The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  In more than thirty years working at The Times, Tim Austin regarded the Hitler diaries as the paper’s most embarrassing episode.27 Still philosophical about the debacle twenty years later, Murdoch felt rather that ‘the result was a black eye for me. People concentrated on me rather than Charlie’ but that ‘It taught us all to be a lot more cautious … You learn from these mistakes.’28 Indeed, to the wider public, with Lord Dacre, Rupert Murdoch and the Sunday Times taking most of the flak, The Times escaped with little more than flesh wounds, its initial role largely forgotten. But even the Sunday Times did not suffer commercially: its circulation was 20,000 higher after the fiasco than it had been before. And as for Murdoch, he got his money back.

  III

  Book reviews had appeared in The Times since its earliest issues (albeit sporadically), but the creation of a separately sold Times Literary Supplement in 1914 encouraged the daily paper to cease providing proper competition. It was not until 1955 that The Times decided to take the task seriously again with the establishment of a regular books page. From then on, book reviews came to be regarded as every bit as essential a component of the paper as the output of the theatre critics. There was no formal collaboration between The Times and the editorially autonomous TLS, but the latter’s interest in fiction, poetry and other more literary works certainly encouraged The Times towards focusing upon non-fiction and, in particular, biography, politics and history. Murdoch’s purchase of Times Newspapers in 1981 gave him not only The Times and the TLS but also a paper whose book reviews had become extremely well regarded – the Sunday Times. This was a formidable combination. In the dailies market during the 1970s, only the FT was recognized as the serious competitor to The Times for the quality of its book reviewing.

  During the 1980s, The Times’s literary editor was Philip Howard. His father, Peter Howard, had become the youngest man to captain the England rugby team in 1931 (despite the fact he had been born with a joined foot and knee and spent his childhood wearing a leg iron that prevented him playing contact sport) who subsequently became one of Beaverbrook’s highest paid journalists. He was also a novelist and co-wrote, with Michael Foot and Frank Owen, Guilty Men, the searing indictment on Neville Chamberlain’s Government. He subsequently led the Moral Rearmament Movement. When he died in 1965, seventeen heads of state or prime ministers sent condolences. Philip Howard’s mother was the former Doris Metaxa, the 1932 Wimbledon women’s doubles champion. An Old Etonian and Classics graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, who had served with the Black Watch during his National Service, Philip Howard had been at the paper since 1964 having been offered a job on the condition he proved his Times loyalty by accepting a pay cut from what he had received from his previous employer, the Glasgow Herald. He subsequently demonstrated himself to be not only a fine home news reporter but also a stylist of great élan whose ruminations on the English language proved to be a hugely enjoyed peculiarity of The Times.

  The emerging vogue for hiring ‘celebrity reviewers’ was resisted at The Times during the 1980s. Instead, as literary editor, Howard worked with a chief reviewer who was expected to pen the main article each week. In the early 1980s, the paper was able to benefit from the wide range of Michael Ratcliffe (one of Howard’s predecessors as literary editor) in this role. Chief reviewer had been a staff position and, as such, was much envied but when Ratcliffe left the paper in 1982, Howard found a worthy replacement in the philosopher and President of Trinity College, Oxford, Anthony Quinton. The author of Utilitarian Ethics and The Politics of Imperfection, Lord Quinton was also a master of the reviewing art (save for one mistakenly, well-intentioned decision to show his review on a Schopenhauer book to its author prior to publication – resulting in a lawyer’s letter attempting to block it). But the demands of a weekly book review eventually proved too great a restriction for someone with Quinton’s buzy diary. In 1984, Howard appointed a successor in James Fenton. From his early twenties, Fenton had thrown himself into the literary and journalistic world, maintaining an impressive output in both and later becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His reviews were incisive and often tart. On one occasion he dismissed a book on Renaissance festivals by Roy Strong, the V&A’s director and prolific writer on courtly and horticultural themes, as having been breathlessly written ‘in a tone of voice that does rather too often remind us of Alan Whicker’.29 When Fenton escaped to the Philippines and the Independent, the distinguished writer and biographer Peter Ackroyd admirably filled his shoes.

