The Devil Wears Primark. Thoughts about my first year in London as a journalist, 17 years on
Being gifted a "stab-proof hoodie" for "doorstepping" as a naive, antipodean reporter in the capital seemed funny at the time. But nearly two decades on my thoughts on this have evolved.
“We want every cough and spit,” said a Cockney accent before the phone was slammed down.
It was the words that sent a shiver down my spine for my first nine months in London, and still would if I heard them today.
In the past week I’ve seen a few pieces around by journalists on the closure of the London Evening Standard’s daily paper. I didn’t like some of the stories that it published towards the end - someone reminded me last weekend that some were Islamophobic - but obviously it’s a sad day for journalism and local news.
I only did a few shifts on the Standard in my first year in London, 17 years ago. One involved an expose on pirated DVDs being sold in Brick Lane. I asked my mother where the physical copy of this groundbreaking story of mine was last week. She told me that it had been in a box of clippings at home but some got eaten by rats and she wasn’t sure if it was in that box or not.
My shifts for the Standard made up about nine months of “doorstepping” as it’s called, in London. I can’t find an actual Australian definition of this anywhere, but back home I tend to associate doorstepping with a politician holding a press conference with many journalists.
In the UK, I have come to associate doorstepping with someone (me) being fresh off the boat as they say in Britain, not wearing the right clothes but wearing heels (at one point another female reporter took me aside and said “Amy, here’s a tip: don’t wear your good heels”), carrying an A to Z as Google Maps hadn’t taken off yet and trying to get any one to speak to me with - and this could often determine what way that the story would go - a broad Australian accent, as I stood endlessly for hours in the rain, often about to be sick.
According to the BBC, "door-stepping" is used to describe “an attempt to obtain an interview, or piece to camera, from a contributor without prior arrangement or agreement, typically by confronting them in a public space, such as outside their home, workplace or courthouse”.
While I could tell you that I was once sent to hunt down a couple who’d been filmed having sex on top of the Windmill Theatre in Soho, central London, or deployed to Chelsea because Jemima Khan’s cat had gone missing and she and then beau Hugh Grant were desperately looking for it and you could tell. me that this wasn’t a normal day, I can assure you that it very much was. And the next day would be even crazier and the one after that even more so.
Every single reporter who worked for this notorious news agency had their own stories about the stories that they were sent to cover while working for it.
What only made mine a bit different is that I wasn’t wearing the right clothes half the time, didn’t know where I was going, and sounded quite different.
It was a great introduction to this diverse city of London for me though. One minute I was standing on a council estate in Elephant and Castle looking at some holes in a door and wondering what they were, the next I was in Ladbroke Grove trying to get a comment off a brewery heiress Sabrina Guinness because she was rumoured to be dating Paul McCartney (more on him later).
I was only about seven days into London and still living in a Bayswater hostel in leafy west London when I was offered a trial shift with this company, through the sibling of a friend who I’d met two years earlier in the Long Street Backpackers in Cape Town. He was working for them at the time. Both of them are two of the most laid back people that I’ve ever met, I can’t believe that they’re British.
“Seems to like it. Paid well, goes home on time,” his sibling told me in a text message.
Nothing could be further from the truth, I’d soon discover when one night at 9pm I was still standing around a Wood Green council estate before the phone rang and a voice said “right, knock it on the head boss”.
For putting my life at risk I would earn an entire £50. I was barely eating. At the same time I was trekking around London, often from the south of the river to north, very quickly via tube then walking. Despite all the minuses, it was the best physical exercise ever. I’d never been so fit.
Of course I could have knocked it on the head probably three hours earlier that night. But if they could squeeze another order out of you from “The Screws” which was what people called News of the World, The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Sunday People, The Daily Express (who then and today still calls itself the World’s Greatest Newspaper), The Mirror or the raft of supposed “real life” magazines such as “Take an Overdose” as some referred to Take a Break as, even if you were pounding the pavement about to be accosted and abused by the relatives of criminals, then they would.
