In My Wildest Dreams (37 page)

My life's dream was still Fleet Street. Scarcely a week went by without my posting off another warning that the national newspaper world was missing a gem. In addition I was about to get married and I needed the money.

One Saturday, in the Willesden church where my marriage was shortly to take place, there was another wedding during which the bridegroom made a sudden dash from the altar and hopped over the boundary wall. It was not a case of cold feet. He was on the run from the army and the police were closing in. The ceremony was abandoned but the reception went on as planned and the couple afterwards met at a secret rendezvous and embarked on their honeymoon. A friendly local policeman tipped me off about this and I went to the church to investigate. There before me I found a reporter from the
Sunday Express
who asked me not to tell any of the other Fleet Street papers. He also hinted he had heard that Exchange Telegraph, the international news agency, was looking for a likely chap like me. He had a friend there and would put in a good word. A week later glory dawned. A letter from Philip Burn, the editor of Exchange Telegraph, arrived inviting me to go for an interview. I went and I got the job. It was not exactly Fleet Street, for the office was in Cannon Street in the City of London, but it was getting close.

In the early part of this century Philip Gibbs wrote
The Street of Adventure,
one of the few lasting novels to have been published about Fleet Street. In my local reporting days I read its archaic story many times, savouring the excitements of the high-collared correspondent dispatched to catch the first possible cross-Channel steamer by an early morning telegram delivered to his door; of reporters picking up their quill pens to record the latest trial at the Old Bailey; of writers returning to the office by hansom cab or on the open top of an omnibus; of gas lamps and coal fires burning late in the editorial room.

When I joined the Exchange Telegraph Company I realised almost at once that I was about to become part of one of the few remaining remnants of this ancient world. The building which housed the news agency in Cannon Street was tall and narrow with a lift that wheezed and squeezed between its floors (the company's doctor had a lift which you operated by pulling on a rope). The newsroom on the fourth floor had, not long before, been illuminated by gas and the odour lingered. Along its length and reaching into the teleprinter room next door, at just-below ceiling level, was a miniature cable-car contraption running on rails, into which written and edited copy could be clipped as the appropriate clamp travelled by. It was somewhat like the apparatus once to be found in department stores which hurried invoices and other dockets from one part of the building to another. The Exchange Telegraph contraption clanked and clattered as it ran, curled around corners and disappeared through holes in the wall to materialise miraculously elsewhere.

There was a legend that when the construction had been installed in the nineteen-twenties a maintenance engineer had arrived with it and had been taken onto the staff, but no one had ever been able to find him since. It was rumoured that he was bricked up in the basement. He was certainly never to be found when the railway broke down, which was frequently, and stories had to be run by relays of office lads in silver-buttoned uniforms from one part of the building to another.

The lift was also prone to fits. One Christmas Eve the distinguished reporter Mr Alan Whicker, before his fame on television an employee of Exchange Telegraph, was trapped in the lift between floors in the select company of Humphrey the office cat. At that season no one could be located who could unstick the cage and pieces of food for both man and cat were pushed through the gratings by other members of the staff who were happily indulging in the office revelries. That was possibly the same Christmas that a rotund sub-editor called Harold Taylor left the office for home and returned half an hour later criss-crossed with sticking plaster and bearing the exclusive news that he had been involved in a train crash. No one believed him and he was put in a corner with a drink and told what a very good prank it was. After several more drinks he stopped trying to tell anybody and it was not until someone bothered to pick up an irritating telephone that we realised about the train crash. By that time Harold had progressed so far into a bottle of Scotch that no eyewitness details could be extracted from him.

The very title the Exchange Telegraph Company had a Victorian resonance. Reporters complained that they were often mistaken for someone to do with the General Post Office. At the time 1 joined its staff in the early nineteen-fifties it was already a journalistic anachronism. It had an unwieldy corps of foreign correspondents, some harking back to the First World War. The Paris man, Andre Glarner, had been an Olympic cyclist and apparently it was thought in the office that he used his bicycle speed to reach the cable bureau before his rivals. On one occasion he filed an exclusive and sensational story with an embargo that it was not to be released for publication until he sent a coded signal which would read: 'Send More Expenses'. In the dust and disarray of the Exchange Telegraph newsroom the first dispatch was mislaid and the second message so much misunderstood that Monsieur Glarner was told sharply that he could have no further expenses that month since he had already used up his allowance.

