The Siege of Wapping and its Consequences
‘History is rarely so convenient, but the day that production began at Wapping was the day when, to all intents and purposes, old Fleet Street ended.’1 The assessment by the financial historian David Kynaston has become the accepted judgment on the cold, miserable day of Saturday 25 January 1985.
The events of that day took place in the teeth of opposition not only from the print unions but also from the journalists’ representatives. The National Union of Journalists had instructed its members not to go to Wapping. Journalists at the Sun and the News of the World voted overwhelmingly to disregard the order.2 But the ballot among Times and Sunday Times journalists was reckoned to be a close call. The Times NUJ chapel met in the ‘ballroom’ (the term was not descriptive) of the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury. Joining Greg Neale, the chapel father, were the NUJ general secretary, Harry Conroy, and his deputy, Jake Ecclestone. The presence of the union’s high command demonstrated how seriously they took the matter. But Conroy, a bluff left-wing Glaswegian, was not naturally appealing to the softer spoken sections of the audience while many remembered Ecclestone, a former Times chapel father, as the man whose militancy had led to the paper being sold to Rupert Murdoch in the first place. For the moment, though, such splitist tendencies were put to one side and the NUJ platform party told the Times journalists to stand shoulder to shoulder with their print union brothers and not to accept potentially open-ended contractual obligations at Wapping. ‘You are Times journalists,’ Greg Neale pointed out, ‘and not even Murdoch, even in this political climate, could get support if he’d just sacked the entire Times staff.’3
In fact, many Times staff were energized by the news that Murdoch was poised to free the paper from the print unions’ grip, perhaps making it sustainably profitable for the first time in their working lives. Disobeying the NUJ edict, they had already started drifting over to the new Times office behind the wire at Wapping to help get the Monday edition ready. Bill Bryson, still subediting the business news pages, was sorry for the many blameless individuals who had suddenly lost their jobs but he could not help basking ‘in the glow of a single joyous thought’ that he would no longer be involved in the nightly demarcation battle with lazy and violent SOGAT wire-room operators. Other subeditors welcomed the opportunity to be freed from similar battles of will. An NGA compositor had once spat at Peter Brown for indicating where he wanted a minor copy alteration. Brown felt the print unions had squandered the sympathy that would normally have been due them. What was more, given the rumours that Murdoch had a reserve army of Australians waiting to write The Times if its staff went on strike, Brown wanted to know what the NUJ’s fall-back strategy was if the paper could be brought out without its official staff. To this, there was no convincing answer.4
Ranged against the Wapping advocates were colleagues with a variety of grievances. For a few, union solidarity was an important consideration. Harry Conroy threatened to bring NUJ disciplinary action against any member who went to Wapping. But, as speeches from the floor made clear, the principal issue was outrage at the appalling way in which Times staff had been treated and taken for granted by their management. Employed to unearth facts and reveal truth, their professional pride had been dented by their inability to detect what their own management had been plotting under their very noses. Indeed, the failure of any journalist in any section of the British media to predict accurately the scale of Murdoch’s coup stood as an indictment. Many felt duped. There was also a more selfish angle. Neale’s claim that Murdoch could not produce the paper without its journalists had resonance. Some believed that the proprietor’s moment of crisis was their moment of opportunity. Given how much Murdoch needed them to support the greatest gamble of his life, why should they meekly assent to do his bidding without pushing for a better offer? If threatened, he might make all manner of worthwhile concessions.
From the outside, not all commentators had sympathy with journalists’ wounded pride and sense of self-worth. Paul Johnson, the Spectator’s media correspondent, was scathing, lecturing that ‘Civilization is not merely created and advanced by individuals; it is promoted and above all upheld by institutions.’ Now was not the moment to risk a great paper’s future, especially since many of those demanding a show of loyalty from management had not even shown it towards the former mild-mannered Thomson ownership.5 This was not a sentiment much aired during the hours of debate at the hotel ballroom. Those who had always disliked what they saw as Murdoch’s casual attitude to the disposability of his staff believed he had to be taught a lesson. Some argued that his demands were illegal. To find out if this could be true, they summoned the labour lawyer (and future Lord Chancellor) Derry Irvine. Corralled in an upstairs bedroom in the hotel, he gave his opinion that there were no grounds to sue News International for issuing an ultimatum to move to Wapping although there might be an opportunity to claim for unfair dismissal if anyone was sacked. This advice was not as positive as many had hoped. The speechifying continued until midnight by which time the meeting had been in session for ten hours. A motion was passed (by fifty-nine votes to fifty-eight) which, although supporting the principle of going to Wapping (subject to negotiating better terms and conditions), deferred final judgment until a further meeting on Sunday. The opponents would need only one Wapping supporter to switch sides in order to derail The Times’s move.6
The key event had already taken place that night. The first pickets – up to two hundred – had assembled outside the Wapping plant, but, inside, the Sunday newspapers had been produced. Surrounded by his senior executives, Murdoch had pressed the button that started the presses rolling at 8 p.m. There was clapping and cheering. Few had ever seen the proprietor in such buoyant mood. Then he turned away from his entourage to make a telephone call. The recipient was Bert Hardy, now at Associated Newspapers and the man whose idea building the Wapping plant had been in the first place and whom Murdoch had subsequently sacked. ‘We’ve done it,’ Murdoch hollered down the receiver, ‘and I’d just like to thank you.’ Little more than an hour later, the first editions were leaving the plant. That night three million copies of the News of the World (plus 750,000 printed in Glasgow) and 1.2 million of the Sunday Times were printed. The former was two million down on Bouverie Street’s production run while the latter had a shortfall of around 150,000. But it was good enough. Management collectively sighed with relief.7 Britain awoke on the Sunday morning to a new dawn in the country’s journalism. It happened to be Australia Day.
This was the sobering reality confronting ‘refuseniks’ as they made there way to the Marlborough Crest Hotel for the conclusion of the NUJ vote. It was a bitter affair. Angela Gordon, the Times Diary editor, called for those who had gone to Wapping that morning in order to bring the paper out ahead of the chapel’s vote to resign their union membership. Telexes came in from Charles Wilson accepting the demands made in the previous night’s motion. Making the obvious deductions, Don McIntyre argued that only by standing firm would a better deal be offered. Greg Neale implored the meeting to vote ‘no’. But a show of hands indicated a three to one vote in favour of going to Wapping. By the time the platform party announced the result and Neale his own resignation as chapel father, the first edition of The Times, written and produced from Wapping, was already hitting the streets without them.8 Several long-serving journalists were in tears.
Bringing that first Wapping edition of the paper out with only a skeleton staff defying the NUJ chapel directive not to do so was an especially difficult task. As Charles Wilson put it, it was ‘a bit like parachute jumping or the art of seduction. You had better get it right first time because you might never get another chance.’9 For the past three months the paper’s production editor, Tony Norbury, had been working round the clock to get it right. He had spent the last few weeks with a folding camp bed by his side, snatching a few hours sleep each night in between longer and longer shifts. For the final stretch, Murdoch had been helping out as Norbury’s general handyman, subbing work, forwarding copy, running errands, issuing instructions, encouragements and occasional oaths. When the moment of truth arrived, as with the Sunday Times the evening before, there was a tremendous sense of expectation. Again, the management and production staff encircled Murdoch and started clapping as he pressed the button that started the first edition of The Times from Wapping. There was a sound of revving, then of whirling. The presses started to roll. As they did so, the platform party turned to Tony Norbury and gave him a no less deserved round of applause. Sixty-six per cent of the Times print run was completed on the first night and much of it left the plant late, ensuring delayed distribution that left large areas of Britain without the paper on the newsstand by the crucial morning rush hour. But it was good enough to ensure subsequent performances and it was 66 per cent more than the print unions had boasted would come out.
Tim Austin was among the coterie of Times journalists who had gone to help bring out the first edition from Wapping while his colleagues were still debating whether to join him. When he had finished subbing it, he formed part of a small group who went off to watch the departure of the first edition at about 9 p.m. He recalled the moment of the great breakout:
We stood behind the fence and watched the trucks lining up behind the gate, revving. There were hordes of baying pickets. The noise was fantastic. A huge police presence. The whole of the area was floodlit. Cries of ‘Scabs! Scabs! Bastards!’ The police were confident their line would hold for the trucks to get out. You could see the driver in the first lorry. He had obviously psyched himself up. The potential for him being damaged severely was pretty clear. They opened the gates and he just put his foot down. I’ve never seen a lorry accelerate so quickly. By the time he got to the gatehouse he must have been doing thirty miles an hour. If he was going to kill somebody, too bad. He wanted to get out.10
On Monday morning, the journalists turned up at their new home. The barbed wire and security measures were the first shock. The Times’s new office was the second. Allegedly, French Napoleonic prisoners of war had constructed the building as a rum warehouse in 1805. Its former use fleetingly gave heart to those journalists who had not yet discovered that Wapping was to be a ‘dry’ work environment; others were filled with foreboding at the thought that their office had supposedly been built by forced labour. From the outside it resembled nothing more inspiring than a long, brick, single-storey tram shed, complete with a corrugated-iron roof. A concrete ramp ascending towards a door wide enough to take a stately wheelchair proclaimed the entrance that had been designed for Charles Douglas-Home. Those venturing inside found the interior brightly lit. It needed to be because, with few windows, there was minimal natural light. Older journalists eyed the computer terminals with apprehension. Monitors were switched on; cursors were blinking. It looked complicated. They had never touched such technology before and doubted whether they could master it now. Indeed, some did not like the idea of typing in their own work directly – as if doing so downgraded them from the status of literati to artisan. Standing on the backbench, Charles Wilson harangued the sceptics: ‘Don’t be so wet. Some of you will learn the new technology in three weeks. Most of you will take three months. And you, Philip Howard, will take three years!’ All eyes swivelled towards the distinguished literary editor. Within days of Wilson’s exposition on the benefits of the new technology, he noticed that Angela Gordon had brought in her portable typewriter and had set it down neatly on her desk between two discarded computer screens. Leading by example, Wilson stormed over, picked up the offending typewriter, walked over to the entrance to the Gents’ lavatory and installed it there as a doorstop. The incident got elaborated with the telling and rival newsrooms were soon agog with the story that The Times was being run by a rampaging, half-crazed Glaswegian who, when not throwing typewriters at his staff, was hurling them down lavatories.11
The first few days proved uncomfortable. There were not enough computer terminals installed and the largely computer-illiterate journalists found themselves having to share. A fortnight passed before there were enough terminals to go round, by which time the possessive instincts displayed by some towards what was supposedly communal property had become apparent. It was not just the older generation who appeared bamboozled by the technology. ‘I had never before learnt even to touch-type (for I had dictated leaders to my secretary, Val Smith, pacing round the desk for what I thought was rhetorical impact),’ recalled Peter Stothard, ‘and I was not alone. One of our finest “production journalists” found it hard even to operate the teach-yourself cassette tape, let alone the Atex computers.’12
The breakdown of trust between management and journalists took even longer to repair. The situation was not as bad at The Times as it was at the Sunday Times, where members voted to go to Wapping by only sixty-eight votes to sixty, but many felt the editor’s office was now enemy territory. The refuseniks obeyed the NUJ stricture not to work at Wapping by continuing to regard Gray’s Inn Road as their place of work and refusing to pass the picket line or file copy to the new location. As they well knew, they were courting the sack. Greg Neale’s successor as The Times’s NUJ chapel father, Clifford Longley, conceded the irony that ‘had our agreement been legally binding – an idea alien to our union but favoured by Murdoch – we could have stopped him in his tracks’.13 Most, reluctantly, accepted their fate and of all News International’s seven hundred journalists, only thirty-eight refused to cross the Wapping picket line. But many of the remaining refuseniks were important figures in the life and work of The Times. Among them was Pat Healy who had been with the paper for twenty years, Paul Routledge, who had spent almost seventeen years at The Times, mostly as labour correspondent (and in the previous six months in Singapore as the paper’s South East Asia correspondent), Greg Neale, Donald McIntyre, David Felton and Barry Clement. They were joined by Martin Huckerby, the assistant foreign editor, with almost fifteen years Gray’s Inn Road experience, whom Wilson sacked for writing a hostile article about Wapping in the UK Press Gazette.14 Ten Times journalists resigned or were dismissed for refusing to go to Wapping from the first,15 although others were to join the exodus to find friendlier work environments over the following months.
