The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  The production problems had become so acute that Douglas-Home told his management colleagues he was frankly amazed the paper’s circulation was going up and that the biggest problem was ‘getting the paper out at all’.54 Moving to computer-set composition certainly brought change to the print hall. The hot-metal process had involved printing from metal chases. It was now replaced by a more complicated system. Computer printouts of text were cut and pasted into place on a page-make-up board in the composing room. The pasted-up pages were photographed onto a sensitized polymer that was used to create a plastic mould. This was baked into a curved shape for casting the metal plates that were clamped onto the print rolls. By 1984, engineers in the print hall were ready to run plastic plates from the rollers. NGA members, however, refused and thus the plastic plates had to be cast back into metal for fixing onto the machines the NGA members operated. If The Times wanted to expand the print run, it had not only to sort out the technical problems but also to get its printers to work more productively. In 1983 the unions had finally agreed to print 420,000 copies per night. This total was usually reached well within time and sometimes within two hours of the end of the printers’ night shift. But when management asked the unions to keep printing additional copies until their allotted shift was up (rather than merely going home early) the unions demanded more money. The boost Portfolio gave to circulation thus proved expensive, not only in terms of promotion and prize money but also in forcing up the cost of printing an additional half a million copies each night. Ultimately, it encouraged the search for an expanded and less expensive means of printing a bigger and supposedly better paper. This was the road that led inexorably to Fortress Wapping.

  IV

  Charles Douglas-Home was an editor in a hurry. In the year before he took the chair, he had been afflicted by increasingly severe back pains. At first, it was thought he had slipped a disc but within a year of taking the chair he was diagnosed terminally ill with bone cancer. For as long as it was possible to conceal it, he did not share the news with colleagues. It was not in his make-up to desert his post just because he was in his mid-forties. In 1985, The Times would celebrate its bicentenary and he wanted to be there to see it.

  The editor was not without support. He had a close and loving family life. He was fortified by a strong Christian faith. Certainly, he was bolstered by capable senior colleagues and, as his health began visibly to degenerate, it was they who carried much of the burden of ensuring business as normal at Gray’s Inn Road. The editor and, indeed, The Times, were fortunate to have two deputy editors, both appointed in 1982, of considerable ability.

  Douglas-Home had learned an important lesson from his service in the Army: that an effective leader needed the close support of those who had experience of commanding in the field (in journalistic terms, those who had made the most of rising through the provincial presses to Fleet Street). The command structure he established around him reflected that belief. When, in the summer of 1982, John Grant announced his intention to retire, the time had come to appoint a new deputy. Fred Emery, the home and foreign executive editor, was obviously qualified in terms of ability but not necessarily of temperament. Despite his regard for Douglas-Home, Emery was not a natural deputy and disliked interference in what he believed to be his own domain. This occasionally manifested itself in the dispatch of somewhat angry and insulting memos to Douglas-Home on the subject.55 Instead, Douglas-Home decided to look from outside Gray’s Inn Road. He chose Colin Webb. By nature calm and even-tempered in a crisis, Webb was someone the editor could trust implicitly. Given the divided and half-mutinous staff Douglas-Home inherited in March 1982, this was important. Two years Douglas-Home’s junior, the grammar school-educated Webb had started his journalistic career in his native Portsmouth before working his passage to Fleet Street via a short-service commission as a captain in the Royal Army Pay Corps. Douglas-Home had got to know him in 1969 when Webb ran The Times’s home news desk. In 1974 he had left to become editor of the Cambridge Evening News and it was from there that Douglas-Home enticed him back with the deputy editorship. Webb was perfect for the role and proved to have sound instincts matched by a steady hand. He saw his primary role as one of ‘boundary maintenance’, forming a protective ring round the editor.56 Nonetheless, when Douglas-Home was away from Gray’s Inn Road it was Webb who edited the paper.

