The Plan to Outwit the Print Unions
In the ten years to January 1986, strikes and stoppages plagued Murdoch’s News International. During the period, industrial action prevented 296 million copies of the Sun and 38 million copies of the News of the World from rolling off the presses. One hundred and four million copies of the Sunday Times had been lost over the past decade. The Times had lost 96.5 million copies.
Financially, losing a day’s distribution represented an immediate shortfall of £71,000 to The Times, £362,000 to the Sunday Times, £470,000 to the Sun and £777,000 to the News of the World.1 But this was only a fragment of the total cost. Trade union activists were able to damage News International without actually taking a full day out on strike. Go-slows, refusal to work specific shifts and deliberate tampering with the printing presses ensured that, although the paper was eventually printed, it was released too late to catch the correct trains and ended up being dumped, unsold. The resulting erratic distribution created uncertainty among readers and advertisers alike. It encouraged the latter to turn to alternative and more reliable media in which to reach their audience. While mindful of Kipling’s adage ‘that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane’, management frequently found it easier to give in to whatever the demand of the moment concerned rather than face an even more costly loss of production.
The 1970s had proved a disastrous decade in the industrial annals of Fleet Street. The eleven-month suspension of The Times was one that merely typified the events of the period. When Murdoch bought the paper in 1981 optimists hoped for a brighter future: the availability of labour-saving technology, a Conservative Government hostile to trade union militancy and the spectre of high unemployment that greeted those who risked their jobs were all indicators that pointed towards management being able to regain the initiative. Yet, the practice proved different from the theory. None of these factors made an appreciable whit of difference to the number of strikes that crippled Fleet Street production.
The one saving grace for executives at Gray’s Inn Road was that competitors were equally disabled by union action. In order to cope with the increased demand created by the 1978–79 shutdown of The Times, management at the Daily Telegraph had added an extra press in their machine room. When The Times was revived, sales of the Telegraph fell back accordingly, making the extra press redundant. But when in November 1982 management finally summoned the courage to remove the press, the SOGAT chapel begged to differ and responded by shutting down the paper for ten days. The dispute cost the Telegraph £1.5 million in lost copies alone.2 The Financial Times suffered an even more devastating blow when its print workers struck in May 1983, closing the paper for ten weeks because the rival NGA and SOGAT shop stewards could not agree the pay differentials between their members (the NGA demanded a reduction in the number of hours worked and a simultaneous pay rise of 24 per cent).3 These were not isolated incidents. In the twelve months between July 1984 and July 1985, the national dailies lost more than 85 million copies due to industrial action. In the calendar year for 1985, the figure was nearly 100 million.4
The Daily Telegraph dispute exemplified the extent to which production had been subcontracted to the unions. It was the shop stewards (chapel fathers), rather than management, who determined which casual shift workers were employed and with what frequency. Consequently, production staff were primarily dependent upon the patronage of their chapel fathers for their terms and conditions rather than enjoying any direct relationship with their employers. In this protective environment, the print unions had certainly been able to deliver material benefits for their members. The average wage in 1985 for Fleet Street production workers was around £18,000 a year. This compared with a Times journalist’s basic salary of £15,050. But at the highest level – such as the Linotype operators (who were still forced upon most national papers), wages in the region of £40,000 per annum could be earned. A few claimed even more. Compositors had developed such a complex pay scale, known as the ‘Scale of Prices’, that different rates were demanded according not only to the quantity of text typed but even to the point size of the type used. There was even a going rate for creating lines of blank text. And there were additional charges for making corrections, a situation which was an open inducement to make errors in the first place.5
That many of those printing The Times were earning more than those writing it certainly caused some ill feeling on the part of journalists struggling to meet mortgage payments and the other burdens of middle-class expectation. There was little social intercourse between the two groups. Times journalists did not trespass into the areas where their paper was printed and rarely had more than second-hand accounts of what went on under their feet in Gray’s Inn Road. Peter Stothard visited the machine room floor only once: ‘I was greeted by grown men pretending to be monkeys in a zoo,’ he recalled. ‘I did not go back. Many managers, I discovered, had rarely entered the alien territory which they were vainly charged to control.’6 It was hard to see how management could reassert authority without taking measures that would ensure a mass walkout, the shutdown of the presses and another loss of consumer confidence in the newspaper.
The ten-week dispute at the FT had been instructive. The paper’s management had considered various options to circumvent its union members’ stranglehold. The possibility of using the T. Bailey Forman plant in Nottingham (where Christopher Pole-Carew used a non-union workforce) was considered but this still left the unions able to block distribution. In the end, the management concluded it would be best just to concede defeat as the easiest way to curtail a dispute that had already cost them in excess of £6 million.7 Like Times Newspapers in 1978–9, the FT management had tried to take a stand – and lost. Without reliable (non-striking) distributors as well as a permanent alternative print centre manned by non-NGA-, non-SOGAT-trained staff, they could not escape the vice-like grip of the Fleet Street unions. During 1985, Rupert Murdoch set about assembling the assets that would free him from constraint. With them, the aspiration to break free from the torment of working with the print unions began to look dimly, vaguely, but tantalizingly possible. An idea that started with the intention of liberating his tabloids developed to include The Times. As for the unions, they had no idea what was about to hit them.
In the late 1970s, London’s ‘Docklands’ – the stretch along the River Thames from Tower Bridge out past the promontory of the Isle of Dogs – was at the nadir of its existence. During the nineteenth century the area had been the world’s busiest commercial waterway. Nor was this hive of activity dispersed when masts were replaced by funnels or by the flattening of the area by German bombs during the Blitz. Indeed, the Port of London achieved its maximum volume of trade in the early 1960s. But from then on, its decline was dramatic. The development of far larger vessels and container terminals to greet them ensured Tilbury and beyond became a more suitable entrepôt for international cargo and raw materials. More than 150,000 jobs were lost within a decade. London Docks closed in 1969. In an act of finality, its mighty basin was filled in.
During the 1980s, the desolate Docklands were given a new lease of life. Silted-up waterways were cleared and the grime was cleaned from Victorian warehouses that, converted into apartments, gave new ‘young upwardly mobile’ professionals (‘yuppies’) the faint notion of living in palazzi by the Thames. The Thatcher Government, and in particular the Environment Minister, Michael Heseltine, encouraged development in what was designated as an ‘Enterprise Zone’. Construction began on the Docklands Light Railway and towards the end of the decade the first of a series of giant towers went up at Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs offering a massive increase in available office space. In time, much of Fleet Street and the City of London would relocate there.
This renaissance of the late 1980s was still but a dim prospect when, in 1977, Bert Hardy, then chief executive at News Group Newspapers, persuaded Murdoch to acquire an eleven-acre site where the old London Docks had stood at Wapping, east of Tower Bridge. The logic was simple. The cramped and outdated machine room at Bouverie Street (where the Sun and the News of the World were printed) had reached capacity. Merely rebuilding it would not overcome the limitations of the site, which would yield far more if sold as a land redevelopment opportunity so near to the City. Although the journalists and compositors would stay at Bouverie Street (at least until a final sell-off of their part of the site), the printing of the Sun and the News of the World would be moved away to the new more spacious brownfield location of Wapping. There the land was cheap by comparison and lorries would not have to negotiate the narrow and congested streets of the old site off Fleet Street. Wapping was Bert Hardy’s brainchild and building work began in 1979. Upon acquiring The Times two years later, Murdoch truthfully reassured its nervous employees that he had no intention of moving them from Gray’s Inn Road to what many of them considered to be the uncharted wasteland of East London. The Wapping plant was being fitted out for tabloid-only production.
Building the great print hall at Wapping necessitated the destruction of five historic warehouses that had been built in 1805. Had the application come any later in the twentieth century, the growing heritage lobby – pointing to the successful conversion of other warehouses – might have succeeded in blocking the destruction. But Labour was still in power when the application was made. The real-estate aspirations of yuppies were not uppermost in the party’s mind and the dilapidated warehouses appeared merely to be grim reminders of the sort of exploitative toil that had given dockers a hereditary grievance against their employers. What was more, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Peter Shore, was the local MP. He was keen to see new jobs created in a constituency that, with the closure of the docks, desperately needed to attract fresh sources of employment. So the go-ahead was given and the five monuments to top-hatted Victorian capitalism were hit by the demolition ball. It was a decision many Labour politicians would live to regret – and not for aesthetic reasons.
