The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  With these proceeds, plans could be laid for new and less labour-intensive printing plants. Robert Maxwell even raised the prospect of colour printing. A clash with the unions was imminent. In the second half of 1985, the warning shots began to be fired. The new chairman of the Express titles, David Stevens, made no secret of his hopes to move his papers out of Fleet Street and to reduce the payroll. Even more significant from Murdoch’s perspective was the determination to cut out waste by Robert Maxwell who, in 1984, had controversially bought Mirror Group Newspapers. A dispute at the Sporting Life had led to his Mirror titles being suspended for a fortnight in August 1985. Vowing ‘the gravy train has hit the buffers’, he retaliated with a major redundancy programme to cut the total of his employees from 7000 to 2100. A two-week closure at the home of his Scottish papers ensued. Maxwell emerged victorious by deploying a mixture of barbed wire, security guards, threats to move from Glasgow and employ non-union workers and the deployment through the courts of the Thatcher Government’s trade union legislation.35 Some thought these methods incompatible with Maxwell’s socialist protestations. But while he had used all means available to him to cut the payroll, he did not destroy the principles of chapel power: the absence of legally binding contracts and retention of the closed shop. In common with every other newspaper proprietor, his journalists still did not have direct input of their own material.

  Although not one of the beneficiaries of the Reuters largesse, Eddy Shah, survivor of the Messenger dispute, had begun to think beyond the confines of Warrington and was envisaging a far more revolutionary plan. He conceived a new mid-market national newspaper to be called Today, edited by Brian MacArthur. Loosely modelled on USA Today, it would transmit its papers via satellite to regional printing plants in Heathrow, Birmingham and Manchester. In doing so it would be free from Fleet Street’s restrictive practices and could thus be produced at a cost that significantly undercut the existing titles. Extraordinarily, its planners budgeted that it could break even without any advertising on sales of 600,000. What was more, by using the latest technology and printing in colour it would be attractive to readers. Its journalists would have direct input. The union boss who was able to deliver these non-restrictive practices was none other than Eric Hammond of the EETPU. Buoyed up by his successful negotiations with Murdoch, Hammond had approached Shah in April 1985 with a no-strike guarantee that became public three months later.36 Like Murdoch, Today’s founder also planned distribution by road not rail. Eddy Shah threatened not just the traditional print unions but also the traditional press barons. If Today’s colour technology worked and the Sun failed to be moved to Wapping, Murdoch faced serious competition.

  The plans for moving The Times to Wapping were in their final stages when, on 27 December 1985, the Financial Times broke the news that a paper called the Independent was to be launched in the new year. It would be the first new national quality broadsheet to enter the market since the Daily Telegraph, 131 years earlier. At first, it was hard to comprehend how serious a threat it would pose. Like opposing groups of First World War sappers mining underneath each other’s trenches, the plans for launching the Independent and for relocating The Times to Wapping had been evolving in total ignorance of the other’s existence. The three founding fathers of the Independent, Andreas Whittam Smith, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover, were all respected journalists at the Daily Telegraph. This was significant. The Times’s principal rival was in serious trouble. Its owner, Lord Hartwell, had decided to provide it with expensive and modern print works in Manchester and London’s Isle of Dogs at a combined cost that soon exceeded £100 million. Union militancy had ensured that the level of overmanning at the Telegraph had been such that it made The Times look like a comparatively lean operation. This was one of the reasons why the market leader, with daily sales in excess of 1.2 million, somehow managed to be a money loser. The new print works would produce a better paper at a lower cost but in the short term only added to Hartwell’s headache: the proposed redundancy scheme alone was estimated at £38 million. Having greatly overstretched his resources – and his Reuters payout – he scraped around for ways to raise money. When the take-up on his share offer was less than expected, the Canadian businessman Conrad Black scented blood. Black bought a 14 per cent stake together with a first-refusal option on any future share offers. Hartwell soon found himself forced into a fresh share issue that Black duly snapped up. By December 1985, Black had secured a majority stake and made Andrew Knight chief executive. For the gentlemanly Hartwell, who since 1954 had been editor-in-chief of a paper his father had bought and vastly improved in 1928, it was undoubtedly sad to see his own position become effectively honorific. Yet, he was to live long enough to see Knight and Black turn the bankrupt company around.37 With the Telegraph saved and poised for rejuvenation and the Independent about to be launched, the future for The Times looked to be a lean one unless it could reap the advantages involved in Project Wapping.

