Shorter Notices
Fleet Street Blitzkrieg Diary. By Gordon Robbins. (Bean. 5s.)
A BRIEF factual diary means most to those whom it reminds of their own past experiences ; those who knew London under the bombardments between September, 194o, and May, 1941, will most appreciate this faithful record of the blitzkrieg (not Blitz, please) in Fleet Street. But there is so keen a sense of events occurring and impending in this day-to-day narrative that any reader will catch something of the atmosphere of those days of efficient improvisation in which newspapers and publishing houses managed to get out their publications, though printing establishments were apt to disappear in a night, and the arrival of a staff was a matter of good luck. Night after night some adjoining land-mark was blown sky-high or collapsed in flames, or some printer working for Mr. Robbins' firm (Benn Brothers) survived or succumbed to a crisis, and the author in his matter-of-fact way describes how -he and his staff, like their rivals in Fleet Street, found ways of bringing out their journals. An enlightening fact which emerges is that everyone in Fleet Street helped everyone else—it was in no small degree thanks to this camaraderie that readers of daily and weekly journals all over Britain seldom lacked their favourite periodicals, manufactured in that part of London which was among the hardest hit. Mr. Robbins has wisely left his record as he wrote it down at the time.
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