Like the name of a seaside resort that might permeate a stick of rock from one end to the other, that irony is present on every page of Leapman’s book. But, possibly more to the point, I also use the word in the sense that the irony skewers the purpose of the work in that as much as it negates, if not destroys, it.
When discussing the British press industry, Leapman knew what he was talking about unlike the Exeter University history professor whose quite awful and largely unreadable book on the evolution of newspapers in Britain I reviewed a while back.
Leapman who died in 2023 at the age of 85, had worked as a reporter and writer on the Sun, The Times, The Daily Express and The Independent, and his career with The Times included a stint as an America correspondent based
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in New York. He was thus a veteran of the generation that cut its journalistic teeth in Fleet Street.
A subsidiary irony is that if he retired in 2003 at the age of 65, he will have been ‘a civilian’ when the larger irony I mention above made itself felt and would not really have known the full extent of the disaster to hit the industry in which he had served.
In this context, however, ‘Fleet Street’ does not refer to the street in central London which runs parallel to the Thames from The Strand in the west to Ludgate Hill where – or nearby – Britain’s national newspaper had their offices and presses.
Here ‘Fleet Street’ and ‘working in Fleet Street’ describes what for many years was, in a sense, seen as the pinnacle for a professional earning his crust in newspaper print journalism in Britain.
Many men and women set their sights – or were assumed to be setting their sights – on a ‘job on one of the nationals’.
Not least, although certainly not the driving reason they wanted to end up Fleet Street, was that wages on the nationals, especially on the tabloids, were more than respectable and certainly far, far better than the pitiful pay handed out in ‘the provinces’.
The standard bullshit excuse – ‘justification’? – for being a gang of unremitting skinflints trotted out by provincial newspaper groups for paying reporters and sub-editor [US copy editors] peanuts was that ‘journalism is a vocation’: just doing the job was pretty much reward in itself. Well, fancy!
Sadly, too many starry-eyed young men and women swallowed that bullshit hook, line and sink, proud to be following in the footsteps of Barnes and Delane after seeing to many episodes of Lou Grant.
After a total of 44 years serving in Her Majesty’s Press [surely it’s now ‘His Majesty’s Press’ as Brian took over after Brenda died? – Ed] both as a reporter and a sub-editor, the last 28 of those years on the nationals but always down in the ranks and as a perpetual ‘casual’ to boot, that wages paid in what was then Fleet Street were noticeably higher when I first washed up in June 1990, even for new arrivals and casuals.
It would be hard to exaggerate the fabulous sums of money the ‘press barons’ made from the end of the 19th century on and carried on making until comparatively recently, although admittedly at my age, 77 on November 21, 2026, that ‘comparatively’ does some very heavy lifting indeed.
But after half-a-century of being pigs in clover, all that largely went by the board these past 25 years, both for the proprietors and the men and women they employed in Fleet Street. New recruits on the nationals are now also paid peanuts, which given how high rents and cost of living is in London is hits them doubly hard.
Even long-time staff who once enjoyed a ‘four-day’ week and often an extended ‘sabbatical’, have been obliged to put up with less.
I’m certainly not suggesting there are not many hacks for whom ‘journalism’ is ‘a vocation’, at least when they set out. But as in 2026 public cynicism of the media is widespread, one wonders whether their number compares well with previous generations.
For the record, though, I was never one of them. I found a job as a reporter, on the Lincolnshire Chronicle based in Lincoln and starting on June 10, 1974, because I wanted ‘to write.’ I then found out that is nonsense: if you are going ‘to write’, you will do it anyway.
Perhaps – but only perhaps – my years working as a sub-editor have been helpful in some ways, but it is certainly not a given. If you want ‘to write’, just sodding ‘write’ and don’t fanny about.
Leapman published Treacherous Estate in 1992 when Fleet Street, as in ‘the nationals’, were still something of a force in Britain’s media landscape, though, as Leapman recounts, by the beginning of that decade none was based in the Fleet Street, and they had all moved elsewhere.
