When News International bought The Times, the paper was produced on Linotype machines, a nineteenth-century, hot-metal technology. In purchasing Times Newspapers, Murdoch had secured agreement with the print unions to switch production from hot metal to ‘cold composition’ thus doing away with the Linotype machines and molten metal. Henceforth, the Linotype operators would be redeployed to type with computer keyboards, as had long been the norm in the rest of the world. But this did not mean computerized page make-up. Instead the computers were capable only of printing up text galleys that were passed on to a team armed with scalpels, scissors and glue who cut and pasted the lines of text into position on a drawing board. When a full page had been arranged in this way, a negative would be made of it and converted into a photosensitive polymer plate. From this, the newspaper would be run off.
Back in 1974, Marmaduke Hussey had complained that moving to ‘cut and paste’ cold composition would scarcely be worth the trouble given that it still involved having to employ process engravers who produced the pictorial printing plates. He argued that only a move to full computerized page composition made sense.110 Eight years later, Murdoch had no more hope than Hussey of getting such a system installed at Gray’s Inn Road in the face of union hostility and – it has to be said – the limitations of the technology then on offer. Getting the halfway house of ‘cut and paste’ accepted was regarded as an achievement in itself even though it had long been the established method throughout the regional presses.
From the first, The Times’s switch to cold composition was beset with teething problems. It was not deemed possible to move the paper overnight from hot to cold composition. Instead the process was gradually expanded and it was not until the following year that the entire paper was produced by photocomposition. The initial results were disappointing. It had taken so long to install the ‘new’ technology that its makers no longer manufactured it. This made finding replacement parts increasingly difficult.111 Reproduction was so appalling that in October 1981 Evans suggested that the paper should use ‘the Sunday Times hot metal facilities for the front and back for as long as we possibly can. I say this because converting to cold type on the front page will be the worst advertisement for The Times and certainly hinder our sales and our authority.’112 Rather than employ speed typists, the NGA had insisted Times Newspapers re-employ the old Linotype operators to work the new computer keyboards. Many of them seemed to have inordinate difficulty adjusting to this change. The initial average of fifteen words per minute frankly beggared belief in an industry driven by deadlines. To this was added the introduction of a further stage in the process – the making of a photo polymer pattern plate, compounding delay and minimizing the time available to pick up errors. Readers zealously spotted the resulting mistakes and wrongly attributed them to declining editorial standards. Nor did speed improve much with practice. On one occasion, Evans found himself standing at the paste-up board until half past midnight trying to insert some copy that had been sent two and a half hours earlier. At that time of night, Rees-Mogg, when he was editor, had long since gone home, had dinner and retired safely to bed. Some thought that Evans should have conserved his energies by following his predecessor’s example, leaving the trials of the production process to his night staff. But Evans was too involved to delegate when so much was going wrong, complaining to Gerry Long, ‘It says something for our deadlines and for our production efficiency in this area that a[n El] Salvador story which was on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune, printed in Zurich and flown to Britain, could not be got into the London Times last night.’113
In the executive dining room, opinion was divided about the extent to which those ‘mastering’ cold composition were governed by incompetence, laziness or genuine malevolence. Nor were the NGA compositors the only union members treated with suspicion. Denis Hamilton had long been of the view that Reg Brady, the father of the Sunday Times NATSOPA chapel, had natural intelligence and would have been a constructive force if the social circumstances of his background had delivered him into managerial rather than union responsibilities. Instead Hamilton had watched while Brady ‘caused more trouble in the machine room than any other man in the history of the newspaper, discovering all manner of disputes and grievances’.114 Many of Murdoch’s most trusted lieutenants, including John Collier and Bill O’Neill, had started off in print union politics before their potential was spotted and harnessed by News Group’s management. It was decided to make Brady an offer and, to the fury of his union brothers, he accepted the Murdoch shilling and switched sides.
