IT'S ALMOST THE DEADLINE [539]

The General Strike of 4th to 12th May 1926 was called by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in sympathy with British coal miners, whose wages and working conditions had eroded and declined in the years after the First World War. The first day saw an estimated 1.5-1.75 million workers on strike, the TUC had restricted participation to key industries: iron and steel, transport, shipping ports, and printing.

However, as “The Times” reported in its edition of 5th May, “The printing industry is at a standstill, but lithographers have not been withdrawn, and compositors in London have not received instructions to strike.”

I have owned a copy of this issue of “The Times” for years, but never properly scrutinised its bizarre appearance. It is a single sheet of foolscap-sized paper (32 x 20 cm) – I have since discovered this edition is known as “Little Sister”, in comparison with the “Big Brother” of the regular broadsheet – printed on both sides in dense typewriter text, the only picture being King’s coat of arms in the paper’s masthead. 

I had seen similar examples of other newspapers printed during the strike in similarly reduced circumstances – there exists rudimentary editions of the “Daily Mirror”, “Daily Mail” and “The Daily Telegraph” – but with “The Times” being Britain’s (unofficial) newspaper of record, with an unbroken print run since 1785, this was the one to have. My copy now resides in a mylar bag, to prevent decomposition of the fragile newsprint paper, a relic of a moment in time.

As “The Times” recently discussed [link], its 5th May 1926 edition was produced and distributed by volunteers and helpers corralled by John Jacob Astor, the then owner of the paper, having already been made aware at a meeting, of newspaper proprietors with the British Government, that its intention was to publish an official Government newspaper to provide both official news and the Government’s viewpoint during the strike, either as a collective effort with the industry, or by itself. This became “The British Gazette”, published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office from the requisitioned premises of “The Morning Post”, using staff from that paper and the “Daily Express”, and edited by the former journalist and current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill.

With printing presses unavailable, six “Multigraph” machines were used to print my copy of “The Times”. These table-top devices, more used by offices for printing direct mail and forms, these involved sliding individual letters, spaces and punctuation onto a cylinder, with motorised versions printed six to seven thousand copies an hour. Haste and inexperience with loading sentences backwards explain many spelling errors, most notably the “WEATHER ORECAST” at the top of the front page, but these were apparently fixed for a second edition the same day, so I now know my copy was from the first edition.

The following days’ editions of “The Times” looked more like the regular paper, printed on its regular presses by an amateur team only just shown how to operate the equipment, but with its page count reduced to one broadsheet folded into four pages. This was partly a result of Churchill requesting newsprint stock for printing “The British Gazette” – originally requesting access to their entire stock for an explicitly Government mouthpiece, “The Times” would only relinquish a quarter of it.

In media terms, the legacy of the General Strike is usually the granting of a Royal Charter to the then-private British Broadcasting Company, having maintained its independent and impartial radio broadcasting during the strike in the face of a threat from Churchill to requisition it for Government use in a manner similar to “The British Gazette”, which still published programme listings for BBC stations like it was a regular paper. The “Little Sister” edition of “The Times” is a further reminder that the UK only ever had state media once, a hundred years ago, for less than two weeks.

The 1926 General Strike ended without agreement, with miners continuing to strike for a further few months. Much later, an industrial dispute over modernising work practices at “The Times” and “The Sunday Times” led to Thomson Newspapers, which bought them from the Astor family in 1966, to suspend production of the papers for nearly a year from December 1978, breaking a near two hundred year print run.

AND NOW THE WORDS JUST SLIP AWAY [305]

Is it still possible to ignore something until it goes away? The expectation these days is to react, fight, stand your ground, voice disapproval, and close the other side down.

As someone whose school years were not the best of their life, I believe the bullies did win after all, or at least everyone chose to adopt their tactics. But the bullies receded eventually, perhaps bored or no longer fulfilled, because I ignored them as much as I could. It takes as much effort to say nothing as saying anything at all.

