave him a job hosting a morning talkback show three times a week. Jack was back.
His broad Australian accent was regarded as something of an impediment to the role, and Jack briefly took some elocution lessons, in an effort to tone it down a bit. “Well bred people eat bred” became his mantra. But, to be honest, it never really stopped sounding to Your Young Girl Reporter’s ears like “Well bread people eat breaaaaad”.
It’s not enough to be fairly professional in this world. You have to be red hot
Jack Spackman
He also put a lot of effort into learning his new craft. He was not a stranger to radio, falling into it almost by accident in the early 1970s as a stringer for Australia’s Fairfax group of newspapers.
“I had filed a story from Hong Kong for a newspaper in Sydney,” he said. “One of the top talk-show hosts down there called me early one morning and asked me about it. Then he said: “I’ll ring you again in an hour and I want you to say all that again on air.”
That was the start of a long run on the Brian White Show which went out over dozens of stations on Australia’s Macquarie network.
But hosting a three-hour talkback show of his own, three mornings a week, was a different matter, and he started studying, listening to tapes of talkback programmes from overseas and getting to grips with the technicalities.
“It’s not enough to be fairly professional in this world. You have to be red hot,” he said.
Commercial Radio talkback radio host Jack Spackman.
At first, Jack was on his best behaviour, overawed by the microphone, and over-concerned about his enunciation. Then, about six months in, he told a story on air and it went down like a rock.
A couple of nights later, he said, he told the same story to a bunch of mates at the Press Club and they cracked up.
“That night I decided that from then I was going to be my totally natural self. So what if I mispronounced a word or said something stupid occasionally?
“You know, it worked. I could almost feel the audience respond. And I proved it. Soon after, I had a real disaster morning. I dropped the headlines, slid under the table, nearly choked myself with the headphone cord, spilt the coffee… and I thought, why fight it?
“It all went on air and it was all right. The point is, every so often your audience likes to be reminded the bloke in the hot seat is human and fallible too.”
Profile of talkback radio host Jack Spackman in the Sunday Post-Herald, 1978.
Jack loved radio. Its immediacy made it, for him, the most exciting of all the media he worked in.
“Radio is now. News has to be processed and put into time slots, but a talk show is immediate news. Sometimes we heard of floods, landslides, fires, long before the police did and we were the ones alerting the parties concerned.
“It was very exciting. You never knew exactly how the show would turn out.”
He liked nothing better than getting in on a breaking story on radio.“There are none of the frustrations of waiting for the printers to do their job to get the story out. And radio avoids the time-wasting features of television.
In distinguished company: Jack Spackman on TVB’s Meet the Press. To his left is David Roads, AP war correspondent and founding member of Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents Club.
“I’ve lost count of the number of hours I’ve spent in a cold TV studio just to get a half-hour programme on tape.”
Talkback shows, on both English and Chinese language radio, were on a roll in Hong Kong in the 1970s and Jack, already well known for his role in the China Mail affair, was suddenly a bit of a celebrity.
Most radio stars probably enjoy a reasonable amount of anonymity when they hit the streets, but everyone knew Jack’s face thanks to it being plastered all over the media during his China Mail days.
We could not walk down the street without him being pulled up every few metres by someone wanting a chat. It suited his gregarious nature down to the ground and I don’t think I ever saw him happier. And, believe me, gentle reader, I had plenty of observation time while hanging around on the pavement next to him and his admirers.
© Maria Spackman 2021
Stay tuned for part two of Jack’s radio career, including his dramatic on-air resignation.
You might also like: The first time Your Girl Reporter heard Jack Spackman on the radio
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