BOOKS

Sensational, frank, affectionate and hugely entertaining!' shrieks the dust cov- er, in black, white and red, the colours which old Fleet Street shared with Hohen- zollern Germany, another vanished empire. 'The record-breaking editor of more newspapers than anyone else' (Tri- bune, Daily Express twice, People and Sunday Mirror) 'tells it all, about prop- rietors, editors, reporters and their victims in a glorious epitaph to the Street of Shame'. It is also a joyous celebration of the holy art of coarse journalism. The language used throughout is appropriately awful. 'F---, f---', shouts an elderly Daily Express reporter, excluded from George VI's funeral and perhaps thus crazed with grief. Mr Edwards spells it out, but such crudity is scarcely suitable for a family organ like The Spectator. I shall merely indicate.

In. Bob's pages (I don't claim acquaint- anceship, but Bob is a short name and Fleet Street was a matey place) much water is passed, or made, though little is drunk. Already at pre-prep school Bob's brother had discovered that, by urinating on the huge central-heating pipes, you could fill the air with a realistic smell of burning cakes. Bob had a go. Mrs Gwatkin en- tered, took him up for a good slippering to her double bed. On this, scared, he 'made water' again. A certain liquid note is here and elsewhere struck, as pervasively aqueous as in De La Motte Fouques romantic Undine.

Bob sleeps later with a Swiss au pair in the flat of her jealous employer. He opens the window to get rid of some of the weak beer imposed on us by the Attlee Terror. `There was a sound like a roll of drums'. Looking out, he finds a conservatory underneath. 'You can't go to ze lavatory, he will hear you,' says Ruth, who resource- fully fetches an empty hot water bottle. He remembers Ruth fondly, as also the land- girl who had before introduced him to sex. Though 'mad about her', he found her `rather rough and not good looking'. Good reporter rather than parfit knight, he names her!

Bob meets Lord Beaverbrook for the first time at Cherkley. The Beaver takes him out to watch him feed 'the fish Churchill gave me'. 'You must excuse me, Mr Edwards', the Beaver said. 'I am an old man, I must make water'. This he did on the lawn, in full view of the house.

Bob was later privileged to accompany the Beaver on his walks. To change an awkward subject, he drew the Beaver's attention to 'the unusual sight, in those days, of a handsome young black man lying

His name was writ in water

Colin Welch

GOODBYE FLEET STREET by Robert Edwards Cape, £12.95

in the long grass with a white girl.' The Beaver was rivetted. 'His next words shocked me: "Do you think, Bob, he puts his cock into her —?" ' He was 'violently crude at times', Bob comments primly. The Beaver's Daz-washed Empire was whiter far than Bob's dusky progressive Commonwealth. The Beaver then ranted joyously on against Kenyatta, 'a descen- dant of apes in trees' as against 'savages' in general. 'How's that for passion, for feel- ing?', he cried, qualities he demanded (often in vain) in Express leaders; and then, inevitably, 'near the top of a hillock overlooking Kentish Town he made wa- ter'.

The Beaver occasionally saw journalists naked (the Beaver, I mean) in his bed- room, and received sitting on his lavatory those timid souls most likely to be embar- rassed. Bob later worked for Maxwell, another megalomaniac. Before getting into his helicopter, Maxwell 'faced the City of Sheffield' and 'made water', just as the Beaver had done, just as Bob presumably then did, for he 'had the same problem'. He must have felt at ease, at home.

Questions arise: is physical shameless- ness an attribute of megalomania? Is some element of sexual exhibitionism anywhere present (the Beaver liked handsome young men)? And why does Bob love megaloma- niacs, for so he confessedly does — yes, and Cecil King too, 'suitably vain and slightly dotty'? He faces the problem quite frankly. He mentions and describes movingly his loveless and sundered child- hood home (his parents were not married). He recalls his very warm feeling when the Beaver fell asleep at his side during Destry Rides Again: 'possibly this has something to do with losing my father when I was twelve'. Mostly he is commendably open and candid, though one wife gives place to another with startling lack of comment.

