1989

by Peter Millar

‘They bailed out over the jungle,’ I said hesitantly, trying to remember all those stories my dad had told that I’d never paid enough attention to, ‘and joined up with the Chindits.’

  Eastwood’s eyes both sparkled and glazed over at the same time. ‘Ahhh, Orde Wingate’s bunch. Magnificent men.’

  For the next ten minutes or so he waxed lyrical about derringdo in the jungle, attacks on railway lines, carriages behind them exploding, carriages in front of them exploding. I smiled. Under the circumstances it wasn’t hard.

  ‘Father still alive, is he?’

  ‘Yes, keeping well, thanks.’

  I got the job. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite the job I was expecting it to be. The Telegraph was stuck in a time warp in more ways than one. For the past three years in Moscow I had been using computers – albeit primitive, green-screen models that were little more than electronic word processors linked to a telex line. At the Telegraph they were still using typewriters, and not even electric ones. News stories were typed on paper that looked and felt recycled but was probably just unprocessed – cheapness rather than concern for the environment being the overriding consideration – with three sheets and two layers of old-fashioned ink carbon in between so that a desk editor and sub-editor had their own copies. Every word was in any case eventually set in hot metal type by members of the print unions, typesetters and compositors who assembled the pages in mirror image out of shapes – words, pictures, adverts – all cast in lead alloy metal. It was a technology not light years removed from that which produced the Gutenberg Bible in the fifteenth century. It was not unrelated that each of the print trade unions in a newspaper was known as a chapel, headed by a Father of the Chapel. The official who presided over the whole lot was known as the Imperial Father of the Chapel.

  Some of the machinery still in use in 1985 had been made in the late nineteenth century, and there were two brand new linotype machines that had been delivered in the 1930s but were still in their packing cases because management and print unions had never reached agreement on terms for their introduction. Things were changing but Rupert Murdoch had yet to unleash the Wapping whirlwind that would change the industry for ever. On my first day foreign editor Ricky Marsh had to almost rugby tackle me to prevent me from stepping over a white line painted on the floor, which was the strict demarcation between journalists and ‘the print’. Had I crossed it, even accidentally, the brothers could have walked out and there would have been no paper the next day. On evening shifts, when the giant presses in the bowels of the building began to run, you could feel the floors tremble, while going along the juddering elevated walkway that led to the canteen felt like a stroll above the engine room of a supertanker.

  But even that had at least a frisson of excitement attached to it: of being at the heart of an industrial machine that was actually producing the newspapers to be delivered to breakfast tables all across the country. The same could not be said of the foreign desk. The Daily Telegraph foreign desk in the summer of 1985 looked and felt as if it hadn’t changed since 1955. This was almost certainly because it hadn’t. Apart from Marsh, there was old Tom Hughes, a genial, well-meaning elderly buffer who sounded and acted a bit like Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army. Tom was the oldest member of the foreign desk but the others were to my youthful eyes not much better: a troika of tie-wearing gentlemen who looked more like clerks than journalists. Called Readman, Mossman and Dudman, their names alone were enough to fill me with silent dread. There had been a low-budget British TV movie I’d seen as a child called Unman, Wittering and Zygo about a teacher who dies for messing his publicschool pupils’ routine. Despite the reversal in the age spectrum, I feared something similar.

  Marsh was a bright, rotund little man, perpetually fizzing with energy, forever bustling in and out of the Foreign Room, which for me rapidly began to rhyme with tomb. The only time of the day when I had to try hard to suppress a smile was mid-morning when the buzzer on the intercom linked to Eastwood’s office sounded, and Ricky would actually stand up to answer it with a brisk, ‘Yes, Peter.’ And then he would bustle off to morning editorial conference.

  The low point was when Tom painstakingly instructed me that, ‘here in the Foreign Room we have a special way of using paperclips to make sure the copy stays together better’, and showed me how rather than just sliding the paper in he bent the inside loop back to create ‘tension’. I could have cried. The ‘copy’ in question, to boot, was usually Reuters, torn off into individual ‘takes’ – the classic 200-word Reuter ‘page’ which I had been so eager to escape – by the final member of our happy little team, Paul, who actually was a clerk and therefore a member of one of the print unions, which – in those days just before the Murdoch revolution – meant he probably earned more than most of us and certainly a lot more than me.

