Mr Lyth was pleased with my offering and even more pleased when the Yorkshire Post, a great rival, wrote a front-page editorial mocking Sheffield’s pretensions. He came by my desk, showed me the Yorkshire Post and said: ‘Tonight, Trelford, you will write another front-page editorial. It will begin like this: “A Leeds-based newspaper has this to say about your great city…”’
The to-and-fro between the two cities went on for several days. At a party some years later, I was talking to Hugo Young, then deputy editor of the Sunday Times, later a columnist on The Guardian and eventually chairman of the Scott Trust that owned the paper. I recalled this amusing story about the enmity between Sheffield and Leeds, knowing that he came from a prominent Sheffield family and had worked on the Yorkshire Post.
He looked at me in astonishment and said: ‘It was me writing those Yorkshire Post editorials. I’ve always wondered who was championing Sheffield. So, it was you!’
We had a talented group of graduate trainees on the Sheffield paper, including Michael Ratcliffe, John Barry, who was to be a key figure on Harold Evans’s Sunday Times, and Jackie Gillott, later a novelist and TV presenter. Sadly, Jackie was to become the fourth of my early friends to take their own lives.
During my time there, the Telegraph and Lyth’s successor as editor, David Hopkinson, picked up a number of national press awards for exposing what became known as ‘the Sheffield rhino whip scandal’. CID officers were shown to have taken suspects into a dark alley outside the station and applied the said rhino whip in order to force confessions.
The hero of this campaign was Keith Graves, who went on to become a star foreign correspondent for the BBC. My humble role in the matter was writing editorials deploring the police conduct and demanding an inquiry. Hopkinson, a fine journalist from whom I learned a great deal, went on to become a long-serving executive at The Times.
• • •
Late one evening, after a visit to the pub, Tinniswood and I decided to break into the editor’s empty office. As I recall, our object was to get hold of some bottles of wine and spirits and boxes of chocolates, which had been confiscated by the editor from the desk of the women’s editor. He evidently thought she shouldn’t accept what he considered to be bribes from the companies she wrote about.
Among the assorted papers we found on his desk – and read unashamedly – was a letter from the head office of the Thomson Organisation seeking candidates within the group to edit a newspaper they owned in Nyasaland. I seized the opportunity to apply for the job, which I might never have heard about if it hadn’t been for this illicit nocturnal invasion.
CHAPTER 3
KAMUZU
I had barely heard of Nyasaland when I went out to edit the country’s English-language newspaper. I was twenty-five and the youngest editor of a national newspaper in the world. I knew Nyasaland was somewhere in Central Africa, that it had some association with Dr Livingstone (I presumed) and a famous lake. I didn’t even know if the country had electricity. As I was likely to be living there for several years, I decided to find out a little more. So, I rang up the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.
A gloomy official voice told me, after a worrying silence: ‘I think you should read this morning’s newspapers. The Prime Minister, Dr Banda, has some very unpleasant things to say about foreign journalists in Nyasaland – as a matter of fact, he wants them all to leave. If you still want to go, I’d be glad to tell you more about the situation. But I warn you: it isn’t very nice.’
That was my first introduction to the problems of the press in Nyasaland. The gloomy voice on the telephone had been right: it wasn’t very nice. That very day, Dr Banda had warned foreign journalists to ‘keep their white noses’ out of his country’s affairs – a phrase I was to hear again, at close quarters, in the period ahead. He wanted to take Nyasaland out of Sir Roy Welensky’s Central African Federation and make his country self-governing and independent.
When I applied for the post within the Thomson group, I was interviewed by Gordon (later Sir Gordon) Brunton, who was to be a recurring figure in my life. He told me that the main reason I was being appointed was that I was just about the only suitably qualified journalist they could find in the group who believed that Africans should run their own countries – not a universally popular idea in the England of the early 1960s.
He explained that the Thomson group owned a prosperous publishing business in Nyasaland, with bookshops and a magazine distribution network, but the newspaper’s unpopularity with Dr Banda was putting the whole enterprise at risk. It was important that the newspaper change its character and win the approval of the new black government.
While I was with him, Lord (Roy) Thomson, the owner of the group, came into his office and Brunton introduced me. Thomson stood close to me, clutched my hand tightly, examined me through his thick pebble glasses and said: ‘You make a dollar for me, boy, and I’ll make a dollar for you.’
I had only been married for a few months, but my wife was enthusiastic about the prospect of an African adventure, however risky, as opposed to teaching in a tough Sheffield comprehensive school where all the pupils wanted to talk about was the Beatles.
• • •
The Nyasaland Times had started life in 1895 as the Central African Planter, providing news for the tea and tobacco settlers. It had later become the Central African Times, and was still popularly known by its initials as the CAT. When I got there, I found one banner headline that ran: ‘Dr Banda Gets Really Nasty with the CAT. He Called Us Stupid Thirty-Five Times’. After reading a few back issues of the paper, I came to the conclusion that Dr Banda was probably right in the low view he held of the paper.