  During the 1980s, several of Britain’s most famous independent publishers were merged and swallowed up into larger conglomerates. Many of the new parent companies were American. To the fore in this respect were Random House and Murdoch’s own HarperCollins (a merger of the American Harper & Row with the Scottish Collins). Big was also thought to be beautiful in the high street where new bookshop chains such as Waterstones and Dillons spread across the country. Opinion divided between those who welcomed the money these innovations brought into publishing and bookselling and those who believed such commercialism contaminated the purity of the product. What was undoubtedly true was that quantity increased noticeably, with more books published than ever before. It remained the task of The Times books page to sift through for the quality. In this quest, Philip Howard stood determinedly against the subtle bullying of the book industry. He had little time for best-seller lists. He thought they could be easily manipulated by the strategies of publishing houses and, in any case, were usually dominated by the sort of cookery books, lifestyle manuals and showbiz memoirs that rarely made much impact on the paper’s literary pages. He successfully resisted Harold Evans’s suggestion that a weekly list should appear. Perhaps more importantly, Howard did not share the Thatcherite zeal increasingly animating The Times’s more forthright columnists and leader writers as the decade progressed. At one stage, he had to make a spirited stand to stop Douglas-Home shoe-horning Woodrow Wyatt, a long-standing friend of Murdoch and confidant of the Prime Minister, into the post of chief reviewer. A compromise was reached that allowed Wyatt to review regularly but not to the exclusion of the lit. ed.’s preferred choices. Indeed, wherever possible, Howard encouraged a counter-culture of alternative voices on the books page. He also fostered younger writers of promise. Among the literary figures of note who reviewed frequently were Richard Holmes, Victoria Glendinning, Isabel Raphael and later, Sabine Durrant and Sarah Edworthy. Without diminishing the interest in history and biography, every effort was made to ensure new fiction received sufficient coverage, despite the difficulty of spotting which first-time novelists were worthy of attention. But the popular end of the market was not snubbed. Harry Keating, Tim Heald and Marcel Berlins regularly harvested the high-yielding crops of crime and thrillers in a quick and incisive round-up format.

  While Howard shouldered the responsibilities of the books pages throughout the 1980s, Irving Wardle did likewise for the theatre reviews, bringing down the curtain on thirty-four years since he started writing for The Times (and as chief drama critic since 1963) in December 1989. Rescued from ‘a life of skivvying’ in a hotel by John Lawrence (arts editor of The Times, 1950–69),30 the Wadham-educated Wardle had spent much of his subsequent career as an enthusiastic supporter of the new generation of playwrights, most famously John Osborne, who challenged what they saw as a staid theatrical Establishment. Wardle looked with favour upon their attempts to say on stage what had formally been mumbled in private. Many of the leading directors of the sixties and seventies were fading away during the eighties and the acting giants of the previous generation – Olivier, Redgrave, Richardson, Gielgud – died or retired. Some promising ventures, like Jonathan Miller’s arrival as artistic director at the Old Vic, were stillborn, with Miller departing after a season. However, the emergence of Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett and Peter Nichols as writers of the first rank was more positive, as was the staging of plays by Racine and Corneille, dramatists whose work had previously been thought unadaptable in English. Other foreign inf
luences came from the Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa and the Canadian Robert Le Page. The latter’s Trilogy of the Dragon encouraged comparisons with the celebrated directorial debut of Peter Brook.

  A major development was the increasing tendency towards theatre of fact, in which plays were inspired or influenced by real lives – such as the death of Steve Biko or T. S. Eliot’s first marriage as interpreted in Michael Hastings’s Tom and Viv. In this respect even Murdoch and The Times provided inspiration (of a sort) for David Hare and Howard Brenton whose Pravda Wardle bravely gave a broadly favourable review.31 His critical impressions were not always those of the broader public. Reviewing Trevor Nunn’s direction of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats when it opened, Wardle felt it ‘never succeeds in taking fire into an organic work’ and deprecated ‘an extremely sickly poem called “Memory” (the only textual departure from Eliot) – an attempt to press the poems into the service of Mr Nunn’s warm-hearted style of community theatre’.32 Cats closed in London twentyone years later by which time it was the second highest-grossing musical of all time (after Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera). ‘Memory’ had received more than two million airplays on US radio stations by 1998 alone.33 Wardle was a fair-minded critic. This was not always the same as being a chronicler of popular tastes.

