Right from the start, Reuters’ emphasis was on financial news. By the time I joined in 1970, the company had just launched its Video-master service, an early on-screen display of stock and commodity prices. Even then, we were taught always to be on the lookout for stories that were known as ‘market-movers’.
That is probably why, at my job interview, I was asked the following question:
Suppose you were the Reuters correspondent in Havana, and you learned exclusively that the Cuban sugar harvest had failed, but you had also been warned that if you published the information, the Reuters office in Havana would be shut down and you would be arrested and expelled from the country. What would you do?
I replied that I would seek advice from head office in London, which seems to have been the right answer because I was one of only six university graduates who were offered a place as a graduate trainee. It was not the job I had set my heart on, but it was the only one I was offered.
All six of us were men, and two of our number went on to spend their entire careers, more than forty years, in the company’s service. Our training was designed largely in accordance with the educational principle known to its practitioners as ‘sitting next to Nellie’, in other words, watching over the shoulder of someone who knew what they were doing and learning from them. We were, however, taught the rudiments of shorthand and media law, neither of which I made much use of during my nearly seven years with the company.
The Reuters training scheme has gone through many incarnations over the years, but it has a pretty good track record: among its alumni are such former newspaper editors as Jonathan Fenby of The Observer, Andrew Gowers of the Financial Times and Alexander Chancellor of The Spectator. The current editor of The Times, John Witherow, is also a former Reuters trainee, as are many of the UK’s top foreign correspondents and broadcasters. (In 2012, Reuters was reported to take on fifteen trainees annually from around two thousand applicants around the world.)
We in the 1970 batch were treated in our first week to a welcoming address from the Reuters general manager, Gerald Long, an imposing figure with a luxuriant moustache and a no-nonsense manner. He had a well-earned reputation as a man who was aggressive, short-tempered, arrogant and intolerant of fools.
Long told us two things that have stuck in my mind for nearly half a century. The first, in the context of war reporting, was: ‘Just remember – you’re no use to me if you’re dead.’ The second, in the context of competing with rival agencies, was equally useful: ‘I’d rather you were second and right than first and wrong.’ It is a principle that I have tried to follow ever since, even today with all the temptations of the Send button on a mobile phone. (Sky News, on the other hand, at least in its early days, was said by its critics to operate according to the opposite principle: Never wrong for long.)
Gerald Long was credited with turning Reuters from a loss-making, traditionally minded news organisation into a profitable, forward-looking venture that understood the full potential of computerised financial data provision tailored to the needs of the financial services industry. So successful was he that when the company went public in 1984 (it had previously been owned by a trust made up of British national and regional newspapers), some of its most senior executives ended up with stock options worth several million pounds. Long was not one of them – he had left Reuters in 1981 after accepting an offer from Rupert Murdoch to become managing director of Times Newspapers. The Daily Mail described him as ‘the man who let £4 million slip through his fingers’.
Gerald Long was never a newspaper proprietor, so his name has never figured alongside such other monstrous Fleet Street legends as Beaverbrook, Northcliffe and Maxwell. It probably deserves to be, even if only for the wonderfully surreal manner of his fall from grace after barely a year as Murdoch’s henchman at The Times. It was all because of a row over French cheese, about which Long believed himself to be a world expert.
The saga started in November 1981, when Long had a meal at Le Gavroche, a renowned French restaurant in central London which was about to be awarded a third Michelin star, the first restaurant in the UK to be thus honoured. Long was not impressed and wrote to the proprietor, Albert Roux, to tell him so.
Dear Mr Roux,
I dined recently at your restaurant Le Gavroche for the first time. I would like to draw one small matter to your attention.
The large selection of cheeses was presented as specially chosen for Le Gavroche by a French cheese expert, and consisting of only French farmhouse cheeses.
This last expression surprised me, since it would, in my experience, be difficult to make such an absolute claim for any cheese board of such variety, here or in France, if one were to translate the rather vague word ‘farmhouse’ as ‘de fabrication fermière’, which has a precise meaning.
The chef replied, as you would expect, with appropriately Gallic elegance. But he stuck to his fromological guns and, after a further exchange of letters, dripping with ill-disguised hostility, M. Roux turned the faux charm-o-meter up to maximum:
The fact that you have taken so much trouble to write about food leaves me with endless pleasure. So much so, that I would very much like you and your wife to be my guests for lunch or dinner, as I find from your letter that we have a great deal in common – a great love of food.
Only a man of Long’s immeasurable arrogance could have replied as he did:
Thank you for your letter of 23rd November, your kind words, and for your generous invitation; I greatly appreciate it, but I hope you will understand if I do not accept it. In any event, I eat very rarely in restaurants, in this country even less than in France.
