The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Why can’t a woman be a sports writer?’
Lucy Davies enjoys these eye-popping tales of female trailblazers who braved the all-male club of Fleet Street
BFLEET STREET GIRLS by Julie Welch 288pp, Trapeze, £18.99, ebook £8.99
ack when this newspaper was put together at Canary Wharf, its digital version still in short trousers and accessible via a dial-up modem, I’d often find my boss asleep in the books cupboard, post lunch. Before lunch, too, should the night before require it. We had a special pillow in there for the purpose. Safe to say, both it and the boss (an exquisitely gifted writer) are long gone.
I was fondly reminded of those rather languorous days when reading Julie Welch’s new book, Fleet Street Girls, which recounts the stories of the trailblazing women journalists of the 1970s and 1980s, whose fight to be taken seriously by the then all-male Fleet Street club both thrilled and nearly killed them. Reader, cupboard snoozes were the least of it.
If you belong to that section of the population that reads the paper back to front, as in sports pages first, then you’ll probably already know Welch. She was the first woman to report on football, and became one of the most respected sports writers of her generation.
She begins this eyeopening, highly enjoyable book by describing the precise moment in 1973 when, aged 24, she walked into the reporters’ room at Coventry City to “two dozen men sucking in their breath in unison,” and “women in the press box. So it’s come to that.”
Her account of the next few hours is a nail-biting ride. By the time she phones in her 500 words at 6pm, riding high on half a pack of Benson & Hedges and a scuffed pink wafer, we’re almost as nervous as she was, and definitely as angry.
“What gives men like him the right to say who’s allowed in and who isn’t? Why shouldn’t a woman be a sports writer?” she writes.
“Sport is for everyone.
It’s playing, it’s belonging, it’s great deeds and huge emotions, it’s a natural expression of being human, part of life. I’ve been given the chance to show what women are capable of, and I am not going to let a dinosaur like him get in my way.”
Fleet Street Girls is part bildungsroman, part wide-roaming survey. Welch’s journey from suburban Essex to the rumbling presses and roaring pubs of EC4, to the “sheer, miraculous, ruthless, glamorous, sexy, wicked energy of it all”, is only one of several dozen accounts by women journalists and editors to be recounted here.
Some of the names you will recognise – Lynn Barber and Katharine Whitehorn, for instance – others only if you were avid readers of a particular section of the paper, at a particular time. A cast list would have been useful to refer to here, as I struggled throughout to remember who was working for whom at what time.
Regardless, the stories are wittily told, if sometimes mouthclaspingly horrifying. If instances of sexism are to be expected in a book on this subject, the flippancy with which they are dished out, and the relentless frequency with which they come, remain shocking. Anyone squeamish about groping or men getting their todgers out (on the desk), here’s your trigger warning.
Welch also looks back at some of the largely forgotten women journalists from Fleet Street’s earlier years: the Edwardian-era editor whose family declared her insane, for instance, or the one who, for that age-old favourite of the women’s pages – the stunt – was forced to dive underwater in Victorian-era diving gear. My favourite of these pioneers though, is the woman covering Winston Churchill’s funeral, who, after phoning in her copy, vandalised the handset so that her male rivals couldn’t use it, thus earning the scoop. (Rather than being cross, the men applauded her enterprise.)
Chapters covering the background of the female reporters of Welch’s day (often as not a father already in the news business, and a mother who wept when the daughter declared her chosen path), schooling (or not) and first rungs on the ladder (sample interview question: “do you like the occasional drink?”) are interesting, if in some cases overly detailed, but things ramp up several notches when Welch gets to the real meat of her book – the newsroom.
Oh, this section of the book alone is worth the cover price. The antiquated systems, hierarchies and squalor; the urchin messengers who responded to the summons of “Boy!”; the four-drawer filing cabinets that are empty but for a bottle of whisky, the clouds of cigarette smoke, overflowing ashtrays, cupboard snoozers, telephone mouthpieces that smelt of the breath of the person who last used them; the beaten-up Remington typewriters and chittering Telex machines. Welch gives us a ringside seat to it all.
Best, perhaps, are the incredible characters that worked in that room and who, day after day and often far into the night, made the best of it all. Men and women whose raging eccentricities (mostly) belied the talent that was the lifeblood of the operation. Here’s Welch’s boss, Clifford: a man who wandered the office in trousers that were held up with string or old pyjama cords “and which hung in swags round his toecaps, while his underpants rose over the waist like a greyish-white cummerbund. At 11am, he arrived. At 11.45, I would hear a hiss, which was him applying breath freshener from a small bottle of Amplex. This was the signal for his departure to lunch, which by rights I should put in inverted commas, as it hardly ever involved actual food. He’d take a taxi to wherever he was going, even if it was only the five hundred yards to El Vino’s.”
