Newspapers: Drink and ink: the end of a world we thought would last for ever

As the last big news organisation leaves Fleet Street. Mike Molloy remembers a lost era

Reuters News Agency is leaving Fleet Street. The last petal has finally fallen from one of the great red roses of England. No longer will journalists tread the Street of Ink!

Reuters News Agency is leaving Fleet Street. The last petal has finally fallen from one of the great red roses of England. No longer will journalists tread the Street of Ink!

Actually, I didn't make up that red rose bit. I lifted it from Cassandra, the great Mirror columnist of Fleet Street vintage. He used it in his obituary of Winston Churchill. But stealing other people's stuff was one of the hallowed traditions of Fleet Street.

Reuters may be the last to go, but a generation has already passed since the extraordinary days when most of our national newspapers were crowded into the lanes, alleyways, roads and squares close to a fairly short length of street stretching from Ludgate Circus to Temple Bar.

Ah, Fleet Street! I remember it well. I arrived as a fresh-faced lad from the western suburbs in 1956 to work as a messenger on the Sunday Pictorial. In those days national newspapers hired boys for a year to do dogsbody work, then they were fired. It was my intention to return to art school and hope to train as an art teacher. But I stayed on when I was offered a full-time job by the editor, Colin Valdar.

Being a messenger gave you a worm's eye view of journalists, and some of them were pretty wormy. But others were made of finer stuff. It was easy for an impressionable youth to find heroic role models. Men who had reported wars, braved disasters, covered riots and submitted expenses to Ken Hord, the legendarily tight-fisted news editor of the Daily Mirror.

Fleet Street had been a news-gathering centre for hundreds of years. It was close to the stage-coach terminal at Temple and the street contained coffee houses patronised by the grubbing gossips of the day. Also, it was only a short cab ride to the City or the Houses of Parliament.

Lord Northcliffe was the man who pretty much created the Fleet Street of the 20th century. He started the Daily Mail; according to Lord Salisbury, a newspaper that was written by office boys for office boys. Northcliffe also owned the Evening News; bought The Times, founded the Illustrated Daily Mirror, as a newspaper for gentlewomen, then, as one of his failures, sold it to his brother, Lord Rothermere.

At the height of his power Northcliffe dictated policy to prime ministers, who tended to jump to do his bidding when he barked down the telephone. He was also, in the end, quite mad. A casual reporter was once working on the Daily Mail news desk when "the chief" rang.

"Who's that," snarled Northcliffe, not recognising the voice.

"My name is Fish, sir," gulped the nervous newcomer. Northcliffe hung up and instantly rang again, getting the night news editor. "That man, Fish. I want him to be on duty every night," he ordered. From then on his lordship delighted in telephoning to boom: "Anything fresh, Fish?" at his employee.

When Northcliffe bought The Times it was said the accounts were written in an exercise book kept in a rusty safe. Northcliffe and his brother, Lord Rothermere, turned newspapers into modern businesses that generated fabulous profits and political clout - when successful.

Lord Beaverbrook, a friend of Churchill and a millionaire Canadian with a shady business reputation, bought the Daily Express in 1919, when it had a circulation of 440,000. By 1961 the paper sold 4.3 million copies a day.

A few doors up Fleet Street was The Daily Telegraph, owned by the Berry family and recognised as the bible of the middle classes. Across the way the Carr family controlled the News of the World, which at one time sold nine million copies each Sunday.

The families who owned the British press were distant with each other, but they operated an understanding that dog would not eat dog. Unflattering news about them, or their friends, did not get printed. With the exception of Lord Hartwell, few of the press lords ever ventured into Fleet Street, preferring to dictate editorial policy from afar.

But, nightly, the presses would roar and so would the journalists in the packed public houses. Some circulations may have plunged but the profits of the pubs always soared. This was the world Rupert Murdoch came, saw and conquered with his relaunch of The Sun.

Before new technology, journalism was mostly a waiting game. Waiting for page proofs, waiting for resets, waiting for reporters to file copy from remote places, like East Anglia, where the telephone boxes may have been vandalised by one's competitors. Naturally, the waiting was done with a drink in hand. Today, there is instant gratification. A lad or lass with a computer knocks it up in less time than it would have taken for a printer to formulate a wage demand.

My God, the pubs were fun. But it is not true that we were more in touch with the public than today's toilers, sealed in the glass towers and brick bunkers of Kensington and the East End. The only people we were in touch with were our fellow journalists and the bar staff of our favourite watering holes.

It all had to come to an end, we all knew that. Only a former Fleet Street employee can really know the surreal world in which we ended up. When I was made editor of the Daily Mirror in 1974 my staff was looked on by management as a beacon of rectitude, compared to the bizarre excesses of the print unions. But I had a motoring correspondent who was banned from driving; a gardening correspondent with no garden; a slimming editor who was a stone overweight; a travel editor who was barred from flying British Airways, and a delightful feature writer who hadn't written an article in five years. Six years later we gave him a farewell dinner at the Ritz Hotel - and he still hadn't written anything.

People ask me if I miss working on a daily newspaper. Usually I say no. But really I do miss Fleet Street. When Irving Berlin reached a hundred it is claimed he said: "If I'd known I was going to live so long I'd have taken better care of myself."

In a way, the same goes for those hilarious years. If I'd fully appreciated what a joyful time we were having I'd have tried to cram in more. But we were sure Fleet Street would be there for ever. Then one day the accountants told the owners it made sense to move, and suddenly it was all gone with the wind.

Mike Molloy was Editor of the 'Daily Mirror', 1974-84, and Editor-in-Chief until 1989