Parting shot

Stephen Glover was one of three journalists who founded the Independent, in 1986. He went on, in early 1990, to become the founding editor of the Independent on Sunday, from which post he was rapidly ousted amid cost-cutting and acrimony. This is from his description of the board meeting at which he ceased to be an executive director:

I arrived back in the boardroom and sat down. Marcus [Sieff, venerable chairman of Newspaper Publishing plc, the parent company of the two papers] had the air of a man brought in to settle a dispute which he did not really want to understand. He said that there had been a consensus that I should be asked to stay as a [non-executive] director, but there were conditions. In the first place, the arrangement would last for a year, and would be renewed only if the board and I wished it to be. I would get no emoluments (the annual fee for a non-executive director was £12,000) since I had received a year's salary on termination of my contract. So long as I remained as a non-executive director I could not write for any other newspapers, but if I wrote for the Independent or the Independent on Sunday I would not be paid. Finally, I would not be released from my undertaking not to sell any shares before March 31st 1992. That was it.

I was getting the impression that some members of the board were not deperately keen that I should become a non-executive director. Andreas [Whittam Smith, editor of the Independent and chief executive of Newspaper Publishing] was sitting to Marcus's right looking red-faced and ruminative. I imagined him at the board meeting, allowing its sillier members to build up this list of conditions, saying nothing when a word from him would have brought an end to all this foolishness.

"Well, thank you Marcus," I said. "Can I think about it for a day or two? I hadn't expected any conditions and I will need to think about them. Some of them don't matter, but I might want to write for other newspapers, and if Christopher Barton was allowed to sell his shares when he ceased being an executive director I don't see why I shouldn't be. Andreas, you said that you would recommend that I should be able to sell my shares."

"Yes," said Andreas, "but the mood of the meeting was that in the circumstances it would be better not to alter that undertaking."

"I see. Well, I would like a few days, if I may."

"Of course, take as long as you want," said Marcus generously. "I hope it will all work out."

As I walked down the stairs it occured to me that there was one condition that they had not thought of. They had not said I could not write a book.

From Paper Dreams (1993), the memoir that Glover's former colleagues failed to stop him writing. By this point in the penultimate chaper they would probably have regretted the omission. Paper Dreams is an entertaining book, vivid and witty and languidly readable, but is also an act of vengeance, chiefly against Whittam Smith, and a little too openly vengeful to be effective. The era it describes - when a newspaper could be an exciting start-up business capable of attracting £200m in City capital, and when the Independent could feel disappointed at selling a mere 300,000 - seems almost more remote than that in older Fleet Street memoirs.

"Stuff endures"

One of the books that has most stuck in my head in the past year is Ruth Belville: the Greenwich Time Lady, by David Rooney. It's a biography, charming but stretched at less than 200 pages, of a woman famous for one thing. And it's a useful parable for anyone who finds themself in a rapidly, scarily changing industry (hi, fellow journalists!).

Ruth Belville inherited from her mother the business of going once a week to the observatory at Greenwich, having a fine 18th-century pocket watch set to the precise astronomically determined time, and touring the jewellers and watchmakers of London selling them time-checks. Her mother had taken on the task when she was widowed, in the 1850s; Ruth took her place from 1892.

By 1908, when she was the subject of a flurry of press interest, Ruth Belville already seemed an anachronistic curiosity. She should, everyone assumed, have been replaced by modern, telegraph-based electronic synchronisation. But that was expensive, and of variable reliability. Miss Belville, by contrast, charged very reasonably, and always turned up. Her market niche still existed.

The surprise is that Belville continued to make her rounds until 1940, well into the age of the radio and the speaking clock, supported by tradition-minded jewellers. David Rooney draws from this the moral I have taken as the title of my post. The past is still with us, just unevenly distributed, and for the best of reasons. "Stuff endures" - Rooney's nice phrase - because of the inertial power of human affection, and because arrangements can continue to yield rewards even if their original rationale has disappeared.

I have come to suspect that my own job, as a subeditor, is another example of the phenomenon. Subediting - the cutting, polishing and headlining of journalistic text as a separate job - was a natural corollary of hot-metal publishing, in which it was an essential gearing mechanism between reporters and the intricate, inflexible machinery their work drove. Ever since hot metal went, managers and consultants have sought to abolish subs; and yet subs have endured. They have been too useful and too well-established to be easily dispensed with. Those final corrections, that last touch of polish on the writing, all that minute coordination of detail and timing - it's hard to suddenly do without.