Tutting? It could be this book isn’t for you.
But personally, I found this story of women kicking dusty, idiotic old prejudices to one side (while getting the better of the tweedy old fools that perpetuated them) as cheering as it was galvanising.
At Coventry City, she faced down ‘two dozen men sucking in their breath in unison’
Call 0844 871 1514 to order a copy for £16.99
Writing is one of the few professions in which a criminal record is a virtue rather than a handicap. The selling point of Gabriel Krauze’s debut novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, is that he has not just written this story about a young man from a Polish immigrant family who spends his time hanging around with London gangs and mugging people – he has lived it.
The novel’s narrator is also called Gabriel, although his friends know him as Snoopz. He’s a brilliant Eng Lit student at Queen Mary who spends his leisure hours being educated in more esoteric matters, such as how to wash gunshot residue out of your ears with petrol, and with a bit of luck manages to make his spells in prison coincide with the holidays. But although the copyright page carries the tautologous disclaimer “This novel is a work of fiction”, the basic facts are true of the author as well as the character and we are clearly meant to take everything
in the book as true, or nearly true.
At the very least his book shows that one can write an “autobiographical novel” that doesn’t have to be nine-tenths solipsistic maundering, in the manner of Karl Ove Knausgaard and his disciples. Yes, there is quite a lot of soul-searching, but it is never allowed to interrupt the action for long; Gabriel is just as likely to be witnessing somebody else’s navel being sliced open as gazing at his own. (He tells us, incidentally, that “when someone gets shanked or shot in the belly, you might just smell s--- if their intestine’s been punctured” – one of the many visceral stamps of authenticity that you feel might be beyond the imagination of a stay-at-home novelist.)
So how does a boy who won a scholarship to a prestigious school because of his intellect and musical talents end up smashing a woman’s arm with her front door as he tries to steal her watch, and spending time in HMP Feltham after headbutting a stranger on the
Tube? Krauze traces his life of lawlessness to a determination to be always in control after he was mugged aged 13; but he also writes honestly and infectiously about the buzz that comes with committing violent crime.
He writes very well about the gang members he fell in with and
the grim housing estates on which they live, where “violence is the punctuation of their reality” and the money given to the council to sort them out never seems to be deployed. There are grimly comic vignettes, including a whole family dependent on drugs, whose only house rule is: “don’t chop up crack
“freedom” and independence for colonies since the mid-1950s, when he was chairman of the Senate’s Africa subcommittee. For Kennedy, decolonisation on his terms was both an ideological axiom and a practical bulwark against Soviet recolonisation and the provision of red aid. Both megapowers were unsympathetic to an ageing and diminished Salazar whose only bargaining device was the strategically positioned Azores and whose only ally was the similarly stubborn, similarly isolated Ian Smith, the 1960s’ favourite pariah. It was not until five years after Salazar’s death that his well-founded fears of Moscow’s (and Havana’s) omnipresent tentacles were proved correct.
Angola’s break with Portugal took so long because of the three-sided proxy war between competing acronyms – there is grim comedy to be found in the puppet masters hedging their bets on which faction to back. Mozambique was worse. The racist future president Armando Guebuza ordered whites out of the country within 24 hours and with 44lb of luggage, a spiteful and unoriginal formula lifted from the Algerian FLN’s “coffin or suitcase” ultimatum of 1962.
Salazar paid the price for failing to be either ephemeral or protean. This book’s subtitle, The Dictator Who Refused to Die, is apt and rather sad. It was not so much a question of outstaying his welcome as neglecting to acknowledge that the many improvements he had brought to his country had changed its people but not, perhaps, him. He was ultimately inflexible because he determined to be so. He was “determined not to adapt to the ascendant humanistic outlook of what to him was a shallow and overly materialistic world”.
Tom Gallagher’s immensely detailed portrait of a fascinating man is itself fascinating. The author is a distant presence, coolly objective and disinclined to judge his huge cast of politicians, soldiers, diplomats and bishops. He allows readers space to come to their own conclusions about a complicated figure in an era when statesmen were persons of a certain seriousness.
Call 0844 871 1514 to order for £22