Every night I would knock hesitantly at the open door, and politely ask if he had seen the Wall Street report, pointing out that it was now quarterpast eleven and we should have had it at halfpast ten. Perhaps he could look for it among the reams of unwatched paper tumbling out of his many machines?
'I don't know wewer you noticed,' Vince would say, 'but I'm eating pizza.'
Everybody had a different approach with Vince. Some tried to get threatening. Some tried bribery. Some tried warm friendship. I begged.
'Please, Vince, can't you just get it for me, please. It won't take a sec and it would make my life so much easier.'
'Fuck off.'
'Please, Vince. I have a wife and family, and they're threatening to sack me because the Wall Street report is always late.'Fuck off.'
'Well, then, how about if you just tell me where it is and I get it myself.'
'You can't touch nuffink in here, you know that.' The wire room was the domain of a union mysteriously named NATSOPA. One of the ways NATSOPA maintained its vicelike grip on the lower echelons of the newspaper industry was by keeping technological secrets to itself, like how to tear paper off a machine. Vince, as I recall, had gone on a sixweek course to Eastbourne. It left him exhausted. Journalists weren't even allowed over the threshold.
Eventually, when my entreaties had declined into a kind of helpless bleating, Vince would sigh heavily, jam a wedge of pizza in his mouth and come over to the door. He would stick his face right in mine for a full halfminute. This was always the most unnerving part. His breath smelled primeval. His eyes were shiny and ratlike. 'You're fucking annoying me,' he would say in a low growl, flecking my face with bits of wet pizza, and then he would either get the Wall Street report or he would 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 piecerate system so byzantine that every composing room on Fleet Street had a piecerate 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 backstreet 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.
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 you've descended so far into the earth that you've lost your bearings utterly and wouldn't be in the least surprised to pass a troop of blackened miners coming off shift, there's always the rumble and tremble of a train passing somewhere on an unknown line even further below. And it all happens in such orderly quiet: all these thousands of people passing on stairs and escalators, stepping on and off crowded trains, sliding off into the darkness with wobbling heads, and never speaking, like characters from Night of the Living Dead.
As I stood on the platform beneath another, fairly recent London civility namely an electronic board announcing that the next train to Hainault would be arriving in 4 mins I turned my attention to the greatest of all civilities: the London Underground Map. What a piece of perfection it is, created in 1931 by a forgotten hero named Harry Beck, an outofwork draughtsman who realized that when you are underground it doesn't matter where you are. Beck saw and what an intuitive stroke this was that as long as the stations were presented in their right sequence with their interchanges clearly delineated, he could freely distort scale, indeed abandon it altogether. He gave his map the orderly precision of an electrical wiring system, and in so doing created an entirely new, imaginary London that has very little to do with the disorderly geography of the city above.
Here's an amusing trick you can play on people from Newfoundland or Lincolnshire. Take them to Bank Station and tell them to make their way to Mansion House. Using Beck's map which even people from Newfoundland can understand in a moment they will gamely take a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, change to a Circle Line train heading east and travel five more stops. When eventually they get to Mansion House they will emerge to find they have arrived at a point 200 feet further down the same street, and that you have had a nice breakfast and done a little shopping since you last saw them. Now take them to Great Portland Street and tell them to meet you at Regent's Park (that's right, same thing again!), and then to Temple Station with instructions to rendezvous at Aldwych. What fun you can have! And when you get tired of them, tell them to meet you at Brompton Road Station. It closed in 1947, so you'll never have to see them again.