Moderate voices within the unions were concerned at the hijacking of the printers’ cause by those with their own, sometimes violent, agenda. Yet, having determined upon a tactic that centred upon trying to block the entry and exit points of Wapping, the logic was to welcome as many able-bodied protestors as possible. Weight of numbers was the only prospect of the siege working. After all, the unions’ other strategies – getting the wholesalers to black distribution, encouraging readers not to buy the newspapers and persuading the contract printers Bemrose and Odhams not to produce the colour supplements, had all failed. Indeed, when balloted for strike action, the SOGAT employees at Bemrose voted twelve to one against coming out and those at Odhams also rejected their union’s call by an overwhelming margin.43 Violence was ‘certainly not what we are after,’ announced Chris Robbins, SOGAT’s London district secretary, although he added:
if there are 8,000 people outside Wapping there is little that the police can do. We have shown [on 16 March, when the Sunday titles were delayed by four hours] that is a sufficient number to stop the papers going out. Unlike Orgreave [a reference to one of the bitterest confrontations of the miners’ strike] the exits are all in a pretty enclosed area.44
The intention was clear. But inside the stockade, plans had been devised to outsmart the siege. News International’s strategy would not have been possible without the active support of the police (a point that particularly riled those activists who believed the Met was being used politically). Police sealed a one-mile area around the plant. There were three permanent roadblocks, augmented where necessary by up to sixteen temporary roadblocks. Because lorries leaving in ones or twos could be picked off, they lined up en masse behind the walls, ready for a group breakout. Two o’clock in the morning was the usual time for one of the sets of gates to open and the lorries to speed their way through the defences, followed by shouts, threats and projectiles. From there, there was more than one route that could be taken and, unlike the drivers and the police, the demonstrators never knew in advance which it would be, ensuring that they had to stretch their troops thinly across the whole area. But on nights where the unions were able to deploy mass numbers it often took mounted-police charges to clear a way through. It was not only the lorry drivers who found themselves running the gauntlet in this fashion. Those journalists and staff who could not get out before the demonstrators started gathering at 7 p.m. were often forced to stay within the compound until 2 a.m. as well. Hours were wasted sitting in cars with the headlights off and engine running, lined up in convoy formation awaiting the command to put the foot down and accelerate fast.
There was an obvious downside to this level of security. The more Wapping’s fortifications were piled high, the less agreeable it appeared to journalists and public alike. The Sunday Express cartoonist, Giles, depicted it as a concentration camp complete with goose-stepping Nazi guards. The police did not allow any buses or taxis through the one-mile cordon. Residents could pass through only on production of identity cards proving they lived there. They could be forgiven for wishing the plant could be shut down so that they could get a decent night’s sleep. Tower Hamlets Council had been inundated with complaints about the night-time noise generated and some hoped this could be used as a pretext for having the police operation scaled back or even the plant forcibly shut. When a journalist from New Society, a weekly magazine later subsumed into the New Statesman, drove over to Wapping to talk to some of those who had lodged complaints, some pickets came within view. He gave them a sympathetic gesture of solidarity. Unfortunately it was misinterpreted and a brick came smashing through his car window.