  Between 1983 and 1985 the deputy theatre critic, Anthony Masters, assisted Wardle. By any measure, Masters was a brilliant young man. He had been Senior Scholar at Winchester and a Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, going down with a First in Classics. For The Times, he wrote reviews with the wit, enthusiasm and assurance of youth. He appeared to have a brilliant future ahead of him. On the night of 2 January 1985 he filed a review of Peter Coe’s adaptation of Great Expectations at the Old Vic. The play had gone on for four hours and Masters ended his piece: ‘I sympathized with the father I overheard telling his son, “Theatrical performances are usually shorter than this.” At least, they usually seem so.’34 These proved to be Masters’s last words for the next day he was found dead at his home. He was thirty-six. Even for the most accomplished craftsmen, writing reviews to a nightly deadline was an immensely demanding task. Masters had found it difficult getting to sleep after he had filed and had started taking medication to help him drift off. The late running of Great Expectations had created extra pressure, leaving him only half an hour to write his review. Getting to sleep afterwards would be a great difficulty. The assumption was that he took a greater dose than usual – one from which he never awoke.

  David Robinson was The Times’s film critic from 1975 to 1990. During the 1970s, the British film industry had all but collapsed. In 1980 a mere thirty-two native feature films were produced. And then, suddenly, a fight back commenced. On its release in 1981, Robinson identified Chariots of Fire as ‘in most respects the kind of picture for which we have been looking in British cinema in vain for many years’ although he found fault with aspects of it, especially the ‘rather out-modish’ slow-motion shots of Eric Liddell running with his head flung back. This, in fact, proved to be one of the abiding images from British film making in the eighties. It was also the first British film since 1968 to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, giving false hope to those who shared the aspirations of its scriptwriter, Colin Welland, who collected his Oscar with the fateful boast, ‘The British are coming!’ For a moment it looked possible. Gandhi and The Killing Fields followed successfully in the wake. Withnail & I would, over time, attain cult status. The creation of Channel 4, with its own film production arm, promised and delivered much. By 1985, British feature film production had risen to eighty releases. But the triumphs were soon shown to be sporadic, with the achievements usually resting more on British acting talent, only sometimes on production or direction and rarely on home funding. One such example came in 1986, when Robinson rightly identified the sumptuous Merchant – Ivory film A Room With a View as a ‘masterpiece’.35 At a time when other European governments were lavishing funds on their film industries, the British Government decided to scrap the capital allowance tax relief that allowed for the writing off of production deficits. Almost immediately investment in the British film industry dried up, falling from £300 million in 1985 to £64.5 million in 1989. Meanwhile, Hollywood cleaned up at the box office with a succession of comic or adventure blockbusters (with multiple sequels) industrially churned out for the teenage market. Robinson struggled to conceal his boredom with so many of the decade’s major commercial hits – an output that could be summed up by the success of Friday the 13th (Part 8).

  On the small screen, Channel 4’s launch in November 1982 was the major event in British broadcasting. The first national terrestrial channel since BBC 2 eighteen years earlier, Channel 4’s birth was a precarious one. It arrived in the midst of an advertising recession and an industrial dispute that ensured a screen card rather than commercials filled many of the breaks between its programmes. Nonetheless, in an eve-of-launch preview in The Times, the new channel’s chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, brimmed with high-minded enthusiasm, assuring Peter Lennon that ‘Channel 4 is the last Reithean Channel! Reithean!’ On the evidence of the first day’s broadcasts – a mixture of quiz shows, soap operas, comedy and a drama about a mentally ill patient – The Times’s television critic, Peter Ackroyd, believed it would prove to be ‘the SDP of television, mouthing the rhetoric of fashion or of commitment while in fact offering approximately the same material as the other three channels’ before settling down ‘perhaps as a slightly down-market BBC 2 (if BBC 2 is not itself already the down-market BBC 2)’.36

