Journalism

Is that a fact?

Ian Jack

Here's a queer thing. I bet you never knew that if Charlie Wilson's father and mother hadn't had a blazing row one night in 1951, then Charlie Wilson would never have been editor of the Times.

Is that a fact?

Aye, what happened was this. Charlie's father was widowed and had taken his brother's widow as his second wife. Char- lie, their wee boy, was born in 1935. But the couple never got on and had a real shouting match just before the boy was due to sit his Higher school examinations. He was a bright lad and he'd have got a good set of Highers, no doubt. His father was keen that he went to Glasgow University. But instead his mother packed her bags the next day and took the boy down south to stay with her family in Surrey. Charlie never took any exams and got a job as a copy boy on the Sunday People and he's never looked back since.

Jings! Life's a funny business, right enough.

And there's more. Did you know that Charlie was the first miner's son ever to edit the Times?

Och away! You're having me on.

No, his father was born in 1881 some- where over Falkirk way and went down the pits at 14 years of age and worked at the face right up until the second world war. Pneumoconiosis was on his death certifi- cate. And he was a great socialist, was Charlie's father.

Help Ma Boab!

Aye, he was a member of the Indepen- dent Labour Party during the ILP's great days in Scotland before the war. A great man for Jimmie Maxton and a strong supporter of the Russian Friendship Socie- ty before he discovered it was a Commun- ist front. He could never abide Commun- ists.

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You'll be telling me next that Charlie was born in the Gorbals.

No, that's just daft English newspaper talk. Charlie never even saw the Gorbals until Basil Spence had rebuilt it. In fact he wasn't even born in a tenement. He grew up in one of those nice wee Glasgow Corporation houses in Sandyhills, right on the eastern edge of the city. It had a bathroom and a garden front and back.

ALL the above information is correct and all of it was imparted, generously and openly, over the telephone last week by Wilson himself. I wondered why I had never read any of it before. Wilson said it was because 'this Gorbals Wilson thing' (his nickname in Private Eye) always led to questions about his alleged thuggishness as a newspaper editor and never to the deeper seams of his origins or finer qualities. Still, it is difficult to imagine a Yorkshire miner's son rising to edit the Times without the headline: 'Yorkshire miner's son to edit Times'. Did anyone not know that Harold Evans's dad was an engine driver?

The truth is that the English remain deeply ignorant of Scotland outside the international iconography of tartan foot- ball supporters, the Gorbals and Billy Connolly. The results of this ignorance have been largely beneficial for the British newspaper trade and the Scots who work in it. Scottish newspapers flourished because Scots needed to know what was going on in their part of the world and could not find out from the journals which came up the railway line from London and Manchester; Scottish journalists flourished because they could move south and diligently climb up the ladders of Fleet Street unencumbered by English notions of their social status. Wilson is a Scot rather than a miner's son. Andrew Neil, who edits the Sunday Times, is a Scot rather than the son of the Territorial Army's head man in Paisley. Whatever else, Rupert Murdoch is not an enemy of social mobility; but then Mur- doch himself is the great-grandson of a Free Kirk minister from Aberdeenshire.

Of course, there is more to Scottish success in Fleet Street than simple English ignorance or the subconscious atavism of Presbyterian proprietors from the colonies (Beaverbrook and Roy Thomson, as well as Murdoch). It may be that the Scot is in some ways better equipped for printed journalism. To risk a dangerous generalisa- tion, denied by the noise at Wembley or Andrew Neil's robust polemics on tele- vision, they are by nature more vocally hesi- tant than the English. They (I mean we) hate showing off, unless drunk. True, Charlie Wilson in his tenure as a Glasgow editor woud sometimes bang his head against the wall in frustration. But that was exception- al behaviour even by Glasgow standards and Wilson is still celebrated for it: 'a genuine head-banger', his old colleagues remember. 'And no delegation, mind you. It was his own head he was banging. Remember the time it went clean through the partition wall?' Perhaps Charlie might never have be- haved like this if he had stayed with his father and caught the tram every morning for Glasgow University. Lecturers at the Scottish universities frequently complain that the country's educational and social systems breed meekness. In tutorials, Scot- tish students sit silently cowed by the cheerful articulacy of youths from over the border. They speak only when spoken to; they do not like to speak and be wrong; and sometimes in the evening they can be heard complaining in the pubs, a little clutch of Boswells repeating that day

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Johnsonian crassness from the boys and girls up from the south.

