By CHRISTOPHER WILSON

Back in the day did you always turn left and head back to the office when you tumbled out of the Cheshire Cheese? Or did you allow your feet take you in the other direction, up Wine Office Court and into New Street Square?

Just to get your bearings, in case Fleet Street’s cat’s cradle of interconnecting alleys has faded in memory, you’d be heading north up towards the Mirror building, maybe meeting a friend in the Stab or, if you lived dangerously, Vagabond’s. Or making your way home via Holborn tube.

If you ever did, you’d have walked under the shadow of these fellows – The Three Printers, the only known public monument to UK journalism. Sturdy, distant, with an air of authority, they were sculpted by Wilfred Dudeney in 1954 and represent not three printers but one, the sculptor’s surname cleverly reversed on the printer’s stick. The other two figures are an agile newsboy, his arm weighed down with the latest editions, and in the centre, the towering figure of an editor – solid, supreme, authoritarian.

Together these three represent the very apex of newspaper history, when the nationals sold 56 million copies a day and households often bought two and sometimes three different titles. Pre-television, print news was the principle source of information for the population and, one might therefore think, the greatest power in the land.

No greater introduction to the glorious profession could there be as I climbed the steps of Westminster Press over which the Three Printers stood guard. Like most of us, I was about to launch my journey into Fleet Street via local newspapers, and here, sixty years ago, was my start-point.

Dudeney’s work jolted me. There’s a greatness about it which triggered twin thoughts – am I good enough to join these remote figures, or is it just a presumptuous dream? But if I do, can I become as great as they?

The answer to both, naturally, was no. But that first encounter stayed etched in memory as I worked my way through the provinces, and when I finally made it to Shamestrasse I’d often take a detour to gaze on these stone men. With their beauty and solidity they had become my guardian angels.

Years passed. Fleet Street fragmented, its diaspora reaching Kensington and the Isle of Dogs and Wapping, but the totem remained, austere and alone now, in New Street Square.

Then one day in 2009 it was gone. Vanished. I walked into the square to discover a scene of devastation not so different from 1941 when the Luftwaffe first levelled the place. Bulldozers were busy at work, dust hung in the air – and Dudeney’s masterpiece was nowhere to be seen.

I asked around, was sent to the foreman’s office, called the contractors’ HQ – what’s happened to the guardian angels? Nobody knew or cared.

In vain I pointed out that this disappearance was a tragedy — the only known monument to so many lives, so many victories and failures, so many tears and laughs, so many friendships formed and drinks drunk. So many headlines.

All gone.

I finally tracked them down. They were in a builders’ yard in Watford and bound for the crusher. Tomorrow they would be dust.

I called in the heavy brigade – in this case the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, the freeholders of New Street Square — and long story short, Dudeney’s masterpiece was whisked away. The guardian angels had been saved.

But no good deed goes unpunished. I had it in mind that since nobody wanted or cared for the sculpture the most appropriate place to relocate it would be the churchyard of St Bride’s where – like it or not – all our souls finally come to rest.

But I’d reckoned without a grabby Goldsmiths curator who, blithely ignoring its significance to the world of journalism, just saw Dudeney’s work as a fancy piece of garden furniture, and without further consultation, spirited it off to a small square opposite Goldsmiths Hall where it rests to this day.

Technically, Three Printers was not the Goldsmiths’ to do with as they pleased – it was commissioned and paid for by Westminster Press and belonged to that company’s heirs. But in the heat and dust of the moment nobody bothered to check, and as people are prone to irritatingly point out, possession is nine points of the law.

If you’ve read this far by now you might be asking – what does it matter? Some lumps of handsome Portland stone have been saved and found a new home where people can visit if they wish. What’s the beef?

Just this. Journalism as we knew it has gone. There’s a new means of disseminating information which may be better or worse than the one we knew and loved. But for me, that lost world — our world — is wrapped up in those Three Printers, and I still long for them to find their rightful home among the souls and the ghosts who inhabit St Bride’s Church, the journalist’s final resting-place.

Maybe one day they will.

27 September 2025