I was so worried by the angry confrontation that I went to see Rowland again on the following day. This time we had a civilised conversation, the first time we had met on our own. I had actually been introduced to him briefly at a Queen’s birthday reception at Government House in Zomba seventeen years before, but he clearly had no recollection of this. He was interested, though, that I had worked in Malawi and travelled throughout the continent. The fact that Tiny and I could talk in shorthand about African politics was one reason why we were able to forge a good working relationship over the coming years. He felt comfortable talking to me.
Tiny was in a talkative mood, clearly hoping to dispel the unpleasant atmosphere of the day before. He gave me some interesting background on the sale of The Observer. He had been introduced to Anderson about eighteen months before, at the California Club in Los Angeles, by D. K. Ludwig, who owned much of the Brazilian rainforest and was said to be the second richest man in the world. He and Anderson had been doing oil business together in Brazil and Mexico. Rowland and Ludwig were partners in the Caribbean-based Princess Hotels group, which Lonrho eventually took over.
Tiny had said to Anderson: ‘If you ever think of selling The Observer, will you give me first refusal?’ He had been surprised by the American’s reply: ‘I doubt if we’ll be long-term holders. I don’t like their policy, and if I decide to sell I’ll let you know.’ This meeting would have been in the second half of 1979, after the British general election, reinforcing my view that The Observer’s support for Labour had been pivotal in Arco’s decision to sell.
True to his word, Anderson had tried to get in touch with Rowland on Thursday 20 February 1981, the day before the board was to fall out with him over Kenneth Harris’s role at the paper. So, Anderson was already preparing to sell the paper before that crucial showdown with the board. Tiny was abroad, so the two men met for lunch at Claridge’s on the Saturday.
There Anderson had complained that Arco had no say in the commercial or political policies of the paper and that he had come to the end of the road. At the coffee stage, Anderson said: ‘Tiny, do you want the paper?’ Tiny had replied cheerfully: ‘If you’re making an unconditional offer, I’m making an unconditional acceptance, and that in law is a contract.’ They shook hands and Anderson said: ‘The paper’s yours.’
‘Why do you want The Observer?’ I asked Tiny. ‘The Observer is a peach for Lonrho,’ he said. ‘It’s the best-known British paper among African leaders, because many of them were exiled in London while fighting for independence and they remember that The Observer supported them. OK, it’s losing money, but not much. Besides, it owns several thousand Reuters shares of significant value.’
He said Anderson had made it a condition that there must be no announcement of the sale until he and Kenneth Harris were airborne on the Sunday evening on their way to California. Any leak and the deal was off. Anderson was particularly concerned that Goodman and Astor should hear nothing until he had left the country. Even allowing for the requirements of commercial secrecy, this was all a bit rich. Anderson had brazenly lied to people to whom he owed some respect and gratitude.
I heard later that the board of Atlantic Richfield had actually stood up and cheered when Anderson told them he had sold The Observer. He said Arco and Lonrho were looking at joint oil projects in Angola and Mexico. This was more obviously comfortable news for the Arco directors to hear than the travails of a loss-making, left-leaning British Sunday newspaper.
Rowland confided in me a couple of special points about the sale. Anderson had made it a condition that Lonrho should ‘look after Kenneth’ and he said he would find a role for him within the company. That’s fine with me, I said, as long as he kept him away from The Observer. Harris was eventually made chairman of George Outram & Co., in succession to Sir George Bolton, the garrulous octogenarian.
The other point was more problematic. He had promised Anderson that he would get rid of Conor Cruise O’Brien, doubtless prompted by Harris. I said Conor was an important part of the paper and I didn’t want to lose his column. He shrugged and said: ‘He has been pretty insulting to me. I guess there’s no immediate hurry, but I gave my word, so he will have to go sometime soon, especially if Bob raises the matter again.’
It seemed certain that Lonrho’s ownership of its Scottish newspapers would automatically trigger an inquiry by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC, now the Competition Commission). That would delay the sale by at least three months and the MMC might decide it would be against the public interest. This official inquiry would be our main line of defence against Lonrho, giving me and The Observer’s journalists a chance to express our objections in the hope that their bid would be rejected.
Rowland said his offer for The Observer was conditional on the takeover not being referred to the MMC and pointed out that Rupert Murdoch had managed to acquire The Times and Sunday Times only the year before without any reference. He was right about Murdoch, but that was a politically loaded decision based on the fact that Margaret Thatcher wanted Murdoch to own The Times and Sunday Times for the political support that would guarantee her new government.
The papers escaped a reference on the spurious grounds that they might go out of business if the sale was delayed for three months – at a time when the Sunday Times was making an estimated profit of a million pounds a week. This ruling had caused such a storm of protest that the Secretary for Trade and Industry, John Biffen, was under strong pressure from MPs and the media not to allow the next newspaper merger to go through unchecked.
And so it came to pass. Rowland made a late bid to halt the reference by saying he would buy the paper himself, but that was quickly ruled out on legal grounds. So The Observer’s heavyweights – Lord Goodman, David Astor, Conor Cruise O’Brien – joined me and the senior staff in seeking to have Lonrho’s bid overturned.
