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Maurice Chittenden

• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781785902826
• eBook ISBN: 9781785903267
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

On a hot, sunny day last August, the final newspaper still working from an office on London's Fleet Street called 'stop the press' and closed its doors for the final time. Thirteen days later it was the turn of award-winning journalist Maurice Chittenden to make his excuses and leave. He was fired from The Sunday Time after a Fleet Street career lasting almost forty years, one that saw him working for a trio of legendary Murdoch editors: Andrew Neil, Kelvin Mackenzie and Derek Jameson.In a rip-roaring trip through his career, he tells how he was involved (accidentally, of course) in the first ever telephone bugging of a member of the Royal Family twenty years before such skulduggery was even thought possible, helped solve the murder of schoolgirl Caroline Dickinson and was credited with bringing down a Tory government.He arrived too late to save his boss the embarrassment of the Hitler diaries, but he exposed the supposed Jack the Ripper confessions and Roswell alien autopsy film as fakes.He sparked a diplomatic incident when he was thrown into jail in Borneo over a lobster. One of the last surviving combatants in The Battle of Wapping, in which an attack on his car led to a police cavalry charge and a bloody riot, he is the most by-lined reporter in The Sunday Times history with up to seven by-lines a week.His career mirrored the rise and fall of Fleet Street and he freely admits that his own excesses played a part in its downfall. The Fleet Street he remembers with fondness no longer exists. But its reputation as the 'Street of Shame' survives in the name of the column in Private Eye which afforded him the plaudit of 'the legendary Maurice Chittenden' in its report of his professional demise.

Table of contents

• Cover
• TITLE PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• PROLOGUE: LAST OF THE HOT METAL BOYS
• CHAPTER ONE: MY FIRST SCOOP
• CHAPTER TWO: THE SUN INVADES FRANCE
• CHAPTER THREE: THE FIRST TIME WE HACKED THE ROYAL FAMILY
• CHAPTER FOUR: A SHAMEFUL EPISODE
• CHAPTER FIVE: ELTON JOHN MARRIES … A LADY
• CHAPTER SIX: AMBUSH ON THE HIGHWAY
• CHAPTER SEVEN: DISASTER AT SEA!
• CHAPTER EIGHT: THE DEMON FIXER OF FLEET STREET
• CHAPTER NINE: DON’T BASH THE BISHOP!
• CHAPTER TEN: HOAXBUSTERS
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: BRINGING DOWN THE GOVERNMENT
• CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FIRST LADY AND THE MOTHER LODE
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN: MY ESCAPE FROM A BORNEO JAIL
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN: SOLVING A MURDER
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN: AT THE MERCY OF THE LESBIAN AVENGERS
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN: RED CARPETS AND BLACK EXITS
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE LEFTIE-BASHING UNIT
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: ROLLED WITH THE STONES
• CHAPTER NINETEEN: BLASTED SPORT!
• CHAPTER TWENTY: LAST OF THE SILVER ARROWS
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: AN ID PARADE AT THE RITZ
• CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: MY LIFE AMONGST THE TRAIN ROBBERS
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: ONE BAD ASSIGNMENT
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: THE LOST WORLD OF BLANKIES
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE QUEEN SAYS THANKS
• CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: GOODBYE TO FLEET STREET
• COPYRIGHT
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