When a sub-editor had finished with a story and it had been passed by the chief sub, the typed copy was then placed on a pulley system, rather like those once used in department stores, and transported by overhead wire to the print room. Unfortunately, the copy quite frequently got lost in transit. I remember one panic over a lost ‘splash’ or lead story that was eventually traced to the gents’ lavatory, where it had slipped off the pulley line into a urinal and made a different sort of splash.
My first Saturday on the paper was the day of the World Cup final. As the match reached extra time, I went down to the stone, where the paper was set into type by the printers, to find a big debate going on. KPO, who had a blind spot about sport, insisted that the first edition should go at its usual time in order to catch trains to Scotland and other places and flights abroad. The sports editor thought the paper should wait for the result; the head printer and the circulation manager stood impatiently waiting for a decision.
As I approached this stand-off, Ken surprisingly asked for my opinion, even though I was the newest kid on the block. I replied (in a way that sounds a bit pompous now): ‘I’m sorry if it makes the paper late, but you can’t possibly send out a copy of The Observer anywhere tomorrow without the result of a World Cup final played in London. We would be a laughing stock, especially if England win.’
To my amazement, this spirited intervention carried the day and we waited for our legendary sports writer, Hugh McIlvanney, who was to become a good friend over the next half-century, to complete his report by telephone straight to the stone, where it was copied down in biro onto a page proof by one of the printers.
After the first edition, the night editor would turn up and take over the paper. It was then a huge, bald Yorkshireman called Ronald Harker, who during the week ran the paper’s foreign syndication service. It was his habit, when he arrived around 6 p.m., to roll the back of his hand across the proof of the front page of the first edition with a disdainful air, then take out his pen and cross out some headlines. He did this to set out his stall, to show he was the boss and that the rest of us might as well go home and leave him to it, as he clearly hoped we would.
My involvement with the World Cup, on this, my first production day at The Observer, was not over. On the front page of the first edition the only reference to this historic event was a brief paragraph containing the result and a cross-reference to the sports pages. When we got back upstairs to the news desk, I plucked up the courage to suggest to Millinship that there ought to be a story about it on the front page. He reported my view to KPO, who passed on the suggestion to Harker.
Eventually Harker’s towering figure stood over me: ‘I gather you think we should have a story about winning the World Cup. Since you’ve got so much to say for yourself, I suggest you write it – here’s all the agency copy.’ At this he dumped a pile of paper on my desk and said I had twenty minutes to write 500 words. The story duly appeared and there was even a front-page picture with it of Bobby Moore lifting the Jules Rimet trophy.
Two and a half years later, in the first week of January 1969, KPO invited me to do the night editor’s job myself when Harker was on holiday. This, I knew, was a great compliment and I was nervously determined not to make a mess of it. It turned out to be an exceptional Saturday for late news. Just before 9 p.m. the wires were buzzing with a report of the Marden rail crash, when a passenger train ran through two danger signals in thick fog and crashed into the back of a parcels train in Kent. Four people were killed and eleven injured.
We had just remade the paper for the last edition with news and pictures across several pages, and were beginning to think about going home, when a reader rang up around 1.30 a.m. from close to Gatwick airport and said she had seen a bright light through her kitchen window and thought there might have been a crash. There was nothing on the wires about this, so we started working the phones.
Arthur Gould, who worked for us on Saturdays and later became a senior figure at The Times, established that the story was true. A Boeing 727 of Ariana Afghan Airways, flying from Kabul via Frankfurt, had crashed in the enveloping fog, killing forty-eight passengers and two people in a house east of the airport, a mile and a half short of the runaway. The pilot, co-pilot and eleven passengers had surprisingly survived.
I had to give the order to ‘stop the presses’ – something all journalists dream of doing – to ensure that there would be enough copies of the paper left to print that would carry the latest news. There would be no point producing an extra edition if the print run had already finished and the machine room staff had all gone home for the night.
I couldn’t help thinking of one of my great heroes in journalism, Arthur Christiansen, the long-serving editor of the Daily Express, who had made his name at the age of twenty-six, while working as night editor, with his handling of the crash of the giant airship R101 in 1930. In the dramatic fire and subsequent crash over France, forty-eight of the fifty-four people on board were killed, including the Air Minister.
Christiansen’s coverage of the R101 disaster became the stuff of Fleet Street legend. I still have a well-thumbed copy of his book, Headlines All My Life, which was one of several newspaper memoirs that I cherished – others were Hugh Cudlipp’s Publish and be Damned!: The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror and Tom Hopkinson’s book, In the Fiery Continent, about his time editing Drum magazine in South Africa. I also absorbed every word and illustration of Allen Hutt’s classic work on newspaper design.
It was after 4 a.m. by the time I took the final edition home under my arm, feeling that we had a paper that any editor would be proud of. Or so I thought. KPO was certainly delighted with my debut performance as night editor and asked Astor on the following Tuesday (our first working day of the week on a Sunday paper) to congratulate me in person. When I went into his office, however, David seemed unusually subdued, as if suffering some inner torment. Finally, he said: ‘KPO tells me you did a good job with the paper on Saturday.’ Then, after a long silence, he blurted out: ‘But you mustn’t think this is what The Observer is about.’
