When it came to industrial relations, The Times was done no favours by being within infection range of the Sunday Times. At the end of the first week in June 1981, SOGAT called a strike at the Sunday Times that cost the paper 400,000 copies. The union had acted in breach of its agreement with News International setting out a specific disputes procedure in which production was supposed to continue while negotiations took place. This was no trivial matter, for it threatened to unwind the agreements by which Murdoch had purchased the papers. Consequently, the TNL board voted unanimously to close both papers unless the union chapels agreed to abide by the disputes procedure. Long accompanied the announcement with the explanation, ‘This is not a threat. It is a decision. Anybody who thinks it is a bluff does not know Rupert Murdoch.’109 This did the trick – for the moment. Talks with SOGAT commenced and a written undertaking to abide by the disputes procedure was procured. It would last all of three months.
When News International bought The Times, the paper was produced on Linotype machines, a nineteenth-century, hot-metal technology. In purchasing Times Newspapers, Murdoch had secured agreement with the print unions to switch production from hot metal to ‘cold composition’ thus doing away with the Linotype machines and molten metal. Henceforth, the Linotype operators would be redeployed to type with computer keyboards, as had long been the norm in the rest of the world. But this did not mean computerized page make-up. Instead the computers were capable only of printing up text galleys that were passed on to a team armed with scalpels, scissors and glue who cut and pasted the lines of text into position on a drawing board. When a full page had been arranged in this way, a negative would be made of it and converted into a photosensitive polymer plate. From this, the newspaper would be run off.
Back in 1974, Marmaduke Hussey had complained that moving to ‘cut and paste’ cold composition would scarcely be worth the trouble given that it still involved having to employ process engravers who produced the pictorial printing plates. He argued that only a move to full computerized page composition made sense.110 Eight years later, Murdoch had no more hope than Hussey of getting such a system installed at Gray’s Inn Road in the face of union hostility and – it has to be said – the limitations of the technology then on offer. Getting the halfway house of ‘cut and paste’ accepted was regarded as an achievement in itself even though it had long been the established method throughout the regional presses.
From the first, The Times’s switch to cold composition was beset with teething problems. It was not deemed possible to move the paper overnight from hot to cold composition. Instead the process was gradually expanded and it was not until the following year that the entire paper was produced by photocomposition. The initial results were disappointing. It had taken so long to install the ‘new’ technology that its makers no longer manufactured it. This made finding replacement parts increasingly difficult.111 Reproduction was so appalling that in October 1981 Evans suggested that the paper should use ‘the Sunday Times hot metal facilities for the front and back for as long as we possibly can. I say this because converting to cold type on the front page will be the worst advertisement for The Times and certainly hinder our sales and our authority.’112 Rather than employ speed typists, the NGA had insisted Times Newspapers re-employ the old Linotype operators to work the new computer keyboards. Many of them seemed to have inordinate difficulty adjusting to this change. The initial average of fifteen words per minute frankly beggared belief in an industry driven by deadlines. To this was added the introduction of a further stage in the process – the making of a photo polymer pattern plate, compounding delay and minimizing the time available to pick up errors. Readers zealously spotted the resulting mistakes and wrongly attributed them to declining editorial standards. Nor did speed improve much with practice. On one occasion, Evans found himself standing at the paste-up board until half past midnight trying to insert some copy that had been sent two and a half hours earlier. At that time of night, Rees-Mogg, when he was editor, had long since gone home, had dinner and retired safely to bed. Some thought that Evans should have conserved his energies by following his predecessor’s example, leaving the trials of the production process to his night staff. But Evans was too involved to delegate when so much was going wrong, complaining to Gerry Long, ‘It says something for our deadlines and for our production efficiency in this area that a[n El] Salvador story which was on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune, printed in Zurich and flown to Britain, could not be got into the London Times last night.’113
In the executive dining room, opinion was divided about the extent to which those ‘mastering’ cold composition were governed by incompetence, laziness or genuine malevolence. Nor were the NGA compositors the only union members treated with suspicion. Denis Hamilton had long been of the view that Reg Brady, the father of the Sunday Times NATSOPA chapel, had natural intelligence and would have been a constructive force if the social circumstances of his background had delivered him into managerial rather than union responsibilities. Instead Hamilton had watched while Brady ‘caused more trouble in the machine room than any other man in the history of the newspaper, discovering all manner of disputes and grievances’.114 Many of Murdoch’s most trusted lieutenants, including John Collier and Bill O’Neill, had started off in print union politics before their potential was spotted and harnessed by News Group’s management. It was decided to make Brady an offer and, to the fury of his union brothers, he accepted the Murdoch shilling and switched sides.
Brady’s fondness for a Soviet fur hat gave him an appropriately Cold War demeanour but, in the event, his defection to the capitalists did not unlock the potential that Hamilton had seen in him. Union officials refused to talk to him, thereby preventing him from playing any constructive role. Indeed, if disarming him prevented Brady from pursuing his previous destructive function, it did not seem to make much difference in the intractable war of attrition at Gray’s Inn Road. The closed shop persisted, preventing management from having a free hand in who was employed. Evans was even unable to fill a secretarial vacancy in his own office because NATSOPA sent a succession of clearly unsuitable candidates from which he had to choose. One secretary he did employ, Liz Seeber, was astonished by the ludicrous demarcation rules prescribing her actions. In the first couple of weeks at her job a typewriter broke but, on lifting it from her desk to remove it, ‘about three people said “Oh my God, don’t do that, you’ll bring SOGAT out on strike.”’ So she had to put it down, ring a SOGAT official and wait until – in their own time – a small deputation arrived armed with a trolley to wheel it away.115 It was not an environment geared to exercising