The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  In the areas of home, foreign, business and sports news, direct comparisons can be attempted between what The Times was providing at different stages of its development. Much of the dumbing down debate, however, involves subject matter that was given far less priority prior to 1981. This was a response to interconnected social, economic and cultural changes. The consumer choices available in the free-market sector of 1990s Britain far exceeded the more limited (and even State-rationed) choice of the post-war high street. This was not just a matter of supermarkets offering ten different varieties of stuffed olive where once there had been none. The number of books published had soared. Deregulation policies and advances in cable, satellite and digital technology broadened the television, radio, computer and internet options in homes across the country. Knowledge and appreciation of wine was no longer confined to the privileged or to aficionados. The quality of restaurants and interest in cooking grew exponentially. Cheaper air travel and the growth of the tourist industry brought travel to exotic or luxurious locations within the budget of young people where once it had been the preserve of the rich or reckless. A profusion of unit trusts and investment options was on offer to those with even relatively modest savings. The Times would have been involved not only in commercial suicide but also in a dereliction of duty if it had not broadened its coverage in all these areas. But for those who regarded any journalism not engaged in the reporting of serious news as a dumbing down exercise, there was much to condemn in the resulting proliferation of pages and supplements that guided Times readers through the bewildering array of consumer choices. Doubtless some who wanted to keep the pleasures of Positano to themselves shivered at the thought of a newspaper article directing hordes of new Times readers to the delights of the Amalfi coast. On this logic, the more information the paper provided, the less exclusive it became.

  The Times in the post-war period had not disdainfully turned its back on consumerism. It happily printed small estate agent advertisements for houses in Surrey, garage salesrooms, stockbroking firms or holiday offers of bed and board in Torquay. This was not considered to be pandering to tawdry tastes. Yet, when the paper expanded the column inches it gave to seriously discussing the property market, assessing the performance of a new range of cars or pension plans, or reporting from an exotic holiday location, so arose the accusations of going downmarket and indulging in the worst excesses of ‘lifestyle’ journalism. This was particularly galling considering how knowledgeable and refined in taste were so many of the journalists involved. The restaurant critic, Jonathan Meades, went in search of high standards of cuisine, not fast food. The wine critic, Jane MacQuitty, did not overindulge on supermarket plonk. Anne Ashworth did not cater, primarily, for those with a poor credit rating.

  Saturdays became the day in which most of these ‘lifestyle’ articles appeared. As the 1990s commenced, the increasing availability of colour printing meant that magazine supplements could be produced that rivalled what had once been the virtual monopoly of the Sunday Times whose colour magazine had famously revolutionized weekend journalism back in 1962. Bigger and glossier, The Times on Saturday mimicked many of the attributes that had made the Sunday Times the country’s market leader. Some readers, indeed, appeared to be under the misconception that the Sunday Times was The Times on Sunday although The Times never quite found the formula to attract the scale of readership amassed by the other News International-owned broadsheet. Nonetheless, by the early 1990s, The Times was among the broadsheets whose combined Saturday market had surged 18 per cent higher than their weekday sales. In February 1997, the Saturday broadsheet market finally overtook the Sunday market. The Times played its part in this process. By 1995, it was selling almost a fifth more copies than during weekdays. It had long been a tough assignment for one man to edit a six-day newspaper, especially when, by the mid-nineties, the Saturday paper had expanded to eight sections. Consequently, the Saturday paper had its own editor and in the latter half of the decade Nicholas Wapshott directed the operation. Wapshott had joined The Times in 1976 and, after a spell as the Observer’s political editor, had taken charge of the new-look Saturday Times Magazine in 1992. Under his command, the Saturday paper continued to broaden its range. Not all the accusations of dumbing down were mistaken. In the main news section, there was, on average, less hard political news. This was partly a response to what was considered to be the different demands of the weekend readership. It was also a reflection of the minimal parliamentary and political business conducted on Fridays. The colourful and breezy style of Play, an arts and entertainment magazine started in September 2000, did not suit lengthy or serious review articles. At the same time, cost-cutting measures in the wake of the collapse of the advertising market diminished what could be offered elsewhere in the paper and many readers found themselves denied the sort of serious literary and artistic review section that rival newspapers were offering on Saturdays. It was a deficiency put right when, in 2004, Play’s stop button was pressed and the more upmarket Weekend Review launched.

