Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  I took him and his wife to dinner in a private room at the Garrick Club, along with some members of the paper’s literary department, the publisher Tom Rosenthal, and Conor and his wife Maire. I sat at one end of the table and Bellow was at the other, surrounded by the O’Briens. From where I sat, everybody seemed to be having a good time. But when, the next day, I said that to Rosenthal, he replied: ‘You were at the wrong end of the table, Donald. It was actually a disaster. Maire O’Brien kept complaining to Bellow, saying things like: “You New York Jews are always moaning about your lot. You should lighten up.”’

  Since Bellow was actually born in Quebec, two years after his Jewish parents arrived from Lithuania, and had spent nearly all his life in Chicago, he was not pleased at being depicted as some Woody Allen figure by someone with literary pretensions, but who clearly knew nothing about him and hadn’t read his books. He was furious and needed restraining by Tom from walking out. I had missed this little drama completely.

  • • •

  One of Barnetson’s innovations had been a weekly management meeting, chaired by himself and attended by the two managing directors, the finance director and the editor. It was his tactful way of exerting his influence on the paper. I suggested that Conor should be included. The benefit to me was that he had such a presence and reputation that the others had to listen to him. I would brief him carefully in advance about the paper’s editorial requirements – perhaps more space for news or a bigger budget for buying book serials or hiring a new specialist writer – and he would put the case with much greater authority than I had been able to muster in the past.

  He managed to make every request sound like a matter of principle that couldn’t be denied, helped by the fact that Barnetson was rather in awe of him. In the past, operating on my own in a room full of managers, I would be fobbed off with comments like: ‘Nice idea, Donald, but we can’t afford it.’

  On one occasion, however, when I needed Conor to put forward the editorial case on a very important matter, he failed to turn up, even though I had briefed him about the meeting earlier in the day. An hour went by with no sign of him, then another, until he finally arrived at five minutes to five, just as we were thinking of breaking up. For some time he said nothing at all, just sitting there with a blank look on his face. Finally, when asked a direct question, he answered coherently with his usual perfect sentence structure, but in a high-pitched squeak that diminished the authority of what he had to say. I failed to get the decision I needed.

  Afterwards I tackled Conor about his absence and he muttered rather shamefacedly: ‘It was all the fault of my fellow Irishman, the picture editor, who led me astray over lunch.’ I went down to the editorial floor in a bit of a rage and confronted the picture editor, Tony McGrath. ‘Tony,’ I said, ‘will you please not get the editor-in-chief drunk when I need him at a management meeting.’

  McGrath replied in his gentle Irish accent: ‘It wasn’t my fault, Donald. It was Conor. We went to a Greek restaurant and he had three bottles of Greek wine, followed by several starboard lights (green chartreuse liqueurs). I couldn’t get him to come back to the office.’

  After that I detailed Iain Lindsay Smith to be Conor’s accredited drinking companion – a suitable choice since he was famed for his ‘hollow legs’, never seeming to get drunk no matter how much alcohol he had taken aboard. Conor could be a joy in the pub, amusing everyone in earshot with his sharp repartee and delightful anecdotes, his rosy face lit up with enjoyment at the camaraderie. But a point would come, not very far into the evening’s drinking, when his head would fall to one side and he would start giggling and talking gibberish.

  While in London, he lived on a houseboat at Chelsea Reach and had to get aboard by walking across a narrow plank. Fortunately, he had an office driver to see him home or he might have ended up in the Thames by missing his footing and landing in the mud. In the end it was the driver (who couldn’t read and so was unable to use a map), not Conor, who eventually had a heart attack.

  Conor had a closer relationship with John Cole than he had with me. They would spend hours wrangling about Ireland or British politics. I suppose I could have joined them if I had been more interested in the inner struggles of the Labour Party as it clung on to power at the tail-end of the 1970s. When they talked about the paper’s policy on Ireland, I was sometimes made to feel like an English intruder.

