Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (72 page)

For the newspaper proprietors, there was one advantage to this arrangement. The cost and hassle of owning a newspaper was so great that it discouraged potential competition from entering the
market. Thus, the restrictive practices of the unions effectively turned Fleet Street into an unofficial cartel for the proprietors. The victim, of course, was the customer. An attempt to break
this stranglehold was not risked until March 1986 when Eddy Shah started a mid-market tabloid called
Today
and in doing so became the first Fleet Street outsider to launch a national daily
since the Communist Party’s
Daily Worker
in 1930.
^EN31

Eddy Shah was in the distinctive predicament of being both a self-made man and the fourth cousin of the Aga Khan. His background defied categorization within the traditional British class
structure. All that could be said was that, as the son of an English-Irish mother and a Persian-Indian father, he was hardly the conventional grandee of the fourth estate. A rebellious temperament
and a disrupted schooling which took him from Karachi to Gordonstoun to various schools in Sussex without his ever taking an A-level, was followed by a stint as a stagehand and a spell selling
advertising space for a local newspaper before he scraped together the money to launch a local free-sheet of his own. It was not until 1983 that he came to national prominence because of his
attempts to employ non-union members at what had become the Messenger Group of local newspapers in Warrington. Rather than see its closed shop breached, the NGA picketed the plant and, in an effort
to ruin Shah, halted production at the
Daily Mirror
in London until its owners promised to divest themselves of their 49 per cent stake in the Messenger Group, and then proceeded to shut
down all Fleet Street newspapers on 27 November 1983. Two days later, the Warrington plant was attacked by four thousand pickets who set fire to buildings and, until the timely arrival of police
reinforcements, seemed intent on razing the entire Messenger plant to the ground, despite the fact Shah and his staff were trapped inside. What lifted the siege of Warrington was the police
demonstrating – as they would thereafter do with the miners – a willingness to intervene to protect employees from violent intimidation, and also the application by the courts of the
terms of the Employment Act 1980 against secondary picketing. The NGA’s assets were temporarily sequestered until it agreed to obey the law. Having won the opening encounter in Warrington,
Shah aimed for a far greater prize, trying to circumvent Fleet Street’s restrictions by printing
Today
, via a satellite link, at several regional printing plants, with the help of
electricians from the Electrical, Electronic,
Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU). Breaking ranks with the rest of organized labour, EETPU’s general
secretary, Eric Hammond, secured his members’ participation in return for a no-strike guarantee and an agreement that modern computers would be used, including ‘direct input’ from
journalists. There would be no ‘double-key stroking’ or other so-called ‘Spanish practices’. With lower production costs and access to new technology that was still being
denied to Fleet Street,
Today
promised to shake up the media. ‘We’re going after an industry that’s just ripe to be taken,’ said Shah bullishly. ‘It needs just
one guy.’
⁴⁵
The results, however, suggested otherwise. Although it led the way with colour printing, the quality was disappointing and
produced almost comically blurred pictures. Initial sales of one million stood at half that number by the end of the first month. With circulation well below his business projections, Shah quickly
ran out of money and in June, only three months after its launch,
Today
’s imminent demise was deferred only by its being sold to Tiny Rowland’s Lonhro conglomerate, which also
owned the
Observer
. The following year, Rowland, unable to turn around its fortunes, sold
Today
on to Rupert Murdoch, whose purchase secured the paper an eight-year stay of execution.
Shah’s sale of the paper and its eventual, if protracted, demise demonstrated the toughness of the market and the difficulty for an outsider intent on reshaping it.