Their departure – the Daily Mail to Northcliffe House off Kensington High Street, west London, the Daily Express and Daily Star just over Blackfriars Bridge to a purpose-built and quite attractive office block, the Daily Telegraph to occupy one whole floor of some semi-skyscraper in Canary Wharf and the Sun, The Times, The News Of The World and Today to Wapping, in East London – was in tandem with the eventual vanquishment of the once exceptionally powerful print trade unions.
Winning the battle with the print unions was something of a coup as it made possible substantial cuts in labour costs and enabled the proprietors make even more money. As it turned out, though – and as in 1992 Leapman had not and certainly could not have – foreseen – finally seeing off ‘the unions’ marked the beginning of the end, not, as many might have believed, a new dawn.
That brings us closer to the irony which I describe as skewering Leapman’s book: the battle with the unions was over the adoption of what was then ‘new’ computer technology.
It allowed many of the tasks necessary to produce a newspaper hitherto undertaken by union men – note, there were no women – to be taken on by editorial staff, by which I mean a papers sub-editors.
Almost at a stroke a whole department – the linotype operators and readers, who checked proofs of completed pages agains the original journalists’ copy – was redundant.
From then on, there would be ‘direct input’ by the journalists and loads and loads money could be saved, little of which, though as you will have guessed, made its way into the pockets of editorial staff.
Naturally, the National Graphical Association (NGA) to which the linotype operators, compositors and readers belonged and the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades whose members undertook more ‘lowly’ tasks (and who were looked down upon by the NGA) fought this development viciously in a very bloody fight. To understand why it was so bloody, context, especially historical context is needed.
Newspapers and the newspaper industry and their evolution are complex: they have many roots. One root was, courtesy of ever cheaper printing, the explosion of pamphleteering, mainly though not exclusively, political.
Although many pamphlets were produced by bods on ‘the left’ as we might now describe them, the authorities of the day were not slow in countering the spread of such ‘subversion’ by producing publications of their own. The true explosion occurred in the run-up and during the English civil wars.
Another root was simple: manufacturers wanted to advertise their goods to attract buyers and those offering a service wanted to advertise that service to attract patrons. Pamphlets, which swiftly evolved into ‘newspapers’, were a useful vehicle for such advertising. This also enabled dealers in grain and other commodities to compare the different prices offered.
Then there was the desire, born of man’s natural inquisitiveness, to know what the hell was going on locally, both in government, the courts and domestically, who was involved and what were the dirty details.
So quite soon the element of entertainment was added to the mix and has remained a part of the mix since. Accounts of murders, rapes and executions were especially popular (as they are now) and in the days before ‘codes’ and ‘professional standards’, much of it was utterly fictional. I mean why not: as is the hoary example the headline ‘Boy Scout does good deed!’ has not sold many, if any, newspapers.
There’s the other hoary example: ‘Dog bites man’ does not sell – but ‘Man bites dog!’ Now you’re talking! I’ll go out on a limb: understanding the whys and wherefores of those headlines is ‘journalism’ in a nutshell. Yes, it’s that simple though of course there’s a lot more to it than that, but essentially . . .
I can only speak for Britain, but I don’t doubt the same pattern was repeated the world over, throughout the 18th century newspapers were launched everywhere. Some thrived, many did not last for long.
Many were also launched by politicians, and when political parties finally evolved, on the eternal Principle of The Two Tweedles, for every rag of one persuasion there would be others from the other side arrived.
As more began to be able to read, the governments, whether Tory or Whig, took fright at their activities coming under greater scrutiny by the voters and from as early as 1712 ‘stamp acts’ were brought in as a kind of censorship mechanism.
The purpose was to bump up the cost of newspapers to price them out of the reach of ‘the common man’. It failed in that each edition of an expensive newspaper was passed around and read by many.
Nevertheless, it took 143 years before the various ‘stamp acts’ were repealed, first being reduced then, in 1855, finally abolished. That and other technological developments – telegraphy and the rail network as well as ever wider literacy – allowed for growth of a ‘popular press’ and the 19th century saw plethora of newspapers in business up and down the land.
Not all survived and many were taken over and merged, but the first nine decades of the last century – the 2oth century – saw a spectacular growth in newspapers in Britain, not least because of fierce competition and a number of very expensive circulation drives.
