Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

retire to his desk in a dark mood. There was never any telling which.
Once, on a particularly difficult night, I reported Vince's insubordination to David Hopkinson, the night editor, who was himself a formidable figure when he chose to be. Harrumphing, he went off to sort things out and actually went in the wire room - an impressive flouting of the rules of demarcation. When he emerged a few minutes later, looking flushed and wiping bits of pizza from his chin, he seemed a different man altogether. In a quiet voice he informed me that Vince would bring along the Wall Street report shortly but that perhaps it was best not to disturb him further just at present. Eventually I discovered that the simplest thing to do was get the closing prices out of the first edition of the FT.
To say that Fleet Street in the early 1980s was out of control barely hints at the scale of matters. The National Graphical Association, the printers' union, decided how many people were needed on each paper (hundreds and hundreds) and how many were to be laid off during a recession (none), and billed the management accordingly. Managements didn't have the power to hire and fire their own print workers, indeed generally didn't even know how many print workers they employed. I have before me a headline from December 1985 saying: 'Auditors find 300 extra printing staff at Telegraph'. That is to say, the Telegraph was paying salaries to 300
people who didn't actually work there. Printers were paid under a piece-rate system so byzantine that every composing room on Fleet Street had a piece-rate book the size of a telephone directory. On top of plump salaries, printers received special bonus payments -sometimes calculated to the eighth decimal point of a penny - for handling type of irregular sizes, for dealing with heavily edited copy, for setting words in a language other than English, for the white space at the ends of lines. If work was done out of house -for instance, advertising copy that was set outside the building - they were compensated for not doing it. At the end of each week, a senior NGA man would tot all these extras up, add a little something for a handy category called 'extra trouble occasioned', and pass the bill to the management. In consequence, many senior printers, with skills no more advanced than you would expect to find in any back-street print shop, enjoyed incomes in the top 2 per cent of British earnings. It was crazy.
Well, I don't need to tell you how it turned out. On 24 January 1986, The Times abruptly sacked 5,250 members of the most truculent unions - or deemed them to have dismissed themselves. On the evening of that day, the editorial staff were called into an upstairs conference room where Charlie Wilson, the editor, climbed onto a desk and announced the changes. Wilson was a terrifying Scotsman and a Murdoch man through and through. He said to us: 'We're sending ye tae Wapping, ye soft, English nancies, and if ye wairk very, very hard and if ye doonae git on ma tits, then mebbe I'll not cut off yer knackers and put them in ma Christmas pudding. D'ye have any problems with tha'?' Or words to that effect.
As 400 skittish journalists tumbled from the room, jabbering excitedly and trying to come to terms with the realization that they were about to be immersed in the biggest drama of their working lives, I stood alone and basking in the glow of a single joyous thought: I would never have to work with Vince again.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   THREE
i HADN'T BEEN BACK TO WAPPING SINCE I'D LEFT THERE IN THE SUMMER of 1986 and was eager to see it again. I had arranged to meet an old friend and colleague, so I went now to Chancery Lane and caught an Underground train. I do like the Underground. There's something surreal about plunging into the bowels of the earth to catch a train. It's a little world of its own down there, with its own strange winds and weather systems, its own eerie noises and oily smells. Even when