Murdoch turns up throughout this narrative as a sort of Marley’s ghost figure, his eerie presence whistling through many of the pages. After all, the two men go back a long way. It was Murdoch who became the sixteen-year-old Hinton’s boss in 1960, when he took over the ailing Adelaide News, which employed Hinton as a copy boy (Murdoch asked him to buy him a ham sandwich). It was Murdoch who ‘followed’ Hinton to Fleet Street, and (luckily for Hinton, as it turned out) bought The Sun in 1969, having already purchased The News of the World. But it is only in the second half of the book that things really get going, and when Hinton begins his corporate climb in Murdochland.

He would probably still be there, were it not for the great British phone-hacking scandal, which led, somewhat obliquely, to Hinton’s resignation in July 2011 as boss of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, thus ending a five-decade professional association with the media mogul. But, as Hinton himself says, it was under his watch, while in London as chief executive of Murdoch’s News International from 1995 to 2007, that much of the heinous phone-tapping activities occurred. There were worse revelations to come, particularly the hacking of the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, which led to the closure of The News of the World, and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry.

As Hinton says, the phone-hacking affair was more than just the ‘reckless behaviour’ of some journalists: ‘their actions also set off a chain of events … unstoppable anger, grief, paranoia and hysteria that gave old enemies, and new, an unexpected and unprecedented opportunity to attack Rupert Murdoch, his politics and his newspapers’. Indeed, the aftermath also made times hard for Les Hinton. Having been accused of misleading the parliamentary select committee in 2012, it took four years for a privileges committee to rule that there was no evidence that he had done so.

Les Hinton alongside Prince Charles and Rupert Murdoch at the commemoration of 300 years of the newspaper industry. (Photo by Max Nash/AFP/Getty)

What emerges from Hinton’s story, and what I found peculiarly comforting and reassuring, is that the man himself emerges as decent, passing the good-bloke test with honours rather than a scrape-through. Sure, he may have worked for Rupert Murdoch, and in important and influential positions, but I feel, from what he says, that he stopped short of selling his soul and has maintained his dignity. As Hinton says of his erstwhile boss, ‘He made me tense, but I was never afraid of him.’

Murdoch, however enticing it is to read Hinton’s accounts of him, forms only part of a wider, more engrossing narrative; the first part of this book is practically a story unto itself. The son of a British Army chef, this wartime boy from Bootle – an industrial suburb of Liverpool whose proximity to the docks ensured it was almost bombed out of existence – relates memories of his early upbringing and subsequent nomadic childhood with a dewy eye but sharp ear. But he wasn’t there for that long: by the time he was five he and his family had embarked on their nomadic life that led them to Adelaide, via such exotic places as Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, West Germany (as it was), and Singapore. No wonder the later reporter Les relished being a foreign correspondent.

The hot-metal memories kick in once fifteen-year-old Les gets to Adelaide and, rejected by The Advertiser, joins the News. Journalism was different then: for one, eccentrics were permitted, expenses (reasonable ones) were allowed, and quality journalism, now a euphemism for making the most of dwindling staff numbers, was paramount. Besides, I empathise with his story. Being an old hack myself, and having, like Les, done the hard yards of shipping-news reporting and ambulance chasing, plus the inevitable migration to Fleet Street, I loved the reminders of those mad and fulfilling days. In this case, they are vastly more entertaining and carefree than the stories of Les the executive in part two.

Various people pepper the cast list, some of them ultra-famous (Bill Clinton, Tony Blair), others in cameo roles (Walter Cronkite, Johnny Rotten, whom Hinton encounters applying sandpaper to rough-up a gleaming new leather jacket), plus a phalanx of family and friends, and a not-too-overcrowded invasion of other members of the Murdoch family. An index would have helped.

Les Hinton with Paul McCartney 11 March, 1969, the night before he married Linda Eastman.

Ultimately, The Bootle Boy is more an honest, cleanly told autobiography than anything resembling a score-settling corporate confessional, which it could easily have been. The journalist within Les Hinton has observed the right professional care by setting his life in context, conveying it with an abundance of charm and refreshingly robust honesty.

Answers. Flong: a thin sheet of matting used as a matrix in printing. Galley: a proof of printed material used for review by editors and authors. WOB: for ‘white on black’, or a block of reverse type. Chase: the steel frame that holds type in a letterpress. Slug: a single piece of metal produced by a Linotype machine; it takes many slugs to make a column of type. Widow and orphan: alternative terms for a short line of type at the top or bottom of a column. Banging-out: the traditional, and noisy, farewell by composing-room staff of a long-serving colleague; a percussive serenade scored for hammers, lead bars, and metal benches.