by Bruce Page
No protest by Rivett. Mrs Nan Rivett explained to me in several conversations in 1999 the advice Sir Stanley Murray gave her husband.
Changing editorial course. The News (Adelaide), 15 and 29 July 1960, Daily Mirror (Sydney), 29 July 1960. David Bowman (18 November 2002) said that Rivett’s successor Ron Boland instituted a practice of having Mirror editorials transmitted to Adelaide: the time-gap enabled him to ensure against the News getting out of line.
Meeting the Queen. Canberra Times, 3 May 2000.
Forgetting. Quoted by Olivier Todd, Albert Camus. At the end of 2002 the national memory was powerfully revived when Stuart’s story was turned into a movie, Black and White, by Craig Lahiff – one in a series of productions (including Rabbit Proof Fence) revisiting the oppression of black Australians. David Ngoombujarra played Stuart; Ben Mendelsohn, Rupert Murdoch; John Gregg, Rohan Rivett; Robert Carlyle, the defence lawyer David O’Sullivan). This also was the occasion for Professor Inglis’ new edition, with extensive material on Stuart’s after-life. Having become literate in jail and overcome (eventually) his drinking problems, Stuart now ranks as a stable and respected elder of the Arrernte community, able to point out in retirement that his life-history doesn’t resemble that of the violent paedophile, where recidivism is the usual case. Murdoch, in Adelaide for News Corporation’s AGM, produced a curious memory for an ABC radio show (The 7.30 Report, 30 October 2002). There had been pride at the News, he said, for circulation maintained, as Stuart ‘was not a popular cause’. And, with apparent seriousness: ‘I remember being tried for treason.’ David Bowman was astonished that anyone should remember a treason trial – many steps past even Tom Playford’s imagination – or assume Stuart’s cause necessarily unpopular. Circulation of the News rose consistently under Rivett. But Max Stuart, in the same programme, was understandably happy to overlook any oddities of memory: ‘If we hadn’t had Rupert Murdoch, I would have been down Adelaide jail now, been buried there in an unmarked grave.’
Boland obituary. The Australian, 28 April 2000. This baldly records his appointment to the News as consequent on his predecessor’s departure ‘in the wake of a judicial and criminal justice controversy which led to complex libel actions successfully defended by the company’. During his seventeen years as editor there seems to have been no journalistic achievement that needed recording (the swimsuit campaign predated WWII).
Television manoeuvres, Murdoch, Frank Packer and others. This is a compression of Munster’s superb analytical narrative in Paper Prince, which demonstrates that the prizes sought were essentially monopolies and quasimonopolies distributed by the state – though public-service obligations were to be minimal compared to those imposed on the state’s own monopoly (the ABC) and fairly simply avoided.
McEwen connection. Eric Walsh, still very much a presence in Australian politics, outlined this to me in January 1999. Peter Golding’s Black Jack McEwen:Political Gladiator is the essential overall source for this remarkable life, and discusses the ‘surrogate parent’ relationship with Murdoch. Both Walsh and Golding are supplemented from John Menadue’s memoir, Things You Learn Along the Way, amplified by discussion with Menadue himself. As a young reporter I heard political experts discussing McEwen’s combination of factional skill and pragmatism; some referred to him as ‘the man who had to screw his hat on’, which Walsh and Menadue consider harsh.
Corporatism has a rather modest literature, but Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society (1979) describes some of the characteristics from British experience. Ralph H. Bowen in German Theories of the Corporate State describes early manifestations in the first half of the last century.
Campaigning for McEwen. Eric Walsh has entertaining memories of attempts to promote the Country Party in the Daily Mirror, puzzling its Sydney workingclass clientele. Murdoch realised that he needed a paper which Canberra politicians would read.
The Australian – intentions and early difficulties. Again, Munster, Murdoch, gives the main story. John Pringle, editor of the rival Canberra Times, describes the other side of the hill in his memoir Have Pen Will Travel Accounts in interview from David Bowman and the late Adrian Deamer confirm the general picture of a newspaper in deep disarray.
Wrong date. Walsh tells this story with some relish.
Launch, defective news coverage and falling sales. Munster, Murdoch, gives the sales figures and expert critique of the Australian’s news coverage.
