Abstract
The first time I met Donald Trelford my heart skipped a beat. It was 1981, I was a postgraduate journalism student at City University and our class had spent time at The Observer shadowing members of staff, then turning our experiences into a newspaper about a newspaper. Trelford came to our department to pass judgment on our efforts.
It may be difficult for people today to understand the might of The Observer then. It was chock full of fabulous writers such as Gavin Young, Neal Ascherson and Katharine Whitehorn, and regularly took on the establishment and provided all manner of scoops. Trelford might have been pint-sized but he was a pocket rocket – dynamic, revelling in the role of editor, a journalist to his fingertips. And he singled out for praise my piece challenging political editor Adam Raphael's acceptance of the lobby system. Wow! This was the paper I had grown up with, the paper which had made me want to be a journalist. It was a golden moment.
That week we students spent at The Observer was not, however, a golden moment in the paper's history. It was when Trelford and the staff discovered that its owners, the American oil barons Atlantic Richfield, had sold the paper over their heads to Tiny Rowland's Lonrho. Trelford recalls the horror they felt over their paper being bought by the man forever associated with Edward Heath's description: that he was the unacceptable face of capitalism. Even worse for The Observer, long regarded as the most authoritative British journal on African affairs, Lonrho had its fingers in many African pies and there were grave fears for Rowland's interventions if stories affected his commercial interests.
It's clear that Trelford feels he has been judged too harshly for compromises he made with Lonrho. Yet his own words show how intertwined his editorship became with his proprietor: travelling on the Lonrho jet and spending time with dubious people Rowland introduced him to, from Adnan Khashoggi to Imelda Marcos.
Trelford could have resigned on principle. He chose not to. Instead, he got so embroiled in Rowland's world that The Observer eventually put out a special weekday freesheet edition containing an unpublished government report into Rowland's arch rival Mohamed Al-Fayed's purchase of Harrods, with the headline “The phoney pharaoh”. It made The Observer look like its owner's plaything.
Rowland's influence was felt in other ways too. When I worked at The Observer in the early 1990s, journalists would have to stay in Lonrho hotels if out on jobs. A reporter from the business section, edited by Melvyn Marckus, recommended for the post by Rowland, would hang around on Saturday nights to check other papers' first editions for Lonrho stories.
The sorriest tale in this memoir is about Farzad Bazoft, a young reporter sent on assignment to the Middle East by the paper, who ended up hanged by a kangaroo court in Iraq after investigating an explosion in a military complex.
Trelford defends himself saying he never even knew Bazoft had gone to Iraq, then later describes him as a dear friend and colleague. But the root problem of that debacle was that The Observer, in a bid to save money, relied on a lot of casuals such as Bazoft, who were without the protection of a staff job and cheap because they were young, eager and often naive. They certainly weren't the editor's dear friends.
What is worthwhile about this memoir is the relish that oozes from the pages about the role of editor. Trelford clearly loved his job: the power, the influence, the people he met, the talent he nurtured, the technical skills he possessed. I recall on the day of the poll tax riot in 1990, Trelford strode out of his office and laid out the pages himself He knew what he wanted as an editor, from the overall strategy to the minutiae. When I wrote a story about the armouries of the Tower of London opening a museum in Leeds, he sent the photographer back to get another picture of a suit of armour, this time complete with jutting metalwork to protect the phallus and children gazing at it in wonder. He was as engaged with humour and titillation dressed up as culture as he was by politics.
The book is full of The Observer's characters such as Alan Watkins. I recall Trelford taking Watkins to task over seemingly dining alone at the Garrick and pointed out he could only claim for entertaining contacts. Watkins' one-line riposte was: “I ate. He drank.”
The dominant character, of course, is Trelford and there are countless quotations from other people, praising his brilliance, his first-class mind, his snookering of enemies, which becomes tiresome. But Shouting in the Street remains a must-read for us journos, a reminder of the days when a national newspaper editor was a force to be reckoned with.