  The Times on Saturdays was much more successful at attracting women readers than during the week. When Robert Thomson succeeded Peter Stothard, the paper’s male-to-female readership ratio was still around 60:40 but on Saturdays it was heading towards sexual equality. In particular, the glossy full-colour Times Magazine proved the right medium for fashion and beauty photography and journalism. During the week, the paper had long attempted – not always successfully – to entice more female readers by producing feature pages perceived to be of interest to them. Like The Times, the Daily Mail had made enormous circulation gains in the second half of the 1990s and this achievement was, in part, attributed to the strenuous efforts it had made to appeal to female readers. There were lessons to be learned from this and, with Sandra Parsons in charge, The Times’s new features T2 tabloid section was started in 2000 amid hopes of similar success. It got off to an uncertain start but by the time the whole paper had followed it down a tabloid path, it was competing favourably with the opposition. In an age when instant news was available from so many other media providers, Parsons’s pages were a principal reason for customers continuing to pay the cover price for The Times. They helped give the paper its distinctive flavour. Features were no longer an afterthought. They had become an essential ingredient.

  To those of a certain age and sex, the dumbing down and the feminization of The Times were one and the same. Female-orientated features were often of the ‘human interest’ variety and might involve ruminations on such intangible and abstract subject matter as emotions and relationships rather than hard facts and world politics. Whether putting a picture of a pretty actress on the front page appealed more to male or female readers was a moot point. At any rate, as Peter Stothard once reminded Jonathan Mirsky when he complained about the pro-glamour picture priority, the boost in sales generated by having a famous catwalk model smiling out from the front page was what helped to pay the expense of keeping the eminent China scholar as the paper’s correspondent in Hong Kong.11 A newspaper that daily repeated the same images of pensive politicians entering and leaving front doors might also be accused of failing to provide a balanced view of the state of mankind. The Times could certainly be accused of getting the balance wrong and the increasing use of page three for ‘soft news’ stories ahead of more solemn events was a case in point. Likewise, some argued (not altogether convincingly) that there was a place for reports from Paris Fashion Week, but it was not in the main news section of the paper. These were not new developments, however. Before Rupert Murdoch bought The Times, page three had not been the place for hard news but for full-page advertisements and fashion spreads appeared cheek by jowl with overseas news. Indeed, some of the old paper’s layout priorities were far less explicable than the blurring of hard and soft news in the 1990s. Sport used to appear in the middle of the paper. Thus, the earnest reader had to flick past several pages devoted to ballgames before reaching the leading articles and weightier analysis. It was not unt
il 1981, when Harold Evans sensibly reordered the contents, that the action from Anfield and Aintree was moved to the back pages.

  The extent to which The Times was ‘feminized’ during the 1990s could be hotly contested. Covering everything from militant feminism (which was poorly catered for) to pedicure and manicure advice, the term was as imprecise as an observation that the paper in the 1930s was heavily masculine. Back in that period, the business pages were almost inescapably written by men for men. By 2002, society’s stratification was less clearly delineated. There was no longer anything especially male orientated about a company report. Instead, a more worthwhile judgment on how The Times had become less male orientated can be made not so much by categorizing the content as by those who produced and commissioned it. In 1981, women represented a small minority of The Times’s complement of senior journalists. Some of them had built high reputations, like Geraldine Norman, who was fearless in exposing corruption and poor practice in the salesroom world. They were at the helm, though, of only three principal departments – fashion, features and Court & Social. By 2002, the position was transformed. The business pages were edited by Patience Wheatcroft, T2 was edited by Sandra Parsons, Bronwen Maddox was foreign editor, Anne Ashworth edited the money section, Rosemary Righter was bowing out after many years as chief leader writer, Erica Wagner was literary editor, Cath Urquhart was travel editor, Lisa Armstrong presided over fashion and Brigid Callaghan edited the internet edition, Times Online. Alice Miles and Mary Ann Sieghart influenced the paper’s politics and, alongside Libby Purves, were regular columnists. For the most part, this blow for equality made little difference to the finished product: there was nothing definitively feminine about a Wheatcroft business page or the thunder rumbling from a Righter leading article.

