Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  Although it is true that this was the result that Astor, as the effective owner of the paper, always wanted, I would not have become editor if a substantial proportion of the journalists had been opposed. Having this degree of support from the paper’s journalists gave me an authority as editor that I would not have had if I had been simply appointed on Astor’s personal say-so. I was quoted in the press as saying that the protracted selection process, which lasted several weeks, was ‘gruelling but worthwhile’.

  I was particularly pleased to learn that I had the firm support of Terry Kilmartin, which must have influenced other journalists in my favour. Two of The Observer’s distinguished foreign correspondents, Gavin Young and Mark Frankland, called in at my office to say that they had supported Sampson out of loyalty to an old friend, but promised me their full support – a promise they both scrupulously honoured.

  I had first met Gavin in 1964 in Malawi, where he had been sent by The Observer to cover the civil war that broke out after independence. He was quite unlike most of the Fleet Street correspondents who turned out to cover the story. Tall, handsome, impeccably dressed in keeping with the style of a former Guards officer, he commandeered a large car, a driver and an interpreter and acted more like a High Commissioner than a hack. His father had been a colonel in the Welsh Guards and his mother was the daughter of a baronet.

  Many years later, I was having lunch at the Garrick Club when a man in owlish glasses, whom I knew to be Sir Maurice Oldfield, head of MI6, padded up to my table and whispered: ‘Any news of Gavin? We heard he was swept overboard in a storm off Celebes. If you get any news, you’ll know where to find me.’ Then he sidled off.

  I could only assume that by ‘we’ he meant the Secret Intelligence Service and that Gavin belonged to it, or was at least well enough known to it for ‘C’ to care about his whereabouts. By this stage in his career, when he was combining reporting with book-writing, Gavin had licence to roam pretty well anywhere he wanted. We wouldn’t hear from him for weeks and would then receive reams of wonderful copy from one of the remote corners of the world. So I wasn’t unduly worried about him.

  When I returned to the office, I asked the news desk secretaries if they had heard from him and, as it happened, they had just received a message (by Telex in those days) saying he had been shipwrecked but was OK. I duly passed on the message to what I had to assume was his other employer that ‘our’ man was apparently safe.

  CHAPTER 6

  ARNOLD

  When Lord Goodman summoned me to the Observer boardroom, his chubby hands were clasped in front of him on the table and he had put on his grave face, like a country solicitor preparing to read out a will that would bring disappointment to those with expectations. The news he brought me, however, was not in the least disappointing, though it carried a gloomy coda. He announced in his rotund way that the paper’s trustees had decided to offer me the editorship, the job for which I had yearned since my teenage years, and had been greatly encouraged in this decision by the support I had received from the paper’s journalists.

  ‘However,’ he went on,

  I must urge you to consider very carefully whether you should accept the offer. Speaking confidentially, I have to tell you that I cannot guarantee that The Observer will still be in existence in six months’ time. You are a young man [I was thirty-seven] and you should therefore take account of the effect this could have on your future career.

  I told him I would take my chances, though I had been shocked by his pessimism over the paper’s immediate prospects. At this time, Goodman and I hardly knew each other. In fact, Robert Chesshyre says that when he was told formally that I was to be appointed editor, Goodman had said: ‘It’s going to be a man called Treffle.’ Although we had met a few times at the dinners that followed trustee meetings, my name had clearly failed to register on the great man’s radar.

  Goodman had chaired an important board meeting about The Observer’s future which David had invited me to attend, even though I was still his deputy and not yet a director. My chief recollection is of Jakie Astor, David’s younger brother, saying: ‘If this was a racing stud, I know what I’d be doing now. I’d be drawing up a list of likely buyers on the back of an envelope and finding out who’s interested.’

  So, Goodman’s warning to me about the paper’s uncertain future had not come as a complete surprise, though I had been led to believe that the savings we had just achieved in the long and bitter cost-cutting exercise with the printers, said to be 25 per cent of the wage bill, had bought us some time.

  I asked Roger Harrison, who was taking over from Tristan Jones as the paper’s manager, whether the paper I was about to edit was in such troubled waters as Goodman had told me. He said the trustees were so hamstrung by intractable legal problems about using Astor family money to benefit The Observer – a problem which lawyers had been unable to resolve for over a year – that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if they sold The Observer to anyone prepared to take on its debts.

  My encounter with Goodman over the editorship was followed by another surprise when I met Tristan Jones, who said to me bluntly: ‘I suppose you will expect a salary. All I can say is that there is no budget for one. David hasn’t drawn a salary for twenty-seven years and in the current situation I don’t know where the money would come from.’

  I refused to be made to feel unreasonable for being paid a salary and replied: ‘Well, Tristan, you know I have a family to support and that, unlike David, I don’t have a private income. I suggest you just add an appropriate amount to my present salary and let me take it out of the editorial budget.’ As I had been handling the editorial budget myself, I didn’t see any problem with this and couldn’t understand why he had to make such a pantomime about it.

