Fleet Street revisited
Congratulations fo Foreign Correspondents CIub I
disbelief and asking
hey used to call it The Street of
Adventure
- or at least that's
By Ted Thomas
what Arthur Hacker used to call it. The satirical magazine, Private Eye, had a more cynical name, having labelled it The Street of Shame back in the days when it had a lot to be ashamed about. I had an office there for some time and bought a flat in Covent Garden, a brisk
ten minutes walk away, and from that time on I was hooked on
it.
It's a love affair that's been going on for nigh on twenty years or so and was not in the least dimished by the fact that the harlots picked up their skirts and ran off to Wapping, led by the Murdoch bordello of the Neurs of the World, The Times (odd bedfellows to be sure), and The Sunday Times and the Sun (equally odd). The Telegraph relocated on the lsle of Dogs, Ihe Daily Mail and The Evening Standard to Kensington (as befits a lady
of her breeding) and the Express just across Blackfriars Bridge to the wrong side of the River Thames.
yers and journalists - uneasy bedfellows indeed ! El Vino's stillfrowns on ladies who have the temerity to front up at the bar along with their male colleagues reeking of booze
and BO in equal measure. Dick and I endured many measures of El Vino's awful plonk - said by connoisseurs to be okay, "as long as you don't get it on your skin".
became camp followers and went with them -- notoriously, Geoffrey Van Hay's Scribes Cellar, a club with which the FCC had reciprocal membership rights, and a famous retreatforthe infamous Mail crowd.
wives, and retired judge Miles Jackson Lipkin was there too, as I recall. I cannot check up on that because l'm not speaking to John Griffiths until he pays me the magnum of Champagne he owes me as a result of a foolish (on his part) wager.
Simon Twiston-Davies on the Sunday Post's'M' Magazine.
Well, recently stumbling toward El Vino's,
bumped into former FCC member Barry Simpson, still with Reuters and brave enough to face a glass of El Vino's special claret - which could double as paintstripper.
The following day
I met up with
Dr
in
Kensington and presumably Mr Van Hay has gone back to doing what he does best; getting up the noses of the tightfisted newspapermen. lt wasn't long before Fleet Street took on a new life.
house in Chelsea. We lunched together with Tommy Roberts, the Hong Kong architect who gave the late Sir Y K Pao a few sleepless nights and left him with a hole in his long pockets
The Printers Pie restaurant never
The venue was the Wig & Pen, not quite Fleet Street, being more properly on The Strand, but who cares? lt's an-
changed. Standing at the bar with one foot on lhe rail you can still observe "the rich tapestry of life in the fast lane" as I once described it in what was said later by a member of the FCC to be the most baroque piece of journalism ever written. I was standing there one day when the late Richard Hughes hobbled past on a walking stick l'd bought him for his 70th
birthday. We retired to El Vino's, that musty old wine bar frequented by law-
10
THECORRESPONDENT
MAY
1992
incomparable Brigette, aided by London's
best barmaid Connie. I used to see my boyhood hero, Express cartoonist Giles there, and despite heading for his eightieth year he usually had an uncommonly good looking assistant along to brighten things up. Hilary Alexander, now atthe Telegraph, but once the darling of the old China Mail,
Derek Seymour - Jones another ex-FCC stalwart, now living in quite the grandest
Scribes had a deservedly short life
Kong
I met John Griffiths, QC, one time Attorney General in Hong Kong there once, with one of Jim Biddulph's former
I
A few of the best-known watering holes
if all Hong
people were like that. "Yes", I said. Prescala, the subterranean hideaway just opposite the old Express building is another welcome way station in the long stumbling trudge from the Law Courts to Ludgate Circus. lt's presided over by the
other hangout forthe lawyers and journos and is abundant in dark nooks and cran-
nies with little mahogany tables and a wine list that won't cause your expense account to be hurled back in your face with a scornful laugh. The lovely Annette Don, now studying to be a doctor, brightened up the luncheon and later came out of the gloomy interior shaking her head in
is working with David Twiston-Davies, brother of the rotund but incessantly jolly
David was hip deep in a story on Peter Godber, the bent copper who went to jail as the first of a procession of Asia's finest who heard the cell doors slam behind him before being released to live out his re-
tirement in sunny Spain. As the world's expert on Peter Godber - (he was f ramed, of that l'm certain) - I was looking forward to a pot of gold for my own input, only to find that the project had been dropped. Any other antediluvian FCC members who might be going to London and would
fancy a trip down memory lane and an hour or two of wet-eyed reminiscing over a pot of ale about how good it was when Tsimshatsui was fields, should phone or fax me and I'll be glad to put you on the right track. A brief round up on some of the better known spots. The Wig & Pen, The Strand Prescala Club, Fleet Street The Printers Pie, Fleet Street The Cheshire Cheese (under renovation after about 300 years) Scribes Cellar, mercifully deceased El Vino, Fleet Street
On Its Tenth Anniversary