  Indeed, if articles could be easily divided according to their gender appeal, the 1990s was also the decade in which sports coverage – which had a far higher male readership – increased by more than 70 per cent. Even this statistic needed qualification. During the decade, the paper turned increasingly to women sports journalists, several of whom became major columnists. Nonetheless, most of the sporting subject matter retained an overwhelmingly male following. Richard Williams believed ‘the single most noticeable factor’ in the history of broadsheet newspapers over the past twenty years was the growth of their sports coverage.12 Football saw the biggest growth with The Times following in the wake of its proprietor’s identification of soccer coverage as a lucrative growth market. Besides the daily reports, a popular development commenced in 2000 with the publication of monthly football handbooks to accompany the league season. These were soon supplemented with similar productions for rugby union’s Six Nations championship, the Ashes and Formula One. There was hardly a sport whose coverage was not substantially improved by the end of the century when compared to ten, let alone twenty, years earlier. In 1984, The Times’s coverage of the Los Angeles Olympics rarely exceeded one page a day. By the time of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, there was, on top of all the usual number of sports pages, a daily twelve-page supplement of Olympic reports. For the many Times readers who had no interest in sport, this expansion looked excessive. This was not, in itself, a reason for cutting back. After all, a large proportion of readers had no interest in what was contained within the business section, although this was hardly an argument for restricting its development. The notion that the expanding coverage accorded to sport was a sign of the paper dumbing down was difficult to sustain, given that the growth of the second section was not at the expense of the main news and comment section. Only when sport intruded into the main section for no better reason than that its practitioners had become well-known celebrities could the charge be made that the overall effect was not an improvement in the depth and reach of the newspaper.

  II

  A history of The Times in the last years of the twentieth century naturally seeks to discern the principal changes and developments. However, the paper’s continuing appeal has not been determined purely by its zeal for experimentation. The great trend of the Murdoch years has not so much been The Times’s dumbing down or wising up, but rather the enduring strength of old staples. In this respect, the letters and obituary pages lead the field. Even those who believed The Times had lost its former authority continued to hold its letters page in esteem. Its autonomous spirit, not least as a forum for dissent against the paper’s editorial line, was what Roy Jenkins assured Peter Stothard ‘has led some of us to remain faithful to The Times even when less enthusiastic about other aspects of the paper’.13

  The irony was that the most famous page in The Times was the one not actually written by its journalists. It was the task of Leon Pilpel in the 1980s and Ivan Barnes in the 1990s to sift through 250 to 300 letters a day (and between 60,000 to 70,000 a year) in order to find the sixteen or so that would make it into the newspaper. Periodically, the letters’ editor would be deluged. Barnes had to struggle with a thousand letters a day arriving on his desk during the Gulf War. Improvements in communications technology also increased the volume of literary traffic. The first letter sent by email was published in 1997 and by 2002 the volume of emails necessitated a new secondary ‘debate’ section where they could be published in ‘The Register’. Three assistants and three secretaries provided the letters’ editor with help and every missive, no matter how barmy, received an acknowledgement. Pilpel would arrive early and read through the entire first post before his assistants arrived, putting to one side those he thought had potential. He had a straightforward criterion for acceptance: ‘It should reflect the intelligent after-dinner conversation that you would expect to find among educated folk,’ adding ‘with the occasional off-beat subject thrown in.’ Over the decades, while the art of letter writing declined in Britain, the proportion of those suitable for publication in The Times remained constant. Pilpel considered that of an average daily postbag, about 8 per cent were usually publishable.14