After the difficulties encountered on the first night, the production run of The Times improved remarkably. By Thursday 30 January (day four from Wapping), the paper reached its full production target (518,800 copies) for the first time. The belief that News International would be lost without the print unions was shown up as amazing complacency. Indeed, the basic statistics immediately demonstrated the extent to which the company had been subjected over the years to a print unions’ racket. In the old press rooms of Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road, it had taken more than two thousand men (there were almost no women) to produce News International’s four national newspapers. At Wapping, it was now taking just 670 to do the same task. Despite being of the same vintage as those at the old sites, Wapping’s Goss press machines, working at two-thirds capacity, were each churning out forty thousand newspapers an hour with a fraction of the paper breaks that had halted business so frequently and so suspiciously in the past. Reaching production targets despite having fewer machines to work from, management discovered what they had long suspected but had never been allowed close enough to prove – that the print unions at Gray’s Inn Road had been running their presses at far below their capacity. Wapping’s productivity was impressive. Nine hundred reels of newsprint were consumed daily, each reel containing around five miles of paper and one press consuming a reel every fifteen minutes. Seventy tonnes of ink were used every week. In the publishing room, 132 employees were now doing what had previously taken nearly 1800 print union members to achieve.16
It was little wonder that Murdoch was being observed around the site in trainers and jumper ‘looking frightfully bouncy and positive about the whole thing’.17 ‘Everybody has been wonderful!’ he gushed, in a thank-you message to his staff.18 The Times letters’ page soon filled with correspondence. A few expressed disgust at the ‘Thatcherite’ agenda of the paper and the actions of its proprietor but most were supportive. There were plaudits from the past, among them from Sir William Rees-Mogg who wrote a letter for publication reflecting on the trouble he had had when editor with the unions. He commended Murdoch’s ‘courage to break out of this intolerable and corrupting monopoly’. He was not alone. Sir Denis Hamilton later ranked Murdoch’s switch to Wapping ‘one of the great newspaper achievements of the century’. One Times columnist who felt particularly joyful was Bernard Levin, who promptly penned an article – ‘Fleet Street – now the truth can be told’ – that catalogued what he saw as the horrors of print union power against which ‘any attempt to let the outside world know what was happening nightly would have led to an immediate strike’. There was also praise from what were normally assumed to be hostile quarters. Harold Evans was asked to join a television debate on Wapping. The offer was quickly rescinded when he revealed he would commend Murdoch on his brave and necessary action. In the Spectator, Auberon Waugh opined that the so-called ‘Dirty Digger’ should be offered ‘a dukedom at very least’.19 For his part, Murdoch appeared to be enjoying the fray. Asked on BBC 1 whether he would move back to Bouverie Street or Gray’s Inn Road, he replied, ‘Of course I won’t move back. I feel like a man who has been on a life sentence and has just been released. I feel a wonderful sense of freedom.’20
His journalists, meanwhile, were not enjoying the same spirit of ecstasy. With each day that passed, the angry crowds of pickets at the gates grew larger. Staff had to telephone a special number each morning to find where the re-enforced buses, complete with grilles and drawn curtains, would pick them up to take them through the gates into the compound. Rendezvousing with buses at ever-changing locations was not suitable for everyone but those who persisted with taking their cars into work were confronted at the gates with pickets slapping sticky labels that, when removed, took the paintwork with them.
It was dispiriting for journalists to run the gauntlet of taunts from those they did not know. But to experience abuse from former friends and colleagues was particularly unpleasant. Former secretaries taunted those they had previously worked for. Indeed, former secretaries taunted remaining secretaries who crossed the picket line. Pat Healy joined the far side of the barricades. Paul Routledge, back from his posting in Singapore, also joined the demonstration in order to give vent to his feelings, although his former colleagues were more unsettled by the presence of Mrs Routledge whose line of invective, although blunter, was more penetrating. Some journalists tried to deflect the verbal taunts. When one picket snarled ‘sc-aaaaa-b’ at Alan Hamilton, the seasoned reporter asked him to elaborate. ‘You’re a traitor to the working class,’ the picket alleged. ‘No, I’m not,’ replied Hamilton, ‘I’m from Edinburgh.’ The picket opted to call him an unprintable part of the female anatomy instead.21 Like many others, Tim Austin faced a daily taunt of ‘I hope your kids die of cancer’ as he passed the pickets. The volley of abuse was not confined to the factory gates. Brian Forbes of the picture desk had excrement thrown in his garden and bricks through his window. Doubtless such behaviour was cathartic for those trying to cope with the loss of their jobs but it was also intended to make the lives of Wapping employees such a misery that they would leave the company. The speed with which elements within the anti-Wapping campaign decided to launch intimidation tactics alarmed those who were on the receiving end. The thuggery took a particularly sinister path on 20 February when two men interrupted Christopher Warman, a respected and long-serving Times correspondent, as he was enjoying a drink with Don McIntyre and friends near the old Gray’s Inn Road offices. Hassled as to whether he worked at Wapping, he conceded that he did. He was then head-butted and a beer glass was smashed into his face, narrowly missing his jugular vein. The assailants ran away leaving him on the floor, covered in blood.22 It was a frightening moment. He required nine stitches to his neck and face. Yet, as soon as he was out of hospital, he made a point of reporting for work. As the paper’s property correspondent, he promptly filed copy on Wapping’s new desirable converted warehouse residences. Although Warman conducted himself with extraordinary sang-froid, many of his colleagues were shaken by the incident and wondered when their own time would come.
Murdoch, Bruce Matthews, Bill O’Neill and the four News International editors were given round-the-clock protection by bodyguards from a security firm of ex-Royal Marines. Others found the level of security a mixed blessing. Used to filing his column from home, Miles Kington had always given his copy to his near neighbour, Philip Howard, to take into the office. But Howard’s lit. ed. office was temporarily still in Gray’s Inn Road. Undaunted, Kington trekked to Wapping to deliver his copy personally only to be turned away at the security gate for not having a pass. For hours, he tried to contact staff he knew behind the wire, but all telephones were recording ‘out to lunch’ messages (somewhat improbably, since there was nowhere for miles around serving a decent meal). Eventually, Kington whipped up the courage to ask to be put through to the editor. ‘Sorry sir,’ the security officer at the gate replied, ‘I haven’t got the number.’23
Someone who did need better protection was the EETPU’s leader, Eric Hammond. Attending a meeting of the TUC General Council, he was jostled by three hundred abusive protestors outside and, upon reaching the supposed sanctuary of the Congress House foyer, was kicked and punched by several union officials. Verbally, the mugging continued upstairs. Yet, although the General Council voted overwhelmingly to start proceedings for the EETPU’s suspension from the TUC, calmer heads argued for caution in expelling the electricians for fear they would start a rival TUC that would attract those working in the new technologies, leaving the TUC with a membership confined to the shrinking heavy industries. Hammond’s position was also strengthened by what he subsequently described as a ‘trump card’ – News International’s threat to sue if the TUC instructed his members to stop work at Wapping against a company with which they were not in dispute.24 Instead the TUC reached a compromise whereby the EETPU members would not be ordered to stop work at Wapping on the condition their union did not assist in further recruitment there or enter into a formal agreement unless it involved the other print unions too. Hammond accepted this, although he was half-minded to encourage the TUC to demand downing tools at Wapping so that he could have sued his fellow union brothers and ‘been free of all their directives.’25
When the Labour Party’s National Executive (the NEC) met on 29 January they called on ‘all Labour Party bodies, Labour local authorities, members and supporters to boycott The Times’ and the other News International titles. Labour’s director of communications, Peter Mandelson, then asked Times and Sun journalists attending the press conference to leave Labour Party premises immediately. Lobby rules prevented a paper from being specifically blacklisted, so Neil Kinnock called off his weekly briefing with the parliamentary lobby journalists and instituted private meetings with each of the non-News International representatives instead. The Daily Mail and the Yorkshire Post refused to play this game, a stance subsequently taken up by other papers, thereby denying the Labour Party its chance to influence the press.
The Labour Party boycott quickly descended in farce. Nick Raynsford, the party’s by-election candidate in Fulham, found it counter-productive and Larry Whitty, Labour’s general secretary, had to be dispatched to ask the print union’s permission for the purdah to be temporary lifted. Permission was granted, so long as the press conferences did not stray from the strict issue of the by-election. Three Labour MPs threatened to boycott the House of Commons Environment Committee’s visit to York unless the presentation on historic buildings by Dr Norman Hammond of the York Archaeological Trust was cancelled. Dr Hammond’s crime was to be The Times’s archaeological correspondent. Meekly, the Committee agreed. But Labour’s boycott did not catch on behind the Iron Curtain. When George Robertson, a Labour foreign affairs spokesman (and future NATO Secretary-General), attended a Communist-organized conference in his NEC capacity, he awoke each morning in his East Berlin hotel to the choice of the Morning Star or The Times.
The boycott campaign made little appreciable impact on sales. By the third week, Wilson was trumpeting Times daily sales of 485,000 copies, an increase of 13,000 since moving from Gray’s Inn Road.26 Sales of the Sun were also marginally up. But by ensuring that no Labour source was prepared to speak to or write for The Times it hit at the paper’s ability to report comprehensively. Labour MPs like Jack Straw who had written regularly for the paper had to cease doing so. That many of the paper’s refuseniks were left-leaning also harmed its breadth. Particularly grievous was the loss of the paper’s labour relations staff. On the night The Times chapel had debated whether to go to Wapping, Harry Conroy had leaned closer to Don McIntyre and made clear, in broad Glaswegian, that the labour staff would be treated as scabs for the rest of their lives and would never get work elsewhere if they were minded to stay on at The Times. Having fully digested this point, the labour correspondent joined the refuseniks.27 It was easy to see their predicament. The Labour Movement’s refusal to cooperate with News International employees (the NUJ even instructed its members at other newspapers not to supply information to any News International journalist) would have made their task extremely difficult even if they had stayed. But their absence, and the difficulty created in trying to cover labour relations in general and Wapping objectively from the new location was shown up at a time when the Guardian was able to field Patrick Wintour and the Financial Times Raymond Snoddy. Matters were made worse when an article that was partly critical of Murdoch written by the highly regarded centre-left columnist Peter Kellner was spiked. Kellner, the New Statesman’s political editor, had been writing a fortnightly column for The Times and the decision not to run his piece ensured his resignation, compounding the paper’s drain of alternative voices. As some were quick to point out, the episode smacked of crude censorship and reflected poorly on The Times’s objectivity.28
Yet, such defensiveness was mild compared to the attempt to gag The Times. At least thirty-three Labour-controlled local authorities withdrew job advertising from the paper and its siblings. Their decision had a proportionately much more serious effect on the Times Educational Supplement, which was the market leader (by a considerable margin) for advertising education vacancies. As such, the boycott must have been counter-productive to those authorities with teaching vacancies to fill. Undaunted, its advocates also intended to sweep staff common rooms and school libraries of the offending literature. The Labour group controlling the Inner London Educational Authority (ILEA) wrote to school and college governors instructing them to table resolutions to cancel Times, Times Literary Supplement and Times Educational Supplement subscriptions at their institutions of learning.29
Whether such activity was in the interests of the teaching profession was open to debate, but the prohibition of The Times from public libraries was altogether more serious and illegal. Across the country, Labour-controlled local authorities had interpreted their party’s boycott of News International to include preventing public library users consulting The Times. The socalled paper of record was removed from public scrutiny in more than thirty local authority areas. Such action was in breach of the 1964 Libraries Act. In some cases, the consequences descended into absurdity. When a barrister, John Riley, went to his public library in Staffordshire, the staff told him they had The Times behind the counter but were instructed not to let him look at it. He threatened legal action.