  What the foreign desk did, I was learning to my horror, was not so much write or even edit copy as to order it up, in much the same way as we ordered milky tea from the lady who brought the tea trolley round. The Telegraph liked to maintain the impression that it had its ‘own correspondents’ in every corner of the globe. In reality most of these were just stringers, local journalists who would knock something together on demand for the Telegraph in exchange for a token annual retainer. This meant the Telegraph could continue to give the impression it still had its ‘own man’ in, say, Srinagar, the Kashmiri old summer capital of the Indian Raj. On the odd occasion that something cropped up in Srinagar or Darwin, Australia, or Durban, South Africa – far-flung outposts of Empire were firm favourites – the Telegraph wanted their man’s byline on it. Or at the very least, ‘from our own correspondent’.

  The trouble was that some of these blokes whiling away their days in the outposts of empire were semi-retired, and even others who might work in local newspapers, often had less access to what was going on in their area than we had with the resources of Reuters, the AP and AFP feeding us news. As a result, it was often the task of the Telegraph foreign desk man to ring up the local stringer and read him the Reuters copy. He would then take notes over the phone, go off, type out his own version, ring up the Telegraph copytakers and dictate it to them, and they would type it up on carbon triplicates, one of which would arrive back up in the foreign desk. Occasionally it was better, written in less-stilted style than that of the agency copy and with maybe a little more local background thrown in, but more often than not it was just a bastardised version of what I or someone else had read to him, with no infrequent occurrence of the ‘send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance’ syndrome. It was soul-destroying.

  The only entertainment came, as it always did for journalists in those days, in the pub. The pub in question was the King and Keys, a dreadful shabby watering hole run by a southern Irishman called Andy, who might have got the job from Central Casting, as he spoke in a loud stage brogue, usually slurred, and routinely insulted all his customers. Luckily most of them never noticed and those who did couldn’t care less, sometimes because they were beyond doing so. There was an interesting patch on the raised flock wallpaper near the door which had been worn smooth, just about head-height, because of the number of heads which over the years had taken an extended rest there on their way out the door. The K’n’K had the one saving grace that it was right next door to the paper and so could be nipped down to quickly for a short ‘refresher’ – often while the refreshee’s jacket was left hanging over the back of his chair – and could also be got back from equally quickly in an emergency, such as when a senior editor noticed that despite the omnipresent jacket the seat in question had been cold for some considerable time.

  The Telegraph did have more than its quota of amiable eccentrics, all of whom were regulars in the K’n’K. There was the erudite if somewhat pedantic home reporter who invariably closed his eyes when talking – occasionally enabling the subjects of his erudition to slope off unnoticed – whose modest byline was R. Barry O’Brien, and was therefore universally known as ‘Our Barry’. His diminutive,
combed-over colleague A.J. McIlroy became (rather unfairly) A.J. Makeitup. There was the learned, acerbic and witty leader writer ‘Blind Peter’ Utley, whose obvious disability meant he required a permanent assistant, invariably in the attractive shape of young female Oxbridge graduettes, whose job description included not only taking his dictation but also taking him to the pub. Considering he was quite capable of making his way, by touch, along the flocked wallpaper, to the Gents’, it was remarkable how often he would completely ‘miss’ his target when turning to tap them on the shoulder or pat them on the knee. And then there was Bill O’Hagan, the former South African police officer who had quit when his colleagues ridiculed his collection of Miles Davis and Count Basie jazz records as ‘kaffir music’. Bill was the Telegraph’s ‘late stop’ which meant his main job was to sit in the newsroom every night until four a.m. in case the Queen Mother died. He was a genial, round, hard-drinking man with a bald head and a little moustache who looked remarkably like a children’s comic butcher, which in order to give reality a lesson is what he ultimately became, when the sausages he made in his garage in Croydon became so popular with his colleagues he decided there might be a business in it. He subsequently bought a butcher shop and you can now savour O’Hagan’s sausages in pubs up and down Britain. Bill famously spent the night in the King and Keys when he dozed off momentarily in the upstairs function room and Andy locked him in.

