PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH

 

People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather

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Heads above the clouds

Back in the sixties - or was it the seventies? - I stood with a large group of people at a Buddhist centre in the Lake District and listened to Sir George Trevelyan, (1906-1996), regarded by many as the grandfather of the movement for spiritual regeneration in Britain. The words were inspired. He saw the regeneration he called for blossoming all around him. And he conjured up an image that has stayed with me since of a vast sea of white cloud, with people's heads popping up here and there - the enlightened ones; while, in the cloud, many others were, in a sense, germinating. We all felt uplifted, although he was presumptious in his forecast, given the experiences of the intervening years. And I was reminded of him by the present state of newspapers.

They appear to be a receding tide. The young are restless,computer-orientated, and the plop of a newspaper through the letterbox is not an event of the day but an incident too casual to care about, if it happens at all. So circulations are in decline and the industry frantically seeks a solution. Free discs are in vogue, together with promotions offering money, cheap meals, whatever. And few people, it seems, ever get close to content.
Of course there is a problem and it lies in the internet, where people can write something one minute and see it on the web within seconds.

Something turned out by machine, then transported by rail, air or road is at a severe disadvantage.The main daily and Sunday papers were selling an average of 31 million copies 10 years ago. In August of this year, that figure had sunk to 22 million. In America, circulation at 814 of the nation's largest daily newspapers declined 1.9 percent over the six months ended March 31 compared with the same period last year. France discovered that papers with web sites held their circulations better than those without.

I would be a genius if I could give a complete answer, or even half an answer to this. But it does appear that proprietors have weakened their products at a time when they should have been strengthened. There is an air of panic.

Evening newspapers cut staffs and editions. Nationals are cutting costs, keeping reporters in instead of sending them out, bolstering management rather than editorial. That, it seems to me, is a defeatist path. The idea of newspapers is that they inform. Evening newspapers before TV were producing editions from mid-day until five o' clock or later, with Stop Press items added in the districts after that.

The days of large news-rooms full of smoke, cigarette stubs and the smell of stale ale are over. Life even for some journalists is now a computer screen and back home on the dot. My journalism was the former and there were those in it who went home for no more than three or four hours' sleep before returning. They drank. As they drank, they talked newspapers. Executives planned ahead. They went to the Press Club after work. And they produced good stuff, too. If they did not produce, they went. It was a hard trade. The drinking was, in part, a structural thing: You had your morning conference, the reporters went out to get their facts and send their stuff by phone later, and there was this gap where production people went to the pub and waited. London executives were at work by ten, and some of them did not leave for home until 12 or 14 hours later, year after year. They entertained each other to lunch and lunches were long.

So be it. That is how the day was organised. But it was always a knife-edge trade. "Who shopped me?" cried an angry pictures executive in London when the editor told him he had not had a day off for weeks and that he had better exit for a rest.

I am not convinced that today's newspapers have any faith in themselves. Television overwhelmed them and that medium is poor at covering stories. It looks very fine - someone standing outside a Ministry answering questions from the studio; or treading through ruins in a bombed city - but it is a flimsy facade. The reality, not just event but primary cause, is what newspaper reporters should be seeking if they are worth the pay they say they require, but don't get. They are using phones. They need to use eyes and ears to do the job properly. The best of their work need not be ephemeral.

I do not claim any great skill either in reporting or observation.. But when a President of the Board of Trade long ago visited Manchester to talk about the cotton industry, he sat at a table with his accolytes and I noticed that he had a hole in his sock. It made a very nice illustration for his words because there were holes in his arguments. We took a picture of a row of feet. You can't see holes in socks from a phone.

Journalists are part of a distinguished tradition: Plato on the death of Socrates, Josephus on the siege of Jerusalem, Edward Grim on the murder of Thomas Becket, Oliver Cromwell writing to his brother in law after the battle of Marston Moor, Pepys writing about the great fire of London, Holwell writing on the Black Hole of Calcutta, Walpole writing on the burial of George 11 - all these were reporters, though they would have other descriptions; the ancestral flag-bearers of good journalism. The tides of history belong to these people for they reflected them on paper for all time.

