How I joined Reuters 70 years ago

Seventy years ago on the Monday after VJ day 1945, at 14 and to earn £5 a week, I started at Reuters - not in Fleet street but at the radio station in Hadley Woods to the north of London. After a week’s “training” I was on shift working. My duties were to receive the Morse and Hellschreiber services to keep the radio monitoring interpreters supplied with records in readiness for whatever happened on the foreign news broadcasts. This included shaving, that is the shaving of the wax Dictaphone cylinders for re-recording. I also had to be ready for overseas journalists on the phone with their pieces of news. Then I had to prepare and send the 6:00 am traffic - those lower priority items from day and night shifts that had to be hand-keyed on an ex-army 50 baud printer to wait for later sending to 85 Fleet Street.

Ah, those were the days! Such was my start in a career in Reuters. And on Monday I shall celebrate by tapping a bottle or two. Cheers! ■