The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Norman Fox, who had been reporting football for The Times since the propitious year of 1966, became sports editor in 1982. He was subsequently assisted by a deputy, Richard Williams, who succeeded in balancing his tasks on the sports desk with maintaining an interest in the arts features. Indeed, Douglas-Home – whose principal sporting interests were sailing and riding – considered Williams and Peter Stothard the two most promising journalists on the paper.64 There were, however, other emerging talents. Upon assuming command, Fox began making a number of first-class appointments that would be critical to the paper’s back pages in the years ahead. David Hands became the rugby correspondent in 1983, a post for which he was so suited that he was still in it twenty years later. Fox also appointed David Miller as the paper’s first all purpose chief sport’s writer. This was an important moment for The Times, heralding a new era in which sports journalism evolved beyond the core skills of filing match reports and related news events. Henceforth, it would, like philosophy or politics, deserve magisterial interpreters. In December 1982, another Fox appointment, Simon Barnes, began working for the paper and would soon demonstrate that he was a master of this art.

  A Bristol University graduate whose father had been the producer of Blue Peter and head of children’s programmes at the BBC, there was something agreeably accidental about Barnes’s path into the highest echelons of sports journalism. He had begun as a news reporter on local newspapers and so hated the bullying attitude of his editor that he had determined to apply for the next vacancy that presented itself. This transpired to be on the sports desk. Nonetheless, he was still in his thirties and living in a London bedsit when he finally got his foot inside The Times’s door. Norman Fox recognized his talents and suggested he write a weekly column on obscure sports. Thus, Barnes turned his attention to such exhibitions of sporting prowess as bicycle polo and boules. It was soon evident that sport, especially at the epic scale, with its polarity of emotions, provided ideal material for his craft as a writer. While politicians and businessmen sought to dissemble and cover themselves up from the critical glare, Barnes liked the way in which sporting figures stood ’emotionally stark naked’.65 The glory and cruelty were inescapable parts of the spectacle. Barnes’s ability to file copy at short notice was widely admired but he had a lyrical and reflective quality that marked him out from the professional space fillers. He edited an anthology entitled A La Recherche du Cricket Perdu and was an avid birdwatcher (indeed, a love of Proust and ornithology was something he shared with the paper’s nature notes writer, Derwent May). As a spectator of birds as well as of sporting prowess, Barnes wrote books on ornithology that were as acclaimed as his award-winning writing on sport. Crouching in the bushes was not his only means of observing nature. He was drawn to country life and long hours were to be enjoyed surveying the countryside from the saddle of one of his horses.

  Indeed, judged by space made available in The Times, racing was, by a considerable margin, the most important sport in Britain. The paper was fortunate to have Michael Phillips as its racing correspondent from 1967 and he continued to write on the sport of kings as ‘Mandarin’ from March 1984 until his retirement in January 1993. Filing copy most days of the week, he was one of The Times’s most prolific journalists.

  Filing beside Phillips, first as northern correspondent and thereafter as racing correspondent until his (semi) retirement in 1991 was Michael Seely. Seely was the sort of journalist whose life and work became the stuff of Fleet Street legend. He was the son of an eccentric Nottinghamshire squire who had ridden in the Grand National and enjoyed a ménage à trois with his wife and a mistress (who was thirty-five years his junior) at Ramsdale Hall in Nottinghamshire. Michael Seely’s early career had been marked by a distinct lack of promise. He had gone from Eton into the Grenadier Guards in 1944 and spent much of the succeeding years woozy through drink. His father disinherited him in 1952 for marrying a ‘hostess’ he had met in the West End’s notorious Bag of Nails nightclub. A second marriage proved more successful and Seely cut back on his alcoholic consumption. Yet, he might have continued as a clerk at the Raleigh bicycle factory had he not got a lucky break to work on the official weekly form book, Raceform. There, his talent was spotted and in his fiftieth year he got his first newspaper posting when he joined The Times in 1975. The role of racing correspondent, with its travelling between racecourses and almost daily deadlines, was not naturally suited to a man of Michael Seely’s disorganization and general inability to master even the simplest technology – he continued to file in an almost illegible longhand until the 1990s – but, no matter how fine he cut the deadline, the copy was invariably of the highest standard. Having shared with Michael Phillips the Lord Derby Racing Journalist of the Year Award in 1980 he won it outright in 1989.