  Colin Webb’s temperament was very different from that of Charles Wilson. Glimpsing Charles Wilson at work, the casual observer would not have been surprised to discover he was a major force in Fleet Street but it would certainly have come as a revelation to learn he was to be appointed the third most important journalist at The Times. In conversation, he had a deft command of expletives and an imaginative turn of phrase when deploying them. A strong Glaswegian accent gave his abuse an edge of menace that might have been absent if the same invective had been delivered in Liverpudlian, Cockney or Australian tones. Indeed, slight of frame but alert and intense in demeanour, there was much of the bantam-weight boxer about him. During the course of his journalistic career, many a desk, door or even, on one occasion, wall, would feel the full force of his punch as Wilson worked off his anger and frustration. Private Eye dubbed him ‘Charlie Gorbals’. It was a name that stuck, sometimes with affection.

  Chance played its part in Charles Wilson’s appointment. Shortly after becoming editor, Douglas-Home had gone up to speak at an annual lunch of Scottish editors. Seated next to him on the top table was Wilson, the start-up editor of a new (and short-lived) Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Standard. The following day, Douglas-Home asked him to become executive editor of The Times. Given that Douglas-Home’s acquaintance with Wilson rested on little more than an agreeable lunch, it was certainly an appointment based primarily upon instinct. As executive editor (soon translated into a second deputy editorship alongside Webb), Wilson was closely involved in selecting what went in the news pages. It involved getting up early in the morning, organizing the news desk, overseeing developments in the afternoon while Douglas-Home was cocooned in his office writing leading articles and spending the evening on the ‘backbench’, overseeing the pages being put together. It was a long day and a tough job. Douglas-Home was right to trust his instinct about Wilson’s suitability for it.

  Unlike Douglas-Home, Wilson’s school of hard knocks had not been Eton and the Royal Scots Greys. His father, a supporter of the Independent Labour Party, had been a miner since the age of twelve but an injury in the 1930s forced him to leave the pits and to seek employment in a steelworks. After his first wife died, he married his late brother’s widow. Charles Martin Wilson – or Charlie as he was better known – was born in 1935, two years before Charles – or Charlie – Cospatrick Douglas-Home. His parents had moved from their Glasgow tenement to a two-bedroom home in a council housing estate. Despite its poverty and industrial heart, Glasgow benefited from several good schools and Charlie did well at the local one, Eastbank Academy. All seemed set for a place at Glasgow University. Instead, everything changed one evening when, after a blazing row with his father, his mother walked out taking Charlie (in his last year at school) and his two brothers with her on the night train to London.

  Although there was no journalistic background in the Daily Express-reading Wilson family, Charlie had read the papers on his schoolboy paper round, consummating a love affair with the press that never left him. With the prospect of proceeding directly to university removed, he lost no time in getting employment with the press down in London, becoming a copyboy at the People. On reaching his eighteenth birthday, he did two years National Service in the Royal Marines where he won prizes for boxing. As soon as he was out, he got back into the press, switching to regional journalism, starting with the Melton Mowbray Times before moving to the News Chronicle as its West Country staffer. Bastion of liberal journalism, the News Chronicle was in its final year of publication and, when it was forced into a seemingly unlikely merger with the Daily Mail (in effect being subsumed by the right-wing paper
), Wilson crossed over with it, becoming the Mail’s East Anglia staffer. From there, his career took off. He moved to London to become a reporter on the Mail’s news desk. By 1961, he was deputy editor during the paper’s conversion from broadsheet to tabloid and thereafter switched to another horse in the Rothermere stable, the London Evening News. The chance to sit in an editor’s chair took him back home to Glasgow when, in 1976, he became editor of the city’s Evening Times. From the Evening Times, Wilson became editor of Outrams’s other leading newspaper, the Glasgow Herald, and designed and launched the group’s venture into weekend journalism, the Sunday Standard. Douglas-Home knew he was bringing back down to London a man who understood how newspapers worked.