In Bob's pages we also find lots and lots of long, lovely, luxurious, lordly, lavish lunches, lasting till four or later. How well some of these socialists do themselves! Alan Watkins has suggested that good eating is in France a mark of the Left.

What about here? Through these lunches flowed appropriate liquids. Indeed they flowed in torrents before and after them.

Bob can't remember visiting Hugh Cudlipp in his office without a glass of wine, but more usually half a bottle. If it was too absurdly early, Hugh would suggest that a couple of beers couldn't do much harm.

On and on into the evening the liquids flowed, often culminating just after mid- night in the final fatal words, uttered perhaps by Ted Pickering (now Sir), 'Shall we go and have one at the Press Club?'

After one heavy day and night, Pickering summoned his driver, who had consumed prodigious quantities of bitter, to drive him home to leafy Haslemere. It was 'a horrible foggy night'. Pickering, 'very tired', fell asleep twice across the driver, who was `bursting', and stopped at a remote lay-by on top of the Hog's Back, yes, to make water. When he got back to the car Pickering was gone. The driver shouted, and heard a distant answering voice through the fog: 'Good night, George'. `Come back, Mr Pickering! You ain't home yet'.

Drink problems abounded at the Mirror, as elsewhere. Solicitous pots fussed about overflowing kettles. A Mirror top execu- tive was asked to warn a popular editor about his increasing. incoherence after lunch. He did so at length on the train back from a Labour conference (at which, un- less I err, the Mirror threw memorable parties which none could remember). Not wishing to appear prudish, the executive ordered drinks. When the train reached London, 'both men were too drunk to proceed and booked a room at the station hotel until they recovered'.

How papers of any sort could be pro- duced by such a rout of piss-artists puzzles me — yes, me. My intimates will know that I am not averse to a stately dance on the optics; but my solitary 'lunches' at the Press Gallery cafeteria would seem to the old Mirror gang austere indeed, fully de- serving the inverted commas. One late night at the Sunday Mirror Bob was discussing with cronies the mess they'd got into by placing the then unmarried Prince Charles and Lady Di together at night on the Royal Train, a conjunction denied by the Palace. A lawyer made a suggestion. `The idea was brilliant', enthuses Bob. Sensible and fairly obvious, I would think it. But 'brilliant' indeed it may have seemed if the day then ending had been a typical one. Must there not have been somewhere at the Mirror a little boring sober man who brought the paper out?

Of the Irish nobility Grattan said they were fit only to carry claret from the bottle to the chamber pot. Make no mistake: I do not seek to place Bob or his colleagues in this menial category. He at least is infinite- ly more various, observant and retentive than it would suggest. His book has some- thing arresting, amusing, perceptive or shrewd on almost every page — shrewd especially about journalism: the old News Chronicle, murdered by that 'deadly duo, a bad proprietor and a weak editor'; about deputy editors, mostly disloyal, mostly thinking they should be editor (what about me, I wondered guiltily?); about those journalists who, unable to write them- selves, often pompously say, `no one is bigger than the paper'.

Never a Beaver fan, I thought him a bit off his head. Without denying this, Bob makes it abundantly and movingly clear why he loved him, what an inspiring if flawed leader he was, and why things have till lately gone so ill for the Daily Express under the transient and embarrassed phan- toms who have taken bits of his place (no, Junor excluded: 'the best', according to Bob). Strange to say, I would blame the post-Beaver Express's misfortunes on a lack of guiding principles, and some of those odd indeed. But genius can manage without them. Bismarck said that, if he had principles, it would be like struggling on through a thick forest with a 12-foot pole clamped between his teeth. But principles, if an encumbrance to genius, are a help to lesser mortals, enabling them to steer a steady course.

