Murdoch's labour pains were a sign of the Times

Rupert Murdoch smashed open the door on 'closed shops'. Picture / Reuters

Those of us who worked at the Times of London in the early 1980s remember the power of print unions.

Journalists weren't allowed near computers, so reporters typed stories on sheets of paper, which subeditors revised with pen, scissors and paste. A union member would key the copy into a computer, often with typing errors we were forbidden to correct.

Printers would stop work if an editor picked up the bromides that came out of the typesetter. In those years, losing a single day's distribution cost the Sunday Times £362,000 ($952,900), says Graham Stewart's The History of the Times: The Murdoch Years.

As the newspaper's official historian, Stewart provides an inside, though partisan, look at Rupert Murdoch's struggle with trade unions after he bought the two papers in 1981. It was a battle that boiled into bloody clashes between unionists and police in London.

Murdoch wasn't the first newspaper boss to tackle UK unions, which ran "closed shops" where only their members could work.

The previous owner, the Thomson family of Canada, shut the Times for 11 months in 1978 and 1979 in a largely unsuccessful attempt to force union concessions.

Union control at the Times was total. Bill Bryson, a colleague on the paper in that period, recalls in Notes From a Small Island a messenger who would refuse to bring the US stocks story to the business desk until he had finished eating his pizza.

One measure of the unions' power was the pay their members received. Linotype operators could earn as much as £40,000 ($105,300) a year in the mid-1980s, Stewart says. My annual salary as a subeditor on the foreign desk in 1982 was £11,400 ($30,000).

Murdoch resorted to subterfuge to launch a surprise attack on the unions. He built a plant in London's Wapping district, secretly equipping it with everything from word processors to printing presses.

Murdoch said he was starting a new paper, for which he began recruiting journalists. In fact, the plant was meant for all his London papers, including the Times, the Sunday Times, the News of the World and the Sun. He hired electricians from outside the capital to handle production.

Then, in January 1986, Murdoch sacked all the union printers and clerical staff at the papers and moved the editors and reporters to Wapping, provoking a year of clashes.

On February 15 alone, eight police officers were injured and 58 people arrested as 5000 protesters fought to keep workers from entering the Wapping plant and newspapers from leaving it, according to the BBC.

I had already left by then, following an earlier battle in which Murdoch ousted Harold Evans as editor of the Times. Evans, who hired me, had won acclaim as editor of the Sunday Times for his campaigning journalism on issues such as birth defects caused by the drug Thalidomide.

I still remember the night Evans hired me. He called me into his office, where I found him poring over the Times under his desk lamp. He asked to see samples of my work. At the end of our chat, he shook my hand and welcomed me to the staff.

After Evans had been in the job less than a year, Murdoch lost confidence in him, Stewart says. A power struggle ensued. This ended when Evans called a television crew into his office and resigned live on camera. Staff watched on a TV set in the newsroom, a few metres away. I quit soon after.

Stewart maintains that his judgments are independent. Yet he who controls the present controls the past. It's unsurprising that Murdoch emerges as the hero of this book.

Stewart belittles Evans even as he praises him. He refers to Evans' talent for designing newspapers and editing stories, then approvingly quotes one of Evans' opponents at the Times, Tim Austin, as saying, "He just did not know when to stop." It is an insidious attack.

That said, this book remains a fascinating read, offering a well-documented look at a vital period in newspaper history.

- BLOOMBERG