Richard Luce, the Arts Minister, wrote to fifteen councils drawing attention to the illegality of their action. Three responded positively but the rest, including Bradford, Sheffield and a succession of famously left wing London boroughs, refused. Salford did not get round to replying.30 When Luce failed to take the matter further, News International called upon the advocacy of Anthony Lester QC and David Pannick and took the local authorities to court. The eventual judgment was damning: ‘There could hardly be a clearer manifestation of an abuse of power,’ Lord Justice Watkins pronounced, than ‘to see such irresponsible behaviour’ by elected representatives knowingly ignoring the law.31 This brought the councils into line, with the exception of the London Borough of Brent which continued to refuse to stock The Times in its libraries. The council cited a succession of increasingly bizarre defences for why the court’s ruling did not apply to it. At one stage, the argument was proposed that the ‘racist and sexist’ material contained within the paper would conflict with the council’s duties under the Race Relations Act. In contrast, the Communist Morning Star remained freely available for consultation. It was not until March 1987 that the council finally bowed to the judgment of the High Court, leading Anthony Lester to declare ‘at the thirteenth hour the white flag has been hoisted alongside the red flag, over Brent Town Hall’.32
Quietly, the Government was delighted by Murdoch’s decision to sack his print union workers although Kenneth Clarke, the Employment Minister, broke cover to say he thought the press baron’s personal public relations required ‘a great deal of continuing attention. He is not an instantly popular figure.’ With John Biffen, the Leader of the Commons, seeking to defer a full-scale debate and the Speaker ruling out Tony Benn’s attempt to get an emergency debate, left wing Labour MPs were reduced to demanding that the Home Secretary declare Murdoch an ‘undesirable alien’ who should be banned from Britain ‘in the interest of decency and public order’. For his part, Neil Kinnock told a print workers’ rally at Wembley that the next Labour Government would curb the monopolistic power of the main newspaper owners and began referring to ‘Stalag Wapping’ and ‘Schloss Murdoch’. He rejected an invitation to discuss the situation with News International management.33 The rhetoric of the Labour leader during the dispute frequently gave the impression he saw it as a fight to resist foreign influence. Not content to lambast Murdoch’s ‘intercontinental ballistic management’ and conjure up Teutonic images, the future Vice-President of the European Commission maintained that when it came to the concentration of media ownership, the rule should be ‘if you’re not British – clear out’.34
One aspect of the Wapping strategy that worked particularly effectively was the switch from rail to road distribution. Using lorries gave The Times much greater flexibility in delaying deadlines if late news or a technical glitch needed to be accommodated. Unlike the railways, road freight could wait. It was flexible. It also ensured that there was just one loading period. Forty-foot lorries could drive up the ramp into the loading bay, take the papers on board and be on their way. Previously, the papers had first to be loaded onto vans and unloaded at the station before being reloaded onto trains, offloaded onto vans at the other end and taken to the wholesale depots before being transported to the shops for sale. The decision had been taken to stick with delivering to the existing wholesalers in the provinces but in London TNT handled all aspects of the distribution right down to delivering to the newsagents’ front doors. Brenda Dean had hoped that even if the papers were successfully printed at Wapping her instruction to regional SOGAT members to refuse to handle them would cripple distribution. But the attitude of SOGAT workers in the provinces towards their London brothers was made apparent when only wholesale distributors in Liverpool, Coventry and Glasgow obeyed the executive order to black the titles. WH Smith and John Menzies management made clear that employees refusing to handle the papers would be sacked. Such was the apathy of provincial members towards the Wapping strikers that SOGAT members in Watford even continued to produce the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. One SOGAT victory proved to be Pyrrhic: refusing to print 1.5 million extra News of the World copies done under contract with Express Newspapers in Manchester ensured that the contract was duly cancelled and jobs were lost. Wapping met the extra print run instead. The unions had badly underestimated the new plant’s ability to meet demand.
With the attempt to black distribution in Britain failing, SOGAT tried to broaden the theatres of war by persuading unions at foreign mills to go on strike rather than supply Wapping with newsprint. One firm had the contract for 75 per cent of News International’s purchase and Wapping would thus have nothing to print its journalism on if foreign unions adhered to the boycott. But workers of the world did not unite on this occasion; they proved unwilling to risk unemployment for the sake of a British labour dispute. SOGAT had to make do with messages of support.35
By creating a legally separate entity to handle distribution, News International’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards, had ensured any blacking campaign would be deemed illegal secondary action.36 Brenda Dean knew that this would be the case and consequently did not bother to hold ballots prior to issuing her order to black the titles. Consequently, the company began recourse to the law. By nightfall on 29 January, High Court injunctions had been placed not only on SOGAT’s blacking tactics but also on the TGWU’s attempts to order members driving the TNT lorries not to cross the Wapping picket line. Dean remained defiant in the face of the injunction, telling a three-hundred-strong rally in Manchester, her home base, on 31 January: ‘If you walk away from your colleagues dismissed in London and their families, you don’t deserve to be called trade unionists.’ ‘Scab newspapers’ should be blacked she told the crowd, adding, ‘If you don’t support your own kind, no one will support you when you need it.’37 It was not surprising she was desperate to strike a quick and overwhelming blow. As she later confided, the siege of Wapping ‘was winnable – or losable – in those first two weeks’.38 The longer the period in which distribution was not seriously disrupted the more certain would be News International’s eventual victory.
On 8 February, three thousand dismissed print workers and activists gathered outside Wapping in a show of strength. Keen to stress the repercussions on the families of those who had lost their jobs, Brenda Dean led a ‘Women’s March’. Advancing in candlelit formation in the manner of a column of medieval pilgrims, the women adapted the drunken sailor refrain to ‘What shall we do with Rupert Murdoch, early in the morning? Burn, burn, burn the bastard …’39 But for all the protesters’ anger, the lorries got through. Two days later, the High Court fined SOGAT £25,000 for contempt of court for failing to obey the injunction prohibiting the ‘blacking’ from the wholesalers. What was more, the union’s £17 million assets were sequestrated until it renounced the ‘blacking’ instruction.
Having stayed silent on the dispute during its first three weeks, The Times’s leader column finally chose the sequestration issue to address the news on its doorstep. ‘When the obstacles between the paper and its readers include darts, drill bits and blackened golf balls as well as illegal attempts to threaten customers and suppliers it should surprise no one that the force of law is our first defence,’ it declared.40 Such sentiments left opponents cold. Proud trade unionists continued to demand defiance. Ron Todd of the TGWU pointed out ‘if the Tolpuddle Martyrs had taken legal advice, they could have saved themselves a trip to Australia’ while Brenda Dean stated ‘our members are more important than money’.41 In fact, many members were far from in agreement with her on this point: the campaign on behalf of the 4500 ex-News International employees was preventing the union’s 213,000 other members from receiving their pensions, injury claims and other benefits provided from its central funds. This became a source of friction.
It was not just SOGAT that refused to retract in front of injunctions and fines. The NGA, which had also been fined for contempt of court, failed to win the support of members in a ballot to black production of the Times supplements (the TLS, TES and THES) printed in Northampton. Regardless of this rebuff, the union’s leadership announced it would black the papers anyway since five NGA members involved in putting the supplements’ pages to camera had voted (in a supposedly secret ballot) to strike. Fortunately the ability of five men to disrupt the entire supplements division was overcome when their employer (working under contract to News International) moved them to a less strategic department. Nonetheless, Tony Dubbins proudly boasted that his union’s initials stood for ‘Not Going Away’.42
News International hoped that the freezing of union funds would lead to a hasty settlement and the calling off not only of the blacking call but also the picketing of the Wapping plant. Union activists believed the court action demonstrated the need to intensify efforts while there was time. Three thousand pickets (many of them Kent miners) descended on Wapping on the night of 13 February intent on stopping The Times and Sun from leaving the gates. Five hundred police, including mounted officers, had to be rushed in to keep the exits clear. There were forty-one arrests on that night alone. A month later, tempers were strained further when two pickets were hit and their legs broken by a lorry they were trying to prevent leaving the plant. To misfortune was added bathos: the lorry was carrying copies of the Sun’s ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ edition. Three nights later, the pickets sought to exact their revenge: seven thousand besieged the plant. Iron bars, lead piping, shotgun cartridges and railing spikes were seized by the police from the rioters, who succeeded in tearing down a forty-yard section of the security fence. Fortress Wapping appeared to be on the verge of being overrun and, in scenes worthy of Sergei Eisenstein, it took mounted-police charges to push the surging demonstrators back. The assault managed seriously to delay, but not to prevent, the lorries getting out.
Most evenings passed with incident, but a pattern was emerging in which Saturday nights involved the most serious breakdowns in order with demonstrators attempting to prevent Murdoch’s lucrative Sunday titles from leaving the compound. As weeks passed without the prospect of resolution, the siege became a cause célèbre, attracting the attention of left-wing activists, students, trade unionists and, increasingly, thugs looking for a bit of violent excitement. Banners were held high proclaiming Class War, the Socialist Workers’ Party and the various Trotskyite factions. The Wapping Highway became a major sales venue for the cottage industry of left-wing newspapers. Only the lonely seller of Labour Weekly was made to feel unwelcome. By the end of the third month of the siege, there had been 474 arrests. Among this number was the NGA’s general secretary, Tony Dubbins, who was charged with obstructing lorries. But of the total number of arrests, it was telling that less than a third were ex-printers.
Moderate voices within the unions were concerned at the hijacking of the printers’ cause by those with their own, sometimes violent, agenda. Yet, having determined upon a tactic that centred upon trying to block the entry and exit points of Wapping, the logic was to welcome as many able-bodied protestors as possible. Weight of numbers was the only prospect of the siege working. After all, the unions’ other strategies – getting the wholesalers to black distribution, encouraging readers not to buy the newspapers and persuading the contract printers Bemrose and Odhams not to produce the colour supplements, had all failed. Indeed, when balloted for strike action, the SOGAT employees at Bemrose voted twelve to one against coming out and those at Odhams also rejected their union’s call by an overwhelming margin.43 Violence was ‘certainly not what we are after,’ announced Chris Robbins, SOGAT’s London district secretary, although he added:
if there are 8,000 people outside Wapping there is little that the police can do. We have shown [on 16 March, when the Sunday titles were delayed by four hours] that is a sufficient number to stop the papers going out. Unlike Orgreave [a reference to one of the bitterest confrontations of the miners’ strike] the exits are all in a pretty enclosed area.44
The intention was clear. But inside the stockade, plans had been devised to outsmart the siege. News International’s strategy would not have been possible without the active support of the police (a point that particularly riled those activists who believed the Met was being used politically). Police sealed a one-mile area around the plant. There were three permanent roadblocks, augmented where necessary by up to sixteen temporary roadblocks. Because lorries leaving in ones or twos could be picked off, they lined up en masse behind the walls, ready for a group breakout. Two o’clock in the morning was the usual time for one of the sets of gates to open and the lorries to speed their way through the defences, followed by shouts, threats and projectiles. From there, there was more than one route that could be taken and, unlike the drivers and the police, the demonstrators never knew in advance which it would be, ensuring that they had to stretch their troops thinly across the whole area. But on nights where the unions were able to deploy mass numbers it often took mounted-police charges to clear a way through. It was not only the lorry drivers who found themselves running the gauntlet in this fashion. Those journalists and staff who could not get out before the demonstrators started gathering at 7 p.m. were often forced to stay within the compound until 2 a.m. as well. Hours were wasted sitting in cars with the headlights off and engine running, lined up in convoy formation awaiting the command to put the foot down and accelerate fast.
There was an obvious downside to this level of security. The more Wapping’s fortifications were piled high, the less agreeable it appeared to journalists and public alike. The Sunday Express cartoonist, Giles, depicted it as a concentration camp complete with goose-stepping Nazi guards. The police did not allow any buses or taxis through the one-mile cordon. Residents could pass through only on production of identity cards proving they lived there. They could be forgiven for wishing the plant could be shut down so that they could get a decent night’s sleep. Tower Hamlets Council had been inundated with complaints about the night-time noise generated and some hoped this could be used as a pretext for having the police operation scaled back or even the plant forcibly shut. When a journalist from New Society, a weekly magazine later subsumed into the New Statesman, drove over to Wapping to talk to some of those who had lodged complaints, some pickets came within view. He gave them a sympathetic gesture of solidarity. Unfortunately it was misinterpreted and a brick came smashing through his car window.