  It was probably Tristan’s last act as the paper’s manager, for David, with whom he had been friends since Oxford, insisted that he should quit the paper at the same time as himself. Tristan’s father, Tom Jones (both father and son were known as TJ), had been a senior civil servant, rising to Deputy Cabinet Secretary, who worked very closely with Lloyd George and had been described as ‘a man of a thousand secrets’ and ‘one of the six most important men in Europe’. He had been a regular visitor to Cliveden from the 1930s onwards and acted as a sort of consigliere to the Astor family.

  Kenneth Harris, a veteran Observer writer, told me that when Tom Jones was on his death bed in 1955, he had whispered to David: ‘Look after Tristan for me.’ Tristan had been a Communist and a bit of a wild card in his youth. David brought him onto The Observer in several jobs, finally appointing him general manager of The Observer, a role for which he was wholly unqualified, which always struck me as an over-generous way of honouring the death-bed promise he had made to Tristan’s father.

  But then David didn’t really understand the function of a newspaper management; he seemed to think they were like the retainers who ran a family estate, people you could trust with the money and to do what they were told. When Roy Thomson brought in a set of whizz-kid professional managers to beef up the marketing and classified advertisement departments of the Sunday Times, we were left looking like the amateurs we truly were.

  Charles Vidler, the man in charge of The Observer’s general office, responsible for the post, messenger services and general repairs and supplies, was a former footman at Cliveden who had been sacked after being found in Lord Astor’s bed with a maid who became his future wife. I once had a frivolous thought about a job swap between Vidler and Tristan Jones.

  The building occupied by the paper when I joined, across the road from Blackfriars station in Queen Victoria Street, had a staircase that you could see from the road. I happened to look up one day and saw Tristan going down the stairs just as Charles was going up. It suddenly occurred to me that if Charles went on up to the sixth floor and Tristan carried on down to the first, they could have done each other’s job at least as well, or as badly, as it was being done already – and TJ might have been a happier man.<
br />
  In the late 1960s, before The Observer had an NUJ chapel, it was part of my job to go to Tristan with a list of journalists who had been recommended by their head of department for a pay rise. There was no such thing in those days as a general increase based on the cost of living. I would hand over the list and wait while Tristan perused it with a sceptical look on his face and his glasses on the end of his nose.

  He would look down the list with a scowl, making comments on the individuals – ‘I’m not giving him a rise,’ for example, ‘he was quite rude to me in the lift the other day – he refused to answer when I wished him good morning.’ A female name got the response: ‘I don’t see why we should give her any more money; her husband must be loaded.’ And so on.

  On one of these occasions, the office central heating system had broken down and we all sat around in sweaters and overcoats – all except Tristan. He opened his shirt and showed me proudly that he was wearing a curved hot water bottle – a Victorian relic – that exactly fitted his protruding belly. He was an avid collector and used to spend Friday mornings, while the rest of us were putting a newspaper together, at Bermondsey Market.

  It wasn’t really surprising that the staff soon demanded a more formal method of representation in wage negotiations through the NUJ, though David was very concerned about what he called ‘the unionisation of journalists’. Neal Ascherson, who had just returned from covering Germany, where he had been reporting on the revolutionary activities of student leaders like Rudi Dutschke, persuaded me on an evening’s pub crawl – a rare event for him – that David had to allow more democracy in the office.

  Tristan once invited me to his splendid house in Kent, where he had an amazing collection of ancient royal coaches and every kind of historic political artefact. He had met his charming Polish wife while he was sitting on a tank and she was walking on the road with a column of homeless refugees. When Anthony Sampson asked me afterwards what I thought of Tristan’s home and collection, I replied in my pidgin French: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas journalism.’

  • • •

  A man of enormous girth and standing over six feet tall, Arnold Goodman had crinkly hair and extravagantly bushy eyebrows over a rumpled face that no one, not even his own doting mother, could honestly have described as attractive. He must have been well over twenty stone in weight.

  These gigantic physical attributes gave him an imposing, even threatening presence, which he doubtless used to good effect in handling industrial disputes, international negotiations and the many other official and unofficial tasks he undertook for two British Prime Ministers, sundry powerful clients and several members of the royal family.

  A man who had been on the receiving end of some clever Goodman manoeuvres in the property world once said to me: ‘That man uses his brain like a bludgeon.’ Judging by the times I saw Goodman in action, I would say there was some truth in that, though it fails to make allowance for the subtlety and humour he also brought to the table and which often swung the argument his way.

  I marvelled at the skill with which he could reconcile apparently warring points of view. Having listened to both sides of a question, he would work out exactly where the compromise solution could be found, and would then patiently push both parties in that direction. It was a great feat of intellect and imagination, seeing before anyone else in the room how an apparently intractable problem could be resolved.

  He was greatly assisted by his ability to make people laugh – a gift he had evidently developed at school to deflect bullies who set out to mock his size and unprepossessing appearance. Once, when The Observer was offered a fortuitous property deal that was to save the paper for several years, a director with much City experience argued that they could strike a better deal than the one Goodman was proposing.

  ‘Arnold,’ he said in some exasperation, ‘can we not just forget for a moment that this is a newspaper and discuss it as we would a normal property deal?’