Here - chosen at random - is Henry G Wales writing of the execution of Mata Hari in 1917:

"Mata Hari is dead. She was shot as a spy by a firing squad of Zouaves at the Vincennes barracks. She was not bound and she was not blindfolded. She stood gazing steadfastly at her executioners, when the priest, the nuns and her lawyer stepped away from her. A sharp, crackling command the file of 12 men assumed rigid positions at attention. Another command and their rifles were at their shoulders, each man gazed down his barrel at the breast of the woman target. She did not move a muscle... (Then the shots.) Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up, always, and without the slightest change of expression. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backwards, bending at the waists, with her legs doubled up beneath her. She lay prone, motionless, her face towards the sky. Mata Hari was surely dead."

Eyes and ears. Above all, eyes.

Stalingrad by Steinbeck, Trafalgar Square by Kingsley Martin, a stoning to death at Jeddah observed by Rene Macoll, the Vietnam war by James Cameron, the fall of President Marcos by James Fenton... These were the people whose heads were above the clouds as reporters and whose words live through what they saw..

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This is the hierarchy; this is the tradition, this is the pride that came before mice emerged from the woodwork with Biros and lines of figures. True journalism was, for proprietors, about power and influence rather than adding machines.

Accountants have dismembered an honourable thing. The public is vaguely aware of what it is getting, but can hardly be aware of what it is missing. Of course, the new proprietors, with their greater emphasis on money, would be mad not to make a profit. The argument here is about how that profit should be made. They have lauded television in their newspapers as if it were a friend, not a rival. They have shed professional standards and have been busy staring at figures while readers slipped away. The thing that most counts in a newspaper office is content. Everything else - advertising, accountants, clerks - is in support. Or should be.. Priorities have gone a little awry. Much of the content does not look at all good. It is slipshod. And there are too many young columnists who look as though they have slipped off the top shelf of daddy's life and landed in Harrod's with a notebook in a Gucci bag.

But if you look around, there are new heads above the clouds. And they are the columnists who think a little deeper and work a little harder than others: people whose commitment is to the written word. There is always a public for them. Because there are always sufficient numbers of people who wish to be informed, not titillated, in this world and these columnists will be remembered in print when the television names have vanished without trace.

Simon Jenkins (in The Times or Guardian, worth the price of those products without thr rest), Niall Ferguson, Matthew d'Ancona in the Telegraph... I could list many observers who are writing well, in depth, and at variance with that clique in journalism that holds trivia, half-hearted newsgathering, cutting the number of editions and general cost-cutting to be the way forward.

Heads above the clouds! How many, in George Trevelyan's terms, are just below the surface ready to take on the crusade? Not enough, I fear.

Newspapers attract erratic proprietors. Northcliffe once phoned the office to declare, "They say I am mad. Send your best reporter." Beaverbrook was mean, ebullient, outrageous, and always a force beyond reckoning. And so to Maxwell, a seedier man than these, the bouncing Czech, who bought the Daily Mirror, raided their pensions fund for £440m, left 30,000 pensioners in despair, and floated into an uncaring sea alone to die. Mourned by somebody, one supposes, but not by most.

Maxwell's House

Robert Maxwell's life duly unrolled on TV, compressed into an impossible 90 minutes, but not to the point where his principal characteristics were obscured: the bullying of his wife, his children, his colleagues, his business associates. He had a devious mind for creating obscure companies with shifts of money from here to there; he was a conjuror, a juggler, a manipulator, ultimately disgraced and left without respect or honour to be buried in Israel.

I watched the portrayal of all this through the actor David Suchet and was fascinated by what I saw. None of it unexpected - the moods, the Citizen Kane backdrops, the rants, the nonsense of the man - and I was glad to have had no part of him. Suchet managed, for me, the near-impossible: he exuded power, threat, irrationality in the way I had always imagined Maxwell. True or not, those closest to him will decide for themselves.

I came close to him only once, I am glad to say. I had arranged to meet him in London because it was rumoured that he was to buy Manchester United. I had a phone call from his secretary at 7.30 in the morning. He sent his apologies but he was already in conference and would be unable to make it. Perhaps as well.

Magnus Linklater, a journalist I had been more than pleased to work with, became one of his editors. He wrote about that experience in The Times. "... and my last meeting with him (was) after the (London Daily News) paper folded, as we all somehow suspected it would. I had gone to see him, bearing my watertight contract, which he had signed. 'It's been fun, Bob,' I said, 'but now I would like the money you agreed to.' 'Mister,'came the almost inevitable reply, 'if you think I am going to honour your contract, then you don't know me very well.'"

