BIG-CITY
JOURNALISM: PART V
It was a lot of fun to be a reporter in London in the
1960s, especially when I was able to choose what I wanted to write about. Occasionally
I fell among the grandees in a number of Commonwealth press organizations. I
remember sitting through one meeting when, I spotted right in front of me Lord
Thomson, the biggest newspaper proprietor in the world, who was still owner of
my first Canadian paper, the Northern
Daily News of Kirkland Lake. I ventured
some kind of semi-radical remark as part of a discussion on something or other,
and the only thing I remember of it was that this dumpy little figure in front
of me slowly turned, and gazed at me through his super-thick spectacles, as if
looking at something from outer space. Then he turned away as if I weren’t even
worth the trouble of looking at. I felt like telling him, “You see, I was worth
more than the $40 a week you paid me!”
In the 1960s
there were major issues of concern to the Commonwealth that I had to deal with
as a reporter. An important one to me was the question of South African
membership of a multi-racial Commonwealth. I felt I had a personal stake in
this argument, because I had an adopted black son, and I still harboured bitter
feelings against South African racism that had developed in the1950s when I
worked alongside a racist South African in Coventry. In fact, my feeling on
this issue went further back to a moment in the 1940s when I covered a Rugby
trial for a proposed visit of a New Zealand All Black team to South Africa, in
which the outstanding player was a young man called Taylor, who was not
eligible to go further in the trials because he was a Maori and therefore not
available for selection. That stuck in my craw at the time, as a disgusting
accommodation with racism, and it was still there in the 1960s, with a vengeance.
I remember Prime Minister Verwoerd arriving
and at an airport press conference smiling benignly upon us as he said that people
didn’t understand the principle of apartheid, which was, in essence,
neighbourliness. Prime Minister Nehru of
India arrived soon after, and when we told him that, he snapped, “I wouldn’t want to be his neighbor.”
I was
surprised when Diefenbaker arrived with an accompanying press corps of
journalists who were almost all hostile towards him. To me, he expressed his
prairie radicalism in forcing the issue against the mealy-mouthed attempts of
the British to smooth everything over. When Verwoerd left he said, “We were
victims of an Afro-Asian-Canadian conspiracy,” and I felt quite proud to be a
Canadian, and that our guy had stuck with the right side.
Having been
brought up in New Zealand and lived in four more Commonwealth countries, I
tended to take these issues quite personally, especially when the British,
realizing they could make more money by concentrating their economy on Europe,
decided to jettison the Commonwealth that had fed them during two world wars,
and had sent tens of thousands of their sons to be slaughtered on foreign
fields in their support. To me, their application to join the European Economic
Community was a classic case of perfidious Albion, writ large.
There were
some notable debates about the EEC, whether to join or not: one of them was at
a Labour Party conference, when Hugh Gaitskell, the party leader, whom I never
liked, made a stirring defence of the Commonwealth contribution: “You may say,”
he said --- in more or less these words --- “well, the world has changed….But what
of Passchendale, Ypres, where thousands of their young men were killed on the
battlefield. Are we just to forget that?”
I found that profoundly moving, to tell the truth.
I tended
perhaps to over-emphasize stories demonstrating British eccentricity. One of
these came with a by-election in the lovely county of Dorset that arose from a
concatenation of eccentricities. First, the sitting member in the House of Commons
since 1941 had been Lord Hinchingbrooke, or to give him his full name,
Alexander Victor Edward Paulet Montagu, who was disqualified from membership of
the Commons in 1962, when his father died and he was elevated to be the Earl of
Sandwich. Old Hinch, as he was usually referred to, was a far-right British Tory
maverick who was impossible to pigeon-hole:
anti-German, pro-Russian, pro-Commonwealth, pro-imperialist, anti-African
nationalism, anti-American, and, of course, a root-and-branch opponent of
Harold Macmillan’s attempt to join the European Economic Community. He was the
sort of politician who, as one British reporter remarked to me, “doesn’t give a
hoot what anybody thinks of him.”
The likeliest candidate to succeed him was a
man called Angus Maude, a former MP, who had become discouraged with Macmillsn’s
leadership a few years before and had gone to Australia to be editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. Perhaps the Aussies didn’t take to his rather
prissy, self-satisfied persona, and he returned to Britain just in time to put
in a claim for the South Dorset seat. Maude expected Hinchingbrooke’s support,
but when Old Hinch learned that a retiring local grandee, Sir Piers Debenham,
an old supporter, was proposing to campaign against the EEC proposal, Hinch
wrote Maude regretting that his support must go to Sir Piers. Maude, of course,
was furious, and began to treat Sir Piers as a totally out-of-touch “ignorant
philosopher, prancing about misquoting the Treaty of Rome,” and worthy of
nothing but contempt. Sir Piers replied, “I don’t care what little Maude says
about me. An awfully sad little man, don’t you think? They are doing my publicity for me. I do
think they are a lot of jugginses, don’t you?”
