V
On 4 April, Murdoch presented the print unions with a free gift. At face value, it was a generous present and – even if mindful of the history lesson of Greeks bearing gifts – the unions could not easily refuse it. But it was an awkward present all the same. The inspiration for it came in a letter published in The Times from a Mr D. P. Forbes of Croydon.61 Murdoch read it and set about investigating its feasibility. He soon realized it contained the kernel of a brilliant idea that could end the dispute on terms that would deliver him victory by an apparent act of magnanimity to his opponents.
In moving to Wapping, Murdoch no longer had any need for Gray’s Inn Road and its print facilities. But rather than selling the property and its contents to the highest bidder he could instead give it away to a trade union body on the condition they used it to print a Labour-friendly newspaper employing the very printers Murdoch had sacked. In return for gaining this employment and better representation of left-wing views in the popular press, the unions would call off the siege of Wapping. The proposal, it seemed, could only rebound to Murdoch’s credit. If the unions accepted the offer, everyone would be happy. If they rejected the offer, they would be shown up for being intransigent and unwilling to operate the very machinery and manning levels that they were fighting to foist upon News International.
At a meeting with the print unions at the Mayfair Hotel, Bruce Matthews made them the offer. Although they would not be allowed instantly to asset strip it, they were being offered the freehold on a 300,000 square foot building that, on the open market, had a potential value of around £15 million. With it came a two-year contract to print London editions of the Guardian worth £1 million per annum. Also included was ‘about £40 million’ worth of equipment with computerized typesetting technology and sixty Goss Headliner Mark 1 presses (the same as Wapping used). The offer naturally caught the union delegation off guard. Needing time to digest what was suddenly being tendered, they asked for an adjournment. After they returned, Brenda Dean conceded the offer was ‘unusual to say the least’ and asked for more time to consider it. She warned, however, that it ‘did not represent an alternative to jobs and compensation’. The NGA’s leader, Tony Dubbins, was far less equivocal. It was not a solution, he protested, because ‘the company was offering plant and equipment – not employment’.
Dubbins was certain that the offer was a non-starter designed to sidetrack the unions from their principal aim. They were demanding the right to work at Wapping and, if that proved impossible, to win generous redundancy payments for those who had been sacked. They had never asked to run a paper themselves. But the offer put his union colleagues in a quandary. If they immediately rejected it, they stood to look like wreckers. In any case, they were short of a convincing fallback position. Their attempts to blockade Wapping were failing and, in becoming increasingly violent, were highly risky. Dean’s initial fear was that the offer was not as good as it sounded and that Murdoch was trying to ‘stage-manage’ a deal by appearing on Channel 4 News to announce the gift. In the event, with cameras rolling, Murdoch was unrepentant. ‘This is an opportunity,’ he announced, ‘for the TUC to achieve their ambition and at the same time employ the people who previously worked at the plant. It allows the trade union movement the start-up capital free of charge with no interest charges round their neck.’ And with the hint of a smile, he added that in permitting a rival newspaper to be born, ‘We will risk the competition.’ Dubbins remained unimpressed, musing, ‘I think people can’t help but be somewhat cynical about an offer from Mr Murdoch’ who ‘has got a cheek in making this offer after sacking 6,000 workers.’62
Union trepidation was understandable. Having come to the conclusion that they were supping with the Devil, they were asking for long spoons. But the secret of Murdoch’s success should have given them the courage of their rhetoric. He had, after all, built much of his own empire on the profits from the Sun, a seemingly unpromising newspaper he had been given virtually for free by Hugh Cudlipp. Might the unions not also make the most of such a golden opportunity? Eager to add to the number of Labour-supporting newspapers, Neil Kinnock thought this new gift should not be casually discarded just because it came from a man the print unions detested. Clive Thornton, the former chairman of the Mirror Group and a director of the proposed left-wing tabloid News on Sunday, agreed, arguing that ‘if [the unions] have got any imagination they should use it to see the prospects. Murdoch has used his imagination in making the offer. The unions should use theirs too.’63 But the TUC’s general secretary would have none of it. Addressing eight thousand demonstrators in Trafalgar Square before marching them off to besiege Fortress Wapping, Norman Willis snubbed the Gray’s Inn Road offer: ‘We put print workers before print works. Our priority has to be people not property.’64