By mid-century, in 1950, 100 years after it was launched, the News of the World sold an astonishing 8.4 million copies. Although other papers could not match that, the tabloids were doing equally as well: the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror were selling more than 5 million daily copies and even in the early 1980s Rupert Murdoch’s Sun sometimes sold more than 4 million a day.
The sun began to set – slowly but as we now know surely – on Britain’s newspaper industry when independent television – snootily referred to as ‘commercial television’ by some – was launched in the mid-1950s, giving the established television service from the BBC a run for its money. But it was by no means a death knell.
It soaked up advertising budgets, but that was not dangerous as there was more than enough of that money to go round. One effect, though was that gradually the public’s habits changed. Locally and nationally, newspapers were no longer their go-to source of news.
After World War II perhaps Britain’s ‘provincial’ press, the many weeklies and small evening papers began to feel the squeeze.
When I worked my first shifts as a sub in London, in June 1990, circulations were still respectable: although Rupert Murdochs’ Sun had long taken of tabloid top spot from the Daily Mirror, that paper and a third rival the Daily Express’s sister paper the Daily Star, all three as well as the Daily Mail were selling multiple million copies.
The broadsheets – the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Guardian and The Independent – were not doing half as well, but then they never had competed on equal terms with the red tops. Circulation was up and down but except for the ‘Torygraph’, rarely made it above half a million. The Telegraph was then still selling over one million daily.
For comparison, when I joined the Birmingham Evening Mail as a trainee sub in January 1980, its circulation was just below 250,000 and it was piqued because it had recently been outsold by its rival based in Wolverhampton, the Express and Star which: two evening papers selling more than half a million copies between them.
And now? Now circulations all round are in the toilet and will never recover. The Sun and the Daily Mail are still selling just above one million a day, but the others are nowhere.
That brings me to the irony which skewers Leapman’s book: it was ‘new technology’ which breathed life back into a declining newspaper industry, at least financially. And it is ‘new technology’, although one of a different stripe, which barely 35 years after Leapman published which has driven a stake into the heart of that industry.
The internet, once known as the ‘worldwide web’ and, in that ridiculous phrase, ‘the information superhighway’, is where we all turn to for our news, gossip, sports, features and all the other bollocks we once bought a newspaper for.
Admittedly, our nationals and, after a fashion, our local newspaper groups have salvaged quite a bit by now having an ‘online presence’, but, honestly, only the Mailonline, the Guardian, the i paper and the Telegraph sites are worth candle. All to a greater or lesser extent make money from those browsing.
The ‘online presence’ of the Sun, the Mirror and the Express is pitifully bad and an embarrassment.
The upshot: writing 35 years ago, Leapman exudes optimism for the future of print journalism in Britain. Sadly, he got it wrong, though he cannot be blamed for not foreseeing the technological future and that the ‘new technology’ he believed would be a saviour was nothing of the kind.
Not least, although certainly not the driving reason they wanted to end up Fleet Street, was that wages on the nationals, especially on the tabloids, were more than respectable and certainly far, far better than the pitiful pay handed out in ‘the provinces’.
The standard bullshit excuse – ‘justification’? – for being a gang of unremitting skinflints trotted out by provincial newspaper groups for paying reporters and sub-editor [US copy editors] peanuts was that ‘journalism is a vocation’: just doing the job was pretty much reward in itself. Well, fancy!
Sadly, too many starry-eyed young men and women swallowed that bullshit hook, line and sink, proud to be following in the footsteps of Barnes and Delane after seeing to many episodes of Lou Grant.
After a total of 44 years serving in Her Majesty’s Press [surely it’s now ‘His Majesty’s Press’ as Brian took over after Brenda died? – Ed] both as a reporter and a sub-editor, the last 28 of those years on the nationals but always down in the ranks and as a perpetual ‘casual’ to boot, that wages paid in what was then Fleet Street were noticeably higher when I first washed up in June 1990, even for new arrivals and casuals.
It would be hard to exaggerate the fabulous sums of money the ‘press barons’ made from the end of the 19th century on and carried on making until comparatively recently, although admittedly at my age, 77 on November 21, 2026, that ‘comparatively’ does some very heavy lifting indeed.