Which might give me new hope for my career, except for the fact that stuff doesn't endure for ever. We can't know whether it's 1908 or 1940. But it feels increasingly like 1940. That's what haunts me about Ruth Belville.

The second lump of sugar

In our view, the effect of every policy must first be regarded from the standpoint of the workers of the Nation, and of the poorest and most helpless among them. The charwoman who lives in St Giles', the seamstress who is sweated in Whitechapel, the labourer who stands begging for work outside the docckyard gates in St George's-in-the-East ... The policy which annexes even an Empire, wins an immortal battle, raises this man or that to the Premiership, or sweeps the board at a general election, shall appear to us infamous, not glorious - evil, not good - a thing to weep over, not to acclaim, if it does nothing towards making the lives of these people brighter and happier. On the other hand, the policy will appear to us worthy of everlasting thanks, and of ineffaceable glory, that does no more than enable the charwoman to put two pieces of sugar in her cup instead of one, and that adds one farthing a day to the wage of the seamstress or labourer.

That is TP O'Connor, writing in the leader column of the first number of The Star, his popular London evening paper, in 1888. You can find it quoted in Matthew Engel's Tickle the Public, or wherever learned British journalists grow teary about their trade. I came across it again in The Last Chronicle of Bouverie Street, a 1963 book about the death in 1960 of the News Chronicle newspaper, and incidentally of the Star. While I knew some of the details of the Chronicle's demise - others were shocking; I may blog about them later - the Star's story came as more of a surprise.

At the time of its death, when it was rolled into the London Evening News for no more than the cost of its pension obligations and week-a-year redundancy payments to its staff, the Star had a circulation - and remember this was a London-only title - of about 700,000. In other words, it was selling 200,000 more copies daily than The London Paper now manages to give away. But in 1960, that was only enough to make it the second-best-selling evening paper in Britain. And it had been losing money consistently since 1956. The poorest and most helpless, while numerous enough to make for a substantial readership, were not a demographic attractive to advertisers.

The city and the country's biggest evening paper, it should be noted, was not the London Evening Standard, eventual sole survivor of this three-way fight, but the title into which the Star was merged, the Evening News. The Standard won out not because of sales but because it attracted the most affluent, advertising-friendly readers. In the end, raw numbers are not enough. That might be considered a parable for the age of the unique-user count.

The other thought the story brings to mind is prompted by O'Connor's leader - as a good a manifesto for intelligent populist journalism as anyone could hope for. Here's the thing. If the conventional media were swept away tomorrow, expert coverage and scandalmongering-shading-into-muckracking would probably continue without much interruption. There are bloggers and others for all of that. What it might take a while to rebuild is any organisation with a wide enough reportorial reach, and a deep enough attachment to a wide enough public, to keep an eye on that second lump of sugar.

Skyline questions

Those who complain that the scale of the Westminster skyline has been outraged by the high-rise interlopers ignore the fact that cold measurements or even hotly angry ones are not everything - not necessarily anything much. What could dwarf that marvellous monster the Victoria tower, but something of its own kind?

When Barry reared his Neo-Gothic palace against the Abbey, the traditional ruler of the Westminster skies for so many centuries, that was true audacity. Both survive as mighty presences, the real abbey and that newer Nightmare Abbey of genius, ruling the scene unmoved by the lofty impotent giants surrounding it. Nothing much counts for much, or intrudes much. The Festival Hall complex, so alluring by night, fades by day into a range of concrete barns: almost a modern agricultural aspect, a Harvest Festival Hall. Next to it the vast inert face of the Shell building expresses total absence. But Wren's surviving churches, however small, refuse to be extinguished. They ignore monsters; they spike the scene like exlamation marks, commanding attention. And wherever you happen to be sailing or driving or walking, whether you are as near as Southwark or as far as Greenwich, St Paul's pops up all over the skyline like a floating bubble nobody can burst. If it had been anchored in a vista, as its creator intended, that dome would never have had the same capricious and buoyant appeal.

- Norman Shrapnel, A View of the Thames

This is 1977, and Norman Shrapnel assumes his readers will be "on the side of sensible planning", "the most careful and tenacious of co-ordinated schemes". The world that he is gently writing against was already disappearing, but he isn't to know that.