Ultimately, it was Murdoch, rather than Shah, who possessed the guile, tenacity and money necessary to transform the country’s newspaper industry. In 1977, Murdoch bought an eleven-acre
site of dilapidated and disused London Docklands in Wapping, on the north shore of the Thames, just beyond the Tower of London. There, he built a vast, airy printing hall, with modern presses. It
cost £72 million and in May 1983 negotiations commenced with the print unions as a precursor to moving production of
The Sun
and the
News of the World
– whose cramped and
antiquated print room in Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street, had long ceased to be adequate – to Wapping. Nineteen months later, in December 1984, the unions were still refusing to relocate
the short distance to Wapping unless they could transfer their existing over-manning and restrictive practices there, reminding Murdoch’s chief negotiator, with evident pride, that ‘the
Daily Telegraph
’s press room lay idle for eight years waiting on our union’s agreement’. One SOGAT representative was even blunter: ‘When will you get it through your
thick heads,’ he postured, ‘we will never let you use it, you may as well put a match to it – or we’ll do it for you.’
⁴⁶
The unions, however, were picking on the wrong proprietor. Concluding that there was no way Wapping’s presses were ever going to start spinning with the NGA and SOGAT
dictating the terms, in February 1985 Murdoch and a small, hand-picked team of executives began planning a covert operation. Codidd
‘Project X’, it involved
using employees who were not members of either the NGA or SOGAT to print all four of the company’s national newspapers at Wapping. If the plan succeeded, the power of the traditional Fleet
Street print unions would be circumvented and newspapers could finally be run by their managements without the constant threat of disruption.

Success depended upon the utmost secrecy. If the NGA or SOGAT realized what was being planned at Wapping before the presses were ready to roll, they could bring production to a standstill at
Murdoch’s Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road (home of
The Times
and
Sunday Times
) print halls in the meantime. The loss of revenue would cripple him, forcing his
capitulation. Thus, during the twelve months it would take to transform Wapping to be ready not just to print four newspapers but also to house offices for their journalists, a cover story had to
be concocted to explain the signs of activity there. The pretence was that it was being fitted up to produce a new evening newspaper, to be called the
London Post
, on which, when it was
ready, new positions would be offered to NGA and SOGAT members. The reality was very different. As Eddy Shah had done before him, Murdoch concluded a deal with Eric Hammond to have members of EETPU
get Wapping up and running. Hammond saw this as an opportunity to create jobs for his members and to show that moderate unions need not necessarily be antipathetic to the new technology-driven
sectors of the economy. Having endured successive TUC conferences where delegates took delight in shouting him down whenever he tried to address them, Hammond was in no mood to be lectured about
fraternity from those he believed were actually wrecking trade unionism with their militancy. Recruiting electricians in London was deemed too risky, in case they talked about their work, so they
were hired in Southampton and daily bussed eighty miles to Wapping and back. This was not the only long and circuitous route. The Atex computer mainframes which would transform how national
newspapers were edited and produced were bought in Boston but shipped in unmarked boxes via Paris to throw off the scent any print union sympathizers monitoring such a surprisingly large purchase.
They were then assembled in London by an all-American team working in the utmost secrecy from an unprepossessing shed in Woolwich licensed to a cover company called Caprilord Ltd.

Even though every precaution had been taken, by September rumours had reached SOGAT’s new general secretary, Brenda Dean, that dummy print-runs were being rolled off at Wapping. The
revelation made a mockery of the claims of Murdoch’s management that there were only a few electricians there doing a bit of wiring. Dean immediately suggested strike action to bring
Murdoch’s four newspapers to a standstill, only to find other members of her executive convinced there was no cause for alarm. In the face of such insouciance, Dean was incredulous, vainly
protesting: ‘Fleet
Street stops at the drop of a hat for absolutely bugger all . . . What’s wrong with you all? Now’s the time to
strike!’
⁴⁷
She was right, it would have been the time. And the time passed. Instead, the NGA and SOGAT got their timing and their tactics
catastrophically wrong. On 21 January 1986, in the face of redundancy threats, ballots recorded over 80 per cent of both unions’ members demanding that Murdoch’s company, News
International, guarantee them ‘jobs for life’ – otherwise they would strike. Murdoch could scarcely believe his luck. The unions were making their most outlandish demand just at
the moment his shadow workforce at Wapping had confirmed that the new presses were ready to roll. The siege of Wapping was about to begin. At St Bride’s, the Fleet Street
‘journalists’ church’, an emergency all-night vigil was held for the future of the newspaper industry.

