Turmoil behind The Times
Michael Cockerell
Louis Heren, the Deputy Editor of The Times, is proud of his cockney origins, his long experience in. Washington and his journalistic machismo. On the night the management of Times Newspapers decided to suspend publication, I found him standing, leather coated and alone in the deserted newsroom, looking a bit like a refugee from The Front Page. Like every good journalist he sub-edits himself when he talks on the record to another reporter. 'I am going home to have two four-ounce Martinis on the rocks to make me civilised.'
That afternoon, the distinguished journalists of The Times had met at the nearest large hall: the London headquarters of the National Union of Furniture Trade Operatives. They had to consider whether to accept new proposals that the management had offered to each of the sixty-five different union branches at Times Newspapers Limited (TNL). There were powerful reasons for acceptance. If the journalists rejected them, they stood to lose their jobs and large redundancy payments. As the debate began, one senior parliamentary reporter calculated on the back of an envelope that he was entitled to £25,000 in redundancy money.
The sound of money crackled through all the opening speeches. One specialist correspondent and former NUJ officer who wanted his identity kept from the public, said he had a large overdraft, an even bigger mortgage and two children. Last year, he had asked the Times management for a loan: 'Why don't you declare yourself bankrupt?' suggested his employer. 'Now we have embarked on a ruthless and hairraising game of chance with this mad management. What we need is a vasectomy league. For the sake of my children we must reject this ritual mass suicide and accept the management's proposals.' But when the chief industrial reporter of The Times spoke, the mood of the journalists changed. 'The management is like a gang of hard-faced Victorian coal owners — proposing an indefinite lock out,' he said. 'In a decade of industrial reporting, I have never seen such behaviour.'
After three and a half hours debate, the journalists voted. The successors of the men who had first brought news of Waterloo and the Charge of the Light Brigade decided by 142 to 90 to reject the management's proposals. And the journalists gave a standing ovation to their union organiser — Jake Ecclestone. As he left the meeting, one senior editorial figure remarked: 'It must take a remarkably inept management to turn a Marxist into a folk hero in the space of six weeks.' The journalists' decision shocked the Chairman and titular Editor-in-Chief of Times Newspapers, Sir Denis Hamilton. For seven months the TNL management had blamed the turmoil at the papers on a tiny but unidentified group of troublemakers in the print unions. Now the papers' most moderate group of workers, who had never had a dispute and stopped work, had turned against the management. 'If only I had been able to speak to the meeting, it would all have been different,' agonised Sir Denis. But if the journalists had ignored the management's voice of sweet reason — it was not because they had not heard it.
Later that night, the Managing Director and Chief Executive of Times Newspapers, Marmaduke (Duke) Hussey entered the seventh floor boardroom wearing make-up. It was a sensible precaution as the place was bathed in television lights. Hussey had come to read the interim obituary of The Times to the press — and to launch straight afterwards on a round of television interviews. His theme that night was familiar to everyone on the TNL payroll. For the past seven months each of them had received a series of personalised letters from Duke Hussey: 'Our aim is to reduce overmanning, end unofficial disruption, and introduce new technology — in exchange for better pay and conditions with no compulsory redundancy.' It all sounded eminently reasonable, even bland. In fact, Duke Hussey wanted to revolutionise Fleet Street.
'What we aim to do is scrap the past, and start all over again', one of Hussey's senior management colleagues told me. 'Every manager at Times newspapers has been instructed to look at his department with completely fresh eyes to make his department as efficient as it can be.' And Duke Hussey's deputy, Dougal Nisbet-Smith, said: 'We've got to grab back the management to the management. When I came here from the Mirror Group in Scotland earlier this year, quite frankly, I was apalled by the enormous conflict that goes on from night to night by the overall power of the chapels (union branches) to challenge everything. In many areas management barely even exists.'