  VI

  In 1985, SOGAT’s general secretary, Brenda Dean, was forty-three years old and in only her first year in the post. She was the first woman to head a major British trade union. What was more, in taking care of her appearance and with an elegant blonde bouffant (rather, if truth be told, in the manner of Margaret Thatcher), she appeared the antithesis of the traditional union brotherhood. This was both her strength – as far as the public was concerned – and her weakness when it came to dealing with the (resolutely male) Fleet Street chapels. She did not come from a particularly entrenched union background (her father had been a British Railways inspector) and grew up in Salford. This caused some misgivings among those in the London Central branch who considered themselves a class apart and disliked the interference of supposed no-nothing provincials in their affairs.38 Doubtless, some were also alarmed that she was dating the CBI’s director of information. But she was devoted to the union that she had joined not long after leaving school at sixteen to become a shorthand typist. During the 1970s she even turned down the options of a safe Labour seat or membership of the Downing Street think tank in order to manage SOGAT’s affairs. Her tenure as secretary of the Greater Manchester branch had coincided with a doubling of the membership. By 1983 she had risen to national president and two years later to the key position of general secretary.

  Shortly after taking command of SOGAT, Dean made a ten-day visit to the United States to examine the effect of the introduction of new technology. She concluded in her report that ‘opposition is not an option, it is simply a rapid road to de-unionization’. In writing this, she was taking a bold stand for modernization that would involve, in particular, confronting the short-term interests not only of her Fleet Street members but also those of the rival union, the NGA, which was still committed to the absurdity of double-key stroking. There was little love lost. Her first direct experience of Fleet Street negotiating had come shortly after the end of the 1978–9 shutdown at Times Newspapers. She was not impressed. ‘It was negotiation with mob instincts,’ she concluded. Incredulous at the salaries some of the printers were earning she told the journalist Linda Melvern: ‘I don’t know what they spend it on. They all live in council houses.’39 Had she been in a position to enforce such views some years earlier, her union might never have been locked out from Wapping.

  Instead the negotiations for the print unions’ participation at Wapping recommenced on 30 September with Dean and the other union leaders convening at the Inn on the Park to hear Murdoch’s terms. Murdoch’s Gulfstream G3 had narrowly avoided Hurricane Gloria on its route before decanting Murdoch, John Keating and Bill O’Neill at Stansted airport. The union bosses could have been forgiven for imagining the trip had affected the chairman’s mood. But, assisted in the drafting by Charles Wilson, he had carefully prepared a statement – which The Times proceeded to print in full.40 He made clear that the negotiations would only concern the proposal to print the London Post. If successful, the terms could then be extended to embrace printing the Sun and the News of t
he World there too. The implication was that The Times and Sunday Times would continue, as before, to be printed from Gray’s Inn Road. The union representatives had to listen while Murdoch made clear he was tired of employing workers who managed twenty hours a week at double the national average wage; tired of some of them getting as much as twelve weeks holiday; tired of a system in which he could only employ whoever the unions offered for a vacancy:

  I have strained myself and my colleagues physically, emotionally and financially to build this business and we have been met with nothing but cynicism, broken promises and total opposition … The result today is that all national newspaper production departments are over manned by from fifty to three hundred per cent, with working practices that are a continuing disgrace to us all.41

  The irony, of course, was that on this occasion it was News International that would be negotiating in bad faith. Having determined to operate Wapping without the traditional print unions, Murdoch’s men were not about to undo all the secretive planning by a last-minute U-turn. Instead, with delays in getting the new Times editorial floor ready, the negotiations would serve a purpose in buying time for Wapping to become operational. What was more, the talks could be confidently predicted to show the print unions unwilling to accept the modern working practices the project demanded.

  News International set a three month deadline for the talks to be concluded. In charge of the negotiating team was Bill O’Neill who, after a year in the United States, made a poor job of hiding his depression at having to be back in the company of many of those who had made his life a misery the last time he had attempted to get them to operate Wapping. For their part, the unions knew enough about ‘Project X’ to fear the prospect of a breakdown in the talks. This time they really did want an agreement. Nonetheless, they reacted in disbelief at O’Neill’s insistence that management would determine the appropriate number of men to work a press. ‘You are trying to introduce the work practices of an alien continent,’ one of the NGA’s team spluttered. O’Neill replied that the far off land was called ‘the real world’.42

  Between mid-October and the end of the negotiations, O’Neill conducted thirty-two meetings with the unions. He made clear that journalists on the Post would have direct input of their own copy; that there would be no union ‘closed shop’ circumscribing who could be employed; that there would be legally binding contracts; that disputes would be settled by legally binding arbitration not by strikes (anyone who struck during his contract period would be sacked without appeal); and that management had the right to introduce new technology even if it involved cutting staff. In essence the package heralded the end of the multiple-chapel system that had plagued attempts to make fast agreements. As to what would have happened if the unions had agreed to all News International’s terms, O’Neill later conceded, ‘while what was presented was not uncommon in U.S. labour contracts, it was completely foreign and unacceptable at that time to the unions I was meeting with. They could never have accepted them and a strike was inevitable’.43

