Notes From a Small Island (5 page)

may actually be true, that one of these functionaries wandered into " a room on the fourth floor full of people who hadn't done anything in years and, when they proved unable to account convincingly for themselves, sacked them at a stroke, except for one fortunate fellow who had popped out to the betting shop. When he returned, it was to an empty room and he spent the next two years sitting alone wondering vaguely what had become of his colleagues.

In our department the drive for efficiency was less traumatic. The desk I worked on was subsumed into a larger Business News desk, which meant I had to work nights and something more closely approximating eight-hour days, and we also had our expenses cruelly lopped. But the worst of it was that I was brought into regular contact with Vince of the wire room.

Vince was notorious. He would easily have been the world's most terrifying human had he but been human. I don't know quite what he was, other than it was five foot six inches of wiry malevolence in a grubby T-shirt. Reliable rumour had it that he was not born, but had burst full-formed from his mother's belly and then skittered off to the sewers. Among Vince's few simple and generally neglected tasks was the nightly delivery to us of the Wall Street report. Each night I would have to go and try to coax it from him. He was generally to be found in the humming, unattended mayhem of the wire room, lounging in a leather chair liberated from an executive office upstairs, with his blood-tipped Doc Martens plonked on the desk before him beside, and sometimes actually in, a large open box of pizza.

Every night I would knock hesitantly at the open door, and politely ask if he had seen the Wall Street report, pointing out that it was now quarter-past eleven and we should have had it at half-past ten. Perhaps he could look for it among the reams of unwatched paper tumbling out of his many machines?

'I don't know wewer you noticed,' Vince would say, 'but I'm eating pizza.'

Everybody had a different approach with Vince. Some tried to get threatening. Some tried bribery. Some tried warm friendship. I begged.

'Please, Vince, can't you just get it for me, please. It won't take a sec and it would make my life so much easier.'

'Fuck off.'

'Please, Vince. I have a wife and family, and they're threatening to sack me because the Wall Street report is always late.'Fuck off.'

'Well, then, how about if you just tell me where it is and I get it myself.'

'You can't touch nuffink in here, you know that.' The wire room was the domain of a union mysteriously named NATSOPA. One of the ways NATSOPA maintained its vice-like grip on the lower echelons of the newspaper industry was by keeping technological secrets to itself, like how to tear paper off a machine. Vince, as I recall, had gone on a six-week course to Eastbourne. It left him exhausted. Journalists weren't even allowed over the threshold.

Eventually, when my entreaties had declined into a kind of helpless bleating, Vince would sigh heavily, jam a wedge of pizza in his mouth and come over to the door. He would stick his face right in mine for a full half-minute. This was always the most unnerving part. His breath smelled primeval. His eyes were shiny and ratlike. 'You're fucking annoying me,' he would say in a low growl, flecking my face with bits of wet pizza, and then he would either get the Wall Street report or he would retire to his desk in a dark mood. There was never any telling which.

Once, on a particularly difficult night, I reported Vince's insubordination to David Hopkinson, the night editor, who was himself a formidable figure when he chose to be. Harrumphing, he went off to sort things out and actually went in the wire room - an impressive flouting of the rules of demarcation. When he emerged a few minutes later, looking flushed and wiping bits of pizza from his chin, he seemed a different man altogether. In a quiet voice he informed me that Vince would bring along the Wall Street report shortly but that perhaps it was best not to disturb him further just at present. Eventually I discovered that the simplest thing to do was get the closing prices out of the first edition of the FT.

To say that Fleet Street in the early 1980s was out of control barely hints at the scale of matters. The National Graphical Association, the printers' union, decided how many people were needed on each paper (hundreds and hundreds) and how many were to be laid off during a recession (none), and billed the management accordingly. Managements didn't have the power to hire and fire their own print workers, indeed generally didn't even know how many print workers they employed. I have before me a headline from December 1985 saying: 'Auditors find 300 extra printing staff at Telegraph'. That is to say, the Telegraph was paying salaries to 300

people who didn't actually work there. Printers were paid under a piece-rate system so byzantine that every composing room on Fleet Street had a piece-rate book the size of a telephone directory. On top of plump salaries, printers received special bonus payments -sometimes calculated to the eighth decimal point of a penny - for handling type of irregular sizes, for dealing with heavily edited copy, for setting words in a language other than English, for the white space at the ends of lines. If work was done out of house -for instance, advertising copy that was set outside the building - they were compensated for not doing it. At the end of each week, a senior NGA man would tot all these extras up, add a little something for a handy category called 'extra trouble occasioned', and pass the bill to the management. In consequence, many senior printers, with skills no more advanced than you would expect to find in any back-street print shop, enjoyed incomes in the top 2 per cent of British earnings. It was crazy.

