The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Yet, long before rugby union went professional, many of its leading players had discovered the opportunities to make money, even legitimately, from the sport without formally drawing an income. The Corinthian spirit in its truest form – where there was neither money nor even much personal fame to be won – was confined to popular fixtures of minority sports like the Boat Race. Between the wars, it was a measure of The Times’s perception of its core market that it gave about as much coverage to the annual tussle between the Oxford and Cambridge University crews as it did to any sporting occasion anywhere in the world. Although the paper’s priorities had broadened by the last twenty years of the century, the Boat Race’s very unusualness as a tough but amateur contest nonetheless continued to keep successive rowing correspondents, Jim Railton and Mike Rosewell, close to the tideway during February and March.

  In 1987, the Boat Race became front-page news. Some doubted that even it could retain gentlemanly values when, in the run up to the 133rd race, the Oxford boat was rocked by a mutiny. Five world-class American rowers, mainly imported to the university on short postgraduate courses, rebelled against Oxford’s fabled coach, Dan Topolski, and the boat club president, Donald Macdonald. The annual battle of the blues had long had an international flavour among its student oarsmen but some felt that the large number of high-quality foreign imports in recent years had undermined the essentially home-grown and undergraduate nature that gave the contest its charm.

  What was at stake was, in the words of The Times’s headline, ‘The great American disaster and the Great British institution’.46 Against this, there were countervailing considerations. If the race did not encourage rowers of the highest quality, it could be derided as an anachronism that was amateur in the pejorative sense of the word. One of the mutineers, the cox Jonathan Fish, wrote a column for The Times entitled ‘Ideas of the Boat Race just a myth’ that attempted to set out the Americans’ position: ‘The mystique of the Boat Race throughout the world is that it represents honesty, fairness and sportsmanship. However, our experiences with the present Oxford University Boat Club hierarchy have shown this not to be true.’ Topolski and Macdonald, Fisk suggested, were more interested in defending their own regime and traditions than selecting the fastest possible crew – the technically superior Americans. The build-up to the race, with claim and counter-claim, was exactly suited to The Times’s increasing interest in previewing contests. John Goodbody, a Cambridge man, found himself lurking around Oxford boathouses on the trail of Topolski, his former classmate at Westminster School. As it happened, the OUBC coach was not backward in coming forward and used The Times’s letters page to state his case and denounce the Boat Race’s critics.47 For everyone – except for the Americans and Cambridge – there was a fairy-tale ending to the saga. Come the great day, the Oxford boat, hastily cobbled together with volunteers from the Isis reserve, rowed to an improbable four-length victory. The events later inspired a film, True Blue. Quoting the vindicated Oxford president, David Miller wrote, ‘“The race is about big hearts, not big reputations.” That is the concept which the American experts seemingly could not, and can not, comprehend.’48

  At the Winter Olympics in Calgary the following February, Britons again demonstrated their preference for the amateur spirit when they applauded the ski jumping effort of Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards who came a convincing last. In such sports where the British had long given up serious hopes of beating the rest of the world, it was easy to understand why a mere enthusiast like Edwards could be taken to the public’s hearts. The national virility test of the Summer Olympics in September 1988 was a different matter entirely.

  After the Palestinian terrorism at Munich in 1972, the crippling cost of hosting the Games in Montreal in 1976 and the political boycotts that marred the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and Los Angeles four years later, it was not surprising that the choice of South Korea, struggling to emerge from repressive government and in a state of continual cold war with North Korea, had been controversial. Miller, however, was enthusiastic from the start, writing ‘The Koreans have the organization of the Germans, the courtesy and culture of the Orient and the sense of money of the Americans. They can hardly fail.’49 He was right. It proved to be the first Olympiad in twenty-four years to pass without violence or a major boycott. In this sense the Games were returning to de Coubertin’s idealistic notions of international comity. Yet, in another respect, it emphasized the extent to which fair play had given way to winning at all costs. Seoul proved to be the drugs Olympics. There was clearly something peculiar about the final tally in which East Germany won more gold medals than the United States. This proved to have less to do with State investment and the triumph of socialist man than – as was revealed following German reunification – the extent of the GDR’s State-sponsored drug programme. During the Olympics, though, it was the ‘greatest race of all time’, dominated by Canada’s Ben Johnson, that attracted the headlines.

  Crossing the line in 9.79 seconds, Johnson broke the 100 metres world record in imperious style. He was the fastest man in the world. It was suggested that he had set a record that might not be broken in fifty or a hundred years. While the stadium erupted in joy and salutation, John Goodbody made his way over to Simon Barnes and stated incredulously, ‘I don’t know about anabolic steroids but that guy is on rocket fuel.’ Waiting for Johnson to face the press, Goodbody was seen mimicking to Barnes the action of a man injecting himself.50 Although such suspicions were commonly expressed within journalistic circles they could not, of course, be printed in the newspaper and Johnson’s amazing feat won ovations across the world. Two days later the results of his failed drugs test were revealed. The story broke with impeccably difficult timing. It was almost 7 p.m. in Wapping and Tom Clarke had less than half an hour left before his section deadline. He telephoned Goodbody who was fast asleep in the Seoul Olympic media village (it was four in the morning there), rallying him with the cry ‘this is mustard!’. Goodbody immediately swung into action, got confirmation that the wire report on Johnson was true and, within an hour, had filed a report down the telephone that was plastered across the front page. The only interruption to Goodbody’s attempt to file had come from Wilson, who, hovering like an excited schoolboy at the copy taker’s shoulder, grabbed the receiver and bellowed down the line in broad Glaswegian, ‘It’s all yer fault, Goodbody, you invented anabolic steroids!’

