Abstract
Graduates in journalism were once a rarity: then an inspiring figure at the head of a new university course changed all that
We hardly felt like pioneers, the 20 or so eager young students assembled in a classroom in Cardiff’s Cathedral Road half a century ago, except that we were the first to enter what was mildly hostile territory. For many academics – these were different times – a postgraduate university diploma in something as low-life as journalism was bound to be an object of suspicion. For as many in the press, the idea that there was anything to be learnt about the trade in a university, of all places, was an object of derision.
Which made it all the more remarkable that the 65-year-old Tom Hopkinson had managed to launch, 50 years ago this October, the first graduate course in journalism at what was then University College, Cardiff. Somehow, he had managed to persuade the university authorities to let him run something entirely new in Britain, and newspaper editors across the country to overcome their scepticism and grant his first students three-week internships in mid-course.
But then Sir Tom, as he would become eight years later, could be persuasive. He had a kindly, considered way of speaking which belied the firmness of purpose he had shown throughout his inspirational career (you can see both characteristics in a fascinating British Council reconstruction, available on YouTube, of a 1946 features conference at Picture Post in which Hopkinson, the editor, convincingly plays himself ).
Hopkinson had first trained journalists in Kenya, towards the end of his long immersion in Africa. But he had also become aware that, below the cynical surface, something was shifting in Britain. As he would put it in a 1975 promotional video for the Centre for Journalism Studies:
“I started the course back in 1970 to try to get over some of the problems I and others had experienced when we were trying to get our first start in journalism. In those far-off days, unless you were lucky enough to be the son or daughter of a proprietor or an editor, the doors were pretty firmly closed…It was very difficult for a graduate to find his way into journalism. And then, as more and more people were given the chance to go to university, editors found that all the brightest young people were being creamed off into the civil service, finance, and so on. So they became more interested in…tapping the best of the talent as it came out of the universities.
“I thought a postgraduate course would offer a highway for graduates to make the transition from academic essays to writing news. I spent a year going around talking to editors, journalists and people in universities to find out what was really wanted from a trained journalist and then set about building a course that would meet the need.”
In that first year, there was nothing like the facilities and range Cardiff University’s prestigious School of Journalism, Media and Culture has now. Val Williams, a genial former Reuters correspondent, taught news reporting, and the formidable Miss Ring Teeline shorthand, but, important as both were to the course, its greatest asset was Hopkinson himself.
A lecture by Hopkinson was always special. When the Life photographer Larry Burrows was killed covering the Vietnam war in February 1971, Hopkinson turned an afternoon over to a discussion of war photography, amply illustrated from his vast collection of slides. Giving a talk on Orwell, whom he had known well, he recalled that the writer’s great capacity had been to make people justly “uncomfortable”. He gave the example of how, in June 1941, Hopkinson, Philip Toynbee, David Astor and others were celebrating at one of their regular lunches that Operation Barbarossa had brought Russia into the war as an ally. Orwell quietly punctured the mood by raising the labour camps and the writers imprisoned in the Soviet Union.
Nor was Hopkinson narrowly mainstream in his expectations of us. He was delighted when his star student Brian Wilson – who, a generation later, would become a minister in the Blair government –went off to Skye to found and edit a new local newspaper, the radically-minded West Highland Free Press, still in business today. And he encouraged fellow student Jim Brannen and me in a project for Cardiff’s cyclostyled People’s Paper, investigating continuing racial discrimination against the residents of one of the country’s longest-established black neighbourhoods, Bute Town – Tiger Bay. More than two decades earlier, Hopkinson had commissioned for Picture Post a ground-breaking piece “Is there a Colour Bar in Britain?” (Picture Post loved question headlines, though the answer was usually “yes”) by Robert Kee and photographer Bert Hardy, which covered the subject in the same docks area of the city.
Given his role as the founder of the now-widespread journalism training in universities, it’s worth recalling what lay behind the lustre he brought to those early years at Cardiff. Hopkinson had indeed had problems entering journalism as an impecunious Oxford graduate in the late 20s and 30s. He freelanced for the Westminster Gazette, which folded within months of his first contribution. Broke, he joined the advertising agency Crawfords, where he met the first of his three wives, the brilliant but troubled and unhappy novelist Antonia White. He joined Odhams Press as a publicity man, promoting a hopelessly out of date encyclopaedia being peddled to its readers by the Daily Herald.
A man of principle
Angered by unemployment and the incompetence of Ramsay MacDonald’s national government, he devised a book, published by Gollancz, of the most idiotic utterances of major public figures. These were deliberately accompanied by unflattering pictures (giving Hopkinson his first, but then lifelong, grasp of the importance of photography). The book’s success enabled him to become a journalist in the Odhams empire, first – alongside Claud Cockburn – at the leftist Clarion and then on Weekly Illustrated. It was there that Hopkinson first met the quixotic and gifted Stefan Lorant, who in 1938 started Picture Post for Hulton Press. Hopkinson worked first as Lorant’s deputy, and then as editor after Lorant, a Hungarian Jew already imprisoned once in Germany by the Nazis, left for the US in 1940.
Because Hopkinson’s editorship ended so dramatically – when Picture Post was selling 1.38million copies – it’s easy to forget its huge impact in war and peace. With some of the best writers and photographers of the day, it laid heavy emphasis from the start not just on politicians, celebrities – and plenty of girls, though nothing like those in the Sun’s Page Three – but on the “ordinary people” caught up in “Everybody’s War”. Indeed, the magazine played back the readers to themselves while, as Hopkinson would later write, being “out to influence events in a particular direction, that of a more just and equal society”.
