The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  For Douglas-Home, this was the greatest issue of the time and he would not have the leading column of The Times failing to take a lead on it. In the 1940s, the paper, under the influence of its assistant editor E. H. Carr, had been indulgent towards Communism. It had accepted the Soviet Union’s right to determine the politics of Eastern Europe’s nations and even announced that Communism and Western democracy had much to learn from each other.84 Some regarded this as the sort of well-balanced argument they expected from The Times leader column. To Douglas-Home it was both misguided and immoral. He thundered against the attitude of a draft statement put before the British Council of Churches in 1985 that maintained ‘both Marxism and Western liberalism in their many forms enshrine positive values’ and that there was some sort of equivalence between the Soviet Union’s incarceration of ten thousand political prisoners and the ‘well over 10,000 Americans killed every year by hand guns which Americans have the “right” to carry’.85

  The crushing of dissenting voices was, to Douglas-Home, the most insidious aspect of Communist totalitarian rule and he could not understand the blasé attitude towards it from so much of the British intelligentsia. During his editorship, The Times devoted much space to the fate of Russian and Eastern European prisoners of conscience and Jessica, his widow, continued to be active in promoting the work of democratic dissident groups in Eastern Europe after her husband’s death. As far as the outside world was concerned, Douglas-Home’s principal contribution was that he gave anti-Communism a stronger voice in one of the world’s most influential newspapers. In Britain, and indeed even within Gray’s Inn Road, many felt this process undermined The Times’s reputation as a paper of judicious and measured observation and that Douglas-Home had reduced it to the status of a partisan periodical from which it never fully recovered. The leader writer Richard Davy later wrote that the extent of Douglas-Home’s hostility to compromising with the Soviets ‘destroyed the intellectual integrity of the paper’.86 Certainly, there are dangers in a newspaper adopting a strong position and both Davy and Edward Mortimer had often good grounds for feeling that they were dissenting voices who were being crushed by an editor who had given up on nuanced argument. If Douglas-Home had continued to take a dogmatic line later in the decade, when even Reagan grasped the opportunities for dialogue with Gorbachev, The Times would certainly have been culpable of terrible judgment. It can only be speculated how, or whether, Douglas-Home would have adapted to changed circumstances. Instead, he was responding to a Soviet Union that under Brezhnev and Andropov presented a far less amenable face. He did not live to see the collapse of Communism. Unquestionably, some early signs for diplomatic overtures were missed because of his attitude, but, whatever the aspirations of some of its more disaffected journalists, The Times was not the house journal of the Foreign Office. The paper had been haunted by its support for appeasing Hitler in the 1930s and Stalin in the 1940s. Douglas-Home laid those ghosts to rest.

  VII

  From within Gray’s Inn Road, the two deputy editors, Colin Webb and Charles Wilson, were the obvious contenders to fill the vacant chair. Colleagues considered Webb to possess a safe pair of hands but recognized that Wilson was the more dynamic candidate. Both had proved themselves more than capable, but Wilson had an advantage. At the end of 1983, Murdoch had bought the Chicago Sun-Times for $90 million, to the horror of the paper’s staff who feared he wanted to turn it into a sensationalist tabloid. When, in the new year, he found himself needing a replacement editor at short notice he had asked Wilson if he would do him ‘a favour’ by standing in as the Sun-Times’s editor until a suitable American could be found to take over. Wilson replied ‘sure’ and asked when he would be expected to go to the Windy City. ‘My plane is on the tarmac,’ replied Murdoch, ‘and I’m going back tonight.’ Mentioning that his pregnant wife was at home with a broken collarbone, Wilson managed to negotiate a day’s leeway. When the new editor arrived for his first day at the Sun-Times, Murdoch was on hand to greet him, introduce him to the managing editor and point him in the direction of the executive washroom. This done, Murdoch announced he was off and if Wilson needed anything he should call him in New York. Within minutes of the proprietor’s hasty departure, Wilson discovered he had been lowered into ‘a bloody cauldron of hate’.87 Sun-Times journalists had been made aware of Harold Evans’s claims in Good Times, Bad Times and were not encouraged by the verdict of Patrick Brogan, a former pre-Murdoch Times journalist of note who had never met him but felt able to pronounce that ‘Wilson is very tough, unpleasant, rude to his subordinates. He puts the fear of God in them.’88 When, at Wilson’s first conference, one staff member asked whether the paper would continue to have a Washington bureau, it was clear how little trust existed.