When negotiations recommenced at the Hyde Park Hotel on 16 April both sides made new bids. News International offered a £15 million exgratia payment to its sacked employees. A forty-year-old printer who had been employed for twenty years on £24,000 per annum could expect a £10,000 payout. In return, Brenda Dean put forward TUC proposals in which News International would recognize a ‘National Joint Committee’ representing all union members (including the NGA and SOGAT) it would employ. This new body (and not the individual unions that comprised it) would have sole negotiating rights on pay and conditions and would recognize management’s right to determine staffing levels.65 Given the cold hostility of the first weeks of the strike, here at least were signs of movement from both sides. But there was now a more fundamental issue at stake: could the union negotiators deliver a deal that their members would accept? From Sydney, Murdoch wrote to Bruce Matthews, asking him to extend the deadline for acceptance of the Gray’s Inn Road plant and expressing his concern that ‘Brenda has lost control irretrievably.’66
There were plenty of signs that the moderates were not in control. On the night of 9 April, about 450 thugs attacked the TNT distribution depot at Byfleet in Surrey, hurling bricks and missiles, throwing nails in the way of the lorry tyres and smashing the windscreens of three lorries trying to deliver copies of The Times to the depot. A TNT manager was grabbed, punched and kicked. The police had to send for reinforcements and an adjacent garden wall collapsed. Two nights later, a further attack by balaclava-wearing individuals was launched upon a John Menzies distribution depot at Southend in Essex causing further damage. But it was not until 3 May – the ninety-seventh day of the dispute – that the worst violence erupted when a concerted attack was made to occupy and destroy the Wapping plant itself.
Two marches – one from the west, the other from the east – converged on the Wapping Highway where the police had barricaded the entrance to the site down into Virginia Street. Seven thousand protestors easily outnumbered the 1700 police blocking the entrance. The first charge on the police line at Virginia Street was ferocious. Coming under a hail of bricks, smoke bombs, bottles and sharpened railings, the police were pushed back as the mob surged forward, seized the barricades and pushed on towards the gates to the plant. Fearing the insurgents were on the verge of smashing their way in, the mounted police arrived just in time to push them back to the original line of defence. The police sustained heavy casualties as the volley of projectiles continued to rain down upon them and a detachment in riot gear was sent behind the assailants’ line to pull out from the crowd those throwing the missiles. But the ‘snatch squad’ approaching the mob from Wellclose Square was hopelessly outnumbered. It soon became clear that unless they were rescued quickly their lives would be in danger as the mob closed in upon them. The decision was taken to smash a way through the rioters’ lines in order to free the encircled policemen. A second charge by mounted police was ordered. ‘We gave no warnings of the charges because there was no time,’ the Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Wyn Jones, admitted, adding, ‘The officers in the square were in danger.’ The charge certainly smashed through some of the demonstrators who were not involved in the violent rampage and trun
cheons struck a BBC camera crew in the ensuing melee. One hundred and fifty demonstrators were injured in the mounted charges, but the endangered policemen were rescued and the assault on the plant repulsed back to the original defence line along the Wapping Highway. Of eighty-one arrested, twenty-five were print workers. The police that night suffered 175 injuries, some of them spending days in hospital. One WPC was badly burned by a smoke bomb that was thrown at her. Another was hit over the head with a concrete slab. From her hospital bed, she recalled, ‘I could hear women shouting “another Yvonne Fletcher. I hope she dies.”’67
Tony Benn, who had addressed the meeting before the riot began, proceeded to condemn what he described as a ‘massive police attack on perfectly innocent people’. In response, The Times leader column was puce with rage, demanding to know:
What would have happened if the police had not been present at Wapping on Saturday? No doubt the crowd would have invaded the plant, destroyed much of the equipment and physically attacked those working there. Many people would have been seriously injured and it is by no means improbable in the circumstances that several people would have been killed.68
One consequence was more positive. Brenda Dean, together with NGA representatives, met Scotland Yard’s Wyn Jones to discuss ways in which the demonstrations could be run and policed with less violence. Telephone contact was established between union officials and the police officer in charge. But it was little deterrent to the activists who nightly attached themselves to the printers’ cause. In the London area alone, twenty-nine separate groups organized money raising and support back-up for the pickets under an umbrella title, the ‘Union of Printworkers Support Groups’. The Socialist Workers’ Party helped to bring together the various groups who had supported the miners in their year-long struggle. There was also a ‘Policing Research and Monitoring Group’ in which the Communist Party member and Marxism Today contributor Cathie Lloyd was active in logging allegations of police brutality. The National Council for Civil Liberties was also quick to blame the law enforcers for the breakdown of order. The official statistics told a different story. By mid-May, there had been 851 arrests and 332 police officers injured. There had also been 296 incidents involving TNT vans, including ninety-two smashed windows and thirty-five drivers assaulted.69
