Some of us were grammar school products, some of us auto-didacts. I was a bit of both. I had won a scholarship to the London School of Printing but never took it up because it was evacuated to Northampton and my parents decided (rather arbitrarily, I think, looking back) that we’d prefer to die together in the Blitz rather than be separated. Despite the chaos of the times, I then won another scholarship to a London grammar school, but left just before my 16th birthday because we’d been bombed out and my poor parents needed me to start earning some money. No scholars’ grants at all in those days.

Fleet Street was a short walk from home across Blackfriars Bridge. We lived in a tangle of narrow streets in the Borough, a district once familiar to Charles Dickens. Here huddled the cramped homes and tenements of Fleet Street’s foot soldiers – the machine minders, van drivers, warehousemen, reel handlers. My dad, an Amalgamated Press paperworker, fixed me an interview in the Express accounts department. I stepped into that amazing Art Deco front hall for the first time just after the end of the war in Europe and before the Japanese surrender. If this was nepotism, it didn’t work. There was no vacancy in accounts, but they were willing to start me as a messenger boy at 35 shillings (£1.75p) a week. After the interview, when I stepped outside, it was raining hard. I ran across Fleet Street, tripped over the kerb and ended dazed and muddied in the gutter by Ye Olde Bell Tavern. An ill omen? I opted to believe there was only one way for me to go thereafter and that was up. For the first few weeks I sat with other boys on a wooden bench under those aggressive bas-reliefs of Empire and Industry in the Express’s front hall. Our lowly position was made clear by the head commissionaire, Mr Tonge. We were not allowed to use the lifts even to cart stuff up to the Sunday Express on the fifth floor. We took our revenge by taking aim with ink pellets down the beautiful oval stairwell on to the distant top of Lord Beaverbrook’s head, as sculpted by Jacob Epstein, that stared unnervingly across the foyer.

I ran messages and packages around the black glass building and into central London. I went to Liverpool Street station by bus to collect Carl Giles’s cartoon off the Ipswich train. Curiosity bubbled when I took the original up to the Daily Express features department and the subs studied it this way and that. “What are they looking for?” I whispered. “The rude bits to blank out,” I was told. Giles was sometimes guilty of deliberately hiding penile shapes, nippled breasts and French letters in the drawn details. The dense foliage of trees was always a major cause of anxiety. You could be sure that if a solitary johnny or worse slipped through, it would be spotted by Outraged of Bournemouth.

One day Mr Tonge picked me to deliver a parcel of books to a famous critic (let him rest anonymously in peace) who lived in a Holborn mansion flat. One of the older lads said, “Hand Vic the cork.” And the benchload of fellow monkeys laughed. “What’s that for?” I asked. I was extremely innocent at 15. “The bloke’s ginger beer,” said a fellow cockney, and he told me what I should do with the cork if I ran into difficulty. I was terrified. I dumped the books on the great man’s doorstep, knocked and ran. Years later I learned something of this critic’s history. Ginger beer he was, but a molester of young rascals from the lower depths he was not.

Shortly after the cork run I was suddenly promoted from the front-hall taxi rank, from messenger boy to copyboy. My workplace was now that famous open-plan editorial second floor of the Daily Express and my life truly began. “Newspapers Are Made At Night” declared the slogan across the ceiling. The windows were still bricked up against blast, and part of the floor had been turned into a dormitory for the night staff when the bombing made getting home impossible. In mid-1945 the glamour of the floor was overwhelming. The celebrated war correspondents, men who’d been at Dunkirk, Alamein, Tobruk, on the Ark Royal, at Arnhem and Monte Cassino and taken part on D-Day were returning, still in khaki with their shoulder flashes up: among them James Cooper, Willie Crumley, Geoffrey Bocca, who became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s biographer, and Sefton Delmer, who’d been on secret work – psychological warfare we learned much later. And then there was the heartrending figure of a former RAF flier named Bill Simpson, hideously burnt, his face an Archie McIndoe restoration. He typed by placing upended pencils between the stumps where his fingers had been.

Bestriding this world was an editor now a legend, Arthur Christiansen. He was plump, with a high forehead, crinkly, brilliantined hair and gold spectacles. Although of modest height, he had the thump, thump, thump stride of a guardsman – we always knew when he was approaching. He was curious about everything, including the escapades of his copyboys. They planted me in the centre of the floor on a chair next to the copytaster. There was a ten-inch diameter hole in my desk. A steel pipe went down through the floor, ending on the composing room stone, just above the in-basket of Percy Pratt, the head printer. The subs’ cries began: “Boyee, copee!” “ ...Boy! Down the ’ole, please.” “Boy! Let’s be ’aving yew.”

