Fifty Years in Fleet Street

Abstract

With the exception of general labouring, no profession, craft, trade, or occupation throws its gates so widely open to all and sundry, including rogues and “wise guys”, as Fleet Street, or the newspaper world. And the true Fleet Street man is peculiarly vulnerable to the attentions of the rogues and others, because, while he is one of the most knowledgeable of individuals, he is by training, and very often also by nature, an observer and a critic, not a doer. He seldom can make a fortune for himself, but is open to be used and abused in making fortunes—and large ones—for others. He is also very much an individualist, and so he and his colleagues can seldom agree on common action. Hence the opportunity of the exploiters and financial manipulators. Characteristically, you have not one, but two professional bodies representing the Fleet Street man—the Institute of Journalists, founded last century under Royal Charter, and the National Union of Journalists, founded before the first World War by a few Manchester journalists, which, instead of being Royal, or anything like it, linked itself to the Trade Union Congress, with wage and working conditions as its ruling concern.