  Three months later, when it was time for Wilson to return to London, Sun-Times staff circulated a petition asking him to stay. The speed with which he had won over the journalists by his hard work and focus on sharper news presentation impressed Murdoch. And Murdoch soon had a new mission for Wilson in London. Fed up with Fleet Street’s industrial relations and technological limitations, he had decided to sack all his print union workers and move his four British newspapers to Wapping in London’s East End. It was an immensely risky operation that – if it failed – stood to bankrupt Murdoch. It needed a hard-working, determined and ruthless general who would see it through and carry the troops of The Times with him. On 5 November 1985, the independent national directors duly approved Murdoch’s recommendation that Charles Wilson should succeed Charles Douglas-Home as the thirteenth editor of The Times. ‘Ah yes,’ Bernard Levin had prophesied when Wilson first arrived, ‘the man who knows how to put the razor blade in the snowball.’89

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FORTRESS WAPPING

  The Plan to Outwit the Print Unions

  I

  In the ten years to January 1986, strikes and stoppages plagued Murdoch’s News International. During the period, industrial action prevented 296 million copies of the Sun and 38 million copies of the News of the World from rolling off the presses. One hundred and four million copies of the Sunday Times had been lost over the past decade. The Times had lost 96.5 million copies.

  Financially, losing a day’s distribution represented an immediate shortfall of £71,000 to The Times, £362,000 to the Sunday Times, £470,000 to the Sun and £777,000 to the News of the World.1 But this was only a fragment of the total cost. Trade union activists were able to damage News International without actually taking a full day out on strike. Go-slows, refusal to work specific shifts and deliberate tampering with the printing presses ensured that, although the paper was eventually printed, it was released too late to catch the correct trains and ended up being dumped, unsold. The resulting erratic distribution created uncertainty among readers and advertisers alike. It encouraged the latter to turn to alternative and more reliable media in which to reach their audience. While mindful of Kipling’s adage ‘that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane’, management frequently found it easier to give in to whatever the demand of the moment concerned rather than face an even more costly loss of production.

  The 1970s had proved a disastrous decade in the industrial annals of Fleet Street. The eleven-month suspension of The Times was one that merely typified the events of the period. When Murdoch bought the paper in 1981 optimists hoped for a brighter future: the availability of labour-saving technology, a Conservative Government hostile to trade union militancy and the spectre of high unemployment that greeted those who risked their jobs were all indicators that pointed towards management being able to regain the initiative. Yet, the practice proved different from the theory. None of these factors made an appreciable whit of difference to the number of strikes that crippled Fleet Street production.

  The one saving grace for executives at Gray’s Inn Road was that competitors were equally disabled by union action. In order to cope with the increased demand created by the 1978–79 shutdown of The Times,
management at the Daily Telegraph had added an extra press in their machine room. When The Times was revived, sales of the Telegraph fell back accordingly, making the extra press redundant. But when in November 1982 management finally summoned the courage to remove the press, the SOGAT chapel begged to differ and responded by shutting down the paper for ten days. The dispute cost the Telegraph £1.5 million in lost copies alone.2 The Financial Times suffered an even more devastating blow when its print workers struck in May 1983, closing the paper for ten weeks because the rival NGA and SOGAT shop stewards could not agree the pay differentials between their members (the NGA demanded a reduction in the number of hours worked and a simultaneous pay rise of 24 per cent).3 These were not isolated incidents. In the twelve months between July 1984 and July 1985, the national dailies lost more than 85 million copies due to industrial action. In the calendar year for 1985, the figure was nearly 100 million.4