IV
The nightly scuffles preoccupied those caught on both sides of the stockade, but it was only one part of a wider battle for public opinion. In this respect, Brenda Dean presented a more appealing face than either Murdoch’s barbed wire or the traditional overweight Bolshie shop steward to which Fleet Street had long played host. Soft-spoken and moderate in tone, Dean led the presentation of the unions’ case to the media. She was adept at steering the rhetoric away from overpaid (usually NGA) print men trying to maintain Luddite practices and onto the fate of the lower-paid cleaning and clerical workers, often women, who were more obviously blameless victims in the battle of Wapping. Much was made of the suffering inflicted upon their families. By May, SOGAT had spent £250,000 on the boycott campaign. Indeed, the unions spent an estimated total of £400,000 on publicity during the long course of the siege.45 Newspaper advertisements were placed, three million stickers produced and six million leaflets printed. The ‘Don’t Buy …’ logo was embossed on posters, plastic bags and T-shirts. When the time of year came round there was even a not especially festive Christmas card proclaiming ‘Christmas Greetings – Please don’t buy The Sun, News of the World, The Times, Sunday Times’ between four pieces of stylized holly. There was also an advert featuring a photograph of a child clutching her teddy bear beside the caption: ‘My dad helped Mr Murdoch make millions. Now he wants to put him on the Dole. Don’t let him.’ This was not all. A pro-strikers’ newspaper, the Wapping Post, was launched. Edited by Chris Robbins and running to twelve pages, it was promoted by the unions who placed bulk orders with 45,000 copies being distributed throughout the country. It provided a lively mix of articles on ‘Mugger Murdoch’, police brutality, the health and safety dangers of operating computers, letters and details of forthcoming events with such titles as ‘The Truth Behind Barbed Wire’ addressed by the likes of the ubiquitous Tony Benn.46
How much effect the campaign had in winning over the public was doubtful. To those involved on either side, it was a life or death struggle for the future of the industry. Those not involved were less concerned. Confidential market research commissioned by News International when the siege was four months old suggested that many of those polled did not care whose will prevailed. Of those who did, 39 per cent favoured the management and 33 per cent the unions (although union support had a majority among those who felt strongly on the issue). Less than half could remember – without prompting – the name of someone connected with the dispute with only Murdoch and Dean attaining significant recognition. But the data did show that no perceptible switch in readership away from The Times could be discerned and that only 6 per cent thought the unions were winning the dispute.47
Within the News International group, only the Sunday Times appeared to be losing circulation in the first three months of the move to Wapping, largely due to distribution problems and, perhaps, the desertion of some of its sizeable non-Thatcherite readership.48 But The Times had particular cause for celebration. On 28 March it published on Good Friday for the first time since 1918. None of its competitors appeared – their print unions forbade it. To capitalize, a record print run of 773,948 copies were made of the Good Friday Times, a full 120,000 more than the celebrated royal wedding edition in 1981. By May, the paper was averaging 503,000 sales per day, breaking the highest sustained circulation in its history. Taking advantage of the national economic recovery, advertising revenue was up by 25 per cent on the year and classified ads were at their highest level for more than a decade.49
The actual paper looked, at first sight, remarkably similar to its Gray’s Inn Road predecessor. Close scrutiny revealed it was produced on a marginally smaller paper size but the quality of the printed page was just as good – or rather bad – as before. This was because the presses were no different. Apart from the departure of some quality journalists, there was little difference in content. Peregrine Worsthorne hoped that by reducing production costs, the Wapping revolution would lead to The Times abandoning its fight for larger circulation in favour of serving its 300,000 ‘top readers’.50 In fact, the paper’s management had been so preoccupied with the logistics of the switch in production that strategic considerations of this kind had been deferred. But upmarket or downmarket, others were fearful for what Wapping meant for the competition. ‘By saving an estimated £60 million on his annual production costs,’ Pet
er Paterson warned that Murdoch was ‘in a position to reduce the cover price of, say, The Times, to the destruction of the Telegraph and the Guardian’.51 Old Fleet Street was swept with panic when it was rumoured Murdoch was poised to drop not only his papers’ cover prices but also their advertising rates.