Of course your byline would never appear on any of the UK nationals despite your efforts, not that you may want it to sometimes, with the copy being rewritten by a tabloid reporter from the safety and confines of their cosy and warm office who was earning three times more than you.
“Knock it on the head” was another one of their favourite lines along with “every cough and spit” and “go and get yourself a cup of tea”. The latter would soon turn into two and three and four cups of tea and sometimes it would even turn into an afternoon of shopping for me - yes I had discovered the UK high street stores which hadn’t yet hit Down Under and was buying a new cheap outfit every week - while they were waiting for another order and left you hanging.
It’s maybe ironic that since my second shift involved me quivering with fear outside the house of a Cabinet minister trying to decide whether I should really ask him if he had an affair or not, I don’t have the slightest inkling where I went on my first or what I wrote. Maybe I subconsciously erased the experience from my memory.
But I remember getting up in the dark in a dorm hostel, ironing my clothes and getting dressed in the dark and then sneaking out while trying not to wake up all the other backpackers to an office tucked away behind council buildings in east London for my trial shift.
I was so nervous I felt sick. I’d left Australia six months earlier - I still remember going to the bank to get traveller’s cheques, remember those, the day Steve Irwin died. I’d been living in Bolivia volunteering at a children’s home (something else that I wouldn’t do these days along with doorstepping but more on it later) before spending some time travelling in Peru and Brazil and landing in London on January 7.
I’d wanted to live in London and travel in Europe. But more than anything I wanted to work on Fleet Street. I may not like or agree with much of what Piers Morgan says. But in his diaries, which I’d soon devour in a whole weekend that year, there’s a line where he says that he was so ambitious that he would have jumped in the Thames. Although I wouldn’t have done any one over, I also felt this way.
Now I’d found a brilliant place to work - and so easily! But for an organisation supplying stories to the paper that once had an undercover reporter who dressed up as a fake Sheikh and were at the centre of some of history’s biggest exclusives involving the royals, they operated from very humble digs.
Not that you were in the office very much. In fact you’d ring in every morning from home. My second shift, my first Sunday shift, was after I’d passed my trial and was told that I’d done a “perfectly reasonable job” which is the most praise you’d ever get out of them. I was then told to ring in that Sunday and they’d assign me a story.
I was hating London. Big time. Particularly the weather. As I gazed out the window of the hostel at the grey sky, as all the other backpackers fresh off the boat went off to do the open top bus tour, I remember thinking that this London experience wasn’t really what it was cracked up to be. I couldn’t figure out the Tube, either.
I waited for the phone to ring for what seemed like an eternity. I started to wonder if anything would ever come up and if it didn’t would I still get paid for setting aside one of my first Sundays in London? Not that it was BBQ weather.
When the call finally came and I was told to pop round to a flat near St James's Palace and Pall Mall to get a comment from a Cabinet minister and the then overseer of the prosecution service over whether he’d been unfaithful to his wife for a newspaper that is now defunct - like I was being asked to get some milk from the corner shop- I nearly threw up. I was just days into life in this foreign city.
I knew I had to do it. After all if I didn’t I would have only lasted about one week as a hard-hitting Fleet Street reporter. I didn’t have a choice.
I legged it into town, A to Z in hand but I also had to ask for directions. Then I stood outside his house for a few minutes, guards watching, working out the courage to buzz him while trying to stop myself passing out.
The agency who I was working for would have meant nothing to him but he wasn’t going to come out and invite me in for a cup of coffee anyway. By the time I’d gotten a “no comment”, a small press pack including photographers had gathered outside the house.
I relayed the message to the rest of them. And then an antipodean photographer carrying all her equipment took me aside and explained to me that there was a kind of game that was played where all the media sent out on jobs like this would get together and corroborate their story before calling the editors in the office.
So was she saying that I’d gone through all this terror for nothing?
I went back to the Bayswater hostel and that was the start of my nine months or so traipsing across London knocking on doors and chasing people down for comment. I did so much of it in fact and was quite often on council estates late at night that I didn’t move out of the hostel for about nearly two months as I didn’t have the time to go and look at flatshares.
