Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  At this, the man introduced himself as Ian Hamilton, a former editor of The Spectator. When I invited him up to the bar for a drink, he said he couldn’t stay long as he was being inducted into the Roman Catholic church that afternoon. Then he explained why he wanted to meet me. ‘I thought I should tell you that I wrote a letter to the club committee asking them to blackball you.’

  ‘Why on earth did you do that?’ I said. ‘You don’t even know me.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry about that,’ he replied rather sheepishly. ‘I had a letter from a man called Rothwell saying he was trying to get you blackballed and asked me to join his campaign. Luckily for you, the committee don’t seem to have taken any notice.’

  The other incident also related to the Garrick. I was late for a lunch at the club and urged my office driver, Jimmy Rennie, to take a shortcut through the narrow streets in Covent Garden. We swung around a corner where the Boulestin restaurant used to be sited just as a man stepped off the pavement into our path. As Jimmy slammed on the brakes, just in time, the man’s arms were spread-eagled across the bonnet, his frightened eyes scanning the windscreen. I looked up in disbelief to see that, of all people, it was Bruce Rothwell – and we had nearly run him over.

  I was in the back, so I don’t think he saw me as he shuffled off. Rothwell had gone on to edit the New York Post under Murdoch and died in 1984 – as, by coincidence, did Anthony Shrimsley, my intended replacement as editor of The Observer.

  I said to Jimmy: ‘What if we had killed him? Nobody would have believed it was an accident after the battle we’ve been through to stop him getting his hands on The Observer.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ said Jimmy. ‘I’d have just popped him into the boot and taken him down to the docks, where my mates would know how to get rid of ’im.’

  I think he was joking.

  I got to meet some of Jimmy’s ‘mates’ a few years later when his son asked me to speak at his funeral in the East End. Jimmy was a lovely man, one of the most popular and best-informed characters in the office. A short, perpetually cheerful figure, he relished the excitements of newspaper life and was equally at home in the company of printers, journalists or commercial staff. He talked of The Observer as ‘a family’.

  As chauffeur to the editor and managing director, he knew many company secrets, which he handled with great tact, especially at times when the newspaper was involved in a takeover or industrial crisis. It was once said that if Jimmy Rennie had kept notes of all the conversations in the back of his car, he could have written an explosive bestseller.

  When I turned up for his funeral, I could see that these friends of his, dressed smartly in black suits and white shirts and wearing Mafia sunglasses, were wondering a bit suspiciously what this toff (in their eyes anyway) was going to say. I started by saying: ‘It would be sad for Jimmy to die at any time, but this weekend was especially tragic. It was the time when his beloved Charlton beat my beloved Coventry City 3–2 in the third round of the FA Cup. How Jimmy would have enjoyed lording it over me.’

  I could see the audience visibly relax. It was one of many occasions in my life when sport has come to the rescue as the lingua franca between all classes, generations and nationalities. Once, as I was going into the Observer building with one of the managing directors, I was met by several jocular shouts from the messengers at the reception desk. The managing director said: ‘Why do they talk to you, Donald, and not to me?’ I replied: ‘It’s sport – the universal language; I speak it and you don’t.’

  • • •

  While in Coventry as a young man, I had got to know a reporter on the Evening Telegraph called Robert Warren, a rather posh character who had been to school at Lancing and had been a naval officer on his National Service. Bob was eagerly pursuing a young woman called Margot, but every lunchtime, after his latest date, he would shake his head ruefully and report: ‘No-go Margot.’

  Bob moved on to the News of the World, becoming its news editor for twenty years, and was the man behind many notable scoops. In all he served forty-five years on the paper, ending up as the highly valued executive editor. He worked under sixteen different editors from Stafford Somerfield (whom he couldn’t stand) to Andy Coulson (whom he liked very much).