 

But bullying makes news, hectoring makes news, provocation makes news. Anything written on Twitter by Piers Morgan is routinely written up by newspapers, including the one he used to edit, the “Daily Mirror”, legitimising the way he uses it, if not condoning it.

 

This playbook appears to have been used by the television channel GB News, which has generated an immense amount of heat, but very little light, since it launched on Sunday 13^th June. GB News courted pre-launch comparisons with the rabid Fox News Channel, touting items on Andrew Neil’s flagship 8pm show with titles like “Wokewatch” and “Mediawatch.” These were initially addressed by Neil’s programme on the channel’s launch night, talking about how the channel would “lend an ear to some of Britain’s marginalised and overlooked voices” and speak up for “their voice has not been heard in the mainstream media.”

 

Online traffic about the channel, which includes boycotts of advertisers and poking fun at numerous technical errors suffered, is led by controversial statements made by presenters, particularly former talk radio “shock jocks” Nigel Farage and Dan Wootton about the England football team “taking the knee,” the Royal National Lifeboat Institution rescuing refugees at sea, “doomsday scientists” running a “Covid scare campaign” that “terrified the public into supporting lockdowns,” and anything else that speaks to how a culture war is being waged by “woke” people. Eschewing traditional news bulletins for leading with conversation, the subjects discussed are few and repetitive.

 

In itself, GB News is rather boring to talk about, for the extent to which its tumultuous launch and continued existence has been taken apart in numerous news articles and opinion pieces, there is really nothing left to say about it that hasn’t already been said, because everyone has said everything about it from the moment the channel was first announced. The broad narrative of overambition and hubris – its viewing figures are currently in the tens of thousands, below what it needs to prove its viability – also invites comparisons with the launch, collapse and overhaul of TV-am when that launched in 1983, suggesting not only that the crisis at GB News, whose director of programmes at launch has already left, suggests not only that the current problems experienced by the channel were not only expected, but forseen. TV-am eventually became more popular, but only by changing itself almost entirely.

 

Since Sunday 13^th June, I have watched a total of three hours of GB News – one was the opening launch programme, followed by bits of other shows, including a Sunday morning with the deliberately provocative title of “The Political Correction.” The repetition of talking points became boring, and seeing a parade of mid-shots of people talking is visually uninteresting, not helped by having a studio set with black walls and no windows. 

 

So, I ignore the channel, and ignore the discourse surrounding the channel. Its viewing figures confirm I cannot be the only one. I am not interested in what the presenters have to say on the same few topics, especially as its competition, as a politically right-leaning channel, is most national newspapers, talk radio stations, and vast sections of the internet. It can only make noise to attract attention, and can only provoke a reaction by creating heat. I already learned to avoid things like that.

THE FEELING IS GROWING, SO LET’S KEEP IT GOING [238]

There exists a song, released in 1968, where the chorus is all about bringing everyone together, and pushing the country forward, but the verses talk of working half an hour longer each day without extra pay, buying British cars and going on holiday in Blackpool. Sung by the all-round entertainer Bruce Forsyth, and written by Petula Clark’s usual songwriters Tony Hatch & Jackie Trent, it is titled “I’m Backing Britain.”

With that title, the song could have been the relic of a Government campaign fronted by Forsyth. It sounds like the essence of Matt Monro’s “We’re Gonna Change the World” has been synthesised and condensed, with the satire removed, and I can’t imagine the British public went along with what was being asked of them. It turns out the campaign that mounted behind the slogan disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared, in a matter of weeks.

“I’m Backing Britain” snowballed from the efforts of five company secretaries working for a heating and ventilation company in Surbiton: the Colt Group, whose headquarters are now based alongside their main factory in Waterlooville, were instrumental in the post-war rebuilding effort, designing and constructing ventilation systems for prefabricated houses that removed the need to build fireplaces. The secretaries - Christine French, Carol Ann Fry, Brenda Mumford, Joan Southwell and Valerie White – received a memo from the company’s marketing director, Fred Price, that gave them the idea of starting work half an hour early each day, to boost productivity. The Surbiton head office voted to begin on 29^th December 1967, two days after the memo was written. The Waterlooville factory later decided to work their extra half hour at the end of the day. As other companies took up the idea after hearing about it over the following weekend, the five Colt secretaries, along with Alan O’Hea, the company’s managing director, created a slogan, “I’m Backing Britain,” and placed an order for a hundred thousand badges to hand out to other businesses. At this point, it had only just reached New Year’s Day 1968.

