Black Friday

Friday the 13th of July, 1984: All the FoCs of the Mirror Group’s sixty-odd chapels were summoned to a four o’clock meeting with the new proprietor in the Rotunda, the Mirror’s circular dining room at Holborn Circus. They represented the National Graphical Association’s powerful and militant skilled printers and compositors, SOGAT ’82’s clerical and machine-room workers and advertising and circulation representatives, the NUJ’s journalists in London, Manchester, and Glasgow, the electricians, engineers, catering staff, security, heating engineers, builders, plumbers, carpenters, messengers, nurses, painters, drivers, cleaners, and all the other ancillary staff required to produce newspapers 361 days of the year.
By four-twenty they were debating among themselves what sort of insult a twenty-minute delay represented. Consensus favoured waiting until half-past four before returning to the more important job of producing newspapers: at four-twenty-two a mountain of a man ambled in and picked up a microphone which he plainly did not need.
‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,’ he boomed. ‘My name’s Robert Maxwell, and I own this company…
Although he was about to protest, as he did frequently that day, that ‘this is not an ego trip’, Maxwell, clearly, was on a supreme high. His introduction, especially with handmike in one hand and large Havana cigar in the other, was fairly reminiscent of ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name’s Frank Sinatra and it’s great to be back in London.’ If he expected applause he was disappointed: nobody clapped. In any case, he was not telling us anything we did not know.
What we didn’t know, and what certainly most of those present did not grasp, was how much this meeting warned of the shape of things to come.
Both journalists’ and printers’ chapels had held post-midnight meetings at which suggestions that the paper be stopped had been considered, but they had decided to continue and produce the last edition. Maxwell said he was pleased that we had ‘shown good sense’ by producing a paper that morning. If we hadn’t printed, he said, we would have closed – ‘and never again reopened’. He wanted the newspaper to work, he said; it was his intention to produce newspapers, but if the staff stopped him, then so be it: it was not as if he needed the money.
It was a strange-sounding threat from someone who had just bought the newspaper he’d been hoping for half his life to buy.
We didn’t know what, if anything, to make of it. It sounded like a brash, bullying and probably empty posture. But it was nothing of the kind; we were to hear the same threat, and suffer from it, several times over the coming eighteen months.
The main board, he said, would be very much as before, with one exception. He had met all the directors and asked all, except one, to stay. He didn’t mention Clive Thornton by name, but he was the only one not sitting behind the new owner. Maxwell reeled off all the names: Douglas Long, chief executive; Tony Miles, chairman and editorial director; Lawrence Guest, finance ; Roger Eastoe, advertising; Roy Woolliscroft, manpower; Jack Ferguson, production ; Tony Boram, editorial administration ; the three editors – Mike Molloy (Daily Mirror), Bob Edwards (Sunday Mirror) and Richard Stott (Sunday People). He momentarily forgot the name of Roger Bowes, the deputy chief executive, referring to him with feigned familiarity as ‘Roger... er... the dodger’.
Events were to show that he could have forgotten more names. By the end of the month Miles and Long had left ‘by mutual agreement’; Boram, whose early retirement had already been planned, also left; Wooliscroft retired and remained for a short time as a ‘consultant’; Bowes went back to his old trade in an advertising agency and the following year joined the Express Group, briefly, as its chief executive.
Maxwell spoke, without notes, for perhaps half an hour. It was a great honour, he knew, to own the Mirror titles, the achievement of one of his biggest ambitions. He was going to restore the Daily Mirror to its rightful place at the top of the popular newspaper market and was starting immediately by reducing the cover price by a penny to restore price parity with the paper’s main rival, the Sun. Before long, he’d be printing the Mirror titles in colour. He was going to launch a new and much-needed evening newspaper for London in September (at a Press conference later that day he gave the launch date as September 15, but when a reporter pointed out that Saturday was an odd start-day for an evening paper, he changed it quickly to September 17 – the first inkling we had that the plans were not totally thought-out).