  None of this conviviality, however, made up for the fact that my own job, having finally made it to the mainstream of Fleet Street newspapers, was deathly dull. Luckily an escape route presented itself, in the jovial, ever optimistic, prematurely white-haired form of Graham Paterson. I had known Graham slightly at university, even if I had been rather put off by his overt self-confidence, loud voice, obvious ambition and the fact that his father had been deputy editor of the New Statesman. When he went straight from university to work on the Telegraph’s Peterborough gossip column on a salary at least fifty per cent higher than mine at Reuters, I muttered to myself about nepotism. Yet he was to prove my salvation. The Daily Telegraph’s dull Sunday sister paper desperately needed a shot in the arm and the man chosen to give it one was the foppish but charming and self-consciously intellectual Peregrine Worsthorne, who prided himself on his wit, dandyish clothes and a claim to have was actually the second; theatre critic Kenneth Tynan had beaten him by eight years). He had picked Graham to be his news editor, and Graham in turn persuaded foreign editor Peter Taylor that I was the man to cover Europe for him.

  In fact, Paterson’s inspired eccentricity was the prime motor in pulling together one of the most remarkably talented groups of journalists ever to work, drink and play together on Fleet Street. It included Bruce Anderson, Patrick Bishop, David Blundy, Walter Ellis, Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, Ronald Payne and Megan Tressider to name but a few. From a newspaper that up until then had read as almost an afterthought to the daily, a stolid but uninspired and pedestrian review of the week, the Sunday Telegraph became – for a brief few years – an anarchic mix of radical opinion, fired by Worsthorne’s erratic and often outrageous leaders, off-beat news stories, and lovingly-crafted, semi-literary, in-depth focus pieces. With far more limited resources it attempted to tackle the market-leading Sunday Times head-on. From 1985 to 1988, it was one hell of a place to work: we worked hard, played hard and lunched hard, doing our best to maintain Fleet Street standards of alcohol-fuelled eccentricity even as we were forced to migrate from the fabled Street of Shame itself to the more sterile surroundings of the then still near empty docklands around Canary Wharf.

  But at last I was able to write the sort of longer, more thoughtful stories about a Europe that was changing faster than many people in Britain noticed or cared to notice. For someone who had spent years watching Eastern Europe in particular, there were definite early signs of rust on the Iron Curtain. Martial law in Poland had come to an end in 1983 but there were still severe restrictions on political rights and although Solidarity was still not the force it had once been, there were fresh rustlings in the undergrowth. These were encouraged by the award to Lech Walesa, recently released from prison, of the Nobel Peace Prize, even though he sent his wife Danuta to collect it, fearing that if he left the country himself the government might not let him return.

  In the other two Eastern bloc states that had tried and failed in the past to shake off the crypto-colonial dead hand of Moscow, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, eyes were still watchfully trained on events in Poland. In Prague, Czech dissident playwright Václav Havel had just been released after a four-year spell of imprisonment, though he was still under surveillance and subject to harassment. In Hungary, the communist leader János Kádár had sought to soften the blows inflicted in 1956 by a relatively liberal attitude to economic reform and less active harassment of political dissidents who did not make a nuisance of themselves. He had replaced the old hardline slogan of ‘He who is not with us is against us’, with ‘He who is not against us is with us’. It was the kind of subtle difference – uncannily familiar to the Bush and Obama regimes in Washington – that has to be understood to get a grasp of what came to be known as ‘goulash communism’. In short, the Hungarian party allowed a degree of political discussion and economic activity (including a flourishing black market in agricultural products which meant far better supplies) as long as lip service was paid to communist supremacy and the country’s membership of the Warsaw Pact. The important thing was to play the game softly softly and make sure that Moscow either didn’t notice or didn’t care. It had worked for nearly two decades. Then along came Gorbachev. He did notice; in fact, he was rather impressed.