Meanwhile, SOGAT had finally done a volte-face. On 8 May it purged its contempt of court by withdrawing its instruction to wholesalers to black all News International titles. Given the failure of the tactic, it was hardly a major concession, but it did unfreeze the union’s £17 million assets. Some felt the union had suffered enough and looked for a more equitable sharing of the hardship. ‘The NGA were sitting relatively pretty,’ Brenda Dean later asserted. ‘We were taking the great burden of the dispute although it was projected as the “print unions” dispute.’70 The Wapping management saw the strained relations between Dean and Dubbins as an opportunity, believing SOGAT’s leadership was far more open to agreeing a negotiated settlement than their NGA counterparts. The decision was taken to treat with them separately. Murdoch’s private Gulfstream jet secretly picked up Dean and her deputy, Bill Miles, and flew them, along with Bruce Matthews, to Los Angeles. From there they were taken to the Beverly Hills villa that Murdoch was renting from the James Bond actor, Roger Moore. It was hoped this would provide the right environment to conclude a deal that could then be presented as a fait accompli to the NGA leadership. Murdoch offered £50 million to his ex-employees.71 A deal appeared to be all but agreed. But Dean had to sell it to her members. This she singularly failed to do.
It was easy to understand Dean’s timidity. SOGAT’s London branches convened their four-thousand members at Westminster Central Hall on 19 May. They agreed a plan to intensify the siege. One branch official was cheered when he suggested setting fire to any ballot papers that excluded reinstatement to work at Wapping. In contrast, when Dean stood up to address her assembled warriors, she was met with a volley of abuse. Her speech was heckled throughout, particularly at those junctures where she counselled moderation and her open-minded attitude towards accepting the Gray’s Inn Road offer. It was not the time or place to admit she had been covertly dealing with the enemy while relaxing around Roger Moore’s swimming pool.
Dean’s failure to tell her members what had been discussed made matters difficult. Murdoch had set a 30 May deadline. On 26 May he flew in for talks with all the principal players (including Norman Willis of the TUC) at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel at Heathrow. As the discussions proceeded, Murdoch added the front part of the Sunday Times building to the Gray’s Inn Road offer. If new job opportunities became available at Wapping, the sacked print workers would be free to apply for them. But he rejected the unions’ idea of a national joint committee on the grounds that its arbitration procedures would not be legally binding. In any case, he questioned whether it would be acceptable to those currently working at Wapping. ‘Did they want to belong to the NGA?’ he asked, before adding that he doubted it. His £50 million redundancy offer was final: News International ‘was not a money fountain’. In seventeen years, its profits had amounted to about £200 million but capital expenditure had been £197 million. Time was short. The unions should accept. This was his final offer.72 He gave an equally uncompromising response to reporters later that day. He would not sacrifice those currently ‘doing a magnificent job’ at Wapping since ‘our loyalty is to the people who are working for us, not to the people who went on strike’. If the latter rejected his offer then so be it: ‘That’s it. I am catching the next plane home.’73
The union leaders put the package to a vote of their members well aware that Murdoch was not bluffing. Maintaining that the offer ‘fell short in every respect’ Dubbins recommended his NGA members reject it.74 In this he was in step with the mood of the union. Indeed, the belligerence at a meeting of eight hundred NGA members was so strongly against even holding a ballot that no one spoke up in favour of accepting the offer. Dean’s tactics were somewhat different. She made clear there was little likelihood of a better offer being made if her members voted no, but she did not risk the personal consequences of formally endorsing a yes vote. Even the procedure by which the ballot was held attracted suspicion and attempts at sabotage. No sooner had the voting papers gone out in the post than SOGAT activists launched a High Court injunction attempt to scrap the vote on the grounds that the papers were being sent out to individual members instead of the traditional procedure of being given to the chapel officers for distribution. The legal attempt failed but it would not have made much difference to the outcome. SOGAT members rejected the settlement by 2081 to 1415, the NGA by 648 to 165 and the smallest union involved, the AEU, by 112 to 56.