  The Daily Telegraph dispute exemplified the extent to which production had been subcontracted to the unions. It was the shop stewards (chapel fathers), rather than management, who determined which casual shift workers were employed and with what frequency. Consequently, production staff were primarily dependent upon the patronage of their chapel fathers for their terms and conditions rather than enjoying any direct relationship with their employers. In this protective environment, the print unions had certainly been able to deliver material benefits for their members. The average wage in 1985 for Fleet Street production workers was around £18,000 a year. This compared with a Times journalist’s basic salary of £15,050. But at the highest level – such as the Linotype operators (who were still forced upon most national papers), wages in the region of £40,000 per annum could be earned. A few claimed even more. Compositors had developed such a complex pay scale, known as the ‘Scale of Prices’, that different rates were demanded according not only to the quantity of text typed but even to the point size of the type used. There was even a going rate for creating lines of blank text. And there were additional charges for making corrections, a situation which was an open inducement to make errors in the first place.5

  That many of those printing The Times were earning more than those writing it certainly caused some ill feeling on the part of journalists struggling to meet mortgage payments and the other burdens of middle-class expectation. There was little social intercourse between the two groups. Times journalists did not trespass into the areas where their paper was printed and rarely had more than second-hand accounts of what went on under their feet in Gray’s Inn Road. Peter Stothard visited the machine room floor only once: ‘I was greeted by grown men pretending to be monkeys in a zoo,’ he recalled. ‘I did not go back. Many managers, I discovered, had rarely entered the alien territory which they were vainly charged to control.’6 It was hard to see how management could reassert authority without taking measures that would ensure a mass walkout, the shutdown of the presses and another loss of consumer confidence in the newspaper.

  The ten-week dispute at the FT had been instructive. The paper’s management had considered various options to circumvent its union members’ stranglehold. The possibility of using the T. Bailey Forman plant in Nottingham (where Christopher Pole-Carew used a non-union workforce) was considered but this still left the unions able to block distribution. In the end, the management concluded it would be best just to concede defeat as the easiest way to curtail a dispute that had already cost them in excess of £6 million.7 Like Times Newspapers in 1978–9, the FT management had tried to take a stand – and lost. Without reliable (non-striking) distributors as well as a permanent alternative print centre manned by non-NGA-, non-SOGAT-trained staff, they could not escape the vice-like grip of the Fleet Street unions. During 1985, Rupert Murdoch set about assembling the assets that would free him from constraint. With them, the aspiration to break free from the torment of working with the print unions began to look dimly, vaguely, but tantalizingly possible. An idea that started with the intention of liberating his tabloids developed to include The Times. As for the unions, they had no idea what was about to hit them.

  II

  In the late 1970s, London’s ‘Docklands’ – the stretch along the River Thames from Tower Bridge out past the promontory of the Isle of Dogs – was at the nadir of its existence. During the nineteenth century the area had been the world’s busiest commercial waterway. Nor was this hive of activity dispersed when masts were replaced by funnels or by the flattening of the area by German bombs during the Blitz. Indeed, the Port of London achieved its maximum volume of trade in the early 1960s. But from then on, its decline was dramatic. The development of far larger vessels and container terminals to greet them ensured Tilbury and beyond became a more suitable entrepôt for international cargo and raw materials. More than 150,000 jobs were lost within a decade. London Docks closed in 1969. In an act of finality, its mighty basin was filled in.

  During the 1980s, the desolate Docklands were given a new lease of life. Silted-up waterways were cleared and the grime was cleaned from Victorian warehouses that, converted into apartments, gave new ‘young upwardly mobile’ professionals (‘yuppies’) the faint notion of living in palazzi by the Thames. The Thatcher Government, and in particular the Environment Minister, Michael Heseltine, encouraged development in what was designated as an ‘Enterprise Zone’. Construction began on the Docklands Light Railway and towards the end of the decade the first of a series of giant towers went up at Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs offering a massive increase in available office space. In time, much of Fleet Street and the City of London would relocate there.