Late in the evening of Saturday, 25 January, Wapping’s presses began printing the following day’s
Sunday Times
and
News of the World
. Many journalists recognized this
as an exciting moment to break free from the restrictions that had so often prevented their articles from being printed. For the first time, they enjoyed direct input of their copy. The objective
was a bold one. As one
Sunday Times
journalists later put it: ‘How many other industries have gone from the equivalent of steam to microchip in a week, without interrupting
production?’
⁴⁸
Not all found this advance so invigorating. Among employees who did not turn up for work were those obeying an edict from the
National Union of Journalists forbidding them to ‘enter the Wapping plant’ or to operate the new technology – the union having thrown in its lot with the printers in a display of
workers’ solidarity. Other absentees simply wanted to record their irritation that, in springing such a major surprise at the last moment, neither their editors nor News International’s
management had had the courtesy to take them into their confidence about the proposed move. It offended their professional pride – though if Murdoch had managed to keep his secret after first
announcing it to his journalists, it would certainly have made for a world-exclusive. Whatever their feelings about management’s tactics and the project’s aims, most regarded moving to
the physical location of Wapping with as much enthusiasm as a posting to Siberia. The regeneration of London’s Docklands had scarcely begun. There were no quality bars, shops or restaurants
– unlike the Fleet Street with which journalists were so cosily familiar. What was more, the Wapping plant, which included the offices and print hall for
Th
e Times
, the
Sunday Times
,
The Sun
and the
New
s of the World
, was a forbidding fortress with twelve-foot railings topped by razor wire, security cameras and guard-dog patrols. It
quickly became clear that the aesthetics of the concentration camp would form a necessary protection from the besieging army beyond. It hardly made for a happy and welcoming work environment.

What those who did answer the call to work discovered on the opening nights was terrifying. NGA and SOGAT pickets, joined by hundreds, and often thousands, of sympathizers
(perhaps also motivated by a desire for vengeance against newspapers that had opposed the miners’ strike), gathered outside in an effort to block all the exits and prevent the newspapers
leaving the plant.
The Times
journalist Tim Austin recalled the scene on the first night as his paper was ready to be dispatched:

Days turned into weeks, over which the siege intensified. Staff were given an ever-changing telephone number to call that would let them know where and when special buses with
wire mesh over the windows and drawn curtains would pick them up and take them in and out of the compound, in order to protect them and conceal their identities. Those who travelled in by car were
at risk of having their vehicles vandalized. Those who went in on foot got covered in spit.
The Times
’s property correspondent survived a smashed beer-glass thrust at his jugular. In
particular, senior management needed personal protection. Their principal collaborators were equally in danger: Eric Hammond escaped the abuse being hurled at him in the street by walking into the
TUC’s Congress House for a scheduled meeting of its general council, only to find himself being kicked and punched by several union officials inside the TUC’s foyer.

It was perhaps surprising that trade unionists, having only the previous year seen how the NUM’s use of flying pickets and physical menace had failed to shut down the working pits of the
Midlands, should imagine the strategy would succeed in East London. However, the calculation second time around seemed a more favourable one: while striking miners had never marshalled sufficient
numbers simultaneously to close all the working pits, there was only one Wapping plant to shut down. On the other hand, a single target was also easier to defend, and the police were deployed in
sufficient numbers to keep its exits unblocked. In particular, SOGAT and the NGA went on strike under the misapprehension that Wapping lacked the capacity
to print sufficient
numbers of newspapers. It possessed only forty-eight presses whereas, at its old premises, a full
Sunday Times
print-run had necessitated all ninety presses. The seeming shortfall was
bridged by the ability of Wapping’s electricians to print double the number of copies per hour that the NGA members had managed to produce. Indeed, the ability of Wapping’s 670
production staff to print four newspapers begged questions about how efficiently the 5,500 NGA and SOGAT members had worked prior to January 1986. Other newspaper proprietors also noticed the
difference. Inexplicably, it was taking 6,800 employees to produce the
Daily
and
Sunday Express
, despite those titles having a fraction of the combined circulation of Wapping’s
output. In April, Murdoch offered the unions a deal. If they called off their strike, he would give them
The Times
’s old offices and print hall in Gray’s Inn Road, compete with
all its presses. Suggesting they use it to start up their own newspaper, Murdoch announced: ‘This is the opportunity 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.’
⁵⁰
‘We put print workers before print works,’ came Norman Willis’s disingenuous reply. ‘Our priority has to be people not property.’
⁵¹
The chance to test the market for a new pro-Labour newspaper produced by 5,500 print union members was hastily passed up.