The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  VII

  The following day The Times’s widely respected subeditor, Tim Austin, received a phone call. It was Charles Wilson, on typical form: ‘I want to meet you early tomorrow morning. Early for you. I’ll meet you eight o’clock at Waterloo. I’ll be in my car. Don’t miss me. If you do, you’re a dead man.’ Despite having spent the last few months with Richard Williams and Michael Hoy assisting Wilson on the London Post start-up, Austin had no idea what the new Times editor was talking about. Nonetheless, he did not want to miss out and arrived two trains earlier than was strictly necessary. Eventually, Wilson’s chauffeured limousine drew up. The back seat window glided down. ‘Get in,’ Wilson commanded, ‘I’m taking you to Wapping. That’s where we’re printing’ – Austin finished the editor’s sentence – ‘the Post?’ The editor smiled thinly. ‘Just wait,’ he murmured. The limousine passed over Tower Bridge and turned east along the Wapping Highway and down Virginia Street. Then Austin got his first sight of what he subsequently described as ‘this hideous vision of barbed wire, ten-foot-high steel fences and this ghastly building’. ‘Just look at that,’ Wilson cut in admiringly. ‘That place is going to change your life!’48

  Over the next few days Wilson repeated the journey taking the newspaper’s key personnel one at a time to visit the plant on the condition they were sworn to absolute secrecy. Most knew the company had plans for Wapping – The Times had, after all, reported the breakdown in the Post negotiations – but only a handful had any idea that a whole new Times office had been constructed within an anonymous looking single-storey East End warehouse.49 The vast majority of the editorial staff remained totally in the dark. The pressure upon Wilson over the past months had been tremendous. He had been dividing his time between The Times – which, with Douglas-Home’s removal to hospital, he was assuming much of the burden of editing – and the Wapping project where he was giving the impression he was setting up the Post, issuing instructions and interviewing staff for it as well as designing the layout and overseeing the equipping of The Times’s new office. For months without let up, his day started before dawn when he awoke and read the morning’s papers. Then he would go to Gray’s Inn Road to discuss the day’s agenda with the news desk. After the morning conference at 10.30 he would work on administration matters in his office until slipping out to go to Wapping. There he would confer with the Atex staff and continue the direction of laying out The Times’s new office. He would return to Gray’s Inn Road for the afternoon conference at 4.30 and stay there until the first edition had left the stone after 8 p.m. On his way home, he would call in on the Atex staff for a drink in their Belgravia ‘safe house’. That nobody who was not in on the secret knew Wilson was leading this demanding double life was a tribute to his organizational powers and resilience. Nor was it just the journalists who remained in the dark. When the directors of the Times Newspapers (Holdings) board had met on 10 December, they were given scant indication from Murdoch that The Times was about to move home. The meeting lasted forty-five minutes. When it next convened, the move had taken place.50 There was only one major lapse in the security and this came, unaccountably, from Bruce Matthews. The managing director took it upon himself to tell Andrew Knight, the incoming chief executive of The Times’s great rival, the Telegraph, the details and even the exact timing of the move to Wapping when he met him, for the first time, in late December. He then updated Knight several times during the first fortnight of the new year. ‘The information was critically important for us,’ Knight subsequently admitted, although, no less amazingly, the news never leaked out from the executive floor of the Telegraph’s offices.51 It was a bizarre and crazy risk for Matthews to have taken which defied any obvious business logic. Fortunately, the leak spread no further.

