The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Ranged against the Wapping advocates were colleagues with a variety of grievances. For a few, union solidarity was an important consideration. Harry Conroy threatened to bring NUJ disciplinary action against any member who went to Wapping. But, as speeches from the floor made clear, the principal issue was outrage at the appalling way in which Times staff had been treated and taken for granted by their management. Employed to unearth facts and reveal truth, their professional pride had been dented by their inability to detect what their own management had been plotting under their very noses. Indeed, the failure of any journalist in any section of the British media to predict accurately the scale of Murdoch’s coup stood as an indictment. Many felt duped. There was also a more selfish angle. Neale’s claim that Murdoch could not produce the paper without its journalists had resonance. Some believed that the proprietor’s moment of crisis was their moment of opportunity. Given how much Murdoch needed them to support the greatest gamble of his life, why should they meekly assent to do his bidding without pushing for a better offer? If threatened, he might make all manner of worthwhile concessions.

  From the outside, not all commentators had sympathy with journalists’ wounded pride and sense of self-worth. Paul Johnson, the Spectator’s media correspondent, was scathing, lecturing that ‘Civilization is not merely created and advanced by individuals; it is promoted and above all upheld by institutions.’ Now was not the moment to risk a great paper’s future, especially since many of those demanding a show of loyalty from management had not even shown it towards the former mild-mannered Thomson ownership.5 This was not a sentiment much aired during the hours of debate at the hotel ballroom. Those who had always disliked what they saw as Murdoch’s casual attitude to the disposability of his staff believed he had to be taught a lesson. Some argued that his demands were illegal. To find out if this could be true, they summoned the labour lawyer (and future Lord Chancellor) Derry Irvine. Corralled in an upstairs bedroom in the hotel, he gave his opinion that there were no grounds to sue News International for issuing an ultimatum to move to Wapping although there might be an opportunity to claim for unfair dismissal if anyone was sacked. This advice was not as positive as many had hoped. The speechifying continued until midnight by which time the meeting had been in session for ten hours. A motion was passed (by fifty-nine votes to fifty-eight) which, although supporting the principle of going to Wapping (subject to negotiating better terms and conditions), deferred final judgment until a further meeting on Sunday. The opponents would need only one Wapping supporter to switch sides in order to derail The Times’s move.6

  The key event had already taken place that night. The first pickets – up to two hundred – had assembled outside the Wapping plant, but, inside, the Sunday newspapers had been produced. Surrounded by his senior executives, Murdoch had pressed the button that started the presses rolling at 8 p.m. There was clapping and cheering. Few had ever seen the proprietor in such buoyant mood. Then he turned away from his entourage to make a telephone call. The recipient was Bert Hardy, now at Associated Newspapers and the man whose idea building the Wapping plant had been in the first place and whom Murdoch had subsequently sacked. ‘We’ve done it,’ Murdoch hollered down the receiver, ‘and I’d just like to thank you.’ Little more than an hour later, the first editions were leaving the plant. That night three million copies of the News of the World (plus 750,000 printed in Glasgow) and 1.2 million of the Sunday Times were printed. The former was two million down on Bouverie Street’s production run while the latter had a shortfall of around 150,000. But it was good enough. Management collectively sighed with relief.7 Britain awoke on the Sunday morning to a new dawn in the country’s journalism. It happened to be Australia Day.

  This was the sobering reality confronting ‘refuseniks’ as they made there way to the Marlborough Crest Hotel for the conclusion of the NUJ vote. It was a bitter affair. Angela Gordon, the Times Diary editor, called for those who had gone to Wapping that morning in order to bring the paper out ahead of the chapel’s vote to resign their union membership. Telexes came in from Charles Wilson accepting the demands made in the previous night’s motion. Making the obvious deductions, Don McIntyre argued that only by standing firm would a better deal be offered. Greg Neale implored the meeting to vote ‘no’. But a show of hands indicated a three to one vote in favour of going to Wapping. By the time the platform party announced the result and Neale his own resignation as chapel father, the first edition of The Times, written and produced from Wapping, was already hitting the streets without them.8 Several long-serving journalists were in tears.

