Journalists on strike

Richard West

Next week the Darlington Northern Echo, one of this country's oldest newspapers, may fail to appear for the first time in its history, if the print unions back the National Union of Journalists in demanding a 'closed shop'. In an article three weeks ago, called Who needs the NUJ?, I discussed the role of this union in general terms with particular reference to the Fleet Street newspapers and now, having since visited Darlington, I should like to examine in greater detail how the argument over the 'closed shop' affects a particular newspaper, this time in County Durham.

Although Darlington is a town of only 100,000 people, the Northern Echo is now the largest-selling morning newspaper in England outside London. It is owned by a Westminster Press subsidiary which also publishes the Darlington Evening .Despatch, the Durham Advertiser and the Darlington and Stockton Times.

The strike began on 3 June, when Mrs Josephine Kirk Smith, a newly-appointed sub-editor on the Darlington and Stockton Times refused to rejoin the NUJ and instead joined the Institute of Journalists, which is less a union than a professional association. Although both sides say that personalities do not enter into the argument, Mrs Kirk Smith's undoubtedly does. A product of Cheltenham Ladies College and Oxford where she took a degree in philosophy, Mrs Kirk Smith had worked as a journalist with The Lady before going to Germany with her army officer husband. He had also been 'stationed at Catterick in North Yorkshire, where their children now go to school, which is why Mrs Kirk Smith, who is now divorced, obtained a job in the district.

Although Mrs Kirk Smith had previously been in the NUJ, she did not approve of the 'closed shop' legislation introduced by Michael Foot, nor of what she describes as the 'bullying' manners of trade union officials at Darlington. 'It could be', she said, 'that the people who approached me thought that because I'm mild-mannered, I'd be an easy nut to crush. But if you've just fought one battle, come through a divorce, you don't like blackmail. The first man said that if I didn't join there'd be a "dispute situation". I was on three months' probation and they thought they could frighten me but they picked on the wrong person. I didn't, join the loJ until the NUJ said that I was a tool of the management and antiunion, which I have never been. They asked me if my loyalty was to my colleagues or to the management. I replied that my loyalty was to my employers and to those colleagues that I respected'. When Mrs Kirk Smith remained obstinate, the NUJ chapel met and voted by 44 to 34 on a strike.

Some of the striking journalists are paid only £40 a week, and a few trainees only £30. The management admits that its wages compare unfavourably to those paid to journalists at Middlesbrough and Newcastle, but insists that it does not pay less than the NUJ minimum. The strikers believe that higher wages can only be won by collective bargaining based on a closed shop. 'We're fighting for bargaining power, nothing more', I was told by Ewen Campbell, one of the picketers and deputy Father of the Chapel.

The present feebleness of the NUJ's bargaining power is shown by the fact that all four newspapers continue to be produced by only a quarter the normal editorial staff. The editor of the Northern Echo, Don Evans, said that the strike had barely affected circulation: 'We're about 500 down on our usual sales. Of those about 200 are due to a stoppage at one ofthe wholesalers. The rest may be people who sympathise with the strikers or don't like the paper we are producing now.'.

One night a mass picket had almost stopped the vans getting the papers out of the building, Mr Evans said: They were the people you might have expected to see on a flying picket, people from other unions and some yobs who wanted a bit of fun, shouting "Scab" and "Blackleg" at the drivers and banging the vans. The paper would have been stopped for the first time in its history but at five o'clock in the morning the police got through the picket line and the local newsagents came in their cars to pick up 20,000 copies. The scuffles and arrests had a bad effect on the local population. Violence doesn't go down well in Quaker Darlington'.

Nor did it go down well with the vandrivers, members of NATSOPA, whose help the NUJ had started out by canvassing. The Darlington branch of NGA, the compositors' union, is also thought to be cool, even hostile, towards the journalists, as was borne out by a graffito in one of the NUJ pubs: `N(,ot) G(ood) A(tall).' The local print union branches may be unwilling to heed calls from London to give their help to the NUJ strikers.

