[An abridged version of this article was published in the September issue of North & South.]
You know you’re getting old when you can look at a 1949
Christmas card illustrated with caricatures of the editorial staff of the
Labour Party newspaper the Southern Cross
and not only recognise many of the names, but recall knowing them personally.
I didn’t know them then, of course; I hadn’t quite been
born. But I worked and drank with them two or three decades later.
The Christmas card (above) is reproduced in Pressing On, the second volume of Ian F Grant’s monumental two-part
history of New Zealand newspapers. Volume I, Lasting Impressions, covered the period 1840-1920 and was published
in 2018. The sequel, which was launched in May, brought us up to the year 2000 –
a cut-off point sensibly chosen because after that, things got messy and
chaotic in the print media, with no clear picture of where all the turbulence
would lead. (It’s probably safe to say there will be no Volume III, or if there
is, it will be a lot shorter than the 670 pages of Pressing On.)
The Christmas card reproduced in Ian’s book was drawn by John
McNamara, aka “Mack”, the Southern Cross’s
resident illustrator. The subjects were identified in spidery writing so tiny
that I had to use a magnifying glass.
In those days newspapers pompously referred to reporters and
sub-editors as their “literary” staff. I couldn’t help letting out little yelps
of recognition as I identified those depicted on the Southern Cross Christmas card. Not all of them, but quite a few.
They were journalists of a generation that now seems as
distant and archaic as clunky Imperial 66 typewriters, wads of copy paper, metal
spikes on sub-editors’ desks (on which to impale stories that didn’t make the
grade), Lamson tubes (pneumatic suction tubes for dispatching stories to the
printer to be set in type) and overfilled ashtrays – all standard newspaper
office appurtenances in that era.
Even the Southern
Cross itself was a thing of antiquity. The idea of a daily paper published
by a political party is unimaginable now, but the Southern Cross was born out of frustration with newspapers that were
seen at best as unsympathetic, at worst downright hostile, to the political and
industrial wings of the Labour movement.
Launched in Wellington in 1946, the Southern Cross was Labour’s attempt to even the score, or at least
the odds, in the battle for the public’s hearts and minds. But the paper lasted
only five years before being brought down by a combination of inadequate
capital, incompetent management, struggles for control between competing party
factions, and not least by the departure of journalists who, although
sympathetic to the cause, became fed up with being told what to write by the
likes of party leader Peter Fraser and trade union tyrant Fintan Patrick Walsh.
Seventy-five years on, the Southern Cross is notable chiefly for the talented people it
employed, many of whom went on to positions of prominence as writers, editors and
broadcasters – which brings us back to the faces and names on that 1949
Christmas card.
In the top row, I see Ian Cross, Noel Hilliard and Winton
Keay.
More than two decades on from his stint as a young reporter
at the Southern Cross, Cross would
become the Listener’s most successful
editor ever, albeit helped by a state-imposed monopoly on the right to publish
weekly TV and radio programme schedules. Long before that, he had attained fame
as the author of The God Boy, a novel
partly inspired by a murder trial he had covered as a young reporter but also incorporating
elements of his own Catholic childhood. Published in 1957, The God Boy was acclaimed by the New York Times as “a brilliant first novel”. Its success wasn’t replicated by his later
literary efforts and Cross vanished into the PR game before resurfacing at The Listener in 1973.
I first dealt with him after he was appointed chairman of
the Broadcasting Corporation in 1977, effectively making him the supremo over virtually
all television and radio, which was then still under tight state control.
Cross was a zealous defender of the Listener’s sole right to publish TV and radio programme information
in advance. Daily newspapers were allowed to publish programme listings no more
than 24 hours ahead, giving the government-owned Listener a huge competitive advantage. On one occasion, when a paper challenged the
monopoly by breaching the rules, Cross punished the entire daily press by
withholding all programme information – a petulant response that penalised the
public at large. I edited the Evening
Post’s TV page at the time and wrote a column accusing him of behaving like
a teacher who placed the whole class on detention because of one pupil’s
transgression.
I interviewed Cross at length for the Listener in 2014, in the big, chilly Kapiti Coast house where he
rattled around with his wife Tui. Cross was a hard man to read; not cold,
exactly – that would be overstating it – but rather distant and aloof. Like
many good journalists, he always retained something of the quality of an
outsider. When he died in 2019, I was privileged to write his obituary for the
magazine he had once edited.
Noel Hilliard was another who became famous as an author.
