Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  We tried to file the story of the coup, but the post office was closed and no overseas telephone calls could get through. We decided to go to the Congo, which required another visa. At the Congolese embassy, a dirty office up some back stairs, a fat girl in hair curlers said we couldn’t have a visa because there was a revolution going on and, besides, the ambassador was at a party. There were pictures of Tshombe on the walls; evidently, they hadn’t been told that he had been overthrown three months before. We managed to bribe a cleaner with a nasty-looking bandage on her leg to ‘borrow’ the visa stamp from an office and stamped our own passports.

  The Rev Munpansha nobly agreed to drive us to Lagos airport while we hid under a blanket to get through the police and army roadblocks on the way. We passed a long line of lorries and cars with people sleeping in the back, since no private transport was allowed through. When we reached the airport, a soldier put his head and his gun through the window of the Mercedes, but was reassured by our host’s dog collar and diplomatic status.

  When we got there, we found the place deserted apart from a handful of people in the bar: British and American diplomatic couriers taking out news of the coup and two diplomats – one Japanese, the other Liberian. A slightly drunken Nigerian pilot said he could fly us to Doula in Cameroon in a Fokker Friendship, but we discovered that our plane, miraculously, was still scheduled for take-off, presumably because no one had thought to stop it.

  While we were on the runway, aware of living through a surreal episode in our lives, a green and white helicopter came down from the skies and disgorged Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, in full Greek Orthodox regalia. He had gone up north after attending the Commonwealth conference in Lagos. We filled him in on the army coup.

  Our plane pitched and tossed in a storm, and at one point Dick got on his knees to pray, while I took a map into the cockpit to make sure the pilot knew how to miss a small mountain close to Douala airport. There we were able to file some stories about the Nigerian coup and were interviewed about it by British and American correspondents. We went on to Togo and then to Leopoldville in the Congo, where we found that we had stamped our passports with the wrong date. We were left to stew in a huge hangar, where we stood by helplessly while aggressive officials shouted at us in Belgian and young boys went through our luggage. We had to fill out some forms in Belgian and though, apart from our names and passport numbers, we wrote gibberish, it was enough to get us through.

  A local correspondent found us an empty house belonging to an absent Canadian journalist, with cockroaches all over the floor. I slept in a bed which had a gigantic pair of boots next to it. These, it turned out, belonged to a Belgian mercenary who also lived there. ‘He won’t be back tonight,’ said our local host, ‘but if by any chance he appears he will certainly shoot you for sleeping in his bed.’ I didn’t get much sleep that night.

  We managed to talk a Congolese pilot into giving us a lift on a military flight to Elizabethville on a plane which had no pressurised cabin. We were met there by someone from the British consulate, who persuaded the Congolese police to let us through, even though our visas were out of date. We stayed in the shell of a beautiful hotel, the Leopold II, built in the days of colonial grandeur, but I couldn’t get to sleep for the sound of rain crashing onto a tin roof. When I opened the curtains, I found there was no glass in the windows. The manager said they were smashed so often it wasn’t worth repairing them.

  There seemed to be no legal way to change money in the Congo; I managed to change some with a bunch of mercenaries I met in a bar. The British consulate said they couldn’t help us with a visa to get out of the country and advised us to get hold of the Associated Press correspondent, a man called Lax who enjoyed signing all his press cables ‘ex-Lax Elizabethville’. He ran a Chinese laundry in his spare time (when not helping the CIA) and we were asked to use a code for security reasons when asking for him: we were to ask to see ‘the paintings.’

  Lax told us to be in the main square at a quarter to midnight and we would be picked up by a white Mercedes taxi that would take us to the Zambian Copperbelt via an old diamond smuggler’s route. The fare was £15 each. At Ndola, we had to empty our pockets and our luggage to show that we hadn’t taken out any diamonds, but no visa was required. This was home for Dick. I took a plane to Salisbury and on to Malawi after one of the most colourful adventures of my young life.

  Meanwhile, a much bigger African crisis had been boiling up as Ian Smith’s right-wing government threatened to break its links with the British Queen and declare Rhodesia independent. When UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) was finally declared on 11 November 1965, my journalists, white and black, crowded round a small radio in my office to hear Smith’s historic broadcast.

  I met my friend Ronnie Bloom for a drink that evening at Ryall’s Hotel and told him I was planning to go to Salisbury the following week for a meeting of the Commonwealth Press Union’s Central Africa committee, of which I was a member. He showed great interest in this and asked if I would be willing to carry out ‘a few small tasks’ for him, since British diplomats would no longer be free to visit Southern Rhodesia.

  I had no doubt that the ‘few small tasks’ would be on behalf of MI6, or Ronnie himself would not have been involved. I was to go on several trips in the coming months, and each time I performed ‘a few small tasks’, usually dropping a letter through a gap left in the window of a parked car, or handing over letters addressed to named individuals at different hotels. I had no qualms about doing this, because I was strongly opposed to a right-wing coup in Salisbury designed to exclude Africans from power – which is what UDI amounted to.

