1989 (3 page)

The
Daily Telegraph
, for example, drank in the King and Keys, right next door, while the
Daily Express
drank in The Popinjay, which had virtually been incorporated into an extension to their art deco black glass palace. The
Daily Mirror
, up Fetter Lane, drank in The White Hart opposite, though no one ever called it anything other than The Stab (short for The Stab in The Back, an enduring testimony to how what was said in the pub could make or break careers). The
Daily Mail
drank in The Harrow in Whitefriars Street. The Press Association, Britain’s national news agency which shared 85 Fleet Street with Reuters, drank in The Olde Bell, on the street itself. El Vino, the legendary wine bar opposite the law courts, attracted a wider variety of leader writers and columnists, the types who blended more easily with the barristers and solicitors who formed the rest of its clientele, and were happy with its insistence on jacket and tie at all times, though there were already rumblings against its insistence that women were not allowed in unless they wore skirts and even then could not be served at the bar.

Reuters men – and the increasing band of women – used to working in the background, their names usually removed from copy before a national newspaper printed it, chose a suitably
subterranean
locale. It was called, at least as far as I knew in the early days of
my introduction to ‘the Street’, Mrs Moon’s, bizarrely located
underneath
a branch of Pizza Hut. Older, wiser heads would eventually inform me that its real name was The Falstaff and it had once been a pub on several stories, but for one reason or another – it seemed hard to imagine it had been for lack of custom – the owners had sold off most of it for offices and the fast food franchise. It had no visible signage anywhere and precious little indication of its existence at ground level. Unless you knew it was there you would only have come across it if you were about to go into Pizza Hut and looked left in the doorway to where a staircase led to an underground room with an old paraffin heater on the linoleum floor and a long
mahogany
bar propped up by hordes of beer-drinking hacks.

It was called Mrs Moon’s because, quite literally, the landlady’s name was Mrs Moon. She ran the place with her son, Billy Moon, and a rod of iron that frequently extended to throwing out almost anybody who came in shortly after nine p.m. This was not because she favoured early closing but because nine p.m. was throwing-out time across the road at The Cheshire Cheese, a celebrated
seventeenth-century
pub and famous tourist haunt. Mrs Moon’s was not the sort of place that would have attracted many tourists – even if they had somehow managed to find it – but it did occasionally pull in senior executive types, including those from Reuters, and Mrs Moon wasn’t having them treat her gaffe as second best.

It was in Mrs Moon’s that George Short taught me one of the lessons that has stayed with me all my life and really ought to be included in school lessons for British kids and all who value what remains of the most traditional British institution: bar space management. This is the technique essential to making sure the maximum number of people desired can take part in the main activity for which a proper English pub is designed. No, not sinking pints, that is merely the lubrication. Banter. Chitchat. Talking to one another, in a group, not merely in a little cluster of introspective twosomes.

‘It’s all right when there’s just two or three of you nattering away,’ said George in his broad West Country accent while trying to marshal his gaggle of keen young wannabes up to the bar. ‘Two of you can lean on the bar and the one in between can face either of them, like a triangle. That still holds good when there’s four, just so
long as the two at the bar move apart a bit to make room for two folk facing in. But the trouble really comes, when you get five or more. That’s when you need one bloke to take what I call pole position,’ and he turned his ample girth through ninety degrees so that all of a sudden he was with his back to the bar, leaning against it to become effectively a fulcrum for his admiring acolytes. ‘See, now another bloke can lean on that side and you can build up a second group that’s still part of the big group.
And
,’ he stressed with a twinkle in his eye, ‘you maximise your control of the barspace (since George I have never been able to think of that as other than a single word, like airspace) so that you can always get another round in without queuing. It’s your go, lad.’

Within weeks we were on the fourth-floor newsroom, shifted and shunted from here to there, amidst the endless chatter of
teleprinters
and typewriters. From the busy sports desk to the slow-paced features desk to London Bureau – where we actually got to go out and cover (minor) stories as part of the team that reported the UK for the rest of the world – and then, inevitably to the, for most of us dreadfully dreary but increasingly important, Econ, newly
rechristend
RES: Reuters Economic Services. And then, bliss oh bliss, the place we all wanted to be: the holy of holies, the grandly named World Desk, then still the hub of Reuters’ global operations. It would be some years still before the telecommunications revolution would mean the ‘world desk’ could be moved seamlessly with the clock from London to New York to Hong Kong and back again. For the moment London was still supreme, the reins held by four senior editors known collectively as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

These were the men who monitored incoming copy, decided how urgent it was and which journalist should look it over and prepare it for publication. There was a ‘top table’ of the best and fastest workers. We trainees were decidedly ‘downtable’. Often we were rewriting copy, turning the bare facts sent in by ‘stringers’ – part-time local correspondents – in places as diverse as Srinagar or Caracas into the ‘inverted pyramid’ form expected by mainstream English-language newspapers: most important facts at the top, second most
important
next, subsidiary information to follow, background and colour merged in after that. The idea was – still is – that the story could
be slotted into any ‘hole’ on a newspaper page and literally ‘cut to length’: you could remove any number of sentences from the bottom and what remained above would ideally still make perfect sense. It was the mainstay of news-agency journalism.

Reuters in those final days before the whirlwind advent of
electronic
information and financial services that would transform it, was still a trust owned by a conglomerate of British and former imperial media interests. The business founded by Paul Julius Reuter, a German Jew, using carrier pigeons to link fledgling French and German telegraph lines had moved to London in 1851 after the laying of the Dover-Calais submarine cable, and subsequently spread a network of correspondents across the world. Reuters got a famous scoop in 1865 when a correspondent arriving on a ship from New York passed a message to a waiting boat off the coast of Ireland enabling the news of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination to be telegraphed to London and the continent nearly a full day before the mail ship docked in Southampton.