  Around the racecourses, Seely cut an eccentric but much-loved figure. He continued to enjoy a reputation as a bon viveur and roué while almost constantly mislaying his false teeth. On one occasion he watched helplessly while his dentures were driven over in the Newmarket car park. Upon disinterring the remains, he nonchalantly gave them a light polish and placed them back in his mouth, subsequently alleging that they were now a far better fit. Besides his prose and racing knowledge, his journalistic talent was honed by his charm and friendliness, attributes that ensured he knew what was going on. To mark his retirement in 1991, Simon Jenkins (by then editor of The Times) hosted a party for him in the Jockey Rooms at Newmarket to which most of the leading figures in the sport turned up. Charlie Wilson took Jenkins on a tour of the Jockey Rooms’ collection of equestrian art, stopping by one painting to helpfully point out which end was the head and which the tail. Seely’s successor was Richard Evans. Evans had been on the racing desk for a year, having previously spent three years as media editor and, before that, eight years on the parliamentary and political staff.

  Besides golf, which was reported on by John Hennessy, cricket was the other sport in which the paper had a rightly acclaimed reputation. Marcus Williams covered the county game between 1981 and 1995. The Test matches were the preserve of John Woodcock, cricket correspondent from 1954 to 1987 (although he was still writing periodically for the paper into the twenty-first century) who combined the post after 1980 with the editorship of Wisden. During this period, one series outshone all others for its mixture of drama and unpredictability: the 1981 Ashes. Ian Botham stepped down after claiming the England captaincy’s worst ever record. No sooner had he done so than he transformed himself into a hero of mythic status. England, having not won any of their past twelve Tests, were following on and struggling at 135 for 7 when he stepped out to bat in the Third Test at Headingley. The canny bookmakers Ladbrokes were offering odds of 500–1 on an England victory. Undaunted, Botham batted England back into the game, although when he finally ran out of support at the opposite crease, the 130-run target set Australia was easily obtainable. When they responded, reaching fifty-five for one, the tourists appeared to be sailing to victory. Then Bob Willis struck with the ball, taking eight wickets for forty-three runs, leaving the stunned Australians eighteen runs short of taking a commanding lead in the series. It was only the second time in Test history that a side asked to follow on had proceeded to win the match (it had last happened in 1894). Yet, the epic was not over, for Botham emerged as Man of the Match in the following Test at Edgbaston when he took Australia’s last five wickets for one run. It was a moment of sporting glory. Having scarcely recovered from recording the miracle of Headingley, John Woodcock was again given the honour of starting his report of this latest triumph on the front page under a picture of Botham and his successor as captain, Mike Brearley, with arms raised in ecstasy, an image trapped for eternity. ‘At times,’ Woodcock informed, ‘the crowd of 15,000 cheered the home side on as though it was a horse race.’ The rarity of such placement in The Times’s order of priorities was demonstrated when England retained the Ashes two weeks later at Old Trafford. The front page ran with a picture of Senator Edward Kennedy swinging a
softball bat during a festival for the disabled in Boston.66

  The year 1981 was an exceptionally memorable one for sport in Britain. Besides Botham and Willis’s heroics in the Ashes, in athletics Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett fought it out for the 1500 metres world record and John McEnroe earned his ‘superbrat’ soubriquet at Wimbledon. In The Times, the Wimbledon fortnight was the busy two-week period each year in which Rex Bellamy, the esteemed tennis correspondent between 1967 and 1992, more than proved his worth and left himself with plenty of time to go fellwalking during the remaining fifty weeks of the year. Nonetheless, despite Bellamy’s considerable experience, the paper usually thought the championships merited only half a page’s coverage a day. It took John McEnroe’s famous racket-breaking tantrum during his first-round victory over Tom Gullikson to ensure another rare sporting picture foray onto the front page. The accompanying text alerted readers that McEnroe had ‘called the referee a four-letter name’. Inquisitive readers turning to the skimpy report of the match on page ten were doubtless relieved to discover ‘it was not a very serious one’. This was the match – although the Times report did not have room to record it – in which McEnroe had famously told the umpire, Edward James, ‘You guys are the absolute pits of the world.’ Unfortunately, James had misheard the taunt and, believing he had been accused of being ‘the piss of the world’, duly penalized McEnroe for obscenity.67