The magic moment

The magic moment of every evening came just before 11pm. I’d plant my feet firmly on the floor and wait for the ground to shift minutely. This sensation was following by a tingling in the soles and a steady vibration. Some 60 feet below, the mighty Hoe presses were beginning to turn. Intoxicating! By the early hours of the morning my feet were often a bloody mess from all the running. I’d limp home across Blackfriars Bridge to run a double gauntlet. First up were the crones from a lodging house on the Blackfriars Road. On a warm night they congregated outside in their billowing nightshifts. Macbeth act one, scene one. “Ooooh! Look at his lovely wavy hair.” “Come and give us a kiss, sonny.” “Does your mummy know you’re out?”

I’d take to my bloodied heels, chased by a chorus of cackles, only for the darkness of a doorway farther along to morph into a policeman. “What’re you doing out? What’s your name? Let’s see your identity card.” The first time this happened I explained and proudly showed my copy of a first edition Express. “Is that for me?” said the copper, taking it. From then on, no matter which route I took home, coppers emerged from the dark for their paper. It was easier to give them one than endure the repeated rigmarole of proving the blameless nature of my nocturnal journey. They’d then plod off for a crafty smoke and read. I think the word had gone round the Borough police station: “Look out for the kid from Queen’s Buildings. He’s always good for a free paper.” As a distraction, the local burglars had much to thank me for.

My feet finally found relief when I was promoted to be copyboy exclusively for the night news editor. I had my own scrubbed pine desk and on it was a shiny black object that terrified me. A telephone. I’d never used one. To this day I have an embarrassingly loud phone voice because I never could quite believe in the technology. The NNE was a 6ft 3in headmasterly man named John Young (he died this year just before his 103rd birthday) who regarded his reporters as a regrettable necessity. “Take my advice, my boy. Don’t be like them. Stay out of the pubs,” he’d sigh.

Soon after I joined, a general election had swept away the wartime government and Labour was in power. One evening, late, the dreaded phone rang. I looked around wildly. There was no one apart from me within answering distance. I picked it up, and said in a trembling treble, “Night news desk.” A voice, vaguely familiar, said, “Would you be so kind as to summon the news editor to the telephone?” “Whom shall I say is calling?” I said. Note that “whom’” – at 16 I was a pedantic little blighter. Still am a bit. The caller told me whom was calling. I dropped the phone in shock and ran down the corridor to the lavatory. “Mister Young! Mister Young!” I shouted over the cubicle door, “Winston Churchill is asking for you.” “My god! Tell him I won’t be a moment,” yelled my panicked boss. I rushed back to the phone. “He’s coming, sir. He’s in the lav…er...convenience.” “Ah,” said the great Englishman, “do I detect that I call at an inconvenient moment?” He made a sound between a bark and a guffaw and was gone. He later had his ghastly son, Randolph, call back. Churchill wanted to know what had been on the nine o’clock news.

That night desk was my university. Under the mostly indulgent eye of John Young, I read several volumes of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall and taught myself shorthand. A nutty reporter named Bernard Hall, ex-Navy, was forever snatching my book and in gunnery officer tones ordering: “Take dictation!” He’d then rattle off at 250 words a minute and stalk off miffed when I couldn’t keep up.

By now I knew I wanted to be a journalist beyond all else. My Uncle Bill, a machine minder downstairs at the Express, was horrified. He witnessed nightly the boisterous goings on in Shoe Lane alongside the building. “They’re all drunks and womanisers,” he said, rather echoing Mr Young. After that, nothing could stop me. I kept my eyes and ears on red alert. I eavesdropped on the techniques the reporters used in drawing people out over the telephone. I made it my business to master the potential of the reference library. At 17, with the aid of a Kelly’s street directory, The Colliery Yearbook and a telephone, I could have covered a late-breaking mine disaster without leaving the office.

