The Broader Picture: 'Fleet Street'

I DON'T KNOW why I wanted to be a journalist. (Wanting to find things out? Wanting to write things down? Wanting to be Kenneth Tynan?) But it certainly had nothing to do with the playing cards on this page. They came, nicely packaged in their original red cardboard box - Fleet Street] emblazoned in silver - from my grandparents' house when my granny died in 1955. Rather more interesting things for a ten-year-old emerged from the trunk at the same time - a stuffed canary, a tiny stuffed crocodile, old pictures from photographic studios in Indian army cantonments - and the cards were put away and forgotten. Fleet Street and newspaper rivalries didn't mean much in our house, even though (something I didn't know at the time) several important items of household reference and decoration were the fruits of the newspaper wars of the 1930s, when my parents were young and poor and did not look a free gift in the mouth. The Home Doctor, guaranteed to make the reader believe he was dying of several diseases simultaneously, must have arrived when my father agreed to the proposition of a newspaper canvasser on the doorstep that he took the News Chronicle. Odham's English Dictionary was the result of a similar call and a return to the Daily Herald. The print of the Boyhood of Raleigh may have come from Reynolds News, though my mother thinks it was more likely coupons from Allinson's Bread.

There is nothing new about newspaper wars, or the weapons with which newspapers choose to fight them. Price cuts, free gifts, Lobby Lud ('You are Lobby Lud and I claim my pounds 5]') - all of them commonplace in the 1930s and all with their parallels today. It can be a fierce and ruthless business, which has very little to do with wanting to find things out, or with Kenneth Tynan. These cards, which were probably printed in the early 1920s, predate the rivalries, amalgamations and closures of the next decade, and any newspaperman or woman looking at some of these titles today must shiver a little at the thought of their trade's easy mortality. Pall Mall, the Paper That Gets Home and Goes Home, whatever became of it? Or the Globe? Or the Star? All of them with their customers, their 'loyal readers', their editors abandoning sobriety after the first edition, their office jokes, their nightly panics, their ranks of paste pots on the sub-editors' desk. And when these papers closed, with beer and whisky in the office pub, pledges to keep in touch, did anyone shout about choice in a democracy? Did anyone, in fact, notice?

I don't know how often my grandparents, sitting soberly at home in Fife 70 years ago, played this game, but judging from the mint condition of the cards I imagine not a lot.

It helps if you can imagine yourself as Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black or Lord Rothermere; the idea is that you collect a full set of eight daily newspapers, or eight evenings, Sundays, weeklies or magazines. You buy and you sell. Budding newspaper tycoons must have filled suburban drawing-rooms with the kind of sights and sounds you can see today on the trading floor of a futures exchange. Rule Four states: 'Having decided what set you will try for, on the word 'Go' from the dealer try to sell the cards you don't want, shouting their names - Times, Punch etc. Don't wait for turns, start right away]'

There are nine rules in total. Nine more than the real Fleet Street had then, or has today. ]

(Photographs omitted)