Dubbins greeted the news by making clear his union would ‘step up this dispute’. Murdoch’s reaction was to repeat that there would be no new offer. Gray’s Inn Road would now be sold commercially instead, the profits from its sale going into News International’s coffers rather than being put at the disposal of the TUC. There would be no new left-leaning newspaper, no jobs for the ex-print workers to take up in producing it. It was, in Bruce Matthews’s words, the unions’ ‘second suicide.’
In fact, there was a perfectly rational explanation for why the vote had gone against reaching an agreement: most of the ex-print workers had already gained employment elsewhere (SOGAT admitted that only a third of its affected members were still eligible for unemployment benefit).75 Thus they were in no rush to reach a deal. Rather, they would hold out indefinitely, tightening all the while the screw on the Wapping siege until Murdoch, in desperation, came back with a larger payout. To this prospect, Matthews warned, ‘if there is an escalation of violence, I think they will isolate themselves from every section of the community.’76
VI
On Monday 2 June – even before the results of the ballot had been announced – new and yet more thuggish tactics were being deployed to smash The Times and its Wapping stable mates. Instead of concentrating on trying to block the newsp
apers coming out, the pickets sought to prevent the journalists going in. For two hours between eight and ten o’clock in the morning, about three hundred demonstrators descended upon the plant, taking the twenty policemen by surprise and forcing the main gates to be locked. But the worst scenes were at the rear entrance. Staff turning up for work, including secretaries and other female employees, were punched and harangued. The pickets prevented those arriving by car from reversing by blocking the road behind them with scaffolding and rubble from a nearby building site and subjecting the trapped employees to a terrifying ordeal of intimidation and threatening behaviour.
Late that night, the assault took a yet more sinister path. A News International warehouse at Convoy’s Wharf in Deptford where newsprint was being stored was fire-bombed. Two men were seen scrambling over garage roofs and along a wall before making a getaway in a waiting car. Moments later, there was a huge explosion from the warehouse followed by an enormous sheet of flame. The result was the biggest fire in London since the Blitz. The tightly packed newsprint ignited, the steel frame buckled and the roof came crashing in. At one stage the heat was so intense that police feared it would crack the windows and set fire to curtains in a nearby housing estate. Throughout the night, a fireboat pumped 26,000 gallons of water from the Thames every three minutes into the inferno. Two days afterwards, the warehouse’s contents were still smouldering. Sifting through the charred remains, police discovered petrol can caps on the floor.
The following morning, Bruce Matthews’s secretary received a telephone call from an anonymous caller with some advice for her boss: ‘That was a well-organized job last night, wasn’t it? Tell him he’ll be the next to burn.’ Although News International offered a £50,000 reward for information leading to the culprits’ arrest and conviction, nobody was ever charged. Whoever were the culprits, what was not in doubt was that they had launched a deliberate attempt to destroy Wapping’s store of newsprint. In the event, almost 10,000 tons were destroyed, of which 20 per cent (two weeks’ supply) had been intended for Wapping. A lorry and trailers were also incinerated. In all, £7 million of damage was incurred.77
The History of the Times Page 39
