Fire creeps up on you in the most unforeseen of places, just when you least expect it.
Of all the fires that have surrounded me, the most startling arose while I was admiring the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London on the evening of May 19, 1970.
I was at work, editing stories on the World Desk of Reuters newsagency on the fourth floor at 85 Fleet Street … sitting directly opposite an older journalist I much admired: Jack Allen.
It was just before 8 p.m. and everything was as usual.
My shift still had four hours to go, so I was looking forward to a quick counter dinner of cottage pie in The Albion pub a few doors down Fleet Street.
Jack Allen always arrived for work in a pinstripe suit, but he would quickly change into the same old jacket with torn stitching on the shoulders, tufts of padding sticking out, the breast pocket always decorated with a dozen pencils, sharpened points standing up.
His world of experience as a foreign correspondent meant that Jack had now been promoted to the important job of copy-taster on the Reuter World Desk.
This meant he had to sample every story from around the world as soon as it arrived here in Head Office … and immediately decide what to do with it.
Stories poured in so fast from a couple of hundred countries that two men were employed to rip them off a bank of a dozen Telex machines and put them into Jack’s IN box for his decision.
Some of these could wait; others had to be sent off without delay. Some needed re-writing. Some were not worthwhile wasting time on.
Still others just needed a quick read to correct any mistakes before sending them off around the globe by telex at an incredible 60 words a minute.
That was my job tonight, and that was why I was sitting opposite Jack.
I was quick sub so Jack Allen would throw any such stories straight across the desk to me without delay: time and accuracy being the two highest values at Reuters.
We were competing with three other world newsagencies to be first with the news … as Jack would say: “Three hundred newspapers are about to go to print somewhere in the world! … TV and radio bulletins are about to go to air!”
Jack looked like a small English version of Clark Gable … thin black moustache, slightly greying black hair: oiled down and combed neatly back at top and sides. He had an actor’s voice too, which meant he could project instructions around the huge noisy room of journalists.
Most of these Reuter journalists had been foreign correspondents in some particularly difficult part of the world, so nobody ever skited about what they had done: no one cared.
But the story on the World Desk was that Jack Allen had been first on the scene when Che Guevara’s body was found shot to death by soldiers deep in the jungle of south-east Bolivia in 1967.
Apparently, Jack only got out with the story ahead of the opposition by purchasing two mules to take him back to civilisation where he could file this world-shattering story first.
But when he claimed the two mules on his expenses form, the Reuters Head Office accountants wrote back crossly, demanding: “And where are our donkeys?”
I felt an affinity with Jack when I heard this story.
When I was sent to cover the Vietnam War in 1967-68, I was given a one-way ticket to Saigon … and £10 expenses to get there. But when I claimed this on the official Reuter expenses form from Danang I got a letter back from Accounts saying “10 pounds is excessive”.
They wanted me to refund £2 and 10 shillings … one quarter of the money.
Which I did.
On my first day at Reuters in 1965, Jack Allen handed me a story to sub saying “do this up for me, Johnny”.
No one else had ever called me Johnny.
Well, it was better than “Lunn” which was what most English bosses used.
I didn’t correct him because he was an older man, and because I was the very newest person in the organisation. So I continued to be his Johnny for the next 12 months while re-writing other people’s stories in London.
Then Reuters sent me off as a war correspondent to Vietnam; then as their foreign correspondent in Singapore; and then as their man in Indonesia, one of the biggest countries in the world.
This meant spending six weeks in the Stone Age western half of New Guinea.
When I staggered back into 85 Fleet Street four years later – older, thinner, and more sunburnt – I knew that Jack Allen would have by now read hundreds of my stories.
Not surprisingly, he was still wearing the same old torn sports jacket when I sat down opposite him in my old seat. He looked up and threw a story across the desk saying: “Do this one up for me Johnny”!
Again I never corrected him. It made me feel special that he had created his own special nickname, just for me.
Two weeks later, Jack and I were sitting opposite each other handling heaps of stories.
From the long row of clear windows behind me you could look out at the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, but tonight it was particularly spectacular.
Jack took no notice when I said there was a red glow coming over the Anglican cathedral.
His head was buried in newly-arrived stories.
Some other journalists were also admiring the bright glow over St Pauls – like an Australian sunset on a particularly dusty day.
A grey-haired Canadian, Dave Betts, was in charge of the World Desk that night as filing editor – no story went out, even re-written ones, until he had personally perused them.
