I have strong personal as well as political reasons for being profoundly relieved that this may not be, after all, my last column for Tribune. It was Tribune, under its then editor Robert J Edwards, which gave me my start in journalism almost 60 years ago. I learned my trade from Bob, and from various other people associated with Tribune, most notably Michael Foot and Geoffrey Goodman. I have been immensely grateful ever since.
At that time I was working as a trade union research officer, where my job was to prepare our annual pay claim. But as a sideline I had started to write articles for the newspapers under the name of our general secretary. One of the papers I wrote for was Tribune, which was then the mouthpiece of Nye Bevan and the so-called Bevanite movement.
It had recently changed from a fortnightly magazine into a weekly newspaper in order to reach a wider audience in Nye’s bitter struggle with Hugh Gaitskell. It was decided that they needed an industrial reporter to cover the unions, and they settled on me.
It is just as well that I was keen, or I might have been bitterly disappointed when I turned up at the Tribune offices on my first day, full of youthful expectation. The address was 222 The Strand, opposite the Law Courts. It is a very smart building now and calls itself the Outer Temple, but in those post-war days it was appallingly shabby, with a manual lift worked by an ancient porter who had once been a drayman and still smelt strongly of horses.
Any ideas I might have had about the “glamour” of my new profession had dissolved by the time this gentleman had deposited me at the Tribune floor. I was faced by a line of opaque glass doors, behind which was a row of dusty rooms connected by a corridor, rather like a railway carriage. My desk was in the darkest and dustiest of the lot. Next-door belonged to the 25-year-old Bob Edwards, who sat in the half-light designing wonderful pages with wonderful headlines while anxiously hoping someone would write the words to fill them. He lived, breathed and slept Tribune, and no restaurant or pub tablecloth was safe from his impromptu layout designs. The result was a brilliant, vibrant paper, which re-inspired me.
The room beyond Bob’s was the largest and brightest of the lot, and it belonged to Michael Foot and his secretary, Elizabeth Thomas. It was here that Michael did his constituency letters, wrote his column for the Daily Herald, and composed majestic leaders denouncing the illiberality of the Gaitskellites, who were constantly trying to expel him and Nye Bevan from the party. Poor Michael suffered badly from asthma, and one could assess the seriousness of any current crisis by the frequency with which one heard him puffing away at his inhaler. Two puffs and things were bad; three and they were really bad.
It was in this room that Michael taught me a vital lesson about my trade. That week there had been a big industrial story running on the day the paper went to press. I spent too much time polishing my copy and missed the edition. Bob was bad at ticking people off, so he delegated the job to Michael, who was only slightly better. He called me in next morning and gently explained that a journalist who missed the edition was like an actor who couldn’t be heard – no matter how good his performance, it is worthless. I don’t think I have ever missed an edition since.
The room beyond Michael’s was inhabited by the paper’s business manager, an astonishing woman called Peggy Duff. Her grasp of business management was, I strongly suspect, minimal. But she was a woman of strongly-held, very left-wing opinions with a wealth of experience campaigning for them.
Her pride and joy was a bright red van emblazoned with the name Tribune, and few big leftish meetings took place anywhere without Peggy arriving in her van with a couple of quire of the paper. She recruited hundreds of sellers, who pushed Tribune at constituency and ward meetings. But alas, her fierce opinions led to so many rows that there was eventually a parting of the ways. I often wonder what happened to the van.
Outside the offices, the landing was often patrolled by people wanting to get articles published. One of these was a youthful Gerald Kaufman, whose modest ambition (eventually realised) was to be Tribune’s film critic. Another was a future Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, who once thrust an article about transport policy into my hand. It happened to be around the time of year when constituency parties were deciding how to vote for the Labour’s National Executive Committee.
But the key events in the office were the meetings of the editorial board – from which I was excluded, as the junior lad. They were sometimes attended by Bevan himself, but more often than not he was represented by his formidable wife, Jenny Lee. She was ferocious in defence of her husband, and gave poor Bob terrible tongue-lashings if she judged that he had stepped out of line. There wasn’t much evidence of workers’ control in her management style. But that, I gather, is about to change under the new regime. And a good thing, too, I reckon.
