The Fleet Street Girls, by Julie Welch, is a marvellous read of the inspiring and evocative story of the female journalists who broke down barriers in the 1970s and 1980s as women moved up the ranks in Fleet Street for the first time.

Julie Welch, the only “girl in the press box” for many years, was a football reporter for the Observer until 1986. This book is both a memoir of how she became a sportswriter and an account of some of the other women who began careers in journalism during that time when for most of Fleet Street was a male preserve.

“I’ve nothing against women, but why must they always infiltrate?”, the Observer’s deputy sports editor Brian Chapman asked in 1973, after a group of female journalists attempted, unsuccessfully, to gain admission to the all-male Press Club. That was the year that the 24 year old Julie Welch, cardboard press pass in hand, took her seat in Coventry’s Highfield Road stadium to watch Coventry City play against Tottenham Hotspur. She was about to make history as the first woman to report a football match for a national newspaper. “Women in the press box”, she heard a voice behind her growl. “So it’s come to that.”

Welch’s largely anecdotal account is also full of gorgeous details about the newsroom paraphernalia of old and amazing recollection of stories - such as the landmark discrimination case against the legendary El Vino’s refusal to serve women at the bar and one of the greatest scoops in Fleet Street history that of exposing the miscarriage of justice by which Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus had been falsely imprisoned for treason.

However, the book is also very much about price that these pioneering women paid to open these doors and break down glass ceilings - the long hours, the broken relationships, the necessary childcare arrangements to offset the unsocial hours and demands of the job, the misogyny and sexism. These women instigated change and made the impossible possible.

Book Review By Martha Grekos in Fleet Street Quarterly