  The Times’s interest in on-court antics at the All England Club appeared positively indulgent compared with its breathtakingly inadequate coverage of the 1982 Football World Cup in Spain. Not even the fact that England and the holders, Argentina, were both competing while the Falklands War was still being waged between them was sufficient to give it a higher priority. Each day, the championships struggled to receive much more than half a page. England had not been in the World Cup since it had been hosted in Mexico, twelve years earlier. Nonetheless, their fixtures received only one report each – from the necessarily hard-working and self-dependent Stuart Jones, The Times’s football correspondent. There was no room for analysis for a team that commenced the competition with a 3–1 victory over France. Readers had to take it on trust that the performance had been ‘inspired’.68 Yet, on the same day, racing coverage received a full page – Royal Ascot being regarded as a bigger sporting event than the World Cup. This was not the behaviour of a newspaper that was serious about broadening its appeal. When, eventually, England was knocked out, The Times did condescend to mention the fact, in passing, on the front page, but it was not deemed worthy of a photograph. The paper led that day instead with a picture of Sir Peter Parker standing talking to a fellow British Rail board member in a deserted strikebound foyer of Euston Station. Italy’s defeat of West Germany in the World Cup final received an even smaller front-page reference, although it did benefit from an accompanying photograph a little larger than a postage stamp.69

  In the 1930s, the football game that The Times – and its readers – was primarily interested in was played with the oval-shaped ball. Nonetheless, given the constraints of the age, it did provide passable association football coverage, especially for those still following the amateur side of the game, where teams, many prefixed by the world ‘old’, vied for manly satisfaction in The Isthmian League, The Spartan League and The Arthur Dunn Cup. By the 1980s, though, the paper’s coverage of league football had moved on sufficiently to have lost contact with its amateur proponents but had not greatly expanded its professional reportage. Stuart Jones was the only staff employee covering the game although he was assisted in reporting the weekend fixtures by various freelancers and by the subeditors who – with no paper to work on for Sunday – spent their Saturdays reporting from the various football grounds. Generally, Monday’s Times would devote two-thirds of a page to the weekend’s action. Necessarily, clubs outside the First Division (which was then the top division) struggled to make an impact beyond the football results. Readers living in the North were lucky if they even received this courtesy. Unlike its principal rivals, The Times did not print in Manchester as well as London. This frequently ensured patchy sports coverage particularly of football results appearing in the northern editions. The chances of anyone in Scotland reading a report on Celtic or Rangers, Hibs or Hearts, was even more remote. It may well have been one of the reasons few people north of the border bought The Times.

  As the decade wore on, so the paper made gradual attempts to enhance its football coverage. Regrettably, the sport tended to make its greatest impact in the paper for the worst of reasons. 1985 proved to be a terrible year for English football. On 11 May, fifty-six spectators were killed in a fire at Bradford City. A fortnight later, seventy England fans were arrested after going on the rampage in Helsinki and on 29 May, a riot begun by Liverpool fans at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels prior to the European Cup final caused the death of thirty-eight Juventus fans and injured one hundred and fifty more. Two days later, the Football Association prohibited English clubs from competing in Europe, a ban that FIFA extended to cover the rest of the world. The country that had invented the sport was now in quarantine, its competitors rightly keen to be inoculated against the ‘British disease’ of hooliganism.

  V

  Edition number 62,025 of The Times appeared on 2 January 1985, two hundred years and one day after the paper’s first edition. For those who had worked on the paper – to say nothing of loyal readers who had stuck with it over many years through thick and thin – it was a justifiable cause for celebration. With circulation at an all-time record, a much-admired editor in the chair and some of the most famous names in journalism on the payroll, it was hard to conceive that only five years earlier the paper had been widely feared to have only ten weeks left to live.

