Newspapers are going through a tough time. Some people think they are dying out. Cleckheaton-born journalist Maggie Hall is not one of them.

The former Daily Mirror news reporter and the paper’s first female New York bureau chief, says newspapers are going to survive – and survive in style.

“We have to tell the new generation that they have to start getting their news from places other than the television and the internet,” she said. “What you see on TV is a minute amount of information about what’s happened. If you really want to know what’s going on, you have to read it. The tabloids are a smorgasbord of information.”

For 23 years, she worked for the Daily Mirror. That was when most of the nationals were based in and around Fleet Street, when there was a distinctive culture of journalism.

Maggie said: “The Mirror used to get hold of a cause-for-concern and do it inside out. I spent days at Erin Pizzey’s hostel for battered women in Hammersmith to do a story on that.

“I did one on the derelicts in London – they are not called tramps any more – and the number of rights central government had of getting into your home.

“You don’t need to be a good writer to be a journalist; you just need to be nosy and willing to knock on doors.”

Maggie got a job on the Mirror by using her loaf.

She was 23 when the Yorkshire Evening News stopped production in 1963. Maggie was based in the Doncaster office, covering the courts.

“I was given two weeks’ notice. Messages from national papers came round saying don’t apply for jobs because there aren’t any,” she said.

“I thought, ‘blow it’, and sent a letter to the Daily Mirror news editor. It said ‘Help! Help! Help!’. By return post I got a letter asking me to go and see him. I got on the train to London that morning. About an hour-and-a-half after I walked in to the Mirror offices, I walked out with a job.”

Later she went to live in the United States and now divides her time between Washington, where she lives with her husband Gary, and Whitby, where she has a home on the harbour.

Maggie’s latest piece of work, however, is not a news story but a book – and an unusual one at that. It’s called The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite: An Anecdotal A to Z Of Tar-In-A-Jar.

“I saw a piece in a magazine about things you cannot get through the week without. One of them was a Marmite jar with a silver lid. It was valued at £65,” said Maggie.

“I thought, what’s going on here? I got back to Washington and went to the Library of Congress and started researching the background of Marmite.”

For example, South Africans are bonkers about cheese and Marmite cake. “The cake itself is a conventional Victoria sponge,” she explains. “It’s the icing that gives it that big M-taste.”

Maggie also reveals that if you take 100 grams of the yeast extract and beat it briskly with a spoon, the old black magic turns white.

She held a hand-held electric whisk and in a couple of minutes the Marmite was…“unrecognisable. It had practically doubled in amount, looked like cappuccino, was fluffy on the tongue and tasted somewhat less salty.”

A Marmite eater, Maggie isn’t planning a sequel on Bovril, manufactured in the same factory in Burton-on-Trent by Unilever. Like Bradford City and Leeds United, Oasis and Blur, Tony Benn and Tony Blair, people rarely favour both.

Prince Charles is a Marmite man, a “huge fan”, says Maggie.

“When Herve Marchand, the French-born chef, left the kitchen at Chatsworth House, he revealed all about the type of picnic sandwich HRH, a regular visitor to the Peak District estate, insists on when riding out or shooting.

“It involved a split home-made organic bap, exactly 8cm across. One half covered in mayonnaise, followed by pesto, shredded mixed green leaves, a cold over-easy fried egg, two thin slices of Gruyere, then topped with the other half, buttered with a ‘small layer’ of Marmite.”

The origins of Marmite are explained in the book. Yeast cells were first observed by the Dutch inventor of the microscope, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, in 1680, but things didn’t properly start until the late 19th century, when two men got going: Louis Pasteur and the German chemist Baron Justus von Liebig. The British came into the picture in 1902, when the Marmite Food Extract Company was formed.

Marmite is said to be good for the health. During both world wars it saved many prisoners of war from beriberi, and is recommended as a cure for boils.

This is a book for dipping into. Maggie hopes it will be a contender for the ‘bathroom’ book of the year.

  • Tonight Maggie will be talking about The Mish-Mash Dictionary Of Marmite at Saltaire Bookshop, Bingley Road, between 6.30pm and 8pm.