The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  At least in the decade up to 2002, The Times avoided the ultimate solecism of publishing the obituary of someone who was still living. The obituaries staff read the death notices (known as the ‘hotch’) every day to check nobody important had died and one of the aspects that Tony Howard found most difficult was having to check that the subject matter really had shuffled off the mortal coil. This involved phoning the deceased’s nearest relatives in order to enquire, in a sympathetic tone, whether the rumours were true. Working beside Howard was Ian Brunskill who had originally joined the paper’s arts pages. Together, they clawed back The Times’s position as the primary dictionary of the departed. The number of notices waiting on file gradually rose to around six thousand although, as the space in the paper increased, so the number of staff assisting the obituaries editor rose from four to six, supplemented by about 150 key contributors. Howard had a regular naval source who provided biographies of Royal Navy sailors and an Army source who did likewise for old soldiers. Other institutions, especially the Church and the major universities, also had their discreet observers.

  Following on from Op-Ed, the leaders and letters pages, obituaries enjoyed a prime place that Howard was tenacious in defending despite periodic attempts to move it to the second section. Eventually, it was Ben Preston who persuaded Brunskill, Howard’s successor, to move obituaries to the second section in return for much more space. This materialized in the form of ‘The Register’. Far from being a demotion – as some at first feared – it represented a major expansion and The Times re-emerged as the paper with the greatest volume of obituary journalism. Brunskill relaxed Howard’s strict demarcation policy that equated rank to column inches. The greater space availability had other positive consequences. The number of foreigners commemorated was increased, despite the occasional complaints of readers who thought the section existed purely as a monument to British worthies. Even before ‘The Register’ was launched, the effect expanding the space availability had on the quality of analysis could be glimpsed by looking at how the paper analysed the lives of two refugees from Hitler’s Europe who made a particularly notable contribution to Britain’s cultural life – Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who died in 1983, and Sir Ernst Gombrich, who died in 2001. Both obituaries were rightly admiring in tone but the extra space that the Gombrich obituary was able to utilize ensured that, in contrast to Pevsner, there was room to analyse the art historian’s views as well as record his achievements.37

  Despite being invented in 2002, ‘The Register’ resembled a conservation area within a larger urban conurbation that had weathered surrounding change while preserving its own character intact. Supplemented with the announcements of the Court & Social page, it was certainly the living embodiment of the ‘journal of record’. In truth, this was less a matter of conservation as of improvement. The standards of the obituary columns had been raised considerably. The days had passed when some of them consisted of little more than – in Brunskill’s description – ‘adding verbs to a “Who’s Who” entry’.38 Indeed, the paper entered the twenty-first century with obituary notices that had as good a claim as any to being the finest being published, day in day out, anywhere in the world. They had certainly come a long way since the 1930s when the paper’s obituaries editor, Frederick Lownes, occupied his time looking out of the window of the Garrick Club in search of the passing visages of famous people looking ill.

  The pace of change remained sedate elsewhere in the Court & Social section of the paper. Indeed, the Court page’s staff had, somehow, managed to avoid the direct input into computer terminals directive to which all other journalists had succumbed when the paper made its moonlit flit to Wapping in 1986. Instead, they enjoyed the distinction of being the only journalists who received a daily visit from a subeditor who would read back to them what they had written. It was dignified, but was not efficient. Eventually, in the late 1990s, the nettle was grasped and direct input enforced. It made almost no difference to the layout of a page that, along with the law reports, changed less than any other section of the paper. Indeed, Court & Social and the law reports remained the strongest emblems of maintaining the ‘journal of record’ tradition. Below the royal coat of arms, the Court Circular announced the daily movements of the royal family with an unceasing adherence to protocol and the correct usage of the upper or lower case. ‘University News’ reported fellowship and professorial appointments in a manner unchanged since 1921. Parliamentary group luncheons, livery guild dinners and lectures at the likes of the Royal Geographical Society were all accorded notices. Even attendees at memorial services of the great and the good continued to be recognized in serried ranks of small type. For traditionally and punctiliously minded readers, these remained welcome reminders of the continuities of British social, metropolitan and intellectual life and a bulwark against the brasher displays accorded the new elite of celebrities and other supposed false idols. Despite strong competition in this department from the Daily Telegraph, placing a notice of a birth, forthcoming marriage or death in The Times remained sine qua non for those wishing to share personal news with a larger, sometimes imagined but often real, community of those who also turned to the same page for solace or curiosity. A sense of kinship was fostered and authority bestowed upon those whose names graced its page. The appearance was, of course, that of old-fashioned values decorously expressed, although the Personal Column was essentially also one of the most commercially minded parts of the paper.