In 2007, those bubblings-up of St Paul's are "protected vistas" - we need planning to protect the appearance of serendipity. I'm not sure what the moral is, except that conventional wisdom is more fluid than it can sometimes seem. We go on making mistakes, but not always the same ones.

[A view of the Thames, by Norman Shrapnel, London, 1977. Late-career ruminations by a former parliamentary sketchwriter of the Guardian, in a lovely version of the paper's old C.E Montague-derived heightened colloquial style. Less deep-thinking than the creaminess of the prose would suggest, but it gives a nice picture of the docklands between death and redevelopment, and an engaging selection of the river's urban myths. The picture, incidentally, is the City seen from the ramp down to the debating chamber in City Hall; the pre-20th-century element seems pretty effectively expunged from that particular vista.]

Worlds lost and found

The reason this blog has been dead again, I would like to pretend, is that I've been reading The History of The Times 1785-1841, and had vague things to say about it that seemed to require finishing it first, even though the system of cross-referencing in the text suggests that no one was ever meant to read it through. And it was heavy, and took up my book-carrying space, and got in the way of anything else. But now I'm free. Ha! And I can put over my crackpot theory about London in the late 18th Century as a model of our future media. Your turn to suffer now.

The first thing to say about The History of The Times 1785-1841 is that it's a monument to The Times in 1935, when it was "written, printed and published at the office of The Times, Printing House Square". It's anonymous and authoritative-sounding, handed down like the most elevated class of leading article. It's tremendously dignified in appearance, displaying the then-really-new Times New Roman to lapidary effect. At the same time, it's a gallery of show-off presswork, stuffed with tipped-in portraits and actual-size fold-out reproductions of documents leaked to the editor. Imagine the world's starchiest pop-up book. And it issues from an office that had come to see itself as eternal: scraps against long-forgotten gossip sheets (the True Sun, anyone? The World?) are covered with warm partisanship for the home side.

The second and bigger thing is that it argues, to this ignoramus convincingly, that all this imperturbable, ultraprofessional smugness, along with most of the other qualities that bloggers now denominate "mainstream media", descend from two men: John Walter II and Thomas Barnes.

Walter inherited from his father (John Walter I, oddly enough) a paper that was first meant to demonstrate a printing gimmick, and continued because it continued. The tax regime on newspapers was then, The Times argues, designed to stop you operating a mass-circulation daily, or any daily at all without accepting bribes. Paper was stamped and taxed. Advertising was stamped and taxed. Payments from political operators, and the "suppression" and "contradiction" fees journalists could extract by public blackmail, were available on relatively advantageous terms. Walter II stepped steadily out of these customary practices, and then bought the first steam-powered presses, which allowed him to produce enough papers quickly and cheaply for the bribeless office to pay.

An obviously bribe-free paper, among obviously bribed ones, is a powerful thing. It became a shockingly powerful one in the control of Thomas Barnes, its first proper editor, a crony of radical poets who became for thirty-odd years a Times-only man. He built up the reporting staff, fighting the Post Office to free his foreign correspondence, cultivating sources all over Britain, and extracting tip-offs from the great. He used all this to present a front of omniscience and infallibility. He took anonymity as far as he could. The first time his name appeared in his paper was a death notice:

On the 7th inst., at his house in Soho-square, Thomas Barnes, Esq., in the 56th year of his age.

And his paper's defensive approach to the apology makes today's Fleet Street look craven. We know the names of his Parliamentary staff because when the Irish leader Daniel O'Connell accused them of misquoting him, they published a signed letter in the paper declaring they would not report another word of his until he had apologised for the slur on their honour.

His opinion-writing was louder and ruder than today's Times would contemplate. One reform-era leader responds to a particularly outrageous suggestion (another slur on the honour of the paper) by a quarter-inch of blank space, and then:

We leave a space vacant, as the author of Tristram Shandy says, "for the reader to swear in, any oath he is accustomed to," only hoping it is an innocent one.

The leaders are composed on a principle of finding out what public opinion is - among the small middle-class then allowed to be the public - and then leading it by advocating a popular position as forcefully as possible. The readers of today's tabloids might recognise the approach, and the ruthless willingness to switch sides.

And that's the most important tradition, right there. Thomas Barnes shafted powerful sources. He would take information and even opinion steers from the likes of Henry Brougham - but when he concluded that Brougham could no longer carry the credit of his readers, he said so plainly. He had the power to get away with it.