In truth, to News International’s competitors, Wapping was both a threat and a godsend. Wapping printed four mass-market newspapers, including the leading daily and Sunday tabloid, with a 670-strong production staff. By comparison, the Daily Mail’s owners, Associated Newspapers, were lumbered with a 3400 production staff and the Daily Express’s new owners, United Newspapers, wilted under the weight of a 6800-strong workforce. Clearly, they had to make cuts urgently or risk going under. In the past, such swingeing cuts would have been impossible since the print unions would have gone on indefinite strike, forcing management to back down or compromise. But Wapping provided Murdoch’s rivals with just the weapon – or threat of using such a weapon – that they needed. Once it became clear to the unions they were losing the siege of Wapping, they either had to bow to the other proprietors’ demands or risk being shut out entirely à la Wapping by them too. The Express’s owner, Lord Stevens, lost no time in drawing this conclusion. He discovered that Wapping had concentrated union minds wonderfully and 2500 redundancies were soon agreed. Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, had already announced his intention to build a new print works in Docklands but he well understood that Murdoch’s coup transformed the scale and urgency with which he had to act. ‘Wapping is a watershed – a great historic date in Fleet Street,’ Rothermere conceded; ‘those who survive are going to be those who have understood this fastest.’52 Indeed, after years of timid inertia, the speed with which the various proprietors shot out of their respective blocks was remarkable, or, as Charles Wilson put it, ‘they were off like rats up a drain’.53 A week after The Times’s move to Wapping, the Guardian rushed through an announcement that it would move to Docklands, switch from hot metal to computer typesetting and introduce direct-input by 1987. Within days, Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers declared it would do the same by 1988. Then, in July, the Financial Times announced it too would go east and that the ‘paper of business’ would enter the computer age in 1988.
‘One after another, the threatened newspaper groups have been able, with no weapon but a pair of binoculars for seeing the smoke pouring from the roaring chimneys of Castle Wapping, to conclude agreements’ that their unions would never previously have accepted, noted Bernard Levin in his ‘The Way We Live Now’ column. Here was a case in which:
The man who makes a hole in the hedge gets scratched, but those who go through it after him feel no discomfort. It may be that, as Messrs Black, Stevens, Rothermere and the rest go through the hole, they experience a warm glow of gratitude to the man they can see disappearing towards the horizon with brambles sticking out of him all over. If so, I conclude that if they fail to express that gratitude, it can only be because of shyness.54
If a little sotto voce, some of the rival proprietors did salute Murdoch’s courage and audacity. One who loudly did not was the Daily Mirror’s owner, Robert Maxwell, who criticized his enemy for ‘not doing things the British way’. The weight of Maxwell’s pronouncement was soon demonstrated when he sacked his Glasgow print workers for refusing to handle a new colour edition, put up barbed wire and guard dogs around the plant and went to court to sequestrate SOGAT’s assets. Labour MPs who had hurled abuse at Murdoch for such behaviour were noticeably silent when Maxwell, a Labour benefactor, trod the same path.
Few rival editors were prepared to be charitable towards Murdoch (an honourable exception being Brian MacArthur at Eddy Shah’s newly launched Today). When News International placed an advertisement stating its case, most newspapers declined to print it. Some, like the Daily Telegraph’s editor, Max Hastings, refused supposedly on the grounds that he did not ‘want to give space to our principal commercial competition’. Others, like the Guardian and the FT, were too scared of their own unions’ reaction to print it and demanded indemnities against consequent legal action. Only the Daily Mail, the Mirror Group and Today agreed to carry it.55 The Times was furious at the craven nature of rivals who stood to benefit from Wapping’s legacy but were not prepared to print (let alone endorse) an advertisement in its support. ‘There are some in the newspaper industry,’ the leader column stated accusingly, ‘who are still afraid of their unions. This alone ought to speak more than any advertisement in favour of the cause that News International is fighting.’56
One head that did not poke far above the parapet was that of Donald Trelford, editor of the Observer. Seven of his subeditors also worked during the week for The Times. NGA print workers threatened to stop production of the Observer unless they were dismissed. Trelford duly did the dirty work. Next, the printers (backed by the paper’s NUJ chapel father) threatened to shut down the paper unless an innocuous review of a book about the Victorian travel writer Augustus Hare was pulled. Its crime was that it had been written by Times columnist and print union scourge, Bernard Levin. Trelford duly pulled the article and, with it, Levin’s contract to review books for the Observer.57 An editor who fearlessly and famously stood up to a bullying owner, Tiny Rowland, on the question of his paper’s reporting of African politics was prepared to capitulate tamely before a delegation of union representatives.
