Best of Times / Worst of Times: Peter Wilby

'
PETER WILBY, 62, was on the front line of the print strike in 1985 when the new offices of the Times were besieged by striking printers. Though he was a successful Education Correspondent at the Sunday Times, physical violence, intimidation and political differences lead Peter to join the biggest exodus of staff in the Times’ history.

"I’ll always remember the barbed wire on the windows of the buses as they took journalists through the picket lines. ‘Murdoch buses’, I called them. Great fortified things that ran from the tube station to the Times offices in Wapping. They had to get the journalists through somehow, without them being assailed.

You see, the mid-eighties was a tumultuous time for Fleet Street. The printers’ union was on strike and many journalists followed suit in solidarity.

I was a very strong union supporter at the time, but I was not a supporter of the preachy print unions. They were racist, sexist and terribly right-wing in their attitudes. They were pretty awful people.

However, Rupert Murdoch had not long bought the Times and Sunday Times and he had a plan. He was mobilizing his staff to move the papers lock, stock and barrel to new premises in Wapping, firing the striking printers and replacing them with people who would work for less money.

When we were told about the move in the autumn of 1985, however, we all knew it was a very bad business. Everyone was incredibly torn. Do we go? Do we support the printers or support Murdoch? I didn’t want solidarity with either!

So some of us stayed behind.

They called us ‘Refuseniks’. We stayed in the old offices as long as we could, twenty or thirty of us sitting at our old desks in Gray’s Inn Road and refusing to leave.

But eventually I had no choice.

I was 40 years old and was the main breadwinner in my family, and my wife was already at home alone most of the time, bringing up small children. She appreciated how difficult my decision was, but she had to see things from an economic point of view and so did I. I didn’t want to lose my job, so I had to go.

But it was an horrific situation when I got to Wapping in the winter of 1985.

The picket lines of striking printers surrounded the offices and they were barracking and assaulting anyone who tried to get through.

On some days there were several hundred protestors barricading the offices. On some Saturday nights, when the unions organised a big one, there would be more. Thousands of them trying to storm the plant and break in.

The green buses ran from Tower Hill and Charing Cross and took journalists through the lines amid hails of stones, but I could never bring myself to go on them. I just couldn’t bear the idea of going on a bloody Murdoch bus.

So I would walk from the station. It was very intimidating, and the atmosphere was horrendous. It was like running the gauntlet.

During those horrible few months, I would regularly be attacked coming out of Tower Hill station, shoulder-charged by banks of printers, rocks and stones flying at me. It was awful.

One journalist was attacked with a broken beer glass in a local pub and had his face quite badly scarred. There was a lot of violence around and I feared for my safety.

Often, I would try to talk to the printers and hear their point of view, but this would only lead to great arguments in the street.

The printers wanted our support and our solidarity, they told us journalists that we should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our ‘brothers’. But they were paid better than we were, used three or four times more people than they needed, and ran all sorts of scams. Those were the kind of people they were.

And yet I was still so torn. I didn’t agree with them, but nor did I like Rupert Murdoch.

Of course, Murdoch had his supporters. Kelvin McKenzie, the then editor of the Sun, used to lead sing-alongs on the buses as they pushed through the picket lines. Eugh. I certainly wasn’t joining in, but I couldn’t keep walking through the lines of printers.

What was I to do? I had become more of a ‘Confusenik’ than a ‘Refusenik’.

However, there was light at the end of the tunnel. Word was out. By a great stroke of fortune, we heard that a new paper – The Independent – was about to launch.

Murdoch knew it too. He blamed the hastiness of the move to Wapping on his plans to create a new newspaper called the London Post, but this was just a front. He had no intention of launching a new paper. He was just scared of the competition.

There was a great exodus from the Times and Sunday Times, and I was among them. A third of the Indy’s original staff were refugees from Wapping who had escaped the unbearable unpleasantness.

You see, my wife didn’t know what I knew. She didn’t understand my world. She didn’t realise that it was always going to be ok, because journalism looks after you. If you’re out of work, something will come up, and the launch of the Indy did just that."