  It was too soon to give the game away to the unions but just the right moment to antagonize them into making a false move that would put them - in the public’s eyes – in the wrong. On the night of 18 January 1986, while the union ballot papers were still being filled in, a twelve-page supplement for the Sunday Times was printed at Wapping. In an act of conscious provocation it was an ‘Innovation Special’ featuring the new plant, its possibilities and confrontational contributions from Murdoch and the editor, Andrew Neil, in a leader column. Murdoch anticipated that printing the supplement would bring an instant shutdown at Gray’s Inn Road, where the other sections of the paper were going to press. A police helicopter with search beam hovered above the Wapping plant looking for (non-existent) saboteurs while the company executives, joined by lawyer Geoffrey Richards, stood waiting for the expected enemy to show itself. Suspecting a trap, Brenda Dean issued a statement telling her members to hold fire, before making clear ‘we are not prepared to see our members treated like eighteenth century mill-workers or Australian convicts’. Down in the cramped print room at Gray’s Inn Road, a heated exchange took place between Bill Gillespie, TNL managing director, and Roy ‘Ginger’ Wilson of the SOGAT machine room chapel. The result was that the printers brought the main section of the Sunday Times out as slowly as possible, achieving only half the print run. It was a final, albeit typical, gesture.52

  The union high command was not going to be rushed into wildcat action before the confidently predicted results of the official ballots were announced. In any case, they did not want to damage the possibility that through a broad based demonstration of union solidarity they could successfully breach Fortress Wapping. One possibility was that the EETPU members could be persuaded not to work the presses. Another was to convince the journalists to down pencils. The first prospect quickly receded. Although the TUC general secretary, Norman Willis, worked on a plan to get the print unions to make further concessions and for Eric Hammond to come into line, Hammond would not be moved. In his defence, he cited the law. His members had individual contracts to work at Wapping but the EETPU itself had no formal agreement. Thus, in the terms of the trade union legislation on secondary action, the EETPU could not order a strike against a company with which it had no contractual agreement.53 Bill O’Neill was of the view that even if Hammond had asked his electricians not to work at Wapping, they would have carried on regardless.54 They wanted the work. They needed the money. As for the journalists, the print unions could expect a show of solidarity from NUJ activists, but could not be confident that journalists whose hard work had so frequently been spiked by militancy in the print room would leap to their aid. At a meeting on 21 January, The Times NUJ chapel duly instructed its members that, in the event of a strike by the NGA and SOGAT, journalists were only to do their work ‘using existing personnel and technologies’ and ‘not to enter the Wapping plant.’ Since ‘existing technologies’ involved all articles being double-key stroked by NGA members, the NUJ was effectively serving notice that it would be joining the strike.55 Times staff would have to decide whether they were primarily loyal to their union or to their employer. Given the secretive manner in which their move to Wapping was being planned behind their backs, some felt their employer had yet to demonstrate loyalty to them.

  Later the same day, the results of the print unions’ ballots were released. Among SOGAT members, the vote was 3534 for striking and 752 against (an 82 per cent yes vote); the margin was similar among NGA members with 843 voting yes and 117 voting no (an 87.8 per cent yes vote).56 On 23 January, Murdoch agreed to meet Brenda Dean and her colleagues in two hours of talks at the Park Lane Hotel. He offered new five-year contracts for ‘some hundreds’ of the five thousand print workers currently employed on his four titles so that they could continue printing editions from Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road, but he would no longer entertain print union representation at Wapping. For her part, Dean went as far as she possibly could to make last-minute concessions on management’s ‘right to manage,’ binding arbitration and a prohibition of wildcat strikes. Such concessions were probably too great for her members and too late for Murdoch. The meeting broke up with neither side accepting its opponent’s offers. ‘It’s tragic that they�
��ve missed this opportunity,’ Murdoch announced to the waiting press; ‘we have been begging the unions to come to an agreement at Wapping for six years now. Earlier on we would have given them all sorts of things.’57 The following day, the print unions’ national executives brought their members out on strike. All five and a half thousand of them – printers, typists, telephonists, librarians, clerks, cleaners – were duly sacked.

  On the evening of Friday 24 January, Bill O’Neill telephoned Brenda Dean. She confirmed the strike was on and in the course of an amicable conversation made clear she thought it would be over within a fortnight when, unable to print enough newspapers or get them distributed, News International would reopen negotiations. It was easy to understand the unions’ optimism. They did not think Wapping had the capacity. They knew it took all ninety press units at Gray’s Inn Road to print the Sunday Times and that there were only forty-eight available units at Wapping. But what they did not calculate was that the Wapping employees were prepared to work using methods that kept the newsprint flowing without constant stops to reload and that Wapping staff were able to average about fifty thousand copies an hour. This was more than double what NGA and SOGAT members at Gray’s Inn Road had felt within their powers to produce.