It has often puzzled us, and Bob too, why the Beaver, a Tory of a bizarre and aberrant sort (he regarded Stalin not 'as a murderer but as the saviour of Russia and a personal friend', and Bob was in 'total agreement'), should have employed and favoured so many people like Bob, 'a keen Labour supporter' at the time, though manifestations like the Winter of Discon- tent and Brent Council seem to have disillusioned him. Bob convinced himself that it was his progressive duty to edit the Express, rather than some Tory. He 're- spected' the Beaver for appointing him. Perhaps he fancied the Beaver respected him in return. More likely, the Beaver respected no opinions save his own, and appeared tolerant only because of his indifferent if affectionate contempt for what his lefty underlings thought, so long as they didn't obstruct him: and Bob didn't.

Nor did Christiansen, perhaps the Beav- er's ideal editor, who apparently had no political views of his own at all. He did once venture to be 'shocked' by Chamber- lain's description of Czechoslovakia as 'a far away country of which we know little'. He expected the Beaver to be shocked too, and rang to tell him. 'Well, it is isn't it?' was the Beaver's damping reaction, and Christiansen, crestfallen, returned dog-like to his paper job, 'editing the paper'. Bob found Chamberlain's remark 'infamous'. Really? Years later Bob knew, by his own confession, little or nothing about the Oder-Neisse Line. How much could he have known earlier about Czechoslovakia? Come off it, Bob!

Persuasively Bob defends the Express of his day: lots of news, no 'trash', excellent writers, two whole arts pages, Beach- comber (whom neither he nor the Beaver seems to have valued). And indeed, if any sensible person were appointed editor of the Express, even now, the first thing he might well do is to demand a month or two off to read back-numbers from Bob's day and before, to see what a marvellous paper the old Express was, and how it might be restored.

Macmillan's 'wind of change' speech, for example, was given the front page lead in Bob's Express, and 2,000 words of it were reported by Rend McColl. Today, as Bob sourly notes, it might get a third of the space and 'take second place to a hyped-up story about Joan Collins or East Enders'. Bob regards Macmillan's utterance as 'now recognised as the most statesmanlike of any British Prime Minister since the war'. Perhaps it was 'statesmanlike' in the sense that synthetic cream is 'creamlike', non- alcoholic beer 'beerlike'. Anyway, it pres- aged decades of chaos and misery in Africa. It thus deserved its prominence and Bob can justly be proud of ensuring that it got it.

Bob's socialism may have sprung from a relatively affluent, even 'spoilt' childhood, with its consequent guilt. It was at first extreme if shallow, like low tide at South- end. He appears more or less to have invented CND. Characteristically, he in- spected one of the first Aldermaston mar- ches from a window at the Savoy res- taurant. 'I put them up to that', he told his friend the carver, and returned to his salmon, 'from a delightful dish surrounded by . . . mashed potatoes'. With those other salmon socialists and Bollinger bolsheviks, the Bevans, his rela- tions were up and down, sometimes stor- my. At Bevan's 'farm', the young Bob was thrilled by his first sight of a whole fresh salmon, the gift of some socialist mil- lionaire. 'What marvellous salmon', he cried. The statesman's reply disconcerted him: 'T-too dry'. Bob launched in Tribune a vicious attack on the then Bomb-hapPY Crossman. The Bevans were not pleased. ' "What you did", spat Jennie, jabbing her fingers towards me three times, "was damnable, damnable, damnable" '. Her face 'registered black fury'. In revenge, Bob records now from her 'the most inexplicable sentence' he has ever heard. ' "Only the scum are left in the mines", she said moodily. What did Jennie mean?' What indeed? Perhaps Messrs Foot, Kin- flock or Scargill could enlighten us. Max Aitken asked the then Duke of Norfolk: 'Would you like to meet the editor of the Daily Express?' Must I?' replied the Duke. Whether the introduction was effected, Bob doesn't relate. If not, the Duke may have missed a treat. I have certainly, from my humbler point of view, found Bob uncommonly jolly and reward- ing company, as good as a succession of liquid lunches. Far cheaper, too, and less likely to leave one at six pm snoring, head fallen onto the typewriter keyboard, all the letters locked together as they jostle to reach the paper at once.