Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  When I became editor and abolished such ‘no-go zones’, I found the women’s pages caused me more problems than any other department. The oddest women’s editor I had was Ann Barr, who had been a star at Harper’s Bazaar but found it difficult to adjust to the very different context of a newspaper. Talking to her was sometimes disconcerting, because she carried marks on her neck inflicted by a pet parrot she kept at home. She became so eccentric that I decided to part company with her, provoking a protest campaign from her admirers, who included people like Germaine Greer and Julian Barnes.

  Miriam Gross, who was brilliant at running books pages but less so at running women’s pages, claims in her memoir that she resigned because I asked her to make the pages ‘more raunchy’ and that in a dispute I took the side of a fashion editor because ‘she was a blonde with large breasts’. Reading these sexist insults, I reflected that a man who accused a female executive of basing her editorial decisions on a man’s attractiveness, let alone the size of his private parts, would be hung, drawn and quartered – and rightly so. For a woman to say that about a man, however, is apparently all right, even if the claims are preposterous and wholly untrue.

  Observer readers didn’t want ‘raunchy’ pages and neither did I – and I never used such an ugly phrase. But we did want something on those pages of greater appeal to women than an article about a male Marxist art critic, which was actually the cause of our falling out. Miriam had the honesty to admit afterwards that the article ‘was totally unsuitable for women’s pages’. So was she, I’m sorry to say, though I was pleased when she went on to be a such a success on her return to running literary pages at the Sunday Telegraph.

  Not all editors of women’s pages were so critical of me. It was comforting to read a flattering account by a former women’s editor, Suzanne Lowry. ‘Among the many and various editors for whom I have worked,’ she wrote,

  Donald Trelford was by far the most sympathique – mainly, I suspect, because he was the only one who actually liked women, in general as well as in particular.

  This is not to suggest that we did not have ferocious arguments and major disagreements. We did, and they were sometimes painful, but Donald at least always had the argument, always listened, and handed down what I now see to have been fair judgements.

  • • •

  David Astor and I fell out over Eric Newby, the paper’s intrepid travel writer. He had arrived through one of David’s unorthodox methods of recruitment, hiring him while he was a fashion buyer for John Lewis. In this role Newby had got to know Katharine Whitehorn at the Paris fashion shows and she recommended him to The Observer on the basis of some books he had written, notably The Great Grain Race and A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

  Newby had won a Military Cross while serving with the Special Boat Squadron in Italy, where he had been captured and made a prisoner of war. He escaped with a broken leg and was hidden from the Germans by a Slovenian family who had moved to Italy and hated all fascists. Wanda, the teenage daughter of the family, used to take Newby food while he lay hidden in a hay loft. He went back after the war to find her and they married in Florence in 1946.

  In the early 1970s, I was living in Wimbledon, as the Newbys did, and we became good friends. I remember lively dinner parties at their exquisite little house, at one of which I remember meeting their neighbour Jane Gardam, the novelist. Eric would become so excited and red in the face that we feared he might burst a blood vessel.

  Newby’s genius was in writing great travel epics, but what the paper required – or, rather, what the advertisement department demanded – was puffs about places where readers could take their holidays, against which they could sell adverts to the travel trade.

  For Eric, of course, this was anathema. Peter Crookston, then editor of the colour magazine, had a splendid idea for a series on ‘Hidden Europe’. When I called Eric to my office to try to enthuse him with the idea, he was horrified at the thought of exposing some of his favourite places to the vulgar gaze of Observer readers. So, there was some point to Astor’s opposition, and I lost the battle to keep Newby on the paper. Later, when he appeared on This Is Your Life, Eric kindly paid tribute to me for trying to save him.

  I sensed some personal animosity in Astor’s attitude towards him. Eric had a rather posh accent on which David, as an aristocrat, would have looked down as a middle-class affectation. Really posh people, it seems, do not talk posh. David was not a snob, but I caught occasional glimpses of him seeking reassurance about someone’s background.

  He had accepted me for what I was – a grammar-school boy from Coventry who had become an officer in the RAF, taken a good degree at Cambridge and edited a paper in Africa. But one day it came up in conversation that a former Observer contributor, Professor Robert McKenzie of LSE, the leading psephologist of the day, whose swingometer became one of the best-known props on TV at general elections, was a distant relative of mine and that Trelford was actually his middle name. David seemed to take comfort in the discovery that he could ‘place’ me and that I wasn’t just a man from nowhere.

  • • •

  Book serials had always been a major part of the Sunday Times’s success, so I made it my business to try to compete in this area as well – an impossible task, as it turned out, since our budget was a fraction of theirs. This meant talking, mostly over agreeable lunches, to agents and publishers. We bought some good circulation-boosters, such as the memoirs of Rose Kennedy, mother of the assassinated brothers John and Bobby Kennedy; and Piers Paul Read’s book, Alive, about the South American football team that survived a mountain air crash by eating parts of their dead teammates.

  When Mrs Kennedy came to London to publicise her book, I was invited by the publisher, Sir William Collins, to join them for lunch at his office. She wasn’t an easy woman to talk to. In fact, it became clear that the lunch itself was what interested her most. While she was silently munching, her nose never far from the plate, I asked her about Gerald Ford, who had just succeeded Richard Nixon as President.