But after half-a-century of being pigs in clover, all that largely went by the board these past 25 years, both for the proprietors and the men and women they employed in Fleet Street. New recruits on the nationals are now also paid peanuts, which given how high rents and cost of living is in London is hits them doubly hard.
Even long-time staff who once enjoyed a ‘four-day’ week and often an extended ‘sabbatical’, have been obliged to put up with less.
I’m certainly not suggesting there are not many hacks for whom ‘journalism’ is ‘a vocation’, at least when they set out. But as in 2026 public cynicism of the media is widespread, one wonders whether their number compares well with previous generations.
For the record, though, I was never one of them. I found a job as a reporter, on the Lincolnshire Chronicle based in Lincoln and starting on June 10, 1974, because I wanted ‘to write.’ I then found out that is nonsense: if you are going ‘to write’, you will do it anyway.
Perhaps – but only perhaps – my years working as a sub-editor have been helpful in some ways, but it is certainly not a given. If you want ‘to write’, just sodding ‘write’ and don’t fanny about.
Leapman published Treacherous Estate in 1992 when Fleet Street, as in ‘the nationals’, were still something of a force in Britain’s media landscape, though, as Leapman recounts, by the beginning of that decade none was based in the Fleet Street, and they had all moved elsewhere.
Their departure – the Daily Mail to Northcliffe House off Kensington High Street, west London, the Daily Express and Daily Star just over Blackfriars Bridge to a purpose-built and quite attractive office block, the Daily Telegraph to occupy one whole floor of some semi-skyscraper in Canary Wharf and the Sun, The Times, The News Of The World and Today to Wapping, in East London – was in tandem with the eventual vanquishment of the once exceptionally powerful print trade unions.
Winning the battle with the print unions was something of a coup as it made possible substantial cuts in labour costs and enabled the proprietors make even more money. As it turned out, though – and as in 1992 Leapman had not and certainly could not have – foreseen – finally seeing off ‘the unions’ marked the beginning of the end, not, as many might have believed, a new dawn.
That brings us closer to the irony which I describe as skewering Leapman’s book: the battle with the unions was over the adoption of what was then ‘new’ computer technology.
It allowed many of the tasks necessary to produce a newspaper hitherto undertaken by union men – note, there were no women – to be taken on by editorial staff, by which I mean a papers sub-editors.
Almost at a stroke a whole department – the linotype operators and readers, who checked proofs of completed pages agains the original journalists’ copy – was redundant.
From then on, there would be ‘direct input’ by the journalists and loads and loads money could be saved, little of which, though as you will have guessed, made its way into the pockets of editorial staff.
Naturally, the National Graphical Association (NGA) to which the linotype operators, compositors and readers belonged and the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades whose members undertook more ‘lowly’ tasks (and who were looked down upon by the NGA) fought this development viciously in a very bloody fight. To understand why it was so bloody, context, especially historical context is needed.
Newspapers and the newspaper industry and their evolution are complex: they have many roots. One root was, courtesy of ever cheaper printing, the explosion of pamphleteering, mainly though not exclusively, political.
Although many pamphlets were produced by bods on ‘the left’ as we might now describe them, the authorities of the day were not slow in countering the spread of such ‘subversion’ by producing publications of their own. The true explosion occurred in the run-up and during the English civil wars.
Another root was simple: manufacturers wanted to advertise their goods to attract buyers and those offering a service wanted to advertise that service to attract patrons. Pamphlets, which swiftly evolved into ‘newspapers’, were a useful vehicle for such advertising. This also enabled dealers in grain and other commodities to compare the different prices offered.
Then there was the desire, born of man’s natural inquisitiveness, to know what the hell was going on locally, both in government, the courts and domestically, who was involved and what were the dirty details.
So quite soon the element of entertainment was added to the mix and has remained a part of the mix since. Accounts of murders, rapes and executions were especially popular (as they are now) and in the days before ‘codes’ and ‘professional standards’, much of it was utterly fictional. I mean why not: as is the hoary example the headline ‘Boy Scout does good deed!’ has not sold many, if any, newspapers.
There’s the other hoary example: ‘Dog bites man’ does not sell – but ‘Man bites dog!’ Now you’re talking! I’ll go out on a limb: understanding the whys and wherefores of those headlines is ‘journalism’ in a nutshell. Yes, it’s that simple though of course there’s a lot more to it than that, but essentially . . .