Home news was covered by a group of reporters and local correspondents. There was one called East of Twickenham who was known as West of Zanzibar. Some were experienced but others worked with more enthusiasm or elan than expertise. The Court Correspondent wafted around in a velvet-collared coat and composed short dullish stories about the doings of the Royal Family. When a different angle, or perhaps something a little more colourful, was suggested he waved it away with the words: 'Her Majesty would not like that one little bit.' There were people who went to police courts and others to conferences. There was an excellent industrial correspondent and a nice religious affairs chap who later became a naval correspondent. The chief sub-editor was tiny and worried. He had to jump from the floor to put copy in the travelling clamps. His night-time counterpart was a slow and urbane ex-army officer, who was writing a history of the Sudan when things were not too pressing in the office. The editor, Philip Burn, was a Will Hay character with an explosion of white hair but only one tooth. He was said to have been playing chess in the Sugar Loaf pub across the street when the news of the Edward the Eighth abdication crisis broke. Like Drake, he decided to complete the game before attending to the matter.

When I first went for my interview I told him that I hoped for a job as a reporter. 'I need good subeditors,' he said sonorously as if making an ecclesiastical pronouncement. 'I can get a reporter by lifting my finger and can't get a first-rate sub-editor by lifting my whole arm.' I was impressed and so apparently was he. He repeated: 'A reporter by lifting my finger . . . a sub not my lifting my whole arm.' He smiled more with one tooth than most people do with a mouthful. 'What do you think of that?' he said. 'Not at all a bad phrase, eh?'

So I became a news agency sub-editor, a job far less exacting and exciting than its equivalent on a newspaper since no knowledge of typefaces or make-up was necessary. The copy had to be checked, rewritten or cut if necessary and passed on to be sent out on the teleprinter to newspapers and other clients. There was a special Club Tape which went to London Clubs upon which the Stock Exchange prices, other City news and the cricket and racing results were of paramount importance.

Disappointed by my failure to become a reporter, I consoled myself that at least it was half a step in the right direction and the office was a mere half a mile from the real Fleet Street. When I was working on the evening shift I would walk to Fleet Street during my break and sit, clutching a brown ale, in the corner of the newspaper bars, listening to men like gods talking about their journalistic adventures. If I saw a man running down the front steps of the
Daily Express
building or hailing a taxi outside the doors of the
Daily Telegraph,
I would catch my breath because I was sure he was off to Afghanistan or Hong Kong, whereas it was much more probably the bar at Auntie's or Waterloo station. The romance has never left me. I would think the same today.

The Exchange Telegraph Company offered little chance of a junior sub-editor entering those realms of adventure. We worked in shifts around the clock and on every day of the year. On the all-night shift the duty sub-editor, who arrived at eleven-thirty, was in command of the entire operation. Things used to quieten down about one in the morning, as a rule, although there was usually some unsleeping local correspondent who could find a fire somewhere. On quiet nights I used to carry a mattress from a wartime air raid store in the basement, spread it out on the desk, and go happily to sleep until five o'clock when the tapes would start chattering again and the telephone would wake up. On these occasions I was frequently joined by Humphrey, the tabby and tough office cat, who would stretch out on the mattress alongside me or even make himself comfortable on my chest, breathing mice into my face.

Mr Burn, the editor, lived out in the country and rarely visited London at night. One evening, however, entertaining some Americans, he took them to the theatre and later, with their encouragement, decided to show them how a great news agency worked on timelessly through the dark hours. He arrived in the newsroom with the telephone operator slumped at the switchboard and the one-man editorial staff snoring on a mattress surmounted by an equally sleepful tabby cat.

I roused to see him standing speechless, gesturing about the shadowy room to his American friends. Humphrey grumbled as I pushed him off my chest. 'Hello . . . Thomas . . .' mumbled the editor. 'Er . . . what's happening in the world?'

'Everything, sir,' I gasped, sizing up the situation. 'Absolutely
everything.'
Like a prophet I pointed to the ceiling, above which both he and I knew was the naked roof of the building. 'Don't go up to the main newsroom, sir. It's bedlam.'

He blinked and then understood. Relief crumpled his annoyance. He hung gladly onto the subterfuge. 'Oh . . . oh . . . really, well no . . . perhaps we'd better not.'

'Oh,' said the American lady, clutching her husband, 'we wouldn't want to get in the way, would we, honey?'

'No, surely not,' he agreed.

'They've sent me down for a rest, sir,' I reported to Mr Burn. 'We're taking it in turns to get some sleep. It's been quite a night.'

As they left, the visitors turned their heads upwards as if they might catch some sound of the frantic night-work going on above. The editor gave me a half-and-half look and looked upwards also to where he and I knew only the London stars were shining. 'Better get your head down again, Thomas,' he nodded. 'Sorry we disturbed you. And . . . look after the cat.'