  Rebekah Wade, who had been his editor, described him to me many years later as ‘the paper’s rock, the coolest head in the office’. When I joked that ‘we used to chase the same barmaids,’ she joked back: ‘He still is, though now it’s the drink he’s after.’ Although his sudden death in 2009 was a shock at the time, it now seems to be a blessing that he never knew about the phone-hacking scandal that resulted in the paper’s closure and the jailing of his friend Coulson.

  When I joined the Observer news desk in London in the mid-’60s, Bob and I resumed the friendship we had formed in Coventry and used to share stories about our respective papers. This was an unusual alliance, not just because the papers were so different, but because The Observer rather snootily turned its back on Fleet Street, mentally as well as physically, and had little to do with other papers.

  We used to lunch in a Fleet Street basement restaurant, close to the Daily Express’s ‘Lubianka’ building, which used to charge five shillings and sixpence for a three-course meal. In those days, the News of the World carried just as many salacious stories as it did later, but with more subdued presentation and in a text-size format.

  Furthermore, as Bob described to me with some amusement, everyone took the job very seriously. At the editorial conference, the executives were all dressed in dark suits with white shirts, sober ties and black shoes (suede shoes forbidden). As they went down the list of smutty stories, nobody ever laughed. Occasionally someone would shake his head sadly at the revelation of human weakness or another would be angry about a miscreant, say, spying on naked women taking a shower through a peep-hole in a caravan park.

  Somerfield edited the paper throughout the 1960s, maintaining and even increasing the sex-and-scandal quotient of a paper that reached a world-record sale of 10 million copies. In 1968, he fought off the embrace of Robert Maxwell in crypto-racist language, insisting that the paper was ‘as English as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding’.

  But he failed to resist the embrace of Rupert Murdoch the following year, when the Carr family sold the paper to the 38-year-old Australian. It was Murdoch’s first newspaper acquisition in Britain, followed closely by The Sun. It is hard to believe that the self-righteous internal culture of Somerfield’s reign lasted long under Murdoch’s ownership. Somerfield himself certainly didn’t last, being sacked a year later by Murdoch, who was quoted as saying: ‘He was too nasty even for me.’

  • • •

  Along with Associated Newspapers, another serious suitor for The Observer’s hand was Sir James Goldsmith, the eccentric billionaire businessman. Goldsmith had left Eton after winning thousands of pounds in a bet and then eloped with a Bolivian tin heiress, who subsequently died in childbirth. He had remained in the newspaper headlines ever since.

  He was known to be interested in buying a newspaper to purvey his political ideas and had often been linked with the Daily Express. He later launched a news magazine, Now, which was an excellent product, but failed to engage the British public in the way that such magazines did at the time in France and the United States, and it died in its infancy.

  He invited me to bring some senior editorial executives for supper at his luxurious house in The Boltons in Kensington. After pre-dinner drinks, we were all sat at a table in the basement, attended by his butler, who brought in a succession of marvellous dishes, while Goldsmith himself wandered around the room like a benevolent maître d’, assuring us that under his proprietorship there would be many evenings like this. Each individual place setting had a bottle of high-class claret alongside. This struck my friend Alan Watkins as a rather convenient arrangement, but insulted more sensitive colleagues, who thought he was assuming that all journalists were drunks.

  John Cole, who was sitting next to me,
whispered: ‘Isn’t it marvellous being a journalist – and to think we’re getting paid for this.’ His written recollection of this occasion is worth recording:

  I arrived late in the pre-dinner drinks period. When I asked Sir James what kind of paper he would like The Observer to be, were he to become its proprietor, I was rewarded with the thought that – subject, of course, to the views of senior staff, not least myself – he would, on the whole, and other things being equal, rather think that it ought to be somewhat left of centre.

  Michael Davie confided to me afterwards that when he had asked a similar question before my arrival, Sir James had seemed to think The Observer ought to be somewhat right of centre. He was patently a man of decent flexibility. Sir James had clearly done his homework, not only on political attitudes, but on the lifestyle of Lunchtime O’Booze.

