Fleet street hell raiser lived a life as dramatic as the stories he wrote

IF Fleet Street was still filled with the sound of clacking typewriter keys and the industrial whirr of print-rooms, they would have fell silent this week for a moment.

That ink-smudged world is long gone of course and this week another wonderful anachronism was lost to the newspaper world.

Peter Batt was an East End boy of Irish extraction who laid down a shovel in a 1970s building site for the last time, blagged his way on to a newsroom floor and made a name for himself: Peter the Poet.