RUPERT AND BRENDA
Couldn’t miss this piece of 40th anniversary history by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky because I had a very small – infinitestimal – dog in this fight. I was freelancing for the Times in 1986 when Rupert Murdoch squared up to Brenda Dean of the SOGAT print union, secretly setting up the Wapping printworks for his four newspapers with modern direct-input machines. I saw the picket lines and had to find ways (before easy online access) to get my minor bits of copy to the paper. It was a sharp turn towards today’s world in several ways: advancing mechanization, corporate ruthlessness, and fierce industrial relations (Thatcher’s new laws restricting strikes had come in: the miners’ strikes were over). So this sharp, well-researched new play of conversations and confrontations is gripping. And it feels true of the period and the people, especially when Claudia Jolly as the tough, idealistic Brenda Dean confronts Alan Cox’s vigorous Aussie Murdoch.
In brief, the old craft typesetters and printers with the hot-metal machinery were expert ,traditional and protected by extremely hawkish shop-stewards and – even their supporters in the battle had to admit – they often got away with absurdly short hours, moonlighting and fake name check-ins : known as “Spanish practices”. Walk around Fleet Street in those days and you knew the time of day because you heard the great rumble of the presses starting. But printers could hold owners to ransom daily by simply stopping the machines: lose a day and owners lose money (a few years earlier the Times lost a year). Technically the modernization, in which journalists type in their copy directly, was well developed . But resisted by unions.
So Murdoch, craftily, set up the new Wapping works announcing that he was going to produce a whole new paper ‘The London Post”. Artfully, a line early on remembers a similar trick he played on his rival Maxwell over a sale. When Wapping was ready, he informed the staff of his four papers that they were moving there. Immediately. Without the unionized printers. So the battle of Wapping began. It was a brutally artful move, and somehow the change had to happen: today of course, all the papers use direct-input , it’s how they survived. Those which most vigorously condemned the Murdoch tactics have, at some point, had to admit that. But it was brutal, and cost thousands of jobs, not only of printers.
It is a lively account on the little stage, and much of the fascination is in the sparring and rivalry between print unions – Dean’s SOGAT, the rival NGA, plus the electricians’ union (which was of course key to the new scheme) and the TUC itself. The editors are there too – Andrew Neil a self-important Andrew Neil, Russell Bentley a puckish, dirty-mouthed Kelvin MacKenzie; both able to offer rises and BUPA to sweeten the pill to any staff journalists queasy about the business. Dean’s union comes close to running out of money, and she has to take hard decisions: it’s a calmly passionate depiction by Claudia Jolly, and Cox’s Murdoch is shown as, for all his rough determined edge, a man who could in other circumstances have liked, admired and hired her. But she was a union woman all the way from childhood, honourably a believer in fair dealing but unfashionably also devoted to the idea of hard manual work, the idea of old printerly craftsmanship passed on like jobs from father to son.
It’s sharp, funny at times (not only accidentally in the passing reference to Labour’s “man you can trust”, a certain Peter). There’s some brief doubling of parts, neatly done with coats. I would like to see it grow, in a bigger theatre which could evoke the miserable and dangerous picketing period beyond the conversations and rows. Because it’s a story we should not forget.
Kingsheadtheatre.com to 3 May
Rating 4
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