Abstract
There are 56 names listed at the end of this book under the heading “The cast”, but I would swear the true figure of those mentioned in far greater. Add in those significant figures that don't make the cut for the main credits – these include the “keen, young and able” Kim Fletcher, then father of The Sunday Times chapel and now editor of this journal – plus walk-on parts such as sundry disillusioned or otherwise hacks, and – fancifully, I know – the lift operators, and there may well be a cast of thousands.
What's more, Linda Melvern's detailed recounting of the outmanoeuvring of the print trades unions in the greatest revolution experienced by the British press since Gutenberg covers several years, when job titles changed and the dramatis personae shifted like pebbles below the waterline. All such incidents were faithfully recorded by the author – a considerable feat considering that The End of the Street was published only months after the dispute had chugged wearily to a halt.
Unfortunately, such meticulous research did nothing for the pace of what the publisher's jacket note describes as “a gripping story of drama, tragedy, conspiracy and even farce”. It is certainly true that Rupert Murdoch's systematic destruction of unions where malpractice had become commonplace contained all those ingredients. It is the word “gripping” with which one can take issue in its telling.
Two hundred years after the first formal agreement was struck between master printers and a compositors' trade union, customs and practices – many of them chicanery ignored by managements desperate to stay ahead in a ruthlessly competitive industry – had pushed composing room weekly wages above £1,100 at the Daily Express.
National newspaper production was frequently interrupted by union action. Restrictive practices were rife. The printers considered themselves the industry's elite, with, as the author reports, the National Graphical Association (NGA) compositors an elite within that elite.
In 1978 the then Thomson-owned Times Newspapers made a stand, locking out all staff except journalists and managers. The group's newspapers were not published for almost a year before business resumed, almost as usual. Few of Fleet Street's finest, real or self-proclaimed, read what turned out to be writing on the wall in the Gray's Inn Road and Bouverie Street.
When Murdoch bought The Times in 1981, describing it on television as “just another newspaper”, journalists shifted uneasily on their barstools and the print unions soon realised that talk of “the new technology” and rumours of production of the company's titles moving to Wapping might test their power like never before.
Those of us on the outside, where peripheral players Eddy Shah and Robert Maxwell were making minor inroads challenging union domination, watched with fascination as Murdoch then proceeded to outwit the techies at almost every turn in the long and tortuous road to Tower Hamlets.
A rare revelation in this book tells how two insiders punctured the security ring of steel surrounding the Wapping plant early in 1985 when they began to be fed information about management plans and tactics from a “Deep Throat” on the inside. The print workers and minor chapel officers, Tony Cappi and Terry Ellis, launched their own investigation, building up a network of informants and compiling a dossier of leaked information and documents.
Perhaps not surprisingly, in view of the unions' histories, their work was “not widely welcomed” by the chapels. Part of the problem, observes Ellis, was that the fathers did not understand the technical implications of the equipment installed in Wapping, on which non-union labour, shipped in every night, was being trained. “To them [the fathers],” said Ellis, “it was just a big new building.” On such miscalculations are battles lost.
One union leader who clearly saw Murdoch's artillery, all guns primed, lurking on the horizon was Brenda Dean, then general secretary of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (Sogat '82) and now Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde. But even she was bamboozled by News International's misinformation – or no information at all – which led her to tell her National Executive Council that the company's proposals were “repugnant”, adding that they were basically an invitation to walk out of the talks. “This would be fatal in my view,” she said. Hanging in there, it transpired, was just as deadly
News International journalists with moral objections to Murdoch's methods, despite feeling little sympathy for those trades union brethren who for years had made their lives difficult, bravely refused to cross the Wapping picket lines and departed. The majority saw the comeuppance of the arrogant and greedy occupants of the composing room, “the stone” (the table where journalists and printers finalised each page) and the machine room as justified.
What was lost to the newspaper industry, other than the livelihoods of many fine craftsmen not necessarily caught up in the suicidal collective hubris? Some of the romance perhaps. Young journalists will never know the thrill of the vibration and distant rumbling from below pavement-level of the presses as they started to roll. Nor will they witness the extraordinary skills of composing room magicians or machine room perfectionists, artisans driven by pride rather than conceit.
After the final meeting between Murdoch and the print unions, in January 1986, Tony Dubbins, general secretary of the NGA, observed: “We had given him an olive branch and he'd broken it in two and beat us round the head with it.” Rough justice, maybe, but many who loved the trade of journalism, and lived through the worst years of union excess, would argue it was justice nonetheless.
Friday January 24, when 5,500 print workers went on strike, is the day Fleet Street ended, writes Melvern. In terms of drama, its implosion and the struggle to the death in which corporate smarts would break the all-mouth-and-trousers chapel dictatorships would make a marvellous movie. Sadly, although it is the only volume published on the subject, it didn't make a marvellous book.