  The only serious falling-out I had with Conor was over Mary Holland. She was plainly republican in her sympathies, and even had a child by a well-known republican supporter, but she made no secret of this and she was one of the best-informed people about both parts of Ireland. I thought her political assessments were shrewd and as objective as she could make them.

  None of us who were there will ever forget the powerful contribution she made to an editorial conference in 1968, when she held the room in thrall as she outlined the many forms of injustice and discrimination suffered by Northern Irish Catholics. In the silence that followed her passionate speech, David Astor said quietly: ‘Go away, Mary, and write it.’ Her double-page spread, entitled ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, foreshadowed the troubles that started the following year. What was so surprising about this was that Mary was then the paper’s fashion editor. She used to be seen in the office wearing a fur coat.

  Mary based herself in Dublin and produced some of the most authoritative and best-researched articles on the conflict. She incurred Conor’s serious displeasure, however, by writing a magazine article about the so-called blanket women, the wives and mothers of IRA prisoners who organised protests about their treatment, that seemed to Conor to be overly sympathetic towards them and to mislead readers about the real situation in the North. So he decided to sack her.

  This is his description of the episode in his memoirs:

  I wrote to her about this and we had a somewhat acrimonious correspondence. She stuck to her guns and I told Donald Trelford that I had no confidence in the objectivity of her coverage of Northern Ireland. John Cole agreed. Donald Trelford acquiesced, for the moment, as he generally did if the opposition appeared adequately motivated. Mary Holland was out of The Observer as long as I was still there, but after I had retired as editor-in-chief Donald quietly restored her. This did not at all surprise me.

  A bigger issue than Northern Ireland was looming in 1979 with the coming general election. Which way would The Observer advise its readers to vote? For an exhausted and divided Labour Party that had just about held on to power with the help of Liberal votes in Parliament? Or for a Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher that would be more right-wing than the one led by Edward Heath? For a paper like The Observer, this was a genuine dilemma. It was to determine the paper’s ownership.

  John Cole, the strongest political voice on the paper, was firmly for sticking with Labour. I was in favour of supporting no party, just setting out the choices for readers to decide for themselves, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. Newspapers don’t vote, I said: people do. Our job is to help them make up their minds, not dictate to them. To me Labour seemed to have run out of steam and was short of ideas and Thatcher seemed too extreme and untested for a paper with liberal values.

  Even though he said in his memoirs that he would personally have voted for Thatcher, Conor never said this when the election was discussed in the office. In fact, I found his account of this episode in his memoirs, written twenty years after the events, either disingenuous or the product of faulty memory.

  Conor had sat as a Labour MP throughout his political career in Dublin, and during the 1979 election campaign he went to Belfast to address a meeting of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. According to agency reports, he had assured them that The Observer would be supporting Labour in the general election, an announcement greeted with loud applause by his audience – and with some surprise by me, since we hadn’t discussed it. He wrote to Thornton Bradshaw saying the same thing and received a horrified response. Arco clearly wanted The Observer
to back Thatcher.

  I suspect that Conor, as an Irishman, didn’t really care much about the election either way, but he wanted to test the Americans’ claims of non-interference with the paper by doing the opposite of what they wanted. It was a dangerous ploy that resulted in Arco offloading the paper as soon as they decently could.

  He virtually admits this in his memoirs in an explanation that still leaves me baffled: ‘I thought that, in the logic of the Astorian tradition I should defer to John Cole … I also thought that to be guided by John Cole on this issue might lead to a showdown with the owners.’ How did the ‘Astorian tradition’, as he called it, lead him to defer to the opinion of the deputy editor rather than that of the editor?

  Barnetson was so concerned about the effect that the general election leader would have on Atlantic Richfield that he asked me, as a special favour, if he could read it before publication. I took a proof round to his swanky Mayfair apartment on a Friday evening and agreed, after some debate, to make a few minor alterations to the wording. I knew what he was up to: he wanted to be able to tell Arco that he had toned the leader down a bit.