His 1960 novel Maori Girl, which was
followed in 1974 by Maori Woman,
broke new ground by tackling the taboo subject of racism in New Zealand. He and
I worked together in the 1970s at the Evening
Post, where Noel was a sub-editor. We lived a short distance away from each
other in Titahi Bay, and on the rare occasions when I had the use of an office
car I would sometimes drive Noel home, he never having had a driver’s licence
(a peculiarity he shared with several other male journalists of his vintage). I
would sometimes sit with Noel’s wife Kiriwai on the bus from Porirua station;
she hailed from the Far North and had been introduced to him by the poet Hone
Tuwhare. The Hilliards’ daughter Hinemoa babysat our kids.
Noel personified many of the characteristics of a particular
type of journalist from that era: a natural leftie from a deprived working-class
background whose political views were forged by his experience of the
Depression and its impact on his parents. In pub conversations he was always polite
and affable, in fact almost courtly, but his politics were never far from the
surface and you could sense a controlled anger. He had been a member of the
Communist Party but like many others, had quit in disgust after the Soviet
invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Noel had previously worked at the Listener and was a veteran of a famous stoush over the 1972 sacking
of the magazine’s editor, the stroppy Alexander MacLeod (whom Cross succeeded).
MacLeod’s dismissal, which resulted in a commission of inquiry, was widely seen
as punishment by the Broadcasting Corporation board (heavily dominated by
National Party figures and chaired by Major-General Walter McKinnon, father of Sir
Don) for taking a defiantly liberal editorial line on such issues as race
relations and the Vietnam War. It didn’t help that MacLeod’s people skills
weren’t great. He had a strained relationship with some of his staff and his
firing triggered a bitter schism that left its imprint for years. I can’t
recall which side Noel took, but I would guess from his political leanings and
his subsequent departure from the magazine that he was in the pro-MacLeod camp.
Next to Noel on the Christmas card is Winton Keay, who in
1949 was the Southern Cross’s editor.
By the time I knew him in the 1970s, Win was an old man and seemed an unlikely
person to have been in charge of a paper with an explicitly political agenda,
still less a left-wing one. He was a frequent visitor to the public bar of the
Britannia Hotel in Willis St, where Wellington’s newspaper journalists drank,
but I don’t recall him ever showing any interest in talk about politics. Win
was dapper, charming and a lifelong bachelor, a combination which in those days
was assumed to mean only one thing. He was also one of the few regulars at “the
Brit” who could fraternise with equal ease among journalists from both the Evening Post and the Dominion – rival papers in those days, with
distinct cultures that weren’t always entirely compatible.
Elsewhere on the Christmas card I see Alex Fry. Alex was
chief reporter and nominally assistant editor at the Listener when I worked there in the late 70s and early 80s. Not
only was he a former flatmate of Noel Hilliard, but both had spent time in a
hilltop sanatorium at Pukeora, near Waipukurau, after contracting tuberculosis
– a life-threatening illness blamed on living conditions in their unheated Wellington
flat.
Alex was that rare creature, a journalist with a university
degree. He had a BA at a time when virtually all his peers joined newspapers
straight from school and worked their way up from menial jobs as messengers and
reading room copyholders. A West Coaster by birth, he had served in the Royal
Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, though not during the war, and worked for the Manchester Evening News. Like MacLeod, Alex
wasn’t popular with all the Listener staff
and had a reputation for being irascible, but I liked him. He was a graceful
and erudite writer who should have spent more time doing what he did well
rather than pointlessly shuffling bits of paper and largely being ignored in
his glass-fronted enclosure.
Talking of erudite writers brings us to another of the rising
stars (excuse the pun) on the Southern
Cross Christmas card: W P (Bill) Reeves. In the 1960s, Reeves became editor
of The Dominion and forged an
unlikely friendship with an ambitious young Australian newspaper entrepreneur
named Rupert Murdoch. It was the time of Murdoch’s successful bid for a
controlling interest in The Dominion
– his first acquisition outside Australia – and the two bonded over their
shared passion for newspapers and journalism. When in Wellington, Murdoch would
stay with the Reeves family and the two men would spend hours sprawled on the
floor planning the layout of the soon-to-be-launched Sunday Times (now the Sunday
Star-Times).
