I only came into the print industry four years ago and it is one of my great regrets that I will never have seen or heard the great clatter and commotion of newspaper printing on Fleet Street.
So I was delighted last week to spend a couple of hours with a contact in the newspaper business who had worked in the Street of Shame – albeit briefly – in the last days before the newspaper industry decamped to Docklands.
I want to share just one of the stories the newspaperman told me. Albeit second hand, it gives an idea of the eccentricity of Fleet Street in its glory days, and why Rupert Murdoch and the other press barons were so exasperated with it.
It goes something like this. On weekend shifts, the printers would be paid in cash at the end of the shifts by a clerk from the newspaper’s accounts department, who would himself have had to come into the office early on a Sunday morning to hand out the little brown envelopes in an upstairs room.
One day in the early 1980’s, a young clerk was handing out the wages and ticking off names on the register. One worker, arriving at the front of the queue, said he was picking up the pay for himself and other worker, Willie Croxson.
“You can’t,” said the young clerk, on his first weekend shift.
“Why not? I always pick up Willie’s pay,” retorted the printer.
“Maybe you do, but he’ll have to come up and pick it up himself.”
“Pick it up himself? You must be joking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he can’t climb the stairs to get up here,” said the printer.
“What?”
“Yeah. He’s 78.”
It turns out that in the glory days of Fleet Street, as well as the printers who would produce the papers, a group of old boys (they were surely invariably old boys at that time) would come in and sit around in the print works for a few hours just to pick up the pay check.
Of course, it would never be tolerated today, in this age where accountants rule the world. But who cares? Working in Fleet Street sounds like a blast.