  The chairman was so grateful for my cooperation that he gave me a bottle of 1964 Chateau Latour Premier Grand Cru to take home, even though I hadn’t changed very much. When I got home that night, however, rather annoyed that I had allowed the chairman to interfere at all in an editorial matter, I said to my wife: ‘We’ll drink that when Barnetson dies.’ Sadly, he died only a year or so later and I felt bad for having said that, especially as I rather liked him. In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to drink his bottle of claret and gave it away to an auction at my daughter’s school.

  After The Observer had thrown its support behind Labour’s losing cause, relations with Arco were never the same again. It was only a matter of time before the paper would be sold. Conor’s own position as editor-in-chief was also doomed. He knew that and didn’t really care, though he was keen to keep his column. He was missing his family in Dublin; he was frustrated that he couldn’t persuade The Observer to change its policy in crucial areas, such as the Middle East; and he had well-paid offers to do other things, over which he would have total control, such as write books, travel and give lectures. He didn’t need the hassle any more.

  • • •

  After the failure of the long stoppage at The Times and Sunday Times, the Thomson Organisation put the two papers up for sale. Although the matter was never discussed with me or The Observer’s management, I discovered from Harold Evans that Arco were interested in joining a consortium he was putting together to buy The Times.

  I discovered this at a crowded party I gave at a tiny house I then had in Canonbury, where I found Evans in deep conversation with Thornton Bradshaw. Harry said he had fixed a meeting with Bradshaw for the following day to brief him on his business plan. The benefit to The Observer, he said, was that The Times could be printed on the Sunday paper’s empty presses during the week.

  Evidently Arco had proposed merging The Observer and the Sunday Times. According to Evans, that idea had been gaining ground and had found some favour with Gordon Brunton, who was handling negotiations for the Thomson group. Needless to say, this had never been mentioned to me. The Daily Mirror got hold of the story and said Anderson was in town ‘to decide between J.R. and Bobby Ewing – that is, between Harold Evans and Donald Trelford’.

  Despite our professional rivalry, Harry and I had always got on well, partly perhaps we were both from working-class families in the provinces. We were both very short and were sometimes mistaken for each other. On a train from Sheffield to London one day I was approached by Tony Benn, who thought I was Evans and took some persuading that I wasn’t.

  All these schemes came to nothing because the Thomson Organisation, effectively Brunton and Sir Denis Hamilton, decided that the two papers should be sold together, not separately, and that they favoured Rupert Murdoch as an already established international publisher who had the clout to deal with the print unions and the experience to run a big newspaper operation.

  Harry was the leading editor of my generation and we certainly missed him in the debates over press freedom and regulation in the decades that followed his emigration to the US. His mistake was to allow Murdoch to tempt him away from his unassailable position at the Sunday Times into the uncharted, shark-infested waters at The Times. As the son of a railway driver, he probably couldn’t resist the opportunity to edit the so-called top people’s paper.

  Their failure to secure The Times was an added reason that Arco were ready to sell The Observer. After Barnetson’s death and Bradshaw’s move to NBC, there were no voices raised to keep the paper.

  • • •

  Conor Cruise O’Brien had an exaggerated idea of my skills as an office politician. He once said to Alan Watkins: ‘Donald used to be a scrum-half, you know. I bet he could reach touch on both sides of the field by kicking the ball with both feet at the same time.’ I certainly needed all the political skills I could muster when we reached the end-game with Arco. The confusion and chaos of that time are caught in some (barely legible) handwritten notes I made at the time. Here is a lightly edited summary of them.

  WEDNESDAY 18 FEBRUARY 1981

  Full of cold, but came in to sneeze through a lunch with Michael Foot. Bob Anderson [ROA] was in town. RH [Roger Harrison] obviously puzzled that he hasn’t been in touch – ‘I’ve no idea what Bob’s up to,’ he says, a bit fed up that Kenneth Harris [KH] obviously does.