I went everywhere. I went to the exclusive King Edward VII hospital when the now Queen had an operation and stood outside in the cold. I’m not sure who was going to come out and speak to me.
I went to Peter Doherty’s court hearings and plenty of others in grand looking courts, always marvelling at them, even if they were in then undesirable parts of London such as Snaresbrook and Wood Green. The UK of course had a history that Australia didn’t. Courts were a particular nightmare, because the bosses wanted to make money so even if nothing had happened they still wanted to get something to offer the red tops and their £50 of flesh from you. We were also sent to employment tribunals far and wide “on spec” to see if we could find anything that they could sell to the papers on quiet days.
I went to see Doherty’s then girlfriend Kate Moss pose in a shop window of the flagship Top Shop store (RIP) in a long orange dress on Oxford Street. One of the highlights of that year and one of the only times I was sent out on a story and didn’t feel nauseous.
I went down the road to Soho when Darren Hayes of former Australian band Savage Garden was arrested after allegedly racially abusing a waiter in a Thai restaurant.
I went to Margaret Thatcher’s house.
I went to the Commonwealth Institute building in ritzy Kensington, worth scores of millions, when squatters invaded it - and was lucky to get out after getting lost because it was so big and there was no electricity so no lights.
But mostly I went to council estates, to the aftermaths of shootings and stabbings, particularly teenage killings. In 2007, there were sadly 26 teens who lost their lives due to violence. (To compare it to 2023, 21 were killed that year).
I stood around on so many doorsteps that I soon realised that it wasn’t called doorstepping for nothing. Sometimes, when the person you were trying to speak to wasn’t home, the neighbours would come out to see what you wanted. Then others would join them. Sometimes there’d be so many people outside it was like a street party. Or you’d go and see if people were home, then you’d go to the pub and sit there for hours on your own. I felt like an idiot doing this. There must have been bar staff all across London wondered what we were doing.
Some people were friendly, but many were not. I remember crying in a gutter one day after the family and friends of a man who had just been sentenced for killing three people screamed at me to get out of their house after they’d answered the door. I’ll never make it now, I thought.
A lot of the time we were sent by papers like the Mail to try to get interviews with the families of murderers who had just been sentenced. We were always told to try to approach people and try to persuade them by saying that besides the victims they themselves as parents had also lost children.
I dreaded phoning the office. I’d already been told off was over a story over a Stradivari violin going up for auction at Christie's. I can barely remember the details and what might go wrong with a story about the Stradivari violin, you might wonder?But I remember being bollocked, a word I now heard a lot in the UK.
If you were lucky, you could shelter from the grim climate and pass the time putting the world’s wrongs to rights in a photographer’s car. But this didn’t happen very often as the snappers, who were also on a measly wage, couldn’t afford to bring their cars into central London (incidentally one of the stories I covered early on was a congestion charge protest) or didn’t have them. This forced them to lug their stuff all around the city.
They had another challenge: trying to gather serious looking portraits while doorstepping for their portfolios to move onto better titles and better paying work. But it was hard for them to get anything other than people running out their front door with leaves in their hair, one photographer explained to me one day as we camped outside a house on a story in Wimbledon about a child who had stoles the family credit card.
Most of the photographers looked out for reporters. One time I was sent to New Addington in Croydon. After a trip from Waterloo and then a tram journey from east Croydon, I discovered that I needed to go to the very top of yet another towering council estate to find a woman.
“I’ll just go up to see if she’s home,” I told the photographer, like I was the prince trying to save Rapunzel.
“Like hell you will, I’m coming up with you,” he replied and barged up the stairs in front of me with his gear.
What really brightened up the day were the reactions of the Brits to my accent.
“Where you from, love?” asked a security guard one day as I placed my things on the conveyor belt to be x rayed at Woolwich Crown Court while covering the extradition proceedings against Abu Hamza al-Masri. The radical cleric was then serving a seven-year jail term in Britain UK for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred.
