The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Dean and Miles met O’Neill in the ground-floor coffee shop of the Hilton at New York’s JFK airport. Dean mentioned the decision of the SOGAT annual conference that mandated the union not to act in a way that risked a further sequestration. If News International took SOGAT to court on a further contempt charge, she would be in a position to get her executive to call the strike off without putting the question to the die-hard strikers. Attracted by the force of what had been put to him, O’Neill went to a pay phone to call Geoffrey Richards for his legal advice. While he was trying to get through, a woman picked up an adjacent pay telephone and could be heard speaking into the receiver: ‘Could I have “copy”?… I want you to know that I’ve been here for over an hour and it seems as though they have come up with a way to bring this strike to an end … They’re analysing a formula now and I will stay here and see how it works out.’ Dean, Miles and O’Neill froze in panic. How had their meeting been rumbled? The three hurried into the hotel lobby which they found packed with reporters and television cameras. And then they noticed they were being ignored. It transpired that the hotel was also the venue for resolving a Long Island railway dispute. Their relief was palpable. Less than three hours after they had touched down at JFK, Dean and Miles caught another Concorde flight home.99 In the meantime, the mechanism to end the dispute had been agreed.

  Soon afterwards, O’Neill flew back across the Atlantic. On 2 February he and Geoffrey Richards met Dean and Miles for dinner at the home of SOGAT’s lawyer. Dean accepted that the strike had been lost long ago and its protraction was only damaging the union’s image. A court hearing was set for 6 February. The video footage of the 24 January riot, showing a two-hundred-strong mob trying to smash down the gates to Wapping, supported News International’s case that the unions were in breach of their legal undertakings to keep to six pickets. The unions stood to have all their assets sequestrated and to face potentially crippling fines of up to £3 million. Over half of SOGAT’s funds had already been spent fighting the dispute and the union’s legal advice was to call off the strike or face bankruptcy. SOGAT’s existence could be decided by what line its National Executive took. On 5 February, it met. Seven London members argued vociferously against surrender, but they were outnumbered. The final vote was twenty-three to nine in favour of calling off the strike. Dean prepared a press release, explaining, ‘a further sequestration would have meant the demise of our union’ and adding ‘we will never forget this dispute and the ravages of it will be evident for a long time to come’. Then she rang O’Neill. ‘I’ve had a terrible day,’ she told him.100

  With SOGAT’s surrender, so collapsed the resistance of its comrades. The NUJ called off its action the following day. All eyes turned to the NGA. Tony Dubbins telephoned O’Neill to plead for a weekend’s grace. O’Neill replied that he had but a few hours to submit or face ruin in court. A clerk from Farrar’s was waiting at the court with orders to file News International’s petition if no news had been received by 3 p.m. The hands of the clock moved slowly around but nothing was heard. Then, a few minutes before three, as O’Neill was preparing to contact the Farrar’s clerk, the telephone rang. It was Dubbins offering unconditional surrender. When the news reached the pickets, there was angry talk among some of them about continuing the blockade by unofficial means. This was quickly quelled by the threat of being ejected from the union. At 4 a.m. on Saturday 7 February the official picket packed up and departed. The siege of Wapping was over. It had lasted fifty-four weeks.

