Abstract
Four decades ago, journalists and printers in Scotland thought they'd found a new way of working. They thought wrong
Bacon, egg and sausage was what I wanted.
“You cannae have that,” Lizzie muttered.
“Oh, why not? Run out of something?” I said, eyeing other journalists and printworkers tucking into large fry-ups.
Lizzie was 78. Decades on the Daily Express backshift had eaten away at her patience. “You can have bacon, egg and chips. Or bacon, sausage and chips. Or sausage, egg and chips. You can have bacon, egg, sausage and chips if you like.”
“But I don't want chips.”
“Chips is compulsory,” she thundered. “Scottish people like chips!”
That was my first night in Glasgow's Albion Street plant in the summer of 1970. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised on my third shift to be ushered into a mandatory meeting of the NUJ Chapel to discuss a temporary absence of chips in the canteen.
All the national newspapers printing in London, Manchester and Glasgow tipped the forelock to nationalism, hence the Scottish Daily Express, the Daily Record (instead of The Mirror) and even today – especially today – the Scottish Sun. The Express was the biggest. Until it wasn't, its circulation overtaken by the Record, which then pulled away by going colour. The lurching dinosaur that foisted a Tory menu on a country that had always returned Labour landslides and was now oiling up for the Scottish National Party began to die.
Its demise was hastened by demonstrations of trade union power that made our Fleet Street brothers seem like chapel choirboys. The 2,000 workers producing the Scottish Daily Express, the Scottish Sunday Express and the Glasgow Evening Citizen organised 81 strikes in 1972, mostly on the editorial floor. Few of the stoppages lasted more than two hours. They didn't need to – that's how long it took to wring another concession from frantic editorial managers. We already had a four-day week, six weeks’ holiday, paternity leave and more allowances to buy newspapers than there were titles on the stands.
“Alastair Mackie greets Tony Benn and Robert Maxwell outside the Scottish Daily News offices in Albion Street yesterday.” Scottish Daily News Monday May 5, 1975
Sir Max Aitken and his well-fed acolytes played their part in what became a ritualistic dance of death – those of us who became Father of Chapel and union negotiators would arrive in London for several days of house agreement talks and find the management team AWOL to Ascot, Henley or Wimbledon. A weary Sir Max handed the reins to Jocelyn Stevens, who set about withdrawing the Scottish operation to Manchester and dispensing with almost all of the 2,000 jobs.
That was in April 1974. Some 600 of the axed workforce refused to go away. They pooled £250,000 of their redundancy payments and vowed to launch a workers-controlled daily newspaper, setting out to garner support from the Scottish public, the British labour movement and the new Wilson government.
They quickly formed an action committee from the leaders of a federated chapel that had been unique in the industry by not only functioning, but also resolving inter-union disputes. Ominously for the new venture, the journalists did not share the printworkers’ enthusiasm for unity, fearing horny hands impinging on editorial control.
In Downing Street, the incoming Labour cabinet was particularly sensitive to serious job losses in deprived areas, since its majority was so small it would go to the country again less than eight months after being elected. But it did contain an avid workers’ co-operative supporter in Tony Benn and it was eventually agreed that £1.2m would be available for the Scottish venture if the redundant workers could raise the same sum in cash and loans.
Politicians, trade unions and rival newspapers deemed it impossible. Stevens, laughing behind his hands, was willing to sell them the plant and machinery (no one else wanted it), after warning off the national print unions and the Trade Union Congress from any “work-in” or other fightback with the threat that either 2,000 jobs were axed in Scotland or the whole 10,000 including London and Manchester would go.
English print union leaders, protecting high wages and demarcation lines – which would be swept away by a workers co-op – were the most implacable opponents. SNP chairman William Wolfe and other nationalists were keen to see something Scottish succeed. Tartan Tories kept their heads down and there was almost a deafening silence from traditional Labour corners. Yet, the public north of the border was incensed at more jobs going south and wanted something done. One booming voice rang out in support.
Step forward Robert Maxwell. He said he would give the action committee 50p for every £1 the workforce contributed. This was music to the ears of the 600, but the compositors, stereotypers, platemakers, engineers and despatch men who formed the leadership were a sight more hardheaded and politically aware than their members. They came away from Headington Hall in Oxford less impressed with Maxwellian promises than with Lady Elisabeth's china tea set, dominated as it was by a giant cup and saucer for Captain Bob.
The action committee leader, Alastair Mackie, a canny and skilled case room tradesman, was convinced that Maxwell would get all the publicity he needed to resurrect his parliamentary career by simply pledging money he wouldn't have to pay. If the newspaper ever saw the light of day, he would certainly demand a more significant role than benevolent onlooker.
No one trusted him. A small, left-wing cabal of journalists said that as the Czech rogue Ludvig Hoch he'd exploited starving Berliners at the end of the war. They annoyed their desperate colleagues by stressing his record at Pergamon Press, when a Department of Trade and Industry report defined Maxwell as “not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company”.
Some of the 17-strong action committee thought they could handle him and cash in on his contacts; others pointed to his ever-changing demands over the months and to his toupee, dyed eyebrows and built-up shoulder pads. They wanted nothing to do with him. He retreated to Oxford while scores of the would-be workforce took to the streets with the company prospectus, hoovering up £25 unsecured loans from factories, publicans, priests, butchers, bakers and at least one candlestick-maker.