  The discussion flowed merrily on, we trying to pin the great man down on specifics, he taking what might charitably be called a minimalist proprietorial stance. What would he see as his role at The Observer, we asked nervously? Well, he replied, assuming that we were finding the evening agreeable, he rather thought his proprietorship might be conducted principally at a series of such dinners, where he and senior staff would toss around ideas of what the paper ought to be doing. It all sounded extremely agreeable, not a touch of menace in sight, not a whiff of sulphur.

  Donald, driving me back to Waterloo afterwards, gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘You do realise, don’t you, John, that there has just been spread before us the prospect of an ideal future. We are intended to go home with the thought that if we will only give him support to take over our paper, life will be an endless vista of agreeable feasts, with a priceless bottle of claret placed in front of each of us, never having to share?’

  John’s recollection of the evening concluded: ‘We drank, but we did not bite.’ More importantly, the Observer trustees did not bite either, especially Goodman, who clearly had no time for Goldsmith. His bid was contingent on using the presses of the Express group, which would have involved another prolonged round of redundancy negotiations with The Observer’s printers, with all the perils of industrial action. ‘It would end up’, Goodman warned, ‘with the closure of The Observer – and very possibly Beaverbrook Newspapers as well.’

  The one good thing to result from Goldsmith’s approach was that he dropped a libel action against The Observer, in which the paper had claimed that one of his company’s most famous food brands was bad for babies. I had made this a pre-condition of meeting him.

  The next suitor for The Observer’s hand was a Hong Kong businesswoman called Sally Aw Sian, whose Sing Tao group’s profits were based on massive sales of Tiger Balm, a patent medicine. She also published five dailies and three magazines in Hong Kong, with overseas editions for Chinese readers in San Francisco, Vancouver, New York and London. In 1971, she had been the first female president of the International Press Institute.

  I received a blast from the past when Ronnie Bloom, my MI6 contact in Malawi, rang me to ask if I would like to meet Ms Aw at the hotel where she was staying in Jermyn Street. He said he was now working for her, among other things. She had already made a formal approach to The Observer’s trustees but wanted to meet the editor as well.

  When I turned up I found she had another unusual figure in her entourage: Norman Barrymaine, an Australian journalist who had been captured while covering the Korean War in the 1950s and released some years later after having been apparently ‘brainwashed’ by the Chinese. For some time, he was suspected of being a Chinese agent, but wrote a book about his experiences that appeared to clear him of these suspicions.

  We had a pleasant chat about The Observer. But I got the impression that Sally still needed to convince her financial backers in Hong Kong that the paper was a good investment. That was doubtless why she kept asking me if The Observer’s building, owned by the Astors, would be part of the deal. I said I wasn’t the person to ask about this.

  She then flew back to Hong Kong and issued a statement saying that Sing Tao newspapers were ‘not interested’ in buying The Observer. This announcement, it appeared, was to protect the company’s share price on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Although it was generally assumed that this meant she was out of the race for The Observer, in fact she had always intended to buy the paper with her personal fortune, and negotiations continued in secret.

  The man chosen to conduct this secret mission was David Astor’s nephew, also called David Astor, son of his younger brother Michael. He was running a bookshop in Burford at the time. As he set off for Hong Kong with Barrymaine, Goodman joked: ‘Tell the lady that the chairman’s hand in marriage goes with the offer.’

  For no obvious reason, except that he was playing a cloak-and-dagger role, Astor travelled under the name of Attenborough. This caused him problems at both ends of his journey. At Heathrow, he found it difficult to shake off the attentions of an airline PR man who kept asking for details of his next wildlife TV assignment.

  At the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong, where he had booked in under the name of St John, he had to explain to the police, who were hunting a gang of hijackers, why he had called himself Attenborough and St John when the name in his passport was Astor. In any event, his journey was in vain, since Ms Aw’s financial advisers were opposed to the deal unless some security, such as The Observer’s building, could be thrown in.