Maxwell Newton. The biographical note in the National Library of Australia outlines a remarkable career. Born in Perth in 1929 he was a brilliant student at the University of Western Australia, the Sorbonne and Cambridge (where he graduated with a first in Economics in 1953). He was an economist for the Commonwealth Treasury until 1960 when John Pringle hired him as a political correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1963 he launched the very successful Australian Financial Review for Fairfax. He was essentially a freelance after breaking with Murdoch, but in 1980 they were reconciled and he became a columnist for the New York Post. He died in Florida in 1990. His libertarian viewpoint implied that corporatism contained seeds of fascism. But he made himself ridiculous by asserting that Australia actually became fascist in the 1980s.
Catholic children, etc. Munster quotes this statement in Murdoch – never a decent comment on Australian Catholicism, but grossly out of touch in 1960s and the era of Vatican II.
Anti-semitism of the intellectuals. No exact citation of this has been found, but Professor Peter Viereck’s colleagues at Mt. Holyoake College are sure that he originated it.
Newton’s letter is quoted in Munster, Paper Prince. Pringle clearly enjoyed publishing it. ‘Leaving the field to us’ is from Have Pen Will Travel.
‘Disaster’. Menadue, who was general manager of the Australian, thought Murdoch was near to closing the paper in 1967.
Harold Holt and succession struggle. This episode, concluding with the Australian’s contribution to McEwen’s victory after the death of Holt, has been described often – notably by Munster. But the version here goes further in making clear the undercover role of the Australian intelligence services, disclosed by Alan Ramsey of the Sydney Morning Herald (23 September 2000). Menadue’s memoirs, Things You Ixarn Along the Way, and discussion with him and Adrian Deamer, added detail and corroboration; Alan Ramsey added more from his long personal knowledge of Canberra politics.
ASIO history and the ‘Scorpion’. Brian Toohey and William Pinwill recount some hair-raising episodes in Oyster.
ASIO documents. Ramsey in Sydney Morning Herald, as above. The circumstances in which Ramsey got them from the Australian National Archives are described below.
McMahon’s suspicions. Ramsey had many discussions at the time with McMahon, who often demanded late-night street meetings, and limited his telephone conversations.
Death of Holt. Kim Torney’s note in the Oxford Companion to Australian History, ed. Davison et al., records the currency of the Chinese submarine, but naturally treats it as fantasy.
McEwen’s manoeuvres. Ramsey reconstructed these from the Scorpion’s pedantic notes, which exactly accord with the public facts but of course add a dimension wholly invisible at the time.
‘Disclosure’ in the Australian. Munster describes this and hints at ASIO involvement – but had no proof at the time he wrote (1984). Menadue, Things You Learn Along the Way, describes the story as ‘a terrible beat-up’ (newsroom language for ‘wild exaggeration’) produced by Murdoch. Deamer thought it unprofessional rubbish, but had only just joined the paper and had no editorial authority.
Ramsey’s disclosure. Ramsay went to the archives to check files which he knew to exist – the police files relating to the notorious raids on Newton. The story ran during the Sydney Olympics – Australians usually take note of tales of political skulduggery but would ignore the Second Coming during a major sporting occasion.
News of the World. The mechanics of the Sunday popular market which it dominated were always well known in Old Fleet Stree
t, and are described with a certain relish in The News of the World Story by Cyril Bainbridge and Roy Stockdale, beginning with its nineteenth-century origins and extending to the early Murdoch period.
‘Hansard of the sleazy’. Reg Cudlipp, Hugh’s brother, one-time No W editor, quoted by Bainbridge and Stockdale.
News of the World takeover. Bainbridge and Stockdale, Shawcross (Murdoch) and Munster all give roughly similar accounts of divisions in the Carr family, unscrupulous attacks on the unscrupulous Maxwell and so on and other public facts of this notorious City duel. ‘Bumptious swindler’ is a personal judgment based on extensive contemporary investigations of Maxwell which I carried out with colleagues from the Sunday Times (1969 onwards). Tom Bower looked still further into the story in later years, and his Maxwell: TheOutsider is definitive.
Script by Catto. Dominic Hobson, in The Pride of Lucifer (1990), records the rising arrogance and subsequent fall of Morgan Grenfell, with interesting details on the No W affair (see below).
