Hanover Street from Prince Street to Fleet Street,
City of Bodton Archieve – Licence CC BY-SA 2.0
Jerry Westerby? Yes, Jerry Westerby. The Honourable Clive Gerald Westerby to the likes of you and me, but Jerry to his chums in the secret world and to his readers at the rag, especially those who are aficionados of the girlies ping pong. Patriot. Old school. A perfect witness. Collector and re-teller of rum stuff.
Thing is, being a sports writer on his penniless but titled father’s sinking newspaper, Jerry gets to visit, or used to get to visit in different times, all sorts of odd little nooks and crannies behind that big metal thing pitched into the ground all the way from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic.
Being legitimately on the other side of the Iron Curtain gave a gentleman correspondent a chance to place a little something in a telephone box in Břeclav (or some such place) to be picked up by one of the locals who was part of one of our spy rings – while pretending to phone his combine harvester driving granddaughter on a collective farm.
The thing is, being gregarious by nature and a member of a brotherhood of soaks by profession, our patriotic scribe could happily while away the hours propped up at a bar between rounds of the International Schoolgirl Table Tennis Championships — held every two years in a crumbling provincial Czechoslovakian school gym, all in the noble cause of promoting peace and harmony among the peoples of the world.
This evening, one imagines in an off-the-beaten-track stand-up sports dive in an unfashionable suburb of a snowy Prague, Jerry fell into conversation with a boy soldier with a besotted pretty girl on his arm, keen to show off his English. An expert on squeezing an interesting story out of a stone, our Jerry moved the conversation in a particular direction – along the tank tracks towards the gunfire.
Well, you know what armies are like; up, down, up, down, down down, back, forward, back, forward, until it’s time for some more ups and downs. All for no reason. Or is it not? You see, Jerry heard a rum tale from this lad about postings in a forest near the border, with senior Russians on the move.
Not only that, but it offered a timeline in which Z came before A and nine before one – flatly contradicting what would nowadays be called a “narrative”, a Gospel truth held by the seventh floor back at spy HQ in London, where inconvenient chronology and settled fact oft waged war.
To the finely tuned Fleet Street mind this dovetailed to a botched operation in Czecho woodland that saw one of our own taking a winging from a Kalashnikov as a prelude to an uncheduled all-inclusive in the Lubyanka Butlins.
Safely back in the Street of Shame, to the accompanying cacophony of busy stand-up typwriters and the distant roar of hot metal presses, our hero put the pieces together and penned a note to a spycatcher called George Smiley.
The rest is history, nay legend, and has been immortalised in a Tinker, Taylor, Soldier Spy franchise that includes a book, a film and old school BBC series caviar.
Subsequently, Smiley and Westerby met in the Ludgate Cellars on Apothecary Street, just off Fleet Street and next to a bomb site car park. Flagstone floor. Good Wine Knows No Bush freeze. Fake muskets on the wall. Or was it the Humble Grape? From Fleet Street into New Bridge Street; halfway to a corner where sits Unilever House and a private bank in what used to be the City of London School.
No matter. What’s important is that, as the plot grows more complex, an authoritative third-hand voice adds flesh to guide the reader or viewer (or mole hunter). Elsewhere, on the other side of the pond, perhaps not surprisingly, the Yanks do it differently.
Mr. X serves as a shadowy, high-level insider informant who provides to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. A sweeping, alternative explanation for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy emerges.
X functions as a dramatic device to expand the film’s storyline from a local New Orleans plot into a vast national and international conspiracy involving the highest levels of the U.S. government and military-industrial complex.
Seedy cellar bar off seedy Fleet Street? Of course not. Garrison meets the mysterious figure (Donald Sutherland in a fedora and trench coat) sitting on a park bench in Washington, D.C., near the Lincoln Memorial.
X delivers a long, dense monologue while the camera intercuts with archival footage and dramatised recreations of foreign operations installing US puppets to high office. He outlines a similar coup d’état stateside orchestrated by powerful interests opposed to Kennedy’s policies.
Different times both here and over there. In these days of open government and rampant social media, there are no secret operations or conspiracies left to tell of. Or are there? Thing is, old Jerry has been in touch regarding a little something overheard and put together that he feels obliged to pass on. Fleet Street? Gone. The BBC? Wokified.
Allergic to the likes of email and WhatsApp, a postcard dropped through the G-P letter box suggesting a meeting. Couldn’t say no to old Jerry, could we? I’ll keep you informed.
To be continued…
© Always Worth Saying 2026