  Given their previous attitude, it was a sign of how scared the unions were that they were nonetheless prepared to make some major sacrifices. On 22 November, the NGA conceded direct input to journalists in return for a fifty-fifty representation with SOGAT for double-stroking the columns of advertising. For the first time in the history of Fleet Street, journalists’ copy would not be needlessly retyped by members of a print union. In other areas there appeared little progress. The unions continued to oppose legally binding contracts. Complaining that he had endured ‘seventeen years of hell’, Murdoch made clear this was non-negotiable. When Eric Hammond broke ranks to state that the EETPU had no objection to legally binding contracts, the other unions recognized that they were being outmanoeuvred. On 11 December, they reported the EETPU to the TUC, hoping disciplinary action would be taken against its non-collective attitude.44

  With Brenda Dean in the chair, the print unions – temporarily putting aside their traditional suspicions of each another – debated what to do at a meeting in the TUC’s Congress House on 9 December. Various rumours were discussed, including that News International had developed ‘connections’ with TNT to deliver the newspapers and sidestep the SOGAT distribution system and the apparent presence of one thousand workers recruited by the EETPU who were up to something ‘within the Wapping development’. Most alarming of all was the ‘information received informally’ that a sixty-page dummy equivalent of the Sunday Times had been run off the Wapping presses and that ‘there was adequate space and machinery to move in all the titles. Indeed there were rumours that Times journalists had already been told they would be moving to Wapping.’ This last piece of news was wrong – Times journalists had heard nothing – but what was most remarkable about the union meeting was the conclusions drawn from the evidence. Through united action, the unions believed they retained the whip hand since ‘at the present time, sixty per cent of the worldwide income of News International was raised by The Sun and the News of the World; the proprietor would not wish to place either in jeopardy’. Consequently the committee drew up a draft proposal for solidarity in opposing Murdoch’s humiliating terms.45

  The deadline for the talks with News International was Christmas Eve. The last meeting before it, attended by the full union top brass, including Dean and Harry Conroy of the NUJ (whose opening gambit was to ask where O’Neill’s black shirt was), broke up without any agreement on 19 December. Three days later, O’Neill telephoned Dean to see if she wanted to talk further. She replied that there was no point. The following day, Bill Miles wrote to Bruce Matthews to inform him that the print unions were united in demanding that News International offer all those it currently employed jobs for life with wage increases ‘not least [sic] than the annual retail price index’. If there was a transferral to new premises ‘you will guarantee that the members of the unions concerned will be offered employment at the alternative premises with full continuity of employment at their prevailing wages and conditions’. If these demands were not met the unions would go on strike.46

  The demand was fantastic, incredible. Murdoch had hoped the three-month negotiating period would demonstrate the print unions’ reluctance to agree legally binding contracts to work at Wapping, but he could scarcely believe his luck when they threatened to bring down the company if all their members were not granted jobs for life. It was hard to conceive what more the unions could have done to publicize their imperviousness to moderation. In doing so they determined to make a stand upon a battlefield whose topography was all against them. Instead of appearing the aggrieved party forced into industrial action by a callous boss’s use of blackleg labour from a covert plant, they ensured that Murdoch could be seen as the put-upon businessman calling upon a coalition of the willing against Luddite militants who had silenced his existing plants in the pursuit of wholly unreasonable demands.

  In fact, News International’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards of Farrar & Co., had skilfully manoeuvred the unions into this situation. The Wapping plant was legally distinct from News International’s other operations. Since a strike at Gray’s Inn Road and Bouverie Street on the issue of preventing EETPU members working at Wapping would be illegal under secondary action legislation, the print unions had to make an unacceptable demand (‘jobs for life’) knowing it would be rejected so that they could legally call a strike that would coincide with Wapping’s launch. But they were playing directly into Murdoch’s hands. Had they not struck, News International would have had to pay their wages for a further six months while the existing house agreements were still in force. Their decision to strike not only relieved Murdoch of that burden but also of the £40 million redundancy payments to which they would otherwise have been legally entitled.

  The print unions opted to strike because they were confident of success. Indeed, their strategy was based upon a fatal assumption that a financially stretched Murdoch could not bring his papers out if the NGA and SOGAT called industrial action. Bill Miles ha
d been looking into the financial structure of News International and concluded that its gearing was far too high for Murdoch to put at risk his Fleet Street cash crop. News Corp. had borrowed $2.6 billion to acquire the American companies that would become its Fox film and television empire. A huge debt burden was being carried. This, it was predicted, was his Achilles heel. Union colleagues complacently assured Brenda Dean that not a single paper would emerge from the Wapping plant without the guiding expertise of SOGAT and NGA members. ‘My view,’ Dean later admitted, ‘was they couldn’t sustain a stoppage of two weeks without any papers at all so there would have needed to be a negotiation.’ Even if – as she thought more likely – Wapping managed a limited production run, Murdoch would still have to climb down or face financial meltdown.47 On 13 January 1986, SOGAT’s strike ballots were sent out to their members. The siege of Fortress Wapping was about to begin.