The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Thanks to the improving economic situation, these were good years in which to be managing editor. The prospectus provided by Dick Linford, News International’s chief financial officer, proffered opportunities for growth. At its commencement in 1993, the price war had seriously dented The Times’s finances. Circulation soared but not the revenue to accompany it because the cover price had been discounted so heavily. Consequently, circulation revenue had halved by 1995. This was a tactical retreat that made possible the strategic advance when new readers continued to stick with the paper after its cover price edged back up. By 1997, with the cover price hiked to 35 pence, circulation revenue was 20 per cent higher than its level at the end of 1993. Even more importantly, advertising revenue increased by 139 per cent over this period as a direct result of the 106 per cent increase in circulation. This was dramatic. Advertising, which had generated half of The Times’s revenue in 1993, was, by 1997, contributing two-thirds of the paper’s income. What had been lost in cover price discounts had more than been made up in ad sales. By 1997, The Times’s losses were less serious than before the price war began. Although still not profitable, the paper’s finances continued to improve thereafter and by 2000, advertising had risen again and was accounting for 70 per cent of revenue. The Sunday Times, meanwhile, was recording healthy returns that ensured that Times Newspapers Limited posted a £22 million profit that year. This was to be the high point, for the arrival of the new millennium was followed by a major slump in advertising that hurt media empires throughout the western world and Wapping found itself, once again, with its hatches battened down. For the most part, though, The Times spent the last years of the twentieth century with far more financial room to manoeuvre than it had enjoyed for any prolonged period in the previous hundred years.

  IV

  The price cut changed the content of The Times less than might have been imagined. Rather, Stothard had set most of the changes in motion before the great bid to increase its market share had got underway. It was these changes that made it a more attractive read for those cajoled into trying it by its sudden cheapness.

  Features and columnists were among the principal means through which readers developed what they imagined was almost a personal rapport with their paper’s journalists. This bond was at its strongest on Saturdays. Two columnists in particular succeeded in generating a loyal following. One was John Diamond. His column ran for nine years in The Times Magazine. His work, which had generally been light-hearted in tone, took on a new profundity in March 1997 when he was diagnosed with throat cancer. For such a naturally gregarious man, it was a particularly cruel assault. As the cancer gradually took hold, robbing him of his voice, his column became his means of expression. Relaying his treatment and facing up to the prospect of death, Diamond retained a sense of self-deprecation that gained him the admiration of readers and colleagues alike. The column was not merely his personal therapy; it served to give hope and understanding to thousands of people facing personal hurdles of their own. By the time of his death in 2001, aged forty-seven, readers were writing to him in extraordinary numbers. Another journalist who developed a particular rapport with readers was John Morgan. Between 1997 and 2000, the dapper boulevardier offered advice on modern manners on the back page of the weekend section of the paper. His achievement was his ability to be amusing and approachable while offering sound recommendations that were never stuffy and rarely antiquated in tone. This was central to the column’s success since many of those writing fell into one of two categories. Those from more traditional backgrounds felt insecure about what was correct behaviour in the baffling environment of contemporary Britain where the breaking down of barriers had brought confusion about appropriate conduct. Others, products of post-sixties modernity, wanted guidance on how to behave in a more dignified – but non-snobbish – way. Themes ranged from how to open automatic doors for women, whether breast-feeding was acceptable in public and whether those who ate and drank less than their companions in a restaurant should complain if the bill was split equally. Morgan wrote with self-assurance but never arrogance while guiding readers through the social minefield of how to avoid causing unnecessary offence to other people. Growing up in Perth, he had acquired metropolitan sophistication rather than having been born into it. He died in July 2000, aged forty-one, after falling from a window in his small (but elegantly appointed) third-floor bachelor set in Albany, off Piccadilly. A generous host and lavish spender, he had become increasingly worried about his financial situation. Friends, however, believed he would have chosen a more dignified means of exit. A coroner’s court inquest returned an open verdict. The Times was inundated with letters from readers conveying their sympathy and sadness at his loss.