Defeat of Maxwell. Files of the Financial Times, December 1968 to January 1969, show almost daily coverage up to the decisive meeting, with criticism of the rival bidders’ behaviour and suggestions that the City authorities should have restrained them.
Out of Scotch. The details are given by Golding in Black Jack McEwen. Walsh recalls driving Murdoch to The Lodge (official Canberra residence of the Prime Minister) for a celebration drink with Gorton on the successful conclusion of the deal.
‘Jungle’. Hobson, Pride of Lucifer, cites the agreement of an unnamed Morgan director as an example of the bank’s contempt for the City’s contemporary regulators.
Bushwhacking Murdoch. Maxwell was an early case of a now notorious phenomenon in which auditors allow bogus transactions to transform the bottom line. ‘THE ANATOMY OF A PERGAMON PROFIT’ (Sunday Times, 1969) led to an official inquiry which judged Maxwell unfit to run a public company. He was allowed nonetheless to take over the London Daily Mirror, with disastrous consequences for newspaper competition.
Sober after lunch. Murdoch to the author in 1969, during interview for Maxwell investigations (see above).
Trade in prurience. Bainbridge and Stockwell, News of the World Story. Details of the defence deals with murderers show the London criminal bar in a very dubious light.
Backlash. Harry Evans, then editor of the Sunday Times, describes in Good Times, Bad Times inviting Rupert and Anna Murdoch to dinner and finding both of them resentful and puzzled by the chorus of denunciation.
Low work in high places. Murdoch gave the annual A. N. Smith Memorial Lecture in Journalism at Melbourne University on 15 November 1972. Smith, a founder of the Australian Journalists Association (1910), was an exponent of nonpartisan political analysis. On his death in 1935 the lecture was set up to give journalists (and sometimes politicians) an opportunity to discuss their work with intellectual rigour. Murdoch is in a list that includes John Pringle, Adrian Deamer, Laurie Oakes, Michelle Grattan, Bob Hawke, Mary Delahunty and Kim Beazley. His Profumo assertions may have been the lecture’s least distinguished moment.
London Weekend Television. Jeremy Potter’s official history, IndependentTelevision in Britain, vol. 3: Politics and Controls (1989), is the basic source.
‘I have given my word’, etc. Personal discussion with Dr Tom Margerison, 13 October 1999, reconfirmed subsequently.
Character assassination. Sir Brian Young, then head of the IBA, and David Glencross concede that Murdoch was under attack in the press but firmly deny that the IBA was responsible for the fact or influenced by it. Murdoch quite clearly was taking control, and nobody with such significant newspaper holdings could legally do so: issues of residence and character were never discussed. Anthony Pragnell, who wrote that LWT’s licence might be invalidated, was unable for health reasons to discuss the episode with me, but Glencross, present at the time, was clear on the sequence of events. Sir Brian Young (9 May 2001) said he did not believe there was any basis to Murdoch’s claim that Margerison was incompetent.
5: TRADING TABLOID PLACES Rise of the Sun. The indispensable history is Peter Chippindale and Chris Home’s Stick It Up Tour Punter, which reflects much personal experience. There are passages in which it comes close to falling for the ‘boys (and girls) will be boys’ defence, and/or for the ‘down with snobs’ defence, but mostly the authors are ruthlessly clear-eyed. Larry Lamb’s Sunrise covers the same early ground, but naturally with more self-congratulation. Roy Greenslade’s memoir of his part in the Sun’s first night (Guardian, 15 November 1999) explains clearly why the initial crew-members were on board.
Cudlipp’s champagne. The sad complacency of the Mirror’s top brass is a famous legend of Fleet Street. Mike Molloy and Tony Miles (both editors of the Mirror subsequently) described this in similar terms. My account of the Mirror’s decline was much helped by recollections from them and from Tony Delano.
Circulation figures. Unless otherwise stated, all these are drawn from the database of the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Records back to the 1930s have now been converted to electronic form, but are inevitably sketchy in the early periods, when major newspapers like the Daily Telegraph refused to take part. Now it is impossible to run a newspaper business without audited sales figures. Many imperfections remain, as the ABC staff readily admit, but at least the system is good enough to smooth out misleading short-term trends.
