My letter home dated 15 August 1967 tells the story: ‘No time for preliminaries – WE DID IT! Yes, all three of us actually did it.’ It took us three days of steady climbing to get to the plateau from which the final ascent could be attempted; then…
Up at 1 a.m., not having slept at all and having had blinding headache all night. Bitterly cold. Was very sick before starting out … impossible to describe effect of lack of oxygen. Was indescribably ill up to top. Very beautiful views (I think) … You cannot imagine the agony of the final climb to the top – it is something I never wish to repeat.
I described the ordeal as ‘a battle of mind versus body – in the event, the mind won, but not without the body putting up an impressive struggle’. A few years ago, I thought it might be fun to try to do it again, with my son, but having now re-read my contemporaneous account, I am glad I never did. The ascent in 1967 remains the most significant physical achievement of my life, just as getting through my Grade 8 clarinet exam remains my most significant musical achievement.
Two weeks after my triumph on Kilimanjaro, having first spent a few days recovering on the beach at Mombasa, I was on my way back to London. It was my nineteenth birthday, exactly 365 days after my adventure, and my love affair with Africa, had begun.
Uganda remains my favourite country in Africa, my first love, although it was to be nearly forty years before I was able to return and revisit Makerere College School. And I found another love while I was in Uganda: the BBC World Service, on which I relied for daily news of the outside world. What a wonderful job it must be, I thought, to sit in a radio studio and broadcast to people all over the world. One day, perhaps…
The University of Sussex was just six years old when I arrived there in the autumn of 1967. It had been the first of the new wave of ’60s universities,† and it was proud of its reputation as an institution at the forefront of all that was exciting in 1960s Britain. It was the time of flowered shirts and long hair (men), and miniskirts and the Pill (women), and the university cultivated a rakish air perfectly suited to the nearest town, Brighton, which had long enjoyed a reputation as a place of dubious pleasures and loose morals. Not at all the sort of town, according to critics like my former headmaster, for a serious place of learning, even if it had already earned itself the nickname ‘Balliol-by-the-sea’ because of the number of ex-Oxbridge academics on its payroll.
Its buildings, in pale brick and concrete, had been designed by one of Britain’s leading architects, Sir Basil Spence, who had also designed Coventry Cathedral, and its location on the grassy slopes of Stanmer Park, halfway between Brighton and Lewes, enabled it to boast that it was the only university in the UK to be built entirely in an officially designated area of outstanding natural beauty.
It suited me perfectly. My first task when I arrived was to switch courses, because during my year in Uganda my interest in philosophy had waned while my interest in politics had grown. My new chosen course was Politics in the School of African and Asian Studies, but it played a much less important role in my student life than my decision to join the staff of the student newspaper Wine Press, to which I devoted far more time than I did to my academic commitments.
My home during my first year at Sussex was a shared room in a guesthouse at 42 Devonshire Place, just a five-minute walk from Brighton Pier. There were only three halls of residence on campus, so most first-year students were accommodated in guesthouses, an arrangement that worked very well for the proprietors, who were delighted to have paying guests during term-time. At the end of term, we had to vacate our rooms to make way for the holidaymakers.
There were eight of us in the guesthouse, all male, and as there was no lounge and no TV, the only opportunity we had to socialise was at breakfast, which is rarely a time when students are at their most interesting. So I spent much more of my time, when I was not in the Wine Press office on campus, in a nearby women’s guesthouse where there was both a lounge and a colour television.
I cannot think of any time, except perhaps in the 1930s, when it could have been more exciting to be a British student than in the late 1960s. There was a real sense that we were in the vanguard of the deep social changes under way: the liberalisation of the laws on abortion and homosexuality, the introduction of the contraceptive pill, the rise of the feminist movement, the civil rights movement in the US, and the politicisation of a whole generation of students over the war in Vietnam.
But I soon discovered that I preferred to be a chronicler rather than an activist. Then as now, I was happier asking the questions than deciding upon the answers. I did, in fact, put myself forward as a candidate to be president of the students’ union – more, I think, because I felt it would be interesting to discover what it was like than because I had any burning wish to hold elected office – but I was beaten into an ignominious third place by both the mainstream Communist Party candidate and by the eventual winner, a 31-year-old former lorry driver who had been regarded by the campus commentators as the ‘joke candidate’.
I learned two useful lessons from the experience: first, that running for office is immensely hard and dispiriting work, and second, that suspicion of journalists, even student journalists, runs very deep. On one canvassing call to a guesthouse, I was treated to the sight of my beloved Wine Press being ceremoniously burnt in a wastepaper bin. In a letter home, I explained to my disappointed parents that I owed my defeat to an ill-advised reliance on ‘floating voters’ whose support I did too little to win over, and to the salience of the ‘trendy careerist’ label that was routinely attached to student journalists by student revolutionaries on the barricades.
