Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  While still at school, Susan had sent some of her work to Pamela Hansford Johnson, the novelist wife of the writer, scientist and civil servant C. P. Snow (later Lord Snow), and had been greatly encouraged by her response. When I told her that I had devoured the whole of C. P. Snow’s novel series Strangers and Brothers while at Cambridge, sensing some kinship with our respective backgrounds – he from Leicester, me from Coventry – Susan said she would arrange for us to meet.

  I had become so involved in the novels that when I wrote to my Cambridge friend, Christopher Dixon, he greeted me in our next telephone conversation with the words: ‘Hello, Lewis,’ identifying me with Lewis Eliot, the narrator of the Snow novels. Susan took me along to one of the Snow–Hansford literary soirees at their house in London and I exchanged a few words with the great man while he sat grandly in a winged armchair. Afterwards, I asked Susan what Snow had said about me. ‘He said you were a very potential young man,’ she told me.

  Snow’s lecture about ‘The Two Cultures’, in which he had said that it was as important for an educated person to know the Second Law of Thermodynamics as the plays of Shakespeare, had been headline news at that time and had famously raised the ire of F. R. Leavis, the Cambridge literary critic, in a hilarious public rant which I, among others, was privileged to hear.

  When Leavis asked his young audience, unbelievingly, if any of us had ever read a Snow novel right through from the beginning to the end, several of us put our hands up. At this, Leavis gathered up his papers in a rage, scattering them all over the floor, and marched out muttering: ‘I can’t be expected to talk to people who take C. P. Snow seriously as a novelist.’ And then he cycled off.

  • • •

  My first year as an Observer reader – 1956 – was the year of the Suez adventure, a crucial episode in the newspaper’s fortunes. Astor had bravely condemned Anthony Eden’s government for illegally colluding with France and Israel to invade Egypt on the pretence that it was ‘saving’ the Suez Canal as an international waterway from an attack by Israel – an attack that, in fact, the three countries had plotted together in secret beforehand.

  In ringing tones that still echo down the decades, the paper said Britain and France had acted ‘not as policemen but as gangsters … we had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness.’ Words like ‘gangsters’ and ‘crookedness’ were a refreshing change from the fustian, stilted and overly respectful prose favoured by most editorial writers at that time. Such stirring language and shining moral certainty attracted idealistic young people like me and my friends, but alienated many of the paper’s older readership, who regarded it (only a decade after the Second World War) as tantamount to treason to write such things while British forces were risking their lives.

  More damagingly for The Observer, many major advertisers withdrew their support, especially Jewish-owned companies. The loss of Jewish readers was a particular source of regret to David and he made great efforts to win them back, most notably by sponsoring the Masada exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall at the end of 1966, soon after I had arrived at the paper. Masada was the site of the last stand of Jewish zealots who reportedly chose mass suicide rather than submit to Roman rule. The symbolism of Masada is central to Israeli consciousness.

  The exhibition, which displayed recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls recovered from the Qumran caves by the great soldier-archaeologist Yigael Yadin, had the desired effect of restoring relations between The Observer and leading Jewish families, such as the Sieffs and the Wolfsons. This was a great relief to David who, according to Cyril Dunn, an old hand at The Observer who had a look of George Orwell about him, had ‘an indestructible respect for the brilliance of the Jewish mind’.

  Not all brilliant Jewish minds reciprocated this respect, however. Isaiah Berlin, for example, described David Astor as ‘a neurotic, muddled, complicated, politically irresponsible, unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of somebody or something … a typical poor little rich boy’. This only goes to show that very clever men can sometimes say very silly things.

  Isaiah once invited me to his house in Hampstead for an evening in honour of Sir Georg Solti, the conductor. Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, was among the guests and I remember his wife saying to me by way of introduction: ‘Have you met the old fiddler?’ I had arrived late and dashed into the house through a rainstorm, to be greeted by Isaiah as I folded up my umbrella with the words: ‘Ah, here’s the only man who can answer this crucial question.’ I was wondering what insoluble philosophical riddle was about to be thrown at me in front of this gilded audience when he added: ‘Do you know if Manchester United won the replay tonight?’

