PATRICK BATTMAN TV
I was Peter’s freelance TV sports columnist on both the late, lamented Evening News and then the Sunday Express. Oh, and always sociable in or out of the office. Had a handle on everything going on in the sporting world, never short of ideas. Peter was out of the blind old school who found it difficult to accept a woman as the superior voice, but he always rewarded her with a cracking and crackling sports section.Īmong his most gifted writers was the omniscient James Mossop, who recalls: “Peter was the ultra professional. Watto moved on to the Sunday Express, where he had an up and down relationship with editor Eve Pollard. The Watson-Collins partnership was much more serene than the short-lived Watson-Batt battle, but both equally rewarding for readers of sports writing at it very best, most incisive, informative and entertaining. took young Pat Collins under his wing and gave him a platform for his beautifully considered and balanced columns that were the best sports read of their time and the forerunner of his wonderful prose for the Mail on Sunday. Once Batty had gone a drinking bridge and binge too far, Peter W. It was Fleet Street out of an Ealing comedy.
PATRICK BATTMAN FULL
They fought and cussed and cursed each other in full public view and the editorial floor would hush as they shouted insults above the thunder of the presses. Soon they would be back battling again, and Battman dubbed Watto ‘The Ayatollah,’ a less than flattering nickname that stuck. The result was invariably some of the finest sports columns ever to adorn the London Evening News and the two Peters later hugging and making up. The two Peters used to clash like a pair of rutting stags, Batty usually fuelled by a drink or three too many. His barnstorming relationship with ‘the Battman’ is a thing of Fleet Street legend. More than anybody, he was responsible for launching the columnist careers of Peter ‘The Poet’ Batt and then the peerless Patrick Collins.
He had a fiery temper to match his flame-red hair, but was always generous with his praise for anybody meeting his energy and search for perfection. Peter was a proud Surrey and then Sussex boy, a top-notch club cricketer and a whirlwind force on the sports journalism scene from the late 1960s into the 1990s. PETER WATSON, A FLEET STREET LEGEND DEPARTSĪ huge old Fleet Street oak has fallen with the passing of Peter Watson, a powerhouse sports editor of the London Evening News and then the Sunday Express in the halcyon days of newspapers.
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