Well, I don't need to tell you how it turned out. On 24 January 1986, The Times abruptly sacked 5,250 members of the most truculent unions - or deemed them to have dismissed themselves. On the evening of that day, the editorial staff were called into an upstairs conference room where Charlie Wilson, the editor, climbed onto a desk and announced the changes. Wilson was a terrifying Scotsman and a Murdoch man through and through. He said to us: 'We're sending ye tae Wapping, ye soft, English nancies, and if ye wairk very, very hard and if ye doonae git on ma tits, then mebbe I'll not cut off yer knackers and put them in ma Christmas pudding. D'ye have any problems with tha'?' Or words to that effect.

As 400 skittish journalists tumbled from the room, jabbering excitedly and trying to come to terms with the realization that they were about to be immersed in the biggest drama of their working lives, I stood alone and basking in the glow of a single joyous thought: I would never have to work with Vince again.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   THREE

i HADN'T BEEN BACK TO WAPPING SINCE I'D LEFT THERE IN THE SUMMER of 1986 and was eager to see it again. I had arranged to meet an old friend and colleague, so I went now to Chancery Lane and caught an Underground train. I do like the Underground. There's something surreal about plunging into the bowels of the earth to catch a train. It's a little world of its own down there, with its own strange winds and weather systems, its own eerie noises and oily smells. Even when you've descended so far into the earth that you've lost your bearings utterly and wouldn't be in the least surprised to pass a troop of blackened miners coming off shift, there's always the rumble and tremble of a train passing somewhere on an unknown line even further below. And it all happens in such orderly quiet: all these thousands of people passing on stairs and escalators, stepping on and off crowded trains, sliding off into the darkness with wobbling heads, and never speaking, like characters from Night of the Living Dead.

As I stood on the platform beneath another, fairly recent London civility - namely an electronic board announcing that the next train to Hainault would be arriving in 4 mins - I turned my attention to the greatest of all civilities: the London Underground Map. What a piece of perfection it is, created in 1931 by a forgotten hero named Harry Beck, an out-of-work draughtsman who realized that when you are underground it doesn't matter where you are. Beck saw -and what an intuitive stroke this was - that as long as the stations were presented in their right sequence with their interchanges clearly delineated, he could freely distort scale, indeed abandon it

altogether. He gave his map the orderly precision of an electrical wiring system, and in so doing created an entirely new, imaginary London that has very little to do with the disorderly geography of the city above.

Here's an amusing trick you can play on people from Newfoundland or Lincolnshire. Take them to Bank Station and tell them to make their way to Mansion House. Using Beck's map -which even people from Newfoundland can understand in a moment - they will gamely take a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, change to a Circle Line train heading east and travel five more stops. When eventually they get to Mansion House they will emerge to find they have arrived at a point 200 feet further down the same street, and that you have had a nice breakfast and done a little shopping since you last saw them. Now take them to Great Portland Street and tell them to meet you at Regent's Park (that's right, same thing again!), and then to Temple Station with instructions to rendezvous at Aldwych. What fun you can have! And when you get tired of them, tell them to meet you at Brompton Road Station. It closed in 1947, so you'll never have to see them again.

The best part of Underground travel is that you never actually see the places above you. You have to imagine them. In other cities station names are unimaginative and mundane: Lexington Avenue, Potsdammerplatz, Third Street South. But in London the names sound sylvan and beckoning: Stamford Brook, Turnham Green, Bromley-by-Bow, Maida Vale, Drayton Park. That isn't a city up there, it's a Jane Austen novel. It's easy to imagine that you are shuttling about under a semi-mythic city from some golden, pre-industrial age. Swiss Cottage ceases to be a busy road junction and becomes instead a gingerbread dwelling in the midst of the great oak forest known as St John's Wood. Chalk Farm is an open space of fields where cheerful peasants in brown smocks cut and gather crops of chalk. Blackfriars is full of cowled and chanting monks, Oxford Circus has its big top, Barking is a dangerous place overrun with packs of wild dogs, Theydon Bois is a community of industrious Huguenot weavers, White City is a walled and turreted elysium built of the most dazzling ivory, and Holland Park is full of windmills.

