Inside the Liz Bar was filled with cigarette smoke, the sour smell of beer, and loud voices. Newspaper men were standing at the bar counter together with newspaper women. At the tables, conversations and laughter, the news of the day. Stories told and retold. Opinions freely offered on politics, the economy, and the behaviour of people. It’s like a time capsule. The curtain rises and a panning shot shows an early evening in the 1980s. What takes me back to this scene as a young reporter is the reality of journalists interacting with the real world and sharing their views. It is a vivid scene filled with life, the odour of human sweat, and the immediacy of the moment. I’m wondering what they could have thought of life today, but this is mere speculation. Each generation in their own time. Newspapers were big, filled with large reporting staffs and subs who had a real place filtering through the reams of daily copy. Competition for stories fierce. Misfits and eccentrics who had found their way into a vocation that didn’t pay very well. Rewarded with bylines for exceptional stories and who lived under the real threat of alcohol. Some turning into drunks and, worse still, alcoholics. What stands out for me was the standard of opinion. Lies, half-truths and self-serving propaganda were all ferreted out, ridiculed and dismissed. A fake person couldn’t last for very long before being found out and even shunned or shamed. I was fortunate to witness the Halicon days and the last of the newspaper tradition that had run for nearly a century. Decline set in and by the next decade several newspapers had closed and the remaining ones were struggling. I witnessed the newspaper camaraderie but didn’t enjoy the drinking knowing what ultimate destruction it would reap on people and their families. For me it was best to get out as soon as I could. I had made other plans. It was hard to leave the lure of newspapers but I knew I must. No hankering afterwards to go back. Many years later I visited Fleet Street and saw the grand towering office blocks that had been home to newspapers like the Express. In this great city legendary newspapers had shrunk and moved out to low rental precincts. It’s not healthy to romanticise an era, each has its own fault and the seed of its decline. For Pritchard Street the Liz is gone, an empty vacant lot is all that remains. No takers. No investors for a city on a long and steep decline. Very few if any of those newspaper men and women left. The sweep of history has obliterated all. I am happy that I saw and experienced the bonhomie, the skill, the prowess of those now gone journalists. I am grateful for being a participant in blood and guts reporting with a few yellowowed news cuttings (some with my byline) to remind me that once it was all real. Those days are sliding away from living memory and will soon be mere footnotes in a larger history. The reporter’s spiral notebook, shorthand, the Bic pen and typewriter, pinning “takes” together, — all artefacts of what once was the present and is now a receding past.
