T , wenty-five years ago this week, I joined Fleet Street.
And it actually was Fleet Street, no. 135, the offices of the Daily Telegraph, with its frieze of naked Mercuries rushing, presumably on expenses, to the four corners of the earth. I had seen Colin Welch, the paper's deputy editor. He was friendly but held out no immediate hope of a job. Having only £14 remaining in the bank, I was desperate. Then I got a call from 'Peterborough', the diary column of the paper. Would I go and meet its editor, Mike Green, at 11.30? The Tube, which, contrary to popular belief, was much worse then than now, broke down on the way and I arrived, sweating and half an hour late, to be told that Mr Green was already in the pub. I hurried round and he asked me, without preliminaries, to start next week. The salary, he said casually, was £8,000, roughly double my best hopes. What was journalism like then, and how has it changed?
The pub. Mike Green was in the King and Keys, just down the street from the paper. The place was full of men and smoke. Beer often ran over every available surface. The staff of the Telegraph were very, very drunk. They would start drinking at about 11.30, stop at about 3, and then resume from 5 (pubs closed in the afternoons in those days). In my first weeks, a messenger 'boy' (he was over 60) got drunk and fell down the stairwell of the paper's offices to his death. No one thought of making the stairwell safer. Nick Garland, the cartoonist then as now, remembers going after lunch into an office which contained three journalists. All were asleep on their typewriters and all had expenses forms in them. Cheating on expenses was a recognised means of making up what were considered inadequate salaries. There was one leader writer, charming when sober, who became dementedly cruel when drunk. He sometimes drank with a man, unhappily called Armstrong, who had no hands. Once he turned to Armstrong and said, 'You know what you ought to do? You ought to
go home and cut your ing throat, but of course you can't.' Nowadays the cruelty is one of corporate euphemisms about 'letting you go'. Then, it was a democracy of despair, the cruelty of people who mostly felt failures, made worse by drink and. .
Tirade unions. It is impossible to / exaggerate the greed and malice of the unions in Fleet Street at that time. Demarcations meant that if, after asking for a new lightbulb for six months, you finally installed it yourself, there might he a strike. The print unions controlled the printing floor, and managers could not go there without permission. The printers stopped the paper without warning, sometimes because they objected to something it was saying. They were clever men who often ran other businesses with the money they looted from us. Once, when I was a features sub, went down to the 'stone' with a well-broughtup, left-wing fellow sub, 'Will 1 see you at the Greenwich Labour party meeting, Arthur?' she said to the head printer. 'Course you —ing won't. I'm a ing capitalist.'
7-The journalism. The Telegraph was / magnificent as a news-digesting machine. It crammed in enormous amounts of information, averaging about 14 stories on the front, rather than the three or four of today. On page three it related court reports of murders and sex crimes with prim gusto. Everything was done crisply, unshowily, permitting no ego on the part of the journalists. You never, ever wrote about 'media' (then a new word). But the trouble was that almost everything in the paper, apart from sport, was news. Features meant half a page about knitting patterns. There were no columnists at all, apart from Peter Simple, Arts were poorly illustrated and obituaries were tiny. The only difference between Saturday and any other day was that the leader page article used to be about flowers or historic houses rather than politics. The list for the leader page article was agreed weekly and would not reflect the news, so a piece by a Tory backbencher about pension reform might appear the morning after the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. The only news recognised as such was 'hard'. Thus a train crash in Bangalore would always trump, say, the fact that Jean Paul Sartre was no longer a fashionable thinker. The Telegraph told you very little about culture, love and marriage, health, death (unless violent), food, property, schools, soft furnishings, travel or ideas. It had great integrity, but it was narrow. On Peterborough, we wrote a lot about regimental reunions, everything typed with fix carbons. One day, Lord Camrose, the proprietor's charming but drunken brother, rang us. Why had we done nothing about the 40th anniversary of the Free French? I apologised. After putting the phone down, I found that we had, about three days before, but neither I nor Lord Carnrose had noticed it.
rrhe people. At the apex stood the .1 proprietor, Lord Hartwell. He was very shy and had two butlers upstairs but drove himself to the office in a Mini. His wife was a great political plotter and hostess, and very demanding. The paper, I was told, had to appoint an airports correspondent so that there was someone to meet her at Heathrow. Lord Hartwell was roughly 70, and so were the managing editor, a man called Peter Eastwood, who controlled the news operation with his terrifyingly quiet voice, and the editor himself, W.F. Deedes. People kept saying that the dear old chap would have to retire soon. Twenty-five years on, Bill works for the paper every day and seems mentally even sharper now than he did then. There were several other old men. If you inquired what they did, you were told, 'Oh, he was one of the Few, you know.' There were hardly any women journalists and those there were tended to be given 'female' tasks like collating the weekly 'shopping basket'. The leader writers' department was the oddest. Jock Bruce-Gardyne was the Boris Johnson of his day in that he was an MP and a journalist and travelled between the two jobs on a bicycle. He used to sleep through leader conferences. T.E. 'Peter' Utley, the blind and sage guardian of the paper's soul, chainsmoked and, if he possibly could, gracefully passed the task of writing the leader to others. A very old man who had known Hitler well in the 1930s used to warn every day about the Soviet menace. Roderick Junor, son of the famed Sir John, wore a steel-reinforced bowler hat because he feared attack, I loved it all, especially the feeling that we were in a tradition and place continuous with Dr Johnson. But it must have been a sad time for any except the very young, because nothing worked. Mrs Thatcher changed all that.
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