On the following day, a Sunday, I was playing in a football match against our deadly rivals, in all spheres, Reuters, and I managed to score a crucial goal. On the Monday I was called into the editor's office and fully expected to emerge with my career, such as it was, in ruins. 'Having a rest, were you?' Philip Burn enquired mildly. 'Getting ready for the big match?'

'Yes, sir, that was it,' I replied gratefully. 'I would not have been asleep otherwise, sir. Not me.'

'No, I'm sure not.' His oblong tooth gleamed. 'If you ever fail in journalism, Thomas, you ought to have a shot at being something like an actor.'

The enclosed and routine work of a news agency subeditor was some distance from the romantic Fleet Street about which I had dreamed. Bereft of the necessity for tailoring the stories to fit the page, having no call for presentation and where only the sketchiest of headlines was required, it was, in truth, merely a matter of dull processing. Sometimes I amused myself with the headlines and some of them appeared intact, with the stories when they eventually saw publication. Exchange Telegraph was, however, set in solid ways and I was censured for a headline which I appended to a report about a civil defence exercise which involved a simulated atom-bomb explosion on a Hampshire village. The words: 'Big Wallop Near Little Wallop' seemed both apt and reasonable to me, but others disapproved.

Several times I went to see the editor to ask about a reporter's job but he always forestalled me; before I had uttered a sentence he would perform his mime, lifting one finger representing a reporter, and then one arm denoting a sub-editor.

So I returned to cutting and paragraphing with occasional forays to a wooden telephone booth in one corner where it was a sub-editor's duty to sit and take down in shorthand interminable and often boring political and economic intelligence from overseas correspondents. We had on the desk a dear and gentlemanly old chap called Sidney, approaching retirement, who was stone deaf. He insisted, however, on taking his fair share of these overseas calls. One of the foreign correspondents was also deaf and to hear the pair of them trying to outshout each other over a continent was a treat that brought the entire newsroom to a standstill.

On rare and happy occasions I managed to get involved in the writing and reporting side of a story. Sometimes I even found them for myself. One spring evening, taking a walk over the almost deserted London Bridge during my meal break, I observed that a ship had become firmly jammed under one of the arches. The vessel had somehow taken a wrong turning and the incoming tide had put it in this embarrassing position. As the tide rose so the wood splintered. The Spanish captain was on the bridge wringing his hands and sobbing orders. I poked my head over and asked him what had happened. He pleaded with me to go and get someone. It was difficult to know whether to call out the fire brigade or the lifeboat but I solved the crisis by stopping a wandering policeman and taking him to what he described as the rummest traffic accident as ever he had set eyes upon. After getting some emotional quotes from the captain I hurried back to the office and wrote the story which was joyfully reported and much photographed in the next morning's papers.

Then, one dull night, we had a report of a gory double murder in a west London suburb. One of the victims was said to be 'Lady Menzies'. There were no reporters in the office so I looked up Lady Menzies in the telephone directory and dialled the number. I wondered what I should say. 'Please can you tell me if Lady Menzies has been murdered?' seemed unnecessarily brutal. 'I wonder if you can tell me how Lady Menzies is?' was obviously erring the other way.

In the event when my call was answered I merely said: 'Could I please speak to Lady Menzies?' The voice at the other end replied briskly: 'Yes, speaking.'

My hair went slightly on end. It was not easy trying to explain that according to my information she was lying in a pool of blood in Ealing. Calmly she helped me out. There had been other enquirers. No, she was not murdered. She was perfectly well, thank you. It turned out that the killer's victim had been passing herself off with the title.

The majority of my spare-time reporting was less thrilling. Each early morning the agency would put out a series of minor items called 'overnights' which evening newspapers used as fillers in the first racing editions and which might occasionally find their way into feature pages or magazine sections. Each item was worth an extra ten shillings in my pay packet. I used to spend my lunch hours walking around the City of London, much of which was still scarred with wartime bombed sites, looking for stories. I found a family of wild cats living among the shut-off ruins and then realised that there were whole tribes of the fierce and skinny animals hunting the wide spaces in the centre of London. It was following these cats that finally led the police to discover the body of a murderer, a young man who had killed a housewife and, himself condemned by some disease, went to a bombed site to die. He was hunted for weeks until the cats, who had gruesomely eaten most of him, led the authorities to the place. It was directly opposite our office. While the police and the newspapers had been looking for him he had been there all the time.