Brady’s fondness for a Soviet fur hat gave him an appropriately Cold War demeanour but, in the event, his defection to the capitalists did not unlock the potential that Hamilton had seen in him. Union officials refused to talk to him, thereby preventing him from playing any constructive role. Indeed, if disarming him prevented Brady from pursuing his previous destructive function, it did not seem to make much difference in the intractable war of attrition at Gray’s Inn Road. The closed shop persisted, preventing management from having a free hand in who was employed. Evans was even unable to fill a secretarial vacancy in his own office because NATSOPA sent a succession of clearly unsuitable candidates from which he had to choose. One secretary he did employ, Liz Seeber, was astonished by the ludicrous demarcation rules prescribing her actions. In the first couple of weeks at her job a typewriter broke but, on lifting it from her desk to remove it, ‘about three people said “Oh my God, don’t do that, you’ll bring SOGAT out on strike.”’ So she had to put it down, ring a SOGAT official and wait until – in their own time – a small deputation arrived armed with a trolley to wheel it away.115 It was not an environment geared to exercising personal initiative. Furthermore, it provided a cover for laziness and intimidation. In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson recounted the misery he used to experience every night as a subeditor on The Times’s business news desk when he tried to get hold of the Wall Street report from the SOGAT member whose task it was to receive it in the wire room. When each night the employee failed to take it to his desk, Bryson had to go up to the wire-room door and ask for it. He would invariably be told to go away (although in blunter language) because the employee was eating pizza and could not be bothered to look for it. Sometimes the threat of violence would be implied. Instead, the employee would come down with it when he felt like it – even if this meant it would miss the copy deadline. Obedient to the union’s demarcation rules, he would not allow a non-SOGAT member like Bryson to cross the wire room’s threshold to look for the incoming report himself. As Bryson later noted, it was just one of the ways the union exerted control on the newspaper industry ‘by keeping technological secrets to itself, like how to tear paper off a machine’.116
In the Gray’s Inn Road machine room the inter-union demarcation rules had far greater implications. There, NGA members had regarded it as a precondition of their superiority that NATSOPA members employed alongside them were not permitted to earn above 80 per cent of their own rate. In September 1981, NATSOPA members were awarded 87.5 per cent of the NGA’s £106 per night wage in return for improved productivity and a small reduction in their manning levels. Although the NGA was not offering similar concessions, it nonetheless demanded that its members’ wages should rise commensurately in order to restore their 20 per cent advantage. This would have added 28.3 per cent to the NGA payroll and management refused the request. So the NGA went on strike. No Sunday Times appeared on 27 September and The Times ceased production that evening.
Those turning up for work on the Monday had to cross a twenty-six-man picket line. Eight hours of negotiation at ACAS failed to produce a breakthrough. In the meantime, all 1400 Sunday Times employees were suspended without pay, a decision to extend this to The Times being deferred until the following day. Working closely with John Collier, Murdoch threatened the paper with destruction unless the NGA backed down. It was, he said, ‘the most serious situation I have ever seen in Fleet Street’:
We are being held up by a small group of men who never work more than half a shift a week for us. It is a straight attempt at hijacking us. If the company gives in on the dispute we will be rolled over by other unions. Unless the NGA back down, I will close The Times. We have lost money, millions of pounds. We are still being held up and there is no point in going on. We are simply not putting any more money into the company.117
The hopes of putting aside the ghosts of the Thomson years appeared dashed. It was Hussey’s shutdown strategy of 1978–9 all over again. But Murdoch had one advantage. In 1978–9, the unions knew Times Newspapers would sooner or later back down rather than see their titles permanently closed down. With Murdoch, it was not possible to be so sure. Unlike Thomson, he could liquidate the company at minimal cost and with the advantage of having separated ownership of the property assets from the newspapers.