  VIII

  Relief was the overwhelming emotion that swept over Times staff as the realization dawned that their daily ordeal was finally over. The paper’s leader column summed up the past thirteen months as a period in which ‘We were set free from damaging trade union practices inside our gates. We exchanged them for damaging trade union practices outside.’101 But many, especially at management level, also felt a quiet sense of satisfaction. In 1978, The Times had taken on its print unions and, after an eleven-month shutdown, been forced to capitulate to them. It had taken eight years, but here at last was the moment of retribution. Everyone who had crossed the picket line had played his or her part. But in devising and implementing the strategy that made Murdoch’s success possible, Charles Wilson, Bruce Matthews, Bill O’Neill and Geoffrey Richards had the most reason to feel proud of their achievement. They were the principal architects of the Wapping revolution. Yet the celebrations were muted. In particular, the dispute had weighed heavily upon Matthews. He had hoped an accommodation might be made to re-employ some of the more moderate print union members but Murdoch was insistent that a complete break had to be made – that, after all, was the point of Wapping and no fresh NGA or SOGAT presence could be recreated there.102 Tired of the persistent wrangling on both sides of the Wapping barbed wire, in November 1986 a despondent Matthews cleared his desk as managing director before the final victory had been assured. O’Neill took his place. None of the print union members who had been friends with Tony Norbury before the dispute ever spoke to him again. He calculated that Wapping had diminished his social life by 75 per cent. But as the man behind getting The Times produced from its new location, he never doubted that he had done the right thing, both for the future of his newspaper and for the unfettering of British print journalism.103

  Victory had come at a cost. Five hundred and seventy-four police officers had been injured and more than a thousand News International and TNT drivers or their vehicles had been attacked. Some had broken arms. Others had glass in their eyes. One driver had had his windscreen broken twenty-three times. For their part, the protestors had also taken a toll. One young man had been killed. Nearly 1500 people had been arrested, two-thirds of whom were convicted. Police attendance at Wapping had averaged three hundred a day (on crucial nights there had been a thousand protecting the site). The estimated cost of this to the taxpayer exceeded £5 million.104 News International honoured its £58 million redundancy payout. Depending upon their time with the company, recipients received between £2000 and £30,000 each.

  ‘Little direct good ever comes out of a dispute of this kind – it’s a fairly sad story,’ was the Employment Secretary Ken Clarke’s downbeat verdict on the strike’s end, although he did add, ‘but I think the lasting effects may be beneficial.’105 Some of his Cabinet colleagues were more cheerful. Indeed, commentators soon assumed that the greatest victor was not Murdoch and his newspapers but Margaret Thatcher in her battle to smash union power in Britain. She had seen off Arthur Scargill over the mines in a fight that symbolized the fate of the old industries. Wapping demonstrated that the unions would not control the destiny of the new technology-driven industries either.

  Certainly, union militancy had been dealt a crushing blow. The NGA and SOGAT began a period of re-evaluation that led to their merger in 1991 as the Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU) with Tony Dubbins as general secretary. Brenda Dean became the new union’s deputy leader but retired the following year. Accepting a peerage as Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, she became an active member of parliamentary committees, health and higher education boards, the Press Complaints Commission and a variety of other bodies. In 1997, she became chairman of the Housing Corporation. Ironically, one who was disappointed by Wapping’s legacy was the union leader who had done so much to make it possible, Eric Hammond. While his members had staffed the plant from the first, he had put off pressing for formal EETPU recognition in accordance with TUC policy. But when, in 1988, the TUC finally expelled the union over its involvement in no-strike deals (and, it was widely presumed, participation in Wapping), Hammond felt free from TUC censure to explore collective bargaining rights there. His attempts were rebuffed, first by O’Neill and subsequently in a painful correspondence with Murdoch. Hammond could have been forgiven for feeling used. In his memoirs he was moved to write that Murdoch had ‘shown no spark of gratitude, even though he couldn’t have succeeded without us, and without the support of our people at Wapping’.106