Everybody knew that the biggest problem in national newspapers was overmanning, said Maxwell, and the Mirror’s manning was ridiculous even by Fleet Street standards. But there would be no compulsory redundancy; staffing could be reduced painlessly by natural wastage – retirement, and people leaving voluntarily for other jobs. Most unions had promised Thornton that they would consider non-automatic replacement in other than key jobs, and Maxwell would expect similar agreements. Other than that, despite everything that had happened in the past, there were no ‘hit lists’; everybody in a job with MGN would remain in employment.
Maxwell was, he assured us, a total supporter of the principle of the closed shop, and these would continue throughout the company. All union agreements would be upheld by him, provided they were adhered to by the chapels. This was to mean no disruption of production and no industrial action other than through established procedures. It meant the end to ‘wildcat’ strikes, but sounded otherwise unoppressive.
‘I believe in negotiation,’ he said. ‘I like negotiating. I consider myself a tough negotiator and I think that most things can be resolved in that way. If the procedures don’t work, if we get to the end of the line and you have to strike, that’s all right with me. Eventually the strike will end and we will see who was right, but we will resume work with no hard feelings on either side – because we will have followed procedures.’
There would be union consultation and involvement in everything, at all levels, including representation on the working party for the new evening paper. But confidentiality was to be the watchword; if there were any leaks, ‘and this building leaks like a fucking sieve’, the union representatives would be sacked.
There were two problems here. First was the expletive before the word sieve and several FoCs, possibly grateful to get a chance of self-expression, complained noisily, as if to suggest that bad language was rare in the newspaper business. Maxwell apologised and said that, anyway, the building leaked like a bloody sieve. The second issue came when questions from the floor were invited. Introducing myself as convenor of all the Mirror Group journalists, I said that if I had heard him correctly, and that if he had meant what he said, he would get no union representatives on his working parties, nor on anything else; it wasn’t the unions that leaked, I said, but the management and the board. Another apology: he hadn’t meant it quite like that; nobody would be sacked, but the working party would be disbanded, so everybody would suffer if there were leaks.
David Thompson, FoC of the Daily Mirror NUJ in London, asked what would happen to the independence of editors, since Maxwell had said that he was in total control of reshaping the papers and, by inference, of the editorial content. Maxwell’s reaction was that this question was an insult; what did we think his editors, Mike Molloy, Bob Edwards and Richard Stott, would say if he asked them to print anything they didn’t want to print? Having identified me as a journalist, he gesticulated in my direction as he asked this rhetorical question. Almost certainly, he was not looking for an answer, but I said they’d probably say yes; otherwise they’d have to stop being editor: in either case the result would be the same. Maxwell grinned. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘So I’ll guarantee now that I’ll never ask them to do anything they wouldn’t want to.’
Maxwell was an enormous man, a giant, a great bear, with a voice like Bovril. At my first meeting with Clive Thornton I had found myself obsessed by the fact that he had only one leg; with Maxwell my chief awareness was, strangely, of his Czech origins. I was listening to his voice, his sentence structure, trying to identify the alien nuances, but there were none. Rather, his vocabulary was amazing in its range, his accent impeccable. Perhaps the whole package was so perfect that he could only be a foreigner. In fact one of the few outward signs of Maxwell’s background, I’d discover later, was his tendency to wear his shirt buttoned up to the neck, without a tie, when off-duty – a strangely un-English but very mitteleuropaisch fashion (another, perhaps harking back to his childhood poverty, was to eat quickly – and not necessarily from his own plate – without using cutlery.)
What did strike me was his resemblance to Orson Welles: the voice, the size, the appearance, the impressive personality. What didn’t strike home immediately was that the meeting was not actually with Welles, but with that actor-director’s most famous creation – Citizen Kane.
He even laughed like C. F. Kane, especially at a printer’s comment about the number of times he’d handed Maxwell his matches to relight his frequently-extinguished cigar: ‘I don’t know, Mr Maxwell, you’ve told us your plans, and how rich you are… but sitting here all we see is you bumming a light all the time.’
The similarities between Maxwell and Kane – modelled on America’s most famous and eccentric newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst – were many, although some took longer than others to emerge.
Kane styled himself ‘Publisher’; so did Maxwell, after toying with ‘Chairman’, ‘Chief Executive’, and even ‘Editor-in-Chief’ – or possibly all three titles. (Actually, for me, this was the clue to Kane-ism; every newspaper except the Mirror had had a ‘proprietor’ – but who had ever heard of a newspaper ‘publisher’? Hell’s bells, it was Charles Foster Kane!)