The correspondence was published in full in The Times of 6 February 1982; the editor, Harold Evans, was engaged in a brutal war of attrition against both Long and Rupert Murdoch at the time, but Long, who approved publication, seems not to have suspected any ulterior motives. Evans later wrote, with what seems like considerable satisfaction: ‘Murdoch did not regard the letters as entertaining when he read them in the paper. He regarded them as incendiary.’22
The timing, as Evans must have known, could not have been worse. Murdoch was about to tell the print unions that he intended to cut 600 jobs, and to have his managing director publicly engaged in an esoteric dispute about French cheeses in a Michelin three-star restaurant was unlikely to be helpful. Long was kicked upstairs to become deputy chairman of News International and left the company in 1984. He retired to live in France, where he died in 1998.
My first day at Reuters was 21 September 1970, and I was immediately assigned to the agency’s London bureau, responsible for reporting the UK to the rest of the world. To emphasise that Reuters regarded its UK output as no different from its output from anywhere else in the world, the bureau was not based in the agency’s grand main office, which was shared with the Press Association at 85 Fleet Street, but in much more modest premises tucked away in Gough Square. It did not matter. I still walked up Fleet Street every morning on my way from Blackfriars Tube station, so I had arrived at the centre of British journalism, where the smell of printer’s ink, the rumble of the subterranean presses and the endless lines of trucks taking each day’s newspapers to every corner of the nation meant that I had arrived in heaven.
Two weeks before I started at Reuters, a hijacked Israeli airliner had landed at Heathrow airport. It was one of several planes that had been hijacked almost simultaneously by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); three were forced to land at a former RAF base at Dawson’s Field in Jordan, where they were blown up, and the fourth, El Al flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York, ended up in London.
One of the hijackers on board, a Nicaraguan-American called Patrick Argüello, was shot and killed by Israeli security agents on the plane; the other, Leila Khaled, a Palestinian, was captured, handed over to British police and detained at Ealing police station in west London. The PFLP demanded her release in return for the release of the hijacked planes and thei
r passengers, and as the crisis dragged on, young Lustig, one of the new batch of wet-behind-the-ears trainees, was dispatched in the company of a more experienced reporter to await developments outside Ealing police station.
Jordan itself had become engulfed in civil war. The Palestinians, who formed a substantial part of the population, rose up under the leadership of Yasser Arafat to try to seize power from the Hashemite monarch King Hussein. What became known as Black September threatened to tip the Middle East back into the turmoil from which it had only recently recovered following the Six Day War of 1967.
It was a huge story, and Britain was directly involved because of Leila Khaled’s presence on British soil. I could not believe my luck: literally days after joining Reuters, I was being asked to help report on a major world news event. Britain was a signatory to the 1963 international convention on hijacking, which committed it not to negotiate with hijackers, but it soon became clear that the UK government led by Edward Heath was doing exactly that. All eyes were on Ealing and, to raise the tension even further, the government was being privately advised by the British ambassador in Jordan that Khaled had become ‘a symbol of Palestine resistance and a folk heroine’.23 She had already hijacked a plane on its way from Italy to Israel the previous year, and had had extensive plastic surgery to disguise her identity. She was, in other words, a female equivalent of the Argentine revolutionary fighter Che Guevara, who had been killed in Bolivia just three years previously.
The Ealing police station experience is deeply embedded in my memory because it taught me, right at the start of my life as a journalist, an important truth: being at the centre of a major global news event is not inevitably exciting. I spent several days standing in the street outside that police station, but the most exciting thing that I was asked to do in all that time was find a nearby public telephone box that worked. In the days before mobile phones, public phone boxes were an essential journalistic resource, and woe betide a reporter who failed to find one in time to file a dispatch.
On 1 October, after twenty-eight days in detention, Leila Khaled was released and driven to Northolt airport, from where she was flown out of the country. But the first any of the reporters gathered outside the police station knew of it was when we heard it on the BBC Six O’Clock News.
Lesson One: reporting a major news story can often be very boring.
Lesson Two: being in the right place at the right time is not the same as knowing what is going on, even right under your nose. (Khaled had been smuggled out of the police station in the back of a van. It drove right past us.)
The life of an agency man (we were almost all men in the 1970s) is not a life of unending glamour or glory. News agencies do the journalism donkeywork, churning out stories to fill the gaps between what the newspapers’ own correspondents have provided. So the rare moments of glory are moments to be fully savoured, and I got my first, tantalising taste in April 1971, when the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky died in New York at the age of eighty-eight.
‘Does anyone know anything about music?’ asked the head of Reuters London bureau. ‘We need to get some reactions.’ I volunteered to see what I could come up with and, with the help of the London telephone directory, I phoned every leading musical figure I could think of. The following day, at the bottom of its front-page story reporting Stravinsky’s death, The Times printed quotes from three of them – the conductor Colin Davis, the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, and the Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Arthur Bliss. And there, right at the bottom of the page, was the all-important credit: ‘Reuter.’
I had made it on to the front page of The Times, an achievement of such magnitude that it warranted a personal message of congratulations from the editor-in-chief. I walked on air for a week.