Because I knew the name of my small town, which had an Indigenous name and another Brit had told me sounded like the band Chumbawamba, wouldn’t mean anything to him and I’d lived there I just said Sydney.
“From Bondi to Plumstead,” he said. “Something's gone terribly wrong, hasn't it?” There was laughter.
Of course like many of the other places where I was sent to during that year such as Clapton, once dubbed “Murder Mile” by an editor who also laughed as he sent me there one dark afternoon, Plumstead and surrounds has changed.
Although I wasn’t in the office very much when I was I took copy. One memory of this that stands out is taking copy from the Diana memorial service and taking down quotes from a Diana superfan who said that he’d been so overcome with emotion in the church that his legs nearly caved in. I have to admit I had to put the phone down, just for a minute.
Another day I was in the office a PR had sent in a “stab-proof hoodie”. According to a story published in September that year, fear of knife crime was creating demand for these.
I’m not sure whether it was just that I happened to be the only one in the office that day or the editors were particularly worried about me (I’d like to think it was the latter) but I was the chosen recipient of the tracksuit top. Someone took of photo of me, which I still have. In it I’m grinning from ear to ear. We all laughed. But was it really that funny?
Teenage killings had continued over the summer. In June I was doing a Sunday Standard shift when a girl was fatally shot in Tottenham in a north London club. I was sent up there to find family and friends to speak to for tributes. Only now instead of just being sent addresses to go and knock, I was being sent profile photos off a new site - Facebook. I remembered a comment by a news editor about whether this new site would change doorstepping.
The same month, a teenage girl stabbed another in Croydon, for the first time I was told, and I spent a couple of days there on this story.
One big story of the summer had been the Meredith Kercher. But an even bigger one had been Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. It had been the “story of the summer that had really kept us going,” I remember one news editor (not at the agency but on a paper where I’d started to do shifts) remark.
We were also sent to the Family Records Centre (FRC) in Islington to get various certificates for some of the reporters on the tabloids. The details from these could be used for other stories and generate further doorsteps. We had to pay for it with our own money, then they’d reimburse us. This was quite the moneymaker for this agency. Only in June of the previous year it had been announced that the FRC would be relocating to the National Archives at Kew in west London, quite a hike, by 2008. The agency would no longer be able to tell us to just pop over to pull a few records.
The year dragged on.
What I still didn’t understand was that despite this job nearly being so unsafe and so exploitative, hardly any of the other reporters seemed to complain at all. A friend and I would talk between the two of us and console each other and another person joked that the news desk was an “abuse line”. But no one ever said that they were going to quit, no one ever mentioned the union.
The job was a viper's nest of danger and exploitation, yet most seemed to swallow it whole. It was as if a silent spell had been cast over some of them. It was, as I’ve often heard Brits say, the done thing. But the done thing is not necessarily the right thing. Even today it still reminds me of that line in the book the Devil Wears Prada where Andrea describes seeing Emily’s eyes glaze over while working for Miranda Priestly. Was I in the Devil Wears Primark? Or was I just not as tough as them? Or were things just different back home in Oz?
In November of that year, I was doing some volunteering leafleting at Australia House for the upcoming election. In the queue was a woman I used to work with. I told her where I’d been working and she told me that she'd worked there in circa 1988 - for £50.
“And it was ridiculous,” she said. “I was standing around on council estates all day.”
By now the seasons had really changed. Winter was coming and to borrow an overused tabloid headline that could also be applied to summer, autumn or spring, it would be the winter of my discontent unless I did something about it.
“Can you get up to Maccas?” someone on the end of the line had said when they phone me one morning. Back home in Australia, “Maccas” is McDonalds. It took me a few seconds to figure out where I was being sent to do.
Spoiler alert: I never got a scoop from Paul McCartney, who was rumoured to have a new girlfriend at the time. Funnily enough he didn’t come outside, invite me in, put the kettle on and then sit down for a tell-all interview, every cough and spit.