  In other areas the paper continued to build on its foundations. Tom Clarke had transformed the paper’s sports coverage but Stothard, who was able to disengage his own disinterest from sporting endeavour from his recognition that it should be given an even higher profile, decided he wanted a change of personnel. In Clarke’s place, David Chappell, supported by Keith Blackmore as his deputy, was entrusted with the sports section. Defeating the Telegraph at the game it played best would not be easy, for, as Stothard conceded, ‘Male sports enthusiasts are one of the most conservative groups in terms of trying to get them to switch and get hooked on a new paper.’29 The brief period in which The Times sold for ten pence on a Monday was specifically designed to maximize the audience for The Times’s improved sports coverage. Slowly, The Times’s score incremented, although at a Boycott rather than a Botham run rate.

  Certainly, the England cricket team could have done with either player in their prime. For a while it looked as if the country’s saviour would come from abroad. In May 1988, Worcestershire’s twenty-one-year-old Zimbabwean-born batsman, Graeme Hick, made light of a slow outfield to score 405 not out, the highest first-class score made in England in the twentieth century. Hick would be available to play for England from 1991 and great things were expected. In the event, great things were nearly achieved. He emerged to become one of England’s finest county batsmen, ranking among the ten highest run makers in the game, but he never quite achieved greatness for his adopted country at Test level. Marcus Williams filed from around the county grounds and, later, as sports editor, proved to be in both longevity and experience the backbone of the paper’s sports desk. When he had arrived at the paper in 1980, the Telegraph reported from all the first-class county matches while The Times contented itself with reports from four or five during the season. Under Williams, the paper made good this shortcoming and followed its rival’s lead in covering all the matches.

  Having reported Test matches for The Times since 1954, John Woodcock had (alongside Richie Benaud) a reasonable claim to having watched more Test match cricket than any other man in history. In 1987 he finally relinquished his place as chief correspondent, although since he was still writing more occasional cricket commentary for the paper into the twenty-first century it was perhaps a matter of his merely dropping down the batting order. There was much that still enthralled him about the game although he was no fan of some of the innovations – the ‘pyjama games’ and overindulgence of one-day matches and anything that could be ascribed to the influence of Kerry Packer. When allegations were made that Ian Botham had taken drugs, Woodcock turned with a sigh to John Goodbody and asked, ‘Dear boy, where will it end?’ Goodbody looked back at the friendly and sagacious face and retorted with resigned worldliness, ‘I think, on the front page.’30

  The arrival of Michael Atherton as England’s captain appeared to offer hope. Circumstances, however, were against him. He came to the helm midway through the losing Ashes series of 1993. The following April, the Trinidadian Brian Lara, aged twenty-four, beat Garfield Sobers’s thirty-six-year record Test score of 365 (not out) by scoring 375 against England in Antigua, watched by Alan Lee, by then The Times’s cricket correspondent. When Atherton resigned after losing a close series to the West Indies in 1998, the statistics
looked poor, but he proved to be England’s longest-serving captain and was the catalyst for the positive changes gradually ushered in after 1999 by Nasser Hussain and the coach, Duncan Fletcher. In good time for this late English renaissance, Christopher Martin-Jenkins joined The Times as its chief cricket correspondent in 1999 after eight distinguished years reporting from the boundary for the Telegraph. One of the most respected voices in the game – his calm, analytical summaries continued to be heard on the radio’s Test Match Special – his move to The Times reinforced the extent to which it had closed the gap with the Telegraph in the battle for providing the best sports coverage.