I wheedled about £700 from shops and bars on one main road in Glasgow's Southside, a typical effort that saw £160,000 collected from the public and trade unions. The deadline for raising the money was the end of March, less than a year after the closure. On the 28th, we were an agonising £14,000 short.
The workforce gathered in Albion Street, round the Portakabin that served as a makeshift office, while the action committee wrangled for hours. Maxwell appeared. He was prepared to put up the difference (he actually borrowed £7,000 each from two elderly newsmen by promising senior editorial positions on the paper), but only if he was accepted as publisher and co-chairman.
Among his other gun-to-head conditions was the additional production of an evening paper, an impossibility with the numbers involved. Perhaps most destructively, he wanted a written agreement that the constitution of the works council that would emerge from the action committee to run the Daily News would include a clause that any director who disagreed with him would resign. His takeover plans were already well formed.
He also demanded the opportunity to address a mass meeting of the hundreds of hopefuls gathered outside in Glasgow's grey drizzle. Mackie and his mates were convinced the triumphant workers would send him packing.
I was at that meeting. Having left the Express nine months before its closure, I had quit a nice job on the Record to throw in my lot with my former workmates. We stood on the Albion St cobbles, while the men who'd led the long struggle took to the loading bay microphones six feet above us to laud the deal that would see the Scottish Daily News publish within five weeks. Some of them strongly advised us to reject every one of Maxwell's demands.
He stood behind them and said nothing. He simply opened his expensive overcoat to reveal dozens of £10 and £20 notes pinned to its maroon lining. He chewed a large cigar and when he did get to the mic he boasted that he and he alone knew the capitalist jungle and that they would need a big animal to survive. He was in.
The workers co-op was effectively dead in the water before it was tested.
Benn, whose teacup, incidentally, also dwarfed those of his guests, arrived to watch the presses start up on 5 May, 1975. He, Maxwell and Mackie posed in an unholy trinity and our king of the jungle told the photographers they were welcome upstairs to snap him in his hammock … he would sleep in the building from now on, to show solidarity with “my wonderful workers”. Maxwell did indeed retire to his hammock on several occasions that week, keeping a taxi waiting downstairs to whisk him to his Albany Hotel suite 10 minutes after everyone said goodnight.
Suffering from having no line at all
The first front page of the Scottish Daily News featured a model who had survived a horror crash to justify the selfie headline, “It's good to be alive!” Inside, the imminent Vietcong expulsion of the Yanks from Saigon was lauded because the foreign editor was a socialist, while another page was given over to an SNP columnist to rail against the Queen visiting Japan. The prospectus had promised an independent, left-of-centre newspaper beholden to neither political party nor trade union, but it suffered immediately from having no line at all.
The editor was selected because he had never upset anyone. He was unable to restrain individual journalists (me included) from venting their pet hates throughout the broadsheet pages. Most of us did at least two jobs and I managed to slag off fans of the government opposition's rising star, Margaret Thatcher. That was in the pop column.
The paper quickly became a hybrid of leftist cliches, reactionary tirades, nationalist resentments and sentimental slush. We easily surpassed the break-even circulation of 240,000 and outsold the Express for a couple of weeks. Then the adverts dried up as business balked at editorials castigating capitalism.
We stuck to our guns. When Scotland's own Bay City Rollers, the top pop group of the 1970s, emigrated for tax reasons, we splashed, “Bye bye cry babies” (farewell lots of young readers). As circulation plummeted, the action committee took the brave decision to relaunch as a tabloid, achieving the transition in a mind-boggling 10 days – the Daily Mail had taken a year.
Maxwell ranted from afar. One week we got a telegram from Moscow. He and Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin had decided we should raise the paper's cover price by a penny to 7p. The next week there was a wire from the White House in Washington – Gerald Ford agreed with Bob that the price must be cut immediately to 5p.
He ranted from close quarters too, seizing the Tannoy system and bellowing in the midst of production: “Attention! This is Robert Maxwell speaking …” hectoring us to work harder and slandering Mackie and co, “these traitors in our midst”. Fearful of the dole again, with no redundancy cash this time, a growing majority turned to him for salvation.
He convened a mass meeting and had himself elected chairman of the works council, with a proposal for all-round wage cuts dressed up as more share-buying loans. Only 12 of some 300 who attended voted against him. We took some consolation in being dubbed the Dirty Dozen.
Sales declined further. Maxwell sacked the action committee. A Sunday Times Insight team arrived in Glasgow and would produce a September centre-spread: “How Maxwell sabotaged the workers’ dream.”
I resigned that weekend, four months after the launch. At 2am on my last stint I got a taste of Maxwell's contempt for the workforce. He strode into the case room, grasped my elbow, pumped my hand and boomed for the benefit of all on the print floor: “I have the utmost admiration for any man of principle.” Still beaming, he bent oily lips to my ear and said: “A rare example of a rat deserting the sinking shits.”
What had begun solely as a battle against unemployment, with each militant chapel out to save as many of the 2,000 jobs as possible for its particular trade, had quickly become a family. Factional interests of a lifetime were jettisoned in a visionary, inspiring and ultimately heartbreaking campaign to try to create a newspaper that would survive and provide jobs for those still to come.
The Scottish Daily News died six weeks later. Benn never came back. Maxwell went on to greater swindles before he sank off his luxury yacht near the Canary Islands.