Intimidation at the offices of the Observer was as nothing compared to that facing those – journalists and printing staff alike – who worked at or collaborated with Wapping. Leaflets were distributed headed ‘Roll of Dishonour’ listing ‘scabs’’ names and – ominously – their home addresses. Even those not on the staff payroll were at risk. Fifty demonstrators smashed through a glass door to get at the history professor John Vincent while he was trying to give a lecture to his students at Bristol University. Vincent was subjected to a barracking because he had written articles in The Times. It was unlikely that many of the protestors had ever been anywhere near the paper’s machine room but worse followed when one hundred demonstrators disrupted Professor Vincent’s lecture for the third week running, some hurling mud at him. Another who experienced the wrath of activist agitprop was the former Times business editor, Hugh Stephenson, who had gone on to become Professor of Journalism at City University in London. Hardly a Murdoch sycophant, Stephenson found himself the target of his students’ wrath and was subjected to a petition condemning him for submitting articles to The Times in breach of the NUJ boycott.58
Neither Professors Vincent nor Stephenson endured as lengthy a trial as David Selbourne. A noted academic writer of eclectic sweep, Selbourne had for twenty-two years been a lecturer at Ruskin College, the adult higher education college in Oxford that had links with the trade union movement. When The Times published an article by him on Labour’s Militant Tendency, he found himself condemned for ‘anti-trade union’ thinking by the Ruskin Students’ Union who ordered him to apologize and not to write such articles again. When he refused to bow to this Maoist instruction, a student picket barred entrance to his lectures. If Selbourne imagined the staff would stand up for his academic freedom of thought he was soon disappointed. The acting principal described Selbourne’s Times article as ‘provocative’ and fellow lecturers declared their ‘solidarity’ with the Students’ Union which promptly called for him to be sacked. Although Ruskin was not part of Oxford University it had access to its facilities and the Oxford University Students’ Union also weighed in to condemn the turbulent academic. The Association of University Teachers were not much more helpful. Selbourne stated that he was not a Murdoch supporter but that he would write again for The Times if commissioned to do so. Ruskin College’s Executive Committee censured him and, unable to get any reassurance that it backed his academic freedom, Selbourne resigned his post. So ended a lengthy career there. But his fate did not go unnoticed. In a succession of leader articles, The Times drew attention to his case and the Government announced an independent enquiry
under Sir Albert Sloman, the former Essex University vice-chancellor, to investigate Ruskin’s (taxpayer funded) commitment to academic freedom. It called for the college to revise its disciplinary procedures and make its commitment to academic freedom more explicit.59
Meanwhile, the National Union of Journalists continued to side with the dismissed printers. The NUJ’s attempts, as The Times leader column put it, ‘to deprive a newspaper of information, and to obstruct the public reading it’, made it as guilty of promoting censorship as those attempting to silence its academic contributors. During April, the NUJ considered what to do about its members working at Wapping.60 The decision was not as simple as the more militant voices hoped. The desire to punish those who had gone there was balanced by the fear they would tear up their membership cards and provoke a mass exodus. With these considerations in mind, the union’s National Executive voted by thirteen votes to twelve against initiating disciplinary proceedings against all the journalists. Instead, the union would only pick on those it suspected of being particularly culpable or cowardly: it would investigate the actions of the four chapel fathers individually. It also barred The Times journalist Peter Davenport, reporting its proceedings from its annual conference in Sheffield. The conference itself was certainly worthy of coverage: delegates voted to reverse their National Executive’s decision, ensuring proceedings could be initiated against all News International journalists after all. Condolences were also sent to Colonel Gaddafi over the US raid on Tripoli.
The History of the Times Page 38