  At Wapping, the sports desk consisted largely of subs hammering and moulding the constant flow of dispatches from the field reporters into their allotted space. John Goodbody, one of the prolific sports writers who did report for daily duty at Wapping, spent most of his working day on the news rather than the sports desk. Not all sports reporters resembled in appearance the fit athletic specimens it was their calling to write about, but Goodbody was one whose sporting days were not confined to the dim and selectively remembered past. His form was certainly impressive. He had broken British junior weightlifting records and was a member of Britain’s national judo squad in 1970 before going up four years later as a mature student to Trinity College, Cambridge. There, he became the university’s leading shot putter. A month after he won his Blue he was displaying the multi-tasking skills that would serve him well in his subsequent career. He spent the morning of his part one English Tripos exam answering questions on Henry James and D. H. Lawrence before speeding over to the Crystal Palace trackside for an afternoon at the Olympic athletics trials deconstructing Brendan Foster and Geoff Capes for the benefit of Sunday Mirror readers. Having joined The Times shortly before the move to Wapping, he continued to cut a toned figure, happily thriving on five hours sleep a night. In August 1991, at the age of forty-eight, his first attempt to swim the English Channel ended three miles from the French coast when he had to be pulled from the water, semi-conscious and suffering from hypothermia. He concluded that the wrong grease and training forty to fifty hours a week in cold water had made him lose too much useful body fat. Undaunted, he tried again and fourteen days later became the oldest Briton for twelve years to achieve the crossing. Simon Jenkins, then editing the paper, was so impressed that he persuaded Goodbody to write a report of his account for the front page.31

  An audit of which sporting figure’s picture appeared most frequently in The Times during the late 1990s revealed that one player was far ahead of his field. This was Tim Henman. Most major sports produced a range of stars and superstars but if any one of them failed to be man of the match there was always another team member to be immortalized scoring the goal or flashing the cricket bat. For many Britons, however, Tim Henman was the face of tennis, or at any rate that of the annual Wimbledon championships that in Britain commanded greater interest than the three other Open tournaments put together. Rex Bellamy having retired from the reporters’ vantage point on Centre Court, it fell to tennis correspondents Julian Muscat and Alix Ramsay to have the pleasure, or mental ordeal, of reporting on Tim Henman’s various attempts to win Wimbledon. The prospect first became a serious possibility when he reached the semi-final in 1998, blocked from becoming the first Briton to make the final since 1938 only by Pete Sampras, the greatest tennis player of the decade and, perhaps, of all time. Henman’s struggles as the nearly man of SW19 – he reached the semi-finals four times in five years between 1998 and 2002 – carrying the fevered hopes of millions of otherwise unhysterical middleclass Britons on his shoulders, was the psychological human drama that always brought out the best in Simon Barnes’s journalism.

  During the 1990s, the progress of both Murdoch’s BSkyB satellite television and football went hand in hand. Winning coverage rights to Premiership games helped transform Sky’s fortunes. The previous decade had been a low point for the sport, albeit as much for the hooliganism and general unpleasantness that took place off the pitch as for the quality of play on it. The yobbery of Liverpool supporters had caused the death of Juventus fans at the Heysel Stadium, provoking a sense of national shame and ensuring the banning of English clubs from European championships. In 1988 the Government seriously considered forcing all football supporters to be registered and presented with identity cards so that troublemakers could be more easily prevented from attending matches. Tragedy had stalked the grandstand at Bradford City, which became an inferno, and the terraces of Hillsborough where ninety-six Liverpool fans were crushed to death. Established in the Hillsborough tragedy’s aftermath, the Taylor Report’s recommendations were enacted, forcing league grounds to become all-seater venues and to carry out improvements that made match attendance less of a threatening experience. At the time, many clubs, dependent on gate receipts, questioned how they could afford the expense of the change and the reduced number of paying supporters they would subsequently be able to squeeze through the turnstile. The Government even felt compelled to announce it would divert funds from the betting tax to support the upgraded facilities. In fact, far from hurting the clubs’ finances, the improvements came just in time to take advantage of the sport’s economic renaissance. In 1992, the Premier League was created. Murdoch’s decision to buy the broadcasting rights for Sky transformed the sport. Suddenly, the leading teams were able to benefit from a huge cash injection, the sums from Sky being supplemented by the greatly enhanced opportunities for sponsorship as other companies raced to gain from the exposure. The growth could be seen clearly enough through the increasing sums clubs were prepared to pay for players. In July 1988, Tottenham Hotspur had provoked gasps by purchasing Paul Gascoigne for a record fee of £2 million. A decade later, Alan Shearer cost Newcastle United £15 million with Shearer receiving a £500,000 signing-on fee and a guaranteed annual salary of £1.5 million for five years. The Premiership’s principal clubs spent £68 million on new signings in 1995 and the figure had passed £100 million two years later. Some maintained that this revolution came at the expense of the less successful clubs. Others argued that far from extinguishing the non-Premiership teams, the Sky deal helped grow the market. With greater variation in kick-off times and the spread of matches to Sundays, supporters found their viewing choices – on the screen as well as at the ground – widened.