Kane was a ‘Democrat’, Maxwell was former Labour MP for Buckingham, although they both were variously described as ‘Communist’ or ‘Fascist’ by their enemies.
Kane printed his ‘declaration of principles’ on Page One of his ‘New York Inquirer’: ‘I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings.’ Maxwell published his – Forward With Britain – on Page One of his first Daily Mirror.
Kane was ‘always trying to prove that he was an honest man’… In response to a question from one FoC – that Maxwell had been quoted as saying that he was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, and had once voted for her, ‘so how can you expect us to believe you when you say you’re a Socialist ?’ – Maxwell said that he had never voted anything but Labour since the War. He had said that Margaret Thatcher was the best Prime Minister we had, no more than that, but thought that some of her policies were in the best interests of Britain.
‘But I do not tell lies’, he said. ‘I never tell lies. I might change my mind sometimes, but I have never told a lie. If anybody can provide proof that I have lied about anything, I’ll promise here and now to give that man a million pounds.’ There were no takers.
Like Kane, Maxwell considered himself ‘more newsworthy than the names in his own headlines’. And in some respects this belief was substantiated by the fact that rival newspapers often rated him or his business dealings as Page One material.
They both saw themselves, too, as ambassadors of their country. Kane returned from a European visit on the 30s having ‘talked with the responsible leaders’ and declared to a Press conference that ‘There’ll be no war’ (although this sounded like a lift from the life of Beaverbrook, rather than of Hearst). Months later, when talking to Ethiopia’s leaders about the delay in world reaction to that country’s famine, Maxwell told them: ‘I speak only for the people of Britain.’
It was all there, even to the monogrammed shirts in which they each prowled the editorial floors in the early hours of the morning.
Like Kane, he was to start writing for his own publications. Maxwell resurrected an old, defunct, house-name for his articles. Charles Wilberforce was a pen-name Hugh Cudlipp had used for ‘anonymous’ articles written while editorial director for the Daily Mirror and the six-million circulation Sunday Mirror – in the days when it was called the Sunday Pictorial.
Both men even stuck their fingers in their mouths and whistled to attract the attention of their employees...
And both wanted to be loved.
At the end of the FoCs’ meeting, Maxwell walked over to me as I was leaving. He put a big arm around my shoulder and, although perhaps three inches shorter than I am, he appeared to dwarf me.
‘How do you think I went down?’
‘Considering how much hostility there was towards you when you came in, I think you went very well.’
‘It’s going to work, you know.’
‘It had better. I’ve got eight hundred journalists’ mortgages to worry about...’
Maxwell, I knew, had served for a time with British Intelligence during the War. His business intelligence service, I suggested, had done well with the timing and background information for his purchase of MGN.
‘Intelligence service? I didn’t need one. Not the way this company leaks information. But it appalled Clive Thornton.’
‘Appalled him?’ I said. ‘It totally screwed him.’
‘Yes. That’s what Clive told me this morning.’
‘Oh, it’s Bob and Clive now is it?’
‘Well, I called him Clive. I don’t think he called me anything. But everybody calls me Bob.’
‘Be that as it may, Mr Maxwell, everybody liked Clive.’ That was a slight exaggeration.
‘You’ll get to like me, too. You’ll see.’
‘What I actually see, Mr Maxwell, is that it is Friday the 13th. I am trying to decide whether or not I am superstitious.’
‘Are you? I am. Thirteen is my lucky number. That’s why I waited until just after midnight, last night, before concluding the deal with Reeds.’
Tom Harrison, convenor of the NGA, stopped with his team on the way out of the Rotunda. Maxwell still had his hand on my shoulder. ‘You ok, Revel? Do you want me to keep a couple of the lads back, for protection?’
I remember reporting back on the FoCs’ first meeting with the new owner, and describing Robert Maxwell as ‘probably the most impressive man I’ve ever met’.
Someone asked: ‘But do you like him?’
I said I didn’t know, but he was the best proprietor we had.
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