  Meanwhile, other bidders had made themselves known. One was Robert Maxwell, whom Goodman rejected out of hand. When Tiny Rowland threw his hat in the ring, Roger Harrison was dispatched to his office in Cheapside to explain that his company, recently described by Edward Heath as ‘the ugly and unacceptable face of capitalism’, was not considered by The Observer’s trustees as a suitable owner.

  Then there was an approach from Olga Deterding, the rich daughter of the founder of Royal Dutch Shell, who had worked as a nurse with Dr Albert Schweitzer at the Lambaréné hospital in Gabon. I went to see this rather eccentric lady in her plush apartment in Grosvenor Square and couldn’t help noticing a strange smell around her person, which I (perhaps charitably) put down to her choice of perfume. When I asked her what she would like see in The Observer, she said she would like it to be ‘more whimsical’. Her offer was politely rejected because, like Goldsmith, she would have printed the paper on the presses of the Daily Express.

  Patrick Seale, The Observer’s Middle East correspondent, came bearing a courteous letter from Colonel Gaddafi offering Libya’s financial help to save a paper he regarded as constructive and fair on the problems of the region. Woodrow Wyatt called me to his house next to Lord’s cricket ground and, puffing on his habitual cigar, said he had a wealthy client who would be willing to invest several million pounds in The Observer. When I pressed him for a name, he reluctantly divulged that it was the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Both offers were politely declined.

  Callaghan, who had asked to be kept in the picture, grew exasperated with Goodman when he heard that all these approaches were being turned down: ‘For God’s sake, Arnold, what does it matter which of them you choose?’ Goodman replied with an air of reproof: ‘There are degrees, Prime Minister, even in the nether regions.’

  On 21 November, I took part in a gloomy trustees’ meeting in Goodman’s apartment in Portland Place, where the various offers were reviewed and finally seen as impossible. There was an air of doom. The hunt for an alternative to Murdoch had taken six weeks and we were all exhausted. Advertisement bookings were down because people didn’t know what kind of paper The Observer might become. The journalists were restless. The printers were making threats. We knew we couldn’t delay any longer. We were worried we might be left with nothing.

  It seemed that we had no choice but to go back to Murdoch. It was a Friday morning and we agreed to meet on the following Monday to work out a way of presenting this solution to the staff. As we trooped out to the lift, David said: ‘I feel I’m attending a funeral.’ I said: ‘I feel as though I’m in the middle of Macbeth
.’

  What neither of us knew was that, before we could meet again on the Monday, salvation was riding towards us in a most surprising form.

  CHAPTER 9

  KENNETH

  By the end of 1976, when the Murdoch crisis erupted, Kenneth Harris was enjoying a comfortable, semi-detached role on The Observer. He worked from home but shared an office on the management floor, from which he organised the annual debating tournament for the Observer Mace. He also wrote one or two leisurely interviews a year with famous people and made political programmes for the BBC; David Astor thought the BBC had missed a trick in not making him the successor to Richard Dimbleby.

  Harris was an elegant, well-groomed man with carefully brushed black hair and a suave, eloquent, rather old-fashioned style that disguised the faint remnants of a Welsh accent. His Observer colleagues regarded him as pompous and nicknamed him ‘the bishop’. It was said of him at the BBC that ‘he could have patronised Winston Churchill’.

  Debating had shaped his life. He took part in the first Oxford Union debating society tour of the United States in 1947, along with Tony Benn and Edward Boyle, who became Labour and Conservative ministers. He wrote a book about the tour and about post-war America that caught the paper’s attention and Astor – in one of the extraordinary gambles he took on young journalists in the early 1950s – sent him to cover Washington for the paper after he had worked for two years on the Sheffield Telegraph (my own training ground, as it happens, a decade later).

  On his return to Britain he covered trade union affairs, then a major subject in newspapers, making friends with the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee. He wrote a biography of Attlee, amounting to more words than any publisher could reasonably accommodate. The book was saved by Alan Bullock, who had taught him history at Oxford – and was later an Observer director – who revised it and cut the manuscript by half.