The print hall that rose on the site could lay a reasonable claim to being one of the most ugly superstructures in London. A charmless box penetrated by a giant concrete ramp, its architects appeared to have an aversion to the art of simple fenestration. Resembling a giant incinerator, it was too utilitarian even to deserve membership of the ‘Brutalist’ school of design whose concrete monstrosities were at that time finally destroying the public’s strained patience with modern architecture. But it was a print hall, nothing more and nothing less, with little thought given to the eventual possibility of relocating journalists there. The building was ready for use in 1984. It had cost £72 million. All that was needed was to get the trade unions to agree to work in it.
Whatever the building’s lack of exterior decoration, on the inside it was an industrial marvel. The print hall was state of the art. Vast, like the loading bay of an aircraft carrier, it was also clean and air-conditioned. It was a world away from the Dickensian conditions and Heath Robinson contraptions familiar to Gray’s Inn Road or (worse) Bouverie Street. The printing units were bought new as the last in a line of Goss Mark I Headliner letterpress machines, a design that was a decade old but of proven quality and durability. Health and safety issues that had been a justifiable area of complaint in Bouverie Street had been addressed and management hoped the new working environment would meet with the approval of the union chapel fathers. As a softening-up episode, an aeroplane was chartered to fly them out to view a similar printing plant in operation in Finland (the original plan was for them to visit print works in Germany, but the German companies politely made it clear that they would not let Fleet Street union officials anywhere near their employees). News International’s labour relations negotiator, Bill O’Neill, accompanied the delegation to Finland, noting that many of the union officials seemed far more interested in treating it as a booze-cruise than as a first insight into their working future. For O’Neill, a subsequent trip to France with them proved to be even more of a living hell.8
Upon his return to London, O’Neill opened negotiations with the Bouverie Street union chapels in May 1983. The discussions were held at Wapping and the union representatives were given a tour of the plant so that they could see for themselves its capacity and capability. A myth later developed that the unions were kept in ignorance of what had been constructed at Wapping. In fact, News International had not only shown a video of the plant to chapel fathers, more than one hundred of them and their members had been given tours of the building by the end of 1984. The initial management pitch was that, although Wapping would need fewer workers, those who were employed would be better paid. O’Neill made the assurance that ‘any reduction in staffing would be achieved by natural attrition or voluntary redundancy’ and that there would not be ‘any form of compulsory termination’ for the remainder who continued on at the Bouverie Street plant.9 But this was not good enough for the union negotiators. They maintained that, if Wapping and Bouverie Street were to coincide, the former would have to share the same overmanning and restrictive practices as the latter. This completely undermined the financial rationale behind the new plant. While O’Neill calculated that nine men could operate Wapping’s three-unit presses, the unions insisted it had to be eighteen (as at Bouverie Street). Lest O’Neill should think the unions a walkover on this matter, he was reminded by them that ‘the Daily Telegraph’s pressroom lay idle for eight years waiting on our union’s agreement’.10 Apparently this was a source of union pride. Tony Isaacs, the SOGAT ‘Imperial Father’, did not mince his words, telling O’Neill, ‘Your initial overtures are to be likened to the back-street abortionist who not very skilfully performs his operation, removes what he thinks he should, and isn’t particularly worried about the survival of the patient.’11
How many men it took to stand round a press was far from being the only point of dispute. An engineer assistants’ union representative refused even to consider the Wapping proposals, claiming that if he so much as reported them back to his members there would be disruption at Bouverie Street. Others were determined to extract a price. There were even demands for ‘relocation money’ despite the fact that Wapping was closer to where most of the print workers lived than Bouverie Street. The main problem, though, was that the proposed move reignited the turf war between the NGA and SOGAT over whose members would do what at Wapping. O’Neill’s suggestion that demarcation should be the same as had prevailed at Bouverie Street was rejected. The NGA’s London deputy secretary wrote to Bruce Matthews, the new managing director of News International, assuring him that, unless the NGA prevailed over SOGAT’s competence in supervising machine manager positions, ‘there can be no question of the Wapping development coming on stream’.12 Management’s hopes that the first press lines would be running from Wapping by November 1983 soon proved preposterously optimistic.
By February 1984, nine months after the negotiations had begun, O’Neill had come to the conclusion that the unions ‘consider[ed] the longer they wait the more anxious the company will become’. The various union chapels raised all manner of excuses to postpone or call off further negotiations unless some other grievance of the moment at Bouverie Street had been settled on favourable terms first. Given the massive cost to News International of the Wapping plant lying idle, the temptation to concede to whatever price the unions named was tempting – as the unions perhaps calculated. The interest charges alone on the plant were running at £10 million a year.13 And, as the months rolled by, union militancy broadened and strengthened. Although there were no proposals in place to transfer the Sunday Times’s production to Wapping, the paper’s chapel officials took the pre-emptive measure of announcing they would veto any such move in the future.14
O’Neill came to the conclusion that if incentives had no effect, the only way to get movement was for the unions ‘to be frightened in some way’.15 It was not clear how this could be achieved. Rather, when it came to threatening behaviour, the unions packed a formidable punch. O’Neill’s meeting with Ted Chard from SOGAT’s London Central Branch demonstrated the improbability of reaching agreement with the union whose members ran the publishing room (where the newspapers were bundled and assembled for distribution). Chard listened carefully to what O’Neill had to say about the proposals for jobs at Wapping. When the presentation drew to a conclusion, Chard stood up and asked if he had finished. O’Neill said that he had. ‘Right,’ said Chard, ‘now I will tell you a thing or two. We are leaving here. We will not be back until you have proposals that make some sense.’16 As he stormed out, his SOGAT delegation rose and followed him out of the door. It was the end of the negotiations, although it should have come as no surprise. Shown round the pristine plant by its technical director, Ken Taylor, a senior SOGAT representative said, ‘When will you get it through your thick heads, we will never let you use it, you may as well put a match to it – or we’ll do it for you.’17
The negotiations to move to Wapping broke down irrevocably on 19 December 1984. In a parallel development, the Scottish union branches also refused to print the Sun at the new Kinning Park plant that had been built in Glasgow unless it was turned into a separate Scottish newspaper rather than one whose pages were transmitted from Bouverie Street. Thus News International had built two state-of-the-art print halls, at a cost in excess of £100 million, which they could not use because the unions refused to let their members work in them. Though the chapel fathers thought they had won a great triumph, they would savour it for only thirteen months. It was a Pyrrhic victory that would ensure only their total annihilation. As Rupert Murdoch had prophesied back in 1981, the unions would soon discover they had finally got the proprietor they deserved.
The most violent dispute during the 1970s had been outside the Grunwick photo developing plant in north London. There, a small picket of those at issue with the management was regularly reinforced by many thousands of other trade unionists, including the Yorkshire miners, who tried to prevent the non-striking employees from getting in to work there. Postal workers also got involved. By refusing to handle mail to the company, they hoped to strangle it into submission. The scenes – many of them ugly – helped to persuade the incoming Conservative Government to prevent such sympathy action. The 1980 Employment Act made ‘secondary action’ (by those not directly employed by the company in a dispute) illegal. A further Employment Act in 1982 curtailed unions’ legal immunity. Henceforth, they could be held financially liable for breaching the law. Guilt might result in a fine or being subject to injunctions to freeze assets until any contempt of court was purged. The definition of secondary action was tightened further, to include making it illegal to refuse to handle – to black in the parlance – products produced by non-union workforces. Further measures followed with the 1984 Trade Union Act which sought to make unions more transparent and accountable to their members. Legal immunity was removed if unions failed to hold secret ballots prior to calling a strike.
On paper, this was a formidable body of legislation but whether it was operable remained to be seen. SOGAT’s National Executive Council wrote to News International’s managing director to disabuse him of any thought that the 1982 Act could be deployed, adding that the union wished ‘to state emphatically that we are prepared to utilize all the resources of this society in resisting any implementation of the proposed “Act”.’ Furthermore, they demanded a carte blanche assurance that News International would not initiate legal action. The letter concluded, somewhat threateningly, ‘we rely on your good sense in co-operating with us’.18 In line with TUC policy, SOGAT also announced that its members would not cooperate or participate in any ballots on the ‘closed shop’ arranged under the provisions of the 1982 Act.19 Put simply, the union did not intend to recognize the law.
In July 1983, a dispute between the NGA and Eddy Shah’s Messenger Newspaper Group based in Warrington became the litmus test of whether the trade union legislation was enforceable. Shah wanted to end the closed shop and recruit non-union labour. In response, the NGA tried to prevent production of his papers and wrote to advertisers requesting them to withdraw their advertisements. NGA members brought production at the Daily Mirror to a standstill, forcing its owner, Reed International, to sell its 49 per cent shareholding in the Messenger Group. Although this sort of secondary action was illegal, the NUJ joined the assault, mandating its members not to provide the Messenger Group with any copy.