But I did nearly get pneumonia.
“I’ve been to the library, had a pretty god day,” said the sibling of my friend who’d gotten me the job when I went to take over from them.
I couldn’t bear to think of doing any more of this in the snow, so I quit the next day.
I still find it funny that unlike the perpetrators who left their marks all over the crime scenes where I was sent to day after day and were later caught, there were hardly any traces of my own on the stories that I filed. Each one was rewritten by a journalist on a tabloid paper who put their name on it. For all my hard work and exhaustion, sweat and tears, all I have left now is my memories and an equally fading hard red diary with the name of the story and £50 written on each date.
After I quit I went from roaming across London to doing office-based newspaper shifts where large chunks of some titles were copy and pasted from the news wires and the only time you ever left the building was for lunch. But it wasn’t lost upon me that suddenly I was the one reading the wire copy coming in late at night from someone walking in my shoes - albeit not my Australian and cheap UK high street ones - out late patrolling a council estate for far less than what I was earning, and was being asked to rewrite it. Was I a terrible person for doing so?
It’s hard to say what I gained from that year. Probably the best thing was that it was a swift introduction to London, a diverse city of such great extremes, wealth and poverty. I saw its glittering facade and its hidden depths, its opulent mansions and its gritty underbelly.
It gave me knowledge of a large section of the UK media.
It kept me fit.
But I also wonder if I could have done without it. It was hugely exploitative and dangerous yet the salary barely covered the rent.
I was hugely ambitious and energetic, new to London and naive in those days though. Pacing those streets and knocking on doors for those titles put me at the centre of the world, I thought. It was incredibly terrifying, but there were times when it could be exciting. At the time, it was what I wanted to do. But that didn’t mean that it was right, or safe.
We’d occasionally have work drinks when I was working for the agency. We’d go to the pub and to parties and talk and laugh. But the elephant in the room was always why did those news editors push us into such dangerous situations? It wasn't just that a young Australian in the wrong clothes who sounded funny shouldn't have been doing the types of things that they asked us to do, no one should have. And that’s before we even get to the ethics of doorstepping.
I know it wasn’t just me who felt this way. Last year I was speaking to a friend of a friend who worked there. She reminded me of some of the things that we were made to do.
If I saw these editors today nearly 20 years on, I know that the elephant would still be there.
I will always wonder how some of them could send me out the door to some of the most dangerous parts of London in a stab-proof hoodie and laugh. It’s a tough question, but then they always gave me tough questions to ask. That we were ambitious and young and needed experience didn’t make it right, either. I hoped that things have improved for young reporters, but if they have I bet it hasn’t been by a lot.
I’m not sure if it led to anything that I really wanted to do. But then if it had, maybe I wouldn’t have gone to Africa, where I’d wanted to report from since I was in high school and an experience that I now wouldn’t haven given up for all the scoops in the world. It took me 13 more years to do it.
I had a lot of doors open and close for me 17 years ago in my first year in London. And I had plenty slammed right in my face. But it’s true that when one door closes, another will always open, even if it takes a while. And if it doesn’t, you make it happen.
God, that's a tough life in journalism, but it sounds fun too. Except for all the waiting around in the rain and the cold for people like Paul McCartney.
The stabproof hoodie sounds a good idea. If you can't completely ban knives (because they're used in kitchens to prepare dinner), why not reduce the risks? After all, the police and military have them to reduce when in dangerous situations.
I wanted to be a technology journalist and tried to do freelance work in the early 1990s, but had to give up because the rejection rate. When I eventually "sold a story" to the Mail on Sunday in 1995 for £400, it didn't appear under my name. The consumer affairs editor I sold it to, Christopher Leake, totally rewrote it and it appeared under his byline, with me just quoted as a "source" in the text! Not exactly helpful and the money didn't cover all the work on previously unpublished articles. The only places that I could be an author in, were obscure technical specialist magazines paying £80 per printed page (small 8-point type so it worked out around 20p per word).