  Pilpel was a former Guards officer and graduate of Trinity College Dublin who had joined The Times in 1953 as a subeditor on the home news desk before taking over responsibility for the letters page in 1980. As Brian MacArthur put it, he may have been a largely anonymous journalist to the reading public but he had the power to ‘gainsay the mighty or uplift the unknown, start or end national controversies, or solve some of the diverting mysteries and riddles of British life such as why so few ingredients of British salads are grown in Britain’. His subediting skills were important since many letters benefited from being cut down to size. Unlike the Daily Telegraph and the Independent, The Times did not solicit letters, a practice Pilpel regarded as ‘bogus’.15 Exclusivity was also a prerequisite. No letter would be published that was being simultaneously offered to another newspaper. Occasionally, Pilpel would spot a letter he had rejected for publication appearing a few days later in the Telegraph. Letters containing personal abuse or vicious invective were also not considered for publication nor were those making specific charges against the royal family since royalty, by convention, could not reply. There were, of course, ways of getting round restrictions. In July 1986 the Sunday Times published allegations that a rift had developed between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher. At contention was supposedly the Queen’s fear that her Prime Minister’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa risked breaking up the Commonwealth. The Queen was also said to be at odds with the more strident aspects of Thatcherism’s domestic agenda. Predictably, an almighty row ensued. The principal source for the allegations was Michael Shea, the Queen’s press secretary. His defensive assertion that his observations had been misconstrued led two of Times Newspapers’ directors – Lords Drogheda and Dacre – to join the calls for Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times, to be sacked. Buckingham Palace took the unusual step of rebutting the Sunday Times’s claims in the letters page of The Times. William Heseltine, the Queen’s private secretary (it was assumed with her approval), wrote at length, making clear that it was ‘preposterous to suggest th
at any member of the Queen’s Household, even supposing that he or she knew what her Majesty’s opinions on Government policy might be (and the Press Secretary certainly does not), would reveal them to the Press.’ The next day, Neil replied at even greater length, denying that the article had gone beyond what Shea had originally intimated. The damage had been done, Neil asserted, because individuals at the Palace ‘were playing with fire and did not have the wit to blow it out before it burned them’.16 Shea stepped down from his post the following year. Neil lasted another seven.

  Despite its designation, the famous 1981 letter from 364 economists denouncing Mrs Thatcher’s monetarist polices was, in fact, never published on the letters page. Its contents appeared in articles on the news and business pages instead. This was an exception. Topicality dictated that some letters had to be used immediately in the next day’s edition. Others were held back while a larger correspondence accumulated so that the best could then be grouped together to create a debate. There was never any danger of a shortage although a section heading, ‘Enigma of the Liberal Vote’, remained for many years on standby to cover all eventualities. Recurring themes over the years represented the preoccupations of many Times readers – cuts in university and research funding, student debt, the state of Britain’s railways and her relations with her European partners. There was also the phenomenon of the recurring letter writer. One of these was Vice-Admiral Louis le Bailly whose contributions on an impressive breadth of interests frequently found their way onto the page. Another was Henry Button – a particular mine of information on Oxbridge ephemera. The publication of an academic league table would almost invariably bring forth another Button missive establishing different criteria such as Cambridge’s propensity to have more of its chancellors executed than Oxford’s (the margin, apparently, was seven to one) or that William Henry Waddington, who rowed for Cambridge in the 1848 Boat Race, was Prime Minister of France from February to December in 1879.17 Errors in the newspaper provided opportunities for the sharp-eyed, the knowledgeable and the pedant. Articles that claimed something was the ‘first’ or someone the ‘oldest’ all but incited letters that pointed out earlier and older examples. For those interested in the arcana of knowledge, The Times letters’ page provided essential reading matter. There was, for example, a lengthy correspondence on the development and demise of the water-powered organ.18 A 1981 Diary column about the forthcoming final reunion of veterans of the Boer War led to a particularly sprightly letter from a Mr A. D. Bowers, born in 1882, who announced he was the only veteran who fought ‘practically naked, butt end and bayonet’ in the last major engagement of the war, the Battle of Tweefontein. ‘I have been to most of the reunions since 1901,’ he added helpfully.19 Replying to a leading article decrying the decline of classical language teaching in schools, Frances Morrell, the leader of the Inner London Education Authority, submitted a three-paragraph letter in Latin. It duly appeared as sent. With a little help from the resident classicist, Philip Howard, The Times was able to provide an explanation for non-comprehending readers on the home news pages. At any rate, ‘Carolo Wilsoni salutem’ provided a welcome change to that usually proffered to the editor.20