Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  Beloff shouted up at him: ‘You’re a murderer.’ David came down and asked what she meant.

  ‘You’ve murdered Michael’s marriage,’ she cried, blaming David for all the personal problems suffered by The Observer’s staff. David, kind and courteous as ever, asked them to stay to supper.

  According to Gavin, the dinner was a comic disaster, with Nora either too drunk or too upset, possibly both, to talk coherently, and David nodding tolerantly as to a naughty child. At one point, Nora was in full flow when she was suddenly overcome with a bout of nausea. Undeterred, she opened her handbag, vomited into it, snapped the handbag shut and resumed the conversation with hardly a pause.

  Dinner at the Astors’, usually a civilised though fairly sombre affair, with a sluggish flow of alcohol – I was rather alarmed on one occasion to see a half-bottle of wine produced at a dinner for six – was occasionally relieved by comic moments. The Astor children were fans of Kenneth Williams, star of the Carry On films, so David asked one of the paper’s journalists, Edward Mace, who knew the actor, if he would invite him to tea with them. Mace said he was too much of a star to have tea with the children and suggested that David should invite him to dinner instead and introduce him to the junior Astors beforehand.

  When the dinner took place, the conversation got on to serious topics, and the unusual guest of honour made a remark that sounded rather racist, certainly to liberal Observer ears. According to Mace, David started tearing the bread in his hands in anguish before quietly, but firmly, putting the actor in his place. This was followed by a few moments of stunned silence until Williams blurted out: ‘OK, duckie, if you put your cock up my nose I’ll put my cock up yours.’ The silence that followed was even longer – until everyone burst out laughing.

  • • •

  The reason Astor chose me as his deputy, according to media commentator Roy Greenslade, was that I ‘had all the management and technical skills that Astor and most of his senior staff lacked’. I was also, he wrote, ‘a clever politician’ with ‘a good grasp of production, bags of tenacity and a helping of boyish charm’.

  David’s main problem in promoting someone so ‘boyish’ was persuading Colin Legum and Robert Stephens, his veteran foreign policy gurus, that I wouldn’t tread on their toes in the creation of editorial policy. He offered them some reassurance by making them associate editors at the same time. When I asked David what associate editor actually meant, he just shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘People prepared to associate with the editor, I suppose.’

  It was assumed at the time that the managing editor, KPO, might have been put out by my promotion over him, but he told me afterwards: ‘I was relieved, to tell the truth. I’d been afraid that you would take over my job.’

  Michael Davie’s shoes were very large ones to fill. He was one of the most important figures in The Observer’s post-war history. His problem, in a way, was that he had too much talent and couldn’t decide how to use it best. A brilliant writer himself, he was forever torn between writing and editing. He was also torn about whether to live in Britain, the United States or Australia, all of which he loved and had spent some time living.

  The US probably wouldn’t have been his final choice because they didn’t play much cricket there. Michael was one of the most obsessive cricket fans I have ever come across, and I have met many. Soon after I joined the paper, he telephoned me in the office and whispered conspiratorially: ‘Sobers is batting at the Oval. Shall we head off?’ We watched the great man score an elegant eighty-one. Modesty fails to forbid me mentioning a cricket match in which Michael and I contributed ninety-nine runs to the total Observer score of 109.

  I spent three years on the MCC Committee, which ended when I led the so-called David Gower campaign, protesting against his omission from an England tour of India. After the meetings, I used to give the doyen of cricket writers, E. W. Swanton, a lift from Lord’s to Baker Street station. Once, when Mike Gatting, the England captain, had been forced to quit after tabloid exposure of an alleged liaison with a barmaid, an episode that was generally condemned as a lowering of standards in cricketers’ conduct, I asked him if that sort of thing hadn’t always gone on but had been hushed up. He thought for a moment, then said: ‘What this incident illustrates is the decline in the standards of the English barmaid.’

  While on the subject of cricket, it may be worth mentioning Michael Davie’s only published comment on me, which he contributed to a book of tributes on my fiftieth birthday, collected by my then wife Kate: ‘My favourite Donald anecdote,’ he wrote, ‘combining as it does cricket and politics, comes from Barbados.’

  Having gone to the USA ostensibly to interview the President, or for some other trifling purpose, he then took off on the serious part of the trip, which was to watch a West Indies v. England Test match in Barbados. He was sitting in the Press Box (and therefore surrounded by wholly trustworthy witnesses) when someone came into the box and said that the Prime Minister wanted to see him. ‘Which Prime Minister?’ said Donald.

  Michael, for all his brilliance, was congenitally indecisive, which made his quandaries all the harder to resolve. At various times, he had been an excellent news editor, sports editor and the launch editor of the colour magazine, where he could control his own editorial space, but as deputy editor he seemed to find it hard to function. This may have been because he didn’t control any particular area of the paper. He also saw the role as doing David’s bidding, while it wasn’t always clear what David wanted or that Michael agreed with it anyway. He was full of exciting feature ideas, but he was hesitant about making other people do what he wanted.