The problem with losing yourself in these little reveries is that when you surface things are apt to be disappointing. I came up now at Tower Hill and there wasn't a tower and there wasn't a hill.*

There isn't even any longer a Royal Mint (which I always preferred to imagine as a very large chocolate wrapped in green foil) as it has been moved somewhere else and replaced with a building with lots of smoked glass. Much of what once stood in this noisy corner of London has been swept away and replaced with big buildings with lots of smoked glass. It was only eight years since I'd last been here, but were it not for the fixed reference points of London Bridge and the Tower I'd scarcely have recognized the neighbourhood.

I walked along the painfully noisy street called The Highway, quietly agog at all the new development. It was like being in the midst of an ugly-building competition. For the better part of a decade, architects had been arriving in the area and saying, 'You think that's bad? Wait'11 you see what / can do.' And there, towering proudly above all the clunky new offices, was the ugliest piece of bulk in London, the News International complex, looking like the central air-conditioning unit for the planet.

When I last saw it, in 1986, it stood forlornly amid acres of empty warehouses and puddly wasteground. The Highway, as I recalled it, was a comparatively sedate throughway. Now heavy lorries pounded along it, making the pavements tremble and giving the air an unhealthy bluish tinge. The News International compound was still surrounded with sinister fencing and electronic gates, but there was a new maximum-security reception centre that looked like something you'd expect to find at a plutonium depot at Sellafield. Goodness knows what terrorist contingency they have allowed for, but it must be something ambitious. I'd never seen a more unbreachable-looking complex.

I presented myself at the security window and waited outside while my colleague was summoned. The most eerie thing about the scene now was how serene it was. The memory seared into my skull was of crowds of demonstrators and police on horses and angry pickets who one minute would be screaming at you with wild eyes and big teeth and the next would say, 'Oh, hi, Bill, didn't recognize you,' and then exchange fags and talk about what a dreadful business this all was. And it was a dreadful business, for among the 5,000 sacked workers were hundreds and hundreds of decent, mild-mannered librarians, clerks, secretaries and messengers whose only sin was to have joined a union. To their eternal credit, most bore those of us still in work no personal grudges, though I confess the thought of Vince stepping from the crowd with a machete always hastened my steps through the gate.

:* For about 500 yards along the northern side of the compound, •butting Pennington Street, stands a low, windowless, brick building, an old storehouse left over from the days when the East find was a bustling port and distribution point for the City. Gutted and kitted out with hi-tech trappings, this rather unlikely building became, and remains, the offices of The Times and Sunday Times. Inside, throughout that long winter of 1986, while we fumblingly found our way through a new computerized technology, we could hear chants and turmoil, the muffled clops of passing police horses, the roar and shrieks of a baton charge, but because the building was windowless, we couldn't see anything. It was very odd. We would watch it on the 9 O'clock News, then step outside and there it would be in three dimensions - the most bitter and violent industrial dispute yet seen on the streets of London -happening just outside the front gate. It was a deeply bizarre experience.

To keep morale up, the company each night brought round boxes of sandwiches and beer, which seemed a cheery gesture until you realized that the largesse was carefully worked out to provide each member of staff with one damp ham sandwich and a six-ounce can of warm Heineken. We were also presented with glossy brochures showing the company's plans for the site once the dispute was over. No two people seem to remember the same things from this brochure. I clearly recall architect's drawings of a large indoor swimming-pool, with unusually sleek and healthy-looking journalists diving off a low board or lounging with feet dangling in the water. Others remember squash courts and exercise rooms. One guy I know recollects a ten-pin bowling alley. Nearly everybody recalls a large modern bar such as you might find in the first-class lounge of a well-appointed airport.

Even from beyond the security perimeter, I could see several new buildings inside, and I couldn't wait to find out exactly what facilities the staff had been blessed with. It was the first question I asked my old colleague - whose name I dare not confide here lest he find himself abruptly transferred to classified advertising telesales - when he came to collect me at the gate. 'Oh, I remember the swimming-pool,' he said. 'We never heard anything more about that once the dispute was over. But give them their due, they've increased our hours. They now let us work an extra day every fortnight without additional pay.'