  Goodman replied: ‘Very well, go ahead, let us imagine that my mother was a number eleven bus.’

  The resulting laughter – caused in part by the implicit joking reference to his size, prompting the thought that his mother might well have been as big as a London bus – closed off any further argument.

  For nearly two decades after 1975, I came to know Goodman fairly well (insofar as he allowed anyone to know him well), not just at Observer board meetings or through the labyrinthine moves and countermoves surrounding changes of ownership, but at relaxed dinners at his Portland Place apartment in London or at his college in Oxford, usually on Sunday evenings.

  Although I saw him regularly throughout the late 1970s and the early 1980s, it was only in the second half of the ’80s, when, with Thatcher in her prime, he had a less prominent role to play in public affairs, that we became close enough for him to reminisce openly about his great days. I think it was these conversations, in which he mostly talked and I mostly listened, that gave him the confidence to allow me to interview him later for a two-part television series on BBC Two.

  By then he had lost the patronage he enjoyed in Downing Street and no longer ran the Arts Council or the Housing Corporation; he had ceased to be Master of University College, Oxford, and his connections with the property world, the film industry, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Opera House had all gradually petered out. His work had been his whole life. Without it I sensed that he had become lonely and rather lost, since he had never had a family or private life, and therefore welcomed the company of old friends who would remind him of his days at the forefront of British public life.

  I couldn’t help reflecting on these occasions, as we relaxed as best we could among some charming paintings by Henry Moore and some rather disturbing ones by Francis Bacon (doubtless in lieu of payment by former clients), how very different things had been when ‘the Blessed Arnold’, as he was jokingly known, had been the country’s supreme ‘fixer’, the miracle-worker, its éminence grise, its Lord High Everything Else (to use a phrase from the journalist Frank Johnson).

  • • •

  Goodman became a close confidant of Harold Wilson during his first period as Prime Minister and was used as a reliable sounding board on a whole variety of issues, thereby incurring the jealousy of Marcia Williams, later Lady Falkender, who saw that as her own role. Goodman complained to me once that Harold kept him hanging around in Downing Street for so long that he often missed his dinner, giving the lie, at least on those nights, to Private Eye’s nickname for him: ‘Two Dinners Goodman’.

  He was so busy in his nominal role as a founding partner in the firm of solicitors, Goodman Derrick, and so easily sidetracked by other demands on his time, that he was notoriously late for all his appointments. His memoirs bore the appropriate title, Tell Them I’m On My Way.

  Every day would start with meetings in his Portland Place apartment. Goodman would emerge from his bedroom (already late after a hectic round of telephone calls in bed) in a bright-red dressing gown, looking like some grand court vizier, to find about a dozen well-known people – businessmen, solicitors, theatre owners and the like – seeking his advice, all sitting around like patients in a dentist’s waiting room.

  As the supplicants were ushered in one at a time, his housekeeper would serve him an enormous breakfast, which he was constantly prevented from eating by calls on the telephone he kept on a small table by his side. He would then be late for all his meetings for the rest of the day.

  On one occasion, when I went to see him as my chairman for advice on some pressing issue, I found him ill in his giant bed, lying fatly in his outsize pyjamas, with the ubiquitous telephone close to hand. We were interrupted by his housekeeper, who pointed to the wardrobe and made the rather startling announcement: ‘Mrs Fleming would like her black dress.’ Mrs Fleming, I assumed, was the divorced wife of the second Lord Rothermere and the widow of Ian Fleming. I was left wondering in what circumstances the dress had been taken off.

  I disco
vered later that Mrs Fleming often stayed over at Goodman’s flat after acting as his hostess for an evening of theatre and dinner. They were inseparable and he adored her, even though (perhaps because) she had a famously barbed tongue. She evidently indicated to him once that an amorous approach would not be unwelcome, but he courteously declined. His friends were surprised by the tears he openly shed when she died in 1981.

  Goodman’s sexual nature, like that of Edward Heath, was a subject of constant speculation. He had a succession of hostesses, most famously Clarissa Eden, widow of Sir Anthony, the Prime Minister brought down by the Suez adventure, and earlier Jennie Lee, widow of Aneurin Bevan, with whom (as chairman of the Arts Council while she was Arts Minister) he helped to create the Open University.

  Others included Hilde Himmelweit, a distinguished social psychologist from the LSE who had published important research on the impact of television on children. The one I knew best was Gael Elton Mayo, whom I first met at Goodman’s flat in 1986. Through her late third husband, she was the Comtesse de Chamberet, and, like Goodman’s other hostesses, she was a strong, intelligent and attractive woman. She was also multi-talented: in turns a model, a novelist, a painter, songwriter and a photographer who had worked at Magnum in Paris.

  Having been born in Australia as the daughter of an American professor, Gael was a genuinely cosmopolitan figure who had lived an adventurous life in Paris, New York, London and Beirut, and had had one Russian husband and two French. She had escaped the invading Nazis on a French train to the border while pregnant at the age of seventeen. She had an invincible beauty that survived a long and ultimately losing battle against facial cancer, which she described defiantly in a book, Battling with Beelzebub. Goodman said of her: ‘She had no hates and many loves.’