In my evidence to the MMC I cast doubt on Rowland’s ‘honesty and reliability’ and pointed out the obvious conflicts of interest that could arise in Africa under Lonrho’s ownership. Rowland, I said, was
a man of powerful personality and immense resource – some would say ruthlessness – in the pursuit of his company’s interests. The development of Lonrho may have required those characteristics, but The Observer carries influence in the very places where his interests are most extensive and most at risk. The Observer has the power to help Lonrho or to hurt it in those places. For Rowland to grant The Observer editorial independence would be to give one of his companies carte blanche to damage the whole business to which he has devoted his life. It is as illogical as it is unbelievable.
In sticking my neck out in this way, I was taking a risk. If Rowland succeeded in obtaining The Observer and ever read my evidence, he might find it impossible to work with me. Copies of my submission were kept under lock and key by my ultra-loyal secretary, Barbara Rieck, who was ready to defend them with her life. It was an unexploded bomb.
I also appeared before the Commission to answer their questions. I have to say I was not impressed with the chairman, Sir Godfray Le Quesne, who didn’t seem awfully interested in the proceedings, especially after lunch. Lord Goodman didn’t think he was much of a lawyer. David Astor sensed that editorial freedom did not rate highly among the Commission’s interests and feared the worst. At the same time, Lonrho were going through a parallel inquiry into their bid for House of Fraser.
John Cole, my deputy, added to our concerns when he escorted Commission members on a site visit to the paper on a Saturday night. He was infuriated and depressed to hear one member, Alastair Burnet, the ITN news reader, say loudly: ‘The Observer is lucky that anybody wants to buy it.’ Later I wrote a profile of ITN for The Listener and was surprised to be invited by Burnet to join him in a large whisky, not long before he was due to go on air.
Cole brought further gloomy news after meeting the former Prime Minister, James Callaghan, at a party at the House of Commons. Callaghan had always shown an interest in The Observer. ‘What I
’m hearing, John,’ he said, ‘is that the government has decided that Lonrho can have one, but not both of their objectives. If they turn Rowland down on House of Fraser, which I gather they are minded to do, they will let him have The Observer.’
And so it turned out. I remember the day the decision was announced as one of the most depressing of my life. My wife was out that evening and I just sat in an armchair brooding in the dark. I told David Astor that until then I had always believed, perhaps naively, in the basic integrity of British institutions.
In preparing our case against Lonrho I had set several reporters onto the task of discovering all we could about Rowland’s eventful life. The main investigator was a tigerish though twitchy reporter called Jack Lundin, who would drop his latest research through my letterbox at home in the dead of night. He insisted that no one should know about his involvement – possibly, I could only surmise, because he might have been concerned that some of his methods of research could be described as, well, unorthodox.
We didn’t find anything incriminating in Tiny’s family background, though it was unusual – father German, mother born in England of a Dutch father and a British mother. He was their third child, named William Roland Fuhrhop, and was born in a British internment camp in India (giving him British nationality) in 1917. The camp was in an unhealthy malarial district called Belgaum in the western Indian state of Karnataka.
The family were glad to return to their apartment in Calcutta when the war ended a year later and Tiny’s father started to rebuild his business. He had been an importer of locomotives and heavy machinery from Europe, which he sold throughout India and Burma. While he was interned, his entire stock had been seized without compensation and his offices and stores around the country had been looted.
Thanks to the efficiency of the British-trained Indian civil service, we were able to find out the names of every family in their apartment block. One other family was called Roland, which might have been the original source of his name. He was called Tiny by his ayah because he was an unusually large baby.
In fact, I was to learn more about his past from Tiny himself than I did from the paper’s somewhat illicit research. Over the next few years he would drop a personal anecdote into our weekly conversations on the telephone, or over lunches at Cheapside, or occasionally at a family Sunday lunch at Hedsor Wharf, his estate at Taplow in Berkshire, situated on a bend of the Thames, and next door, as it happens, to the Astor estate at Cliveden. I could tell that his children had never heard these personal stories before and were fascinated by them.
Around the time The Observer was sold in 1993, Rowland became much exercised by extracts published in the Daily Telegraph from a biography written by Tom Bower. He said he didn’t recognise the person written about and described the book as ‘smearing and distorting everything that belongs to me and giving me a character of his own choosing’. Neither I nor Tiny had talked to Bower and the author seemed to have relied heavily on sources with a grudge against the paper, some of them people I had sacked.
Bower impugns my motives and my integrity throughout the book, putting the worst possible gloss on any situation involving me, and makes numerous false allegations. The Telegraph presented the extracts with a picture of a face that was half Tiny’s and half mine, implying absurdly that our personalities had become intertwined.
The tone of the book was unremittingly hostile – a formula that worked with Bower’s biography of Robert Maxwell, a brave book that was written under extreme intimidation. But Maxwell was a monster. Tiny Rowland was an altogether more complex, subtle and many-sided character. Bower’s unrelenting case for the prosecution created a portrait of Rowland that I simply couldn’t recognise after getting to know him pretty well over a dozen years.
