THE FLEET STREET GIRLS THE WOMEN WHO BROKE DOWN THE DOORS OF THE GENTLEMEN’S CLUB

JULIE WELCH Trapeze, 288p, £18.99, ebook £18.99

Julie Welch, who in 1973 became the first female football reporter for a national newspaper, the Observer, has combined her own memoirs with an ‘eye-opening study of Fleet Street’s pioneering women’, wrote Lucy Knight in the Sunday Times. ‘Welch’s book is imbued with nostalgia for a time in her life that was, while difficult, also fun. The Fleet Street

Girls is as much an obituary for the “glory days of print” as it is a story of pioneering women. Fleet Street, Welch says, was “a place where you bashed out your words through clouds of cigarette smoke, among overflowing ashtrays, on a beaten-up Remington, to a soundtrack of chittering Telex machines” which stood for “glamour, fame and opportunity”.’

There was an ‘abundance of sexism’ to contend with, even on the part of some women – Evening Standard star reporter Anne Sharpley once advised a junior colleague to ‘always sleep with the Reuters man, darling, because the news desk checks your copy against Reuters, and you’ll have filed before him’. Welch ‘writes with style’, Knight concluded, and ‘her journey to acceptance in a man’s world makes for fascinating reading’. In her review for the Herald (Scotland), Susan Flockhart described the book as ‘a colourful evocation of the pre-digital and decidedly preMetoo culture that prevailed half-a-century ago, in fetid newsrooms where senior editors snoozed off liquid lunches amid clattering typewriters and rumbling subterranean presses... And despite the groping, sexism and exhausting pace of work, it was, she suggests, a golden era.’

‘Despite the groping and sexism, it was a golden era’