1967 was the year of the Six Day War in the Middle East, when Israel pre-empted a feared attack by its Arab neighbours and ended up occupying east Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was the year when a right-wing military junta seized power in Greece, and China exploded its first H-bomb. Race riots erupted in several cities in the US, and in apartheid South Africa, Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant. The US had nearly half a million troops in South Vietnam; 11,000 were killed in action. The following year would be even more momentous.
It is not difficult to explain why I became a journalist. To be a student, and to be a student journalist, while the world was undergoing such fundamental change was bound to have a lasting effect. By January 1968, when I had already seen one of my news stories splashed across the front page of Wine Press, I was writing to my parents that the experience ‘has made me all the more convinced that journalism or something akin to it is the life for me’.
The following month, Sussex burst into the national and international spotlight when a pot of red paint was thrown at a visiting official from the US embassy, Robert Beers, who was accompanied for some reason by his twenty-year-old daughter Elizabeth. It was, by the standards of the day, a shocking act of political violence, and the university authorities responded by suspending the two students responsible for eight weeks. A vote at an emotional meeting of the students’ union on whether to support the two students by going on strike was overwhelmingly defeated, with 1,000 votes against to sixty in favour.
For us student journalists on the ground, of course, it was all wonderfully exciting. Fleet Street’s finest descended on the campus and made a beeline for the Wine Press offices. We did our best to explain the background, to no obvious effect. An American news agency report set the tone:
A US embassy official today said police saved his 20-year-old daughter and himself from death at the hands of an anti-Vietnam war crowd hurling paint, eggs and rocks Wednesday night. ‘They saved our lives. The students had rocks and were really out to get us,’ said press attaché Robert Beers.21
It has gone down in the history books as ‘the red paint incident’, and it taught at least one budding journalist an important lesson: never trust other journalists to get things right. I count myself fortunate that I learned the lesson even before I went into the business.
It also found space to report the view of a leading Brighton councillor, Alderman Gerald FitzGerald, that prescribing the contraceptive pill to unmarried students ‘allows students to avoid practising self-discipline, that the free love which it encourages is a prostitution of the marriage vows, that it is against Christian teaching, and that this sort of freedom does not provide a happy foundation for marriage’.
Sex, music and politics: Sussex in the ’60s. And in 1968, Wine Press was named the best student newspaper in Britain. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive…
Not so blissful, however, for the management of the Kent and Sussex Courier in Tunbridge Wells, where Wine Press was printed. As editor, it was my job to drive the thirty miles from Brighton to Tunbridge Wells each week to oversee the production process, a task that often pitted the anarchic, libertarian tendencies of Sussex undergraduates with the very much more traditional approach of the Courier. Four-letter words were banned, and satire and personal abuse were frowned upon. Just as unwelcome was our inability to match the number of written words per page with the space available, which frequently meant either the hasty cutting of over-written material, or the equally hasty filling of gaps at the foot of a column.
In the days of hot-metal printing, the art of ‘stone-subbing’ – the editing of material even after it had been cast in metal and page proofs had been run off – was the most highly prized of all editorial skills. To have an opportunity to learn the rudiments of the art while barely out of short trousers was a rare privilege, and the unforgiving printers of the Kent and Sussex Courier were determined that we would never forget it.
Even fifty years ago, I realised that there was more to journalism than ink on paper, and I was part of a team that set up the first on-campus TV network. In my debut as a broadcast interviewer, I subjected the vice-chancellor Asa Briggs to a grilling that was so gentle that a camera operator, dying of boredom, wandered over to me mid-interview – out of shot, fortunately – and whispered in my ear: ‘I think you should ask him another question.’
I also did some reporting for BBC Radio Brighton, which went on air in February 1968 as one of the first of the BBC’s local radio stations. On one occasion, I was sent to interview Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the United Nations, who was visiting Brighton.‡ When I returned to the studios with the tape, shaking with nerves, I discovered that the tape was blank. ‘Never mind,’ said the station manager. ‘You’ll just have to go back and interview him again, won’t you?’
Which, of course, I did. Just as I did on many other occasions in the decades that followed, when I suffered the embarrassment of having to explain to a variety of eminent interviewees why a technical malfunction (never my own incompetence) meant that we would have to record an interview a second time. I was always pleasantly surprised by how understanding the interviewees were when confronted with a gibbering, grovelling wreck of a radio reporter.
As part of my degree course, I was expected to research and write a final-year dissertation on a subject of my own choosing. Despite the fact that I was attached to the School of African and Asian Studies, I decided to write about the doomed US presidential campaign of the Democratic Party Senator Eugene McCarthy, who in 1968 was challenging his fellow Democrat, and incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson. My dissertation was decidedly thin, little more than an extended piece of journalism, depending largely on the weekly reports that I read in Newsweek magazine and containing not a single reference to any recognisable principle of political theory.