  It has been said that the real damage that the Suez affair caused to The Observer was not so much commercial, though that was plainly severe, but the effect it had on David Astor’s self-confidence. I can’t make a reliable judgment on that because I never knew David in his editorial prime between 1948 and the early 1960s. By 1966, however, when I joined the paper, he certainly seemed weighed down by editorial uncertainty and by heavy commercial losses – caused by increased competition from the Sunday Times and the recently launched Sunday Telegraph and by the increasingly outrageous demands of the printing unions.

  David had a highly developed sense of guilt and he was still clearly obsessed by the damage his Suez line had caused the paper. He asked Iain Macleod at an Observer lunch I attended in 1970, shortly before the Conservative Chancellor died, why the paper still suffered from the fallout of the Suez affair when it was now manifestly clear that The Observer had been right all along. Macleod replied: ‘The trouble is, David, you can be wrong by being right too soon.’

  Observer guest lunches in the late 1960s and early 1970s were lavish affairs, offering a taste of the opulence David had enjoyed at Cliveden, the stately home of his parents, Lord and Lady Astor. There would be a drink (two drinks usually) at the bar beforehand (whisky or gin and tonic), then white wine and red wine (both of top quality), even brandy and cigars, all served with a smooth and silent efficiency. The brandy and cigars were dropped by the mid-1970s, either for reasons of economy, because of changing tastes or, more likely, because David was no longer the editor. The guests were usually senior politicians of all parties, but sometimes there were figures from the arts or literature, occasionally even royalty, in attendance.

  It may not have been just the Cliveden effect, for other newspapers also entertained lavishly at the time. Once, when I was invited by Denis Hamilton to a lunch at The Times, we were served on gold plates. At the Daily Telegraph, Lord Hartwell had a grass putting green on a balcony outside the dining room, looking over Fleet Street, where we were served by an ancient manservant who looked as though he had wandered in from Downton Abbey.

  The nicest guest I can recall at an Observer lunch was John Betjeman, who charmed everyone, especially the serving and kitchen staff, making a point of thanking each one personally. The nastiest was Richard Crossman, the Labour Cabinet minister. I had been warned that he usually found someone round the table to bully and would wait for a stray thoughtless remark to seize on like a dog with a bone. In this case the victim was Nora Beloff, the paper’s political correspondent, whom he tried to tear limb from limb, though she put up a characteristically feisty defence.

  I invited Margaret Thatcher for lunch with senior executives and the political staff in 1976, a year after she had become Leader of the Opposition. Just as my secretary received a message from reception to say that her car was arriving and would I go down to meet her, I had to take an urgent call from Lord Goodman telling me that the trustees were almost certainly going to ask Rupert Murdoch to buy the paper. As a result, I was a bit late greeting her and also in a confused state of mind.

  As we got into the lift I muttered something, by way of small talk, about the late-night sittings and narrow majorities that the Callaghan government was patching up with the Liberals. Unfortunately, I prefaced my remarks by saying: ‘I see yo
u’ve been having fun in the House of Commons.’ It was a tiny lift and we pretty well filled it; suddenly it felt even smaller when Mrs T. puffed out her ample chest and bellowed: ‘Fun, Mr Trelford? Fun?! Is that what The Observer thinks about our national politics?’

  Having led with my chin, I had only myself to blame for getting it punched. She clearly didn’t feel at home at The Observer and continued in a defensive/aggressive mood throughout the lunch, doubtless feeling trapped in a crypto-Marxist hideout.

  I was reminded of this episode, some decades later, when Simon Hoggart entitled his book about Parliament House of Fun. I amused myself with the thought of the Iron Lady thundering from beyond the grave: ‘Fun, Mr Hoggart? Fun?! Do you think Parliament is fun?’ To which Simon would doubtless have replied: ‘Well, yes, actually.’