  This renaissance of the late 1980s was still but a dim prospect when, in 1977, Bert Hardy, then chief executive at News Group Newspapers, persuaded Murdoch to acquire an eleven-acre site where the old London Docks had stood at Wapping, east of Tower Bridge. The logic was simple. The cramped and outdated machine room at Bouverie Street (where the Sun and the News of the World were printed) had reached capacity. Merely rebuilding it would not overcome the limitations of the site, which would yield far more if sold as a land redevelopment opportunity so near to the City. Although the journalists and compositors would stay at Bouverie Street (at least until a final sell-off of their part of the site), the printing of the Sun and the News of the World would be moved away to the new more spacious brownfield location of Wapping. There the land was cheap by comparison and lorries would not have to negotiate the narrow and congested streets of the old site off Fleet Street. Wapping was Bert Hardy’s brainchild and building work began in 1979. Upon acquiring The Times two years later, Murdoch truthfully reassured its nervous employees that he had no intention of moving them from Gray’s Inn Road to what many of them considered to be the uncharted wasteland of East London. The Wapping plant was being fitted out for tabloid-only production.

  Building the great print hall at Wapping necessitated the destruction of five historic warehouses that had been built in 1805. Had the application come any later in the twentieth century, the growing heritage lobby – pointing to the successful conversion of other warehouses – might have succeeded in blocking the destruction. But Labour was still in power when the application was made. The real-estate aspirations of yuppies were not uppermost in the party’s mind and the dilapidated warehouses appeared merely to be grim reminders of the sort of exploitative toil that had given dockers a hereditary grievance against their employers. What was more, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Peter Shore, was the local MP. He was keen to see new jobs created in a constituency that, with the closure of the docks, desperately needed to attract fresh sources of employment. So the go-ahead was given and the five monuments to top-hatted Victorian capitalism were hit by the demolition ball. It was a decision many Labour politicians would live to regret – and not for aesthetic reasons.

  The print hall that rose on the site could lay a reasonable claim to being one of the most ugly superstructures in London. A charmless box penetrated by a giant concrete ramp, its architects appeared to ha
ve an aversion to the art of simple fenestration. Resembling a giant incinerator, it was too utilitarian even to deserve membership of the ‘Brutalist’ school of design whose concrete monstrosities were at that time finally destroying the public’s strained patience with modern architecture. But it was a print hall, nothing more and nothing less, with little thought given to the eventual possibility of relocating journalists there. The building was ready for use in 1984. It had cost £72 million. All that was needed was to get the trade unions to agree to work in it.

  Whatever the building’s lack of exterior decoration, on the inside it was an industrial marvel. The print hall was state of the art. Vast, like the loading bay of an aircraft carrier, it was also clean and air-conditioned. It was a world away from the Dickensian conditions and Heath Robinson contraptions familiar to Gray’s Inn Road or (worse) Bouverie Street. The printing units were bought new as the last in a line of Goss Mark I Headliner letterpress machines, a design that was a decade old but of proven quality and durability. Health and safety issues that had been a justifiable area of complaint in Bouverie Street had been addressed and management hoped the new working environment would meet with the approval of the union chapel fathers. As a softening-up episode, an aeroplane was chartered to fly them out to view a similar printing plant in operation in Finland (the original plan was for them to visit print works in Germany, but the German companies politely made it clear that they would not let Fleet Street union officials anywhere near their employees). News International’s labour relations negotiator, Bill O’Neill, accompanied the delegation to Finland, noting that many of the union officials seemed far more interested in treating it as a booze-cruise than as a first insight into their working future. For O’Neill, a subsequent trip to France with them proved to be even more of a living hell.8