The single was pressed in different places, and Bruce 

Forsyth's surname was spelt incorrectly on all of them.

If the Government weren’t planning a campaign to increase productivity, they needed one, and approved of the one served up for them. Fred Price’s 27^th December memo, mainly a company progress report, also paraphrased a letter published in “The Times” two weeks earlier, in which the MP John Boyd-Carpenter suggested how the United Kingdom could reduce the massive deficit created by the gap between imports and exports, which had led to the devaluation of the Pound. Boyd-Carpenter’s solution was to suggest the first Saturday morning of the month could be used to set an example, using the equipment that would have remained idle over the weekend. Price modified this to suggest an extra half-day is added to the working week, before the Colt secretaries chose to make their existing work days longer instead. In response to the growing sentiment, a press conference attended by Britain’s three main political parties backed “I’m Backing Britain” on 5^th January 1968, one week after Colt’s longer days began.


The campaign was a gift to the media, which spread it further. The “Daily Express” ran a story on the Colt secretaries on 30^thDecember, while the “Daily Mirror” ran editorials welcoming the campaign from 3^rdJanuary, the same day an advertisement in “The Times” was run by an ad agency offering their spare time to create ads for the campaign. This was when Pye Records stepped in: the promotional record made by Tony Hatch, Jackie Trent and Bruce Forsyth, who reduced their usual fees to participate, was released on 8^thJanuary, costing two thirds of the usual cost of a seven-inch single. However, “I’m Backing Britain” never charted, selling fewer than eight thousand copies. The record was made so quickly the singer’s surname was misspelt as “Forsythe” on the label. 

The campaign looked bizarre, as people suddenly began waving their flag for their country, often literally with flags supplied by the campaign’s office, but it became uncomfortable for some. It insinuated that people were not being as productive as they could be, and should work longer, without compensation, to make up for that fault. Unions were upset by this, but the fervour generated by the campaign meant they could be seen as obstructing patriotism. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had already criticised people who complained that others were not pulling their weight in a speech on 8^thJanuary, only three days after the Government became involved.


The campaign began to unravel during February. On 12^thFebruary, workers at Colt voted to return to their standard work schedule – the unions present there had been strained, and the Colt secretaries ironically had their work interrupted by their running the campaign. Only three days earlier, the Post Office had started using an “I’m Backing Britain” postmark on millions of letters, stopping on 29^th February. Colt had passed on the running of the campaign to the Industrial Group (now the Work Foundation) during January, but when it was wound up, at the end of September, they were only sending out promotional material. The MP and book publisher Robert Maxwell attempted a concurrent “Buy Britain” campaign from the outset, later amended to “Sell British, Help Britain, Help Yourself,” but the protectionist campaign unravelled when it was discovered his promotional T-shirts were made in Portugal.


By 1969, “I’m Backing Britain” was forgotten as a campaign, leaving relics strewn about the place, especially the badges and the Bruce Forsyth song, which can be found on eBay. The Beatles song “Back in the USSR” originally began as a satire of the campaign, before being refocussed following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czecholslovakia. However, for a campaign later derided as an over-patriotic aberration, it has an ironic link to “Dad’s Army”: the first episode, filmed on 15^th April 1968, and broadcast on 31^stJuly, begins in “the present day,” with Captain Mainwaring as chairman of Walmington-on-Sea’s “I’m Backing Britain” campaign, reminding viewers of a time when everyone backed Britain. The studio audience then laughed loudly as the Nazi arrows in the opening titles moved Britain back home, puncturing the hubris.

"Made in New Zealand"