Fined £50,000 for contempt of court for persisting with secondary picketing, the NGA’s response was to refuse to pay up. An all-out siege of Shah’s Warrington plant was organized. The fine was increased to £100,000 and the union’s assets sequestrated. NGA members in London took revenge by striking on 25 November, shutting down all the national newspapers for the following day. The main attack on Shah’s print works came on the night of 29 November from a mob of four thousand ‘pickets’. Buildings were set on fire, the police lines broken and the gates repeatedly rammed (employees were on the other side of them trying to prop them up against the blows). Shah was trapped inside, fearing for his life. The situation was only saved by the timely arrival of the riot police. In Fleet Street, Shah’s greatest supporter was the young and outspoken new editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil. Never one to let deferential niceties get in the way of his principles, Neil took it upon himself to place a post-midnight telephone call to the Home Secretary warning of the dire consequences of letting the mob incinerate Shah. Neil’s reward was a shutdown at his own paper when the unions refused to print the 4 December edition unless the leader column’s supportive comments towards Shah were toned down. Neil refused to be intimidated by these tactics. When the unions restarted the presses what followed that evening was a suspiciously high number of paper breaks and lost production.20
But the tide was turning. Eventually, in January 1984 the NGA agreed to operate within the law having lost more than £2 million of its £10 million assets in fines and fees. Eddy Shah had won. A minor proprietor of regional free sheets had taken on a national print union on principles for which no Fleet Street proprietor had been prepared to risk all. But the implications would stretch far beyond Warrington. Three important lessons had been learned. First, by legally separating his subsidiary organizations into independent companies, Shah had been able to get court injunctions against ‘secondary action’. Secondly, the police could be counted upon to help break an illegal siege of a print works. Third, the TUC might donate some financial aid (it gave the NGA £420,000) but it would not organize cross-union resistance.21
These lessons were not lost on Bruce Matthews, the straight-talking Australian who Murdoch had brought in as News International’s managing director. In January 1985, Matthews made the journey over to Murdoch’s house in Old Chatham, upstate New York, and outlined a scheme to switch all four of News International’s major newspapers to Wapping and ditch the existing NGA and SOGAT workforce in the process. It was a seemingly fantastical proposition. Matthews had met Tom Rice, the EETPU (electricians’ union) national secretary, and was impressed by the way his union had run a Finnish-owned paper mill in Wales after SOGAT had made unreasonable demands. Matthews proposed that EETPU members could operate Wapping. Ultimately, the EETPU would want recognition with sole bargaining rights but initially would be happy just to see its members employed without formal recognition. In one bound, News International would be rid of the NGA and SOGAT forever.
Matthews, a close follower of the Turf, was setting the stakes for an extraordinary gamble. If the NGA and SOGAT realized there were moves afoot to cut them out of working at Wapping they could call strikes at Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road that would destroy Murdoch’s media empire long before he would have the chance to get production up and running at Wapping. 1985 was a particularly bad time for Murdoch to risk catastrophe. With total debts of $2.6 billion and plans to take on more with the extension into US film and television (what was to become the Fox network), he was reliant on the revenue provided by his British newspapers – revenue that accounted for almost half of News Corp’s profits. A major shutdown would finish him. But he was intrigued by Matthews’s audacious plan. Murdoch’s modus operandi was to come to decisions quickly and then stick by his word. He needed no further persuading.
On 10 February, Murdoch summoned the key personnel he would entrust with the operation to his Fifth Avenue apartment in New York and explained to them their mission. The editors of the four papers were not brought in at this stage. However, The Times’s deputy editor, Charles Wilson, was invited. Impressed not only by his work at Gray’s Inn Road but also by his handling of the fractious journalists in his brief stint editing the Chicago Sun-Times, Murdoch had decided Wilson would fulfil a central role. Those who assembled around the table were left in no doubt about the magnitude of what was being proposed. Logistically, the operation was extremely complicated. It was not just a matter of telling a group of electricians which buttons to press. Wapping had been built to print two tabloids, the Sun and the News of the World. But the idea now was to move the broadsheets, The Times and the Sunday Times, there as well. This necessitated a change in capacity. What was more, the journalists of all four papers were to be moved to the new site too. This was the second strand of the strategy. The idea was not only to dispense with the services of the NGA and SOGAT but also, in doing so, to achieve what management had failed to win during the 1978–79 shutdown – an end to double-key stroking. Henceforth, journalists would be given the technology the unions had denied them – access to computer terminals where they could type their copy straight in without having to get an NGA compositor to do it for them. Wapping would not only be a blow against trade union militancy, it would herald the long-delayed dawn of technological freedom for journalists.
It was one thing to state the objective, but Murdoch proceeded to sketch the means of pulling off the coup. In great secrecy, the computer terminals would be tested and installed at Wapping. A cover story would be created to throw suspicious observers off the scent: it would be pretended that the plant was being set up to launch a new local newspaper, the London Post. This fictitious journal would be ‘edited’ by Charles Wilson who would go through all the motions of starting up the paper as if it was for real. He would even advertise and hire journalists for it. When the plant was finally ready to print its real product – The Times and its stable mates – the unsuspecting journalists from the existing papers would be bussed in and Gray’s Inn Road and Bouverie Street evacuated. But until that moment, it would be imperative that the journalists were told nothing about what was planned for them. If news of the plot leaked out before it was ready to ‘go live’, the unions could bring News International down. And in this eventuality, not just News International but the entire national press would remain at the whim of union activism. For those let into the secret that afternoon it was a bold and exciting plan and the prospect of success was intoxicating. Flying back to London on Concorde, Wilson and his co-conspirators made the most of an otherwise almost deserted cabin. In fact, cruising at supersonic speed above the clouds, they had a party.22
In 1814, John Walter II, the son of the founder of The Times, had wanted to use a modern steam press that could do the printing of the paper far more effectively that the existing machinery. Fearing the Ludditism of his printforce, he had the steam press installed secretly and ran off the first edition without them realizing. Clearly beaten, his workforce agreed to operate the new machinery. One hundred and seventy-one years later, Walter’s successor at The Times was contemplating the same tactic although, less certain of his print workers ability to perform a tactical retreat, he would not be offering them the option of re-employment. There was also a more recent – American – precedent for what Murdoch was planning. In 1975, Katharine Graham’s Washington Post had overcome a violent nineteen-week siege by print workers hostile to the introduction of new technology. Graham had ensured new staff were trained to do the strikers’ jobs. The striking printers retaliated by setting fire to the press room. Graham broke the siege by hiring helicopters to ferry the printing plates over the pickets’ heads. Ultimately the Post got through. Whether the British public would greet Murdoch’s attempt with the same understanding it had shown towards Kay Graham’s initiative remained to be seen. Unlike her, he was not also a benefactor of liberal causes and could more easily be painted as a bottom-line capitalist careless of his responsibilities to organized labour.
One of those who had helped do the groundwork for Kay Graham’s victory was an American-domiciled Liverpudlian, John Keating. Keating was now Murdoch’s technical director and was instrumental in advising on the installation of the Atex computer typesetting system at Wapping in a $10 million deal. With so much experience of Fleet Street’s failures, Murdoch drew on as much international talent as he could find. Christopher Pole-Carew (brought in to advise from the union busting company T. Bailey Forman) and Bill Gillespie were Englishmen, but in this respect they were in a minority. Wapping’s operational manager would be John Cowley who, like Bruce Matthews, confirmed Murdoch’s penchant for preferring tough Australians to what he frequently assumed were effete Englishmen. Charles ‘Gorbals’ Wilson was in no danger of being described as either effete or English. The upper-class Englishman Murdoch did admire, Douglas-Home, was certainly not effete. But in common with the other editors involved in the move, he did not play a leading part in the technical discussions primarily because the plan did not involve any alternation to editorial practice. Nonetheless, Douglas-Home was extremely enthusiastic about the plan and Murdoch kept him briefed on developments. As 1985 progressed, Douglas-Home was a man having to carry the burden of keeping two secrets from his close colleagues: his excitement for the Wapping project and the knowledge that he might not live long enough to see it put into operation.
The first sign that inquisitive visitors were no longer welcome at Wapping came in January when barbed wire went up around the site. In the same month, Tony Britton, News Group’s labour relations manager, rebuffed Tony Isaacs, the Imperial Father at the News of the World machine chapel, when the latter indicated he was ready to restart negotiations for working at Wapping after all. The unions had missed the boat and, having seen an opportunity to escape them for good, Murdoch was not going to send out a rescue craft to pick them up.