  After each visit, I gave Ronnie Bloom a written account of what I had seen in Salisbury and how I judged the public mood. By the time of my third trip, he asked if I could use my journalist’s nose to find out more – or at least form a view – about the feelings that ordinary white Rhodesians had about the revolutionary and illegal step being taken by their rulers. I managed to do more than that. I blagged my way into the Salisbury Club, using my out-of-date membership card for the RAF Club in London, and there I struck gold.

  I met a small group of aircrew, two of them pilots, from the Rhodesian Air Force. Over pints and gin and tonics, therefore, we were able to compare experiences of flying training aircraft in Salisbury and the UK. They were happy to meet someone with my RAF experience and took me along with them to a military club for a few more drinks. They knew I was a journalist and would be asking some questions about the impending showdown with Britain, but the fact that I came from neighbouring Malawi, not from London, blunted any suspicion. At the next club we came across more military personnel and I was able to gauge their attitude without asking too many leading questions.

  I went back to Malawi and sent in a report on these conversations, concluding that Southern Rhodesian forces would be very reluctant indeed to fight British troops. I went way beyond my brief to suggest that if British planes were to fly under the radar over Umtali from an aircraft carrier they kept off the coast at Beira and land paratroopers in Cecil Square in the centre of Salisbury, they would not be met by gunfire. If the action was swift and decisive, I felt sure it could and would succeed.

  It was some time later that Ronnie Bloom told me that my paper had found its way, doubtless amended by going through the hands of MI6, to a Cabinet committee in London, presided over by the Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart. It had failed to find favour, which didn’t surprise me. It would have required a bold and risky decision of the kind Margaret Thatcher was to make over the Falklands seventeen years later.

  I noted with irony that Harold Wilson and Stewart were to have no hesitation, a few years after this, in sending arms to help Nigeria crush the breakaway eastern state of Biafra, causing the loss of an estimated million lives. But those were black lives. Risking a few dozen white people, on the other hand, was something they couldn’t possibly contemplate, even though it would have saved hundreds, possibly thous
ands of both white and black lives over the next decade and a half.

  Wilson, who (unlike many members of his Cabinet, such as Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, Anthony Crosland and Tony Benn) had never heard a shot fired in anger, was much too cautious to run the risk of killing what he called ‘our kith and kin’ (code for white people, many of whom still held British passports). What he ignored was the corollary that ‘our kith and kin’ would also be unwilling to kill British people. I doubt very much if an order to kill British troops would have been issued by Smith’s rebel regime in 1965 or early 1966, with the prospect of being hanged for treason if it went wrong.

  The British government at the time cannot have seriously believed that Smith and his men could be ‘negotiated’ out of their cast-iron conviction that Africans should never rule ‘their’ country – even when the negotiations were led by the formidable Lord Goodman. They succumbed eventually to the only argument they could accept: brute force – but it had to be applied by Africans, since whites could not be persuaded to take on whites.

  I still believe that if Wilson had shown more guts in 1965, Smith’s rebellion could have been snuffed out with minimal casualties and the country spared a vicious fifteen-year civil war that destroyed its previously booming economy, brutalised the next generation of African youth and brought a white-hating Marxist monster like Robert Mugabe to power.

  • • •

  Malawi’s civil war soon fizzled out. A series of guerrilla raids were planned from Tanzania, but came to nothing. Ronnie Bloom asked me to go to the Tanzanian border to find out what was going on. I found myself escorting a frightened group of Frelimo guerrillas from Karonga in the north to Fort Johnston in the south and helping them set off by boat to Mozambique to conduct guerrilla operations.

  Chipembere, exiled in California, was laid low with the diabetes from which he later died. With that, the opposition to Banda effectively died too. Internal opposition was put down ruthlessly. I was invited to the public hanging in Zomba prison of one of the captured rebel ministers. It came on a stiff white card with gilt edging like an invitation to a party at Government House to mark the Queen’s birthday, with an RSVP at the bottom. The wording, however, was rather different: ‘The Ngwazi Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, President of Malawi, invites your presence at a public execution…’ I declined.

  The country’s prison camps were soon full to overflowing. Unknown to Banda, the administrative secretary of the Malawi Congress Party, Albert Muwalo, was found to have been organising the throwing of bodies over a cliff – an offence for which he was later hanged. Foreign pressmen were no longer allowed into the country.

  Three of the people in his prisons were Austin M’Madi, son of the kachasu queen of Zingwangwa; Roy Manda, my bright sub-editor; and Levson Lifikilo, ace sports reporter. They were held without trial for three and a half years. What eventually happened to them I was never able to discover, despite many efforts through the British High Commission and international journalist organisations. I also sought news of them, without success, on my only return visit to Malawi, in 1983.

  Their offence was to publish a story about a report of an alleged border incident – which they had said was ‘unconfirmed’ – that turned out to be untrue. If the same rules applied in Britain, how many of our journalists would be in jail for publishing ‘unconfirmed’ stories that turned out to be untrue?