As Dominion editor,
Reeves – a natural-born liberal – had gently eased the paper away from its
traditional conservative stance. He later recalled that Murdoch made no attempt
to interfere with the Dom’s editorial line; in fact was something of a
left-winger himself back then. But when the young tycoon decided in 1968 that the
paper should go tabloid – a grievous mistake, reversed four years later –
Reeves was replaced as editor by Jack Kelleher, whom Murdoch thought
better-suited to tabloid-style journalism. Reeves stayed on as an editorial
writer and columnist and continued contributing his weekly Standoff: A Radical View – always authoritative and impeccably
crafted – long after his retirement.
It almost goes without saying that there were few women on
the editorial staff of the Southern Cross;
to be precise, two out of the 32 people on that Christmas card. It wasn’t until
the 60s and 70s that women started to infiltrate newsrooms in numbers. But one
of those two on the Labour daily, women’s editor Christine Cole, would become Dame Christine Cole
Catley, an influential figure in journalism and book publishing.
Again, I had a personal connection with her because she was
one of the tutors on the Wellington Polytechnic part-time journalism course
that I attended two nights a week – my course fees paid by my employer, the Evening Post – in 1968. Something of a
trail-blazer for women journalists, Chris had been the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation’s correspondent in Indonesia during the turbulent years of the
autocratic Sukarno regime. She wrote a popular daily TV review in the Dominion under the nom-de-plume Sam Cree,
the choice of a male name indicating that even in the 60s, editors weren’t sure
their readers were ready for women columnists. (Chris told me years later that she
deliberately adopted a “tough-sounding” name because she didn’t want to sound effeminate.)
Later again, while living in the Marlborough Sounds, she and her husband
founded Cape Catley Press. She became an important mentor to New Zealand
writers and was made a Dame in 2006, five years before her death, for services
to literature.
Moving along, we come to the force of nature that was Gordon
Dryden, then a young and very left-wing sub-editor. How left-wing? A small
clue: he later edited the NZ Communist Party paper The People’s Voice. The
son of a sawmiller, Dryden lost count of the number of schools he attended and
got his first newspaper job at the scandal-sheet New Zealand Truth when he was 15.
He would go on to become a PR consultant to Labour Party
leaders, a pioneer of talkback radio (he founded Radio Pacific) and the
promoter of an unsuccessful bid – squashed by prime minister Norman Kirk – to run
the country’s first private TV network. He
also, in later life, became a formidable current affairs interviewer. Robert
Muldoon reputedly called him the most dangerous man in New Zealand and refused
to be interviewed by him again after they clashed on the TV show Friday Conference. An irrepressible
communicator of ideas, Dryden also became a passionate promoter of child
welfare and educational reform, but never forgot his roots in newspaper
journalism. On trips to Wellington from his base in Auckland he would make a
point of calling in at the Brit for a beer – or several – with old colleagues.
(If my research is correct, he was the last of that 1949 cohort to pass on. He
died in 2022, aged 91.)
One of Dryden’s drinking mates, and another face on that
Christmas card, was Tom Walsh, whom I knew during his long tenure as the Evening Post’s chief sub-editor. Tom was
old-school to the core, with a voice like the bark of a seal. The uncle of Dame
Fran Walsh, of Lord of the Rings
fame, he was the only man I ever knew who would light each cigarette with the
butt of the previous one, which is where the term chain-smoking came from. Tom
would be in the public bar of the Brit every afternoon as soon as the day’s
work was done and wouldn’t leave until it was time to go home for dinner. Like
most journalists of that era he drank too much, at least by today’s standards,
and smoked to excess. I doubt that he ate a healthy diet – certainly not at
work, because deadline pressures didn’t permit it – and I can’t imagine that he
was a stickler for regular exercise. He lived into his 90s.
(As an aside, pubs were central to the culture of
journalism. A journalist visiting an unfamiliar city always knew where to find
local journos because every issue of the Journalists’ Union’s monthly paper
carried ads showing which pubs they frequented.)
Several other familiar names leapt out from that Christmas
card. One is Ben O’Connor, who came from a big Irish Catholic family from
Nelson and the West Coast – the same family that produced present-day Labour
MPs Damian and Greg. Ben became the Evening
Post’s business editor and later, the spokesman for the Bankers’
Association. A trenchant and acerbic conservative despite his family’s
left-wing leanings, he once stood up at an Independent Newspapers Ltd annual
shareholders’ meeting and called for my sacking as editor of the Dominion because he disapproved of the
paper’s editorial line, which (among other things) supported the Labour
government’s right to defy the US over nuclear-armed ships and the Anzus
Treaty.
