Late extra... staff reunite 50 years after Star papers shut

Published: 21 October, 2010
by TOM FOOT

THEY were rival journalists locked in competition on the London newspaper beat – but all part of the same Fleet Street family.

On Monday, a dozen journalists and former staff of the Star newspaper marked the 50th anniversary of the paper’s demise at their old boozer, the Cheshire Cheese pub in Wine Office Court.

Just around the corner in Whitefriars, journalists of the News Chronicle filled the Classroom restaurant to “bemoan the burial” of their newspaper.

The former colleagues have met each year at their old haunts since owner Cadbury’s closed both titles on the same fateful day in 1960, merging them respectively into the Evening News and Daily Mail.

Lashings of red wine triggered memories of interviews with big names such as Winston Churchill and Elizabeth Taylor and recollections of Fleet Street and its characters: publican “Fat Les”, “Horsemeat” Mick’s greasy spoon and tipster Tony “Captain Co” Cosgrove.

George Vine, 91, told how he entered the Chronicle building aged 27 “on tiptoes”, later notching some “great front-page reports” from a patch “brimming with massive stories”.

Chronicle reporter Geoffrey Goodman – later assistant editor on the Daily Mirror – spoke of a “wonderful team of journalists” including the late Ian McKay, “one of the greatest columnists on any national newspaper”. He added: “He used to say I never imagined I’d be financed by Cadbury’s to preach the gospel of socialism. The Chronicle was a voice of radical feeling without parallel in Fleet Street.”

At the Cheshire Cheese, Star man Ken Dunjohn, 82, said: “You have to be careful not to get too romantic about it. If I told you I was reporting on the Profumo case, you would say: ‘My, how interesting’ – but all I’d been doing was standing outside his house in the rain all day.” But he did have to walk about with a monkey wrench in his pocket for protection after some of his articles enraged unions.

Recalling the days when the paperboys’ cries of “Star, News, Standard” rang out, Star correspondent Sidney Rennert, who lives in St Pancras, said: “There were a number of reasons for the papers’ decline from their heyday when they sold four million copies a day. When commercial TV arrived, that hit the profitable advertising as the big spenders divided up similar-sized budgets among more outlets.”

Mr Dunjohn added: “When the six o’clock news started up, people would just rush off home to watch the TV. It was the same with the racing – the TV stopped people picking up the paper for that too.”