  A most productive lunch took place two years later when the guest was Dickie (later Lord) Attenborough. Our correspondent in South Africa, Donald Woods, editor of the Daily Dispatch in the Eastern Cape, had just made a dramatic escape across the border to avoid arrest for his robust reporting on the death of his friend Steve Biko. The young leader of the ‘black consciousness’ movement had been battered to death in custody by the South African security police.

  Attenborough was so taken by the story that he eventually made a film about it, Cry Freedom, with Kevin Kline as Woods and Denzel Washington as Biko. It may have been made several years later but the seed had been planted at that Observer lunch.

  The most productive Observer lunch, however, resulted in the launch of the London Marathon in 1981. It was the brainchild of Christopher Brasher, who had been sports editor of The Observer as well as taking part in the first four-minute mile with Roger Bannister, winning a gold medal in the steeplechase at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, and being head of features at the BBC. In addition, he was a mountaineer, an environmental pioneer and an expert at fly-fishing – and as if that wasn’t enough, he became a rich, racehorse-owning businessman when his running-shoe company was taken over by Reebok.

  Chris was a determined man, used to getting his own way, and he was frustrated that the idea of a London Marathon, devised by himself and his old friend and fellow Olympic athlete John Disley, was being held up by bureaucratic objections from the police, the keepers of the royal parks and politicians from the London boroughs. He asked me to host a lunch at the newspaper, to which he would invite all the groups whose cooperation he needed.

  I wasn’t surprised that Chris had got people’s backs up. He had a manic energy and bustling single-mindedness that brooked no opposition. Once, in a hot-tempered exchange at The Observer, I asked him: ‘Are you so big-headed because you won an Olympic gold medal, or did you win an Olympic gold medal because you were so big-headed?’ He looked chastened at this, a rare occurrence. He chewed on his filthy pipe and growled: ‘Good question. I don’t know the answer.’

  Sir Horace Cutler, leader of the Greater London Council, gave us strong support at the lunch in banging the heads together of the Metropolitan and City of London Police and sweet-talking the bosses of the parks and the main London boroughs affected by the marathon route. He was scathing when they asked for the launch to be delayed for a year to give them more time to get their act together. Cutler was a keen sports fan, wore a goatee beard and was regarded as a bit of a showman.

  Many years later, in 2003, I was surprised and flattered when several of Brasher’s obituaries credited me with playing a key role in getting the London Marathon started. The truth is that Brasher and Disley were 99 per cent responsible for that; the contributions of Cutler and myself amounted to no more than 0.5 per cent each. Even so, it is something The Observer can be proud of.

  When, some years later, Princess Margaret came to lunch to make a presentation to Dame Ninette de Valois, I suggested a loyal toast. The Princess Royal replied: ‘Oh, well, if you like. Sorry, what I meant to say was, how very kind. I’m sure my sister would be pleased.’ Then she added with a laugh: ‘I don’t suppose Andrew Neil would be doing this at the Sunday Times.’

  • • •

  I have now written articles for The Observer in seven different decades, a record that only Katharine Whitehorn could possibly match – though William Keegan, whom I recruited as an economic correspondent in 1977, can perhaps claim an even greater achievement in having now completed fifty years’ continuous writing on the paper. I began writing, in a small way, for the sports pages while still an undergraduate at Cambridge. I covered some rugby matches from Coventry and Cambridge and wrote up the first Oxford–Cambridge tiddlywinks match.

  I still have the letter dated 17 September 1959 from Geoffrey Nicholson, then deputy to Christopher Brasher on the sports desk, commissioning my first piece: ‘You know the sort of thing, I imagine: an attempt to convey the atmosphere of the match and to combine comment with the blow-by-blow stuff.’ I blush to recall that the first line of one of my early match reports was a quotation from Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: ‘Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.’

  When Geoff came to cover matches himself at Coventry or Cambridge, I would join him in the press box and act as his bag man, offering to telephone his copy through to The Observer for him while he caught his train back to London or to Wales. As we walked from the rugby ground to the railway station I would nag him for stories about my heroes on the paper.

  He used to tell me tales about his early career in advertising, saying that his sole lasting contribution to the profession was one slogan: ‘Hey fella, Fruitella.’ He told me about a campaign from his own agency that used the line: ‘Daks – the Trousers that Stand Out in Front.’ He had spotted the innuendo, but decided not to point it out and the ad duly appeared in print.