  There was, perhaps, some irony that it had been saved by Rupert Murdoch, a proprietor accused of having an unsentimental approach to the survival of British institutions. Yet, he proved as animated by the bicentenary celebrations for Britain’s oldest and most famous national newspaper as everyone else. Indeed, he and his wife, Anna, even hosted a dinner for the descendants of John Walter, the man who invented the paper and whose family had owned it outright until 1908. With the miners’ strike continuing to dominate the front page, it was only a small left-hand column that alerted readers to the fact that this was the paper’s bicentennial issue. Inside, however, the commemoration began with the enclosure of a free facsimile of the first edition of 1 January 1785: a four-page newspaper given over largely to small ads and self-promotion in which only four of the sixteen columns of text contained actual news. There was certainly nothing particularly portentous about that first edition, a fact that might explain why only one copy had survived the intervening two hundred years to tell the tale. Before entering the care of the British Library, it had been kept by the father of the late eighteenth-century novelist Fanny Burney.

  The Times certainly made more of its bicentenary than it had in 1885 when it celebrated one hundred years with nothing more than a single self-effacing paragraph. In 1985, a colour commemorative magazine and wall-chart poster were published together with two books: a large coffee-table tome focusing on the highs (and a few lows) in the paper’s history entitled We Thundered Out by Philip Howard and Double Century: 200 Years of Cricket in The Times edited by Marcus Williams. The latter was formally launched at the bicentennial cricket match at the historic Hambledon ground in Hampshire in June where a Times XI declared on 128 for 3 (helped by an undefeated fifty from guest batsman, Mike Brearley). Their opponents from the publishers Collins (assisted by Bob Willis) had made sixty-six for two when rain stopped play. John Arlott had presided over lunch and in the evening 450 Times staff were entertained at a dinner in the Victoria & Albert Museum as Douglas-Home’s guests.

  The involvement of other bodies in the celebration was the real testament to the paper’s enduring place in national life, not least because it showed it was still a marketable asset. The Post Office brought out a celebratory first-day cover of stamps. Wedgwood
designed a plate reproducing Benjamin Haydon’s painting Waiting for The Times. At the Chelsea Flower Show, Anna Murdoch officially named The Times rose (a hardy perennial floribunda with deep crimson-scarlet blooms that had been selected by the paper’s gardening correspondent, Ashley Stephenson). It was subsequently made available in a reader offer. Likewise, Bollinger brought out a Times cuvée. Douglas-Home named a British Rail locomotive (class 86) The Times amid great fanfare (the train later crashed, to more muted reporting). On 31 January, the bicentennial concert was performed at the Festival Hall, Sir George Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a programme of Shostakovich and Bruckner. The British Library’s ‘Signs of The Times 1785–1985’ exhibition ran from March to June. This was a level of public recognition accorded few other national institutions and no other newspaper.

  There were two television documentaries to mark the bicentenary. Hugo Young presented the BBC’s The Times at 200, the Corporation reversing its earlier disinterest in such a programme when it learned Thames TV had been given six months’ access to film in Gray’s Inn Road for a commemorative documentary they were making. The latter, narrated by Anthony Quayle with the title The Greatest Newspaper in the World! (with a tabloid exclamation rather than a broadsheet question mark), was broadcast on 2 January 1985, three days after Hugo Young’s more agnostic approach to the birthday institution.

  The Thames documentary took as its starting point the view of Establishment critics of their supposed house journal: Edward Heath claimed, ‘It doesn’t thunder any more, occasionally screams. Today’s Times has very little influence’; Dr Anthony Kenny, the Master of Balliol, noted that it was no longer a journal of record; Lord Mancroft drew attention to the poor picture reproduction and misprints; the Bishop of Peterborough thought it was becoming trivial, like the antics of a trendy vicar. Some of the paper’s journalists also felt free to criticize. Michael Binyon expressed regret that the paper was lacking its former intellectual drive (an observation that Wilson subsequently assured him was a sackable offence) while the salesroom correspondent, Geraldine Norman, bemoaned the fact that where once she could write about what she thought was important now she was expected to reflect what readers were presumed to find interesting. The view that the paper’s golden age was as the house organ of a tiny elite was firmly slapped down by someone who came from that very class. Douglas-Home told the cameras ‘we don’t want to confine the paper to the mandarin class’. This sentiment was more forcefully expressed by Murdoch, who, in words that closed the programme, condemned ‘people who are elitist at heart’, adding ‘and if it’s going down-market for them then good, because one of the things that’s wrong with this country is its all pervasive elitism’.70