Louis Johnson, who became a much-admired poet, is on the
card too. So is Noel Harrison, who established the aforementioned Wellington
Polytechnic journalism course (New Zealand’s first, and long since absorbed by Massey
University) and critiqued the press on the weekly TV programme Column Comment, as did Ian Cross. Harrison’s career ended under an undeserved
cloud when he was implicated in allegations of fraud at Northland Polytech, where
he was chief executive. A judge threw the case out for lack of evidence and an investigation by North & South
reporter David McLoughlin concluded that Harrison had unfairly been targeted by
disaffected staff. Harrison later won a $124,000 Employment Court payout and
successfully sued National MP John Banks, who had levelled the accusations
against him, for defamation.
Lastly there’s Merlin Muir, who understandably preferred to
be known as Lin (although his caricaturist misspelled his name as Lyn). Lin covered
Parliament for the Southern Cross and
would later spend more than 20 years as a desk man at the NZ Press Association.
I remember him well from my time as a young and hopelessly inadequate industrial
reporter at the Dominion, because Lin
would sometimes phone me to query some aspect of a story I had written about
the constant industrial disputes which in those days (the early 70s) caused
enormous disruption in the life of the country. (All daily papers supplied
copies of important stories to the NZPA so they could be distributed
nationally.) I came to dread those calls from Lin because while his questions
were always polite and reasonable, which wasn’t always the case when sub-editors
pulled up mistake-prone reporters, I was often embarrassed because I couldn’t answer
them. He exposed flaws in my stories that the Dom’s own subs never picked up.
The same Merlin Muir had a celebrated feud with his
Khandallah neighbour, the architect Ian Athfield. Muir complained that
Athfield’s hillside house kept expanding with scant regard for council planning
laws or the rights of those living next door. The bitter dispute culminated
with Muir bringing a defamation action against the Institute of Architects,
whose magazine took Athfield’s side but ended up publishing an apology to the
retired journo.
There were other notable journalists who worked for the Southern Cross but didn’t feature in the
Christmas card, presumably because they weren’t on the staff in that particular
year. One was my uncle Dick Scott, the paper’s farming editor. Dick, another
communist (though he too would quit the party), was married to my father’s
younger sister. He subsequently edited the union paper Transport Worker and wrote the book 151 Days, a partisan but immensely lively and readable account of
the 1951 waterfront dispute. He also founded and edited New Zealand’s first
wine magazine, but left his most indelible mark as the author of Ask That Mountain, the 1975 book that
lifted the veil on the Parihaka affair – a stain on the country’s history
that had previously been ignored.
The aforementioned Jack Kelleher also once worked for the Southern Cross, as did Russell Bond, a
quiet little man who would later occupy a back room at the Dominion, where he wrote editorials and classical music reviews.
That so many former Southern
Cross journalists went on to work for the Dominion (Cross was another – he became the Dom’s chief reporter in
the mid-50s) was ironic, to say the least. Politically the papers were poles
apart, the Dominion having been
founded in 1907 by wealthy farmers and professional men with the express object
of bringing down the Liberal Party government that laid the groundwork for the welfare
state and broke up the estates of the landed gentry.
Another long-serving Dominion
journalist was the dignified and gentlemanly Read Mason, a Second World War
conscientious objector whose brother Rex had been the influential Minister of Justice in the
first Labour government. Kelleher, on the other hand, was a Catholic and a
conservative, albeit a liberally minded one. Despite the paper’s Tory roots, the Dom
welcomed journalists of all political shades and its newsroom always had a slightly
wild, anarchic spirit.
In any case, while many of the Southern Cross journalists may have been left-wing in their personal
beliefs, I don’t think they necessarily saw it as their mission to promote a
particular political creed. It’s more likely that some simply thought the field
was unfairly tilted in favour of the Tory press and that the other side
deserved a fair shake.
While it’s a mere side track to the main narrative in Ian
Grant’s newspaper history, the 1949 Christmas card is an important journalism
artefact. It recalls a time when
newspapers were staffed mostly by egalitarian, personable, highly literate and
idealistic lefties, some of whom had a very limited formal education. They observed
the rules of editorial balance, had a broad general knowledge, were well-read, could
spell properly and were sticklers for correct grammar. Today’s journalists,
despite being the most highly educated in history – at least in terms of
academic credentials – could learn a lot from them.
Pressing On: The story of New Zealand’s newspapers, 1921-2000, by Ian F Grant, is published by Fraser
Books in association with the Alexander Turnbull Library. Recommended retail
price: $69.50.