Without the involvement of the EETPU in recruiting suitable staff, launching Wapping would have been all but impossible.23 With 365,000 members, the union was the eighth largest in the TUC. Since 1982, its general secretary had been Eric Hammond, a political moderate who was used to confrontation. His speeches at TUC and Labour Party conferences were usually drowned out by a chorus of jeers and catcalls leading him on one occasion to assure delegates that Hitler would have been proud of them. In the early 1980s, the EETPU’s London press branch had been led by the hard-left. But, following a thwarted attempt to merge with SOGAT, the London Branch had lost its power over employment to the area office. Hammond did not forget SOGAT’s attempt to poach his members and extinguish the union’s Fleet Street presence. He had been shown no interunion fraternity and would offer none in return. This was the man with whom Murdoch could do business.
Accompanied by Tom Rice, Hammond had his first meeting with Murdoch and Bruce Matthews on 31 January 1985. The secret gathering took place at the house of Murdoch’s intermediary, Woodrow Wyatt. It was there that Hammond made the assurance that his electricians could not only set up Wapping but also run it. From this moment onwards, what was never more than a verbal understanding became an article of faith with, in particular, Murdoch’s future riding upon it. In April, the collusion began in earnest, with Tom Rice flying out to the United States with Christopher Pole-Carew. Joined by John Keating, they toured several newspaper plants, including USA Today and the Washington Post, to see the modern technology at work.
Given the need to keep the plot a secret, the hiring of electricians for Wapping could not be done in London. Instead the EETPU did the recruitment in Southampton via an independent employment agency that conducted the interviewing (and vetting). Most of those selected were unemployed EETPU members or their friends and relatives who grasped the opportunity to get a job at what was considered a decent wage. Every day, these men were bussed the eighty miles to work at Wapping and then bussed back again. When, many months later, the plan was eventually revealed, the use of Southampton electricians caused resentment from existing London EETPU members who had been kept in the dark about it. In the view of the SOGAT general secretary, Brenda Dean, this was ‘the greatest treachery of all’.24 But it was inconceivable that Wapping’s ‘staffing-up’ could have been kept secret if job application forms had been distributed across London.
While the covert use of the electricians to get the Wapping plant ready gathered pace, other aspects of the plan were put in motion. Merely getting the plant to function was not, in itself, enough. News International could print any number of newspapers but if they could not get them distributed properly they would just pile up at the plant’s front gate. As with its competitors, the company had a contract with British Rail to transport its papers. From the trains the bundles were taken to 250 wholesalers who then distributed them to the country’s forty thousand newsagents. But here was a snag: the wholesale workers were all SOGAT members. Thus, if the rail unions and SOGAT refused to handle newspapers coming out of Wapping they could kill the project. With great secrecy, Murdoch’s men devised a way round this hurdle: they would pull out of their contractual obligations with British Rail and sign a deal with the Australian road-freight company TNT instead. TNT depots would be used round the country, cutting out the wholesalers, and deliveries would be made directly to the newsagents.
Getting a list of all the newsagents’ addresses involved a good deal of surreptitious research and some wholesalers may have experienced the strange sensation of feeling they were being followed as they went about their work. In fact, using lorries was significantly more expensive than using trains. TNT had 1500 vehicles and Wapping’s requirement of eight hundred (and up to two thousand new drivers and distributors) was more than they could spare. In return for increasing their fleet accordingly, TNT got News International to underwrite the £7 million additional outlay if the unions did not strike and the train system could be used after all. Even with this agreement, there remained one potential snag: TNT had a closed-shop agreement with the TGWU whose members drove the lorries. If the drivers responded to their union’s call not to enter Wapping, News International would be back with the problem of having piles of newspapers and no means of distributing them. But it was a risk that had to be taken. In June 1985, TNT was given a five-year contract. Meanwhile, British Rail knew nothing of the fact they were shortly to be dumped.
By then the computer system had been installed that would revolutionize newspaper editing and production. The decision to buy Atex had been taken in March. Murdoch wanted to use a system that was tried and tested rather than state of the art because only simple processes could be quickly picked up by ‘half-trained manpower’.25 It would be a disaster if the Wapping opportunity was squandered because staff could not figure out how to work the technology within their deadlines. It would have been easier and cheaper to use Atex’s UK subsidiary, but the risk of news of the order leaking out was considered too great. Instead, the $10 million order was placed with the US parent company. The mainframes and typesetting equipment were huge and could have attracted attention while being shipped over from Boston, so they were transported in unmarked boxes and routed via Paris just to doubly confuse anyone who was monitoring their progress. Under the direction of Ben Smylie, the American-only staff charged with creating the software and installing the equipment were also flown over, their tracks suitably covered behind them.
Away from the prying eyes of Fleet Street, ‘Smylie’s People’ (as they inevitably became known) got to work assembling the computer mainframes in a dilapidated but suitably anonymous shed by the Thames Barrier at Woolwich – codenamed ‘The Bunker’. A small plaque was affixed, announcing that the shed belonged to ‘Caprilord Limited’, the cover company created to mask Atex’s involvement. With a security guard posted to dissuade curious passers-by and the mist rising from the river, the scene had something of an illicit gangland operation about it, not least when the limousine of ‘Gorbals’ Wilson drew up to appraise the handiwork. Charged with designing the layout of the new offices as well as launching the London Post, Wilson was the Murdoch lieutenant who worked closest with the Atex team in getting the editorial floors technologically operational. Murdoch, the Godfather, visited on 20 April. On 1 May the first test run proved successful. At the end of the month the mainframes were transported over to Wapping, in the dead of night, in long, customized lorries. It was a sign of management’s jumpiness that a helicopter flying low overhead just as the lorries were passing through the gates caused momentary alarm that the move was being monitored by spies hired by the unions. But the helicopter moved on, allowing the mainframes to be unloaded and installed on the fourth floor, behind doors that needed a special code to open. Weeks of teething problems and reconfigurations lay ahead, but ‘Project X’ was well underway.
Meanwhile, back at Gray’s Inn Road the journalists were still unaware of the major news story that was waiting to burst. In league with the print unions, the NUJ prohibited any of their members from touching the three or four Atex terminals located on the editorial floor, leading one journalist to glance wistfully at the banned technology and murmur, ‘I have seen the future and it’s got dust on it.’26 Little did he appreciate what was being installed a few miles to the east. Wilson and Douglas-Home maintained the façade. The situation was the same at the other News International titles. At the Sunday Times only the editor, Andrew Neil (who had experience of using Atex at his previous berth at The Economist), and James Adams knew what was being planned although Ivan Fallon, the deputy editor, had his suspicions confirmed.27 But as the scheme proceeded to plan, so it became necessary to pass the ‘Wapping Cough’ onto a few more key personnel who, under the cover of sick leave, prepared the ground for the move.
In March, the company had publicly stated its intention to launch the new tabloid newspaper for the capital, the London Post. This was the biggest of all the ruses. It was not just a cover story for explaining signs of activity at Wapping. On the advice of News International’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards at Farrar & Co., London Post (Printers) Limited was established as Wapping’s operating company. Thus, Wapping was given a separate legal identity from News Group in Bouverie Street and Times Newspapers in Gray’s Inn Road. Come a strike, this would prove significant since it would allow the trade union legislation against secondary action to be invoked. It was formally announced that Charles Wilson was the Post’s editorial director. Oddly, this did not involve his standing down as deputy editor of The Times, but this point was passed over, perhaps because Wilson was well known for his multitasking skills. He even went as far as interviewing journalists for positions on the paper. One of those who turned up naively for an interview was Julie Burchill, who was poised to emerge as one of Fleet Street’s more outspoken columnists and controversalists. Murdoch never intended the Post to see the light of day although if the unions managed, somehow, to prevent The Times and the other existing titles from being switched to Wapping, then there was the fallback possibility of launching The Post as an interim measure. In these circumstances, it might be the only way of getting Wapping operational. To that extent, the paper was not a complete fiction, but it would only hit the streets if the main plan failed and those responsible for establishing the shadow paper – in particular Charles Wilson – had no intention of letting the main plan fail.28 Indeed, part of the cunning of the Post project was that it incited the unions to play into Murdoch’s hands. It was hoped that merely the prospect of the Post being printed without their agreement would – at the appropriate moment – provoke the Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times printers to come out on strike. In doing so they would provide Murdoch with the grounds to sack them and move his four papers to Wapping where they would be printed by staff happy to work there.