  Goodbody had been at the journalistic forefront of exposing the extent to which there was a lucrative trade in performance-enhancing drugs. His articles were part of a campaign to force legislation making illegal possession of non-prescription steroids, a contribution that was recognized by the British Sports Journalism awards. There had been a long history of horse-doping scandals, steroids in weightlifting and stimulants in cycling, but sports’ authorities had been slow to wake up to what was going on in other disciplines, especially athletics. In May 1987, David Jenkins, the 1972 Olympic silver medallist, had gone on trial for running a lucrative anabolic steroid-smuggling operation and at the world athletics championships, the American sprinter Carl Lewis had made allegations against unspecified opponents. Goodbody’s articles followed. That the debate was still in its infancy was clear when the paper also published an article by Dr Richard Nicholson that recited evidence that the steroids’ medical side effects had been overemphasized – a position that in turn drew a furious rebuke from Ron Pickering in the sport section’s ‘End Column’.51 Despite the warnings of Goodbody, Pickering and others, it was Ben Johnson’s seventy-two-hour metamorphosis from international hero to global villain that made drugs the central issue in athletics. With Johnson’s disqualification, Carl Lewis was moved up into gold position and Britain’s Linford Christie into silver. Subsequent drug test revelations would eventually create suspicion about even their achievements. The day after Johnson’s race, Florence Griffith-Joyner, the American sprinter celebrated around the world as ‘Flo-Jo’, won the women’s 100 metres and on 28 September, while the shock
waves of Johnson’s shame were still reverberating, she set a world record in the 200 metres that also looked impregnable to future generations. The Times did not feel at liberty to circulate the rumours that these triumphs were also drugs-assisted. The paper was not so reticent when she died from a heart attack in 1998 aged thirty-eight, the obituary quoting an opinion that the glamorous runner was ‘a drug addled hermaphrodite’.52 She had retired, hurriedly, from athletics the year after her 1988 triumphs, aged twenty-nine, on the eve of mandatory random drugs testing – one of the Seoul’s major legacies.

  The increasingly professional attitude adopted by athletes put winning above other considerations. The drug-fuelled means by which a few of them pursued this goal had the tarnishing effect of putting winners under a cloud of suspicion. It was an extraordinary turnaround. Generations of schoolmasters had upheld the cause of sport because they believed it built character. As Simon Barnes articulated only too clearly, it was also a means of revealing character. Nothing, though, could alter the fundamental human drama of competition. ‘The Olympic Games, like all sporting events, are about disappointment,’ Barnes wrote when it was time to pack up and leave the Olympic village. ‘Every race has more losers than winners, but for winners, there is the strange, unearthly disappointment of victory. To have your dream come true must be the most frightening and disillusioning experience of them all.’53

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  STURM UND DRANG

  Poor Morale; Robert Fisk Departs; New Faces;

  Thatcher on the Ropes; the Collapse of Communism;

  Something for the weekend; Sent to Siberia

  I

  There was something distinctly odd about the old rum warehouse in which The Times’s journalists daily got down to work. Producing a journal that purported to illuminate the ways of the world from a building that had almost no windows was a metaphor worthy of Kafka. After January 1987, the baying hordes outside, shouting abuse and hurling iron railings, had packed off and gone. But the sense of being under siege was not lifted with their departure.

  Wapping was home to at least three editors whose reputations for brilliance and brusqueness extended far beyond their offices. In the floors above the giant printing hall, Kelvin MacKenzie appeared to be a law unto himself at the Sun, the most iconic, trailblazing and incorrigible of any British newspaper in the 1980s. Strong-willed and abrasive Scotsmen ruled the roost at either end of the long rum warehouse. At its west end was the office of the Sunday Times’s editor, Andrew Neil. A cordon sanitaire of boilers, pipes and humming power generators separated his domain from that of his compatriot, Charles Wilson, at the east end where The Times was based. Life in these quarters was difficult. Times journalists felt as if they were toiling on board an unusually elongated hunter-killer submarine patrolled by a gifted but periodically tyrannical captain. At the far end – where the design team, features, sport and business writers were located – there was at least some legroom. However, the closer operations got to Wilson’s command post, the more claustrophobic it became. Journalists sat alongside the foreign desk monitoring incoming wire reports and information traffic. A galley of subs separated them from the keyboard-pounding reporters on the home news desk. The advantage of this cheek-by-jowl existence was that there was nowhere to hide – the crew members were always visible and usually within hollering or shoulder-tapping distance. This benefited subs wanting to check changes to stories with their authors. For a hands-on commander like Wilson, it was particularly useful. A mezzanine level had been slotted within the rafters. This doubled as the captain’s bridge. From it, Wilson could stand and harangue the ratings stretched out below as far as the eye could see. Those who clambered up to his berth soon discovered that he too was a stranger to comfort. Such was the makeshift nature that the staff lavatories had been erected adjacent to Wilson’s wardroom. Potential eavesdroppers were deterred by his periodic habit of giving an almighty kick to the Gents’ door as he passed. Those who did squeeze into his personal cabin discovered just how cramped were the conditions from which he charted the paper’s course. Its low ceiling was liable to spring a leak whenever there was a heavy downpour. Those most committed to the submarine analogy found this particularly unsettling.