  Bill Millinship and I would sometimes ask for his advice on a problem that was perplexing us on the news desk and would find him oddly unable or unwilling to help. Once, I recall, we sent him the cuttings of two female candidates for medical correspondent because we couldn’t decide between them. His scrawled comment, ‘Choose the one with the biggest tits’, wasn’t very helpful – nor, it has to be said in fairness, was the vulgarity at all typical of him. I once sent him an article for his comments and he sent it back with a cryptic note on the top: ‘Not boring enough.’

  Although he was attracted to the US and Australia, Michael was a quintessential Englishman at heart. With his matinee idol good looks and faultless public-school manner and accent, he would have looked completely at home at a 1930s country house party in an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. It may be no accident that he was drawn to edit Evelyn Waugh’s long-lost diaries, which were supplied by a literary agent in barely decipherable longhand – probably because Waugh had penned most of the entries in his study late at night while drunk. The diaries, peppered with deliciously malevolent comments, about his friends as well as his enemies, were a huge success, both as a newspaper serial and as a book.

  Michael also wanted to write a biography of P. G. Wodehouse. Once, when he was in the US, he looked up the exiled author’s address in the telephone directory, then turned up on his doorstep on Long Island. When he introduced himself by saying he had been to school at Haileybury, that was enough to gain him admittance to the great man’s home. Wodehouse proceeded to demonstrate how he had scored a try for Dulwich College against Haileybury in 1899.

  • • •

  Another person who fascinated him was Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Express titles and the Evening Standard. They met in curious circumstances towards the end of 1956, around the time of the Suez affair. One Saturday afternoon, shortly before the paper was due to go to press, The Observer’s news desk belatedly realised that, alone among Fleet Street papers, it had failed to send a reporter to cover the arrival of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, the newly-weds of the decade, who had been greeted with an hysterical reception at Heathrow airport.

  Michael, then a reporter, was handed a pile of Press Association copy and told to knock out a 600-word story for the front page. This he did, making the point that few intellectuals in history could ever have been so widely e
nvied as Mr Miller. A week later, Michael received a message inviting him to fly out to Beaverbrook’s villa in the South of France. The old man had evidently been greatly impressed by the article and, on the strength of it, was ready to offer Michael the job of New York correspondent on one of his papers.

  A bewildered Davie arrived at La Capponcina to have dinner with Beaverbrook and his house guests, an assortment of ancient aristocrats whose conversation was mainly about Churchill, Lloyd George and gossip about old sexual and financial scandals. Michael eventually turned the job offer down, but wrote a long and delightfully amusing account of the visit.

  These contemporary notes were to form, thirty-six years later, the introduction to a full-scale biography of Beaverbrook, which he and Anne Chisholm wrote together. The biography was highly praised, one reviewer saying it was better than the authorised version by A. J. P. Taylor.

  • • •

  As David’s deputy, I took to sitting beside him at conference. Soon, however, he asked me to move back to my former position half-way down the table. When I asked him why, he said: ‘You have a very expressive face and I can tell what you think when people put forward ideas just by glancing at you, especially if you don’t like them. If you sit next to me, I can’t look at you without turning around.’

  Although the seemingly endless editorial conferences could be frustrating, especially for those of us with things to do outside the leader pages, I began to understand why David valued them. It was partly, of course, because he preferred listening to reading, but also because it was a way of getting to know his staff better – not being the sort of editor who buys large rounds of drinks in the pub. He seemed to see conferences as a form of staff therapy, giving writers a chance to get ideas off their chest.

  Some senior colleagues, especially busy departmental editors, used to beg me to try to persuade David to cut these conferences short. But I had begun to see the point of them if it meant that the office specialists simply talked their ideas out at length, then retired to their desks satisfied that they had had their say, rather than inflicting them on the paper’s readers. This was, of course, a luxury that only a weekly paper could afford to indulge.

  After the frustrations that Bill Millinship and I had suffered over the Six-Day War, I was determined to use my new position to ensure that this could never happen again. It always struck me as ludicrous for the paper to have a single news editor who covered both home and foreign affairs. The custom was a throwback to the days of eight-page papers, caused by newsprint rationing which lasted beyond the war until the mid-’50s. As I wrote in a forceful memo I sent to David – and which I still have – this was no longer an appropriate arrangement for papers that had grown to sixty-four pages.

  ‘One man’, I pointed out,

  is responsible for the ordering of all stories on all the news pages (sometimes as many as ten or eleven), for supervising closely the work of a large staff at home and abroad, plus foreign and local stringers, and all administrative chores attached to this work (such as reporters’ expenses and the paper work involved in sending people abroad), answering up to a hundred telephone calls a day, attending endless conferences, lunches and other meetings, as well as personally handling and often rewriting all the news copy (as much as 40,000 words) that comes into the office on a Friday and Saturday.

  I got my way eventually, with KPO’s strong support, but also, I think, because David had little real interest in news anyway and was disinclined to make a big issue out of it.

  • • •

  Running the paper while David was away on holiday could be fraught with difficulties. Michael Davie had learned the hard way to steer well clear of any of David’s pet subjects. John Pringle had once fallen foul of David for running a profile in his absence of Roy Thomson when he bought Times Newspapers. Pringle put this down to the fact that David cared so passionately about the paper that he couldn’t bear the thought that policy decisions were being made without him.