The nightly scuffles preoccupied those caught on both sides of the stockade, but it was only one part of a wider battle for public opinion. In this respect, Brenda Dean presented a more appealing face than either Murdoch’s barbed wire or the traditional overweight Bolshie shop steward to which Fleet Street had long played host. Soft-spoken and moderate in tone, Dean led the presentation of the unions’ case to the media. She was adept at steering the rhetoric away from overpaid (usually NGA) print men trying to maintain Luddite practices and onto the fate of the lower-paid cleaning and clerical workers, often women, who were more obviously blameless victims in the battle of Wapping. Much was made of the suffering inflicted upon their families. By May, SOGAT had spent £250,000 on the boycott campaign. Indeed, the unions spent an estimated total of £400,000 on publicity during the long course of the siege.45 Newspaper advertisements were placed, three million stickers produced and six million leaflets printed. The ‘Don’t Buy …’ logo was embossed on posters, plastic bags and T-shirts. When the time of year came round there was even a not especially festive Christmas card proclaiming ‘Christmas Greetings – Please don’t buy The Sun, News of the World, The Times, Sunday Times’ between four pieces of stylized holly. There was also an advert featuring a photograph of a child clutching her teddy bear beside the caption: ‘My dad helped Mr Murdoch make millions. Now he wants to put him on the Dole. Don’t let him.’ This was not all. A pro-strikers’ newspaper, the Wapping Post, was launched. Edited by Chris Robbins and running to twelve pages, it was promoted by the unions who placed bulk orders with 45,000 copies being distributed throughout the country. It provided a lively mix of articles on ‘Mugger Murdoch’, police brutality, the health and safety dangers of operating computers, letters and details of forthcoming events with such titles as ‘The Truth Behind Barbed Wire’ addressed by the likes of the ubiquitous Tony Benn.46
How much effect the campaign had in winning over the public was doubtful. To those involved on either side, it was a life or death struggle for the future of the industry. Those not involved were less concerned. Confidential market research commissioned by News International when the siege was four months old suggested that many of those polled did not care whose will prevailed. Of those who did, 39 per cent favoured the management and 33 per cent the unions (although union support had a majority among those who felt strongly on the issue). Less than half could remember – without prompting – the name of someone connected with the dispute with only Murdoch and Dean attaining significant recognition. But the data did show that no perceptible switch in readership away from The Times could be discerned and that only 6 per cent thought the unions were winning the dispute.47
Within the News International group, only the Sunday Times appeared to be losing circulation in the first three months of the move to Wapping, largely due to distribution problems and, perhaps, the desertion of some of its sizeable non-Thatcherite readership.48 But The Times had particular cause for celebration. On 28 March it published on Good Friday for the first time since 1918. None of its competitors appeared – their print unions forbade it. To capitalize, a record print run of 773,948 copies were made of the Good Friday Times, a full 120,000 more than the celebrated royal wedding edition in 1981. By May, the paper was averaging 503,000 sales per day, breaking the highest sustained circulation in its history. Taking advantage of the national economic recovery, advertising revenue was up by 25 per cent on the year and classified ads were at their highest level for more than a decade.49
The actual paper looked, at first sight, remarkably similar to its Gray’s Inn Road predecessor. Close scrutiny revealed it was produced on a marginally smaller paper size but the quality of the printed page was just as good – or rather bad – as before. This was because the presses were no different. Apart from the departure of some quality journalists, there was little difference in content. Peregrine Worsthorne hoped that by reducing production costs, the Wapping revolution would lead to The Times abandoning its fight for larger circulation in favour of serving its 300,000 ‘top readers’.50 In fact, the paper’s management had been so preoccupied with the logistics of the switch in production that strategic considerations of this kind had been deferred. But upmarket or downmarket, others were fearful for what Wapping meant for the competition. ‘By saving an estimated £60 million on his annual production costs,’ Peter Paterson warned that Murdoch was ‘in a position to reduce the cover price of, say, The Times, to the destruction of the Telegraph and the Guardian’.51 Old Fleet Street was swept with panic when it was rumoured Murdoch was poised to drop not only his papers’ cover prices but also their advertising rates.
In truth, to News International’s competitors, Wapping was both a threat and a godsend. Wapping printed four mass-market newspapers, including the leading daily and Sunday tabloid, with a 670-strong production staff. By comparison, the Daily Mail’s owners, Associated Newspapers, were lumbered with a 3400 production staff and the Daily Express’s new owners, United Newspapers, wilted under the weight of a 6800-strong workforce. Clearly, they had to make cuts urgently or risk going under. In the past, such swingeing cuts would have been impossible since the print unions would have gone on indefinite strike, forcing management to back down or compromise. But Wapping provided Murdoch’s rivals with just the weapon – or threat of using such a weapon – that they needed. Once it became clear to the unions they were losing the siege of Wapping, they either had to bow to the other proprietors’ demands or risk being shut out entirely à la Wapping by them too. The Express’s owner, Lord Stevens, lost no time in drawing this conclusion. He discovered that Wapping had concentrated union minds wonderfully and 2500 redundancies were soon agreed. Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, had already announced his intention to build a new print works in Docklands but he well understood that Murdoch’s coup transformed the scale and urgency with which he had to act. ‘Wapping is a watershed – a great historic date in Fleet Street,’ Rothermere conceded; ‘those who survive are going to be those who have understood this fastest.’52 Indeed, after years of timid inertia, the speed with which the various proprietors shot out of their respective blocks was remarkable, or, as Charles Wilson put it, ‘they were off like rats up a drain’.53 A week after The Times’s move to Wapping, the Guardian rushed through an announcement that it would move to Docklands, switch from hot metal to computer typesetting and introduce direct-input by 1987. Within days, Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers declared it would do the same by 1988. Then, in July, the Financial Times announced it too would go east and that the ‘paper of business’ would enter the computer age in 1988.
‘One after another, the threatened newspaper groups have been able, with no weapon but a pair of binoculars for seeing the smoke pouring from the roaring chimneys of Castle Wapping, to conclude agreements’ that their unions would never previously have accepted, noted Bernard Levin in his ‘The Way We Live Now’ column. Here was a case in which:
The man who makes a hole in the hedge gets scratched, but those who go through it after him feel no discomfort. It may be that, as Messrs Black, Stevens, Rothermere and the rest go through the hole, they experience a warm glow of gratitude to the man they can see disappearing towards the horizon with brambles sticking out of him all over. If so, I conclude that if they fail to express that gratitude, it can only be because of shyness.54
If a little sotto voce, some of the rival proprietors did salute Murdoch’s courage and audacity. One who loudly did not was the Daily Mirror’s owner, Robert Maxwell, who criticized his enemy for ‘not doing things the British way’. The weight of Maxwell’s pronouncement was soon demonstrated when he sacked his Glasgow print workers for refusing to handle a new colour edition, put up barbed wire and guard dogs around the plant and went to court to sequestrate SOGAT’s assets. Labour MPs who had hurled abuse at Murdoch for such behaviour were noticeably silent when Maxwell, a Labour benefactor, trod the same path.
Few rival editors were prepared to be charitable towards Murdoch (an honourable exception being Brian MacArthur at Eddy Shah’s newly launched Today). When News International placed an advertisement stating its case, most newspapers declined to print it. Some, like the Daily Telegraph’s editor, Max Hastings, refused supposedly on the grounds that he did not ‘want to give space to our principal commercial competition’. Others, like the Guardian and the FT, were too scared of their own unions’ reaction to print it and demanded indemnities against consequent legal action. Only the Daily Mail, the Mirror Group and Today agreed to carry it.55 The Times was furious at the craven nature of rivals who stood to benefit from Wapping’s legacy but were not prepared to print (let alone endorse) an advertisement in its support. ‘There are some in the newspaper industry,’ the leader column stated accusingly, ‘who are still afraid of their unions. This alone ought to speak more than any advertisement in favour of the cause that News International is fighting.’56
One head that did not poke far above the parapet was that of Donald Trelford, editor of the Observer. Seven of his subeditors also worked during the week for The Times. NGA print workers threatened to stop production of the Observer unless they were dismissed. Trelford duly did the dirty work. Next, the printers (backed by the paper’s NUJ chapel father) threatened to shut down the paper unless an innocuous review of a book about the Victorian travel writer Augustus Hare was pulled. Its crime was that it had been written by Times columnist and print union scourge, Bernard Levin. Trelford duly pulled the article and, with it, Levin’s contract to review books for the Observer.57 An editor who fearlessly and famously stood up to a bullying owner, Tiny Rowland, on the question of his paper’s reporting of African politics was prepared to capitulate tamely before a delegation of union representatives.
Intimidation at the offices of the Observer was as nothing compared to that facing those – journalists and printing staff alike – who worked at or collaborated with Wapping. Leaflets were distributed headed ‘Roll of Dishonour’ listing ‘scabs’’ names and – ominously – their home addresses. Even those not on the staff payroll were at risk. Fifty demonstrators smashed through a glass door to get at the history professor John Vincent while he was trying to give a lecture to his students at Bristol University. Vincent was subjected to a barracking because he had written articles in The Times. It was unlikely that many of the protestors had ever been anywhere near the paper’s machine room but worse followed when one hundred demonstrators disrupted Professor Vincent’s lecture for the third week running, some hurling mud at him. Another who experienced the wrath of activist agitprop was the former Times business editor, Hugh Stephenson, who had gone on to become Professor of Journalism at City University in London. Hardly a Murdoch sycophant, Stephenson found himself the target of his students’ wrath and was subjected to a petition condemning him for submitting articles to The Times in breach of the NUJ boycott.58
Neither Professors Vincent nor Stephenson endured as lengthy a trial as David Selbourne. A noted academic writer of eclectic sweep, Selbourne had for twenty-two years been a lecturer at Ruskin College, the adult higher education college in Oxford that had links with the trade union movement. When The Times published an article by him on Labour’s Militant Tendency, he found himself condemned for ‘anti-trade union’ thinking by the Ruskin Students’ Union who ordered him to apologize and not to write such articles again. When he refused to bow to this Maoist instruction, a student picket barred entrance to his lectures. If Selbourne imagined the staff would stand up for his academic freedom of thought he was soon disappointed. The acting principal described Selbourne’s Times article as ‘provocative’ and fellow lecturers declared their ‘solidarity’ with the Students’ Union which promptly called for him to be sacked. Although Ruskin was not part of Oxford University it had access to its facilities and the Oxford University Students’ Union also weighed in to condemn the turbulent academic. The Association of University Teachers were not much more helpful. Selbourne stated that he was not a Murdoch supporter but that he would write again for The Times if commissioned to do so. Ruskin College’s Executive Committee censured him and, unable to get any reassurance that it backed his academic freedom, Selbourne resigned his post. So ended a lengthy career there. But his fate did not go unnoticed. In a succession of leader articles, The Times drew attention to his case and the Government announced an independent enquiry under Sir Albert Sloman, the former Essex University vice-chancellor, to investigate Ruskin’s (taxpayer funded) commitment to academic freedom. It called for the college to revise its disciplinary procedures and make its commitment to academic freedom more explicit.59
Meanwhile, the National Union of Journalists continued to side with the dismissed printers. The NUJ’s attempts, as The Times leader column put it, ‘to deprive a newspaper of information, and to obstruct the public reading it’, made it as guilty of promoting censorship as those attempting to silence its academic contributors. During April, the NUJ considered what to do about its members working at Wapping.60 The decision was not as simple as the more militant voices hoped. The desire to punish those who had gone there was balanced by the fear they would tear up their membership cards and provoke a mass exodus. With these considerations in mind, the union’s National Executive voted by thirteen votes to twelve against initiating disciplinary proceedings against all the journalists. Instead, the union would only pick on those it suspected of being particularly culpable or cowardly: it would investigate the actions of the four chapel fathers individually. It also barred The Times journalist Peter Davenport, reporting its proceedings from its annual conference in Sheffield. The conference itself was certainly worthy of coverage: delegates voted to reverse their National Executive’s decision, ensuring proceedings could be initiated against all News International journalists after all. Condolences were also sent to Colonel Gaddafi over the US raid on Tripoli.
On 4 April, Murdoch presented the print unions with a free gift. At face value, it was a generous present and – even if mindful of the history lesson of Greeks bearing gifts – the unions could not easily refuse it. But it was an awkward present all the same. The inspiration for it came in a letter published in The Times from a Mr D. P. Forbes of Croydon.61 Murdoch read it and set about investigating its feasibility. He soon realized it contained the kernel of a brilliant idea that could end the dispute on terms that would deliver him victory by an apparent act of magnanimity to his opponents.