Indeed the Darlington NUJ was obviously rash to take on one of the wealthiest companies in Great Britain, when its own strike fund was running out and the other newspaper unions were unsympathetic. Worse, the strike has shown that all four papers were grossly overmanned. As he walked through silent, almost empty offices, Mr Evans spoke wistfully of how, in the future, the Northern Echo might be run by 'a much smaller staff with much higher pay'.

In my previous article I attempted to show how the overmanning of newspapers resulted in slackness, jealousy, loss of competitive spirit and the reduction of wages, which journalists then tried to make good by fringe benefits, overtime and allowances. I also remarked that the NUJ, by taking upon itself the role of editor and employer, was keeping potential journalists out of work and excluding the contributions of freelance writers, whether NUJ or not. Anyone wishing to see how good a newspaper can be when it is not overstaffed, has only to turn to the old files of the Northern Echo which one hundred years ago was edited by W. T. Stead, the most famous journalist in this country's history.

The Northern Echo began on 1 January 1870 as the first morning newspaper to sell for a halfpenny. It soon caught the attention of Stead, then twenty years old, who was employed in nearby Newcastle as clerk to a merchant, also the Russian Consul. A fervent Christian, Liberal and social reformer, Stead started to send the newspaper letters, leading articles and reports on philanthropic matters. Although Stead had left school at fourteen he was a mighty reader of books and a fluent, even compulsive writer, who was to advise aspiring journalists to 'fall in love with a clever woman a dozen years older than themselves' in order to practise their prose on long, passionate letters.

At only twenty-one, Stead, who had never, yet entered a newspaper, was made the new editor of the Northern Echo„ whose additional staff consisted of one 'experienced sub (editor)'. Between them they produced, six days a week, four large pages of small-print copy, about evenly divided

between editorial and advertisements. Stead reckoned that during his first three years in the job, in addition to administrative duties, he had written more than one thousand leaders, three thousand notes and various other articles, which was comparable to about three Spectator pages a day. He wrote in his journal in 1874: `There IS no paper now in existence which can be to me what the Echo is. I have given it its character, its existence, its circulation. It is myself. Other papers could not bear my image and superscription so distinctly. I have more power and more influence here than on almost any other paper, for I work according to my inclinations and bias'. • His boast of power was certainly not a light one for the Northern Echo was to become a powerful voice in the land. Although Darlington was a small town and the Echo's sales seldom more than 5,000, it was anything but parochial as can be seen from the subjects of leading articles for the week beginning 25 July 1877: 'Bright Unveiling Statue of Cobden in Bradford; Railway Strike in USA; The House of Commons and the [Irish] Obstruction; the Local Iron Trade, and, Egypt.' Since it was customary in those days for newspapers to republish leading articles in their contempories, Stead soon became well known throughout England and the Earl of Derby wrote to The Times extolling the Echo's views on the Gold Coast problem.

Perhaps partly because he had Worked for a Russian Consul, Stead was a partisan of the Russians against the Turks, in their rivalry over the Balkan provinces, and was seconcj only to Gladstone in waging the famous , campaign against the `Bulgarian Atrocities'; indeed the campaign's first meeting was held in Darlington. By 1877 Stead was an honoured visitor to London, Where he made friendships with Bright, James Froude, Thomas Carlyle, Albert Henry George (later Lord Grey) and Mme Olga Novikoff, the `ambassadress of good Will' for Russia in English society, who called the Northern Echo 'the best paper in .11rope'. Lord Grey was later to remark vv,,,nh some hyperbole that `this provincial editor of an obscure paper was corresponding with kings and emperors all

ver the world and receiving long letters 'tom statesmen of every nation'.

