When sexism was routine: the life of the female reporter in 1970s London

This book made me almost weep with nostalgia, but heaven knows what today’s snowflakes will make of it. Fleet Street working conditions were horrendous — the offices were filthy, and covered in a thick pall of cigarette smoke. There’d be frequent wastepaper bin fires when someone threw a smouldering cigarette into a bin full of paper and a male journalist would pee on it to put it out. (Nobody had bottles of water on their desks in those days.) The noise was ear-splitting, with everyone shouting into their phones above the constant clatter of Remingtons. When the presses started to roll around 4 p.m., the whole building shook. ‘Actually,’ Julie Welch observes, ‘that was quite erotic.’

Sexism was routine. If you were one of the rare women in Fleet Street, you felt insulted if men didn’t pat your bottom or tell you you had nice legs. Everyone was drunk nearly all the time. When conference started at 11 a.m. all the subs would troop off to the pub, except one junior who was left on guard duty to phone the pub when conference finished. All the newspapers had their own favoured pubs, as well as the City Golf Club, which was a melting pot for the different newspapers and the place you went when you were fired and needed to scout for another job. The big cheeses went to El Vino’s — but not if they were women, who were only allowed to sit in the back room. Three-hour, three-bottle lunches were common and you would sometimes come across colleagues sleeping them off under their desks.

And then quite suddenly, in 1986, it all stopped. Rupert Murdoch whisked his papers off to Wapping, and within a decade all the other newspapers had gone.