  In trumpeting the public service role of Channel 4, Isaacs claimed ‘we have six years while the cable people are still digging holes in the ground to impose ourselves’. But a greater challenge would emerge more quickly from satellite television. This was to be another of Murdoch’s great gambles. Months of hostile press speculation that Murdoch was orchestrating The Times’s criticism of aspects of the BBC and the future of its licence fee in order to promote his Sky satellite company came to a head in a speech by Alasdair Milne, the BBC’s director-general. Before an audience of the TV and Radio Industries Club in January 1985, he posed the question: ‘Who is the more likely to serve the public interest, the BBC or The Times, whose recommendations if acted upon would have the practical effect of enabling its owner Rupert Murdoch to acquire some of the most valuable broadcasting action in the UK?’ Douglas-Home was not amused by this apparent slur on his editorial independence and organized a meeting with Milne to repudiate his imputations. He also asked the independent national directors of Times Newspapers to investigate Milne’s claims.37 When the directors asked Milne for a statement he backtracked, admitting, ‘I do not of course have the concrete evidence for which you ask because I do not work for The Times. The inference I drew from the paper’s behaviour over the BBC seemed a reasonable one, and I was not alone in drawing it. But the Editor’s explanation was sufficient to lay my fears to rest.’ With editor and proprietor both denying collusion, the independent directors had little option but to conclude that there was no evidence to support Milne’s innuendo.38 Hostile entities were less convinced. When the NUJ made its submission to the Peacock Inquiry into the BBC’s future funding, it drew attention to the The Times’s attacks on the BBC and stated, ‘we find it hard to believe, despite Mr Murdoch’s denials, that this attitude is unconnected with his own commercial interests in broadcasting’.39

  The Times’s problem throughout the period of its ownership by Rupert Murdoch was that few people outside the paper’s editorial office appeared to believe the proprietor honoured his pledges not to interfere in its editorial policy. Murdoch backed Margaret Thatcher, took a tough stance against the Soviet Union and resented the restrictive practices of both left-leaning trade unions and professional vested interests. That this was also The Times’s general editorial line appeared suspicious. The paper’s outlook was, in reality, the world view of Charles Douglas-Home and those with whom he surrounded himself. Unlike Evans, plucked to
edit from outside the paper by Murdoch, Douglas-Home had become editor primarily because he enjoyed the confidence of the overwhelming majority of the newspaper’s senior staff. He was very far from being parachuted in by the proprietor. Indeed, no editor in the first twenty years of News International’s ownership of The Times had grounds for feeling as secure in his post and unconcerned about annoying the proprietor as the socially self-assured Douglas-Home. As we shall see later, it was his successors who would have greater difficulty convincing sceptics that any favourable reference to a programme that appeared on Sky or – when Murdoch’s interests spread to Asia – any comment that fell short of ringing condemnation of the Chinese government was not directly, or indirectly, a consequence of the proprietor’s views and business interests.

  A secondary charge was that if Murdoch did not interfere directly in the editorial line of the newspaper it was because, with the right-wing Douglas-Home in the chair, he did not need to do so. Certainly there was little to cause the proprietor tremendous offence in the leader column where a barrage was kept up not only against the Soviet Union but also against what the Prime Minister infamously referred to as ‘the enemy within’ – militant trade unions. There was much less Thatcherite zeal among the paper’s reporters. The labour editor was Paul Routledge, a straight-talking Yorkshireman and son of a railway worker who had come to The Times in 1971 via grammar school, Nottingham University and the Sheffield Telegraph. A man of firm socialist convictions, he was acknowledged as one of the journalists with the best sources on the paper. Within Gray’s Inn Road, he had won widespread respect not only for the professionalism of his work but also for his steadfastness as father of the NUJ chapel (a large petition was signed forlornly trying to dissuade him from resigning this post following an incident in which he had responded to goading that he was a pacifist by punching his accuser, Jake Eccelestone, in the face). The miners’ strike of 1984–5 proved to be an exceptionally busy time for him, for he was not a reporter who believed a story could be investigated from the monastic introspection of his office desk. Instead, he embarked on a gruelling year trailing round the disputes’ battlefields and, in making the most of his familiarity with the National Union of Mineworkers leaders, gaining a level of access to the key players that was the envy of rival newspapers. Although the two men were poles apart politically, Douglas-Home had little option but to give Routledge grudging respect. Indeed, Routledge had previously taken him down a coalmine so that he might get a feel for what the miner’s life was like (Douglas-Home appeared to relish the occasion, but was noticeably quiet when Routledge proceeded to take him for a drink in a miners’ social club). Yet, despite the excellence of Routledge’s coverage of the year long dispute, the editor allowed his ideological suspicions to rise to the surface, on one occasion writing Routledge an insulting letter implying that he was not investigating stories relating to the NUM closely enough. The labour editor certainly felt the pressure of working for a paper whose political direction he did not share but he refused to alter the tenor of his reporting. In any case, whatever his differences with the paper’s political comment, he did not care for the middle class student revolutionaries posturing in the Guardian. Importantly, his copy for The Times during the miners’ strike was never spiked or fundamentally altered for political purposes.40