  Usually accompanying the Court & Social section were other familiar features that stood testimony to The Times’s seriousness of purpose. The Times brought together an impressive range of expert writers. Michael J. Hendrie, The Times’s astronomy correspondent, offered regular updates – complete with an accompanying diagram – of the movement of the planets and where to see the brighter stars of the night sky. Meanwhile, Professor Norman Hammond, the archaeological correspondent since 1967, had become one of the paper’s longest serving regular contributors. His columns demonstrated his breadth and versatility although he was a particular authority on Mayan civilization. His digs in the Mayan lowlands had, indeed, contributed towards an international recognition that included lengthy periods at the universities of Cambridge and Rutgers as well as visiting professorships at the University of California at Berkeley, at Jilin in China, Bonn University and at the Sorbonne. A succession of other specialists also provided regular copy. One of the most influential figures in the heritage lobby, Marcus Binney, wrote with great erudition and passion on architecture and the preservation of civilization’s bricks and mortar. Between August and December every year since 1981, Angus Nicol swung into action as the piping correspondent. The Times, indeed, must surely remain the only newspaper south of Berwick-upon-Tweed to profit from a regular bagpipe columnist. The ornithologist and Proust expert, Derwent May, closely observed birds and their habitats. Signing off with the initials DJM, May’s Nature Notes had appeared every Monday since 1982 and became daily when ‘The Register’ was launched in 2002. His style was governed by his observations of the changing seasons: ‘Lesser spotted woodpeckers are beginning to make their spring call in the treetops: it is a thin piping note, like a faint car alarm going off’ was a typical mode of introduction, rather in the manner of a Cold War spy affecting small talk, before eventually signing off with an equally conspiratorial rejoinder, ‘On London plane-trees, there are strings of prickly-looking seed-balls, many of which will go on dangling there until the leaves come out in April.’39 These columns enjoyed a devoted following.

  The Times’s range of expert correspondents extended to the more cerebral games and pastimes. From 1986, the chess correspondent was Raymond Keene. Keene was a grandmaster with a long list of accomplishments that included becoming British Chess Champion in 1971 and was eight times a member of the English Olympic team between 1977 and 1980. The organizer of several world championships, he was the natural choice to oversee the 1993 Kasparov vs Short contest that was sponsored by The Times. He became the pap
er’s daily columnist in 1995 and also found time to write more than 110 books on chess, which was a world record. Such was his mental ability that, in 1990, Lancashire police asked him to solve a chess-based puzzle that a computer designer had devised while being detained on suspicion of murdering an ex-girlfriend. Handed a puzzle that involved four chess pieces, a board drawn in the outline of a map and a series of moves, the police believed the suspect was providing them with the coordinates for the shallow grave of the disappeared woman. Keene examined it and concluded that her remains might be buried in Ireland, north-west of Limerick. No body was ever located, however, and the suspect was released.40 Meanwhile, as bridge correspondents, both Robert Sheehan and his successor, Andrew Robson, dealt a daily hand to a large and conscientious following among the readership. Robson, a former World Junior Champion, was one of the youngest players to win the European championship in 1991 and was the first English player to win a US major, which he did two years running. The author of Common Mistakes: And How to Avoid Them also started the Andrew Robson Bridge Club, which became the largest in the land.