Popular journalism at its finest, it goaded the government into training the Home Guard by launching its own training camp for volunteers. Those comparing Covid-19 to World War Two, and suggesting that criticism of the government’s handling of it is somehow unpatriotic, should note that Picture Post, with support from frontline troops, published telling criticisms of the war effort, including one about the inferior tank shells supplied to the British army in North Africa, which resulted in a bar on the magazine being sent to forces in the Middle East. As early as 1941, the magazine published “A Plan for Britain”, which presaged some of the post-war radical changes which came to pass, including the founding of the National Health Service.
To his credit, Edward Hulton, whose political views were profoundly, if temporarily, changed by the fall of France, strongly backed all this, and even enthusiastically welcomed the 1945 election of Attlee’s government. But as the 40s drew to a close, his views, possibly under the influence of his beautiful and strong-willed wife Nika, a Russian princess, had reverted to their pre-war Conservatism. His frequent criticisms of the magazine, despite its stellar success, came to a head in 1950, when James Cameron and Bert Hardy returned from Korea with stunning picture stories, not only of the Inchon landing but of North Korean prisoners being abused by their South Korean captors. Hardy – no graduate, but a cockney who had left school at 14 – was the greatest of Hopkinson’s photographic appointments at Picture Post, producing scenes from the Blitz, the D-Day landings, and later iconic portraits of post-war Britain. Although technically innovative, adapting his developing skills and his 35mm Leica to take pictures in any light, he would sometimes use an old box Brownie to show the readers that good pictures could be taken without an expensive camera.
Hulton didn’t want the prisoner story used. “All journalism is a compromise,” Hopkinson once told us at Cardiff. But his red lines were clear. He laid out the prisoner story, after scrupulously hunting down a balancing picture of an American prisoner being humiliated by North Korean troops. Refusing to pull it and invited to resign, he maintained that while it was the proprietor’s right to hire and fire his editors, it was the editor’s right to decide what was published while he was in the job. If he was to go, Hulton would have to fire him. Which he did.
Unluckily, the full Cameron/Hardy story was passed to the communist Daily Worker, probably by a print worker, conferring on Hopkinson, among those who knew him least, a wholly unfair reputation as a fellow traveller. In fact, Hopkinson, a clergyman’s son from a Manchester Guardian-reading family, was a decent and democratic old-fashioned left-liberal. But the aftermath of the row with Hulton made it more difficult to find work. After a period of freelancing and two years as features editor at the slowly dying News Chronicle, he went to Johannesburg to edit the Drum, read – and staffed – mainly by black South Africans.
It was at Drum that Hopkinson, in March 1960, sent photographer Ian Berry (another of his inspired appointees, later with Magnum) to a Transvaal township called Sharpeville, where Berry shot the only pictures to document the massacre of 69 anti-pass law demonstrators by police. By the next issue, the South African government had passed its infamous Emergency Powers Act; Berry would later blame Drum’s owner for vetoing the pictures in case the magazine was shut down. Hopkinson had anyway suggested immediately filing them to a London agency. They went round the world and were used to vindicate the surviving demonstrators who were taken to court for affray. Hopkinson left Drum not long afterwards.
A bit tight on the exes
While Hopkinson was a natural editor, rather than a frontline reporter, his bravery was physical as well as ethical. Berry would tell The Guardian in 2012 how, travelling through the Congo with Hopkinson, he had once started photographing an inter-tribal stoning and beating. Hopkinson plunged into the crowd and stood over the victim, allowing him to escape from his assailants. “Tom undoubtedly saved the man’s life,” Berry recalled.
Back in Cardiff, though he didn’t talk of such incidents, it didn’t take long to realise that beneath Hopkinson’s gentle exterior there was a certain moral steel (in later life, he became, like his third wife Dorothy, a devotee of the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba). He once described to some of us a flagrant expenses scam operated by a British correspondent in Africa – charging for flights which were never taken, and so on. We giggled in a pseudo-worldly way. “I don’t even think it’s funny,” said Hopkinson sharply. It was the sort of remark that stuck in the memory.
It wasn’t easy to get a job that first year. Those of us aged 23 or more suffered from a double disadvantage: having to be paid the NUJ senior rate and having all too little hands-on experience to show for it. When I went after many months to work at the Sunday Mercury in Birmingham, I was one of a tiny minority of graduates on the staff, and quickly discovered that didn’t make me smarter than – or indeed as smart as – most of my colleagues, some of the most talented journalists I ever worked with, like many of my non-graduate colleagues since.
Then, relatively few journalists, in print at least, were graduates. Now a majority are. Hopkinson certainly never thought that journalists had to have a degree. Instead, as he intimated in that 1975 video, he helped to ensure that having one was not actually a barrier to entering the trade.
Practically, we, the class of ’71, probably learnt as much on our attachments – mine was three memorable (for me) weeks on the Glasgow Herald. But Hopkinson brought something more intangible, even if most of us – Brian Wilson probably excepted – no doubt forgot it all too frequently in our subsequent careers: a sense of what journalism was for.
At one point early in the course, thinking I’d been a student for too long, I had answered an advertisement for a job as assistant literary editor at The Spectator, which to my amazement, given my unfitness for it, the then-editor George Gale offered me after an interview. (Since Gale himself didn’t last that long, I probably wouldn’t have done either). When I went to discuss my would-be apostasy with Hopkinson, he couldn’t have been kinder. Yes, he said, it could turn out to be the start of an interesting – perhaps even glamorous – career. But was that really the sort of journalist I wanted to be? I stayed the course at Cardiff – and of the various regrets I have in life, that isn’t one.
Footnotes
Donald Macintyre was the Independent’s Jerusalem bureau chief for eight years between 2004 and 2012, and before that its political editor and chief political commentator. He was previously on the Daily Express, Sunday Times, The Times and Sunday Telegraph.