1989

by Peter Millar

  That was how I found myself, barely thirteen months later – in the last stages of my final year at Oxford with the prospect of finals still to come and unemployment beckoning unless I found myself a job – sitting in a room on the fourth floor of No. 85 Fleet Street in front of an intimidating audience of mostly middle-aged men with clipboards.

  I had just about survived some thirty minutes or so of grilling on international affairs: ‘What did I know about Charter 77?’ (the then recently formed movement dedicated to human rights in Czechoslovakia). I answered most of them on a wing and a prayer. And then a severe-looking man who couldn’t have been older than his mid-forties despite a shock of snow-white hair and thick glasses leaned back thoughtfully, chewed the end of his ballpoint pen for a second or two, then flicked the chewed end towards me and in a clipped Scottish accent posed a question it seemed he had only just come up with.

  ‘Say we were to send you somewhere to cover a breaking news story,’ he intoned ominously, ‘what do you think would be the first thing you might do when you got there?’ I bit my lip and let my head drop as I ummed and ahhed a bit as if trying to mull over such a difficult question. In fact I was desperate not to let him see the smile I was having immense difficulty suppressing. ‘We-ell,’ I began. And in my head I was playing over my Parisian mentor’s words: ‘There’s any number of sensible things you might do of course, find a hotel, have a shit and a shower, hit the sack or get yourself a stiff drink.’ But that wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear.

  So I furled my brow and gave a vintage performance. ‘I suppose,’ I said slowly, as if I was just working this out, and looking for some sign of reassurance, which was decidedly not forthcoming from the man with the white hair and impenetrable glasses, ‘I suppose it might be sensible to find a phone or a telex, some way of getting in contact with London to be sure I can get the story back.’ (Mobile phones were still something you saw on Star Trek.) The white-haired man, who I would later learn was Reuters Chief News Editor Ian McDowell (more frequently referred to as Ian McDour) looked at me for a second, and then nodded slowly, as if he thought that wasn’t necessarily the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. There were a couple more questions, but somehow they seemed like an anti-climax, to me at least, and maybe they were to them too. I’d come through the big one, and as I walked out of the office with a nod to the other candidates sitting nervously on chairs outside, I had a sneaking hunch the job might be mine. And it was.

  I have no misgivings about the ‘sneaking’ either. All’s fair in love and journalism, not that the two mix much. Two other colleagues of mine – both of whom came through the Reuters training process – have publicly identified the main characteristics of a successful journalist as, and I quote, ‘ratlike cunning’ and ‘intelligent guile’. One has been a successful Reuters bureau chief on most continents and the other is the editor of an esteemed British national newspaper. There is also one other element, which had been on my side that day back on the périphérique in Paris, one which editors prize in their journalists as much as Napoleon prized in his generals: luck.

  Knowing the answer to the $64,000 question was not, of course, the only thing that got me the job, even if it was probably the clincher. All ten of us who got hired – with another to be taken on twelve months later after a sponsored year at the new Cardiff journalism school – had been tested on our basic mastery of the English language, our ability to marshal facts and our command of one other language fluently and a second at a basic level of competence. I had had no difficulty proving the first in French – after a year living with students in the Parisian suburbs I had acquired a facility with the current argot that mystified some of my Oxford tutors but would have let me pass for any mec on the métro. My Russian, despite my degree, was at an altogether different level: I could read (if not exactly race through) Gogol and Dostoevsky but with the Soviet Union still a difficult destination, my experience of the vernacular on the ground had been limited to a two-week holiday course. But it was good enough to be my ‘banker’. The signal absence, you will have noticed, was the language that would eventually become more important to me than any other: German.

  In the meantime we all had a more basic linguistic function to master: typing. None of us could. Not properly anyhow. I had spent an hour or two a week during the summer before starting the job in September, bashing away on an ancient Remington typewriter of my mother’s, but it weighed a tonne and had been ill-maintained. It would all be different when I got to the real world of journalism and super modern equipment, I told myself.

  It wasn’t. The trainees were dumped not even in the hallowed 85 Fleet Street headquarters but in a draughty building belonging to British Telecom around the corner in Seacoal Lane. And our equipment was – yes – heavy, old, ill-maintained typewriters. Not necessarily Remingtons: anything that came to hand, it seemed. I would later discover to my surprised dismay that it was little different in the newsroom itself. We weren’t taught to type properly. I discovered later very few journalists could ‘touch-type’, even though some were lightning fast with two fingers alone and in at least one instance, with just one. We were given news stories to analyse and rewrite; we played through scenarios of being fed reports from police, firemen, army, and told to ‘type it up’ and make ‘a story’ out of it. Typed. We got sore fingers.

  Our training was undertaken by a variety of senior journalists from ‘across the road’ but supervised by a genial, grinning, expansive-waisted West Country man called George Short*, who saw to it straight away that we understood the most important duty of a trainee journalist: buying his betters a beer. Fleet Street was tribal in those days. And each tribe had its watering hole. Printers and journalists on the newspapers hardly spoke to one another – there were literally demarcation lines on the floor in the print works which no journalist dared cross for fear of triggering a walkout. But the journalists too all drank in different places. It wasn’t that they didn’t mix with one another, just that if you weren’t in the office it was a good idea to be in the office pub: that way in a crisis all hands could get, however unsteadily, to the deck.

  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. M
y 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.