A Short Walk Down Fleet Street: From Beaverbrook to Boycott. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, March, 2001 by George Evans

A Short Walk Down Fleet Street: From Beaverbrook to Boycott. Alan Watkins. Duckworth. [pound]18.00. ISBN 0-7156-29107.

If this book has a hero, writes Alan Watkins, it is Fleet Street in its silver age, from about 1955 to about 1985. It is the only place he says, wistfully, where he ever felt entirely at home. It would not feel like that now. The retreat of the national papers in the mid-Eighties to distant, less fashionable locations such as Wapping may not, as the cynics predicted, have led to a headlong rush by building societies and dry cleaners to colonise Fleet Street but it would not have made much difference if they had. The place would never be the same again. El Vino or El Vino's as it is universally known, the long-established rendezvous of what Mr Watkins calls the emissaries of higher journalism, columnists and the like, is still there along with lesser taverns of happy memory but that apart, the Fleet Street of old, as one of its former denizens observed, is now as remote as the Byzantine Empire.

Nostalgia for the past cannot, however, obscure the fact that Fleet Street's so-called silver age was, in reality, one of the darkest chapters in its history. It was an era when the print unions, not management, controlled the production and distribution of the national newspapers with dire economic consequences for the whole industry. Crippling losses caused by industrial anarchy saw off respected, long-established titles such as the News Chronicle. The Times and Sunday Times were forced to close and stay closed for nearly a year. When they came back The Times was again silenced by its journalists who had been kept on full pay during the year it was shut down. With accumulated losses running into millions it proved a strike too far for Lord Thomson. He sold the papers to Rupert Murdoch who, in defiance of violent opposition by the unions, shortly afterwards led the retreat from Fleet Street. The rest soon followed him.

But that is another story well outside the scope of this engaging book which is about journalism and journalists. It is a subject on which the author, a successful, highly regarded columnist himself can speak with an authority derived from long experience in the front line of political journalism. In forty years in Fleet Street he has dispensed wisdom, praise and blame in ample measure in public prints as widely opposed in their political allegiance as Beaverbrook's Express and The Observer or The Spectator and the New Statesman. He has known most Prime Ministers from Harold Macmillan onwards and has, he says, probably worked for more politician-editors and politician-proprietors such as Beaverbrook, than anybody else. His editors, or a representative sample of them, included R. H. S. Crossman, Nigel Lawson, Conor Cruise O'Brien and Rosie Boycott. He got on with all of them. He is, it is good to see, still going strong.