In my early career as a cultural historian, I made many journeys along the Northern line in London to the now defunct British Newspaper Library at Colindale. It was a melancholy place, with that vanilla-and-almonds smell of decomposing ink and paper, and little crumbs of disintegrated newspaper on the floor by the reading desks. Like the mayfly, a newspaper is meant to die on the day it is born. News now lives longer on the Guardian website, but prominently displayed warnings tell us when an article is more than a month old. “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” the Rolling Stones sang. “Nobody in the world.”
So newspaper history is a tricky genre that must capture the ephemeral and show why it matters. Ian Mayes’s excellent book follows two previous, quasi-official volumes of Guardian history by David Ayerst and Geoffrey Taylor. It begins in 1986 when the Guardian was still a one-section, inky, monochrome paper full of misprints and poor quality pictures, newly threatened by Rupert Murdoch’s move to Wapping and the birth of the Independent. It ends in 1995 with a radically restyled paper, with new sections such as G2 and the pocket-sized TV and entertainment supplement, the Guide. A second volume will tell the story up to 2008, when the Guardian moved to its current home in Kings Place.
The Guardian is seen from the outside as an ideological monolith. Mayes quotes one Daily Mail executive who says that his newspaper was “utterly obsessed with the bloody Guardian” and that the editor, Paul Dacre, “would grumble away to himself under his breath about ‘Polly fucking Toynbee’ as he marched to the lift”. Even to its natural allies, the Guardian could be exasperating. In 1993, Salman Rushdie wrote in: “May I commiserate with your literary editors, Richard Gott and James Wood, whose jobs so plainly make them miserable?” And the paper, at least in this period, had a reputation for suffocating earnestness. In 1986, Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (played by Michael Gambon) tried to control lustful thoughts while a nurse greased the lower parts of his psoriatic body by thinking of “something very very boring” like “the Guardian women’s page”. It didn’t help, which, Mayes says hopefully, might be seen as “an oblique compliment to the page”.
As Mayes reveals, this uniform Guardian imagined from afar does not exist. It may have become a refuge for a loose anti-Tory coalition in these years of Conservative rule, but its politics were all over the place. Richard Gott was convinced that the editor, Peter Preston, was a progressive Tory (Mayes dismisses this, but discovers that Preston did vote Tory once in a local election). Gott was later revealed to have worked for the KGB. Several Guardian journalists stood as candidates for the Social Democratic party. Seumas Milne and Martin Kettle, who both joined the paper in the mid-1980s, represented Labour’s left and right. The Guardian management, and many of the printers, were firmly Tory. Few events in these years, from the fatwa on Rushdie to the first Gulf war, failed to provoke fierce disagreements in the newsroom.
Many of the old guard – mostly male and often to be found in smoke-filled pubs and the Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho – worried that the paper’s political direction was being lost in its increasing coverage of lifestyle and popular culture. One of the new guard, Peter Silverton, on first entering the Guardian canteen, thought that “this dull, clean, uncomfortable, chummy little lunchroom” was “the last of the wartime British Restaurants. And the senior editing staff were in there – in such bad clothes.”
Yet for all this, the Guardian thrived. It successfully negotiated the end of hot metal and its replacement by computerised typesetting and printing; it fought off competition from the Independent; it bought the Observer, almost certainly saving it from extinction; and it weathered Murdoch’s price war. One hero of the book is David Hillman of Pentagram, who led the Guardian’s great redesign of 1988, turning it overnight from the ugliest British newspaper to the best-looking one. Longstanding readers will recall this redesign from its distinctive masthead, with the The in Garamond italic font and the Guardian in Helvetica bold. The Hillman revolution worked because he understood that design grew out of content, and that pictures and words had to work together.
Covering nine years in more than 300 pages, this book has all the comprehensiveness of an official history. To read it without judicious skipping, you probably need to be interested in the building of printing plants, new computer systems, page layouts and house agreements with the unions. But Mayes enlivens his narrative throughout with humorous touches and compelling character sketches. He never quite cracks the enigma of Peter Preston, his presence in the newsroom announced by pipe smoke, until he swapped smoking for chewing the tops of leaky ballpoint pens, which made him look like “a bizarre Petrushka”. Preston was so quiet in one meeting with the blind politician David Blunkett that Blunkett asked whether he was still in the room. Guardian staff often left meetings with Preston puzzled as to what had occurred. Yet he must take much of the credit for the newspaper’s successful transformation in these years, when some feared it would not survive.
A newspaper’s contents may be ephemeral, but the fate of newspapers themselves matters hugely. I finished this book feeling awed by all this forgotten labour in a collective cause, done so that the Guardian could “carry on as heretofore”, in the traditional instruction given to its editors. It also left me thinking that, for all the sometimes fractious office politics, this newspaper remains, in the words of its longest-serving editor CP Scott, “an organ of civilisation”.
• Witness in a Time of Turmoil: Inside the Guardian’s Global Revolution – Volume One: 1986-1995 by Ian Mayes is published by Guardian Books (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