This was brinkmanship of the highest order. Earlier in the month the embattled management of the FT had threatened to shut their loss-making paper unless a similar differentials dispute was resolved. Now Murdoch was following suit and he personally took charge in the negotiations, accepting Len Murray’s invitation to come to the TUC’s headquarters, Congress House. It was there, after hours of torturous exploration, that the NGA finally accepted Murray’s proposals at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning. There would be a written (but not legally binding) guarantee of future uninterrupted production and acceptance of an agreed disputes procedure. Murdoch thanked Murray who ‘persuaded me not to pull the plug for the last few hours while he worked around the clock to get this together’.118 After three days off the streets because of a dispute among those printing its Sunday sibling, The Times was back in business with the essential battlegrounds of management versus union rights and inter-union demarcation disputes unresolved. ‘In recent months, Rupert Murdoch has learnt that he has no special magic in dealing with London print unions,’ concluded the Australian Financial Review. ‘From the point of view of News Corp. shareholders, the danger is that Murdoch will delay closure of The Times beyond the point which commercial sanity dictates.’119
VI
At best, The Times survived the September crisis with a stay of execution. But there was little cause for celebration. Sales continued to be up on the same month the previous year and, while the royal wedding-fuelled circulation surge of July was always likely to be a one-off, new readers were continuing to outstrip the dead and disaffected. In normal circumstances the improvement would be considered to be excellent but Evans’s reputation had created an unrealistic level of expectation that detracted from the gains that were made. The editor himself was concerned by a disturbing fall in reader subscriptions.120 But whatever angle was taken on the sales figures, the more important statistic was that, between July and November 1981, the paper was losing between £250,000 and £374,000 every week. None doubted that Richard Williams had done an excellent job with Preview, the new arts listing tabloid section, but it was expensive to run, failing to attract much advertising, and market research showed few signs that it was raising the paper’s circulation. When Ken Beattie, the commercial director, circulated a paper at the TNL board meeting calling for Preview to be scrapped, Evans did not mince words in a note he sent Beattie: ‘I really do think that you have an obligation to consult me as Editor first before the Chairman. You put me in an impossible position if the Chairman is persuaded against the project which is close to my heart and was, I thought, to his. I tell you frankly that I could not continue to edit The Times in circumstances like this.’121
While Evans was determined to defend – seemingly with his professional life – an innovation like Preview, he was less staunch in support of the arts coverage he had inherited in the main section of the paper. He had a succession of disagreements with John Higgins, the arts editor. One battleground was the failure to take television reviewing seriously. Another concerned Higgins’s enthusiasm for giving so much space to opera staged outside Britain. Higgins had greatly improved the arts coverage in the Financial Times but Evans was less impressed by his efforts in Gray’s Inn Road, threatening, ‘I will have to see a marked improvement or consider different ways of covering the Arts.’122 He proceeded to take the Saturday Review section out of Higgins’s hands but mishandled the appointment of Bevis Hillier who, having been half-promised various competences, was left in a semi-employed limbo. Hillier was so dissatisfied with his treatment that when he was finally given the Saturday Review section to edit in January 1982 he resigned a month later with six months’ severance pay.
Hillier was not alone in becoming exasperated by the editor’s swings between drive and indecision. The political commentator Alan Watkins claimed that Evans would offer him a job whenever they ran into one another, the details ‘about which I would hear nothing until we met a few months later, when he would suggest lunch, about which I would likewise hear nothing’.123 But the journalist Evans most wanted in his paper was the star columnist he had allowed to take a sabbatical – Bernard Levin. ‘Not a day goes by,’ he told Levin in September 1981, ‘without the Editor of The Times, in advanced years, being accosted on the streets, in clubs and society dinners, and racecourses and parlours and, in his bedroom before his shaving mirror, about the absence of Mr Bernard Levin from the columns of the newspaper.’124 Evans’s pleading became desperate. He suggested Levin could return as a television critic, a music critic or even a parliamentary sketchwriter (despite the fact that Frank Johnson was winning such acclaim in this role).125 Evans even suggested that Levin should pay a visit to Gray’s Inn Road to ‘satisfy yourself that the place is still inhabited by reasonable men’.126 Levin kept his distance.
