There’s nothing quite like the thrill of your first job on a local paper.
Former Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo and nationals man Patrick Nicholson looks back on his cub reporter years.

The reality of that first newsroom was worlds away from my romantic expectations.

The room was floored with faded linoleum and there was a bare electric light bulb, a gas fire and tables with a couple of ancient typewriters, still regarded with some suspicion by old hacks who preferred to handwrite their copy.

The smell of stale tobacco smoke hit you immediately you opened the door and rich coughs were punctuated with: ‘Those bloody fags!’

I was a boy among men and the other members of the staff were all middle-aged and seemed very old. And far from the sharp-suited Hollywood reporters they were a fairly shabby lot, bearing in mind, of course, that the war hadn’t been over long and this was the age of austerity with clothes on ration.

I was in awe of them and for a long time addressed them deferentially as ‘Mr’, as I did Harold Bawden until the day I left. Even though they didn’t fit my Hollywood image – apart from the drooping cigarettes – they were real reporters, battle-scarred after years on the South East London news beat, the principal circulation area of the KM, despite its title.

George McCullum, for instance, was the irascible police reporter and deputy editor who would noisily unwrap his cheese and onion sandwiches in the press box at Greenwich Magistrates’ Court and snort his disapproval at sentences with which he disagreed.

He’d been there so long that he was a law unto himself and nobody, not even the presiding magistrate, dared say anything.

Les Seaman wrote like an angel and was used for all the offbeat stories. He became another role model for me.

Then there was Ticker Atkins (his real name was Ron and I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how he got his nickname – sorry). Ticker lived a suburban life as sedate as the Austin Seven he drove until his wife died, when he bought an open tourer with a leather strap round the bonnet, married a gorgeous black nurse and went to live in a place in the sun.

It was said he drowned while swimming in a lagoon but I was never able to verify this. Very Somerset Maugham.

Later a girl reporter joined the staff. Daphne her name was; she was 19 and she introduced me to smoking. On quiet afternoons we would sneak off to a local cinema with our fags long before such habits were banned in cinemas.

One freelance who worked for us regularly would write his stories by hand on ‘flimsies’ – very thin sheets which could be duplicated copiously with carbon copying paper inserted between each of them.

Flimsies had also been used when reporters employed homing pigeons to get their copy to newspapers in the days before telephones were an integral part of our life. Yes, you laptop users, this was true! Mind you, they were before my time.

We had a stern head printer, all white hair and leather apron. And then there was the fearsome Mr Swan, the chairman of the company. He too had white hair and a beard and dressed like the Victorian gent he was.

When I came back to the paper after two years’ National Service he sent for me. He looked me up and down. “The Army has made a man of you,” he snapped in his abrupt style and gave me a salary of £6 a week, a fortune for a 20-year-old in those days.

I would like to say that in the time-honoured way for journalists of my generation I started by making the tea. I can’t. I fetched it from the café opposite the office and also bought Mr Bawden’s fags and evening papers.

I filed the weekly issue and the photographic blocks (does anyone, apart perhaps from the Grey Cardigan, remember blocks?), sent out complimentary copies and typed some letters for him.

These were the only mundane tasks I was required to do. For the rest I was out on the streets of South East London growing up on the job simply by doing it.

You must remember there was no training scheme, no work placements. Much later Kelvin MacKenzie trod the same path as a l7-year-old district reporter for the paper.

Part III tomorrow.