But for all the management's tough talking, behind the decision to suspend publication lies a major and unreported irony. It was apparently not the management but national print union leaders who first suggested the 30 November deadline. The date came from private meetings between Duke Hussey and general secretaries of the print unions in the spring. The union leaders have their own interest in the Times management proposals. If the power of the shop-floor union chapels is curbed, then the general secretaries might, be able to grab back to themselves some el the authority over their Fleet Street metri" tiers. 'We haven't abrogated power in Fleet Street, we've been stripped of itover the years by the employers', says Bill Keys, the general secretary of SOGAT and senior print union leader. 'All the proprietors would make joint national agreements with, us, and then individual proprietors WOW go off and make deals behind our backs with the shop floor: Duke Hussey wants W eradicate overnight at Times newspapers, the corrupt 'old Spanish customs' that ban grown up in Fleet Street with the On" nivance of the proprietors. 'We could lose° thousand men here, and not feel the difference,' one senior TNL executive told nle; Duke Hussey told me: 'One of the !tat problems in Fleet Street in the past is 16,.hat the newspaper companies — most of whil'" were small private companies owned hY families — have not had the money to with,: stand strikes. They just had to go along wit'' it. But gradually, these families have gone: the Cadbury's have gone, David Astor has had to give up The Observer, Max Aitket,a the Express. And what's happened? VtleaP financially narrow-based companies al being replaced by very large internatioila companies. And so now of course we ha.v.,e, the financial muscle to resist what "" believe to be wrong and that's what we ate is not prepared to ny go on seeing no,wmydofainnig' money going into the front door of the Tirnes and straight out of the back, if there, are means of it not happening that OP( said Kenneth Thomson, the Chairman the Thomson Organisation that owns Tn` Times and the Sunday Times, last year in ar„I interview with the BBC. The organisatt this year will make £100 million in pr 10 profits from North Sea oil; apparentLly million has been earmarked for the 1 Ply board in its stand against the unions ; enough to keep the paper closed down fa six months. Unlike his father, Roy Thc'alici son, who died two years ago, the new 1-0.1 Thomson does not share a sentiment' attachment to the best of old British as' toms. He says: 'There is nothing finer,Wew own than The Times, but we cannot all° the papers to go on bleeding to death.' t Kenneth Thomson is determined tllaw Times Newspapers must use the ne technology for computerised typesettilt The Union that stands to lose most fro'n th is the NGA. Compositors are skilled trlea.ci proud of their craft, and the highest pal print workers in Fleet Street. , not Although Joe Wade says he Is opposed in principle to the new technologani he insists that only his NGA members c.‘„, be allowed to operate it. But the n''to technology has already cost £3 install. For it to be profitable, the I'D'ot management says that half the Preset go NGA jobs in the composing room Mils and the new equipment must be operated i directly by journalists and telephone girls n the classified ads department. The comPuter produces instant credit ratings and automatic billing for classified advertisers and would save £2 million a year. Do you realise,' says Duke Hussey 'the machines we use to set our papers on are under glass cages in museums in America.' Joe Wade responds 'the outcome of the war over new technology will now be determined by the battle at The Times. The rest of Fleet Street management is watching like vultures. If we allow the Times management to walk over us with their arrogant demands and threats the other vultures will Pounce in no time at all.' One senior executive at The Times told me: 'Every other management in Fleet Street has its head below the parapet as we go over the top. I feel a growing sense of outrage that we are the only company standing up against the anarchy of Fleet Street not like Victor we-shall-not-be-moved Mathews for all his brave words. Everyone is silent now, but when not ifwe succeed, they'll all get up and cheer.' Joe Wade puts it differently: 'Lord Thomson and Times Newspapers management seem determined to act as executioners and cast us in the role of undertakers. All right, that appears to leave us no choice, but to bury them. But I still hope Lord Thomson has second • thoughts.' Both unions and management believe that for the moment they must keep up the public pressure on each other. In private, their language is less bloodthirsty. And at a brasserie in Mayfair on 30 November, the journalists and other Grays Inn Road groupies drank on staunchly -still not quite able to believe that this was the night that closed The Times.
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