  Nonetheless, the undisputed monarch among The Times’s daily offering of games and brainteasers was the crossword. The first had appeared in 1930 and a second, concise crossword, was added in 1983. The paper had also instituted an annual championship in 1970. When Dr Helen Ougham, a scientist at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research at Aberystwyth, won it in October 1995 (the first woman to do so) she solved the four puzzles in an average of eleven minutes. As crossword editor between 1983 and 1995, John Grant presided over a team of twelve regular compilers that included a former Scrabble champion, an ex-IBM executive, a French horn player, a retired Army officer, a postman and Brian Greer, a lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast, specializing in the psychology of mathematics education. Having been on the team for twenty years, it was Greer who succeeded Grant as editor in 1995 when the paper celebrated its 20,000th crossword. There was only one serious error – in March 1986, puzzle number 17,005 was published with the wrong grid. ‘More than a hundred readers nevertheless solved it on grids of their own devising,’ Grant recalled, ‘and even suggested it was more fun that way.’41 More than seventy years after its inception, The Times crossword not only remained a national institution, it retained its reputation as perhaps the most recognized test of daily mental agility. This, in itself, was no small achievement.

  III

  Anthony Howard believed that the journalist’s working life had changed remarkably – and not necessarily for the better – since he was first enlisted into its ranks in 1958. Instead of getting out and about in search of stories, reporters had become ‘largely dependent on the information revolution. You scan the Internet, you look at what all the news agencies have to say – all there supplied and ready-processed on your desk.’ He pitied Wapping’s ‘galley-slaves’ with ‘sandwiches to eat at their desks, crouched over their terminals from 10.30 till 6.30, never seeing anyone, working the phone quite hard, but never actually going out into the real world’. Lobby correspondents, operating from the bars and corridors of Westminster and Whitehall, were a rare exception.42 There was some accuracy in Howard’s depiction of desk-bound journalism. In fairness, the revolution in information technology meant there was usually far more readily accessible material to be had by staying close to one’s computer screen than by standing around expectantly in pubs. In this respect, perhaps The Times had not moved on so far from its established mid-twentieth-century role as the great information interchange in which experienced subeditors polished other agencies’ wire reports and disseminated officially released information. Yet even that was only partly true. Then, as in the early twenty-first century, the great disclosures still came through personal contacts and a questing spirit that was not easily put off by obfuscation. Front-line journalists like Anthony Loyd, Richard Beeston and Janine di Giovanni could hardly be accused of a reticence to go deep into hostile territory in search of stories at no small risk to their own welfare. They were in the tradition of the celebrated and fearless reporters who had brought such fame to The Times in bygone days. Technological advances greatly assisted foreign correspondents’ means of communication. During the 1980s, they still had to get back to an office where they could file their copy through the fraught and time consuming medium of the telex machine. Even in the early 1990s, getting hold of London could take hours. Mary Dejevsky recalled her attempts to cover the Ukrainian independence referendum in December 1991. She tried to file from Lvov, only to be told there was a thirty-six hour wait for an available foreign telephone line. ‘There was nothing you could do except go to the post office and yell at people or hope that London called you,’ she recalled.43 Her only option was to fly to Kiev and try from there. Fog, however, ensured that the planes were cancelled, so she had to hire a black-market car and drive for eight hours through the snow and rain in order to get the story out. Such experiences were typical until the advent of mobile phones and electronic filing shrunk the world.

  There was always something romantic about the notion of the foreign correspondent sending dispatches from exotic locations but those reporting from domestic shores were no less capable of winkling out information from some of its most concealed crevices. Indeed, in the last twenty years of the twentieth century, the amount of information leaked to journalists from those in official positions seemed far greater than in any previous age. Not all these disclosures were totally unsolicited. Often they were the result of a long period in which trust had been developed through mutual acquaintance. Such was the success of the fourth estate’s ability to live by disclosure that some wondered whether it was irreparably damaging the culture of trust that made public governance possible.