Tabloids. Northcliffe is supposed to have adapted the term from pharmaceutical marketing. David G. Krajicek’s concern in Scooped! Media Miss Real Storyof Crime while Chasing Sex, Sleaze and Celebrities is that of an experienced crime reporter anxious to show that popular journalism can and should be serious.
Spiked with invective. A representative comment is Anthony Lewis of the NewYork Times covering a British general election, and seeing journalism of ‘a kind now hardly known in the United States; grotesquely partisan, shamelessly advancing one party’s cause’ (International Herald Tribune, 3 April 1992).
Daily Herald . Francis (Lord) Williams, at one time its editor, gives most of its history in Dangerous Estate. I worked there in 1962 and found it depressing after a rather exhilarating period on Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard. There was no temptation to remain for IPC’s relaunch of it as the Sun – because this, while based on interesting sociology, included no provision for effective newsgathering, which I was trained to consider indispensable.
Devious Briginshaw. Chippindale and Home’s account in Stick It Up YourPunter is confirmed by Geoffrey Goodman, then industrial editor of the Mirror.
Early Sun, premises, content etc. Greenslade adds some detail to the Chippindale-Horrie picture. Jacqueline Susann’s remarkable work is still in print.
Murdoch the reformer. This comes from Menadue (Things You Learn Along theWay), a severe Murdoch critic, and sympathisers usually take the idea much further. The element of truth in the generalisation was corruption in industrial relations – an important one, but as shown by the cynical manoeuvre with Briginshaw (see above) one that Murdoch was then far from challenging.
Bartholomew, Gudlipp and the Mirror. Williams in Dangerous Estate describes Bartholomew’s career from personal acquaintance. Hugh Cudlipp in Walking on the Water adds some rather chilling personal insights. Mike Molloy pointed out the Mirror’s Little Rock coverage to me.
Mark Abrams. The work Dr Abrams did for IPC’s Sun launch was the basis for a large presentation at the Cafe Royal in 1963: this is well remembered by Geoffrey Goodman, Molloy and other Mirror veterans. The documents on which it was based do not appear to be among Abrams’ voluminous papers in Churchill College, Cambridge, but there is no doubt about the basic thrust, which was in tune with his general outlook, reflected in political works such as Must Labour Lose? (1960) written with Professor Richard Rose. Professor Harry Henry, a pioneer of newspaper marketing for Roy Thomson, recalls Abrams as a ‘visionary’. Masterman’s observation is in The Double-Cross System, a history of intelligence in WWII.
Mirrorscope and Larry Lamb.
Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, report this largely from Lamb’s view – as he does himself in Sunrise. Delano, Miles, Molloy and other Mirror veterans take a variety of views, but agree that for it to have succeeded much more time and determination would have been needed.
Recruitment. Godfrey Hodgson, after joining Times Newspapers in 1957, received a questionnaire asking him to list his school, college, regiment and clubs
– and state whether he had a private income. Nicholas (Nico) Colchester, of the Financial Times, died sadly young in 1996; his obituary said that he had felt ‘drawn’ to journalism after Oxford and ‘had an interview with Gordon Newton, the Financial Times editor who … asked him to sit outside his office and write an article on the current state of British Leyland. Colchester did the piece and got the job.’ Colchester had a distinguished career. But one should try to see how this kind of thing might look to a Larry Lamb – especially when put against John Douglas Pringle’s evidence in Chapter 3 about the very modest difficulty of such a task.
Tabloid ambitions. Greenslade on ‘wannabes’ in the Guardian, cited above; Anthony Delano in Slip-Up, on upward mobility.
Dick Dinsdale. Personal to the author, many times. But perhaps not his own coinage.
Cudlipp and his (one) reporter. A very characteristic remark according to Mike Molloy.
Son of Cassandra, etc. Chippindale and Horrie in Stick It Up Tour Punter, who bluntly describe the Sun as a wholly unoriginal ‘rip-off’ from the Mirror.
Michael Christiansen quoted by Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up TourPunter. He and all the other Mirror executives cited are open to the accusation of being bad losers. Nonetheless, it may be doubted whether editorial genius could have made itself effective in face of the commercial handicaps they describe. A truism of media history is that commercial and editorial creativity rarely appear separately from each other.