  The process was mutually beneficial. The broadcasting deal rescued Sky’s previously perilous bank balance. Murdoch’s commercial interest in the people’s game appeared to approach new heights when in 1999 he made a bid for Manchester United. The deal was blocked by the Government but, by then, the proprietor’s business interest in the sport had already manifested profound repercussions for The Times. Although there was never any tie-in between the newspaper and Sky, Murdoch’s experience of watching the expanding market for football coverage had made him conscious that it was a growth area from which even the most elevated sections of his media empire could benefit. During the spring of 1996, Murdoch paid a visit to The Times and asked which big events were coming up. Various forthcoming attractions were mentioned but those that prompted the proprietor’s interest fell into one category which he summed up in the phrase – later adopted in the paper and elsewhere – ‘the great summer of sport’. Without pausing to digest what had been said, Murdoch made clear that funds would be made available for a massive expansion of The Times’s sports section.32 At its heart was Euro ’96 – the European football championships – to be hosted by England in June. With Murdoch’s encouragement, the paper would now be able to provide a far higher level of in-depth coverage than it had accorded any previous soccer tournament. Through Sky, he had learned how well football sold and was sure that The Times could not afford to miss this extraordinary growth market. This proved a defining moment in the development of the paper. The football coverage shot up from four to nine pages. The expansion was well timed: Euro ‘96 proved a turning point in the fortunes of football in Britain. There was little sign during the tournament
of the unappealing sideshows of hooliganism and bad sportsmanship that had previously tarnished the sport’s image. Instead, it proved a tremendous spectacle of the British summer. The Times rose to the moment with Rob Hughes, its football correspondent, ably supported by a team that featured the man-marking skills of Oliver Holt, Alyson Rudd and David Maddock. By the time England were defeated in a penalty shoot-out in a thrilling semi-final by the eventual champions, Germany, the country had – in the parlance of the moment – ‘gone footie mad’.

  The legacy was a noticeable upsurge in interest in the game even from among those who might previously have imagined logging a 4–4–2 formation was something to do with train spotting. Bankers and accountants crammed into pubs to watch the match, rubbing shoulders with the sport’s less fair-weather devotees. Even ascending a couple of floors in the office lift the next morning would be treated as a sufficient moment to impart some second-hand observation about the match and, for this, the broadsheets provided their fair share of primary information. The high level of interest in The Times’s coverage certainly suggested soccer was becoming gentrified and was even a suitable subject for front-page photography. In this respect David Beckham, a player in danger of being recognized as a celebrity in his own right, became the pin-up of tabloids and broadsheets alike. With money, glamour and excitement all coming together, it was noticeable that football was finally beginning to interest large numbers of women too. This was a change The Times was quick to discern. In the past, the concept of the female sports’ journalist was poorly grasped. There were rare exceptions, especially in sports with a strong female following like show jumping: after fifteen years as equestrian correspondent, Pamela Macgregor-Morris passed over to Jenny MacArthur in 1983. During the mid-nineties, though – and accentuated by the popular reaction to Euro ’96 – the paper turned to journalists like Alison Kervin and Alyson Rudd not only to report on matches but also to become columnists and pundits. Rudd and Lynne Truss, whose ‘Kicking and Screaming’ column began during the European championship, lifted the lid off the lad culture of soccer. Kervin became an interviewer as well as a reporter, sports coverage having become almost as much about previewing events and analysing the chief protagonists as about filing match reports. The Times invested not just in women writing about men’s sport but also about their own. Sarah Potter, a specialist on women’s cricket, reported extensively on women in all walks of sport.