DIARY ALAN RUSBRIDGER
The death of a former Guardian editor . is a rare event: until this month the last one to die was A.P. Wadsworth in 1956. Alas- tair Hetherington, who died last week, was, as far as anyone knows, only the ninth edi- tor of the Guardian/Manchester Guardian since 1821. (C.P. Scott was in harness for 57 Years. The relentless quest for the iyoof market in 1872 led to his appointment as editor at the age of 25.) Alastair shared many characteristics with C.P. He was quiet, austere, simple-living and rigorous — a man who would walk two miles to the Athenaeum for lunch and, if he was editing that night, decline cream so that he would keep a clear head. More than one reporter from the Fifties and Sixties recalls being approached by the boss on a Friday after- noon and asked whether he fancied a brisk ramble in the Peak District the following day. This is not something the present gen- eration of Guardian reporters lives in terror of. Alastair's funeral in Logic Kirk, Bridge of Allan, on Friday last week was a suitably simple family affair. One of his sons, Alex, Spoke movingly about their joint climbing expeditions. One peak they scaled, Beinn Dearg, was called the Inaccessible Pinnacle — a name his son saw as something of a Metaphor for his father. He went on touch- ingly to describe how, more recently, the Alzheimer's disease which afflicted Alastair had, though terrible, helped reveal a warm, loving nature which, he felt, had sometimes been inhibited by the professional burdens of his earlier life. Those who wondered why Alastair chose to end his active journalistic life running a small BBC outstation in Inverness were answered by reading an article he wrote for The Spectator in 1956 about being a Scot in England: 'Dr Johnson had it all wrong. The finest sight a Scots- man ever saw was the night sleeper north- wards.'
Two politicians made it to Bridge of Allan for the service, and afterwards both had characteristic stories about Alastair. David Steel recalled how, as a newly elect- ed Liberal MP, he had been flattered to receive a call saying that the editor of the Guardian wished to have lunch with him at the party conference in Eastbourne, He put O n his best suit and at the allotted hour the editor arrived by car and picked him up. After five miles or so the editor jumped out and returned with two cheese sandwiches Purchased from a local stall. The editor then drove the young MP to the top of Beachy Head, where the two men discussed Politics while eating their sandwiches on a bench overlooking the English Channel. Tam Dalyell was the other MP present. I asked him how long he had known Alastair.
`To be perfectly honest,' he replied, 'he did not speak to me for 21 years. He violently disagreed with me on devolution and was the only man ever to have called me a traitor.' It was generous of him to have come to the funeral, then? 'Apart from his views on devolution I venerated him. I would have come today just for the first leader he wrote on Suez in 1956.' How many journalists writing today will produce one piece so powerful that it will live on in the memory of others for nearly half a century?
When Alastair joined the Guardian in 1950 the reporters' room had no phones 'because the people who edited the paper cared about rational thought, good writing, and peace to concentrate'. We like to think we still care about such things, but we do stretch to the odd phone nowadays and every reporter now has high-speed Internet access. Last week the Guardian hosted a small gathering of all the Internet compa- nies which have sprung up around our offices in Clerkenwell. I entered the room expecting to find a throng of teenage mil- lionaires. There were certainly a lot of
young faces, as well as the odd virtual mil- lionaire, but the first Internet whizz kid to greet me was rather older and greyer: one Ernest Saunders. We chatted for a while about all the Internet companies he has a toe-hold in — including a smart new Net 'incubator' company called Credo — before he wandered off into the night. I gave a few words of welcome to the rest of the Netties, remarking on Ernest's pres- ence. This met with blank incomprehension since no one had heard of him. He is, you see, PW: pre-Web.
hould newspapers send reporters to interview the relatives of people killed in accidents? The answer seems obvious: of course not. And yet any reporter who has been forced by a news editor to do a 'death knock' knows that, as often as not, the recently bereaved will warmly welcome you in. I will never forget the first time I had to do it on my local paper. It was as horrific a case as you could imagine: a schoolgirl whose clothing had been trapped in the doors of a bus and who had been dragged under the wheels. I was almost physically sick when the news editor told me I should go and knock on the parents' door. At first I pretended they weren't in and rang the desk to tell them so. The canny old news editor told me to try again. I eventually screwed up all my courage and walked up to the door. The tear-stained father took me in, made me a cup of tea and took me through the family album, reliving memo- ries of his little girl. He was insistent that I take away some pictures and was delighted that her short life, and horrific death, would find some public acknowledgment. I never enjoyed that bit of the reporter's job — and it is true that sometimes you were angrily rebuffed on the doorstep — but I never minded it as much after meeting that girl's father. I think that if, God forbid, any close relative had been killed in the Paddington disaster, I would have wel- comed the chance to express my anger at Railtrack's attitude to safety and to see the waste of a life very publicly recorded.
Talking of which, Jack Straw's comically named Freedom of Information Bill would (Clause 25, 2 a iii) specifically prevent the public from being able to read any informa- tion gathered 'for the purpose of ascertain- ing the cause of an accident'. Mr Straw is reported to be reconsidering this ludicrous exclusion, but there are a dozen other inanities alongside it. Perhaps the public anger over Paddington will force a rethink of this awful Bill.
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