  Yet even if Wapping’s electricians managed to bring the papers out, SOGAT was still confident of preventing distribution. Eighteen hundred SOGAT members were employed at the ninety depots of the country’s biggest newspaper wholesaler, WH Smith. Dean promised they would black all News International titles. The union also hoped to prevent production at subsidiary plants in Merseyside, Watford and Manchester where the colour magazines for the Sunday Times and News of the World, together with extra copies of the tabloid’s main section, were printed. Furthermore, Dean had met Ron Todd of the TGWU before Christmas to insist that his members did not drive TNT lorries carrying the papers. Approaches were also made to ASLEF and the NUR to prevent rail distribution.58 On the night of 23 January, the print union and transport union officials met to coordinate disrupting distribution from Wapping. Together they would show Murdoch who was boss. That night, The Times’s deputy editor, Colin Webb, was down on ‘the stone’ and was surprised to witness the print workers’ cheerful attitude. ‘We’re off for a weekends’ golf’, they assured him; ‘see you Tuesday when Rupert gives in.’59

  VIII

  On the morning of 24 January, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Wilson and Peter Stothard stood in The Times vestibule at Gray’s Inn Road waiting to greet Shimon Peres, the Israeli Prime Minister. A semicircle of angry print workers faced them. One member of the reception committee quipped mirthlessly that the Israeli security guards might have to protect the hosts rather than the guest.60 Throughout the building, Times journalists wondered who, if anybody, was going to print the paper that evening. The editor, whom they looked to for leadership and protection, had told them nothing. There had been no mention of moving to Wapping at the morning news conference chaired by Colin Webb. At 7.30 p.m., a PA wire confirmed that the strike was going ahead as planned. Desperate to find out what was afoot, a demand was made for the editor to address his staff in a room journalists had booked in Holborn. Webb, however, took the view that Wilson should not answer a summons as if to some revolutionary tribunal but, rather, should call the staff to hear him, and to do so on the home territory of Gray’s Inn Road.61 This was psychologically astute. Wilson had been editor for only three months. What was more, he had spent much of the past two years away from The Times office, first in Chicago and subsequently hovering around Wapping. Consequently, he had not had a chance to sustain the personal following or natural authority that the late Charles Douglas-Home could have commanded in the situation. Yet, if journalists did not respond to his appeal, not only Wapping but the future of The Times would hang in the balance.

  It was not until 8.20 p.m. that Charles Wilson finally strode into a room packed with tense journalists. To rise above the scrum he clambered on top of a table. Hush descended. It was noticed that he was visibly shaking. ‘The storm has broken tonight,’ he declared: ‘We have lost tonight’s paper. But we do not intend to lose any more editions of The Times. It is going to be produced editorially at Wapping – on Sunday night for the Monday paper. I am here to invite you to come along and help us do it.’

  He told them to clear their desks of all their possessions – this would be their last day at Gray’s Inn Road – and announced the news that the Sun’s journalists had just voted overwhelmingly to go to Wapping. Times staff refusing to go there would be sacked for breach of contract. Those who went to Wapping would get a £2000 pay rise and free private health insurance for their family. But more to the point, they would be free at last to type their own articles straight into the editorial system. ‘At a single key stroke, this gives the journalist his birthright,’ he declaimed. ‘I implore you to come with us.’62

  Had the appeal worked? One journalist was heard to whisper ‘he’s won’, but the tone of the questions asked was hostile and there was considerable muttering as the packed meeting dispersed. That the editor had conspired with Murdoch but not involved or even forewarned his own staff was seen as a betrayal. He had put a gun to his journalists’ heads, informing them at almost the last possible moment to move everything to some probably hideous site somewhere in the East End of London (of all places) or be sacked. Such dismissive treatment infuriated those who felt they were professionals being hired or fired like casual cleaners. One journalist went up to Wilson and hissed ‘I hate you for this’. Greg Neale, The Times NUJ chapel father, convened the second chapel meeting of the day at 9.30 p.m. It took the decision for a mass meeting the following afternoon. The journalists would not be taken for granted.