Wilson was the right man for the job. At the Chicago Sun-Times he had experienced at first hand how complete editorial control could work. At the Sun-Times, suggestions were acted upon at a time when in Fleet Street they would have created only months of consultation, negotiation and eventual cancellation. What was more, unlike Douglas-Home, Wilson understood the technical side of production. He brought a tight group of lieutenants with him to head-up the Post: Mike Hoy, Richard Williams, David Banks, John Bryant and (later) Tim Austin. All believed it was the Post they were working on. Sworn to secrecy, they were installed in a back room at Gray’s Inn Road and even accessed the building from a different entrance. In charge of subbing dummies of the paper, Austin was sent across to the Chicago Sun-Times for a fortnight’s crash course on using the computer technology.29
The extent of the conspirators’ secrecy seemed extreme: meeting venues were checked for bugs and long-range listening devices; key executives were advised to trim trees and bushes in their gardens in case they camouflaged eavesdroppers and to consider buying a dog. Ex-Royal Navy, Christopher Pole-Carew was in charge of directing the Wapping defences. When, after he had listed the security measures, Murdoch asked if there was anything else, Pole-Carew replied, ‘well, that’s all we can do, unless we use guns’. This was doubtless intended as a joke, although the nervous glance exchanged by Murdoch and Wilson suggested the need for reassurance. The subsequent proposal that the way to defeat the pickets’ interference with small lorries coming into the plant was to file the underside of the lorries’ bumpers to razor sharpness was not taken up. Some wondered if Pole-Carew was becoming overzealous.
In fact, the need for vigilance – rather than vigilante-ness – was real. Comings and goings at Wapping were being monitored by Tony Cappi, a SOGAT member, and Terry Ellis of the AUEW. By establishing contacts with those contracted to set up the plant, they were able to gain intelligence reports on what was going on behind the Wapping barbed wire. They discovered that Atex mainframes had been installed. To a sales manager of NAPP Systems, they posed as potential customers interested in purchasing photopolymer printing plates. They were told the company was supplying Wapping. Some of the work could be explained away as ongoing preparation for the Post’s launch if or when the unions gave it the go-ahead. But the Post was to be a tabloid. In May, Cappi and Ellis learned that the presses were being configured to print broadsheets. Cappi left an urgent message at the office of SOGAT General Secretary Brenda Dean and finally got to speak to her in June. From that moment on, he was a regular supplier of information.30 In July, Dean had a meeting with the various chapel fathers, but it was not until the following month that, accompanied by SOGAT and NGA officials, she managed to get an appointment to speak with Bruce Matthews and Pole-Carew at Bouverie Street. The extent to which these two men provided obfuscatory answers was evident in the subsequent statement Dean released:
I am pleased to say that they both totally denied that any personnel were being recruited or were currently working in the premises being trained in jobs traditionally done by SOGAT members. The electricians and engineers working in the plant are engaged on the installation of electrical wiring and equipment.31
But it was not long before Brenda Dean had cause to doubt the helpful explanations she had received. By September, Cappi’s spies had copied the names and numbers of over five hundred people with access to working at Wapping. Dean was in Blackpool for the last day of the TUC conference when she received a telephone call from a spy informing her that dummy runs of the Post had been successfully run off the Wapping presses. This was incontrovertible proof that the electricians were doing rather more than a bit of wiring. They were actually printing newspapers. Dean immediately got in touch with Tony Dubbins of the NGA and the various London officials. ‘My own view,’ she told them, ‘is that we should stop the whole of News International tonight.’ Dubbins pondered the options. Militants subsequently believed Dean had been slow to ascertain the seriousness of the situation although, according to her own recollection, she said:
Come on! Let’s get real about this. Fleet Street stops at the drop of a hat for absolutely bugger all. This is not about money it’s about jobs. We need to get home to Murdoch that we’re not having it. We want to get to that negotiating table now, before they go any further … What’s wrong with you all? Now’s the time to strike! What’s wrong with you all?
She was sure that Murdoch was playing for time but, if confronted with the shutdown of all four of his titles, he would have to respond and respond on terms dictated by the unions. Back at home, at tea time on the Saturday, she got a call from SOGAT’s general officer, Bill Miles. He said he had had a meeting with Bruce Matthews and the News International management. They had offered negotiations for the unions to work at Wapping and, therefore, the members had decided not to call a lightning strike. ‘Of course,’ Miles added, ‘the chapels have said if you as General Secretary instruct them to come out, they’ll stop the job tonight.’ There was a short pause. ‘Bill,’ sighed Dean, ‘if they’re not prepared to stand up for themselves, I’m not prepared to put the union on the line for them.’
Thus the unions missed their opportunity to bring down Murdoch’s media empire at the moment of his greatest vulnerability – while he was heavily in debt because of his expensive acquisitions in the American market and before he was ready to launch Wapping to produce the newspapers that kept him creditworthy. Instead the unions opted to be locked into months of fruitless negotiations during which time Wapping was brought into operational readiness. ‘It was like a wife who is told her husband is playing away but refuses to accept it is happening’ was how Wilson interpreted the moment of union self-denial.32 Reflecting on the missed opportunity eighteen years later, Dean could still not comprehend how such a ‘major tactical error’ could have been made. ‘It was a complete reverse of normal animal behaviour from our people,’ she concluded. ‘Normally they took action first and asked questions after.’33
The most important twenty months in Fleet Street’s history passed between February 1985 and October 1986. In the popular market, News International faced sharper competition from Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Group where a redundancy package was ruthlessly forced through. In the midmarket, there was the promise of similar savings at the Express while a new newspaper, Today, was planned by Eddy Shah using the latest technology and avoiding the traditional print unions. There was a similar situation in the broadsheet market where The Times faced new threats not only from its principal rival, the Daily Telegraph, which was rescued from bankruptcy, but from the launch of a new newspaper, the Independent, proudly trumpeting its sovereignty from traditional press baron ownership. In the space of twenty months, Fleet Street was destroyed as the capital of the newspaper kingdom.
The catalyst for some of these changes was an event Murdoch had originally opposed – the flotation of Reuters. In return for bailing the news agency out in 1941, the various Fleet Street titles, through the Newspaper Publishers’ Association, had taken on a 41 per cent share in the company. Diversification into financial services information technology had subsequently made Reuters profitable. Its profits had quadrupled in Gerald Long’s last year as its managing director and doubled again in 1982. By purchasing Times Newspapers, Murdoch had doubled his potential shareholding. If it was floated on the stock exchange, it could realize him between £90 and £100 million. As one of the ten directors on the Reuters board, Murdoch thus had an interest in pushing for the company to be floated. But floating Reuters was against the spirit of the terms that had been agreed in 1941 (in a document drawn up by William Haley who was subsequently The Times’s editor). What was more, it would give Murdoch no obvious advantage over his Fleet Street rivals since they would all make similar gains. He did not push for Reuters to be floated. But others on the board were intent on liquidating their assets and in 1984 the company was duly quoted on the stock exchange. While Murdoch chose to hold onto his shares, rivals went for the quick profit. The Guardian realized £70 million, paying off all its debts as a consequence and laying the groundwork for a new printing plant in London’s Docklands. Associated Newspapers, owner of the Daily Mail and a range of regional titles, netted the most. By 1990, it had realized £300 million from its Reuters shares and built new print works in Docklands. Across Fleet Street, proprietors now had the ready money to push for expansion.34
With these proceeds, plans could be laid for new and less labour-intensive printing plants. Robert Maxwell even raised the prospect of colour printing. A clash with the unions was imminent. In the second half of 1985, the warning shots began to be fired. The new chairman of the Express titles, David Stevens, made no secret of his hopes to move his papers out of Fleet Street and to reduce the payroll. Even more significant from Murdoch’s perspective was the determination to cut out waste by Robert Maxwell who, in 1984, had controversially bought Mirror Group Newspapers. A dispute at the Sporting Life had led to his Mirror titles being suspended for a fortnight in August 1985. Vowing ‘the gravy train has hit the buffers’, he retaliated with a major redundancy programme to cut the total of his employees from 7000 to 2100. A two-week closure at the home of his Scottish papers ensued. Maxwell emerged victorious by deploying a mixture of barbed wire, security guards, threats to move from Glasgow and employ non-union workers and the deployment through the courts of the Thatcher Government’s trade union legislation.35 Some thought these methods incompatible with Maxwell’s socialist protestations. But while he had used all means available to him to cut the payroll, he did not destroy the principles of chapel power: the absence of legally binding contracts and retention of the closed shop. In common with every other newspaper proprietor, his journalists still did not have direct input of their own material.