It did, however, provide a perfect excuse to spend the summer of 1968 in the US, staying mainly with my American uncle’s family just outside Washington DC and sitting up late into the night watching the TV coverage of a chaotic and violent Democratic Party convention in Chicago. The civil rights leader Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April, Robert Kennedy, brother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, was shot dead in June, and anti-Vietnam War protests were at their height. This was politics as high-octane drama, and I was utterly transfixed. The most powerful nation in the world, with a nuclear arsenal big enough to destroy our planet many times over, was on the brink of revolution.
And as if all that was not enough, in August, Soviet-led troops invaded Czechoslovakia to end the ‘Prague Spring’ experiment, during which the Czech leader Alexander Dubček had tried to introduce a form of liberal Communism, and France exploded its first hydrogen bomb. For me, as a student of politics with dreams of becoming a journalist, 1968 was the year that the die was cast. I had never felt so alive, and my summer in the US marked the start of a lifelong fascination with both the country and its politics.
It was while I was in Washington that I first met the man who was later to become my journalistic mentor and guru. Anthony (Tony) Howard was Washington correspondent for The Observer and when I contacted him to seek his advice about the US political scene, he was generous with both his time and his knowledge. Later, when I was looking for a job and he was back in London working for the New Statesman, he arranged for me to meet several of his journalist friends and contacts in high places. None of them was able to offer me work, but Tony and I remained friends – and, for a time, colleagues – until his death in 2010.§
Wine Press did not long survive my editorship. In June 1969, the students’ union, by now firmly in the control of the extreme left, voted to end its annual subsidy. I commented, I suspect disingenuously, in a letter home: ‘It’s no great tragedy that Wine Press is dead, as it was never a very good newspaper.’ The minutes of the final meeting of its management board ended with the words: ‘The management board committed suicide at 3.58 p.m.’
My personal tutor throughout my time at Sussex, Professor Bruce Graham, was a man of seemingly infinite patience and understanding who had little difficulty in seeing where my loyalties lay. ‘You know,’ he said to me one day, ‘you are going to have to make up your mind soon. Are you going to be a political scientist, or are you going to be a journalist?’ I am sure he knew perfectly well what the answer would be, although my determination to land a job in broadcasting was thwarted at every turn.
It was to be nearly twenty years before I was finally able to say: ‘I work for the BBC.’
* Buganda is one of four recognised traditional kingdoms of Uganda, the others being Bunyoro-Kitara, Busoga and Toro.
† The others were East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Lancaster, Warwick and York.
‡ Caradon’s younger brother, Michael Foot, became leader of the Labour Party in 1980.
§ By pure coincidence, the first home I bought after I got married in 1980 was in the house in Highgate, north London, where Howard had been born and spent his early childhood.
CHAPTER 8
AGENCY MAN
Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.
AMERICAN HUMORIST FINLEY PETER DUNNE (1867–1936), DESCRIBING THE ROLE OF JOURNALISTS
I OWE MY CAREER to a woman called Carolyn Robb. She worked at the Sussex University Careers Advisory Service, and when she heard that I was getting nowhere with any of my multiple applications to join the BBC, she managed to persuade me to look elsewhere. Reuters news agency, one of the most venerable and respected of British journalistic institutions, ran a training scheme aimed specifically at university graduates, and Carolyn had a pile of application forms. With great reluctance, I filled one in and posted it.
On 9 April 1970, after a series of interviews and a written test, and shortly before I sat my final exams at Sussex, I received the letter I had been waitin
g for:
Dear Mr Lustig,
Following your recent interviews here, we are pleased to offer you an engagement as a trainee journalist with Reuters General News Division … Your starting salary will be £1,190* per annum.
Reuters was founded in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter, born Israel Josaphat, the son of a rabbi, in Kassel, Germany. He had moved to London in 1845, after establishing a successful news service in Germany using carrier pigeons to carry stock market prices between Berlin and Paris. (There was no telegraph link between Brussels and Aachen at the time and the pigeons were faster than the trains. Later, Reuter invested in telegraph communications, which were even faster than the pigeons.) According to the official company history, the agency soon earned ‘an enviable reputation for speed, accuracy, integrity and impartiality’.
Reuters was famed for going to extraordinary lengths to be first with the news. In 1865, after Abraham Lincoln was shot while in the audience at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, the news reached Europe only twelve days later, but it would have taken even longer had Reuters not been able to make use of its own private communications network.
We forget sometimes in this era of instant news how complex and cumbersome news technology used to be, so this is how it was done. First the news flash was transmitted by telegraph from Washington to New York. But the next mail steamer heading for Europe was not due to leave until the following afternoon, so the Reuters man in New York chartered a fast tug boat to chase after a steamer that had left a few hours earlier. It caught up, and a canister containing the Lincoln dispatch was thrown on board.
Once the steamer had crossed the Atlantic, the canister was transferred onto a smaller vessel off the west coast of Ireland, so that the news could then be transmitted onwards via telegraph. And because Julius Reuter had laid his own private telegraph line that reached further west – to Crookhaven – than the commercial line that stopped at Cork, he could get the news onto the telegraph several hours before anyone else.
Is Anything Happening? Page 13