One of the traditional tests that news agency reporters were taught to apply to their stories was whether they would be intelligible to a milkman in Kansas City. Why Kansas City? Because it is just about in the geographical centre of the United States and used to be regarded – perhaps it still is – as a perfect symbol for Middle America. So we were taught to use simple English, short words not long words, and explain what needed to be explained to someone who may not have been following the news too closely. (In show business, the question that used to be asked of a new show was ‘Will it play in Peoria?’, a small town in Illinois that, like Kansas City, was regarded as epitomising the virtues – or otherwise – of Main Street, USA.) They were good lessons to learn, and they have served me well.
Part of my time as a Reuters trainee was spent working on what was then called the World Desk, the hub of the global operation, through which correspondents’ dispatches were filtered, rewritten, edited and retransmitted around the world. Teleprinters would chatter around the clock, spewing out miles of paper bearing the news of the moment. The job of the World Desk was to make sure that the copy was fit to be read by that milkman in Kansas.
Sometimes, it also needed to be translated. Reuters stringers (part-time correspondents) in west Africa, for example, sent their dispatches in French, in the form of telegrams. We graduate trainees were expected to turn them into Reuterese and add whatever background material might be required for the benefit of readers in Middle America.
‘Fine, you’ve translated it,’ was the irritated response from one senior sub-editor as he glanced over one of my early efforts. ‘Now see if you can turn it into a news story.’ Graduates were still something of a rarity in Fleet Street, and we were tolerated rather than welcomed by many Reuters lifers. One former trainee described them well as ‘dinosaurs, who affected a proletarian loathing of graduate trainees but were actually often quite kind and instructive beneath the veneer of philistinism’.
On the relatively quiet overnight shifts, while Europe and Africa slept, the graduate trainee’s most important job was to cross Fleet Street at 3 a.m. to Mick’s Café to buy doughnuts. The night editor, known, inevitably, as the Prince of Darkness, would doze with his head resting against the teleprinter, from which incoming news dispatches would periodically be disgorged. It was a foolproof technique, guaranteeing that he would be woken by the sudden whirring and spluttering as the machine sprang to life with a fresh piece of news.
One night, I learned another important lesson: a story that may look like just another routine bit of news may well be life-changing to someone, somewhere. A short dispatch arrived at the World Desk from a stringer in Papua New Guinea. A young British volunteer teacher had been found murdered. Her name was Sandra Smith and she had, briefly, been my girlfriend at Sussex. I subbed the dispatch as best I could, explained the circumstances to the editor, and hoped that her parents had already been told. I could not bear the thought of having to break the news to them myself.
In May 1971, I was shipped overseas to spend the next twelve months learning how to be a proper foreign correspondent in a proper foreign country. Reuters, unlike VSO five years previously, had decided that it might as well make use of my A-level Spanish, so I was posted to Madrid to be the third man in a three-man bureau.
Spain was still ruled by the Fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who had seized power after the 1936–39 civil war. There was no political activity to speak of – Fascist dictators do not tend to encourage a spirit of lively political debate – so most of the work was either sports-related or what is known in the trade as ‘soft features’, the kind of stuff that gets published on a newspaper’s inside pages when there is nothing else around. In my first two weeks, I found myself reporting (mainly on the basis of Spanish news agency reports rather than first-hand) on football, gymnastics, horse-riding, cycling and boxing.
Humdrum it may have been, but it still required at least a smidgeon of journalistic and linguistic skill. Late one night, after filing yet another tedious football report, I received an unusually laconic message from head office. ‘Multitks yr soccer. Fyi opps reporting other team won.’ (Translation: ‘Many thanks for your football report. For your information, the other agencies
are reporting a different result.’) In the circumstances, I got off lightly: Reuters does not like having to issue corrections, and it is not easy to explain away the idiocy of a correspondent who gets a simple score line wrong.
I was on firmer ground when it came to covering the European Amateur Boxing Championships. Not because I knew anything about boxing – I had never seen a boxing match in my life – but because I was at the ringside with two other news agency reporters from Reuters’ two main rivals, Associated Press and United Press International. We sat side by side, each with our own phone, and soon realised that our lives would be much less complicated if we checked with each other before phoning in our reports, just to make sure that we all agreed.
Our bosses would certainly not have approved, and I suspect there will have been several boxers surprised to discover from the following day’s papers that they had felled their opponent with, say, a right hook, when they could have sworn it was a left jab. It was not what I had imagined when I had dreamt of being a foreign correspondent: 189 bouts over eight days, 200 words per fight, dictating a report about one fight while simultaneously making notes about the next one. Fleet Street’s finest boxing correspondents were there as well, of course, but they could afford to take a more relaxed attitude, knowing that the agencies would hold the fort.
‘Well done, chaps,’ they said, patting us on the head as they popped out to the bar. ‘Keep it up.’ I told myself it was all good experience.
My first boss in Madrid, John Organ, was a boisterous, charismatic man who spoke fluent Spanish at the top of his voice with a pronounced English accent. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him – on the phone, he would invariably begin any conversation with the single barked word ‘¡Oiga!’, roughly equivalent to ‘Hey!’ His habit of wearing a full-length opera cloak when the weather turned chilly guaranteed that he was noticed wherever he went. Our normal arrangement was that he worked more or less regular office hours, while the Number Two man and I would alternate between afternoon and evening shifts.
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