Although not one of the beneficiaries of the Reuters largesse, Eddy Shah, survivor of the Messenger dispute, had begun to think beyond the confines of Warrington and was envisaging a far more revolutionary plan. He conceived a new mid-market national newspaper to be called Today, edited by Brian MacArthur. Loosely modelled on USA Today, it would transmit its papers via satellite to regional printing plants in Heathrow, Birmingham and Manchester. In doing so it would be free from Fleet Street’s restrictive practices and could thus be produced at a cost that significantly undercut the existing titles. Extraordinarily, its planners budgeted that it could break even without any advertising on sales of 600,000. What was more, by using the latest technology and printing in colour it would be attractive to readers. Its journalists would have direct input. The union boss who was able to deliver these non-restrictive practices was none other than Eric Hammond of the EETPU. Buoyed up by his successful negotiations with Murdoch, Hammond had approached Shah in April 1985 with a no-strike guarantee that became public three months later.36 Like Murdoch, Today’s founder also planned distribution by road not rail. Eddy Shah threatened not just the traditional print unions but also the traditional press barons. If Today’s colour technology worked and the Sun failed to be moved to Wapping, Murdoch faced serious competition.
The plans for moving The Times to Wapping were in their final stages when, on 27 December 1985, the Financial Times broke the news that a paper called the Independent was to be launched in the new year. It would be the first new national quality broadsheet to enter the market since the Daily Telegraph, 131 years earlier. At first, it was hard to comprehend how serious a threat it would pose. Like opposing groups of First World War sappers mining underneath each other’s trenches, the plans for launching the Independent and for relocating The Times to Wapping had been evolving in total ignorance of the other’s existence. The three founding fathers of the Independent, Andreas Whittam Smith, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover, were all respected journalists at the Daily Telegraph. This was significant. The Times’s principal rival was in serious trouble. Its owner, Lord Hartwell, had decided to provide it with expensive and modern print works in Manchester and London’s Isle of Dogs at a combined cost that soon exceeded £100 million. Union militancy had ensured that the level of overmanning at the Telegraph had been such that it made The Times look like a comparatively lean operation. This was one of the reasons why the market leader, with daily sales in excess of 1.2 million, somehow managed to be a money loser. The new print works would produce a better paper at a lower cost but in the short term only added to Hartwell’s headache: the proposed redundancy scheme alone was estimated at £38 million. Having greatly overstretched his resources – and his Reuters payout – he scraped around for ways to raise money. When the take-up on his share offer was less than expected, the Canadian businessman Conrad Black scented blood. Black bought a 14 per cent stake together with a first-refusal option on any future share offers. Hartwell soon found himself forced into a fresh share issue that Black duly snapped up. By December 1985, Black had secured a majority stake and made Andrew Knight chief executive. For the gentlemanly Hartwell, who since 1954 had been editor-in-chief of a paper his father had bought and vastly improved in 1928, it was undoubtedly sad to see his own position become effectively honorific. Yet, he was to live long enough to see Knight and Black turn the bankrupt company around.37 With the Telegraph saved and poised for rejuvenation and the Independent about to be launched, the future for The Times looked to be a lean one unless it could reap the advantages involved in Project Wapping.
In 1985, SOGAT’s general secretary, Brenda Dean, was forty-three years old and in only her first year in the post. She was the first woman to head a major British trade union. What was more, in taking care of her appearance and with an elegant blonde bouffant (rather, if truth be told, in the manner of Margaret Thatcher), she appeared the antithesis of the traditional union brotherhood. This was both her strength – as far as the public was concerned – and her weakness when it came to dealing with the (resolutely male) Fleet Street chapels. She did not come from a particularly entrenched union background (her father had been a British Railways inspector) and grew up in Salford. This caused some misgivings among those in the London Central branch who considered themselves a class apart and disliked the interference of supposed no-nothing provincials in their affairs.38 Doubtless, some were also alarmed that she was dating the CBI’s director of information. But she was devoted to the union that she had joined not long after leaving school at sixteen to become a shorthand typist. During the 1970s she even turned down the options of a safe Labour seat or membership of the Downing Street think tank in order to manage SOGAT’s affairs. Her tenure as secretary of the Greater Manchester branch had coincided with a doubling of the membership. By 1983 she had risen to national president and two years later to the key position of general secretary.
Shortly after taking command of SOGAT, Dean made a ten-day visit to the United States to examine the effect of the introduction of new technology. She concluded in her report that ‘opposition is not an option, it is simply a rapid road to de-unionization’. In writing this, she was taking a bold stand for modernization that would involve, in particular, confronting the short-term interests not only of her Fleet Street members but also those of the rival union, the NGA, which was still committed to the absurdity of double-key stroking. There was little love lost. Her first direct experience of Fleet Street negotiating had come shortly after the end of the 1978–9 shutdown at Times Newspapers. She was not impressed. ‘It was negotiation with mob instincts,’ she concluded. Incredulous at the salaries some of the printers were earning she told the journalist Linda Melvern: ‘I don’t know what they spend it on. They all live in council houses.’39 Had she been in a position to enforce such views some years earlier, her union might never have been locked out from Wapping.
Instead the negotiations for the print unions’ participation at Wapping recommenced on 30 September with Dean and the other union leaders convening at the Inn on the Park to hear Murdoch’s terms. Murdoch’s Gulfstream G3 had narrowly avoided Hurricane Gloria on its route before decanting Murdoch, John Keating and Bill O’Neill at Stansted airport. The union bosses could have been forgiven for imagining the trip had affected the chairman’s mood. But, assisted in the drafting by Charles Wilson, he had carefully prepared a statement – which The Times proceeded to print in full.40 He made clear that the negotiations would only concern the proposal to print the London Post. If successful, the terms could then be extended to embrace printing the Sun and the News of the World there too. The implication was that The Times and Sunday Times would continue, as before, to be printed from Gray’s Inn Road. The union representatives had to listen while Murdoch made clear he was tired of employing workers who managed twenty hours a week at double the national average wage; tired of some of them getting as much as twelve weeks holiday; tired of a system in which he could only employ whoever the unions offered for a vacancy:
I have strained myself and my colleagues physically, emotionally and financially to build this business and we have been met with nothing but cynicism, broken promises and total opposition … The result today is that all national newspaper production departments are over manned by from fifty to three hundred per cent, with working practices that are a continuing disgrace to us all.41
The irony, of course, was that on this occasion it was News International that would be negotiating in bad faith. Having determined to operate Wapping without the traditional print unions, Murdoch’s men were not about to undo all the secretive planning by a last-minute U-turn. Instead, with delays in getting the new Times editorial floor ready, the negotiations would serve a purpose in buying time for Wapping to become operational. What was more, the talks could be confidently predicted to show the print unions unwilling to accept the modern working practices the project demanded.
