Telegraph People

Telegraph People celebrates the characters who produced a multi-edition evening newspaper in the  large industrial Midlands city of Coventry across two decades. 

It reveals what went on behind the façade of the Coventry Evening Telegraph offices in Corporation Street. Read about the journalists who put this newspaper together – the dramas, the crises and the fun. 

This was before the digital revolution and… 

  

•     Stories had to be by filed by phone

•     Reporters hammered out their words on typewriters

•     Breaking news from around the globe clattered into the office on tele-printers

•     The news was set in hot metal

•    Pages were torn up hourly to accommodate breaking news and great pictures 

•     Copies were printed in their tens of thousands on giant, thundering presses

•     Vans roared all over the city and neighbouring towns, dropping off copies, including the Saturday night PINK sports edition

•     Tens of thousands of newspapers were delivered direct to homes

These people arguably had the best job ever – journalism. Among them was a young man who embarked on an unlikely career in newspapers.

This exclusive and true story is seen through the eyes of journalist JOHN LAMB, who gained an intimate insight into the Telegraph on three separate occasions – as office boy, deputy sports editor and assistant editor.  

He worked on the smallest and the largest newspapers in the UK, including the Kenilworth Weekly News, the Coventry Evening Telegraph (plus its PINK Saturday night sports edition), the Birmingham Evening Mail, the London Evening News, the News of the World, the Sun, the London Evening Standard and the Birmingham Post.