  Office rumour that Associated are buying The Observer. Continuing concern over who will be vice-chairman, since we all fear KH will use this position to lord it over everyone, as he would be senior Ob exec in London.

  THURSDAY 19 FEBRUARY 1981

  Savoy lunch to launch of new Grove Dictionary of Music. Meet Goodman [Lord G] in gents. Says he’s seen ROA and wants to talk, but he’s quickly surrounded at pre-lunch drinks. At lunch he sits next to George Melly, an unlikely couple.

  Walk back along Embankment, risking my cold, and find KH (in Stetson) waiting for lift at the office. Happen to know he was due to lunch with ROA because RH had told me, so I leave him to mention it and tell him where I’ve been lunching. He doesn’t mention his lunch. I press him a bit, saying I’d heard that ROA might drop in on our management meeting that afternoon. He replies in his grand cryptic way: ‘Nothing Bob does would surprise me.’

  I’m puzzled about this – the fact that he won’t mention that he has seen ROA – so I tell Conor and Lajos, who also think it’s odd. ‘Fishy,’ says Lajos. ‘Up to no good,’ says Conor. John Cole says he has seen KH and ROA lunching at Athenaeum. He and Jimmy Cox, the production manager, had actually pinched the table they had booked.

  ROA wanders in at about 5 p.m. into our management committee meeting. After general chat, he said he had decided to take over the chairmanship himself – ‘You guys have got a fight on your hands and I wouldn’t want to miss it’ (meaning the competition with Murdoch’s Sunday Times).

  We all welcome this – genuinely, because we were glad to have as chairman the man with the real power. We said there had been rumours of a bid by Associated Newspapers. He admitted Vere Harmsworth had offered to buy the paper, but he’d turned him down.

  Went to Israeli Ambassador’s house for musical evening. Among the guests were Lady Avon, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Lady Melchett, Peregrine Worsthorne, Max Beloff – and (a late arrival as usual) Lord G.

  After supper Lord G took me aside. Had I heard that ROA planned to be chairman? I said I had – I thought it was good news. Did I know who he planned to make vice-chairman and his resident representative here? Not KH, surely? He feared so. Caesar was making his horse a consul. It had to be stopped. KH was an implausible figure who would make The Observer look foolish. He couldn’t understand the curious relationship ROA had formed with him, his peculiar dependence on him. KH had had a poisonous influence. He said he would ring ROA before the board meeting to make sure he wouldn’t propose KH as vice-chairman.
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  I sat next to the glamorous Lady Melchett, who asked about KH (I had first visited her house with him). She said he was typical of men who formed too close an attachment to their mother. On the way out Lady Avon said she had ‘almost’ started taking The Observer again – for the first time since Suez: ‘It’s so much better than the Sunday Times.’

  FRIDAY 20 FEBRUARY 1981

  Board meeting today. Lajos rang early to ask what was going on. He said he smelled trouble. I told him what Lord G had said about KH. ‘You’d better warn the others’, he said, ‘in case it comes up.’ In the office, I saw John Cole and Iain Lindsay Smith and told them about the Harris possibility. ‘You’d better warn Conor,’ they said. I knew of Conor’s contempt for KH, so I said to him: ‘You’re the bravest among us and you’ve got the least to lose. If the subject comes up, you must ask for KH to leave the room. Once he’s out of the room I’m sure he’ll get no support.’ Conor said he’d ask for that if the matter came up. He likened KH to Shakespeare’s Malvolio.

  I told RH, who said he was sure ROA wouldn’t bring the matter up. Conor mustn’t provoke anything. (RH always nervous about offending Arco.) I then went along the corridor to Brian Nicholson’s office and was half-way through a discussion when Frank Stanton, one of our American directors, came in. I learned afterwards that Frank had gone to warn Brian that ROA intended to sell the paper. Brian, having heard Bob deny the Rothermere bid, didn’t think he meant immediately.