The Bootle Boy: My Untidy Life

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There are some books that resonate because of their subject matter, and others because they take you straight back to where you came from. The Bootle Boy did both for me. Growing up in Merseyside, with my dad now living in Bootle, there was something wonderfully familiar about Les Hinton’s portrait of the place - its humour, its characters and its pride.

But the Bootle of Hinton’s childhood is only the beginning of an extraordinary journey. At 15, having left school with no qualifications, he landed a job as a copy boy on an Adelaide newspaper owned by a young Rupert Murdoch. It was the beginning of a relationship that would span more than five decades and take Hinton from copy boy to reporter, foreign correspondent and editor, and ultimately to the highest echelons of international media.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for me, I loved discovering the role reading played in that journey too. Hinton had always been a reader, but once he entered the newspaper world he realised just how much catching up he had to do. He buried himself in books, newspapers, history and biographies of the great media moguls - educating himself voraciously for the world he had entered.

And what a vantage point he went on to have. Fleet Street, hot metal, big stories, powerful personalities and a digital revolution that transformed the newspaper business almost beyond recognition. Hinton was there through an extraordinary period of social, political and technological change, from the days when print ruled to the rise of global media empires and an internet that would fundamentally disrupt the economics of newspapers.

Running alongside it all is his complicated half-century relationship with Rupert Murdoch, taking Hinton from teenage copy boy to one of Murdoch’s most senior executives, before his extraordinary 52-year career with the media empire came to an abrupt end in 2011, when he resigned as chief executive of Dow Jones amid the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal.

My only frustration? Murdoch. After more than fifty years at his side, I occasionally wanted Hinton to get further off the fence. He certainly doesn’t shy away from Murdoch’s faults, but there were moments when I wanted him to push harder, tell us more and be a little less diplomatic about one of the most powerful and controversial figures in modern media.

Perhaps that’s unfair given such a long and complicated relationship, but I definitely finished those sections wanting more. His own description of Murdoch as variously charming and irascible, forgiving and fierce, tough and surprisingly kind perhaps demonstrates just how complicated that relationship was.

Yet what struck me most wasn’t the famous names or extraordinary positions. It was that the boy from Bootle never seems very far away.

And that’s because The Bootle Boy is about much more than newspapers. It’s about family, ambition, resilience, curiosity and grabbing opportunities when they appear. With both hands. Hinton himself talks about the toughness and perseverance of his family and how those qualities stayed with him, while describing Bootle quite simply as the place where he belonged.

It’s also about where we come from and how those beginnings continue to shape us, however far we go, however far we travel.

Warm, candid and hugely entertaining, this is a fascinating journey through a disappearing newspaper world, but ultimately it is the story of one boy from Merseyside who could scarcely have imagined where life would take him.

Deborah Maclaren

About The Bootle Boy: My Untidy Life

A brilliantly evocative memoir from the golden age of newspaper publishing, from a man who helped define our modern media. When Les Hinton first fulfils his schoolboy dream of working on Fleet Street, it is still a place awash in warm beer, black ink, fag ash, and hot metal. Fifty-two years after being sent out to buy a sandwich for his first boss, one Rupert Murdoch, when Les finally leaves Murdoch's employment in 2011, the business of news has been turned upside down, in a tumble of social and technological change.

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