  Despite their different social backgrounds, Douglas-Home and Wilson got on well. The latter saw past the aristocratic pedigree of the editor, admiring instead ‘an instinctive news man’ who, prior to The Times, had honed his skills in the hard-working, hard-drinking environment of the Daily Express (initially in its Glasgow office before escaping to Fleet Street) in the early 1960s. Douglas-Home’s informality and disinterest in ceremony appealed to Wilson. There was nothing ‘effete’ about the editor, Wilson concluded years later. He was ‘a tough guy’ who was not afraid to be ruthless in cutting away dead wood and taking the responsibility of wielding the axe to do it.57

  The editorial triumvirate of Douglas-Home, Webb and Wilson saw the paper through a period that started with its very future in question and ended with its circulation doubled and its financial prospects more rosy than they had been for a quarter of a century. There was not a single university degree between these three most senior journalists at Britain’s most venerable newspaper, but there were plenty of formal academic credentials among the other key lieutenants. The well-read Peter Stothard assumed responsibility for Op-Ed and leaders with George Brock as his deputy. Oxbridge degrees abounded among those who appeared on these pages. Arts coverage continued to be under the intelligent gaze of the opera specialist, John Higgins. Peter Strafford succeeded the long-serving Colin Watson as obituaries editor and Leon Pilpel continued to organize the letters page.

  There was a question mark over the future of The Times Diary column. Its home had long been across the bottom of the Op-Ed page. In June 1982, the page’s editor, Peter Stothard, wanted to make room for more columnists. Henceforth, ads would no longer be permitted there and Stothard felt the Diary could be safely banished too. Yet no one could agree where, if not on the Op-Ed page, the column should appear. It certainly did not look like a worthy squatter on a serious news page and The Times in 1982 did not think it had a soft news page.58 However, the plot to shunt the Diary into obscurity was very effectively spiked by its editor, Robin Young, who alerted readers to the threat of it being moved to a less august berth. The appeal reaped the desired effect – three hundred letters demanding that it stay put.59 So it remained on the Op-Ed page, albeit recast as a vertical single column on the left edge, rather than languidly occupying the bottom third, ‘the basement’, of the page horizontally.

  Compiling the Diary was always a delicate task. Adopting a reverential line reduced it to a notice board for anyone with a new book, play or exhibition to promote. Yet, in the early to mid-1980s, The Times retained a sufficiently high impression of itself to eschew following other newspapers’ interest in the doings, preferably salacious, of popular celebrities. This was not just for fear of the laws of libel but on grounds of taste and what was felt appropriate for the supposed paper of record. ‘The Diary has got to keep off smut,’ pronounced Douglas-Home over a piece by Young that referred to the composer Percy Grainger’s inventive sex life.60 The Diary’s compiler (though in fact there was a small team engaged on it) remained anonymous. Only the initials ‘PHS’ (which stood for Printing House Square – The Times’s traditional address) were proffered at its foot. Under this guise, Angela Gordon, a twenty-six-year-old Scot who had started out on the Edinburgh Evening News before moving to the Telegraph, assumed the editorial mantle in 1984. Nonetheless, some continued to wonder what purpose it served, or, as Lord Dacre put it to Douglas-Home, ‘Don’t you think that the action of your gossip-writer in soliciting, paying for, and publishing juvenile indiscretions, dirt, trivialities, about the great is rather lowering to your great newspaper?’61

  One aspect of the Diary that was widely admired was its daily pocket cartoon. Mark Boxer (who traded under the name ‘Marc’) had been the master of this art there since 1969. Having been the first editor of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, Marc’s work drew primarily upon the metropolitan life of which he was himself a rich adornment. His friends included George Melley and Simon Raven and, as an undergraduate in 1953, he had achieved the distinction of being sent down from Cambridge for blasphemy – the first such case since Shelley at Oxford – for a lighthearted but irreverent poem in Granta. Inheriting the tradition of Osbert Lancaster, Marc’s usual format for a thumbnail cartoon involved a sketch of an upper middle-class couple confidently sharing a blasé opinion. He chronicled what became known as the ‘chattering classes’. Sometimes they would be a covert coat- and headscarf- and pearls-wearing couple rasping a reactionary sentiment, although often they were smug Hampstead liberals declaiming the latest fashionable nostrum. Almost invariably, they were apiece with the titbits from the literary and theatrical world that provided the Diary column with so much of its copy. By 1983, Marc had been providing cartoons for the paper for fourteen years and, feeling constrained, moved on, assuming the editorship of Tatler and taking his miniature world with him first to the Guardian and subsequently the Telegraph. He was only fifty-seven when, in 1988, he died of a brain tumour.