In moving to Wapping, Murdoch no longer had any need for Gray’s Inn Road and its print facilities. But rather than selling the property and its contents to the highest bidder he could instead give it away to a trade union body on the condition they used it to print a Labour-friendly newspaper employing the very printers Murdoch had sacked. In return for gaining this employment and better representation of left-wing views in the popular press, the unions would call off the siege of Wapping. The proposal, it seemed, could only rebound to Murdoch’s credit. If the unions accepted the offer, everyone would be happy. If they rejected the offer, they would be shown up for being intransigent and unwilling to operate the very machinery and manning levels that they were fighting to foist upon News International.
At a meeting with the print unions at the Mayfair Hotel, Bruce Matthews made them the offer. Although they would not be allowed instantly to asset strip it, they were being offered the freehold on a 300,000 square foot building that, on the open market, had a potential value of around £15 million. With it came a two-year contract to print London editions of the Guardian worth £1 million per annum. Also included was ‘about £40 million’ worth of equipment with computerized typesetting technology and sixty Goss Headliner Mark 1 presses (the same as Wapping used). The offer naturally caught the union delegation off guard. Needing time to digest what was suddenly being tendered, they asked for an adjournment. After they returned, Brenda Dean conceded the offer was ‘unusual to say the least’ and asked for more time to consider it. She warned, however, that it ‘did not represent an alternative to jobs and compensation’. The NGA’s leader, Tony Dubbins, was far less equivocal. It was not a solution, he protested, because ‘the company was offering plant and equipment – not employment’.
Dubbins was certain that the offer was a non-starter designed to sidetrack the unions from their principal aim. They were demanding the right to work at Wapping and, if that proved impossible, to win generous redundancy payments for those who had been sacked. They had never asked to run a paper themselves. But the offer put his union colleagues in a quandary. If they immediately rejected it, they stood to look like wreckers. In any case, they were short of a convincing fallback position. Their attempts to blockade Wapping were failing and, in becoming increasingly violent, were highly risky. Dean’s initial fear was that the offer was not as good as it sounded and that Murdoch was trying to ‘stage-manage’ a deal by appearing on Channel 4 News to announce the gift. In the event, with cameras rolling, Murdoch was unrepentant. ‘This is an opportunity,’ he announced, ‘for the TUC to achieve their ambition and at the same time employ the people who previously worked at the plant. It allows the trade union movement the start-up capital free of charge with no interest charges round their neck.’ And with the hint of a smile, he added that in permitting a rival newspaper to be born, ‘We will risk the competition.’ Dubbins remained unimpressed, musing, ‘I think people can’t help but be somewhat cynical about an offer from Mr Murdoch’ who ‘has got a cheek in making this offer after sacking 6,000 workers.’62
Union trepidation was understandable. Having come to the conclusion that they were supping with the Devil, they were asking for long spoons. But the secret of Murdoch’s success should have given them the courage of their rhetoric. He had, after all, built much of his own empire on the profits from the Sun, a seemingly unpromising newspaper he had been given virtually for free by Hugh Cudlipp. Might the unions not also make the most of such a golden opportunity? Eager to add to the number of Labour-supporting newspapers, Neil Kinnock thought this new gift should not be casually discarded just because it came from a man the print unions detested. Clive Thornton, the former chairman of the Mirror Group and a director of the proposed left-wing tabloid News on Sunday, agreed, arguing that ‘if [the unions] have got any imagination they should use it to see the prospects. Murdoch has used his imagination in making the offer. The unions should use theirs too.’63 But the TUC’s general secretary would have none of it. Addressing eight thousand demonstrators in Trafalgar Square before marching them off to besiege Fortress Wapping, Norman Willis snubbed the Gray’s Inn Road offer: ‘We put print workers before print works. Our priority has to be people not property.’64
When negotiations recommenced at the Hyde Park Hotel on 16 April both sides made new bids. News International offered a £15 million exgratia payment to its sacked employees. A forty-year-old printer who had been employed for twenty years on £24,000 per annum could expect a £10,000 payout. In return, Brenda Dean put forward TUC proposals in which News International would recognize a ‘National Joint Committee’ representing all union members (including the NGA and SOGAT) it would employ. This new body (and not the individual unions that comprised it) would have sole negotiating rights on pay and conditions and would recognize management’s right to determine staffing levels.65 Given the cold hostility of the first weeks of the strike, here at least were signs of movement from both sides. But there was now a more fundamental issue at stake: could the union negotiators deliver a deal that their members would accept? From Sydney, Murdoch wrote to Bruce Matthews, asking him to extend the deadline for acceptance of the Gray’s Inn Road plant and expressing his concern that ‘Brenda has lost control irretrievably.’66
There were plenty of signs that the moderates were not in control. On the night of 9 April, about 450 thugs attacked the TNT distribution depot at Byfleet in Surrey, hurling bricks and missiles, throwing nails in the way of the lorry tyres and smashing the windscreens of three lorries trying to deliver copies of The Times to the depot. A TNT manager was grabbed, punched and kicked. The police had to send for reinforcements and an adjacent garden wall collapsed. Two nights later, a further attack by balaclava-wearing individuals was launched upon a John Menzies distribution depot at Southend in Essex causing further damage. But it was not until 3 May – the ninety-seventh day of the dispute – that the worst violence erupted when a concerted attack was made to occupy and destroy the Wapping plant itself.
Two marches – one from the west, the other from the east – converged on the Wapping Highway where the police had barricaded the entrance to the site down into Virginia Street. Seven thousand protestors easily outnumbered the 1700 police blocking the entrance. The first charge on the police line at Virginia Street was ferocious. Coming under a hail of bricks, smoke bombs, bottles and sharpened railings, the police were pushed back as the mob surged forward, seized the barricades and pushed on towards the gates to the plant. Fearing the insurgents were on the verge of smashing their way in, the mounted police arrived just in time to push them back to the original line of defence. The police sustained heavy casualties as the volley of projectiles continued to rain down upon them and a detachment in riot gear was sent behind the assailants’ line to pull out from the crowd those throwing the missiles. But the ‘snatch squad’ approaching the mob from Wellclose Square was hopelessly outnumbered. It soon became clear that unless they were rescued quickly their lives would be in danger as the mob closed in upon them. The decision was taken to smash a way through the rioters’ lines in order to free the encircled policemen. A second charge by mounted police was ordered. ‘We gave no warnings of the charges because there was no time,’ the Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Wyn Jones, admitted, adding, ‘The officers in the square were in danger.’ The charge certainly smashed through some of the demonstrators who were not involved in the violent rampage and truncheons struck a BBC camera crew in the ensuing melee. One hundred and fifty demonstrators were injured in the mounted charges, but the endangered policemen were rescued and the assault on the plant repulsed back to the original defence line along the Wapping Highway. Of eighty-one arrested, twenty-five were print workers. The police that night suffered 175 injuries, some of them spending days in hospital. One WPC was badly burned by a smoke bomb that was thrown at her. Another was hit over the head with a concrete slab. From her hospital bed, she recalled, ‘I could hear women shouting “another Yvonne Fletcher. I hope she dies.”’67
Tony Benn, who had addressed the meeting before the riot began, proceeded to condemn what he described as a ‘massive police attack on perfectly innocent people’. In response, The Times leader column was puce with rage, demanding to know:
What would have happened if the police had not been present at Wapping on Saturday? No doubt the crowd would have invaded the plant, destroyed much of the equipment and physically attacked those working there. Many people would have been seriously injured and it is by no means improbable in the circumstances that several people would have been killed.68
One consequence was more positive. Brenda Dean, together with NGA representatives, met Scotland Yard’s Wyn Jones to discuss ways in which the demonstrations could be run and policed with less violence. Telephone contact was established between union officials and the police officer in charge. But it was little deterrent to the activists who nightly attached themselves to the printers’ cause. In the London area alone, twenty-nine separate groups organized money raising and support back-up for the pickets under an umbrella title, the ‘Union of Printworkers Support Groups’. The Socialist Workers’ Party helped to bring together the various groups who had supported the miners in their year-long struggle. There was also a ‘Policing Research and Monitoring Group’ in which the Communist Party member and Marxism Today contributor Cathie Lloyd was active in logging allegations of police brutality. The National Council for Civil Liberties was also quick to blame the law enforcers for the breakdown of order. The official statistics told a different story. By mid-May, there had been 851 arrests and 332 police officers injured. There had also been 296 incidents involving TNT vans, including ninety-two smashed windows and thirty-five drivers assaulted.69
Meanwhile, SOGAT had finally done a volte-face. On 8 May it purged its contempt of court by withdrawing its instruction to wholesalers to black all News International titles. Given the failure of the tactic, it was hardly a major concession, but it did unfreeze the union’s £17 million assets. Some felt the union had suffered enough and looked for a more equitable sharing of the hardship. ‘The NGA were sitting relatively pretty,’ Brenda Dean later asserted. ‘We were taking the great burden of the dispute although it was projected as the “print unions” dispute.’70 The Wapping management saw the strained relations between Dean and Dubbins as an opportunity, believing SOGAT’s leadership was far more open to agreeing a negotiated settlement than their NGA counterparts. The decision was taken to treat with them separately. Murdoch’s private Gulfstream jet secretly picked up Dean and her deputy, Bill Miles, and flew them, along with Bruce Matthews, to Los Angeles. From there they were taken to the Beverly Hills villa that Murdoch was renting from the James Bond actor, Roger Moore. It was hoped this would provide the right environment to conclude a deal that could then be presented as a fait accompli to the NGA leadership. Murdoch offered £50 million to his ex-employees.71 A deal appeared to be all but agreed. But Dean had to sell it to her members. This she singularly failed to do.
It was easy to understand Dean’s timidity. SOGAT’s London branches convened their four-thousand members at Westminster Central Hall on 19 May. They agreed a plan to intensify the siege. One branch official was cheered when he suggested setting fire to any ballot papers that excluded reinstatement to work at Wapping. In contrast, when Dean stood up to address her assembled warriors, she was met with a volley of abuse. Her speech was heckled throughout, particularly at those junctures where she counselled moderation and her open-minded attitude towards accepting the Gray’s Inn Road offer. It was not the time or place to admit she had been covertly dealing with the enemy while relaxing around Roger Moore’s swimming pool.
Dean’s failure to tell her members what had been discussed made matters difficult. Murdoch had set a 30 May deadline. On 26 May he flew in for talks with all the principal players (including Norman Willis of the TUC) at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel at Heathrow. As the discussions proceeded, Murdoch added the front part of the Sunday Times building to the Gray’s Inn Road offer. If new job opportunities became available at Wapping, the sacked print workers would be free to apply for them. But he rejected the unions’ idea of a national joint committee on the grounds that its arbitration procedures would not be legally binding. In any case, he questioned whether it would be acceptable to those currently working at Wapping. ‘Did they want to belong to the NGA?’ he asked, before adding that he doubted it. His £50 million redundancy offer was final: News International ‘was not a money fountain’. In seventeen years, its profits had amounted to about £200 million but capital expenditure had been £197 million. Time was short. The unions should accept. This was his final offer.72 He gave an equally uncompromising response to reporters later that day. He would not sacrifice those currently ‘doing a magnificent job’ at Wapping since ‘our loyalty is to the people who are working for us, not to the people who went on strike’. If the latter rejected his offer then so be it: ‘That’s it. I am catching the next plane home.’73
The union leaders put the package to a vote of their members well aware that Murdoch was not bluffing. Maintaining that the offer ‘fell short in every respect’ Dubbins recommended his NGA members reject it.74 In this he was in step with the mood of the union. Indeed, the belligerence at a meeting of eight hundred NGA members was so strongly against even holding a ballot that no one spoke up in favour of accepting the offer. Dean’s tactics were somewhat different. She made clear there was little likelihood of a better offer being made if her members voted no, but she did not risk the personal consequences of formally endorsing a yes vote. Even the procedure by which the ballot was held attracted suspicion and attempts at sabotage. No sooner had the voting papers gone out in the post than SOGAT activists launched a High Court injunction attempt to scrap the vote on the grounds that the papers were being sent out to individual members instead of the traditional procedure of being given to the chapel officers for distribution. The legal attempt failed but it would not have made much difference to the outcome. SOGAT members rejected the settlement by 2081 to 1415, the NGA by 648 to 165 and the smallest union involved, the AEU, by 112 to 56.