  In Moscow itself, it was becoming clear that perestroika was not just another empty slogan: Gorbachev really did intend reform of the hidebound Soviet economy. There was a story told by a French diplomat that under Chernenko, when Gorbachev had been put in charge of the agricultural sector, he had arrived late for a state dinner with visiting French President François Mitterrand. When Chernenko asked what was wrong he said, ‘Nothing works properly’. ‘How long has this been going on?’ asked Chernenko, shocked by the revelation. ‘Since 1917,’ Gorbachev replied. Apocryphal or not, the anecdote was certainly prophetic.

  Similarly if glasnost did not yet mean the total transparency it proclaimed, there was at least a reduction in the climate of paranoid secrecy. And a more human face on display to the world. Gorbachev had retired foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, the dour face of the Soviet Union abroad for nearly three decades and nicknamed Mr Nyet. He had suspended the deployment of SS-20 missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and preparations were apace for him to meet Ronald Reagan at a summit in Reykjavik. Britain’s Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher had said he was a man she could ‘do business with’.

  But the horizon was not without clouds. There were more disconcerting ripples of change running through Yugoslavia, the self-appointed leader of the ‘non-aligned’ movement that in the Soviet bloc was regarded by ordinary people as a soft semi-capitalist paradise and in the West as a cheap holiday destination ‘sort of’ behind the Iron Curtain. The ‘neither fish nor fowl’ state that was an amalgam of Balkan mini-nationalities with a history of bloody rivalry and vendetta, had been held together by two factors. One was the iron fist of Josip Tito, for whom communism was not so much an ideology as a means of clamping down on dissent which he believed would lead to a revival of old nationalisms and inevitable fragmentation. He was right.

  After Tito had died in 1980, a ‘collective presidency’ had been established comprising representatives of each of the six constituent republics as well as from Serbia’s two ‘autonomous provinces’, Kosovo and Vojvodina, which had respectively large Albanian and Hungarian-speaking populations. At first it seemed to work well: in 1984, Sarajevo, the capital of the racially- and ethnically-mixed republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, had hosted the Winter Olympics. But then for the moment the other crucial factor in holding Yugoslavia together was still in place: the pressure of the mutually host
ile blocs that flanked it on either side. The Cold War had become a guarantor of the status quo. This theory implied that ending it could cause the pressure cooker to explode. But it was only a theory. Europe’s ideological divide was laid down in concrete: the physical concrete all too evident in the Berlin Wall. And no one was about to change that. It was as unimaginable as the idea that the beautiful old city that hosted the Winter Olympics would become a battlefield and its main thoroughfare earn the nickname Snipers’ Alley.

  I persuaded Worsthorne to let me style myself Central Europe Correspondent, thereby not just inventing a job but revitalising a term – Central Europe – that had been current for centuries but dormant since the onset of the Cold War and the continent’s split down an ideological fault line. Central Europe prior to 1945 had been essentially everything north of the Alps from Germany’s Western border to the Polish frontier with Russia, dipping down to include the Balkans. It was, in effect what had been the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. It would be nice to portray my new title as a prophetic glimpse of the new world order about to break through, and in truth there was just a hint of intuition if only that changing a name sometimes encourages people to look at things differently. The usual newspaper title of ‘Eastern European correspondent’ was, I felt, de facto collaboration with the existence of the Iron Curtain, which although it showed no likelihood of disappearing, was once again becoming just ever so slightly more permeable.

  For three years I flitted across Europe, covering stories that were sometimes related to the Cold War, sometimes not. From time to time they overlapped in a way that made the reality of that unnatural divide stand out more clearly than ever. Rudolf Hess, the last prisoner in Spandau, whose demise I had so frequently anticipated when posted to Berlin, finally died, in dubious circumstances that suggested suicide or even foul play (he was found with an electrical extension cord twisted around his neck). I was gutted to miss the story, being on a family holiday in Spain at the time. As soon as I got back to the office I was expecting to be sent off to his funeral, particularly as there was widespread anticipation of neo-Nazi trouble. But his son Wolf-Rüdiger buried him secretly in a night-time ceremony in the little north Bavarian town of Wunsiedel where the old man’s parents were buried.