  ‘Do you know Mr Ford, Mrs Kennedy?’

  ‘You mean the man who makes the motor cars?’

  ‘I meant the President, Mrs Kennedy.’

  ‘No, he’s a mid-westerner. I wouldn’t know a man like that.’

  At that, her attention switched rapidly back to the plate in front of her. I got the point: her mouth had much better things to do than answer my tomfool questions.

  I am reminded of a conversation David Astor once had with President Lyndon Johnson in Washington. Patrick O’Donovan, who was present, told me that David asked a long, hard-to-follow question about the Vietnam War, including several sub-clauses, to which LBJ replied: ‘You mean to say you came all the way across the Atlantic to ask me a chicken-shit question like that?’

  • • •

  A succession of sports editors had to get used to my intrusions, which resulted in good working friendships, usually fostered in the pub, with people like Clifford Makins, Hugh McIlvanney, Peter Corrigan and my old chum Geoffrey Nicholson. I got to know McIlvanney better when he strayed from the sports pages to cover some major sporting event that appeared on the Review Front, which was my territory.

  Once, while he was abroad, I shifted around some paragraphs in his report. This was a daring thing to do, for nobody messed with McIlvanney’s prose. When he returned to the office, however, he saw the point of my modifications and I sensed that our relationship changed for good once he accepted that I had a genuine feel for words.

  McIlvanney has been described as ‘the best writer ever to apply words to newsprint’. That high praise came from David Randall, a highly skilled newspaper technician who made himself an indispensable backbench operator on The Observer and later on the Independent on Sunday. In his book, The Great Reporters, he quotes some examples of McIlvanney’s striking way with words.

  On Lester Piggott: ‘A volcano trapped in an iceberg.’ George Best: ‘Feet as sensitive as a pickpocket’s hands.’ Boxer Joe Bugn
er: ‘The physique of a Greek statue but fewer moves.’ Or on the skinny build of snooker champion Stephen Hendry: ‘Never has a wearer of dinner suits been so urgently in need of dinners.’ Or this, on the comeback of the sportsman he understood better than anyone: ‘We should have known that Muhammad Ali would not settle for any old resurrection. He had to have an additional flourish. So, having rolled away the rock, he hit George Foreman on the head with it.’

  By the early 1970s, Hugh was generally regarded as the best writer on the paper, even on one that prided itself on brilliant writers. It was inevitable that other papers would try to tempt him away from us, especially as the salaries we paid were not competitive. On a number of occasions, around six o’clock in the evening, he would put his head round my door and ask if he could have a word. I would ring my then wife and say I was going out with Hugh McIlvanney. After a pause, she would reply: ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

  We would head off into the night, often to Soho, where (insofar as I have any reliable recall of our well-fuelled jaunts) we would end up in the early hours in some seedy club where we would engage in a friendly bout of arm wrestling and Hugh would swear his undying love for The Observer. Another crisis over his potential defection had been averted. Recently, when I was staying at the Garrick Club, one of the old waiters said to me: ‘I thought you’d be interested to know that the record you and Mr McIlvanney set for the longest lunch in the club, finishing at 7.25 p.m., has now been beaten.’

  It was a surprise, not to mention an editorial and commercial calamity for The Observer, when he accepted an offer to join the Daily Express, presumably for a much higher salary. I warned him that the Express, for all its promises, would really value him for his adjectival brilliance and would not allow him, after a honeymoon period, to enjoy the space to which he had become accustomed on The Observer. This was something, however, he had to find out for himself.

  Meanwhile, I had to find his successor as chief sports reporter. After meeting a number of Fleet Street’s sporting heavies, I settled on Peter Corrigan, then writing on a variety of sports in the Daily Mail. The big problem came when, as one might have predicted, Hugh became disenchanted with the Express and asked to come back.

  We met a number of times in secret, trying to work out a way in which I could manage his return to The Observer without putting Corrigan’s or anyone else’s nose out of joint. He had critics on the paper, notably KPO and some people in management, who objected to the size and lateness of his expenses and the length and lateness of his copy.

  I was lucky in that the two people whose opinion would carry most weight – Astor and Corrigan – were not opposed to his return. Had they been hostile, it would have been impossible to secure the restoration of our star writer. Corrigan, in particular, was completely grown-up in his attitude and eventually became sports editor for a decade in which the pages won many awards. Peter was a fine man and exuded a natural authority, partly though his size but also as a result of his engaging personality.

  • • •

  Had David Astor retired in the mid-1960s, as he might well have done, to sort out the paper’s complex financial affairs, which were inextricably mixed with those of his family, Michael Davie would have been the obvious successor as editor. A decade later, however, when David finally retired, he wasn’t a candidate, having made it clear that he didn’t want to be considered.

  He seemed happy enough with his return to writing and showed no resentment, at least to me, that I had taken his job. He was given a back-page column of his own in which he explored any subject that took his fancy. This quickly became one of the most popular parts of the paper. He won a Granada press award for some investigative columns about the secret workings of Cabinet committees.