  Bringing that first Wapping edition of the paper out with only a skeleton staff defying the NUJ chapel directive not to do so was an especially difficult task. As Charles Wilson put it, it was ‘a bit like parachute jumping or the art of seduction. You had better get it right first time because you might never get another chance.’9 For the past three months the paper’s production editor, Tony Norbury, had been working round the clock to get it right. He had spent the last few weeks with a folding camp bed by his side, snatching a few hours sleep each night in between longer and longer shifts. For the final stretch, Murdoch had been helping out as Norbury’s general handyman, subbing work, forwarding copy, running errands, issuing instructions, encouragements and occasional oaths. When the moment of truth arrived, as with the Sunday Times the evening before, there was a tremendous sense of expectation. Again, the management and production staff encircled Murdoch and started clapping as he pressed the button that started the first edition of The Times from Wapping. There was a sound of revving, then of whirling. The presses started to roll. As they did so, the platform party turned to Tony Norbury and gave him a no less deserved round of applause. Sixty-six per cent of the Times print run was completed on the first night and much of it left the plant late, ensuring delayed distribution that left large areas of Britain without the paper on the newsstand by the crucial morning rush hour. But it was good enough to ensure subsequent performances and it was 66 per cent more than the print unions had boasted would come out.

  Tim Austin was among the coterie of Times journalists who had gone to help bring out the first edition from Wapping while his colleagues were still debating whether to join him. When he had finished subbing it, he formed part of a small group who went off to watch the departure of the first edition at about 9 p.m. He recalled the moment of the great breakout:

  We stood behind the fence and watched the trucks lining up behind the gate, revving. There were hordes of baying pickets. The noise was fantastic. A huge police presence. The whole of the area was floodlit. Cries of ‘Scabs! Scabs! Bastards!’ The police were confident their line would hold for the trucks to get out. You could see the driver in the first lorry. He had obviously psyched himself up. The potential for him being damaged severely was pretty clear. They opened the gates and he just put his foot down. I’ve never seen a lorry accelerate so quickly. By the time he got to the gatehouse he must have been doing thirty miles an hour. If he was going to kill somebody, too bad. He wanted to get out.10

  II

  On Monday morning, the journalists turned up at their new home. The barbed wire and security measures were the first shock. The Times’s new office was the second. Allegedly, French Napoleonic prisoners of war had constructed the building as a rum warehouse in 1805. Its former use fleetingly gave heart to those journalists who had not yet discovered that Wapping was to be a ‘dry’ work environment; others were filled with foreboding at the thought that their office had supposedly been built by forced labour. From the outside it resembled nothing more inspiring than a long, brick, single-storey tram shed, complete with a corrugated-iron roof. A concrete ramp ascending towards a door wide enough to take a stately wheelchair proclaimed the entrance that had been designed for Charles Douglas-Home. Those venturing inside found the interior brightly lit. It needed to be because, with few windows, there was minimal natural light. Older journalists eyed the computer terminals with apprehension. M
onitors were switched on; cursors were blinking. It looked complicated. They had never touched such technology before and doubted whether they could master it now. Indeed, some did not like the idea of typing in their own work directly – as if doing so downgraded them from the status of literati to artisan. Standing on the backbench, Charles Wilson harangued the sceptics: ‘Don’t be so wet. Some of you will learn the new technology in three weeks. Most of you will take three months. And you, Philip Howard, will take three years!’ All eyes swivelled towards the distinguished literary editor. Within days of Wilson’s exposition on the benefits of the new technology, he noticed that Angela Gordon had brought in her portable typewriter and had set it down neatly on her desk between two discarded computer screens. Leading by example, Wilson stormed over, picked up the offending typewriter, walked over to the entrance to the Gents’ lavatory and installed it there as a doorstop. The incident got elaborated with the telling and rival newsrooms were soon agog with the story that The Times was being run by a rampaging, half-crazed Glaswegian who, when not throwing typewriters at his staff, was hurling them down lavatories.11