Indeed, the trickle of departures among the editorial staff was turning into a torrent. First out of the door was Hugh Brogan, the respected Washington correspondent, who resigned shortly after Evans’s arrival in protest at what he anticipated would be Murdoch’s certain destruction of the paper’s integrity. But Evans soon found himself at loggerheads with the paper’s New York correspondent, Michael Leapman, as well. Exasperated by the frequency with which Brian Horton, the foreign editor and French restaurant lover, spiked his copy, Leapman assumed the worst and accused Evans of political censorship.127 One of Horton’s techniques was to unsettle Leapman by sending him dismissive comments about the quality of his grammar. Not that Horton knew better. He covertly obtained the judgments from the literary editor, Philip Howard, who innocently thought Horton was seeking advice on grammatical matters as a form of self-improvement. 128 Leapman, meanwhile, continued to express dissatisfaction and when Evans demanded an assurance of a ‘reasonable’ attitude from him he resigned,129 preferring to become ‘William Hickey’ in the Express instead.
As Evans’s closest colleague, Anthony Holden, the features editor, became the lieutenant most closely associated with the drive to introduce new blood – by which was also meant the determination to sack old favourites. Marcel Berlins took voluntary redundancy.130 With this, The Times lost a distinguished and authoritative commentator on legal affairs. The leader writer, Roger Berthoud, also packed up and left. Another to seek redundancy was the paper’s Whitehall correspondent, Peter Hennessy. This was a grievous blow for Hennessy was, as Patrick Marnham has pointed out, the first journalist to persuade senior civil servants to talk regularly about what was really going on in the corridors of Government.131 Evans was sorry to see him go but was unable to dissuade him from doing so.132 In the course of Evans’s opening year as editor, more than fifty members of the editorial staff left with redundancy payouts.
Too much was happening all at once. Familiar faces were leaving, less familiar ones arriving. The paper was riddled with mistakes due to the delays caused by switching to cold composition, a change that was not even improving the print quality of the paper. This was not the best moment to reorder the contents, but the editor did so all the same, deciding that, instead of constantly having to shift around the various news, sport and law sections of the paper in order to
keep the centre of the paper fixed, the centre pages should float instead. At one stage he even considered the sacrilege of moving leaders and letters to pages two and three. Even without going that far, floating the paper’s philosophical core a few pages either way succeeded only in giving the impression that editorial policy was adrift. Readers were not impressed. Nor were the leader writers, increasingly airing their doubts about the editor’s variable decisiveness. Owen Hickey, the chief leader writer, tackled Evans directly, assuring him that readers did not want to turn to the centre of their paper and find obituaries on the left and badminton on the right.133
The Times was not used to being in a state of perpetual revolution. But this was now the inevitable tension in a paper stretched on the live wire between the two electricity pylons of Rupert Murdoch and Harold Evans. Recognizing his desire to be closely involved, the backbench would try and track Evans down when news broke during the course of the night. Calls would be made across London to establish his whereabouts. Eventually, he would be discovered subbing a sports report elsewhere in the building. The problem was that, called away from his handiwork, he would then forget to return to it, leaving the subeditors unable to ascertain which bits had been sent. They were left with no option but to unpick his work and start again from scratch. No matter how helpful – how the master of the paper – Evans thought he was being, subs did not always welcome his attempts to steer every boat in the paper’s flotilla from early morning to late at night. The Times had long published the Oxford and Cambridge exam results, but the editor decided to extend the service to all the universities. Compiling these graduation lists involved an enormous amount of extra work done after the London edition had been put to bed. On one occasion, around midnight, Tim Austin was working on them when Evans arrived back from a dinner in his black tie. Seeing it was Durham, his alma mater, Evans volunteered to do the subbing himself. Unfortunately, he got the style wrong and the whole section had to be redone. ‘He just did not know when to stop,’ concluded Austin; ‘he was not the best at delegating.’134
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