'Their way of showing they think highly of you all?'t

'They wouldn't ask us to do more work if they didn't like the way we did it, would they?' Quite. .

We strolled along the main thoroughfare of the plant between the old brick storehouse and the monumental printworks.  People passed like extras in a Hollywood movie - a workman with a long plank of wood, two women in smart business suits, a guy with a hardhat and a clipboard, a deliveryman cradling a large pot plant. We passed through a door into The Times editorial suite and I gasped quietly. It is always a small shock to go back to a place where you worked years before and see the same faces toiling at the same desks - a combination of sudden familiarity, as if you've never been away at all, and profound, heartfelt gratitude because you have. I saw my old friend Mickey Clark, now a media star, and found Graham Searjeant in his little cave made of newspapers and press releases, some of them dating back to the days when Mr Morris was still making motorcars, and encountered many other friends and former colleagues. We did all the usual things -compared stomachs and bald patches and made lists of the missing and dead. It was quite splendid really. Afterwards, I was taken to lunch in the canteen. At the old Times building on Gray's Inn Road the canteen had been in a basement room that had the charm and ambience of a submarine and the food had been slopped out by humourless drones who always brought to mind moles in aprons, but this was bright and spacious, with a wide choice of tempting dishes served by chirpy cockney girls in bright, clean uniforms. The dining area itself was unchanged except for the view. Where formerly had sprawled a muddy swamp crisscrossed with neglected water channels full of bedsteads and shopping trolleys, there now stood row upon row of designer houses and jaunty blocks of flats of the kind you always find around redeveloped waterfronts in Britain, the sort of buildings where all the balconies and exterior trim are made from lengths of tubular metal painted red.

It occurred to me that though I had worked at this site for seven months, I had never seen Wapping and was, of a sudden, keen to have a look at it. When I had finished my pudding and bid fond farewells to my ex-colleagues, I hastened out through the security gates, intentionally failing to turn in my security pass in the hope that nuclear attack sirens would sound and men in chemical warfare suits would begin a sprinting search of the compound for me, and then, with nervous backward glances, I redoubled my pace up

|^'. jtennington Street as it occurred to me that at News International ?this was not actually outside the bounds of possibility.

I had never strolled through Wapping because during the dispute & was unsafe to. The pubs and cafes of the district teemed with disgruntled printers and visiting delegations of sympathizers - Scottish miners were particularly feared for some reason - who would happily have torn a wimpy journalist's limbs from his sockets to use as torches for that night's procession. One journalist who encountered some former printers in a pub some way from Wapping had a glass smashed in his face and, as I recall, nearly died, or at the very least failed to enjoy the rest of his evening.

So unsafe was it, particularly after dark, that the police often wouldn't let us out until the small hours, particularly on nights of big demos. Because we never knew when we would be set free, we had to form our cars into a line and then sit for hour upon hour in the freezing cold. Some time between 11 p.m. and 1.30 a.m., when a significant portion of the braying throngs had been beaten back or dragged off to jail or had just wandered home, the gates would be thrown open and a great fleet of News International trucks would roar down a ramp and out onto The Highway, where they would be met by a barrage of bricks and crush barriers from whatever was left of the mob. The rest of us, meanwhile, were instructed to make haste in convoy through the back lanes of Wapping and to disperse when we were a safe distance from the plant. This worked well enough for several nights, but one evening we were sent on our way just as the pubs were shutting. As we were proceeding down some darkened, narrow street, suddenly people were stepping out of the shadows and into the road, kicking doors and heaving whatever came to hand. Ahead of me there were startling explosions of glass and intemperate shouting. To my deep and lasting astonishment someone about six cars ahead of me - a fussy little man from the foreign desk, who even now I would happily drag over rough ground behind a Land-Rover - got out to look at the damage to his car, as if he thought he might have run over a nail, bringing those of us behind to a halt. I remember watching in sputtering dismay as he tried to press back into position a flapping piece of trim, then turning my head to find at my window an enraged face - a white guy with dancing dreadlocks and an army surplus jacket - and everything took on a strange dreamlike quality. How odd, I thought, that a total stranger was about to pull me from my car and beat me mushy for the benefit of printworkers he had never met,t