SEX DRUGS AND STRIKE 1974-1986
As told to Calum Macdonald
He was on the Daily Mail for the last years of the Harold Wilson, Labour Government and was involved in the ‘Hunt for Lord Lucan’, and in the ‘Hunt for the Jackal’, Carlos Ramirez, and at two big armed sieges in London, one at the Spaghetti House in Knightsbridge. the other in Balcombe Street.
He was also present for the Daily Mail’s catastrophic airlift of ‘orphans’ from Vietnam, and the invasion of Cyprus by the Turks.
He interviewed Yvonne Goolagong, (Cawley) the Australian aboriginal tennis player. and remembers the Daily Mail finding the ‘Lost City of the Incas’ and then losing it the next day (not him he insists).
Andrew Drummond ended up working in the Investigations Department and it was from there that he was invited to join the ‘News of the World.
In those days the News of the World was broadsheet with a 5 million circulation, double that of today.
While there he joined the cult ‘Children of God’ in Tenerife for a report which was commended in the European Parliament; covered the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and went on assignments among others to the United States, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Tenerife, Australia, and the Philipinnes.
For nearly two years he went undercover to join the a Nazi organisation for a series of articles which earned him the ‘Maurice Ludmer Memorial Prize for Investigations into Fascism and Racism’. He also investigated contract-rigging in government departments, safety conditions on North Sea oil rigs, a rogue British army unit in Northern Ireland (not published but several soldiers were courtmartialled) and crime, a lot of it.
(Andrew Drummond on left with Great Train Robbers from his day working on crime at the News of the World)
In 1986 he decided to quit the News of the World during the Wapping Industrial dispute, to freelance and make films.