I left the office feeling rather deflated, and when I got home that night I got out Christiansen’s book to compare David’s response with that of Lord Beaverbrook, who had telephoned Arthur to say: ‘You have secured a wonderful feat of journalism. I am proud to be associated with a newspaper on which you work.’ Yet I can understand now what David was trying to say: people don’t buy The Observer to read about rail or air crashes; they buy it for stimulating opinions and brilliant writing.
That was one reason, I believe, why David never showed any serious interest in the paper’s Saturday news operation: that wasn’t what The Observer was ‘about’. On a Saturday, he stayed in his office, rather than on the back bench with the paper’s senior executives, and usually went home early before the first edition was out. He wasn’t even interested in knowing what story the paper would be leading with, though he might sometimes be consulted by KPO if it was likely to be politically controversial or running a serious legal risk.
He would spend Saturday mornings working painstakingly on headlines for the leader and the leader page articles, usually with John Silverlight, a sprightly and delightful character, known as the paper’s ‘super-sub’ who, unlike most sub-editors, was admired by reporters for clearly improving, rather than mangling, their precious words. He was immortalised as John Dyson in Michael Frayn’s comic novel about newspapers, Towards the End of the Morning, published a year after I joined the paper. Although the rest of us could see that the gestures and attitudes struck by Dyson in the book were pure Silverlight, the man himself could never see the resemblance.
I can still see John in his shirtsleeves, spectacles gleaming, hair flopping, as he confronts a writer while clutching a sheaf of subbed copy or galley proofs, plus a dictionary or some other work of reference, crying out, as he often did to Frayn and to others: ‘Pure gold!’ Every week I would pass Silverlight’s tiny office and see Frayn sitting patiently
on the radiator until John finally turned and uttered the words: ‘Michael, you write like an angel.’
Eventually I would take part myself in the leader page discussions with Astor and Silverlight and came to admire David’s own unexpected skill as a headline writer and copy editor. He sought exactitude, even if it meant keeping the production line waiting. But the work David really cared about took place on a Friday evening, when he would sit alone in his office, long after his secretary had gone, often with a blanket or overcoat round his shoulders – not because the room wasn’t heated but because of the lasting effects of a gunshot wound he had received in a German ambush after landing in the Ardennes with Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1944. There he would wrestle for hours with the main leader or the profile, which were treated like Holy Writ.
When I showed him an article, he would take ages to read it and would then read it all over again, even more slowly, to make sure that he fully understood it. He often said how amazed he was that I could read something and express a view about it so quickly. I have since come to the conclusion that David was dyslexic – probably the only dyslexic editor in the history of Fleet Street. This would explain the problems he had with his studies at Eton and at Oxford, where his teachers were puzzled that someone of obviously high intelligence had such problems with written work such as essays and exams. I have sometimes wondered if David could ever have finished a book in his life.
From an early age David acquired his knowledge, not from books, but from listening to people talking. In his childhood, the talkers at his parents’ dinner table would have been eminent politicians of the day or writers like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells; Charlie Chaplin and Mahatma Gandhi were among the more exotic visitors to Cliveden and the Astors’ London home in St James’s Square. Later, David would listen to George Orwell and Brendan Behan, one of whom he tried unavailingly to save from TB and the other from alcoholism.
I believe it was because he enjoyed listening that he called so many editorial conferences. He hardly bothered with the day’s newspapers; he relied on his Observer colleagues to keep him informed – and not just informed, since news as such didn’t interest him very much. He wanted to know what it meant and enjoyed nothing so much as hearing discordant voices arguing over the rights and wrongs of an issue.
John Pringle, who had been deputy editor until five years before I joined the paper, wrote in a memoir:
If Mao-Tse-tung invented the permanent revolution, David Astor invented the permanent conference … he presided over this intellectual bear-garden with extraordinary patience and good temper … listening attentively with a smile on his handsome, boyish face, occasionally brushing his hair off his forehead with a characteristic gesture, and sometimes intervening shyly but effectively.
None of this had changed very much by the time I arrived, though some of the personnel had moved on, especially David’s post-war coterie of distinguished German and East European intellectuals such as Sebastian Haffner, Isaac Deutscher, E. F. Schumacher and Rix Lowenthal (a Foreign Office press officer once asked, tongue in cheek, what language The Observer’s conferences were conducted in). The conferences were still interminable and though the discussions were often brilliant, they used to drive production people frantic because of the difficulty of getting a decision.
It used to be joked around Fleet Street that after these four days of non-stop talk, from Tuesday to Friday, The Observer would then be produced on Saturdays by KPO and a few other professionals with little or no reference to what had been said before. Not entirely true, in my experience, but not entirely untrue either.
I was driven frantic myself, just a year after joining the news desk, when the Six-Day Arab–Israeli War broke out in the Middle East. Millinship and I were desperate to send out reporters to Jerusalem, Cairo, Amman and Damascus to cover this huge story. But we couldn’t get access to David to authorise the expenditure because he was locked in his office all day – pretty well all week actually – with Colin Legum and Robert Stephens, the paper’s foreign panjandrums, with occasional sharp interruptions from Nora Beloff, the political correspondent.