News International set a three month deadline for the talks to be concluded. In charge of the negotiating team was Bill O’Neill who, after a year in the United States, made a poor job of hiding his depression at having to be back in the company of many of those who had made his life a misery the last time he had attempted to get them to operate Wapping. For their part, the unions knew enough about ‘Project X’ to fear the prospect of a breakdown in the talks. This time they really did want an agreement. Nonetheless, they reacted in disbelief at O’Neill’s insistence that management would determine the appropriate number of men to work a press. ‘You are trying to introduce the work practices of an alien continent,’ one of the NGA’s team spluttered. O’Neill replied that the far off land was called ‘the real world’.42
Between mid-October and the end of the negotiations, O’Neill conducted thirty-two meetings with the unions. He made clear that journalists on the Post would have direct input of their own copy; that there would be no union ‘closed shop’ circumscribing who could be employed; that there would be legally binding contracts; that disputes would be settled by legally binding arbitration not by strikes (anyone who struck during his contract period would be sacked without appeal); and that management had the right to introduce new technology even if it involved cutting staff. In essence the package heralded the end of the multiple-chapel system that had plagued attempts to make fast agreements. As to what would have happened if the unions had agreed to all News International’s terms, O’Neill later conceded, ‘while what was presented was not uncommon in U.S. labour contracts, it was completely foreign and unacceptable at that time to the unions I was meeting with. They could never have accepted them and a strike was inevitable’.43
Given their previous attitude, it was a sign of how scared the unions were that they were nonetheless prepared to make some major sacrifices. On 22 November, the NGA conceded direct input to journalists in return for a fifty-fifty representation with SOGAT for double-stroking the columns of advertising. For the first time in the history of Fleet Street, journalists’ copy would not be needlessly retyped by members of a print union. In other areas there appeared little progress. The unions continued to oppose legally binding contracts. Complaining that he had endured ‘seventeen years of hell’, Murdoch made clear this was non-negotiable. When Eric Hammond broke ranks to state that the EETPU had no objection to legally binding contracts, the other unions recognized that they were being outmanoeuvred. On 11 December, they reported the EETPU to the TUC, hoping disciplinary action would be taken against its non-collective attitude.44
With Brenda Dean in the chair, the print unions – temporarily putting aside their traditional suspicions of each another – debated what to do at a meeting in the TUC’s Congress House on 9 December. Various rumours were discussed, including that News International had developed ‘connections’ with TNT to deliver the newspapers and sidestep the SOGAT distribution system and the apparent presence of one thousand workers recruited by the EETPU who were up to something ‘within the Wapping development’. Most alarming of all was the ‘information received informally’ that a sixty-page dummy equivalent of the Sunday Times had been run off the Wapping presses and that ‘there was adequate space and machinery to move in all the titles. Indeed there were rumours that Times journalists had already been told they would be moving to Wapping.’ This last piece of news was wrong – Times journalists had heard nothing – but what was most remarkable about the union meeting was the conclusions drawn from the evidence. Through united action, the unions believed they retained the whip hand since ‘at the present time, sixty per cent of the worldwide income of News International was raised by The Sun and the News of the World; the proprietor would not wish to place either in jeopardy’. Consequently the committee drew up a draft proposal for solidarity in opposing Murdoch’s humiliating terms.45
The deadline for the talks with News International was Christmas Eve. The last meeting before it, attended by the full union top brass, including Dean and Harry Conroy of the NUJ (whose opening gambit was to ask where O’Neill’s black shirt was), broke up without any agreement on 19 December. Three days later, O’Neill telephoned Dean to see if she wanted to talk further. She replied that there was no point. The following day, Bill Miles wrote to Bruce Matthews to inform him that the print unions were united in demanding that News International offer all those it currently employed jobs for life with wage increases ‘not least [sic] than the annual retail price index’. If there was a transferral to new premises ‘you will guarantee that the members of the unions concerned will be offered employment at the alternative premises with full continuity of employment at their prevailing wages and conditions’. If these demands were not met the unions would go on strike.46
The demand was fantastic, incredible. Murdoch had hoped the three-month negotiating period would demonstrate the print unions’ reluctance to agree legally binding contracts to work at Wapping, but he could scarcely believe his luck when they threatened to bring down the company if all their members were not granted jobs for life. It was hard to conceive what more the unions could have done to publicize their imperviousness to moderation. In doing so they determined to make a stand upon a battlefield whose topography was all against them. Instead of appearing the aggrieved party forced into industrial action by a callous boss’s use of blackleg labour from a covert plant, they ensured that Murdoch could be seen as the put-upon businessman calling upon a coalition of the willing against Luddite militants who had silenced his existing plants in the pursuit of wholly unreasonable demands.
In fact, News International’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards of Farrar & Co., had skilfully manoeuvred the unions into this situation. The Wapping plant was legally distinct from News International’s other operations. Since a strike at Gray’s Inn Road and Bouverie Street on the issue of preventing EETPU members working at Wapping would be illegal under secondary action legislation, the print unions had to make an unacceptable demand (‘jobs for life’) knowing it would be rejected so that they could legally call a strike that would coincide with Wapping’s launch. But they were playing directly into Murdoch’s hands. Had they not struck, News International would have had to pay their wages for a further six months while the existing house agreements were still in force. Their decision to strike not only relieved Murdoch of that burden but also of the £40 million redundancy payments to which they would otherwise have been legally entitled.
The print unions opted to strike because they were confident of success. Indeed, their strategy was based upon a fatal assumption that a financially stretched Murdoch could not bring his papers out if the NGA and SOGAT called industrial action. Bill Miles had been looking into the financial structure of News International and concluded that its gearing was far too high for Murdoch to put at risk his Fleet Street cash crop. News Corp. had borrowed $2.6 billion to acquire the American companies that would become its Fox film and television empire. A huge debt burden was being carried. This, it was predicted, was his Achilles heel. Union colleagues complacently assured Brenda Dean that not a single paper would emerge from the Wapping plant without the guiding expertise of SOGAT and NGA members. ‘My view,’ Dean later admitted, ‘was they couldn’t sustain a stoppage of two weeks without any papers at all so there would have needed to be a negotiation.’ Even if – as she thought more likely – Wapping managed a limited production run, Murdoch would still have to climb down or face financial meltdown.47 On 13 January 1986, SOGAT’s strike ballots were sent out to their members. The siege of Fortress Wapping was about to begin.
The following day The Times’s widely respected subeditor, Tim Austin, received a phone call. It was Charles Wilson, on typical form: ‘I want to meet you early tomorrow morning. Early for you. I’ll meet you eight o’clock at Waterloo. I’ll be in my car. Don’t miss me. If you do, you’re a dead man.’ Despite having spent the last few months with Richard Williams and Michael Hoy assisting Wilson on the London Post start-up, Austin had no idea what the new Times editor was talking about. Nonetheless, he did not want to miss out and arrived two trains earlier than was strictly necessary. Eventually, Wilson’s chauffeured limousine drew up. The back seat window glided down. ‘Get in,’ Wilson commanded, ‘I’m taking you to Wapping. That’s where we’re printing’ – Austin finished the editor’s sentence – ‘the Post?’ The editor smiled thinly. ‘Just wait,’ he murmured. The limousine passed over Tower Bridge and turned east along the Wapping Highway and down Virginia Street. Then Austin got his first sight of what he subsequently described as ‘this hideous vision of barbed wire, ten-foot-high steel fences and this ghastly building’. ‘Just look at that,’ Wilson cut in admiringly. ‘That place is going to change your life!’48
Over the next few days Wilson repeated the journey taking the newspaper’s key personnel one at a time to visit the plant on the condition they were sworn to absolute secrecy. Most knew the company had plans for Wapping – The Times had, after all, reported the breakdown in the Post negotiations – but only a handful had any idea that a whole new Times office had been constructed within an anonymous looking single-storey East End warehouse.49 The vast majority of the editorial staff remained totally in the dark. The pressure upon Wilson over the past months had been tremendous. He had been dividing his time between The Times – which, with Douglas-Home’s removal to hospital, he was assuming much of the burden of editing – and the Wapping project where he was giving the impression he was setting up the Post, issuing instructions and interviewing staff for it as well as designing the layout and overseeing the equipping of The Times’s new office. For months without let up, his day started before dawn when he awoke and read the morning’s papers. Then he would go to Gray’s Inn Road to discuss the day’s agenda with the news desk. After the morning conference at 10.30 he would work on administration matters in his office until slipping out to go to Wapping. There he would confer with the Atex staff and continue the direction of laying out The Times’s new office. He would return to Gray’s Inn Road for the afternoon conference at 4.30 and stay there until the first edition had left the stone after 8 p.m. On his way home, he would call in on the Atex staff for a drink in their Belgravia ‘safe house’. That nobody who was not in on the secret knew Wilson was leading this demanding double life was a tribute to his organizational powers and resilience. Nor was it just the journalists who remained in the dark. When the directors of the Times Newspapers (Holdings) board had met on 10 December, they were given scant indication from Murdoch that The Times was about to move home. The meeting lasted forty-five minutes. When it next convened, the move had taken place.50 There was only one major lapse in the security and this came, unaccountably, from Bruce Matthews. The managing director took it upon himself to tell Andrew Knight, the incoming chief executive of The Times’s great rival, the Telegraph, the details and even the exact timing of the move to Wapping when he met him, for the first time, in late December. He then updated Knight several times during the first fortnight of the new year. ‘The information was critically important for us,’ Knight subsequently admitted, although, no less amazingly, the news never leaked out from the executive floor of the Telegraph’s offices.51 It was a bizarre and crazy risk for Matthews to have taken which defied any obvious business logic. Fortunately, the leak spread no further.
