I Was Rupert Murdoch's Figleaf

by John Bull

Overview

A pale ray of sunlight seeps through a dusty stained glass window to light a shabby congregation - all kneeling, eyes closed in devout prayer: “Thank you, Lord. Thank you for saving us.” The scene is a Fleet Street pub at lunchtime - and, as yet, hardly a drop’s been touched. I stand up, cross myself, dust the knees of my corduroy trousers and reach to take a grateful sip of my pint of London Pride. All around me my fellow workers are rising from their knees: men - and a few women - all known to the world as penny liars, scribbling scum, foot-in-the-door merchants, callous bastards, and reptiles. The massed hacks of the News of the World. We are celebrating a crucial moment. Just ended is a long, bitter financial war. It has been the saving of the world’s best-selling Sunday paper from the grasping hands of the monster - Robert Maxwell. And our unlikely saviour? A newcomer to the Fleet Street jungle, a raw young hayseed from the Australian outback - Rupert Murdoch. In this lively memoir, John Bull lifts the lid on what it was really like to work on the ‘News of the Screws’ in its heyday, producing what the staid British Establishment called a ‘torrent of filth’ every Sunday - and selling four million copies a week.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909183766
Publisher:	Andrews UK
Publication date:	04/08/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

John Bull was born in 1935. He grew up in Gosport, Hampshire, and trained as a reporter on the Portsmouth Evening News. His subsequent provincial newspaper career included stints for the South London Press, where Battersea was his 'beat' area; the Bath Chronicle; and the Southern Evening Echo in Southampton. He worked in Paris, for the Associated French Press, before moving to Fleet Street where he wrote the John Field column for the News of the World (with a weekly readership of more than 12 million), and worked as a sub-editor on the Daily Mirror. His skills as a newspaper 'doctor', turning around failing papers and putting them back on the road to success, have been called on many times, most notably when he became editor of Sunday Sport in the 1980s. His previous memoirs, The Night They Blitzed The Ritz and The Smile on the Face of the Pig, are both published by Chaplin Books.