  Another m
ajor union to lose out was the NUJ. In August 1987, a new disputes procedure involving ACAS was agreed at The Times that all but banished the grounds for a journalists’ strike. For its part, the NUJ had not done much to endear itself. Its National Executive had sought to impose £1000 fines on ninety-five News International employees (forty-eight of them Times journalists) for crossing the Wapping picket line during the siege. They were singled out because their names had appeared in news reports (another 320 were acquitted because their names did not).107 The Times NUJ chapel responded by freezing its payments to the union and the fines were eventually dropped but not before irreparable damage had been done. The union was, in any case, in disarray. Among other eccentricities, its accounts had been kept during the 1980s by an official who refused to switch from ledgers to a computer database. Eventually, the accounts were handed over instead to someone whose fake credentials were revealed after the reference he had provided transpired to be the number of a public telephone box.108 The belief that the union was having difficulty putting its house in order did it much harm. By the 1990s, the once all conquering NUJ had been reduced to but a small bargaining presence in Fleet Street. The Times and its Wapping stable-mates opted for total derecognition of the union. The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Independent followed suit.109 Even the left-leaning Daily Mirror refused to recognize the NUJ. This was part of a wider process fuelled by the policies of the Thatcher years and the restructuring of the economy. In 1980, 70 per cent of wages in Britain were set through collective bargaining. By 1998, the figure had fallen to 35 per cent. Only a third of companies established since 1980 recognized unions.110

  The consequences of Murdoch’s victory for British politics or the Labour Movement can be debated. But what can be more easily assessed was the direct effect it had on The Times newspaper. By ditching the print unions there was, of course, a huge saving in cutting the surplus workforce. But Wapping also ensured massive improvements to the way the paper’s content could be altered at short notice. At the unionized Gray’s Inn Road, the paper was limited to making around a dozen significant page changes per night. But at Wapping it was possible to make between thirty and fifty page changes a night and to tinker with a front page that usually changed six times over the course of the evening.111 It had formerly taken the print union members forty-five minutes to make a single change to a graphic. Wapping’s staff could do it in five minutes. Late changes to stories could be done at the press of a button. At Gray’s Inn Road, a late change had involved adhering to a lengthy set of union demarcation procedures. First of all, a request would be made to the composing department to come down with a proof. The changes would be marked onto the proof. The proof would then be taken (by hand) back up to the composing department. The comp would then type in the changes and these would be checked again to make sure they had been done correctly (which frequently they were not). A minor change to a story could take thirty to forty-five minutes to enact. Whether the copy or a new headline fitted the allotted space was a matter of trial and error. Wapping’s direct-input computers gave journalists an instant ‘copy fit’ thereby making page planning easy. Correspondents’ copy and agency wires could also be brought onto the system at the touch of a button. Previously, they had to wait until a messenger brought them over to the right desk (if he got the right desk) in his own time.112 Errors and spelling mistakes – once the bane of Fleet Street journalism – could now be quickly corrected. The last edition of The Times to come from Gray’s Inn Road contained 150 misprints in thirty-two pages. The Times of (taking a day at random) 7 May 1987 contained just fourteen in thirty-eight pages. Wapping gave the reader a better product.

  Yet the gains were by no means all down to new technology. Although the arrival of computers on the editorial floor greatly speeded up the process of writing and subbing the paper, in other parts of the production process The Times was still being produced in an old-fashioned manner. The page make-up techniques and printing presses used at Wapping were essentially those the print unions had operated at Gray’s Inn Road. In the Napoleonic vaulted basement of The Times’s Wapping home, stylish girls fresh from art college replaced old union lags but they were doing the same task – laying out the pages with scissors and paste. Late changes were often effected by scrambling about on the floor for excised words on tiny trimmed rectangles of paper. Frequently the missing word would be found stuck to someone’s shoe. Thus the difference was not in the tools for the job but in the attitude and adaptability of those who wielded them. Wapping’s ‘paste-up’ team cut the time it took from ‘last-copy-to-composition’ and the last page leaving the stone from sixty-five to ten minutes. What used not to be ready until after 9 p.m. was now completed by 8.10 p.m. And, in the longer term, removing union power at management level did smooth the way for the easier adoption of the technological revolutions of the 1990s – colour, fast redesign, better computer-generated graphics and vastly improved print and picture reproduction.

