BYRON Rogers has met the last man to see Lord Byron's private parts. The poet and celebrated lover was long dead and in his coffin but to church warden Arthur Houldsworth he still looked fit.
"Good looking man putting on a bit of weight, he'd gone bald. He was quite naked you know," Houldsworth told him.
Not all of which followed reached the pages of The Star. "Look, I've been in bathhouses, I've seen men. But I never saw anything like him. He was built like a pony," hissed the church warden.
Byron Rogers was a journalist on The Star from 1965-68 and had a column called By The Way, a precursor of The Diary.
He was given carte blanche to write about anything which came into his head. "I was a protégé of (then editor) Tom Watson. He liked 'writing,'" recalls Byron.
Which is how on a whim he remembered the poet was buried at Hucknall and rang the vicar. The reporter was introduced to Houldsworth who years before had taken a shuftee when he put a spade through the coffin in the family vaults.
His time in Sheffield takes up a chapter of his autobiography, titled Me, just published. He arrived as a graduate trainee, a Welshman frequently mistaken for a Hungarian in Sheffield.
"I was allowed to write anything that came into my head and I never got that freedom again," he recalls at his home in Northampton.
One day he went out for a stroll and ended up writing a stream of consciousness piece which began: "The parks were full in Sheffield this week as, like a long-awaited relative, summer finally came, and the slow, hot afternoons."
He says: "I wrote about myself. When I bought a car, I wrote about it. When I crashed, I wrote about that, too."
He was allowed to roam far, back to Wales to the birthplace of a local prince, to Castle Howard for a traction engine rally powered by Welsh steam coal. These days we are more parochial.
Sometimes he made things up. "I invented a left-wing, folk-singing dentist who grew three sets of teeth," said Byron, now 67.
Sent on a vox pop, interviewing people in the street about a burning issue while the photographer takes their picture, he was faced with a photo of a woman who merited a single line.
Byron dreamt up 150 words, making her praise the Wilson government to the skies.
Unfortunately she was the vice chairman of a constituency Tory party.
He was appointed this paper's film reviewer, joining the late Ian Sainsbury on the Morning Telegraph.
"We had a wonderful time going to the pictures. They used to serve us breakfast, toast and coffee, just the two of us in a 1,000-seater cinema," he recalls.
Having interviewed the longest serving Englishman in the French Foreign Legion, a real Hungarian, the owner of a travelling freak show with a one-eyed pig and smallest baby (much later he met her son, still with the same exhibits, only more dead), and being asked to leave his bedsit because his curries ruined the smell of incense, he set off for The Times and a proper reporting job.
And why has he decided to write his autobiography now?
"It's the thing that comes to most people when we get older.
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