What worries me most about the decline of the press, apart from the chance that I will have to find a proper job, is that soon we will have no journalists powerful enough to fuck over the influential; and that control of information is not going out to a more democratic world of volunteers and citizen investigators - great as they often are at mining data already in the public domain - but back to its previous owners, the great and the good and their small vindictive functionaries. Even Jeff Jarvis occasionally has such thoughts, on his way to something more uplifting.

Brougham had a press agent called Le Marchant. He doesn't make the index of The History of The Times. But until the Great Shafting, he is as much cited as a determinant of what appears in The Times as anyone apart from Barnes. His time is returning.

How terribly British

"The Northern Light was one of the most militant strike bulletins, and its distributors were often arrested. A touch of generosity, which would have been unthinkable in most countries, entered into relations between police and strikers here in Durham. When Stephenson [the editor] was fined £2 with the option of fourteen days' imprisonment, he chose to go to prison, but asked the police not to call at his home on the day he was due to go inside. They agreed, and he met them at the railway station. When Stephenson asked how they knew that he would keep his word, the constable was surprised. 'Funny thing, nobody ever thought of that'." -- The General Strike, Julian Symons.

Even more British was the end of the strike: the anway reluctant TUC leaders appear to have taken vague reassurances of goodwill from Baldwin as a promise of no reprisals. They awoke to employers imposing wage cuts and legislation that would broadly have satisfied Thatcher. If Baldwin had implied -- stopping scrupulously short of saying -- that he would meet you at the railway station, you would have needed police around his house at once.

[The General Strike, by Julian Symons (Cresset Press, 1957). Doubtless completely superseded account of great trade-union disaster; lots of great narrative colour, but the overall effect is more GCSE history than Strange Death of Liberal England.]

CV of the week

"Sir Henry Woods, KCVO, Lt RN; late Admiral and Pasha in the Imperial Ottoman Naval Service; Grand Cordon of the Medijeh and Osmanieh; Knight Commander of the Saxe-Coburg Order; Aide-de-Camp for some years to the late Sultan, Abdul Hamid" -- self-description of an 1870s Turkish correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, from the title page of his autobiography, Spunyarn; quoted in Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper, by David Ayerst.

To judge by what Ayerst says, much of the rest of Spunyarn consists of boasting about the lies Woods told various newspapers. Still, having government officials deceive your readers directly was probably cheaper than embedding.

[Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper, by David Ayerst (Collins, 1971). Read as part of this blog's continued stalking of C.E. Montague (last episode here), this turns out nonetheless to be more interesting than your average institutional biography -- and a hell of a lot more so than Changing Faces, the post-1956 follow-up volume. Is aided by fifty years of C.P. Scott, and an astonishing photograph of the crowds at his funeral procession in Manchester.]

Form burial

"Beginning on the second day, whenever a patient appeared to be moribund, a piece of paper with his name on it was fastened to his clothing. The corpse detail carried the bodies outside, placed them on pyres of wood from ruined houses, burned them, put some of the ashes in envelopes intended for exposed X-ray plates, marked the envelopes with the names of the deceased, and piled them, neatly and respectfully, in stacks in the main office. In a few days, the envelopes filled one whole side of the impromptu shrine" -- John Hersey, Hiroshima.

The second day is the second day after the bomb. If you look at the lines immediately above, this passage is about a reassertion of respectability: "Disposal of the dead," the line goes, "by decent ceremony and enshrinement, is a greater moral responsibility to the Japanese than adequate care of the living." It seems chilling in a way that set-up doesn't point to, however.

[Hiroshima, by John Hersey (Penguin, 1946). I read the Mary McCarthy attack on this thing (quoted somewhere downpage here; it's in this book) long before I read the thing itself. The journalistic stiff-neckedness she twits him for is real, but proves in some way a strength: if you aren't Dante, better not to try to interview the dead.]

Authenticity?

"Julia Reed saw it as one of her functions to provide me with authentic American experiences. On one memorable evening in New York she arrived at my apartment in a chauffeur-driven limousine with a bottle of whiskey, three tumblers, and her voluptuous schoolfriend from South Carolina, Courtney Cowart, a fun-loving Anglican theologian. The limousine delivered us to the Radio City Music Hall for a concert by Ray Charles." - Alexander Chancellor, Some Times in America

Ah, those fun-loving Anglican theologians. So quintessentially American.

