The warning could not have been more serious. “You touch that button son and I’ll stop every newspaper in Fleet Street!” It was my second day as a journalist for the Daily Express and I was standing in the old, caged lift with four other people – the lift attendant’s finger an inch from my nose.

The one-armed war veteran had appeared from nowhere in a grey industrial jacket with a limp, a British Legion badge and a mug of tea when I had joked out loud: “I’ll drive!” as we waited to be taken up to the editorial floor. This was my first brush with union power in Fleet Street. It was September 1972 and he meant what he said. I never went near the lift button again.

I had entered the Republic of Fleet Street and the World’s Greatest Newspaper where strikes made printers cash rich, the drinks flowed like the Fleet River it stood on, cheque book journalism was flourishing and the circulation of our black-and-white broadsheet was more than three million a day.

During my years to come, the big stories were to flow… the Yorkshire Ripper; the Falklands War; two Gulf Wars; the death of Elvis; the Fall of the Berlin Wall… far too many to mention.

The Express was published at three centres – London, Manchester and Glasgow. We had bureaus in Paris, Belfast and New York and stringers all over the world. In London alone, there were more than 100 journalists… reporters; sub-editors, feature writers; photographers; the William Hickey diary team, fashion, showbiz, city desk, columnists and executive editors, backed up by advertising, accounting, circulation, secretaries andmanagement staff.

Reporters used every trick in the book to get stories… vans with peep holes parked outside houses; microphones pinned to the back of their ties; monkeys (photographers) hidden in trees; dustbins and wastepaper bins rummaged and fistfuls of crisp fivers for drinks.

I would work alongside such legendary journalists as spy catcher Chapman Pincher, who entertained MI5 and MI6 in a swish Mayfair apartment paid for by the Express.

He got most of his stories by taking politicians and senior government ministers to lunch at expensive London restaurants and filling them up with copious amounts ofoysters and Chablis. Grouse shooting was another way of finding stories.

“I just shot and listened,” said the doyenne of defence reporters, who finally shuffled off to the great newsroom in the sky in August 2014, aged 100. He had been determined to reach his century and he did.

Legendary chief crime reporter Percy Hoskins was there too, looking like Alfred Hitchcock as he wandered through the vast newsroom with its yellowing, nicotine-stained walls and ventilation pipes across the ceiling. The place was like an old battleship.

Hoskins also had an apartment given to him by the late Lord Beaverbrook, in Park Lane – to entertain top cops from the Yard. Money and cases of scotch often changed hands.

Feature writer Sandy Fawkes unwittingly slept with a notorious serial killer on a job in Atlanta and had the guts to write about him. Woman editor Jean Rook “clawed and scrambled” her way to become First Lady of Fleet Street. Irish reporter Mike O’Flaherty brought fugitive Great Train robber Ronny Biggs back from Rio… and then disgraced himself by getting drunk and biting the leg of our chairman, Lord Matthews, under a banqueting table.

There were no mobile phones, no computers, no social media – and no HR. The journalists ran themselves.

It was not unusual for a crumpled cigarette packet to hit a news sub-editor on the head at his desk, just before a public bo*****ing, punctuated with swear words, from an executive about the way he had rewritten a story. Worse could happen. A journalist only had to touch a print compositor’s metal page or pick up a line of type to spark a production stoppage.

I lost count of the number of times the paper didn’t get out because of overtime disputes or demands from the inkies. These were the heady days when Linotype operators and compositors setting headlines were earning up to a thousand quid a week when the average wage in Britain was £40.

And the staircase at night was often full of lads from the van loading bay queueing to get wads of dosh from the management after settling a dispute on the night.

Some signed for it as Michael Mouse or Donald Duck. The Express, like much of Fleet Street, was being bled dry.

I was to work with 10 editors, one fired after the other. They included Sir Larry Lamb; Sir Nicholas Lloyd, Derek Jameson and News At 10 frontman Alastair Burnet.

The 1970s began with Ted Heath as Prime Minister and in 1977 we went from broadsheet to tabloid. Two years later, Maggie Thatcher became PM. She was a Goddess at the Express and visited regularly.

When she did the lift walls were covered in blue Perspex and Tory-blue carpets were laid. On one visit to the editorial floor she spotted that the journalists’ desks were littered with bottles of Perrier water.

“What’s that French stuff doing here!” she barked at the chairman and editor. Perrier was banned thenceforth in the Express; you couldn’t even buy it in the canteen.

In those days, Fleet Street was a village. We knew the journalists on other papers and would drink with them at our pubs like The Punch; The Old Bell; The Tipperary and El Vinos. Some of the other newspapers were nearby: The Sun; The Telegraph; News of the World and Daily Mirror to name a few.

Across the road from the “Black Lubyanka”, as Private Eye had named our famous art-deco building at 120 Fleet Street, was The Albion and its landlord Mickey Barnet. It was quite normal long after closing time, to hear a knock at the door and in would come top cops from Snow Hill and the Yard for a snifter after hours, along with boxers like Billy Walker, East End gangsters and actors such as George Sewell.

Tricks to fool the opposition newspapers were a way of life. Often, we would keep an exclusive story back and print a false Page One early, knowing that Fleet Street would be getting first copies. Then we would stop the machines and put up the real scoop to print, making it too late for the Daily Mail and others to catch up.

Reporters were cheating the opposition too. One night newsmen Ashley Walton and Bob McGowan turned up at veteran News at Ten anchor Reginald Bosanquet’s home to ask some questions. He answered the door three sheets to the wind and thought they had come from the Mail about his life story book they had bought for a fortune.

The lads, who did nothing to disabuse him of this, took him to a swish London restaurant and got him more sozzled as he gave them his complete life story and anecdotes over two hours for free, after eating only a teacake. Meanwhile, the desperate battle to save the Express in the face of strikes and soaring costs was going on with takeovers and several new owners. In 1989 we went full colour – no one on the editorial floor thought it would catch on.

Finally, Rupert Murdoch set up Fortress Wapping and trained journalists to set his papers on computers behind 12ft high walls topped with razor wire and equipped with cameras and spotlights to withstand the expected siege by printers.

Union power died and the Express and other newspapers followed his lead.

The Express moved over the bridge from Fleet Street to Blackfriars at the end of 1989 and a new era of computer life began. There were some silver linings; not least the bar in the basement of the new building.

When I look back, perhaps one of the lasting memories of how things were in The Street had come in the shape of legendary cartoonist Carl Giles. At the height of his popularity, he was taken to lunch in London by Express chairman, Sir Max Aitken. As they walked through Berkeley Square, Sir Max – son of legendary proprietor Lord Beaverbrook – asked Giles how he was getting home. “By train,” replied the cartoonist who lived in Suffolk. Aitken then walked him into Jack Barclay’s, the top London dealer in Bentleys and Rolls-Royces.

He asked him which one was his favourite. Giles immediately pointed out a Bentley Continental. Sir Max said: “Okay, give me your return ticket to Ipswich.”

He did. “Right. I’ll keep this and you go home in that. It’s yours!” he said, throwing him the keys. Great days.

Terry Manners was night editor for six years before becoming assistant editor in London and editor-in-chief of Express Newspapers in Glasgow. He left to become editor of the Western Daily Press in 2001 and later worked for the Press Association. Read more about life in Fleet Street and the Express on the satirical website The Daily Drone