  The first few days proved uncomfortable. There were not enough computer terminals installed and the largely computer-illiterate journalists found themselves having to share. A fortnight passed before there were enough terminals to go round, by which time the possessive instincts displayed by some towards what was supposedly communal property had become apparent. It was not just the older generation who appeared bamboozled by the technology. ‘I had never before learnt even to touch-type (for I had dictated leaders to my secretary, Val Smith, pacing round the desk for what I thought was rhetorical impact),’ recalled Peter Stothard, ‘and I was not alone. One of our finest “production journalists” found it hard even to operate the teach-yourself cassette tape, let alone the Atex computers.’12

  The breakdown of trust between management and journalists took even longer to repair. The situation was not as bad at The Times as it was at the Sunday Times, where members voted to go to Wapping by only sixty-eight votes to sixty, but many felt the editor’s office was now enemy territory. The refuseniks obeyed the NUJ stricture not to work at Wapping by continuing to regard Gray’s Inn Road as their place of work and refusing to pass the picket line or file copy to the new location. As they well knew, they were courting the sack. Greg Neale’s successor as The Times’s NUJ chapel father, Clifford Longley, conceded the irony that ‘had our agreement been legally binding – an idea alien to our union but favoured by Murdoch – we could have stopped him in his tracks’.13 Most, reluctantly, accepted their fate and of all News International’s seven hundred journalists, only thirty-eight refused to cross the Wapping picket line. But many of the remaining refuseniks were important figures in the life and work of The Times. Among them was Pat Healy who had been with the paper for twenty years, Paul Routledge, who had spent almost seventeen years at The Times, mostly as labour correspondent (and in the previous six months in Singapore as the paper’s South East Asia correspondent), Greg Neale, Donald McIntyre, David Felton and Barry Clement. They were joined by Martin Huckerby, the assistant foreign editor, with almost fifteen years Gray’s Inn Road experience, whom Wilson sacked for writing a hostile article about Wapping in the UK Press Gazette.14 Ten Times journalists resigned or were dismissed for refusing to go to Wapping from the first,15 although others were to join the exodus to find friendlier work environments over the following months.

  After the difficulties encountered on the first night, the production run of The Times improved remarkably. By Thursday 30 January (day four from Wapping), the paper reached its full production target (518,800 copies) for the first time. The belief that News International would be lost without the print unions was shown up as amazing complacency. Indeed, the basic statistics immediately demonstrated the extent to which the company had been subjected over the years to a print unions’ racket. In the old press rooms of Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road, it had taken more than two thousand men (there were almost no women) to produce News International’s four national newspapers. At Wapping, it was now taking just 670 to do the same task. Despite being of the same vintage as those at the old sites, Wapping’s Goss press machines, working at two-thirds capacity, were each churning out forty thousand newspapers an hour with a fraction of the paper breaks that had halted business so frequently and so suspiciously in the past. Reaching production targets despite having fewer machines to work from, management discovered what they had long suspected but had never been allowed close enough to prove – that the print unions at Gray’s Inn Road had been running their presses at far below their capacity. Wapping’s productivity was impressive. Nine hundred reels of newsprint were consumed daily, each reel containing around five miles of paper and one press consuming a reel every fifteen minutes. Seventy tonnes of ink were used every week. In the publishing room, 132 employees were now doing what had previously taken nearly 1800 print union members to achieve.16

