At the wetter end of Fleet Street, close by the Crown Inn and not far from the famous Cheshire Cheese, there is a five-storey red brick building which houses the London Morning Call, a national newspaper with a certified daily net sale of nearly two million copies. Though the paper is popular, no one has ever been known to say a good word for the building in which it is produced—a late-Victorian monstrosity of classic ugliness with an incongruous flesh-pink filling where a hole blown in the structure by a delayed-action bomb in 1941 has been repaired.
In addition to being unsightly, the building is inconvenient for its purpose. Its interior may have been functional enough in the leisurely days when reporters travelled to work in top hats and morning coats, and leader-writers fulminated with a bottle of port at the elbow, but its dark narrow passages, steep stone stairs, antiquated lifts and multitude of small rooms with heavy mahogany doors are quite unsuited to the production of a modern newspaper. The directors have long intended to pull the whole place down and build on its site a worthy neighbour to the black-and-shiny Daily Express and the dignified Daily Telegraph, but having missed their chance before the war they now face insuperable problems of temporary accommodation and building licences. They have therefore had to content themselves with such interior improvements as the modernisation of the plumbing and the provision of additional amenities for the higher-placed executives.
On a hot Monday evening in late July, 1949, there was the usual lull in office activity as seven o’clock approached. The work of the day staff was almost done and the work of the night staff had barely started. It was the hour of editorial slack water, when those who were going to see the paper through the presses took over from those who had planned it in outline.
The specialists had already begun to trickle out past the green-uniformed commissionaire at the front box; the Literary Editor first, with an armful of review copies; the Sports Editor, who had a darts match to play off at his “local”; the Agricultural Correspondent, who owned a farm and made a useful profit writing about his losses; and the Columnist, who did very much as he liked. The Open Air Correspondent, whose accounts of arduous hikes personally undertaken were at once an example and stimulus to the rising generation, was starting up his car in the office garage preparatory to the effortless exploration of yet another route. Upstairs, other privileged experts with rooms of their own and names on their doors were jingling their keys and reaching for their hats. The Leader Writer had just been handed a damp galley proof by a white-aproned printer and was concentrating on the last and most trying stage of his normally unexacting job—the excision of three superfluous inches from a column that could spare almost any three inches without irreparable harm. In a few minutes, he too would be gone.
In the News Room, pressure had cased. The News Editor had handed over most of his problems to the Night News Editor, and in spirit was already having a drink with his pretty new girl reporter. One or two people drifted in and out on final missions—to get an expense account signed, or a draft letter approved, or just to say “Good-night” before departing. The Diplomatic Correspondent strolled in to tell the Night News Editor that he would be at the Savoy if wanted. The Night News Editor was studying the night rota, reflecting on the dullness of the news, and privately hoping for a big fire or explosion with heavy loss of life. The undersized youth whose job it was to tear off the ticker tape had sensed the temporary preoccupation of authority and was buried in a lurid “Western”.
The Reporters’ Room, separated from the News Room by a glass door, was as untidy as a battlefield. Despite the dearth of big stories—or perhaps because of it—a busy day had evidently been had by all. Old newspapers, clippings from the Library, reference books, telephone directories and mounds of copy paper were piled in disorder on the desks between the typewriters—a cleaner’s nightmare. Huge waste-paper baskets overflowed like horns of plenty. On the floor beside one of the chairs a dozen sheets of discarded copy paper were scattered, each with the single unfinished sentence, “An unparalleled nation-wide scheme …” or as a variant, “A nationwide scheme which will revolutionise …” Someone had evidently been in creative travail here. On the Chief Reporter’s desk, a printed card in a holder read “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but if you are it helps.” In one of the many telephone boxes which lined the walls, a shorthand-writer was taking a story from Rome. Two day-staff reporters, about to go off duty, were playing cricket with a paper ball and a broken chair leg. The pretty girl reporter was keeping an eye on the glass door and polishing her nails. By the window, where a million specks of dust floated in a shaft of evening sunlight, one of the night men who had just come on duty was unaccountably cleaning his shoes. Presently the door opened, a colleague from another department gave a peremptory, intimate jerk of the head to the two cricketers, and the three of them departed for the Crown.
Across the passage, the Sub-editors were sorting and savouring bits of copy in a desultory way, exchanging pleasantries while they still had the leisure to do so, and chaffing a waitress who had come down from the office restaurant with the supper menu. Some of them were quiet, respectable family men; men with neat houses at Streatham and Penge; pale men who rode on night trams and had almost forgotten what a beauty sleep felt like; amiable, worthy men, who drank a great deal of tea and whose thoughts dwelt much on pensions. Others stoked secret fires and contemplated personal or professional adventures. The view widely held among the reporters that the Subs were smug, stodgy and dim-witted almost to a man was the result of prejudice rather than of dispassionate observation.
Along the corridor, the deep peace of the Foreign Room was broken only by the sound of the tape machine ticking out the “cold war” round by round. The inevitable boy crouched by the machine. The Assistant Foreign Editor sat in watchful contemplation of the clock, for he had an appointment with the Editor in five minutes’ time. The Features Department—the mahogany door a few yards along the corridor—had temporarily closed down, and a note pencilled on a pad beside a wet page proof said “Gone to CEN 43029”—in short, to the Crown.
At the end of the passage, the hard-working Assistant Editor was discussing the “make-up” of the paper with the Night Editor. They were not aware of any lull. The Editor, a couple of doors away, was winding up the administrative work of the day. As was his custom at this hour, he was seeing members of the staff whose problems had been crowded out by the day’s rush. In the adjoining room, his secretary worked on as steadily and imperturbably as though she had just come on duty.