Legum, a South African, was a strong supporter of Israel, having once worked for David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first Prime Minister. Stephens, who was diplomatic correspondent, was an Arabist who had worked in Palestine radio. The paper’s Middle East policy was David’s attempted compromise between their opposing views.
Legum had a habit of turning up late at the editorial conference, after the main decisions had been made, and then persuading us to change everything, much to KPO’s frustration. He would open his remarks by saying pontifically: ‘There are four points to be made about this.’ We would all then have to sit in impatient silence while he ticked them off. He spoke with an authority that no one dared challenge. It was maddening, but he was often right.
For all Astor’s belief in editorial democracy, the paper’s policy on the Six-Day War was not made in conference, but behind closed doors. The news desk’s attempt to get reporters out into the field to tell our readers what was actually happening was a much lower priority. The episode illustrated David’s core belief that news wasn’t what The Observer was about: what mattered was what the paper thought about it.
And what did it think? When the leader page was finally unveiled after days of anguished debate, the main headline read: ‘Two Wronged Peoples’. An unarguable point, it has to be admitted, but I suspect the readers of the Sunday Times got more useful information about the war from their correspondents in the field.
• • •
My progress at The Observer was remarkably swift. After less than two years I had been made assistant managing editor to Ken Obank. The purpose of this new appointment was to give me more money to persuade me to stay with the paper. I had received two outside job offers. One was from Granada Television, then a hothouse of editorial talent that went on to occupy key jobs in British culture – people such as Jeremy Isaacs (head of Channel 4 and Covent Garden), John Birt (Director-General of the BBC), and Gus (later Lord) Macdonald, chairman of Scottish TV and a minister under Tony Blair.
I was approached by Jeremy Wallington, a talented TV journalist and editor, who wanted me to join a new investigative unit he was setting up. Its main outlet would have been World in Action. I suspected the hand of Leslie Woodhead behind this offer. Les was a brilliant, award-winning documentary film-maker for Granada and had produced and directed World in Action programmes.
He knew me well from the time we spent reading English together at Selwyn College, Cambridge. I will always remember with a rosy glow coming back to the pavilion after scoring a fifty for Selwyn, including two sixes, seeing Woodhead sitting with my then girlfriend, a pretty Jewish mathematician from Newnham with long black hair, and crying out: ‘All this, Trelford, and a First as well!’
The other offer was from Gordon Brunton, who had been head of Thomson Publications, the part of the group that contained my Malawi newspaper. I had evidently impressed him on his visits to Africa. I remember him admiring some front pages we had framed about the assassination of President Kennedy at the end of 1963. By 1968, when all this was happening, Brunton had become chief executive of the whole of the Thomson group and wanted me to be his personal assistant, to act as liaison with the group’s newspaper interests.
These interests included, most notably, The Times and Sunday Times, over which Denis (later Sir Denis) Hamilton – the man who had given me my first proper newspaper job in Sheffield – now reigned as editor-in-chief.
So I said to Brunton: ‘Isn’t Denis Hamilton your link to the newspapers?’ He replied: ‘I want my own man to report to me about the newspapers, not to have to go through Hamilton all the time.’ That sounded like an uncomfortable position to be in, as Hamilton was an immensely powerful figure. The idea that I could act as a buffer between him and Brunton didn’t seem entirely feasible. He would see me as Brunton’s spy.
So I turned the offer down, though I so
metimes wondered what would have happened to me if I had joined the Thomson group. I might have ended up running one of their oil rigs, since Brunton had expanded the group into the oil business in a big way. Or, perhaps a more likely scenario, I might have joined the Sunday Times and found myself working for Harold Evans in rivalry with The Observer.
I confided to Millinship in the pub that I had received these offers out of the blue; he immediately reported this to KPO, who felt he should warn Astor. David called me in and was highly flattering about my work at the paper and promised me that the next time a big promotion came up it would be mine. He said he hoped desperately that I would stay.
I was a print man at heart, so I had no problem turning down the Granada offer as well. I had never worked in television, had no idea how it worked and rarely watched it. Furthermore, the medium was much less influential in people’s lives in the ’60s than it became later. Again, I have sometimes wondered how a TV career might have worked out. It was only in the 1980s that I started presenting some programmes for the BBC and Channel 4.
• • •
You couldn’t work for very long on Astor’s Observer without learning that psychology was not a subject you made jokes about. Journalists on the women’s pages bore the brunt of this obsession. One sometimes wondered why David employed any women at all, especially those who had children, since he believed so fervently that a mother’s place was at home. He once accused Katharine Whitehorn of ‘penis envy’ when he disagreed with her line on some current gender issue.
The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s caused him great confusion. He was delighted when Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Huffington) wrote a book, The Female Woman, challenging the main arguments of the women’s liberation movement, and made us buy some extracts for serialisation.
Shouting in the Street Page 9