  About fifteen years after this, when I became editor of The Observer, I appointed Geoff Nicholson as my sports editor. He had recently returned to The Observer from the Sunday Times. As a man who smoked sixty Gauloises a day all his life – he even wrote a history of the cigarette called Passing Clouds – Geoff had not been happy with a prolonged fitness campaign in the Sunday Times, which was addressed not just to its readers but to its staff as well.

  Geoff commented: ‘What the Sunday Times could do with is a deep breath of foul air.’ He found the boozy camaraderie of The Observer sports desk – described by sports editor Peter Corrigan as ‘a publoving, carousing bunch of laid-back troubadours’ – much more to his liking.

  But he preferred writing, especially on Welsh rugby or cycling, to being a desk-bound executive and gave up the job after a couple of years to follow a wide range of sporting events, most famously the Tour de France, about which he wrote a classic book.

  I took a train to Wales for his funeral, accompanied by Harry Enfield Sr and Richard Ingrams, then editor of The Oldie, for which Geoff’s wife Mavis, the well-known television interviewer, wrote an agony column. He was buried in a hillside cemetery in a valley of bleak beauty at Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, where he and Mavis had lived.

  • • •

  My love affair with The Observer was undiminished during my time in Africa, where we would receive a beautiful airmail edition on thin and very white newsprint that was laid out, I discovered later, by the paper’s veteran managing editor, Ken Obank (‘KPO’, as he was universally known), and won many design awards. My house in Blantyre was on the airport road, so I bribed the African van driver who collected all the overseas newspapers to stop off at my house to make his first delivery.

  Eventually, even though it wasn’t what she really wanted herself, my wife said to me one morning as I stood by the roadside waiting for the papers to arrive: ‘If you’re so desperate to know what is happening in England, maybe it’s time you went home.’

  And so I did, joining The Observer in July 1966, in the week that England won the World Cup. Despite my wife’s pregnancy, we had stopped off on our journey home in Nairobi, Cairo, Athens, Belgrade and Milan. In all these places I would seek out a television set, either in a hotel or a bar, to follow Engla
nd’s progress through the opening rounds.

  Our son Tim was born three weeks after I joined the paper, conveniently on a Sunday morning, so that I could attend mother and son in hospital for a couple of days – a couple of days being deemed sufficient father care in those benighted times.

  My arrival in the newsroom caused some confusion; I felt that I wasn’t really expected. This was because I had been appointed as number two to John Thompson, but he had quit the news desk to take over the colour magazine in the period between my interview in May and my arrival in the office in July. William Millinship was now the news editor and he had never met me.

  This might have made for a difficult relationship, but Bill and I hit it off from the start, though I bore some slight resentment over his habit, in the Blackfriars pub after work, of ordering a gin and dry martini (five shillings and sixpence) while I could only afford a half-pint of bitter (one shilling and threepence).

  Bill had spent his entire journalistic life in the field and had never handled any reporter’s copy except his own, so he welcomed my sub-editing experience. Bill was always a reporter at heart and when, in 1968, France was overcome by the student revolts and industrial strikes, he insisted on quitting the desk for a couple of weeks and going back on the beat.

  He had been the paper’s Paris correspondent for many years, covering the Algerian war, and was later our man in Moscow and Washington, where his meticulous reading of documents made him the most reliable reporter of the Watergate affair. He afterwards returned to London as my managing editor, looking after budgets and staffing problems. He was adept at both, careful with the paper’s pennies and handling temperamental staff with what Neal Ascherson described as ‘almost Buddhist patience’.

  By the time I arrived, The Observer had recently left Tudor Street, in a warren of lanes behind Fleet Street, and moved to Queen Victoria Street, opposite the Mermaid Theatre and Blackfriars station, occupying one wing of the building that then housed The Times. On a Saturday, when The Times wasn’t working, we took over their newsroom for the day. The production arrangements were not just pre-digital but pre-war, a throwback to the 1930s.