The agency had always aimed at the widest possible
international
coverage and a reputation for impartiality, but during the Second World War its London base and British and Imperial
ownership
meant it effectively became an arm of the Allied propaganda machine. By the 1970s it was once again moving towards status as an independent international operation (it would eventually be
publicly
floated in 1984), but there was still a fair amount of the old mindset amongst senior figures on the editorial floor.

For example when a delegation of German business people were being escorted round the office, with a view to signing them up for the still embryonic financial information services that would
dominate
the company’s future, one of them politely asked a senior filing editor, ‘Have you ever been to Germany?’ He grinned back and answered, ‘Yes, but only at night.’ When this was met with a slightly puzzled look, he added, ‘And we never got below 10,000 feet.’ The message was met with a frosty smile.

When eventually – as a signal indicator of the changes to come – the News Service got its first German editor, a jovial cheery plump man called Manfred Pagel, his beaming rounds of the newsroom were often accompanied by a strange hissing sound and, when his
back was turned, older staff pointing to the new air-conditioning units. There has never been any shortage of black humour on ‘the Street’.

If I was surprised to find the ‘Don’t Mention the War’ attitude still held sway, it wasn’t until one evening while eating dinner in the seventh-floor staff canteen that I gained an inkling of
understanding
. Most of the canteen fare was unimpressive but in the quieter hours of the late-evening shift, the chef had a way with offal, serving up the most exquisite griddle-fried lamb’s kidneys. I was tucking into them when I noticed the view for the first time: a clear vision of floodlit St Paul’s Cathedral, barely half a mile away, and wondered how it must have looked from here during the Blitz as the firemen fought the blazes around it. And then there was St Bride’s, literally just outside the window, the great soaring white wedding-cake spire of Sir Christopher Wren’s other masterpiece, beautifully restored but which in December 1940 had been completely gutted by firebombs. The men who worked at Reuters then – and there were a couple still here – had been in the front line indeed.

There was also a remnant of Empire concealed in the codes which designated where in the world a particular story would be sent. Once raw copy had come in, been handled by the desk and judged of sufficient merit to be sent out to the world, it went to a ‘filing’ editor who decided which parts of the globe would be most
interested
. He accordingly scribbled on it, usually in ink, a three-letter code which would then be transferred into electronic signals by the battery of telex operators who sat behind him. Often these codes were self explanatory: UKP meant United Kingdom Press, EUS was South Europe, EUN North Europe, EUR all of Europe, SAF was South Africa, NOR North America. They mostly reminded me of the rather simplistic codes Ian Fleming had the Secret Service use in the early Bond books: Station B for Berlin, Station Z for Zürich, Station J for Jamaica. Some were more obscure: CCC meant all main regions of the world, while anything that included Asia for some reason began with a Y. My absolute favourite was YCW. Attach those three letters to the top of a story and it went, apparently quixotically, to Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies. Every part of the world that cared about cricket.

All journalists were required to have a two- or three-letter code for themselves – usually their initials – which was added to the bottom of the story, after the word REUTER, which indicated its end. This made clear who had handled it from the first reporter to the last sub-editor. It was the sports desk which first gave me the opportunity to add my own to the score of a football match in the Republic of Ireland. Hardly a major world event – and I had not altered the copy – but I still felt a brief gush of pride at affixing the letters PYM at the end. (PM and PJM were already taken, so I chose a ‘Y’ at random. The editor of
The Sunday Times
still occasionally refers to me as PYM, but only when he’s being polite.)

The reign of the Four Horsemen, however, did not extend into the small hours of the morning. Despite the fact that the World Desk in London was the nerve centre for the whole global network there was a period, between when New York would down for the night and when Hong Kong/Tokyo woke up, of relative lull. There were still things to watch out for: the west coast of the USA in
particular
was still wide awake – and one day there would be that San Francisco earthquake – but by and large the world was a less busy place. From eleven p.m. therefore until officially nine a.m. the next morning (though the day shift arrived earlier) the world passed from the control of the Four Horsemen to the Princes of Darkness.

There were two of them, both called Jim. There had to be two, because each worked a seven-day shift, followed by seven days off, with an overlapping staff, each of whom also had an opposite number whom they never saw. Jim Forrester was a large, grey-bearded, bespectacled, scholarly gourmet from Edinburgh. Jim Flannery was a rangy, ginger-bearded, woolly-hat-wearing, Sinophile from
Australia
. Both Jims were drawn to things Asian. Scottish Jim’s
interest
tended towards the Indian subcontinent, Ozzie Jim’s towards Peking (as it still was) and Hong Kong. This was reflected in the overnight shift’s culinary traditions, although in supposed deference to one another (in reality because it was a good excuse) both
traditions
were honoured each week: Friday night was therefore the Dark Prince’s Curry Club, while Saturday night saw the Hong Kong and Oriental Dining Experience.

Some hours after the last of the hectic day shift had departed
we would push together the big rectangular desks at each of which between four and six sub-editors would work during the day, extra long sheets of teleprinter paper would be pulled from spare rolls in the store cupboards and ripped to length to form, when aligned together, a makeshift tablecloth. Two of us, the most junior and one other would be sent out to a takeaway to bring back an assortment of Asian delights.

For the Indian night we varied our custom, depending on opening hours of establishments in Covent Garden or The Strand but the Chinese always came from the Lido restaurant on Soho’s Gerrard Street. This was partly because this cavernous
establishment
on four floors served some of the most exotic and authentic Cantonese cuisine to be had in London, and at a reasonable price. But also because it stayed open until four a.m. which meant our dining was less likely to be interrupted by such inconveniences as world emergencies. At four a.m. GMT pretty much everywhere on the planet has either wound down or not yet wound up.