[Some Times in America, by Alexander Chancellor, Bloomsbury, 1999. Distinguished former Spectator editor spends enjoyable time out of his depth on the New Yorker. A thicket of dropped names.]

Squelch. "How pleasing that such profound prattle should inevitably find its way into print! 'Not precisely a symphony in white... for there is a yellowish dress.. brown hair, etc... another with reddish hair... and of course there is the flesh colour of the complexions.'
"Bon Dieu! did this wise person expect white hair and chalked faces? And does he then, in his astounding consequence, believe that a symphony in F contains no other note, but shall be a continued repetition of F, F, F? ...Fool!" - James McNeill Whistler, in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, responding to a review of his painting "Symphony in White No. III" in the Saturday Review.
[The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, by James McNeill Whistler, Heinemann, 1890. Consists mostly of cuttings from Whistler's critics, followed by the slashings he sent in response. Lots of pettiness, lots of random French phrases, lots of English that doesn't make actual sense (or at least not now), but enough venom and penetration to remain addictive.]

Max Beerbohm considered as a yoof columnist. "Shortly after Max's success with his Works, Harmsworth put at his disposal a column in the Daily Mail. Max came on board in December 1896 and had carte blanche to write about anything he wished - fire brigades, sign-boards, knighthoods. The pieces all had the kind of smart-alecky hook Harmsworth liked. 'What I want ever morning in the paper,' Harmsworth said, 'is something new and strange.'" - N. John Hall, Max Beerbohm: A kind of a life.
To translate: Beerbohm was hired by the first modern British newspaper baron as a means of exploiting the decadence craze. He was chosen to write look-at-me comment on subjects which he was unqualified to discuss, except as a representative of a certain kind of young person. This should be sounding familiar. It may be of comfort to Bidisha, Johann Hari et al that he went on to be one of the most admired personal essayists in English.
[Max Beerbohm: A kind of a life, by N. John Hall, Yale 2002. Written in a glaringly first-person style as a tribute to its subject, and an excellent demonstation of how hard that style is to master.]

What it is to be well-connected. "Antonio Armellini, Paddy Ashdown, Tony Benn, Lord Biffen (formerly John Biffen), Tony Blair, Sir Leon Brittan, Gordon Brown, Charles Clarke, Kenneth Clarke, Lord Cockfield, Robin Cook, Tam Dalyell, Jacques Delors, Andrew Duff, Lord Garel-Jones (formerly Tristan Garel-Jones), Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar (formerly Ian Gilmour), Lord Hattersley (formerly Roy Hattersley), Lord Healey (formerly Denis Healey), Sir Nicholas Henderson, Michael Heseltine, Lord Howe of Aberavon (formerly Geoffrey Howe), Lord Hurd (formerly Douglas Hurd), Lord Jenkins of Hillhead (formerly Roy Jenkins), Sir John Kerr, Neil Kinnock, Helmut Kohl, Norman Lamont, Ruud Lubbers, John Major, Peter Mandelson, Geoffrey Martin, Denis McShane, Sir Christopher Meyer, Lord Owen (formerly David Owen), Chris Patten, Michael Portillo, Sir Charles Powell, Giles Radice, Lord Renwick of Clifton (formerly Robin Renwick), Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Lord Ryder of Wensum (formerly Richard Ryder), Robert Schaetzel, Richard Shepherd, Lord Shore of Stepney (formerly Peter Shore), Lady Thatcher (formerly Margaret Thatcher), Sir Roger Tomkys, Lord Tugendhat, William Waldegrave, Karel Vam Miert, Lode Willems and Robert Worcester" -- 'Public figures' section of the Acknowledgements in Hugo Young's This Blessed Plot.
[This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair, by Hugo Young, Macmillan, 1998. Not finished yet, so judgment will be reserved until a (possibly much) later quotation.]

Max Hastings has an endearing love of embarrassment, even if his. To judge by Editor, his memoir of running the Daily Telegraph, he also has a favourite way of describing it.
"Mrs Thatcher, Bernard Ingham and I sat down to a frosty and attenuated tete-a-tete" (p60); "Our dinner table at the Relai was liberally coated with frost" (p67); "The occasion ended, as it began, with several inches of ice on the table" (p110. Shall we stop now?).
Things do become a little smugger as he settles into the job, but there is still scarcely a dining table mentioned that couldn't double as a skating rink.
[Editor, by Max Hastings, Macmillan, 2002. Also interesting in what it refuses to talk about.]