  It was not an environment conducive to high morale. Wilson was under tremendous pressure and was well aware that his most able staff members were subject to relentless targeting by the Independent to jump ship. Some of the most prized names succumbed. Never had the competition been so intense. What especially alarmed Wilson was when a journalist who was no stranger to hardship and did not even have to work from Wapping decided that he too had had enough. Robert Fisk was The Times’s most famous serving reporter. The editor treated his decision to quit as a shattering blow.

  Wilson liked Fisk because he admired his courage and professionalism. Politically, the two men had little in common. Fisk had made his reputation at The Times during the 1970s when he had been a thorn in the side of the British Army in Ulster. When he shifted his reporting to the Middle East in 1976, the Israeli forces and government came to loathe him no less. To many of Israel’s sympathizers in Britain he was a hated figure and accusations of anti-Semitism (which he furiously rejected) were frequently levelled at him and The Times for indulging his passions. Yet, he had not regarded Murdoch’s purchase of the paper with quite the same foreboding as had some left-leaning journalists. Frequently, he had risked his life to bring out stories from the world’s most dangerous region only to discover that the unions had called a strike and the paper had not come out. Four years into News International’s ownership, Fisk was still happy to state that Murdoch could have cloven hoofs for all he cared – at least he brought out the newspaper.1 It was easy to understand why he was sanguine. With Douglas-Home in the editor’s chair, he knew he had a protector who would defend his right to report events in the Middle East as he saw them. ‘While Douglas-Home was there, there was no problem, you could write what you liked about the Israelis,’ Fisk recalled.2 He began, however, to sense that Douglas-Home’s successor was uneasy about some of the stories he wished to pursue. Wilson looked to balance Fisk’s dispatches with columnists who were sympathetic to Israel’s case. This should not have been a problem. Fisk, however, took particular exception to what he saw as a personal slur when a columnist was allowed to state that journalists working from West Beirut could not report fairly because they were too scared or embedded with the Muslim militias. A collision course had been set.

  The divergence between what The Times was saying on its leader page and what its Middle East correspondent was reporting on its front page became increasingly apparent. In April 1986, US warplanes flying from British bases attempted to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in Tripoli. Instead, they killed around a hundred others including the Libyan leader’s adopted daughter. Fisk was there to record the scene of devastation. The leading article, however, defended the raid. Such was the extent of complaints from readers at this line of argument that the paper was forced to write another leader that conceded ‘a newspaper which finds itself in marked disagreement with the opinions of its readers must seriously address their concerns if it is to have any hope of influencing them’.3 Having originally believed that the paper’s editorial line was no business of his so long as he was left to report events as he saw fit, Fisk increasingly felt annoyed and perhaps even snubbed by the tone taken on surrounding pages.4

  Like Douglas-Home before him, Wilson recognized Fisk as a courageous man, prepared to risk his life daily for his profession. Wilson admired toughness. In 1984 he had even gone out to visit him in Beirut. There, he was introduced to Fisk’s close friend Terry Anderson, the bureau chief of the Associated Press news agency. Keen to talk to Israeli troops in order to get their point of view, Wilson travelled with Fisk to southern Lebanon. It proved a mistake. One Israeli lieutenant left Wilson in no doubt about his views when he promptly had him arrested. Giving the command ‘get these bastards out of here’, the officer had the two distinguished
Times journalists put under armed guard and sent back to Beirut. When they reached the capital it was to discover there had been another suicide bomb attack on the (new) American Embassy.

  Filing copy from the Lebanon to London was a particularly frustrating part of Fisk’s job. The era of the mobile phone had not arrived and getting through on a landline was a process that could take many hours if achieved at all. Instead, late afternoons and early evenings were spent up in the AP bureau, huddled over a stuttering telex machine whose staccato click-click-clicking replicated the outbursts of rapid machine-gun fire in the streets outside. The AP wire was an old machine using Second World War technology that worked with codes punched out on tape. Whenever the electricity cut out before the complete coding had gone through to London, the whole process would have to be repeated, the tape stuck back together and pushed through the machine with a new code added while Fisk prayed for the requisite twenty minutes of uninterrupted electricity supply. Such orisons were frequently offered up in vain and filing reports that ran to several pages could take hours. There would then be the anxious wait before a telex would come back stating all the pages had been received and understood.