Book: The Fleet Street Girls by Julie Welch

Julie Welch was the first woman in Fleet Street to be a football reporter. How I didn’t know this or have this book on my radar is mystifying. I spotted it by chance in my favourite section of the library ‘smart thinking’. Situated as it is opposite the desk where I go to pick up my reservations.

Of course, it jumped out towards me. In case you’re unfamiliar, I spent 15 years working in the media which was all I wanted to do when I left school. I loved every minute of it. My time in Fleet Street, in a different capacity, was some years after the author and her compatriots and yet some of the media patriarchy was alive and well as we moved into the 1990s.

There were two bars at that time that refused to serve women at the bar. I’m pretty sure at least one frowned upon women wearing trousers. So obviously I didn’t go there but entertained my clients - a major part of my advertising job - at decent restaurants.

These male-only bars get many mentions in this book and much more fondly than I remember them. I remember a less 'romantic Fleet Street and more chauvinism. Just a few years before I was there, it seemed they were much more accepted, or at least the women had a more nonchalant attitude. They made it work for them and there is much talk about the characters they enjoyed hours of chat with, found in the same chair, creatures of habit that we are.

There are so many discoveries like The Observer used to be on my. Tudor Street where I was based until we moved the fancy purpose-built Express building over the river. Now sadly been turned into flats. So the newspaper industry was much more than Fleet Street but there was one more thing we all had in common; we all poured out of Blackfriars every morning.

I’ve been back twice in the last couple of years but now desperately want to go back and spend a few hours there. My observation is where there is a Tesco Express, would have been a newsagent. Where there’s a clothes boutique there would have been a shirt shop. And where the hundreds of Prets have popped up - well, what I wouldn't have given for healthy food rather than the bad greasy joints I avoided and instead went to the bakers. There was not an M&S food hall to be seen for miles then.

I learned about Rachel Beer who edited the Sunday Times for 10 years but didn't get her obituary in it. The original Fleet Street girl was born in 1858 and inherited a fortune from her dad and chose to live with purpose, shunning the society she was born into. She married the owner of the Observer and they ran it together, she the more keen and wanted to do more.

I had never heard of her before and now I am fascinated. Where was the blue plaque?

My experience of sexism was a bit like the menopause. I never had any symptoms. But I did work hard.

As much as I love that Julie Welch had a fantastic time as the sports depts secretary at the Observer in the early 70s, I m finding it difficult to understand how she mixed with 'nice men'.

The translation is they were nice to her, which should be a given and a relief, given how many stories of those who were not.

But having multiple office affairs, never turning up for work and having to 'hunt' them (the men) down and being permanently drunk (who we refer to today as, alcoholics who need help) does not a nice my man make in any decade.

But it's hard to imagine working in 1971.

Nothing says you don't belong more than excessive politeness

And also did not know about Felicity Green who made more recent history as the first women director in a newspaper board. Another book I need to seek out.

I love the description of the feeling when seeing a football ground as I am the same. Almost with any football ground, anyway. And the author’s description of the Observer office in a "side street opposite the Baynard Castle pub* makes up a glorious few pages.

When is this going to be a TV series? Those are the opening scenes, surely.

I love this book and don't want to return it to the library. This one needs to be bought for the bookshelf.