It was too soon to give the game away to the unions but just the right moment to antagonize them into making a false move that would put them - in the public’s eyes – in the wrong. On the night of 18 January 1986, while the union ballot papers were still being filled in, a twelve-page supplement for the Sunday Times was printed at Wapping. In an act of conscious provocation it was an ‘Innovation Special’ featuring the new plant, its possibilities and confrontational contributions from Murdoch and the editor, Andrew Neil, in a leader column. Murdoch anticipated that printing the supplement would bring an instant shutdown at Gray’s Inn Road, where the other sections of the paper were going to press. A police helicopter with search beam hovered above the Wapping plant looking for (non-existent) saboteurs while the company executives, joined by lawyer Geoffrey Richards, stood waiting for the expected enemy to show itself. Suspecting a trap, Brenda Dean issued a statement telling her members to hold fire, before making clear ‘we are not prepared to see our members treated like eighteenth century mill-workers or Australian convicts’. Down in the cramped print room at Gray’s Inn Road, a heated exchange took place between Bill Gillespie, TNL managing director, and Roy ‘Ginger’ Wilson of the SOGAT machine room chapel. The result was that the printers brought the main section of the Sunday Times out as slowly as possible, achieving only half the print run. It was a final, albeit typical, gesture.52
The union high command was not going to be rushed into wildcat action before the confidently predicted results of the official ballots were announced. In any case, they did not want to damage the possibility that through a broad based demonstration of union solidarity they could successfully breach Fortress Wapping. One possibility was that the EETPU members could be persuaded not to work the presses. Another was to convince the journalists to down pencils. The first prospect quickly receded. Although the TUC general secretary, Norman Willis, worked on a plan to get the print unions to make further concessions and for Eric Hammond to come into line, Hammond would not be moved. In his defence, he cited the law. His members had individual contracts to work at Wapping but the EETPU itself had no formal agreement. Thus, in the terms of the trade union legislation on secondary action, the EETPU could not order a strike against a company with which it had no contractual agreement.53 Bill O’Neill was of the view that even if Hammond had asked his electricians not to work at Wapping, they would have carried on regardless.54 They wanted the work. They needed the money. As for the journalists, the print unions could expect a show of solidarity from NUJ activists, but could not be confident that journalists whose hard work had so frequently been spiked by militancy in the print room would leap to their aid. At a meeting on 21 January, The Times NUJ chapel duly instructed its members that, in the event of a strike by the NGA and SOGAT, journalists were only to do their work ‘using existing personnel and technologies’ and ‘not to enter the Wapping plant.’ Since ‘existing technologies’ involved all articles being double-key stroked by NGA members, the NUJ was effectively serving notice that it would be joining the strike.55 Times staff would have to decide whether they were primarily loyal to their union or to their employer. Given the secretive manner in which their move to Wapping was being planned behind their backs, some felt their employer had yet to demonstrate loyalty to them.
Later the same day, the results of the print unions’ ballots were released. Among SOGAT members, the vote was 3534 for striking and 752 against (an 82 per cent yes vote); the margin was similar among NGA members with 843 voting yes and 117 voting no (an 87.8 per cent yes vote).56 On 23 January, Murdoch agreed to meet Brenda Dean and her colleagues in two hours of talks at the Park Lane Hotel. He offered new five-year contracts for ‘some hundreds’ of the five thousand print workers currently employed on his four titles so that they could continue printing editions from Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road, but he would no longer entertain print union representation at Wapping. For her part, Dean went as far as she possibly could to make last-minute concessions on management’s ‘right to manage,’ binding arbitration and a prohibition of wildcat strikes. Such concessions were probably too great for her members and too late for Murdoch. The meeting broke up with neither side accepting its opponent’s offers. ‘It’s tragic that they’ve missed this opportunity,’ Murdoch announced to the waiting press; ‘we have been begging the unions to come to an agreement at Wapping for six years now. Earlier on we would have given them all sorts of things.’57 The following day, the print unions’ national executives brought their members out on strike. All five and a half thousand of them – printers, typists, telephonists, librarians, clerks, cleaners – were duly sacked.
On the evening of Friday 24 January, Bill O’Neill telephoned Brenda Dean. She confirmed the strike was on and in the course of an amicable conversation made clear she thought it would be over within a fortnight when, unable to print enough newspapers or get them distributed, News International would reopen negotiations. It was easy to understand the unions’ optimism. They did not think Wapping had the capacity. They knew it took all ninety press units at Gray’s Inn Road to print the Sunday Times and that there were only forty-eight available units at Wapping. But what they did not calculate was that the Wapping employees were prepared to work using methods that kept the newsprint flowing without constant stops to reload and that Wapping staff were able to average about fifty thousand copies an hour. This was more than double what NGA and SOGAT members at Gray’s Inn Road had felt within their powers to produce.
Yet even if Wapping’s electricians managed to bring the papers out, SOGAT was still confident of preventing distribution. Eighteen hundred SOGAT members were employed at the ninety depots of the country’s biggest newspaper wholesaler, WH Smith. Dean promised they would black all News International titles. The union also hoped to prevent production at subsidiary plants in Merseyside, Watford and Manchester where the colour magazines for the Sunday Times and News of the World, together with extra copies of the tabloid’s main section, were printed. Furthermore, Dean had met Ron Todd of the TGWU before Christmas to insist that his members did not drive TNT lorries carrying the papers. Approaches were also made to ASLEF and the NUR to prevent rail distribution.58 On the night of 23 January, the print union and transport union officials met to coordinate disrupting distribution from Wapping. Together they would show Murdoch who was boss. That night, The Times’s deputy editor, Colin Webb, was down on ‘the stone’ and was surprised to witness the print workers’ cheerful attitude. ‘We’re off for a weekends’ golf’, they assured him; ‘see you Tuesday when Rupert gives in.’59
On the morning of 24 January, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Wilson and Peter Stothard stood in The Times vestibule at Gray’s Inn Road waiting to greet Shimon Peres, the Israeli Prime Minister. A semicircle of angry print workers faced them. One member of the reception committee quipped mirthlessly that the Israeli security guards might have to protect the hosts rather than the guest.60 Throughout the building, Times journalists wondered who, if anybody, was going to print the paper that evening. The editor, whom they looked to for leadership and protection, had told them nothing. There had been no mention of moving to Wapping at the morning news conference chaired by Colin Webb. At 7.30 p.m., a PA wire confirmed that the strike was going ahead as planned. Desperate to find out what was afoot, a demand was made for the editor to address his staff in a room journalists had booked in Holborn. Webb, however, took the view that Wilson should not answer a summons as if to some revolutionary tribunal but, rather, should call the staff to hear him, and to do so on the home territory of Gray’s Inn Road.61 This was psychologically astute. Wilson had been editor for only three months. What was more, he had spent much of the past two years away from The Times office, first in Chicago and subsequently hovering around Wapping. Consequently, he had not had a chance to sustain the personal following or natural authority that the late Charles Douglas-Home could have commanded in the situation. Yet, if journalists did not respond to his appeal, not only Wapping but the future of The Times would hang in the balance.
It was not until 8.20 p.m. that Charles Wilson finally strode into a room packed with tense journalists. To rise above the scrum he clambered on top of a table. Hush descended. It was noticed that he was visibly shaking. ‘The storm has broken tonight,’ he declared: ‘We have lost tonight’s paper. But we do not intend to lose any more editions of The Times. It is going to be produced editorially at Wapping – on Sunday night for the Monday paper. I am here to invite you to come along and help us do it.’
He told them to clear their desks of all their possessions – this would be their last day at Gray’s Inn Road – and announced the news that the Sun’s journalists had just voted overwhelmingly to go to Wapping. Times staff refusing to go there would be sacked for breach of contract. Those who went to Wapping would get a £2000 pay rise and free private health insurance for their family. But more to the point, they would be free at last to type their own articles straight into the editorial system. ‘At a single key stroke, this gives the journalist his birthright,’ he declaimed. ‘I implore you to come with us.’62
Had the appeal worked? One journalist was heard to whisper ‘he’s won’, but the tone of the questions asked was hostile and there was considerable muttering as the packed meeting dispersed. That the editor had conspired with Murdoch but not involved or even forewarned his own staff was seen as a betrayal. He had put a gun to his journalists’ heads, informing them at almost the last possible moment to move everything to some probably hideous site somewhere in the East End of London (of all places) or be sacked. Such dismissive treatment infuriated those who felt they were professionals being hired or fired like casual cleaners. One journalist went up to Wilson and hissed ‘I hate you for this’. Greg Neale, The Times NUJ chapel father, convened the second chapel meeting of the day at 9.30 p.m. It took the decision for a mass meeting the following afternoon. The journalists would not be taken for granted.
The last piece of filed copy for the never-to-appear Times that evening reported that there would be an-all night vigil at St Bride’s, ‘the journalists’ church’ in Fleet Street, for the future of the newspaper industry.63 Only as the journalists filed out of Gray’s Inn Road that night did it really dawn on them they might never return there. Most of the cars had been moved from the surrounding streets and police ringed the building. The magnitude of what was happening only struck one journalist when he spotted the editor’s secretary, Liz Seeber, pulling paintings of past proprietors (she could not find a screwdriver) off the panelled editorial walls. Seeber recalled:
I had my car outside the reception door and Joe [the editor’s chauffeur] was down there reclining and having a fag and then he rang me the moment the SOGAT official disappeared around the corner. So I rushed down to the car and shoved the paintings into my car and Joe had the others and we all went off to Wapping at about ten o’clock at night.64
But would the journalists – hurt at being taken for granted – follow the oil paintings of Murdoch’s predecessors?