  • • •

  Looking back on my time in Africa, I have often wondered what good I achieved. An independent newspaper in a one-party state was always an anomaly and was bound to come to grief. My predecessor was forced to leave the country, and so were the two editors who succeeded me. Their African successors are in jail. Some years after I left the country, my paper was taken over by Dr Banda’s private company.

  I was very lucky: I managed to hang on long enough to leave of my own volition in 1966, when the country became a republic. I had seen it develop from a colony, through independence, into a republic that was well on the road to dictatorship. I was glad to leave in the end. The country’s dreams had faded. The sense of expectation had given way across the land to the most primitive fear – that of the knock on the door in the night.

  I derived more benefit from my time there than Malawi did. I learned some useful things about newspapers and about politics. And I trained a few journalists in the tricks of our trade, it is true – but look where that led them: to jail, without trial or hope of justice. Lord Thomson’s publishing business survived, but I never got that dollar he had promised.

  CHAPTER 4

  DAVID

  David Astor was a great editor because he was a great man.

  That was the opening sentence of the address I gave at the memorial service for my former editor at St Bride’s, the Fleet Street church, on 22 February 2002, fourteen months after his death at the age of eighty-nine.

  We had first met in May 1966, when I flew from Africa for a job interview. Thinking back to that interview – for the relatively junior post of deputy news editor – I am sure we would both have found it utterly incredible that, thirty-five years on, I would be the person chosen by his widow, Bridget, to make that memorial speech, or indeed that I would take over his job less than a decade after that first meeting.

  David would then have been fifty-four, having edited the newspaper for eighteen years – the same period that I was destined to sit in the editorial chair as his successor. I was twenty-eight and had arrived for the interview from Malawi, where, as the previous chapter described, I had spent three years editing a local newspaper and working as an occasional correspondent for The Observer, The Times, the Daily Mail and the BBC – and even more occasionally as a contact for MI6.

  What I remember most about this initial meeting was David’s apparent nervousness, bending down shyly from his great height, almost apologetically, but with a gentle courtesy, to examine with a shrewd and wary eye his short, unprepossessing and thoroughly unimportant visitor. The interview was conducted in what I was to learn was David’s usual cryptic, allusive and elliptical style. When he asked me a direct question – which writer I particularly admired – I said George Orwell, which was an extraordinary piece of luck on my part that probably clinched the job. I didn’t know then that Orwell was his great hero and friend.

  The outcome of the meeting was that I was offered the job of assistant (not deputy) news editor – a subtle distinction that I took to indicate some reservation on David’s part. I was made to understand afterwards that this wasn’t personal: it was just that David cared deeply about who should be admitted to the Observer family and disliked taking a risk, especially with someone he had met only once.

  I was naturally delighted to join the paper I had worshipped since my school days, even though Jan, my first wife, was plainly upset to be leaving Malawi, where she had been chairman of Save the Children Fund and also taught at a school for teenage African girls. She cried at the airport as we left. I was never quite sure if this was because she was giving up her work and a grander style of life than we had known before (or since, come to that); or because she had to have Fred, our golden retriever, put down; or because she was over seven months pregnant with our second child at the time of our departure. All of the above, perhaps.

  • • •

  I can still remember the moment I was advised by Ken Osborne, a fellow sixth-former at Bablake School, to read The Observer, mainly for its sports pages which, as I found out later when I got to know them both, had been revamped by Christopher Brasher and Michael Davie so that they had a style, inventiveness and literacy usually associated with books or arts pages.

  Much of the freshness came from using non-journalists to write on sport, such as Clement Freud, the philosopher Sir Freddie Ayer, John Jones, later an Oxford professor of poetry, and an England footballer, George Eastham, who would file copy from the telephone in the Arsenal dressing room after the match – the first time this had been done without a journalist intermediary, and it produced infinitely more urg
ent and lively copy than the ghosted columns we read today.

  But it wasn’t only the sports pages that excited me. Kenneth Tynan was attacking traditional theatre in sparkling prose that my friends and I used to read out to each other; Patrick O’Donovan and John Gale wrote delightful pieces of a kind that you couldn’t find anywhere else.

  Ian Jack shared this youthful enthusiasm for The Observer, writing recently: ‘Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant quality Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young.’ Jack, a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and of Granta magazine, said the Observer of his teenage years was ‘patrician, humane, cosmopolitan and inspiring’. That sums up my recollection exactly.

  My own juvenile addiction to the paper was such that my friend, the novelist Susan Hill, has since written that, when asked what I planned to do with my life at the age of nineteen, I had announced: ‘I’m going to be editor of The Observer.’ That same ambition is confirmed by a former girlfriend at Cambridge, who used to joke that I would be lucky to become editor of the Wigan Observer. Michael Frayn, later a brilliant columnist on The Observer, evidently entertained the same ambition when he was at school.

  I first met Susan Hill in Coventry when my sister brought her round to our house for tea after school; later she would visit me in Cambridge, where she was terrified to ride pillion on my Lambretta. Susan and I both worked in university vacations on the Coventry Standard, the old-fashioned weekly paper I described earlier. She was sacked and I became chief reporter inside three weeks, which must say something about the paper’s editorial standards, though I’m not sure exactly what.