I can only speak for Britain, but I don’t doubt the same pattern was repeated the world over, throughout the 18th century newspapers were launched everywhere. Some thrived, many did not last for long.
Many were also launched by politicians, and when political parties finally evolved, on the eternal Principle of The Two Tweedles, for every rag of one persuasion there would be others from the other side arrived.
As more began to be able to read, the governments, whether Tory or Whig, took fright at their activities coming under greater scrutiny by the voters and from as early as 1712 ‘stamp acts’ were brought in as a kind of censorship mechanism.
The purpose was to bump up the cost of newspapers to price them out of the reach of ‘the common man’. It failed in that each edition of an expensive newspaper was passed around and read by many.
Nevertheless, it took 143 years before the various ‘stamp acts’ were repealed, first being reduced then, in 1855, finally abolished. That and other technological developments – telegraphy and the rail network as well as ever wider literacy – allowed for growth of a ‘popular press’ and the 19th century saw plethora of newspapers in business up and down the land.
Not all survived and many were taken over and merged, but the first nine decades of the last century – the 2oth century – saw a spectacular growth in newspapers in Britain, not least because of fierce competition and a number of very expensive circulation drives.
By mid-century, in 1950, 100 years after it was launched, the News of the World sold an astonishing 8.4 million copies. Although other papers could not match that, the tabloids were doing equally as well: the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror were selling more than 5 million daily copies and even in the early 1980s Rupert Murdoch’s Sun sometimes sold more than 4 million a day.
The sun began to set – slowly but as we now know surely – on Britain’s newspaper industry when independent television – snootily referred to as ‘commercial television’ by some – was launched in the mid-1950s, giving the established television service from the BBC a run for its money. But it was by no means a death knell.
It soaked up advertising budgets, but that was not dangerous as there was more than enough of that money to go round. One effect, though was that gradually the public’s habits changed. Locally and nationally, newspapers were no longer their go-to source of news.
After World War II perhaps Britain’s ‘provincial’ press, the many weeklies and small evening papers began to feel the squeeze.
When I worked my first shifts as a sub in London, in June 1990, circulations were still respectable: although Rupert Murdochs’ Sun had long taken of tabloid top spot from the Daily Mirror, that paper and a third rival the Daily Express’s sister paper the Daily Star, all three as well as the Daily Mail were selling multiple million copies.
The broadsheets – the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Guardian and The Independent – were not doing half as well, but then they never had competed on equal terms with the red tops. Circulation was up and down but except for the ‘Torygraph’, rarely made it above half a million. The Telegraph was then still selling over one million daily.
For comparison, when I joined the Birmingham Evening Mail as a trainee sub in January 1980, its circulation was just below 250,000 and it was piqued because it had recently been outsold by its rival based in Wolverhampton, the Express and Star which: two evening papers selling more than half a million copies between them.
And now? Now circulations all round are in the toilet and will never recover. The Sun and the Daily Mail are still selling just above one million a day, but the others are nowhere.
That brings me to the irony which skewers Leapman’s book: it was ‘new technology’ which breathed life back into a declining newspaper industry, at least financially. And it is ‘new technology’, although one of a different stripe, which barely 35 years after Leapman published which has driven a stake into the heart of that industry.
The internet, once known as the ‘worldwide web’ and, in that ridiculous phrase, ‘the information superhighway’, is where we all turn to for our news, gossip, sports, features and all the other bollocks we once bought a newspaper for.
Admittedly, our nationals and, after a fashion, our local newspaper groups have salvaged quite a bit by now having an ‘online presence’, but, honestly, only the Mailonline, the Guardian, the i paper and the Telegraph sites are worth candle. All to a greater or lesser extent make money from those browsing.
The ‘online presence’ of the Sun, the Mirror and the Express is pitifully bad and an embarrassment.
The upshot: writing 35 years ago, Leapman exudes optimism for the future of print journalism in Britain. Sadly, he got it wrong, though he cannot be blamed for not foreseeing the technological future and that the ‘new technology’ he believed would be a saviour was nothing of the kind.
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