It was still defending the Central African Federation, run by whites in Salisbury, long after the cause had been abandoned in London and rejected by the Africans of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland; the blacks in Southern Rhodesia weren’t even asked. The federation was dead, finished. It didn’t need a constitutional genius to see that the country’s only possible future was as an independent sovereign state under Banda’s leadership. So, it seemed to me, one either got on with Banda, or one did not get on at all.
Before daring to approach him, however, I decided to make an impression in the way I knew best – through the newspaper – to demonstrate that my arrival really did represent a total change of outlook. I recruited the paper’s first African reporters, and wrote the first leading article the paper had dared to carry for more than a year. I published it on the front page.
‘The CAT has lived several different lives since it began in 1895, and the time has come to give it a new one,’ I wrote. ‘In the rapidly changing conditions, the newspaper has failed to adapt its outlook to the needs of the times.’
I deplored the absence of editorial opinions at such an historic moment in the new country’s life and continued:
We have decided to set off in a new direction, with a new name, and a policy more in line with the aspirations of the people … As the only independent newspaper in Nyasaland, we are conscious of our great responsibility, and we propose to do our best to discharge our obligations to the concept of a fair, honest and responsible press.
To my surprise, this editorial was quoted widely throughout Africa and in British newspapers. I still have a copy of a front-page story in the Daily Telegraph about my changes to this obscure Nyasaland paper. I soon found I was being invited to official Malawi functions, and the paper was quoted approvingly by African MPs in Parliament – though, perhaps as a corollary, I was blackballed at the British club.
A South African magazine, News Check, wrote an article about the paper at this time entitled: ‘CAT on a Hot Tin Roof ’. It reported: ‘Trelford’s editorship has been a saga of tenuous survival in a hostile and threatening environment.’ Funny how that word ‘survival’, written more than fifty years ago, would continue to be mentioned as a key feature of my entire career as an editor. For ‘Dr Banda’ read ‘Tiny Rowland’, two decades later, when he bec
ame my boss at The Observer – another ‘saga of tenuous survival in a hostile and threatening environment’. The magazine went on to say: ‘For almost the first time, reading the Nyasaland Times openly has become a fashion among educated Africans.’
I decided that the time was now right to make my peace with Dr Banda. His waiting room in Zomba was lined with Morley’s Life of William Ewart Gladstone in many volumes, as well as books on de Gaulle, Churchill and other Western heroes. He was calm and utterly courteous, dressed in a Savile Row suit with a waistcoat, and dark glasses. ‘Your paper has changed,’ he said, ‘and I welcome that. But can the leopard really change its spots?’
I told him that, as an Englishman, I felt I was an historical anomaly in his country. I was a guest and guests had to meet certain standards of conduct if they were to remain welcome. All this sort of thing went down quite well, as you might expect. But then I said, trying to be helpful: ‘I think it is wrong for a European to edit an African newspaper. I hope that by the time I leave I shall have trained an African to succeed me.’ I meant it, and I thought he would be pleased.
Instead, he looked at me strangely for a long time, then said slowly: ‘You must not insult my intelligence. No African in this country will be capable of running a newspaper in less than fifty years.’ This remark has always intrigued me – not just because he was so manifestly wrong, and insulting the intelligence of his own people, but because it provided a clue to Banda’s curious personality. He did not really regard himself as an African; he talked about Africans as another race and obviously saw himself, judging from his library alone, as part of a European tradition going back to Churchill and de Gaulle.
A story comes to mind that demonstrates the power – and the eccentricity – of Banda’s personality. It was the opening of the University of Malawi (Nyasaland’s new name after independence). It was a cold afternoon, and we sat in our thousands to hear Banda speak. He was dressed in the academic robes he had acquired at universities in Scotland and America and he spoke without notes for over two hours.
The assembled dignitaries could hardly believe their ears when he started to take them through the whole of an English language textbook (still without notes), starting at chapter one and going right through the parts of speech, transitive and intransitive verbs, proper nouns, common nouns, objects in sentences, and so on – even giving examples to illustrate every point. As my wife muttered afterwards, the only chapter he had plainly missed was the one on precis.
This grammatical tour de force was climaxed by a ringing declamation of the best of Churchill’s wartime broadcasts, all by heart. The audience of invited academics, Western diplomats and illiterate Malawi peasants all looked at him with equal amazement.
Once I had established a working relationship with Banda, and set the paper on its new course, it became clear to me that I was living in a time of hope and great excitement. I had left England at the fag end of the Macmillan era, amid the Profumo scandal and a general air of decadence and demoralisation. Here, however, I was at the birth of a new nation, offering scope for youthful ideals.
I threw my paper wholeheartedly behind this new national mood, keeping up the flow of front-page editorials, and I gave African reporters increasing prominence in the paper. Three of them turned out to be outstandingly good. I don’t know where they had learned their idea of how a journalist should look and behave – from Chicago films of the 1930s I should think, to judge by their snap-brim hats and their wise-cracking. They were characters straight out of Ben Hecht’s The Front Page.