Contrary to the widespread idea of the good reporter as a brash interloper, however, this hushed cultural background provides an important rudiment of the trade. From an early age you have been listening, and learning to use language as a means of communication (please be brief) rather than the nervous tic or the florid ornament it can become further south. I can remember how, as a small boy in a Fife village in the early 1950s, I would overhear old village women encouraging innocent and chatty incomers to reveal more and more of themselves. 'Is that a fact . . . my, my, ye don't say . . . whatever next!' They could have given lessons to David Frost and quite possibly Freud, though it was a skill they never knew they had. Later, friends left school to train as journalists at D.C. Thomson's large comic, magazine and newspaper factory in Dun- dee, and brought back amazing news. D.C. Thomson's, then as now, was the most successful publishing house in Scotland (profits last year, £14.69 million). It has never allowed a trade unionist inside the Premises and never interferes with success-

ful products, which include the Dandy and the Beano, and its newspaper flagship, the Sunday Post, always a paper to uphold sobriety, the Kirk and Queen (Scottish liberals used to insist: 'Scotland will never be a decent place until the last Free Church minister is strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post.' Today religious apathy and the new licensing laws have dethroned Calvinism as an enemy, and the Post positively glows as a model of decent literacy compared with its popular Sunday rivals from the south.)

We knew all this about Thomson's. What we did not know — and what, as fans of the trench-coat school of journalism, we were surprised to hear — was that all the office phones had a sign stuck to them. It said: 'Speak softly and say Yes Please.'

DESCRIBED thus, Scottish journalists can sound like the psychotherapists of the scribbling trade, drawing our chair close to the interviewing couch and pinging the bell for the next customer. That wouldn't be universally acknowledged as true; we can be just as bumptiously unpleasant as the next man or woman in newspapers, and indeed some of us are known to be more

so. Evidence suggest, however, that Eng- lish antipathy has declined since the 19th century, when poor but literate Scotsmen poured south to make money out of hack-work, many of them as prolix (though few of them as talented) as their great hero, Thomas Carlyle. In The Unspeakable Scot, an abusive and occasionally comic book published in 1902, T.W.H. Crosland tried to explain their disproportionate in- fluence.

Journalism suits the Scot because it is a profession into which you can crawl without inquiry as to your qualifications, and because it is a profession in which the most middling talents will take you a long way. The reporting staffs and sub-editorial staffs of the London and provincial journals can, I think, boast a decidedly decent leaven of Scotch- men. In Fleet Street, if you do not happen to possess the Doric, you are at some disadvan- tage in comprehending the persons with whom you are compelled to talk. 'Hoo arre ye the noo,' is the conventional greeting in most newspaper offices.

. . . the Scotch journalist possesses, too, certain solid qualities which are undoubtedly desirable in a journalist. For example, he is punctual, careful, dogged, unoriginal and a born galley-slave. You can knock an awful lot of work out of him, and no matter how

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little you pay him, he may be depended upon to sustain . . . a dog-like devotion to the hand that feeds him and the foot that kicks him.

Today, in Glasgow at least, the last quality is not to be seen. Fraternal solidar- ity and industrial muscle have established Glasgow journalists as among the best-paid in Britain, with salaries that some in Fleet Street might envy. The average salary on Captain Maxwell's Daily Record and Sun- day Mail is £22,500 a year; a figure which includes the wages of the cleaners and the lift-men; most journalists earn several thousand more. Recently Maxwell tried to get much more work out of his journalists for not much more money, with various and vari- able schemes for new newspapers in the north of England and Ireland (Record men called this project the Daily Shillelagh). The journalists dug in, and Maxwell, who has his own eccentric version of industrial relations, dismissed the entire staff three times in five weeks. The Record, a Labour paper with a (diminishing) Scottish con- tent, was off the streets for 19 days in March. So what did the Scottish working class buy instead, as the electorate whose elected councillors have banished Rupert

Murdoch's publications from almost every public library in central Scotland?

Well, every newspaper benefited a little from the absence of the Record's 700,000 circulation. But the paper that benefited most was the Sun. Over 19 days the non-union presses at Kinning Park, Glas- gow, pumped out an extra 5.5 million copies and managed to sell most of them. In the words of rival circulation manager's private report: 'Despite the bad press for the Sun (Rupert Murdoch, trade unions etc), this proved the most popular substi- tute with an average daily increase of 141,000 copies.'

REALLY, is that a fact? I wonder what Maxton and Charlie Wilson's father would have made of that.

We'll never know. They've both been, dead for umpteen years. But the Sun's no' a bad paper, mind you. Did you know that sometime in the next sixteen episodes Dirty Den will ditch Angie again and run off with that posh tart?

Is that a fact?

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