I couldn’t challenge Bower on the history of Lonrho’s business (though I’m sure Tiny could have done) but what he wrote about me and The Observer was seriously skewed. He had been misled by his sources into describing situations that never happened and quoting verbatim from conversations that never took place.
I told Tiny that he could expect to be misrepresented if he kept the details of his early life and business career secret, and I offered to publish anything he decided to write. I expected him to say no, but I was amazed when, just a few days later, an article of about 4,000 words landed on my desk. It appeared in the last issue of The Observer that I edited in May 1993, but it doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention in the hullabaloo surrounding The Observer’s sale.
• • •
In the early 1920s, Fuhrhop had moved his family from India to Hamburg, where Tiny enjoyed a pleasant childhood by the Alster Lake. From an early age, he showed all the signs of being an entrepreneur, buying and selling all sorts of playground necessities and making money. In his teens, he travelled with an uncle to Romania, Poland, Norway and Denmark.
At school, he became the Hitler Youth Troop leader (Scharfuhrer) of about 150 boys, alarming his father, who was already concerned about the rising power of the Nazis. He swiftly despatched Tiny to England, where he became a boarder at Churcher’s School, Petersfield, excelling at sport. After leaving school he spent a short time in the City of London before his uncle employed him in the family shipping business. He was soon travelling all over Europe, obtaining shipping contracts in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Germany and Austria.
He became involved in helping Jewish families to get their assets – or the small proportion of these allowed by the authorities – out of Germany. His family was well equipped for this role because it had extensive warehousing and customs facilities in London and several European countries, and a firm belonging to his mother’s family, Ryley & Company, had a number of postal depots around Britain.
On the brink of war in 1939, he said he had been arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin, suspected of being part of a ring that helped Jewish families to take more assets out of Germany than the authorities allowed. He was held in total silence and darkness for long periods in Moabit jail, expecting to be taken out and shot. Eventually his family’s protests that he was a British subject secured his release and he was dumped across the Dutch border. He returned to England and changed his name by deed poll. His father had refused to do that, making his life in war-time England more complicated than it needed to be.
• • •
After several months of enquiries, he found that his father had been interned on the Isle of Man, along with thousands of other German nationals, and had been appointed camp leader of 4,000 declared anti-Nazi detainees. Fuhrhop had been interned in both world wars and in both he had seen his business destroyed. Tiny himself had been drafted to a non-combat field ambulance unit in Hertfordshire, which was later transferred to Scotland. Because his father was German and his elder brother had been recruited into the Wehrmacht (where he later took part in the retreat from Moscow), Tiny couldn’t join a British combat unit.
When he was refused compassionate leave to visit his father on the Isle of Man, he went anyway and was punished on his return with twenty-seven days in Barlinnie prison in Glasgow, one of the toughest in Britain. On his first day, an NCO (non-commissioned officer) slashed him across the face with a whip. His mother became ill and was sent, as the wife of a German (even though she was British), to Holloway prison, where the doctors missed her cancer and accused her of malingering.
In Edinburgh, Tiny had been befriended by his commanding officer, Colonel Malcolm McKinnon, even though he was the man who had sentenced him to his term at Barlinnie. He invited Rowland to his home for a supper. Allegations have sometimes been made that Tiny expressed pro-German, even pro-Nazi, sympathies at this time. His friendly treatment by his commanding officer surely argues against that.
Tiny is known to have applied to join MI6 and been turned down. A senior War Office figure interviewed him at Edinburgh Castle and said: ‘Rowland, what are we going to do with you now? You could be of great use to us, but it’s all very difficult. For instance, we are now allies of th
e Russians. Let me ask you, who is worse to you, Stalin or Hitler?’
Tiny replied: ‘They are both equally evil.’
The officer then told Tiny that, because of this response, he was being placed under close arrest and would be charged under Section 18B, which referred to ‘British-born persons with leanings towards fascism’. Tiny says they knew he wasn’t a fascist, but it was the only regulation under which he could be detained, since its interpretation was elastic. He spent several weeks at Saughton prison in Edinburgh before being shipped to the Isle of Man to join his parents in internment.
By this time his mother’s condition had worsened. She was sent for treatment in Liverpool, where Tiny was taken under armed escort to Walton prison to visit her there. Tiny finally watched in anguish as she died in British custody at Peel on the Isle of Man. It is easy to see why Tiny was so bitter about his mother’s treatment and was to retain a profound hatred of the British establishment. She was British; her only offence was to have married a German forty years before. She was a sick woman in her sixties and clearly no threat to national security. Why she had to be moved around the country in her weak condition is hard to understand and can only explained by the bureaucratic chaos of war.
• • •
It is hard now, after more than seventy years, to understand what it must have been like to be a German in Britain at a time of war. Britain’s propaganda efforts were aimed at demonising anyone and anything German. I remember seeing a sign outside an empty cinema where the name of the film would normally appear. The sign read: ‘THE ONLY GOOD HUN IS A DEAD ONE’. In such a hate-filled atmosphere, reason often went out of the window.
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