  Barry Fantoni filled Marc’s gap with cartoons for the Diary column. Fantoni’s angular, harder-edged figures often conversing either side of the headline on a newsstand, represented a wider social and regional milieu than Marc could carry off convincingly although, perhaps in consequence, there was not a comparable level of penetrating satire. Meanwhile, there was also a change with The Times’s principal cartoonist when Ranan Lurie opted to part company on ‘fair and pleasant terms’.62 His skills as a draughtsman had never been in doubt but he had not lived in Britain for long enough to have a feel for its politics, society or humour and critics felt that this was evident in work that often failed to convey the subtle nuances of the national life. His replacement as chief cartoonist proved to be one of the paper’s enduring assets, Peter Brookes.

  On the front page, the thumb cartoonist between 1979 and his untimely death aged sixty-two in 1994 was Mel Calman. His drawing style could not have been more different from that of Peter Brookes. Calman’s figures – composed of a few curved lines and a large nose – lacked individual characteristics and thereby represented ‘everyman’. Given how small the box was in which his idea had to be conveyed, the sense of the little man, anxious and perplexed by the weight of the world around him, worked perfectly. Born in Hackney, the son of Russian-Jewish parents, there was a touch of the underdog in Calman’s own character. Despite his great gifts for friendship and generosity, he was defensive about having become a cartoonist after failing to get into Cambridge or be accepted for a journalism course. Ironically, his art got more closely to the helpless anxieties of the age than even some of the most perceptive reporters despite the fact that, as one posthumous tribute put it, he ‘hated leaving the West End unless it were for New York’. His arrival in The Times office every early evening was one of the great rituals through which those who worked there marked the approach of their own deadlines. Calman’s appearance on the floor was strangely magisterial, the act of removing his overcoat acquiring the symbolic resonance of the boxer slipping out of his dressing gown. He would go through the motions of consulting the backbench about what was in the news and what would make appropriate subject matter before getting down to work. Moments later, the backbench would watch in awe as he re-emerged, overcoat over arm, to bid his toiling colleagues adieu for the evening. Was it really as effortless as he
made out? That, at any rate, was the impression he liked to give, at least until on a royal visit to the building, the Duke of Edinburgh took one look at his handiwork and asked, ‘Did you draw these on the bus coming in, then?’63

  Feature articles, a fast developing area of broadsheet journalism that by The Times of the year 2000 merited a whole daily section, received only a single page a day in the paper of the 1980s under the title ‘Spectrum’. However (except on Thursdays when book reviews occupied the available space) there was also an additional page devoted to features designed to be of particular interest to women. These were unimaginatively entitled the Monday, Wednesday and Friday pages, while on Tuesdays Suzy Menkes’s fashion page appeared. Besides the lead story, there was a diary column, graced by the likes of Joanna Lumley, Penny Perrick and Alan Franks and recipes on Wednesdays and Saturdays by The Times cook, Shona Crawford Poole, as well as regular medical briefings.

  In some respects, The Times’s greatest shortcoming was not – as was regularly claimed – its generally male-orientated outlook (beyond the designated page for women) but its failure to expand a section that particularly appealed to more masculine pastimes. The paper was at its weakest in its sporting coverage. The Times had no shortage of quality sports’ journalists but the failure to give them the room they needed ensured that in the twenty years before Murdoch bought the paper it competed seriously against its rivals only in its coverage of racing and cricket with rugby union and golf as runners-up.