Old ghosts of Fleet Street past with nowhere to haunt
PAUL JOHNSON
The recent death of Mike Hartwell removes the last of the old grandees of journalism. I call him Mike because that was how his wife Pamela used to refer to him when she was in a good mood. He had a prewar mind, which made him seem to me a rather innocent figure, lost in the odious modern world of malicious and mendacious journalism. Not that prewar journalists were saints. Shortly after I arrived in London half a century ago, there came to my office, to solicit my support for some weird cause — spiritualism, I think — the moth-eaten, etiolated figure of Hannen Swaffer. He had joined the Daily Mail in its infancy, and had then invented the first modern gossip column on the Daily Sketch, before the first world war. His white hair stuck out of his head in huge yellowing spikes. and on top of it was balanced a wide black hat, of velour or some such substance, greening at the edges.
Swaffer had that old habit, dead for half a century now, of never taking his cigarette out of his mouth once he had lit it. He breathed in short, sharp gasps, talked in a wheezy, coughy voice, and the ash on his fag accumulated, waggling perilously as he spoke, so that you found yourself watching it, fascinated, until the moment came when the accumulated detritus toppled off the end and cascaded down his waistcoat, leaving a long grey trail. He told me that his straggling hair caused Lord Northcliffe, whom he knew well and idolised, to call him 'the Poet'. He was also known as 'Swaff, 'the Assassin' (by theatre people), and 'the Pope of Fleet Street'. He boasted that he had been banned from more theatres than any other critic in London's history, and that his face had been slapped in the Savoy Grill by a Yankee actress 'on behalf of the American people'. In his heyday he wrote a million words a year and lived in a strategically placed flat overlooking Trafalgar Square. Either there was no lift or it wasn't working on the day I had promised to call on him, and I remember toiling up battered, catsmelling stairs to reach his eyrie. He pointed grandly at the empty square. 'That is where the revolution will start,' he said, 'and I am well placed to watch it.'
Swaffer had little time for Cecil King, then building up what was to become, for a few precarious years, the largest publishing empire in the world. Swaffer would himself swallow a good deal of table-rapping nonsense, believing he could conjure up the spirit not only of Northcliffe but also of old Delane
and even Thomas Barnes, the Times's first great editor, who had known Lamb and Hazlitt. But he would not accept King's claim that he could make himself invisible and walk down Fleet Street without anyone realising he was there. My own explanation is that King was not only very tall but also looked up for most of the time. Never seeing anyone himself, he presumed that no one could see him. The only time I ever glimpsed him in Fleet Street he was plain enough but sitting in the back of a Rolls-Royce, as you would expect. However, there was an occasion, at the American ambassador's house, when I was talking to Dora Gaitskell, and she, a fierce lady of Russian birth, was holding forth about the iniquities of the Dai6., Mirror. Suddenly I felt a chill, and she did too, and looking around we saw behind us the colossal shape of King, looking up as usual and over our heads. Because of the disposition of the furniture, there was no way in which he could have got to this place by natural means. Alarmed by this epiphany, we hastened away. I did not like to ask Michael King about his father's propensity for dematerialising himself, for I knew that they did not get on. Michael inherited his father's bulk, but was in other respects the opposite: shy, unambitious, sweet-natured, content with his job as foreign editor of the Mirror, which took him to all the summit conferences, a feature of those days. His great chum, Derek Marks, carried out the same role on the Express, but was called, I think, political editor. He too was well over six foot. When not summiting, they were always to be seen at lunchtime in El Vinos, just inside the door. They stood a yard or two apart from one another, and exchanged bellows, so that Henry Fairlie once compared them to two dinosaurs trumpeting to each other across the primaeval swamp.
Swaffer was occasionally seen in El Vinos, which had not banned him or, if it had, the ban had been lifted. But Frank Bower, who presided over the joint — referred to by Lord Beaverbrook as 'El Vinos public house', though this was inaccurate since it was a City vintner's shop and could make its own rules — did not like Swaffer. Bower dressed smartly, wearing a stock, and had not long abandoned spats when I first went there. Swaff wore a stock too, but ash-stained, and Bower considered him 'a slovenly fellow'. It was for trying on, for fun. Bower's enormous bowler hat that the cartoonist Vicky was banned, and Jimmy Cameron banned too for backing him. I never saw Cecil King in El Vinos, or anyone at the proprietorial level — Michael Berry, Camrose, Kernsley, the second Lord Rothermere, or the third for that matter. But Northcliffe had frequented it, as a piece of furniture proclaimed, 'Lord Northcliffe's chair'. Even editors were rare visitors. I once saw the great Geoffrey Crowther there, not long before his retirement from the Economist, which he had taken over on the eve of Munich and made into a great power in the land, indeed in the world. That must have been in 1956, Suez year. He went into big business and came a cropper, dying of a heart attack at Heathrow, having just stepped off a plane from Australia.
Another editor I glimpsed there briefly was Sir William Haley, probably in Suez year too: it was an exciting time which caused editors to come into the caravanserai in search of the latest gossip. Even the austere Sir Colin Coote, editor of the Telegraph, popped in for a brief noggin, and mighty uncomfortable he looked. Haley was austere too, having come up from the bottom, starting as a copytaker. He ran the BBC before editing the Times, and was moderately successful at both, but did not survive the Thomson takeover in 1966. The jovial Sir Denis Brogan, who had his own reasons for disliking Haley, observed, 'Haley? Finished. An exeditor of the Times is unemployable. And Haley is an ex-director-general of the BBC as well. That makes him doubly unemployable.' In fact Haley went off to edit the Encylopaedia Britannica in Chicago, of all places — a grim coda to a remarkable career.
Fleet Street grew up where it did as an appendage of the publishing industry. That in turn had to be located near St Paul's, because until the 1640s the Bishop of Lon. don's imprimatur was needed on printed material, censorship being in the hands of the Church courts. The great bombings of 1940-42 destroyed all the old publishing houses and scattered the trade to the four corners of London. The new technology ended the concentration of newspapers in and around Fleet Street in the last decade or so of the 20th century. Now it is dislocated, a nowhere place, and the spirits of the past have no home to haunt. They linger on in the memories of a few of us. But soon we will be gone too, and old Fleet Street will be mere history, like Grub Street before it.
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