Sir Piers certainly was a
delightful old fellow, who had spent the greater part of his life planting
trees on the heath made famous in literature as Egdon Heath by Thomas Hardy’s
novel, The Return of the Native. Sir
Piers told me disarmingly: “Normally at this time of year I would be planting
my trees. It is really a frightful nuisance this by-election.” Waving above his
head a copy of the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of the EEC, he would declare,
“In Europe their frontiers are a bother
to them. Our frontiers are not a bother to us, and we do not need this Treaty
to put things right.” He referred to
Harold Macmillan as “this old silly who governs us.” When asked if he was not
worried that he might split the Conservative vote and let the Labour Party
through to take the seat, he said, “I don’t care tuppence who wins if I do
not,” he said. “I am supporting the
British constitution, the Imperial connection and the agricultural interest.”
Lord
Beaverbrook’s reporters knew that they were expected to twist every story they
wrote to illustrate their proprietor’s strange collection of biasses. Day after
day they wrote stories interpreting every statement made by Maude and his
supporters as statements of treason to the British interest. And Sir Piers they
portrayed as an authentic English hero, expressing a last-ditch patriotism. The
Tory head office said he couldn’t win. In fact, they were right, he even lost
his deposit, but he got more than 5,000 votes, which allowed the Labour candidate
to come through and take the seat from
the Tories for the first time since 1906.
I got to know
quite a number of journalists who worked for Beaverbrook, and they had great
affection for him, especially those who knew him personally, as many did. He was, apparently, a mischievous buggar, and
that mischief was on show every day in the way his newspapers reported the
events of the day. The closest I ever came to him was when Lord Thomson staged
a celebratory dinner at the Dorchester
for his 84th birthday. It was a splendid occasion. Thomson gave every one
of the 1500 people who attended that dinner a copy of a huge book by Robert
Carrier, a Sunday Times writer on food, called Great Dishes of the
World. My wife wore that book to pieces over the years.
Beaverbrook made a brief but very amusing speech, of
which I remember his quoting one of his political enemies who described him in
this way: “When Max Aitken was a boy he lived in a New Brunswick village with fifteen
hundred souls. It was too small for him, and he left for Halifax, a city of
fifty thousand. It was too small for him, so he went to Montreal, where there
were a quarter of a million people. It was too small for him, so he left for
London, and he is here now. One day London will be too small for him and he
will go to hell. What then? I will tell you. It won’t be big enough for him.”
Beaverbrook added, in a moment of reflection: “This js my final word.
It is time for me to become an apprentice once more. I am not certain in which
direction, but somewhere, sometime, soon.” He fell ill almost immediately after
that dinner, and died a week or two later. Of him it could be said that
although his newspapers were a brilliant success, every cause he supported
failed.
It has just occurred to me that over the years
I have caught brief glimpses of the media moguls who make all the major
decisions about what the public will read about what is going on. I have never
been impressed by their work, and having from time to time worked with
publicly-owned institutions such as the CBC and the NFB, I can say they were in
no way inferior to any of the privately-owned businesses I have worked for,
either in their respect for their employees, or in respect for the ethical
foundation of their work. Thus I have never been agitated about freedom of the
press, because in my experience, private ownership of the media is a far from
perfect model for ensuring that freedom.
Most of these moguls were in place because
they inherited the business from their fathers, and I always wondered why that
gave them authority over me, when I actually had much more experience in
dealing with information than they did. Clifford Sifton, in Winnipeg, was of a
family that had owned the Winnipeg Free
Press for half a century or more when I was there, and he was handing it on
to his son. John G. McConnell, son of the father who grew rich from cornering
the sugar market during the First World War, was a son to whom was handed The Montreal Star to manage as he
wished. Max Aitken, whom I brushed up against in an episode recorded in my
previous Chronicle, was the son of Beaverbrook, and inherited his father’s
newspapers, which he managed with much less flair than did his father. Roy
Thomson at least was a self-made man, creating a shoddy chain of small-town newspapers
in Canada that were implacably non-union, then using the money he amassed to
buy into Scottish TV (which he described as “a licence to print money”) and
finally making it to the big time when he bought The Sunday Times, and The
Times in London. Confronted by unions in Britain, he had enough sense to
make his peace with them, and under his ownership for a few years The Sunday Times was one of the
outstanding newspapers in the history of English-language journalism, so he
knew how to hire good people. But then he handed his business on to his son, having
created another obscenely rich entrepreneurial family in the process.
Since all of these media-owning families have
been extremely wealthy, it follows, does it not, as night follows day, that their
newspapers represent their own interests above everything.
I didn’t share their outlook, and I never felt
they owned me.
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