  While there was some truth in this, I would have been inclined myself to play safe and call David, even on holiday, about a profile of a rival newspaper owner. David was fond of quoting a remark Beaverbrook had once made to fellow proprietors at some media crisis in the past: ‘Gentlemen, we must not bomb each other’s headquarters.’

  With one significant exception, I found deputising for David a more rewarding experience. For some weeks in 1970, soon after I became his number two, he was stricken by a mysterious illness, so I was thrown straight into the hot seat. I recently found a letter he wrote to me in June of that year that said:

  Just a word to say that I thought the last issue of the paper was excellent. Naturally, this makes me very confident of your ability to cope without me … I watch your activities with enjoyment and congratulate you on being able to assume the ‘father’ role in the office with such apparent ease.

  Jeremy Lewis’s excellent biography of Astor quotes a letter he wrote to his friend Mary Benson around this time saying: ‘I am enormously helped by having at last a really good deputy in the form of Donald Trelford. He runs the paper much better than I do when I’m away.’ David said of me later:

  In my experience, Donald always used his own head, although he never made a show of his independence. He also had the supreme merit of usually being right, particularly in resolving clashes of will, where the whole repertoire of diplomacy is of less use than the right hunch about timing.

  But I was to fall out with David over something that appeared in the paper while he was away – our only serious disagreement in the six and half years I served as his deputy. It was during the Vietnam War. Gavin Young was in Hue for the paper and filed a long and brilliant piece which I put on the right-hand leader page – sacred territory for David. But I couldn’t understand why he was so upset when he returned to the office. The subject was top of the news agenda and we were lucky to have one of our best men on the spot.

  David said his objection was to the introduction to the article, in which I had described Gavin as ‘International Reporter of the Year’, a title he had won that week in the British Press Awards. I thought it was reasonable to mention this in the intro to the article, but David argued that it gave Gavin’s piece a spurious authority which it didn’t need.

  On reflection, I decided there were really three separate strands to David’s rather puzzling objection: one was that he hated anyone else deciding things in his absence, as Pringle had found, especially on the leader page; another was that he despised press awards as meaningless baubles; but deep down I think he objected to the anti-American tone of Gavin’s article, in which he depicted the US troops as incompetent and heartless.

  David, being half-American himself through his mother, had an abiding belief in the essential goodness of United States intentions and believed that only they, working with Soviet Russia, could force peace upon the world. Many of us had doubts about this policy – I couldn’t see Russia being able to influence China, for example – but it was part of the fundamental Astor creed. The Vietnam War brought out some serious office divisions over David’s generally benign attitude towards Americans.

  I had a different attitude from Michael about the role of the deputy editor and became much more interventionist. David was really concerned with the leader pages, with the main article on the front of the Review section, with the so-called women’s pages if they were covering feminist issues, and in the colour magazine if it was majoring on a subject that interested him. But he didn’t even read some sections of the paper.

  I felt it was my job to assume that role. At first, I sensed that section heads naturally nursed some resentment at my intrusions, since they were used to being left alone. Gradually, however, eased by some frank and friendly sessions in the pub, usually the Blackfriars or the Cockpit, they got used to my involvement in their fiefdoms, which generally took the form of writing comments on galley or page proofs. Some, such as Terry Kilmartin, the distinguished literary editor, actually welcomed a second op
inion, especially if it was offered gently over a gin and tonic. This was a surprise, for Terry had a reputation for guarding his territory fiercely.

  I didn’t always succeed in persuading him to do what I wanted. He was resistant at first to my argument that John le Carré, for example, deserved to be reviewed as a serious novelist, rather than as a thriller writer. When I tried to get him to give my old friend Susan Hill more serious coverage, he viewed this as log-rolling on my part. I tried to persuade him to publish a bestseller list – this was some years before the Sunday Times carried one – but he argued that most bestsellers were either rubbish or spin-offs from TV shows.

  One area where it was soon made clear that my intervention was not welcome was the women’s pages. Reading my set of galley proofs one day, I decided that Shirley Conran’s article, though very good, was much too long for a column and suggested some cuts. The next thing I knew, David had summoned me to his office and said I had caused grave offence to the editor of the section, George Seddon, and he advised me to leave that department to its own devices. ‘George understands these matters better than you and I do,’ he said by way of explanation.

  I forbore to point out that Seddon, while a highly skilled editor and a thoroughly genial soul, was not actually a woman. He had ‘come out’ after joining The Observer, wearing pastel shades rather than the pinstriped suit and bowler hat he had previously worn at The Guardian. After a token protest at this limit imposed on my powers, I gave in gracefully, aware that Seddon really did know his job and was adept at keeping a disparate team of women writers happy.

  I remember once, when Seddon was away, his place was taken by the redoubtable Mary Stocks, long-time women’s editor at The Guardian. As I entered the room with a set of marked galley proofs, Mary turned her forbidding spectacles in my direction as if to say: what is this man doing here. She listened to my comments patiently, as to a child’s suggestions, and made no changes at all. I left abashed and never dared to return while she was around.