  He left later to edit The Age in Melbourne, where he was adjudged to be a big success, adding an investigative edge to the paper and bringing in some excellent writers. He returned in 1981 and wrote for The Observer until he retired to write books full time in 1988.

  David’s retirement, when it came in 1975, followed a long, drawnout battle with the printers, who were told that the paper would have to close unless staffing costs could be cut by a third. The printers insisted that journalist numbers should be included in the cull.

  I handled the negotiations with the Observer chapel of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) – in some discomfort, as I recall, hobbling around on a pair of crutches after snapping an Achilles tendon on the squash court. David, against all advice, agreed to allow a BBC documentary team to wander round the office while all this was going on. They even sat in on some of my meetings with the NUJ. The printers refused to talk to them.

  In the end, a deal was struck in which about 25 per cent of the paper’s massively inflated payroll costs were reduced. The Observer management insisted that all printers accepting redundancy would have to appear in person in the managing director’s office to receive their compensation package from the safe.

  As a result, many of them never appeared to collect their redundancy money – people with names like Mickey Mouse, for example, who were listed on the union’s schedule of Observer Saturday workers, but were never required to work. A number of employees had been paid several times under different names.

  At the conclusion of this crisis, David announced that he would be leaving at the end of 1975 and asked the paper’s trustees to find his successor. The concept of workers’ control, much favoured by Tony Benn, then a minister in Harold Wilson’s government, was in the ascendant at the time. At The Guardian, when Alistair Hetherington retired earlier that year, the journalists organised a kind of beauty contest in which all the staff had a vote.

  The two main contenders were Peter Preston and John Cole. When Preston was shown to be the more popular choice, Cole was persuaded to join The Observer. Cole, who became my deputy, told me later that it had been made clear to him when he joined that, whatever selection procedures were adopted by the NUJ, or indeed by the paper’s trustees, I would be the next editor and he would be my number two.

  This has led some people to conclude that the whole selection process was a farce, since the result was pre-ordained in my favour. This view underrates, in my opinion, the quality and independence of the Observer trustees and the determination of the NUJ chapel to see a fair fight.

  Although more than half a dozen senior Fleet Street figures put their names forward, it soon became clear that the contest was between me and Anthony Sampson, who had worked on the paper before I joined and had afterwards written some successful books.

  David Watt, political editor of the Financial Times, made a favourable impression on Goodman, but he was thought to lack the all-round experience that an editor, especially one running a Sunday newspaper, would need. Watt was sadly electrocuted a decade or so later by a live power line he picked up, thinking it was a branch from a tree, at his Oxfordshire home after the storm of 1987.

  Other candidates included Joe Rogaly, a talented columnist on the FT; Geoffrey Cannon, a former editor of Radio Times, who went on to write some bestsellers on dieting; and Dennis Hackett, who had worked on a variety of Fleet Street papers.

  Hackett later became editor of Today and was then rather foisted on me by Lonrho, who owned Today, when they sold the paper. I made him editor of the Observer magazine. Dennis was an engaging character and one of the most skilled operators in the business, but even a friend described him as ‘blunt, forthright and combative’.

  When I told him I didn’t like the direction in which he was taking the magazine and objected to the fact that he never consulted me, he replied defiantly: ‘And what is the penalty for displeasing Donald Trelford – ex-fenestration?’ I told him to pack his bags and leave that afternoon with an abruptness that was unusual for me – provoked by his tone and possibly by well-sourced rumours that he was after my job.

  Sampson had his supporters among older Observer journalists who had worked with him in the past when he ran the Pendennis column. He was also muc
h admired for his editorship of Drum, the South African magazine, which had used black writers and photographers during the worst period of apartheid. He became a friend of Nelson Mandela (whose biography he wrote many years later) and advised him on the speech he gave at his treason trial. He was also the author of bestselling non-fiction books such as The Anatomy of Britain and its several sequels as well as exposures of the oil, banking and aviation worlds.

  He was clearly a powerful contender. What I had in my favour was that I was fifteen years younger and had effectively been running the paper for some time. After six and half years as David’s deputy, the journalists were used to working with me. I suppose I was the continuity candidate, whereas Sampson offered unpredictable change, which might have made some journalists uneasy about their own futures. Some might also have wondered if he could give total commitment to The Observer if he was still engaged in writing books.

  • • •

  The NUJ chapel, in its wisdom, chose two staff members to sound out the views of individual journalists as to who should become their new editor. One, Michael Davie, was chosen because he was known to support his old friend Sampson; the other (Robert Chesshyre, the head of the NUJ chapel himself) because he was thought to favour me. Both were sworn to eternal silence on the exact result of their soundings and who had supported whom. All the chapel members were told was that there was strong support for both Sampson and for me and little for the other candidates.

  After this exhaustive consultation process, the NUJ told the Observer trustees that it would object to neither of us as editor, but would oppose anyone else. In his biography of Astor, Jeremy Lewis says I won the support of the journalists ‘by a fairly large margin’, an assessment supported by Lord Goodman in his memoirs, in which he said I had been ‘overwhelmingly the winner’.