Dubbins greeted the news by making clear his union would ‘step up this dispute’. Murdoch’s reaction was to repeat that there would be no new offer. Gray’s Inn Road would now be sold commercially instead, the profits from its sale going into News International’s coffers rather than being put at the disposal of the TUC. There would be no new left-leaning newspaper, no jobs for the ex-print workers to take up in producing it. It was, in Bruce Matthews’s words, the unions’ ‘second suicide.’
In fact, there was a perfectly rational explanation for why the vote had gone against reaching an agreement: most of the ex-print workers had already gained employment elsewhere (SOGAT admitted that only a third of its affected members were still eligible for unemployment benefit).75 Thus they were in no rush to reach a deal. Rather, they would hold out indefinitely, tightening all the while the screw on the Wapping siege until Murdoch, in desperation, came back with a larger payout. To this prospect, Matthews warned, ‘if there is an escalation of violence, I think they will isolate themselves from every section of the community.’76
On Monday 2 June – even before the results of the ballot had been announced – new and yet more thuggish tactics were being deployed to smash The Times and its Wapping stable mates. Instead of concentrating on trying to block the newspapers coming out, the pickets sought to prevent the journalists going in. For two hours between eight and ten o’clock in the morning, about three hundred demonstrators descended upon the plant, taking the twenty policemen by surprise and forcing the main gates to be locked. But the worst scenes were at the rear entrance. Staff turning up for work, including secretaries and other female employees, were punched and harangued. The pickets prevented those arriving by car from reversing by blocking the road behind them with scaffolding and rubble from a nearby building site and subjecting the trapped employees to a terrifying ordeal of intimidation and threatening behaviour.
Late that night, the assault took a yet more sinister path. A News International warehouse at Convoy’s Wharf in Deptford where newsprint was being stored was fire-bombed. Two men were seen scrambling over garage roofs and along a wall before making a getaway in a waiting car. Moments later, there was a huge explosion from the warehouse followed by an enormous sheet of flame. The result was the biggest fire in London since the Blitz. The tightly packed newsprint ignited, the steel frame buckled and the roof came crashing in. At one stage the heat was so intense that police feared it would crack the windows and set fire to curtains in a nearby housing estate. Throughout the night, a fireboat pumped 26,000 gallons of water from the Thames every three minutes into the inferno. Two days afterwards, the warehouse’s contents were still smouldering. Sifting through the charred remains, police discovered petrol can caps on the floor.
The following morning, Bruce Matthews’s secretary received a telephone call from an anonymous caller with some advice for her boss: ‘That was a well-organized job last night, wasn’t it? Tell him he’ll be the next to burn.’ Although News International offered a £50,000 reward for information leading to the culprits’ arrest and conviction, nobody was ever charged. Whoever were the culprits, what was not in doubt was that they had launched a deliberate attempt to destroy Wapping’s store of newsprint. In the event, almost 10,000 tons were destroyed, of which 20 per cent (two weeks’ supply) had been intended for Wapping. A lorry and trailers were also incinerated. In all, £7 million of damage was incurred.77
A couple of days after the Deptford fire, Eric Hammond answered the telephone to a caller who assured him, ‘You and your family are going to burn, you bastard.’ He later recognized the voice when he was heckled while giving an interview. It belonged to someone with ‘an honoured presence in SOGAT’.78 At the annual TUC conference in Brighton, Hammond had to be accompanied by bodyguards wherever he went. The Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, also received death threats, with his home in Onslow Gardens becoming a regular destination for hate mail. When he appeared on the panel of BBC TV’s Question Time, demonstrators smashed the building’s windows and at one point the electricity was cut, plunging the studio into darkness. On another occasion, Neil’s attempts to honour an invitation from the Institute of Journalists had to be abandoned when strikers threw smoke bombs into the basement where the meeting was in progress.79 Marmaduke Hussey had to endure obscene abuse being hurled at him by a picket who accosted him as he was getting into his car. As Hussey levered himself into the driving seat the picket slammed the car door on Hussey’s leg. Luckily it was his artificial leg (he had been seriously wounded in the Second World War) and the door ‘bounced back with an almighty clang’. The picket was somewhat taken aback.80
Throughout the summer, the spate of targeted attacks continued apace. On 19 June, a TNT distribution depot for The Times at Snodland in Kent was attacked by masked intruders who shattered windscreens and damaged property. This was not just a hit and run mission by a few desperados: four hundred demonstrators marched on the depot. Six days later, forty men armed with iron bars smashed into a TNT depot in Luton, attacked police officers with bricks and missiles and destroyed vans while two hundred demonstrators picketed outside. A similar assault was launched eleven days later, causing more criminal damage at a TNT depot in Eastleigh, Hampshire.81 The varied geography of these locations, the premeditated collection of weapons and the size of the supporting demonstration highlighted the organized extent of the campaign being waged against News International and its interests.
Yet, violent methods – whether by or on behalf of the sacked print workers – were a sign of desperation. In rejecting a £50 million financial settlement and having failed to stop or seriously hamper production at Wapping, such measures appeared to be all the activists had left with which to fight. For those enduring the daily abuse and intimidation on their way in and out of work, this was particularly unnerving. But the question now was whether the militant forces within SOGAT would seek to oust Brenda Dean and all other moderating influences within their union. The showdown came in mid-June at the SOGAT annual conference in Scarborough. Dean entered the hall to shouts of ‘Judas’. But her speech was uncompromising, making clear that no one branch of ‘wreckers’ was going to determine the union’s destiny as a whole. She rounded on the street-corner chants that alleged she had sold her London members down the river: ‘That sort of chant usually comes from those who failed to recognize that there was no longer any river to sell them down.’ It was a strong performance and she carried the day. The conference voted to leave the National Executive in charge of handling the dispute rather than devolving it to the militant London chapel. In a decision that would only later take on great significance, the conference also agreed that the union could not take any action that led to its assets being sequestrated a second time. The will of the provincial majority had prevailed – to the disgust of activists from London. The extent of this culture clash was manifest when one London member, in the course of berating Dean, asked her how he was expected to meet his £50,000 mortgage. Dean attempted to explain: ‘If I go and tell the rest of the union you need help with that mortgage, you’ll get nothing. They’re living in houses that don’t cost half of that as a total cost.’82
The situation was a stalemate. The News International management was not prepared to improve the offer and the union leadership had been given no room for manoeuvre by its members. To Times journalists the situation was becoming close to intolerable. Those driving into work sometimes spotted strikers noting down their number plates. Some noticed their photographs being taken. Given what had happened at Deptford, this was an effective form of intimidation. What was more, Wapping in 1986 afforded few of the lunchtime and evening comforts to which journalists were accustomed. Even if there had been pubs or restaurants worth patronizing, it was too risky to do so. Many felt marooned inside the compound, a fate as bad for personal morale as it was for getting out in search of news stories. What made matters worse was the limitations of the office environment. A casualty of the move from Gray’s Inn Road was The Times library. Six months after the move to Wapping, Times journalists were still separated from their paper’s books archive and picture library which had been left behind at their former site. In view of staff and space shortage, it was decided to base Wapping’s library around the News of the World’s holdings with the other papers merely adding what contents they could fit in. This was a short-sighted economy of scale. For the next few years, the paper had to continue to make do with inadequate information resources (although, in truth, whether they were better or worse than the previous Times library was debatable). Although improving internet research engines made life easier in the 1990s and there was a sizeable cuttings library, the newspaper still had to rely upon a lamentable range of source material on the communal bookshelves.
Times journalists had other causes of woe. When they moved to Wapping, the basic journalists’ salary at the paper was, at £15,050, around £5000 less than the equivalent at the News of the World and the Sun. There was a good reason for this: the tabloids made money and The Times made a loss. But the broadsheet’s writers felt they deserved remuneration that represented – to put it mildly – something closer to parity of esteem. On this score, Wapping represented a great opportunity. It threatened to make even The Times profitable. The paper’s NUJ chapel, led by its new father, the religious affairs correspondent, Clifford Longley, seized the moment to press home the advantage, demanding: ‘The time is now right for The Times to make good its claim to be the greatest newspaper in the world, which dictates in turn salaries appropriate to that status … We feel therefore that our goodwill has been exploited for many years.’ The chapel demanded a pay increase of 25 per cent and proper compensation for those who departed citing they felt themselves ‘unable to come to terms with the move to Wapping and/or the introduction of new technology’. The salary demand ignored the fact that the company had increased average pay at the paper by 27.2 per cent between March 1985 and March 1986. As far as Longley was concerned, this was not the point; Times staff were still ‘at the bottom of the Fleet Street pay league’. The paper’s managing editor, Mike Hoy, was incredulous. Inflation was running at around 4 per cent. He assured the NUJ chapel that if they wanted a significantly steeper rise they would have to conclude the sort of agreement that management had demanded from the print unions. This would involve working five days a week (many journalists still managed just four), a no-strike clause, legally binding arbitration and no closed shop.83
On 9 June, Sun journalists, unhappy with a 3.5 per cent pay offer, narrowly voted to strike. A panicked management swiftly increased the offer to 10 per cent and the threat was averted. The Times NUJ chapel followed suit and were duly rewarded with a ‘full and final offer’ of 10 per cent as well. But the animosity towards not only the managerial but editorial high command was clear when the chapel made a formal complaint to Charles Wilson over the paper’s failure to report the original strike vote at the Sun. Furthermore, the chapel voted by eighty votes to two to strike if the refuseniks who had declined to cross the Wapping picket line were not reinstated.
This was a serious shot across the bows. Only a third of the paper’s NUJ members had attended and voted in the meeting but it only took this number to wreck the paper. Some wondered if the spirit that had animated the active minority of Times journalists to go on strike in 1980 – thereby ensuring the paper’s sale – had suddenly gripped the chapel once more in this latest period of crisis. Wilson responded by writing a four-page letter to his staff, appealing to them to stay at their desks. Aside from the specifics of the individual refuseniks’ cases, The Times’s future would be threatened at the very moment it was on the verge of breaking free from the dead hand of those who were making the journalists’ lives so unpleasant from the other side of the wire.84 Longley, however, was making a stand. He spurned the higher pay offer on the grounds that ‘we will not discuss money with you while the jobs of six sacked members are at issue. It would be immoral to talk about money.’85 Yet, in the event, the religious affairs correspondent was deserted by his flock: the chapel voted not to strike over the refuseniks’ fate by sixty-three to twenty-eight. In September, Longley became a martyr to his own cause when the NUJ Executive Committee summoned him before a disciplinary hearing on a charge of conduct detrimental to the interests of the union (for not being a refusenik himself). His first reaction was to get a temporary court injunction against the hearing going ahead. When that failed his union found him guilty, but voted narrowly to censure rather than expel him.86 Perhaps they realized the negative consequences of ridding themselves of a turbulent priest.
While dissent from and between NUJ officials was being seen off, News International had decided, once again, to seek legal redress against the manner in which the siege was being conducted. On 31 July, High Court injunctions were granted that permitted the unions to hold demonstrations only on the condition they passed the Wapping plant and did not seek to block it. Any attempt at the latter would be construed as an official picket that, under the terms of the 1982 Trade Union Act, was limited to six individuals. Mr Justice Stuart-Smith reminded the unions that ‘freedom of speech has never extended to intimidation, abuse and threats directed at those going about their lawful business’.87 Unions who failed to restrict the Wapping picket to six individuals would be liable to fines or resequestration. TNT promptly launched similar injunctions against mass action at their depots. At 2.30 in the morning of 1 August, only a few hours after the High Court had pronounced against mass picketing, a mob of two hundred attacked a TNT distribution depot at Thetford, Norfolk. Besides smashing up vans, the assailants tried to set the depot ablaze by firing flares into the building. In this they were unsuccessful although they did manage to torch bundles of The Times that had just been unloaded.88
Having paid a heavy financial penalty the last time they had come up for contempt of court, the unions took this new legal threat seriously and SOGAT’s head office ordered its London branch leaders to cooperate with the letter of the law.89 Indeed, while the NGA and SOGAT leadership were busy trying to get the EETPU expelled from the TUC, they were also receptive to a further attempt to reach a settlement with News International. In late August and early September, they had a series of talks with Bill O’Neill at a hotel near Gatwick. The issue of a national joint committee to represent members of all unions at Wapping was again raised. O’Neill parried that this would be a matter for the existing Wapping employees to decide and ‘if pushed now’ they would reject the mechanism. O’Neill advised an eighteen-month ‘cooling-off period’ before the proposal was put to them.90 In the meantime, the unions should settle. As an inducement, the redundancy offer was increased from £50 million to £58 million. The unions agreed to put it to their members. Once again, the ballot papers went out in the post.