Across this extensive 24-hour-a-day seven-day-a-week newsroom there were various sections, each comprised of several desks, and each servicing a part of the world: Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, North America, South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Singapore …
The World Desk was in the centre of the factory-floor-sized room because it only handled stories of interest to every country in the world.
Thus Dave Betts had a long microphone in front of him with a heap of buttons so that he could alert all, or any, of the desks to any big upcoming news story.
That strange red glow now filled the sky outside our windows and Dave Betts suddenly stood up at his desk with a phone to his ear, pressed one of his buttons, and announced in Canadian:
“ATTENTION ALL DESKS: THE BUILDING IS ON FIRE! WOULD ALL NON-ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL PLEASE VACATE THE BUILDING NOW … SO YOU DON’T GET KILLED IN THE CRUSH LATER!”
That last bit put me in a little bit of a panic.
I’d been caught in a fire of my own making when I was six years old when I accidentally set my mosquito net on fire while playing with matches in bed … and I’d never forgotten the experience.
After all, I still had the third degree burns to prove it.
I was stuck in the Mater Hospital in Brisbane for three months.
That fire on my mosquito net started tiny but, as I went to get up and hit it with the heel of a shoe to put it out, it suddenly flared up red to the ceiling, engulfing me and setting my pillow on fire.
Mum woke up and rescued me, but not before breaking three of her toes.
Just three years previously, in the rice paddies of the Hiep Duc Valley in Vietnam when a Company of American Marines were ambushed, silver cans of napalm were dropped from American warplanes overhead setting half the valley alight around us ... the flames billowing a fierce red to the sky above … then switching to black.
Now I knew why we were taught at the Convent that Purgatory and Hell were on fire.
As other journalists rushed to leave, I said, as casually as I could manage across the desk: “Jack … uhm … are we essential personnel?”
Jack picked up a sheet of copy paper and inserted it into his Royal typewriter – motioned for the telex operator to stay in his seat – and began to type.
By now the three of us were the only people left on the editorial floor.
Then Jack turned to me with an air I’d never seen before – the look of the scoop-breaking Bolivian jungle correspondent who’d just seen Che Guevara’s bullet-riddled body:
“Johnny,” Jack said, staring into my eyes, “you and I are going to be sitting here until the flames are licking around our arseholes!”
And he finished typing his message for the thousands of Reuter customers around the world.
Looking at it today it seems incredibly calm and official. He marked it URGENT and the telex operator, as they always did, put the time at the start: 1959, or, in civilian terms, 7.59 pm.
We resumed work when Jack told the two of us: “The Reuters news service has been going non-stop all day every day for one hundred and twenty years since it started with homing pigeons … and it’s not going to stop tonight!”
Minutes later we heard something burst loudly through the doors onto the editorial floor.
The three of us swung around as one to look.
It was a fireman. I could tell because he was in uniform and he was wearing a huge polished brass helmet and carrying either a deflated canvas hose or an axe, or both.
He seemed more surprised to see us than we were to see him.
“What are you doing still here!” he shouted across the room. “This building has been evacuated! Get out! Get out! or you’ll be burned to death!”
Jack turned once again to put another sheet of paper in his Royal typewriter – and motioned once again to the telex operator to sit back down. He then typed out another, more detailed, message to all Reuter subscribers around the world.
Meanwhile, outside – unbeknown to us – 25 fire engines and 100 firefighters were attacking our building with 600,000 gallons of water.
Four hundred people had been evacuated.
A fleet of ambulances was standing by.
Journalists outside reported: “Firemen on the roof leapt to safety as a giant tongue of flame shot out of a window … they had to use breathing apparatus as the smoke thickened. The smoke could be seen for miles around and one fireman said: ‘I have never seen so many firemen or fire engines in Fleet Street since the War’.”
Reuter telex operators did nothing else but type stories into their machines all day every working day. So they never, ever, made mistakes.
But that final message Jack sent out – before the three of us abandoned Reuters via a rickety old wooden staircase in an adjoining ancient timber building behind – was so full of errors that I’ve kept it for the last 53 years.
The second telex message on the fire was sent 30 minutes after the first at 2029 or 8.29 p.m.
The first full line, instead of coming out as words, was all punctuation marks, numbers, and even a dollar sign!
It is a memento of the effect fear can have on even the very best of touch-typists.
Illustrations © profusely.illustrated.com
I dunno John, I think you would have taken umbrage at being ordered around by a man in uniform -- even if he was carrying an axe!
I don't think you or Rae will ever be classified as "non-essential".
Hugh
John Sheridan
Strike a light! I would have immediately categorized myself as non-essential and been out of there in a flash!