  It was little wonder that Murdoch was being observed around the site in trainers and jumper ‘looking frightfully bouncy and positive about the whole thing’.17 ‘Everybody has been wonderful!’ he gushed, in a thank-you message to his staff.18 The Times letters’ page soon filled with correspondence. A few expressed disgust at the ‘Thatcherite’ agenda of the paper and the actions of its proprietor but most were supportive. There were plaudits from the past, among them from Sir William Rees-Mogg who wrote a letter for publication reflecting on the trouble he had had when editor with the unions. He commended Murdoch’s ‘courage to break out of this intolerable and corrupting monopoly’. He was not alone. Sir Denis Hamilton later ranked Murdoch’s switch to Wapping ‘one of the great newspaper achievements of the century’. One Times columnist who felt particularly joyful was Bernard Levin, who promptly penned an article – ‘Fleet Street – now the truth can be told’ – that catalogued what he saw as the horrors of print union power against which ‘any attempt to let the outside world know what was happening nightly would have led to an immediate strike’. There was also praise from what were normally assumed to be hostile quarters. Harold Evans was asked to join a television debate on Wapping. The offer was quickly rescinded when he revealed he would commend Murdoch on his brave and necessary action. In the Spectator, Auberon Waugh opined that the so-called ‘Dirty Digger’ should be offered ‘a dukedom at very least’.19 For his part, Murdoch appeared to be enjoying the fray. Asked on BBC 1 whether he would move back to Bouverie Street or Gray’s Inn Road, he replied, ‘Of course I won’t move back. I feel like a man who has been on a life sentence and has just been released. I feel a wonderful sense of freedom.’20

  His journalists, meanwhile, were not enjoying the same spirit of ecstasy. With each day that passed, the angry crowds of pickets at the gates grew larger. Staff had to telephone a special number each morning to find where the re-enforced buses, complete with grilles and drawn curtains, would pick them up to take them through the gates into the compound. Rendezvousing with buses at ever-changing locations was not suitable for everyone but those who persisted with taking their cars into work were confronted at the gates with pickets slapping sticky labels that, when removed, took the paintwork with them.

  It was dispiriting for journalists to run the gauntlet of taunts from those they did not know. But to experience abuse from former friends and colleagues was particularly unpleasant. Former secretaries taunted those they had previously worked for. Indeed, former secretaries taunted remaining secretaries who crossed the picket line. Pat Healy joined the far side of the barricades. Paul Routledge, back from his posting in Singapore, also joined the demonstration in order to give vent to his feelings, although his former colleagues were more unsettled by the presence of Mrs Routledge whose line of invective, although blunter, was more penetrating. Some journalists tried to deflect the verbal taunts. When one picket snarled ‘sc-aaaaa-b’ at Alan Hamilton, the seasoned reporter asked him to elaborate. ‘You’re a traitor to the working class,’ the picket
alleged. ‘No, I’m not,’ replied Hamilton, ‘I’m from Edinburgh.’ The picket opted to call him an unprintable part of the female anatomy instead.21 Like many others, Tim Austin faced a daily taunt of ‘I hope your kids die of cancer’ as he passed the pickets. The volley of abuse was not confined to the factory gates. Brian Forbes of the picture desk had excrement thrown in his garden and bricks through his window. Doubtless such behaviour was cathartic for those trying to cope with the loss of their jobs but it was also intended to make the lives of Wapping employees such a misery that they would leave the company. The speed with which elements within the anti-Wapping campaign decided to launch intimidation tactics alarmed those who were on the receiving end. The thuggery took a particularly sinister path on 20 February when two men interrupted Christopher Warman, a respected and long-serving Times correspondent, as he was enjoying a drink with Don McIntyre and friends near the old Gray’s Inn Road offices. Hassled as to whether he worked at Wapping, he conceded that he did. He was then head-butted and a beer glass was smashed into his face, narrowly missing his jugular vein. The assailants ran away leaving him on the floor, covered in blood.22 It was a frightening moment. He required nine stitches to his neck and face. Yet, as soon as he was out of hospital, he made a point of reporting for work. As the paper’s property correspondent, he promptly filed copy on Wapping’s new desirable converted warehouse residences. Although Warman conducted himself with extraordinary sang-froid, many of his colleagues were shaken by the incident and wondered when their own time would come.