Like a Hollywood star

The night news desk had a serious design fault – it left Mr Young with his back to his reporters. One by one they’d tiptoe up to me and whisper: Punch...Bell...Poppins...Albion... And off they’d slope while Mister Young happily read his copy of The Stage – his wife was a West End actress. The inevitable would happen. I’d plonk a news flash in front of him, he’d turn and rise to his tremendous height, booming, “SONNY, WHERE’S THE STAFF?” I’d gallop off for a pub round-up only to be greeted with, “You haven’t seen me”…“Bugger off, Victor”…“Can’t you find someone else?” One night Mr Young demanded Arthur Cook’s presence. I found him in Poppins Court, not in the pub but in a doorway, pressed up against a girl reporter. They seemed to be practising some kind of South American tango. Arthur’s buttocks were moving quite rhythmically. “You’ve got to come right away,” I cried in my innocence. “Oh, really Victor!” said the great Lothario over his shoulder while the girl collapsed giggling. He’d forgiven me by the time we fetched up in darkest Africa.

I remained a copyboy until, at 18, I received my call-up papers. My greatest fear had been that I would not lead an interesting life. But I’d created my own university in the black Lubianka and I’d laid the foundation for what is proving to be a long career. Unknown to me then, directly across the road a Reuters messenger, an elementary schoolboy from Hackney, East London, was doing likewise. Derek Jameson went on to edit the Daily Express, the News of the World and the Daily Star before becoming a successful broadcaster.

A couple of years later at the Press Association Bernard Shrimsley was deviling for reporters, phoning in their copy and, as he puts it, “acting as a human carrier-pigeon”. He subsequently established a remarkable record of editorships: Daily Mirror (Manchester), Liverpool Daily Post, The Sun, News of the World and The Mail on Sunday, where he was succeeded by the late Stewart Steven, who, aged 17, himself spent a year as a Manchester Guardian copyboy. Brian Hitchen, later to edit the Daily Star and Sunday Express, started out at 15 as a copyboy with the Evening Chronicle in Manchester.

Scottish-born Charles Wilson’s two years as a copyboy on The People before his call-up has marked similarities to my own experiences. He fetched tea and ran errands for such Fleet Street supernova as Arthur Helliwell, Hannen Swaffer and Tommy (Duncan) Webb while learning his craft from these masters of popular journalism. Charlie, who later was to edit three Scottish newspapers, The Times for five years and stop-gap edit The Independent and the Chicago Sun-Times, recalls fondly: “The People news editor, Charles Rowe, introduced me to editorial accountancy. He’d hit the office float so that we could go for a drink and replenish it later before he was found out.”

Shades of my cork-run episode: Wilson once had to call at the Chelsea flat of columnist and famous TV grouch Gilbert Harding to collect copy. “He had a penchant for young boys,” says Charlie, “and he chased me round the room.” Harding was foolhardy as well as randy. Charlie, who did his national service in the Royal Marines, may well have introduced “The Man of The People” to a Glasgow Kiss if he’d been cornered.

At 15, Mike Molloy, an ebullient middleclass lad from Ealing, West London, ran away from art school and “for a bit of fun” joined the old Sunday Pictorial as a messenger. The boys were normally sacked after a year, but the editor, Colin Valdar, thought he saw promise in Mike – and how! Later Molloy edited the Daily Mirror for 10 years, the Sunday Mirror for a year and was editor-in-chief for a further five. Now back in civilian life, he is a noted artist, and the writer of novels and a chain of successful children’s books.

The messenger boy who rose nearest to God was Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International. Back in 1960, Down Under, his most important task of the day was to fetch a sandwich for young Rupert Murdoch. Les must have sloshed plenty of mustard between the slices. And the grand-daddy of boys-made-good was Louis Heren, distinguished foreign correspondent and deputy editor of The Times. In the mid-1930s he was a £1-a-week cocky messenger where, as at the Express, using the lift at the old Printing House Square premises meant instant dismissal. He was a gor’-blimey cockney from the East End of London who insisted: “Neither the accent nor the attitude mattered at The Times. Journalists tend to be classless, and I was readily accepted as a colleague by the superior Oxbridge men who then ran the paper.”

Now a dead-end job

Sometime in the 1950s the paperworkers’ union stopped teenaged lads working at night. Copyboys became messenger men. Subs could no longer shout “Boy!” without causing offence. When I did a stint of night-news editing myself a decade later my “copyboy” had been one of Lord Lovat’s commandos, as fine a body of men as ever cut a throat, as the aforementioned Churchill said. My bloke never had any trouble dragging ’em back from the pubs.