Austin M’Madi had worked on papers in Southern Rhodesia and was a fairly sophisticated operator by Malawi standards. I can remember interviewing him for the job and asking where his family came from. With immense pride, he told me: ‘My mother is kachasu queen of Zingwangwa.’ Kachasu is a lethal African gin and Zingwangwa is an African suburb of Blantyre-Limbe. In the social hierarchy of the time, she was a very important lady indeed.
Roy Manda was a highly intelligent sub-editor with excellent English who, with training, could have held down a job on any paper in the world. Levson Lifikilo was our ace football reporter, with an immense following, judging by the letters I received.
At the time, I had not realised what a dramatic innovation it would seem to give African reporters a chance to write in their own country. It was not a racial or political gesture on my part, however, but a professional decision: Africans knew what was going on in their country, they spoke the language, they had access to places that white reporters couldn’t go.
The changes in the paper were again noted by the South African magazine News Check, which remarked: ‘The change has picked up the Times’s ailing fortunes. With ruin and closure hanging over it a year ago, the paper is fattening once again. Since Trelford’s dramatic editorial, circulation has gone up over 30 per cent and advertising has risen over 20 per cent.’
All this was true enough – or nearly true, as I found out a little later. I went on a circulation tour, using a small plane, to the remote parts of the country. In the very north, close to the border with Tanzania, was a small town on the lake. The main road – the only road – lay between two lines of houses, some of them Asian shops. It was covered in grass. I steered the plane down on the street between the houses, causing some excitement – not only to the spectators. I particularly wanted to visit this place because we seemed to be selling a remarkable number of papers there. So many, in fact, that the local African agent had qualified several times for the bicycle I was offering as a reward for enterprise.
I found this wizard salesman in his small hut by the lake, where he told me his secret. The retail price of the paper was three pence. As an agent, he got it wholesale for two pence, then separated the sheets of paper and sold each double-page spread for a penny to the local fishermen, who used them to wrap up their fish. It was the only source of paper in the area. With any bits that were left over, he cut out the pictures, especially pictures of Dr Banda or the Queen, and sold them to the villagers as decorations for their huts. He was making a fortune: and not a single copy of the paper, as far as I could see, was being read.
Now, every editor has to get used to the idea that his paper will wrap tomorrow’s fish and chips – but not today’s, and not before the paper has even been read. What could I do about this appalling situation? I decided to do nothing about it, and flew out the next day, leaving the agent secure with his secret monopoly. After all, he was happy enough, his customers were happy, and I was happy to be selling so many papers. The only people who would not be happy were the advertisers, who were paying good money on the assumption that the paper was actually being read. I decided that the truth might upset them, so I kept it to myself.
This was not the only way in which running a newspaper in Africa turned out to be different from what I was used to in Britain. It is the usual practice on newspapers in the UK, for example, to prepare for the death of famous men by having an obituary notice written in advance. I found there were none at the Nyasaland Times, so I had a biography of Dr Banda quickly prepared and sent out to the printing works for setting into type.
After a while, the head printer came to see me. ‘You’d better go out and have a look,’ he said. I went into the printing works and found that all the African workers had abandoned their jobs and were leaning over the machine of the operator who had been given this story to set. They were reading it with mounting amazement and muttering among themselves.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said. Eventually one of them came up to me and explained. ‘This article is about the death of Dr Banda. They think this is very bad magic. They think you must want him to die, and if he does die, they are afraid that they will be blamed.’ On reflection, I decided that this was a healthy attitude – more healthy, perhaps, than our own.
• • •
I said that the paper had been founded in 1895. The printing works seemed to go back at least that far. The printing plant consisted entirely of museum pieces,
and when one machine broke down one day, I wrote off to seek a spare part. Eventually, I got a reply from the manufacturers, explaining that that particular machine had ceased being made in Chicago in 1906.
In my final weeks in Sheffield, before setting out for Africa, I had been working the late shift in the composing room, which meant that there wasn’t much for the printers to do as they hung around waiting until the early hours in case there was sensational news story that required changing the paper. I had taken in copies of my African paper for them to see. The type-faces were all broken from cracked wooden type, so they suggested an alternative that I should take with me to Africa. They cast the letters of the alphabet in Century Bold, down from seventy-two point to thirty-six point, then put them together in a chase (a page in a metal forme) and converted the metal into papier-mâché flongs, which were used as part of the printing process.
I took a dozen flongs with me in a suitcase to Nyasaland, where they were recast into metal and cut up into individual letters. It had a revivifying effect on the look of the paper. It occurs to me now that very few journalists in this digital age – certainly none under the age of forty – will have the slightest idea what I am talking about. But I’m sure that old hands like Harold Evans, Peter Preston and Paul Dacre would be impressed – as would my former managing editor, Jeremy Hunt, who qualified as a printer before becoming a journalist.
The wages paid in the printing works were shamefully low – some operators getting about £5 a month. With the rising expectations created by their new-found political consciousness, it was only a matter of time before we had wage demands and other industrial problems on the Nyasaland Times. The situation came to a head when one of the European supervisors was accused of racism. The Africans said he had insulted them, talking to them as if they were monkeys and asking them when they had ‘come down from the trees’. They refused to work with him and insisted that he be sacked. I was summoned from my editorial office to help break the deadlock.
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