It was all very Citizen Kane, and there is ample evidence that newspaper proprietors as a genre are never short of, at the very least, eccentricity. Henry Luce, of Time magazine, chastised a writer who complained that he did not have a desk for lack of log cabin spirit. A satirical piece in, I think, the New Yorker describing Time contained the words, "Backward ran the sentences till reeled the mind." The descriptions of people were lurid. "Snaggle-toothed and pig faced" was one.

As boss of Life magazine, Luce sent out an edict to all staff - "Let us bend our attentions to the Japanese beetle." And they did. At great expense. Dorothy Parker wrote for the New Yorker and told the editor she was absent from the office because someone else was using the pencil.

A New York man for the Daily Express once described for me a visit by Beaverbrook:

"I was sitting in the office when I got a phone call from London. No. 1 reader arriving. Meet at airport. No, no, I said. I can't. Deadline looming. Busy writing a story you want. Forget story, said London. Meet No. 1 reader." So off he went to the airport, late, having first ordered two large limousines - one to collect the old man, the other to be available round a corner should the luggage exceed the capacity of the first.

Enter Beaverbrook and secretary. New York correspondent missing so that the No. 1 reader was not smoothed through the arrival process. The New York man explained his dilemma of having to write a story and be at the airport. "That," said Beaverbrook, "must have been a very difficult decision for you." Second limousine required...

So the old man went to his hotel and began to send messages about share movements on the exchanges. And our New York man was hunting in the waste paper baskets for old envelopes in which to send the replies - since Beaverbrook would have complained about new envelopes..

The old man invited him to breakfast at his hotel. The New York man began to study the very large menu with great anticipation. From the other side came the small voice, "I always think that at this time of morning, an egg and toast is enough..."

Beaverbrook rolled away and eventually returned for his flight home. He sat hunched at the head of his plane waiting, with impatience, for his secretary. He had bought a copy of Lollita. . Finally she arrived, breathless, and thrust a present into his hands. He brightened. Then darkened once more as he unwrapped his present. It was another copy of Lollita.

Once, he was walking, in the South of France, with several colleagues, all in black suits and homburgs, one very tall and wearing a black eye patch. They were surrounded by people in bright clothing, some in bikinis. "Why," asked Beaverbrook, "is everybody staring at us?"

Beaverbrook managed to form a strong, workable relationship with his editor, Christiansen, though it was never, I imagine, easy going. I was once in the London Express when a phone rang in the editor's office. I had been left to wait there. A middle-rank editorial executive had joined me. We both stared at the phone. Eventually, I said, "Aren't you going to answer it?" "Not bloody likely," he said. "You answer it. Last time I picked up that phone it was the old man." Fear was abundant. When Beaverbrook walked into London office, the footsteps quickened in Manchester.

Once when the general manager, editor and Max Aitken were gathered in conference, Beaverbrook phoned from the south of France. "What's the weather like?" he said. "Snowing," said the general manager, his brow perspiring from the sunlight blazing through the window. "In that case," said Beaverbrook, "I think I will delay my return to London." All three were relieved, that editor told me.

So to Maxwell: He behaved like the others, but whereas they - particularly Northcliffe - had a feeling for newspapers, he appeared to me to lack it. He was all power, and seemed to impede editors around him who had great competence in their line of business. He reminded me of Joe Hyman, who once bossed Viyella. Hyman said he was interested in buying The Spectator. "What would you do with it?" I asked. "I would have a headline - 'Joe Hyman says...' - on Page One." That, I imagine, would have killed off The Spectator in no time. And it sounded a bit like Maxwell.

Journalists go through a long learning process. Proprietors tend to think they understand the business without the training because they know money. Murdoch at least had a go at being a journalist before tycoonery whirled him to his penthouse in the sky. Thomson rode the Underground to work and remained modest. Beaverbrook always paid well for the not-so-obvious reason that it put pressure on other papers.

As for Maxwell. Poor man to rich man, rich man to poor man, lost at sea. What an epitaph! Oh dear.

Geoffrey Mather © 2006