  The last piece of filed copy for the never-to-appear Times that evening reported that there would be an-all night vigil at St Bride’s, ‘the journalists’ church’ in Fleet Street, for the future of the newspaper industry.63 Only as the journalists filed out of Gray’s Inn Road that night did it really dawn on them they might never return there. Most of the cars had been moved from the surrounding streets and police ringed the building. The magnitude of what was happening only struck one journalist when he spotted the editor’s secretary, Liz Seeber, pulling paintings of past proprietors (she could not find a screwdriver) off the panelled editorial walls. Seeber recalled:

  I had my car outside the reception door and Joe [the editor’s chauffeur] was down there reclining and having a fag and then he rang me the moment the SOGAT official disappeared around the corner. So I rushed down to the car and shoved the paintings into my car and Joe had the others and we all went off to Wapping at about ten o’clock at night.64

  But would the journalists – hurt at being taken for granted – follow the oil paintings of Murdoch’s predecessors?

  CHAPTER SIX

  FIFTY-FOUR WEEKS UNDER SIEGE

  The Siege of Wapping and its Consequences

  I

  ‘History is rarely so convenient, but the day that production began at Wapping was the day when, to all intents and purposes, old Fleet Street ended.’1 The assessment by the financial historian David Kynaston has become the accepted judgment on the cold, miserable day of Saturday 25 January 1985.

  The events of that day took place in the teeth of opposition not only from the print unions but also from the journalists’ representatives. The National Union of Journalists had instructed its members not to go to Wapping. Journalists at the Sun and the News of the World voted overwhelmingly to disregard the order.2 But the ballot among Times and Sunday Times journalists was reckoned to be a close call. The Times NUJ chapel met in the ‘ballroom’ (the term was not descriptive) of the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury. Joining Greg Neale, the chapel father, were the NUJ general secretary, Harry Conroy, and his deputy, Jake Ecclestone. The presence of the union’s high command demonstrated how seriously they took the matter. But Conroy, a bluff left-wing Glaswegian, was not naturally appealing to the softer spoken sections of the audience wh
ile many remembered Ecclestone, a former Times chapel father, as the man whose militancy had led to the paper being sold to Rupert Murdoch in the first place. For the moment, though, such splitist tendencies were put to one side and the NUJ platform party told the Times journalists to stand shoulder to shoulder with their print union brothers and not to accept potentially open-ended contractual obligations at Wapping. ‘You are Times journalists,’ Greg Neale pointed out, ‘and not even Murdoch, even in this political climate, could get support if he’d just sacked the entire Times staff.’3

  In fact, many Times staff were energized by the news that Murdoch was poised to free the paper from the print unions’ grip, perhaps making it sustainably profitable for the first time in their working lives. Disobeying the NUJ edict, they had already started drifting over to the new Times office behind the wire at Wapping to help get the Monday edition ready. Bill Bryson, still subediting the business news pages, was sorry for the many blameless individuals who had suddenly lost their jobs but he could not help basking ‘in the glow of a single joyous thought’ that he would no longer be involved in the nightly demarcation battle with lazy and violent SOGAT wire-room operators. Other subeditors welcomed the opportunity to be freed from similar battles of will. An NGA compositor had once spat at Peter Brown for indicating where he wanted a minor copy alteration. Brown felt the print unions had squandered the sympathy that would normally have been due them. What was more, given the rumours that Murdoch had a reserve army of Australians waiting to write The Times if its staff went on strike, Brown wanted to know what the NUJ’s fall-back strategy was if the paper could be brought out without its official staff. To this, there was no convincing answer.4