There was confusion over who was still entitled to vote. The majority of the four thousand affected SOGAT members had now got jobs elsewhere. Nonetheless, Dean got her way in insisting that since the settlement concerned them too they had the right to decide it. The vote was announced on 8 October. SOGAT members rejected the improved offer by 2372 votes to 960 while NGA members rejected it by 556 to 116 (and the AUEW members by 107 to 47).91 News International’s attempts to get a package approved collectively had now failed not once but twice. A grand negotiated settlement had proved impossible. Henceforth, the company would try a new tactic, making individual offers over the collective leadership’s heads. The dismissed employees would be picked off one by one.
In the fortnight after the vote, management received 180 letters from sacked print workers responding to the prospect of a private settlement.92 By the time the first anniversary of the strike approached, 1750 had reached agreement. State unemployment benefit was due to end on that date. In order to raise the £2 million need to finance those who continued to be out of work, the SOGAT leadership proposed a six month fifty-eight pence a week levy on all its members nationwide. The membership voted by 51,187 to 44,265 not to contribute.93 Most, it seemed, had had enough of encouraging the London branch to persist in fighting a war that was clearly lost. On 20 January 1987, a further squeeze was imposed when News International went to court to seek from the unions the costs of Wapping’s security measures over the past six months. Events were, it seemed, approaching a denouement. Few appreciated that the worst bout of violence was about to be unleashed.
The massed assault on Wapping that took place on the night of 24 January was timed to commemorate the first anniversary of the strike. But its ferocity was sharpened both by the realization that the resistance of strikers was crumbling and by a tragedy that had taken place the previous fortnight. A nineteen-year-old youth, Michael Delaney, was killed trying to confront a TNT lorry in Stepney. Delaney, who had no connection with the dispute, had gone under the wheels while banging on the side of the truck and shouting ‘scab’.94 Lamentably, The Times failed to report the death when it occurred although it did subsequently cover the inquest three months later. A combination of these factors contributed to the dark mood animating those who planned the first-anniversary Wapping attack.
About 12,500 demonstrators marched on the site. The company’s security cameras showed a relatively non-violent protest in progress until 7.30 p.m. But the ensuing assault had been carefully planned. The first sign that an orchestrated offensive was being unleashed came when an attempt was made to electronically jam police communications. Then a sting wire was unfurled across the road with the intention of maiming police horses and their riders. There was also an attempt to ignite petrol when five litres were spilled onto the road in front of the police officers. Some rioters overturned a lorry – the same one that had carried the band that had led the march to Wapping – and tried to set it on fire. Missiles were thrown. Uniformed police fell back to be replaced by those in riot gear. An hour later, the police lines had succeeded in pushing the demonstrators back from the top of Virginia Street into the Wapping Highway. Brenda Dean could be heard from the union rostrum lecturing the police to stop harassing the crowd. The security cameras then recorded an unidentified man wearing an armband apparently assuming command of the agitators. He called a group of about twenty-four of them into line. They were all wearing balaclavas and scarves over their faces. This vanguard launched itself at the police, trying to drive them back into Virginia Street. Under a hail of broken bricks and pieces of paving stones, the police line faltered. Mounted police tried to shore up the line and grab some of the activists only to be answered with a hail of thunderflashes, petrol bombs and scaffolding poles. The police sustained many injuries.95
Such was the ferocity of the assault that at one point the attackers looked like breaking through into the compound. At the opposite end of The Times building, Andrew Neil’s office was dangerously close to the main gate. Fearing it was about to be overrun, Neil’s bodyguard burst in and tried to persuade him to retreat to the print hall building where he could hide in the last redoubt – locked in behind the steel fire doors at its heart. Neil, who was in mid-meeting, would not be moved. He opted to stay behind with his staff, although he did ask ‘them to check that the underground passages connecting our building with the main facility – and our last line of refuge – were open and clear for a dash to safety’.96
The audit of war produced sixty-seven arrests (of which thirteen were print workers) and injuries to thirty-nine police officers. Eleven police horses were injured and nine police vehicles damaged. Around thirty demonstrators suffered injuries when mounted police tried to push the surging crowds back. Barbara Cohen, a spokeswoman for a team of observers filing a legal report to the Home Secretary, blamed the police for the problem on the grounds that ‘there was barely a visible police presence during the march, which was peaceful and orderly. When the marchers reached Wapping, the sight of rows of riot police equipped for violent conflict raised the tension.’ Among the Labour MPs who had addressed the demonstration was Dennis Skinner who told the crowds that Labour’s chances of success at the next general election depended upon ‘extra-parliamentary activity’ to ‘win it on the streets’.97 Certainly, a portion of the streets was ripped up as the pile of discarded weaponry, including chunks of paving stone, assembled by the police the following day demonstrated. A permanent legacy of the night was left in the rows of missing spikes removed from the Wapping Highway’s Victorian iron railings. They had been thrown as javelins at the police.
While some in the Labour Movement chose to see the riot as a consequence of police brutality, others were appalled at the discredit it was attaching to the cause. Neil Kinnock described the violence as ‘hideous and horrifying’ while Norman Willis condemned the ‘disgraceful and violent scenes’.98 Indeed, Willis was now adamant that the strategy of organizing mass demonstrations at Wapping had to stop. The morning after the riot, Dean telephoned Bill O’Neill to request an urgent meeting. O’Neill, who was completing the process of his US naturalization, made clear he could not leave America and wondered if it could wait until he returned. Dean was determined to meet sooner, adding that she wanted the strike brought to an end before her executive met on 5 February. With Bill Miles, she flew to Paris and there caught Concorde to cross the Atlantic.
Dean and Miles met O’Neill in the ground-floor coffee shop of the Hilton at New York’s JFK airport. Dean mentioned the decision of the SOGAT annual conference that mandated the union not to act in a way that risked a further sequestration. If News International took SOGAT to court on a further contempt charge, she would be in a position to get her executive to call the strike off without putting the question to the die-hard strikers. Attracted by the force of what had been put to him, O’Neill went to a pay phone to call Geoffrey Richards for his legal advice. While he was trying to get through, a woman picked up an adjacent pay telephone and could be heard speaking into the receiver: ‘Could I have “copy”?… I want you to know that I’ve been here for over an hour and it seems as though they have come up with a way to bring this strike to an end … They’re analysing a formula now and I will stay here and see how it works out.’ Dean, Miles and O’Neill froze in panic. How had their meeting been rumbled? The three hurried into the hotel lobby which they found packed with reporters and television cameras. And then they noticed they were being ignored. It transpired that the hotel was also the venue for resolving a Long Island railway dispute. Their relief was palpable. Less than three hours after they had touched down at JFK, Dean and Miles caught another Concorde flight home.99 In the meantime, the mechanism to end the dispute had been agreed.
Soon afterwards, O’Neill flew back across the Atlantic. On 2 February he and Geoffrey Richards met Dean and Miles for dinner at the home of SOGAT’s lawyer. Dean accepted that the strike had been lost long ago and its protraction was only damaging the union’s image. A court hearing was set for 6 February. The video footage of the 24 January riot, showing a two-hundred-strong mob trying to smash down the gates to Wapping, supported News International’s case that the unions were in breach of their legal undertakings to keep to six pickets. The unions stood to have all their assets sequestrated and to face potentially crippling fines of up to £3 million. Over half of SOGAT’s funds had already been spent fighting the dispute and the union’s legal advice was to call off the strike or face bankruptcy. SOGAT’s existence could be decided by what line its National Executive took. On 5 February, it met. Seven London members argued vociferously against surrender, but they were outnumbered. The final vote was twenty-three to nine in favour of calling off the strike. Dean prepared a press release, explaining, ‘a further sequestration would have meant the demise of our union’ and adding ‘we will never forget this dispute and the ravages of it will be evident for a long time to come’. Then she rang O’Neill. ‘I’ve had a terrible day,’ she told him.100
With SOGAT’s surrender, so collapsed the resistance of its comrades. The NUJ called off its action the following day. All eyes turned to the NGA. Tony Dubbins telephoned O’Neill to plead for a weekend’s grace. O’Neill replied that he had but a few hours to submit or face ruin in court. A clerk from Farrar’s was waiting at the court with orders to file News International’s petition if no news had been received by 3 p.m. The hands of the clock moved slowly around but nothing was heard. Then, a few minutes before three, as O’Neill was preparing to contact the Farrar’s clerk, the telephone rang. It was Dubbins offering unconditional surrender. When the news reached the pickets, there was angry talk among some of them about continuing the blockade by unofficial means. This was quickly quelled by the threat of being ejected from the union. At 4 a.m. on Saturday 7 February the official picket packed up and departed. The siege of Wapping was over. It had lasted fifty-four weeks.
Relief was the overwhelming emotion that swept over Times staff as the realization dawned that their daily ordeal was finally over. The paper’s leader column summed up the past thirteen months as a period in which ‘We were set free from damaging trade union practices inside our gates. We exchanged them for damaging trade union practices outside.’101 But many, especially at management level, also felt a quiet sense of satisfaction. In 1978, The Times had taken on its print unions and, after an eleven-month shutdown, been forced to capitulate to them. It had taken eight years, but here at last was the moment of retribution. Everyone who had crossed the picket line had played his or her part. But in devising and implementing the strategy that made Murdoch’s success possible, Charles Wilson, Bruce Matthews, Bill O’Neill and Geoffrey Richards had the most reason to feel proud of their achievement. They were the principal architects of the Wapping revolution. Yet the celebrations were muted. In particular, the dispute had weighed heavily upon Matthews. He had hoped an accommodation might be made to re-employ some of the more moderate print union members but Murdoch was insistent that a complete break had to be made – that, after all, was the point of Wapping and no fresh NGA or SOGAT presence could be recreated there.102 Tired of the persistent wrangling on both sides of the Wapping barbed wire, in November 1986 a despondent Matthews cleared his desk as managing director before the final victory had been assured. O’Neill took his place. None of the print union members who had been friends with Tony Norbury before the dispute ever spoke to him again. He calculated that Wapping had diminished his social life by 75 per cent. But as the man behind getting The Times produced from its new location, he never doubted that he had done the right thing, both for the future of his newspaper and for the unfettering of British print journalism.103
Victory had come at a cost. Five hundred and seventy-four police officers had been injured and more than a thousand News International and TNT drivers or their vehicles had been attacked. Some had broken arms. Others had glass in their eyes. One driver had had his windscreen broken twenty-three times. For their part, the protestors had also taken a toll. One young man had been killed. Nearly 1500 people had been arrested, two-thirds of whom were convicted. Police attendance at Wapping had averaged three hundred a day (on crucial nights there had been a thousand protecting the site). The estimated cost of this to the taxpayer exceeded £5 million.104 News International honoured its £58 million redundancy payout. Depending upon their time with the company, recipients received between £2000 and £30,000 each.
‘Little direct good ever comes out of a dispute of this kind – it’s a fairly sad story,’ was the Employment Secretary Ken Clarke’s downbeat verdict on the strike’s end, although he did add, ‘but I think the lasting effects may be beneficial.’105 Some of his Cabinet colleagues were more cheerful. Indeed, commentators soon assumed that the greatest victor was not Murdoch and his newspapers but Margaret Thatcher in her battle to smash union power in Britain. She had seen off Arthur Scargill over the mines in a fight that symbolized the fate of the old industries. Wapping demonstrated that the unions would not control the destiny of the new technology-driven industries either.
