Sex and the World Desk

I have not been to Fleet Street in a long time, maybe because I wish to remember it as it was when Number 85 was Reuters Head Office.

One of my enduring memories of the “Street of Shame” is starting an early Sunday morning shift on the Reuters World Desk in the early 1980s. I took a seat among four colleagues hunched over clipboards of teleprinter paper, reading quickly to catch up with what had happened around the world overnight.

Midway through the file I came across a feature story from New York about the first phone sex lines that had started up in the US. It even gave a telephone number.

When I looked up from what I was reading I found myself alone on the desk with the copytaster. My four other colleagues had disappeared.

I glanced around the editorial floor and saw them on the phone at vacant desks. Chief sub-editor Cy Fox came back grinning and panting, mimicking the sounds he had just heard.

Reuters’ telephone bill must have shot up that day. And probably so did that of thousands of Reuters subscribers around the world.

US telecoms shares rose the following quarter in the New York Stock Exchange. 

PHOTO: Fleet Street before the journalists moved out and the bankers moved in. ■