After ten years at the Northern Echo, Stead went down to London as deputy e. ditor of the Pall Mall Gazette, a new evening newspaper. In another ten years he had revolutionised journalism, introducing anteing other things, interviews, illust:ations, signed articles and cross heads. His -rensational exposures included the `Maiden :.rthilte of Modern Babylon' on child prostitution

as a result of which he was sent to

rson for three months, much to his satissaction. He would at the end of his life have 7.0°Ped the world on the sinking of the !runic, had he not perished with the ship. r was an article of faith to Stead and the 0vvtiller new journalists', that they were men ith a mission and quite different from owners, who aimed only `to sweat dividends, however earned, out of their properties'. As Raymond L. Schults wrote in a recent book about Stead (Crusader in Babylon, University of Nebraska Press, 1972) `it was a tenet of the New Journalism that newspaper directors could not profit at the expense of their workmen'. Although the Pall Mall Gazette had slightly more stet than Stead's Northern Echo, most of the articles were sent in by freelance writers.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that had Stead been born a century later, he could not have enjoyed such a splendid career. Without having passed through an approved NUJ training school, he could not have got a job on the Northern Echo, let alone started as editor. No newspaper management of today, obsessed as they are with `sweating dividends', would give free rein to a man of such disturbing originality and the NUJ would have been appalled by a man who worked long, `anti-social' hours, and actually took a delight in journalism. Since Stead was not in a union, it might be assumed in the NUJ that his wages were beaten down to starvation level. Yet the evidence points the other way.

When Stead joined the Northern Echo he got a salary of £150 a year, or double what he had earned as a merchant's clerk and the following year this was increased to £250 and in 1875 to £300. He said of his job at the time: 'In money, of course, it is not much, but it is enough to keep Me comfortable and Bell [the proprietor] has promised me a share in profit hereafter'. At the Pall Mall Gazette, Stead got a starting salary of £1,000 with an extra £1,00 for writings additional to his regular duties.

From looking through old advertisements one gets some idea of what such salaries were worth in terms of con

temporary purchasing power. In Darlington one hundred years ago, one could buy a six-roomed house for £225, rent a fiveroom house for £14 per annum and an eleven-room house for £50. The fees for one term at Darlington's 'Middle Class School for Boys' were one guinea per term. Down south, one learns from the Pall Mall Gazette, things were marginally more expensive so that a seven-room house in Oxford, with a tennis court, stable and large garden was up for sale at £1,500, or rentable at £100 per annum, a furnished nine-room house near Clapham Junction rented at two guineas a week, and a furnished flat in Victoria for 12s. New books sold at about 6s.

According to my calculations, presentday salaries after tax are worth about onefifteenth of salaries one hundred years ago; but in making comparisons such as this it is sensible to consider the special needs of any particular trade or profession. A navvy, for instance, might spend more on food, to renew his strength; a scholar would spend more on books, and an actress on clothes. Journalists spend an abnormally large part of their income on alcohol, which is therefore the measure I take to compare their relative salaries. From the advertisements in the Northern Echo one hundred years ago, one learns that rum, gin and whisky were obtainable at 2s (or 10p) a bottle, compared to the average modern price of £5 so that the young Stead, had he been a drinking man (which he was not) began his career at the Northern Echo at about 1,500 bottles of whisky a year, or thirty bottles a week, or four bottles a day. By the time he reached London, his salary had increased to 11,000 bottles of whisky a year, 450 bottles a week, or 65 bottles a day. If we take Stead's Northern Echo income of one hundred years ago, 3,000 bottles of whisky, it is possible to work out that the equivalent today would be £15,000 after tax. Allowing for tax, one can say that a young Northern Echo jburnalist one hundred years ago was paid the modern equivalent of £50,000; which is rather more than the NUJ has obtained for its members.

The drop in earnings of journalists over a hundred years has been accompanied by a

• drop in social status. The picketers outside the Northern Echo, shouting abuse at the van drivers and scuffling with the police, seem consciously to have proletarianised themselves, to have joined what they probably call the masses. It was Mrs Kirk Smith who remarked in her tart, -dismissive manner: `I can't think that scruffy pickets hanging round street corners are doing anything to enhance the professional reputation of journalists'. The comment is not wholly unfair, for many of the most militant NUJ members, the ones you see clutching Socialist Worker, come from middle-class families and have been (unlike Stead) to a university. If, for sentimental reasons, they chrose to think of themselves as downtrodden workers, they cannot complain if the newspaper proprietors pay them wages to match.