Certainly, union militancy had been dealt a crushing blow. The NGA and SOGAT began a period of re-evaluation that led to their merger in 1991 as the Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU) with Tony Dubbins as general secretary. Brenda Dean became the new union’s deputy leader but retired the following year. Accepting a peerage as Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, she became an active member of parliamentary committees, health and higher education boards, the Press Complaints Commission and a variety of other bodies. In 1997, she became chairman of the Housing Corporation. Ironically, one who was disappointed by Wapping’s legacy was the union leader who had done so much to make it possible, Eric Hammond. While his members had staffed the plant from the first, he had put off pressing for formal EETPU recognition in accordance with TUC policy. But when, in 1988, the TUC finally expelled the union over its involvement in no-strike deals (and, it was widely presumed, participation in Wapping), Hammond felt free from TUC censure to explore collective bargaining rights there. His attempts were rebuffed, first by O’Neill and subsequently in a painful correspondence with Murdoch. Hammond could have been forgiven for feeling used. In his memoirs he was moved to write that Murdoch had ‘shown no spark of gratitude, even though he couldn’t have succeeded without us, and without the support of our people at Wapping’.106
Another major union to lose out was the NUJ. In August 1987, a new disputes procedure involving ACAS was agreed at The Times that all but banished the grounds for a journalists’ strike. For its part, the NUJ had not done much to endear itself. Its National Executive had sought to impose £1000 fines on ninety-five News International employees (forty-eight of them Times journalists) for crossing the Wapping picket line during the siege. They were singled out because their names had appeared in news reports (another 320 were acquitted because their names did not).107 The Times NUJ chapel responded by freezing its payments to the union and the fines were eventually dropped but not before irreparable damage had been done. The union was, in any case, in disarray. Among other eccentricities, its accounts had been kept during the 1980s by an official who refused to switch from ledgers to a computer database. Eventually, the accounts were handed over instead to someone whose fake credentials were revealed after the reference he had provided transpired to be the number of a public telephone box.108 The belief that the union was having difficulty putting its house in order did it much harm. By the 1990s, the once all conquering NUJ had been reduced to but a small bargaining presence in Fleet Street. The Times and its Wapping stable-mates opted for total derecognition of the union. The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Independent followed suit.109 Even the left-leaning Daily Mirror refused to recognize the NUJ. This was part of a wider process fuelled by the policies of the Thatcher years and the restructuring of the economy. In 1980, 70 per cent of wages in Britain were set through collective bargaining. By 1998, the figure had fallen to 35 per cent. Only a third of companies established since 1980 recognized unions.110
The consequences of Murdoch’s victory for British politics or the Labour Movement can be debated. But what can be more easily assessed was the direct effect it had on The Times newspaper. By ditching the print unions there was, of course, a huge saving in cutting the surplus workforce. But Wapping also ensured massive improvements to the way the paper’s content could be altered at short notice. At the unionized Gray’s Inn Road, the paper was limited to making around a dozen significant page changes per night. But at Wapping it was possible to make between thirty and fifty page changes a night and to tinker with a front page that usually changed six times over the course of the evening.111 It had formerly taken the print union members forty-five minutes to make a single change to a graphic. Wapping’s staff could do it in five minutes. Late changes to stories could be done at the press of a button. At Gray’s Inn Road, a late change had involved adhering to a lengthy set of union demarcation procedures. First of all, a request would be made to the composing department to come down with a proof. The changes would be marked onto the proof. The proof would then be taken (by hand) back up to the composing department. The comp would then type in the changes and these would be checked again to make sure they had been done correctly (which frequently they were not). A minor change to a story could take thirty to forty-five minutes to enact. Whether the copy or a new headline fitted the allotted space was a matter of trial and error. Wapping’s direct-input computers gave journalists an instant ‘copy fit’ thereby making page planning easy. Correspondents’ copy and agency wires could also be brought onto the system at the touch of a button. Previously, they had to wait until a messenger brought them over to the right desk (if he got the right desk) in his own time.112 Errors and spelling mistakes – once the bane of Fleet Street journalism – could now be quickly corrected. The last edition of The Times to come from Gray’s Inn Road contained 150 misprints in thirty-two pages. The Times of (taking a day at random) 7 May 1987 contained just fourteen in thirty-eight pages. Wapping gave the reader a better product.
Yet the gains were by no means all down to new technology. Although the arrival of computers on the editorial floor greatly speeded up the process of writing and subbing the paper, in other parts of the production process The Times was still being produced in an old-fashioned manner. The page make-up techniques and printing presses used at Wapping were essentially those the print unions had operated at Gray’s Inn Road. In the Napoleonic vaulted basement of The Times’s Wapping home, stylish girls fresh from art college replaced old union lags but they were doing the same task – laying out the pages with scissors and paste. Late changes were often effected by scrambling about on the floor for excised words on tiny trimmed rectangles of paper. Frequently the missing word would be found stuck to someone’s shoe. Thus the difference was not in the tools for the job but in the attitude and adaptability of those who wielded them. Wapping’s ‘paste-up’ team cut the time it took from ‘last-copy-to-composition’ and the last page leaving the stone from sixty-five to ten minutes. What used not to be ready until after 9 p.m. was now completed by 8.10 p.m. And, in the longer term, removing union power at management level did smooth the way for the easier adoption of the technological revolutions of the 1990s – colour, fast redesign, better computer-generated graphics and vastly improved print and picture reproduction.
There was, however, a downside to the move to Wapping and the dispersal of the other newspaper offices that it hastened. By destroying the village of Fleet Street, the geographically tight-knit community that allowed journalists and their contacts to lunch together, dine together and drink together, it reduced not only the convivial quality of life to which many reporters had become accustomed but also their ability to trade contacts and insights from outside the office. The Wapping move did encourage less adventurous journalists to confine the world to what was presented on their computer terminals, rather than going out themselves in search of stories. It is, of course, possible to make too much of this and to overemphasize the extent to which indulging in a long liquid lunch with friends constituted searching for news. On a narrow measure, the destruction of the Fleet Street lunch certainly improved productivity even if a part of the journalistic soul died as a consequence. Health-wise, it was probably a godsend.
Ultimately, what the Wapping revolution delivered could be summed up in one word – flexibility. It gave The Times’s production and editorial staff the means to change, alter, innovate and increase the size or quantity of their paper without months of haggling with shop stewards intent on preventing any change without first extracting an inflated price. Murdoch had described the old world from which Wapping permitted him to escape:
If you wanted to change a column width in The Times it would take you three months to negotiate and £10 a day or a week to everybody in the plant. And in the meantime, having to put up with one hundred typos on page one every second day if people felt they had a bad liver or something.113
The barriers to innovation were now swept away. This was not merely a time saving exercise in the nightly rush to press. Strategic changes could at last be enacted. In 1987, The Times came out on Boxing Day for the first time in seventy years (although some readers imagined a Boxing Day newspaper was a disturbing sign of the secular consumerism of the 1980s, The Times had continuously come out on every Boxing Day from 1785 to 1917). Without Wapping, it is hard to envisage the unreformed print unions agreeing to work on such an edition or the rail unions being willing to carry it to its distributors.
Even more importantly, the pagination of the newspaper was expanded. In the first six months of printing at Wapping, The Times was able to raise its number of pages from thirty-four to forty-eight. The only way the presses could handle the bigger paper was to print it in two sections. Thus, while news and comment remained in the main part of the paper, a second section was produced covering business and sport. Complaints flooded in and when, after a year of working at Wapping, Charles Wilson was assured that the capacity had been created to print the whole paper in one section, he took the decision to switch back. The result was a fresh broadside of complaint from readers in support of the two-section paper (many sighting the morning bliss of husband and wife being able to read the different sections over the same breakfast table). This fresh postbag, and the difficulties the presses were having in producing the paper in one section, quickly convinced Wilson to revert to a two-section newspaper. The ability to respond at this speed would have been unthinkable at Gray’s Inn Road. Nor was this the end of the matter. As the months progressed, the paper began to expand further. On 3 September 1987, a four-section, sixty-four-page Times was launched on Saturday with more pre-print colour than any other national newspaper.114
There was also now the possibility that The Times could buck its twentieth century history and become a newspaper that actually made a profit. The immediate consequence of moving to Wapping was a threefold increase in News International’s profitability. The Wapping plant itself had cost £100 million to build and a further £67 million to equip, but it allowed for the old premises to be sold. Bouverie Street fetched £72 million (the site was subsequently levelled for redevelopment) and The Times’s old home, Gray’s Inn Road – the building which the unions had turned down for free – was sold to ITN for £70 million.115 Setting these sales against the expense of construction gave Wapping a net cost of £25 million (which rose significantly a few years later when the plant had to be extended), but, by ditching the print unions, News International had been able to realize job cuts that saved in the region of £65 million each year.116 Wapping took the company’s operating income from £38.4 million in 1985 to £150.2 million in 1987.117 One estimate suggested it had increased the four newspapers’ worth (excluding outstanding debt) from $0.3 billion to $1 billion.118 The share price trebled. Indeed, in 1987 News International performed better than any other major company on the London stock exchange. Contributing 40 per cent of News Corp.’s global profits, Wapping pump primed Murdoch’s expansion into the American television and film network. As we will see later, this encouraged fresh borrowing that almost proved his undoing. Yet, in 2002, Peter Chernin, the News Corp. president, was in a position to reflect that the move to Wapping ‘was the most significant labour event in the world during the past forty years’, adding that he did not think the company would have survived without it.119
Moving to Wapping certainly helped to secure The Times’s survival, but it was not just a victory for it, News International and its shareholders. Before Wapping, the print unions had a stranglehold over the management of all Britain’s national newspapers. After Wapping, they had a toehold. As Hugo Young, the Guardian journalist who was no admirer of Murdoch’s politics, nonetheless conceded in 1993, ‘What he did for the economics of newspaper publishing, by killing the power of the worst-led trade unions in modern history, has benefited every journalist, advertiser and reader.’120 At the moment when the siege of Wapping began, The Times’s rivals had been attempting to move to new print premises in Docklands but were frustrated by their unions refusal to accept terms that would make the move economic. Wapping enabled them to turn the tables on unions who, overnight, awoke to discover the price for not being shut out entirely was to concede much of their old bargaining power and workforce. The management at the Daily Mail’s owners, Associated Newspapers, accepted that Wapping ‘was a great help to us. When that happened, if there was any reluctance of our people to come along with us, it disappeared.’121 Consequently, the company was able to cut its workforce by half without any loss to the production of its papers. Similarly, when the Daily Telegraph moved from Fleet Street to Docklands, its management was able to cut the print workforce from 1650 to 678, a wage bill saving of £24 million. The FT also made huge economies when it moved its printing works to Docklands in 1988. Its chief executive, Frank Barlow, had argued that the move was essential because of the ‘huge cost advantage’ that Wapping had given Murdoch.122 In fighting for his own papers, Murdoch had won a victory for all national newspapers. Of course it might be argued that these results could have been achieved without the Wapping gamble, but the failure of Eddy Shah’s innovative and brave venture, Today – which eventually had to be rescued from collapse by Murdoch – suggests the process was far from inevitable. The Independent would have been launched regardless, but – without Wapping – its founders would have been confronted by many of the industry’s old problems. There is no certainty the little infant would have prospered under such rough midwifery. In the opinion of Ivan Fallon, its chief executive eighteen years later, ‘The Independent would not have been possible without the move to Wapping.’123
The battle of Wapping won a larger war for all Britain’s newspapers. But it is worth contemplating an imaginary scenario where, despite being in a weaker position, other newspaper proprietors did eventually manage, somehow, to overcome the grip of their unions, leaving Murdoch hamstrung in the old world of Fleet Street industrial relations. In this eventuality, it would have been The Times that would have found itself plunged into a perilously uncompetitive position, smashed to pieces between a new unencumbered Independent and a Daily Telegraph rejuvenated by its chief executive, Andrew Knight, both newspapers able to deploy the ways and means to consign ‘The Thunderer’ to the scrap heap. Wapping also prevented this contingency. It ensured a newspaper that was bigger, quicker, sharper and with fewer mistakes. It offered the prospect of a paper that could even become profitable. It was certainly hard to argue with the most easily measurable consequence – in the decade before the move to Wapping, The Times had lost 96.5 million copies through industrial action. In the decade following the move, it lost none.