  There was, however, a downside to the move to Wapping and the dispersal of the other newspaper offices that it hastened. By destroying the village of Fleet Street, the geographically tight-knit community that allowed journalists and their contacts to lunch together, dine together and drink together, it reduced not only the convivial quality of life to which many reporters had become accustomed but also their ability to trade contacts and insights from outside the office. The Wapping move did encourage less adventurous journalists to confine the world to what was presented on their computer terminals, rather than going out themselves in search of stories. It is, of course, possible to make too much of this and to overemphasize the extent to which indulging in a long liquid lunch with friends constituted searching for news. On a narrow measure, the destruction of the Fleet Street lunch certainly improved productivity even if a part of the journalistic soul died as a consequence. Health-wise, it was probably a godsend.

  Ultimately, what the Wapping revolution delivered could be summed up in one word – flexibility. It gave The Times’s production and editorial staff the means to change, alter, innovate and increase the size or quantity of their paper without months of haggling with shop stewards intent on preventing any change without first extracting an inflated price. Murdoch had described the old world from which Wapping permitted him to escape:

  If you wanted to change a column width in The Times it would take you three months to negotiate and £10 a day or a week to everybody in the plant. And in the meantime, having to put up with one hundred typos on page one every second day if people felt they had a bad liver or something.113

  The barriers to innovation were now swept away. This was not merely a time saving exercise in the nightly rush to press. Strategic changes could at last be enacted. In 1987, The Times came out on Boxing Day for the first time in seventy years (although some readers imagined a Boxing Day newspaper was a disturbing sign of the secular consumerism of the 1980s, The Times had continuously come out on every Boxing Day from 1785 to 1917). Without Wapping, it is hard to envisage the unreformed print unions agreeing to work on such an edition or the rail unions being willing to carry it to its distributors.

  Even more importantly, the pagination of the newspaper was expanded. In the first six months of printing at Wapping, The Times was able to raise its number of pages from thirty-four to forty-eight. The only way the presses could handle the bigger paper was to print it in two sections. Thus, while news and comment remained in the main part of the paper, a second section was produced covering business and sport. Complaints flooded in and when, after a year of working at Wapping, Charles Wilson was assured that the capacity had been created to print the whole paper in one section, he took the decision to switch back. The result was a fresh broadside of complaint from readers in support of the two-section paper (many sighting the morning bliss of husband and wife being able to read the different sections over the same breakfast table). This fresh postbag, and the difficulties the presses were having in producing the paper in one section, quickly co
nvinced Wilson to revert to a two-section newspaper. The ability to respond at this speed would have been unthinkable at Gray’s Inn Road. Nor was this the end of the matter. As the months progressed, the paper began to expand further. On 3 September 1987, a four-section, sixty-four-page Times was launched on Saturday with more pre-print colour than any other national newspaper.114

  There was also now the possibility that The Times could buck its twentieth century history and become a newspaper that actually made a profit. The immediate consequence of moving to Wapping was a threefold increase in News International’s profitability. The Wapping plant itself had cost £100 million to build and a further £67 million to equip, but it allowed for the old premises to be sold. Bouverie Street fetched £72 million (the site was subsequently levelled for redevelopment) and The Times’s old home, Gray’s Inn Road – the building which the unions had turned down for free – was sold to ITN for £70 million.115 Setting these sales against the expense of construction gave Wapping a net cost of £25 million (which rose significantly a few years later when the plant had to be extended), but, by ditching the print unions, News International had been able to realize job cuts that saved in the region of £65 million each year.116 Wapping took the company’s operating income from £38.4 million in 1985 to £150.2 million in 1987.117 One estimate suggested it had increased the four newspapers’ worth (excluding outstanding debt) from $0.3 billion to $1 billion.118 The share price trebled. Indeed, in 1987 News International performed better than any other major company on the London stock exchange. Contributing 40 per cent of News Corp.’s global profits, Wapping pump primed Murdoch’s expansion into the American television and film network. As we will see later, this encouraged fresh borrowing that almost proved his undoing. Yet, in 2002, Peter Chernin, the News Corp. president, was in a position to reflect that the move to Wapping ‘was the most significant labour event in the world during the past forty years’, adding that he did not think the company would have survived without it.119