THE END OF THE STREET
Tom Pocock remembers
the life of Fleet Street 40 years ago
LIFE in Fleet Street is becoming in- creasingly like that Victorian narrative painting, 'The Last Day in the Old Home', The talk is of topography and transport: where one is going and when; how do you travel to the Isle of Dogs and where will you drink in Battersea? A void lies ahead of newspaper journalists but the impending death of our mediaeval craft-street has yet to be accepted.
Journalists are as ephemeral as their products. Every quarter-century a new cast has taken over the Fleet Street stage, its predecessor flying forgotten, commemo- rated only in envelopes of flaking cuttings, or deeply buried in microfilm. The Fleet Street of 40 years ago has almost totally vanished, for who remembers the big names of that time (let alone conjures with them): Don Iddon, Bernard Wicksteed, Gordon Beccles or G. Ward Price? Survi- vors from that and even earlier periods Lord Deedes and Sir Edward Pickering come to mind — must practise the secret of immortality.
Forty years ago wartime Fleet Street was already forgotten: its axis of activity run- ning north-west to the Ministry of Informa- tion in Bloomsbury and Broadcasting House; fire-watching rotas; in the pubs, drinkers gathering respectfully around re- turned war correspondents with Continen- tal mud on their boots. It was a social place; Lunchtime O'Booze was in his prime and not only at lunchtime: at two and three in the morning the bar of the Press Club behind the ruin of St Bride's church was crowded with beer-drinkers from the night shift.
Forty years on, tangible reminders of that time are already scarce. Indeed there is almost as much to recall the Fleet Street my great-great-grandfather knew two cen- turies ago when he lived on the site of New Carmelite House and bought some of Dr Johnson's furniture when his neighbour died. At least there would be his parish church, a couple of pubs and the view of St Paul's to remind him. About half the scenes of our own jollity in the post-war years have already gone and it is hard to believe that all are to follow.
The pubs were the meeting-place; then more than now. The staff of the News Chronicle was where one wanted to be and most specifically in that ebullient crowd led by Ian Mackay (essayist) and Richard Winnington (film critic) in The Temple. The Temple? A big mahogany-and-mirrors pub named The Feathers in Tudor Street near the gates of the Temple, now replaced by an instant-old basement bar called The Witness Box beneath a new office block. Journalists with less finely tuned sensibili- ties hankered after the Daily Express and the social life of Poppins, a slip of a bar called the Red Lion in Poppins Court, which went — together with the early Georgian houses of Racquet Court when the elephantine Aitken House was put up not so long ago. Here Arthur Christiansen would appear with his hench- men most evenings to exchange banter with his reporters, sub-editors and com- positors. The glassed-in telephone box at the end of the bar, from which one could tell the news desk that one was out on a story, had its own exit for escape when the editor appeared.
Even then there was a poignancy about The Falstaff in Fleet Street itself, where the drug-store Underwoods now gapes onto the pavement. There, the dive bar was decorated by already fading photo- graphs taken in 1934 of former stars, wearing wide-brimmed trilby hats, collars of raincoats turned up, cigarettes dropping or telephone to ear. A few were still about: Montague Smith, a Daily Mail reporter so feared that Northcliffe had given him the title of Special Commissioner, was now an old party propelled by two sticks and employed to summarise government white papers; Hannen Swaffer, in black stock and cigarette ash, was still with us and lunching at the Savoy; the handsome, virile Frank Owen, a Member of Parliament at twenty-four and editor of the Evening Standard at thirty-three, was editing the Daily Mail.
Frank could sometimes be found in Auntie's, as we knew the Dorset Arms, a tiny Georgian pub between Salisbury Square and Tudor Street, which seemed timeless but became a car-park about 20 years ago and is now a new office block. But he was not primarily a beer-drinker and I recall him editing his newspaper from the gloom of the Milroy night-club, to which dispatch-riders would bring page proofs throughout the night and, while a waiter illuminated them with a torch, he would give orders to his night editor at Northcliffe House by a white telephone placed amongst the bottles and ice- buckets.
Sometimes I have wondered how accu- rate are such memories, recorded through rose-tinted eyes and polished by nostalgic rummaging. The recent discovery of a letter I had written to a friend in 1948, when aged 23, after my first day on the staff of the Daily Mail, suggests that they were at least fun and probably more fun than Fleet Street has been in its final years. I had written:
At noon today I presented myself at North- cliffe House and was shown up to Frank Owen's office. The features editor was hovering there and Frank strode up and down, banging the furniture. 'It's an exciting world, Tom! You go out into the world and tell our readers how exciting it is!' He then suggested that I spend the rest of 1948 travelling the country finding out why no- body is doing any work. The features editor thought that would be too gloomy, so Frank suggested I write a 'happy' industrial story. Suddenly he boomed, 'Why are dustmen happy?' Because they never know what they're going to find in a dustbin next,' I replied.
`The whole world's a dustbin!' he roared, `You look and there — there at the bottom of the dustbin are f — ing diamonds, Tom! Go out and get me the buggers, Tom!'
Taken to my desk, I was given a book called Teamwork in Industry and told to write it up. After sweating blood, I managed a short piece. Owen burst in and asked, `That book any good? Good ideas? Anything new?' Me: 'No.' Owen: 'Throw the muck out!' He then hurled a book into my office called England's Heritage, mainly about Hadrian's Wall, clog-dancing and basket- making in Somerset. . ..Sorry this is such a rushed letter.
That scrap of a letter is like a fragment of inscribed tablet found in one of the strata at Ur, for Fleet Street has seen more than four centuries of the same human activity. In about a year only the great ziggurats will still stand, some listed as of architectural interest but probably inhabited by bankers and lawyers. In their lunchtime, they may drink in El Vino's, which will seem as historic as the Cheshire Cheese, and won- der who Philip Hope-Wallace might have been and why a little brass plaque com- memorates his name in the alcove where they are discussing stock market reports from Tokyo.
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