There’s nothing quite like the thrill of your first job on a local paper.
And for Patrick Nicholson, despite working for The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo and retiring as chief sub of The Sunday Times Magazine, he still looks back fondly on life as a junior reporter 60 years ago.

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At a few minutes before nine one March morning in 1947 I stood on the corner of Blackheath Road, on the border of Greenwich and Deptford, and looked across at the offices of The Kentish Mercury.

An imposing edifice, then only 23-years-old, it had the newspaper’s title inscribed in stone at the top of the building, a flag staff and clock and heaving printing machinery that bellowed every Thursday in the basement press room.

It was still standing until recently when the developers moved in, although it had long ceased to be the home of the newspaper which has moved to the group headquarters in Streatham.

I was 16. I was exhilarated. I was apprehensive. I was about to become a reporter.

I had been hired by Harold Bawden, the editor, at 25 shillings (£1.25p now) with the promise of a five-bob rise in six months if my work was satisfactory.

For some reason Harold Bawden had a fearsome reputation, but this short, stocky man with a moustache and blue eyes was not as awesome as his dad, editor before him who looked sternly down from a rolltop desk in a sepia photograph above the mantelshelf in the editor’s office.

Awesome Harold Bawden might have been, but he gave me my chance in journalism after I wrote a passionate letter telling him that it had been my ambition to work in newspapers since I was 11.

He was very proud of the Mercury was Harold Bawden and would refer to it as ‘The Daily Telegraph of local papers’. A far cry from the tabloid redtop it has now become; when it won the provincial paper of the year award long after my time it was described as ‘the little paper with a big Cockney heart’.

It had – indeed, has – played an important part in the community since it was founded in 1833 and was once publicly burned for revealing that cholera existed in the area. One of the penalties, the editor of the day dryly remarked, for publishing unpalatable truths.

I was dressed for the part – Brylcreemed hair raised in a quiff, a grey loose-fitting sports jacket known as a drape, then high fashion for young bucks, pale blue shirt, navy tie with a sizable knot, a Windsor as it is still so called after the Duke’s style, gabardine trousers and light brown shoes.

Later would come the trilby hat, the pork pie – its circular crown gave it the name – duffel coat or white belted trench coat and suede shoes which was what we suburban hacks were told was de rigueur in Fleet Street.

I had some preconceived and inaccurate ideas about my colleagues as I crossed the marble threshold of the Mercury building. I think I expected to walk into a Hollywood film-set of the Thirties and Forties which would be inhabited by sharp-suited newspapermen with trilbies on the back of their heads, the Late Extra sticking out of their jacket pockets and cigarettes drooping from their lips. I should have known better.

My role model, my inspiration for being here at all on this day, was my cousin Roy Nash. He was the family success story when he landed a job sometime in the 1930s with The Star, one of London’s three evening papers which were published at that time from the South London Press.

He didn’t fit the stereotype, his working gear was a well-worn sports coat and flannels so I don’t know why I clung to it. But I was only 16 and my head filled with the most romantic ideas of journalism from reading about the exploits of such giants as Hannen Swaffer, Charlie Hands and the life story of any other Fleet Street legend I could get my hands on.

I had once seen in a local fleapit – a seedy cinema for younger readers – a re-run of the Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht classic 1931 movie The Front Page, the story of a high-profile Chicago reporter who is tricked by his scheming editor into covering one last story before he retires.

It made a lasting impression on me, as did Sir Philip Gibbs’s The Street of Adventure (1909) but not so much as the newspaper career of Edgar Wallace, whose life story was brilliantly captured by Margaret Lane’s 1939 biography.

A swashbuckling journalist, he scooped the world for the Daily Mail with news of the end of the Boer War, aided by an old Army mate who was on sentry duty in the heavily-guarded camp where negotiations were being held in the strictest secrecy.

A railway ran alongside the camp and with the help of coloured handkerchiefs his friend was able to convey to Wallace, travelling up and down the line, that ‘peace was absolutely assured’.

I would stand on the corner of Fleet Street and thrill at the plaque erected to his memory with the stirring inscription:

“He knew wealth and poverty, yet had walked with kings and kept his bearing. Of his talents he gave lavishly to authorship – but to Fleet Street he gave his heart.”

A bust farther up Fleet Street in honour of TP O’Connor, founder of my cousin’s paper The Star, also inspired me:

“His pen could lay bare the bones of a book or the soul of a statesman in a few vivid lines.”

Both those memorials, I’m glad to say, are still in place along Fleet Street and even now, years into retirement, I can’t pass them without stopping.

Part II tomorrow.