  Sometimes the criticism has not been that increasingly sedentary journalists have missed stories but rather that they have not taken sufficient care to establish the facts before rushing with indecent haste to claim a scoop. The Hitler diaries fiasco was a case in point. Earlier in the century, The Times could not always have been accused of rushing to judge. It had sufficient time to report in relative depth on the news pages the dropping of the first atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, yet it opted not to bother changing the leader column on that day to discuss what was potentially the most momentous event in world history – one that might virtually bring it to an end. From a modern perspective, this reluctance to comment appears reticent to the point of sheer laziness and, had it been the modus operandi in response to 9/11, readers would have questioned why they were purchasing a paper that could not rise to a challenge that was eagerly being met by the twenty-four-hour rolling news services of television, radio and the internet. In short, such a detached attitude would no longer be considered acceptable. Yet, The Times’s Blackfriars of 1945 would have argued that taking time to ponder such a major development was less unprofessional than rushing in with a gut reaction when a period of careful consideration was the only response equal to the moment. This was a mode of thought made famous by Zhou Enlai when he answered a question about the meaning of the French Revolution with the answer, ‘It is too early to tell.’ Zhou, however, was not in the business of selling newspapers.

  Such a detached attitude, even if desirable, is no longer possible. The market will look for alternative news sources that will provide near-instant responses. Reticence is not of itself an attribute. It has to be accepted that analytical journalism can never be more than the daily practice of risk assessment. If historians cannot agree about the cause and effect of events that took place deep in the past despite the advantages of hindsight and a steady accretion of information in the meantime, it is not reasonable to assume that those writing the first draft of history for the morning’s newspapers will have a monopoly on truth or wisdom. Looking back with the advantages of fifty years’ experience in Fleet Street, William Rees-Mogg made the assessment that, ‘Any journalist who gets his judgments right more than half the time is doing quite well. Our job is to make the best judgment th
at can be made on the first day, when the cork has come out of the bottle but the wine has not yet been poured.’44 It is debateable whether the greater reticence in reacting to events made by the mid-twentieth-century Times ensured it any better diagnostic results. The ability of The Times of 2001 to respond to the unimaginable calamity of 9/11 by producing within a matter of hours a paper whose reporting and analysis remained calm, measured and authoritative in its tone was a tribute to how its journalists had maintained standards of the highest professionalism despite the increased pressures placed upon them by expectant readers. Indeed, by the twenty-first century, the question of whether ‘fast news’ was a good thing was, in any case, entirely academic. Flashing up-to-the-minute news on the paper’s website was an implicit requirement, not an optional extra. Internet users had the ability to surf rival sites at the click of an electronic mouse in search of the most up-to-date news and comment. News providers who hesitated lost.

  A failure to provide a virtual paper on the web was not a viable option when the rivals all chose to do so. In terms of attracting the major advertisers, newspapers had been losing market share to television throughout the period covered in this book.45 It remained to be seen whether launching websites would prove to be the alternative visual medium that allowed them to claw some of that share back. The Guardian made a huge investment in its online version during the 1990s and succeeded in attracting a large audience from the United States in particular. Online services proved to be the most effective means yet invented of disseminating newspapers around the world. Among the British broadsheets, Times Online moved into second place ahead of FT.com. Meanwhile, despite having the highest sales of any broadsheet newspaper, the Telegraph’s website slid into fourth position. Charging to read the online paper ran the risk of diverting readers to rival free sites and the launch of the BBC’s online news service made it difficult for newspapers to introduce registration fees. Naturally, there were fears that if readers could access the material for free, the paper would lose revenue. However, the research suggested that around a half of Times Online users were not regular readers of the print edition. Thus, while the paper was inevitably losing sales to those – often in office environments where the internet costs were borne by the business – who were browsing without charge on their computer screens, it was also gaining a new audience from those who would not have bothered to look at it at all if the only means of doing so involved interacting with a newsagent. This new market created opportunities for advertisers seeking space on the virtual paper as well as for hooking new readers to its printed format.