On This Day: National newspapers hit streets again after the month-long Fleet Street strike

APRIL 21, 1955: National newspapers all hit the streets again after a month-long strike by Fleet Street’s print workers ended on this day in 1955.

Seven hundred maintenance men returned to the Telegraph, Times, Mirror, Express, Mail, News of the World, Sketch, Herald and Chronicle despite owners refusing to pay them an extra £2 a week.

The titles lost £3million during the walkout and couldn’t cover the Budget, Prime Minister Winston Churchill's resignation and the announcement of a general election.

A British Pathé newsreel filmed news-hungry Londoners devouring copies of their favourite papers after a 26-day absence.

It also filmed the ghost town that was central London’s Fleet Street before the presses were switched back on.

The walkout by electricians and engineers maintaining the printing machines led to 23,000 others, from journalists to paper makers, being out of work for a month.

The Guardian was the only national paper that was unaffected by the strike because it was then printed in Manchester and not in central London’s Fleet Street.

The lack of newspaper sports pages led to a drop in business for bookmakers, with some doing only 5% of their normal trade because gamblers couldn’t get information.

However, some sectors have benefited from the absence of the national press – notably, sales of book and magazines boomed.

C J William, of W H Smith’s, said: ‘Never was there such a rapid sale for magazines. For the cheap editions of books we had to scour London.’

[On This Day: World’s first Legoland opens]

Also, extra copies of American newspapers such as the New York Times were also being flown in and bought in record numbers.

And several libraries reported a jump of more than 10% in borrowing during the month of the strike.

The walkout demonstrated both the importance of newspapers – now mitigated by 24-hour TV news and the Internet – and the power of unions in the industry.

Strikes, including one that meant the Times went unpublished for a year between 1978 and 1979, remained relatively common until the 1980s.

Rupert Murdoch, who also bought the Times and its sister paper in 1981 to add to his News of the World and The Sun titles, was responsible for curbing union power.

He secretly equipped a new printing plant in Wapping, east London with less labour-intensive technology and found an alternative union to staff it.

[On This Day: MP Terrence MacSwiney dies in first major Irish republican hunger strike]

Then, when the National Graphical Association, the main print union, called a strike in over pay and conditions in 1986, News International sacked all 6,000 taking part.

It led to a bitter year-long strike with dozens of journalists also refusing to cross increasingly fierce picket lines.

Nevertheless, like the 1984 miners’ strike, the Wapping dispute would also fail and become one of two landmark defeats to erode the labour movement.

They failed to stop a single day of production and Murdoch was able to produce and distribute his papers at a vastly reduced cost.

His success encouraged other newspapers to adopt new technology and leave Fleet Street for cheaper premises and lower labour costs in east London.

[On This Day: Soviet forces enter Berlin, 1945]

Within two years none of the major titles that had once dominated the famous City thoroughfare remained there.

Reuters, a news agency, remained the only major media organisation on the street until it too moved in 2005.