Slowly, we are learning what has been happening to the Western Mail, the self-styled national newspaper of Wales.
Those who have been shown the door at the Cardiff morning have generally buttoned their lips – or been reluctant to say much.
But now one of the strongest voices from that paper has spoken out, and named names and detailed company policies.
John Humphries spills the beans in his Freedom Fighters – Wales’s Forgotten “War”, 1963-93, just published by the University of Wales Press. The war, of course, ranged from Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru’s attack on pipelines sending Welsh water to England so that the English could bath and wouldn’t get thirsty, to several hundred arsons against rural cottages owned by immigrant English.
But what is really fascinating are Mr Humphries’s extensive comments on policies within the Western Mail. If we ever thought of dubbing the WM Llais y Sais, we now possess the detailed evidence. Perhaps not the Voice of the English, but certainly the Voice of the British – and of course the two are widely regarded nowadays as synonymous.
The paper was, of course, founded by Conservative interests to serve both Bristol and Cardiff (in that order, the first town being at that time, and now, by far the larger and potentially more profitable). It didn’t take long, of course, for the Bristolians to send the Welsh newcomer packing !
By containing his comments within his pioneering study on the “war”, it might perhaps be supposed that the journalist is taking a pro-bomber line.
At the time in question, far from it. JH had just added £30,000 from the Western Mail to the £50,000 North Wales Police reward for information about the arson campaign (and a fat lot of use the coppers’ reward was !).
In his volume, JH writes, “In refocusing the Western Mail on Welsh national issues, after a decade of relative indifference, I had upset those who regarded the 1979 devolution result as the last throw of the Welsh dice. By resurrecting the debate about the democratic deficit and the need for a Welsh Assembly I was rocking the boat again.
“That was fine so long as the managing director backed me, but once Robert Tilsley was dispatched I was exposed to those who cared only for the balance sheet and not a jot for Wales….
“I was told by the new managing director, imported from England, that London had decided it was time for a change of direction: I had taken the paper as far as I could and now they wanted someone else.”
JH has never said anything remotely like that. All he has done, a number of times, has been to state that a “hit list” existed which “they” were working down. One never knew what to make of the comment.
Not so long afterward, his deputy John Cosslett, another Welshman – who, in fact, knew as much, if not more, about Wales – found himself frozen out of an increasing number of decisions, until his job went as well.
News editor Lee Wenham, an Assembly enthusiast, from Rhondda, was given a couple of months to get a new job. For a time he thought he might end up in the dead-end lands of Hull. He is now with Swansea council. His crime had been to make it clear to the then editor, a son of Southend and a devolution hater, both when in Cardiff and during a previous time when he had edited one of the north-east of England morning papers, that history was moving on. In other words, a JH of a later generation.
When I got the push – in 2002 – the company went too far. They closed the Assembly office at the same time, using the ridiculous claim they would do the task from Thomson House (a little over a mile away, beyond Central Station). “Ridiculous” because journalists just won’t make that sort of trip (a very long walk) unless it is pressed on them, and the news desk for some time had exhibited extremely little interest in any coverage of the Assembly.
Indeed, almost the only reporter who over the years willing to make the trip was health correspondent Madeleine Brindley. Anyway, the upshot was the biggest shock Mr Dye has ever suffered when south Wales commercial interests launched the bid to launch a rival daily.
It can sometimes be questioned who is the most important figure in a newspaper, the editor or the managing director. Judging by the Western Mail and Echo’s performance before an Assembly committee, it is certainly Mr Dye, not editor Alan Edmunds – Bristol university-educated son of an estate agent now principally active in Fairwater, adjacent the Ely council estate in Cardiff.
Mr Dye made the running in the committee, leaving Mr Edmunds trailing as his deputy. Mr Dye’s certainly not Welsh. He started with Thomson (now Trinity Mirror) in the north-east of England, and never worked in Wales until he arrived here in 2002.
And you can be sure of one thing – Mr Edmunds is no JH. When he took on editorship of the Western Mail, he admitted to speaking “pigeon” Welsh – ie, very simple Welsh, presumably not extending much beyond “bore da”. This is very much an anglocentric term, which basically denies the existence of Welsh as a communicative language, scarcely heard outside the Cardiff middle classes..
The big policy turn taken by the Western Mail on London’s orders is to dumb down. This decision has done the paper little good. Not only did it spark the bid to set up a new paper; it is also radically different to the line taken by Northcliffe, part of the Daily Mail group.
That group’s papers (seen in Wales in the Evening Post, Swansea) have continued to believe its readers retain brains – with the result that the company is retaining readers much better than Trinity’s down-marketed efforts.
Now that Mr Humphries’s book is out, it is surely no surprise that, when two new volumes are featured, it is the soccer book which gets far more prominence: four pages in the colour magazine for a soccer volume from Roberto Martinez, temporarily of Swansea, compared with a single news page for Freedom Fighters.
It would be an interesting question as to whether there is more interest in Wales about John Jenkins or Mr Martinez. I suppose we may beg to differ. But it fits in very well with Western Mail company policy. Stuff your readers with the opiate of the masses; keep them as far as possible away from the real stuff of politics, particularly if it might go bang.
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Clive,
You must know that most of this is horseshit. For example, Lee Wenham didn’t leave until after Neil Fowler – quite some time afterwards, in fact.
I wasn’t working at the paper when John Humphries was editor, but you should have at least addressed claims that his drinking led on two occasions to incidents of great embarressment for both the Western Mail and Wales as a whole.
There is no evidence to suggest that the various step-changes in editorial direction that we experienced were anything other than local decisions, and you cannot hold up the Evening Post as the last bastion of Welsh journalistic values, which in no way denigrates the staff’s efforts. The business has gone through exactly the same kind of changes as Trinity Mirror (albeit on a smaller scale). For example, the Post is no longer printed in Swansea – it is printed in Swindon, I believe – and it is no longer an evening paper.
You seem to suggest that there is some sinister historical mission to impose English values upon Wales via the Western Mail, when this simply isn’t the case. The paper has changed ownership on a number of occasision, as you well know, and with new propriators come new priorities.
You really should have made more of the Assembly hearing into the Welsh media, and Mr Dye’s performance there, when it happened. I also doubt he worried very much about plans for a rival Welsh daily, particularly as those plans are dead in the water.
What is most galling is that there is a substantial and ongoing debate to be had about how Wales is best served by its media, and this inaccurate, ranging and, frankly, self-serving rant contributes nothing to it. Along with commercial direction and other issues of the moment for publishers and broadcasters, there remains significant geographical, demograpical and cultural differences that they have to contend with.
I trust that you treat some of the personal issues I’ve highlighted here about certain colleagues with the confidence they deserve.
Duncan, a former colleague on the Mail, fails to notice that the entire background to my piece is John Humphries’s material in Freedom Fighters. The claims about London control are his. I was very surprised at his comments – but his thoughts have been held for some time by quite a few others in Wales; now they have the backing evidence. You may call JH a liar if you wish…but we soon get into the entire issue of Llais y Sais, dumbing down, etc.
Duncan is right that the entire issue is worthy of investigation. Which is where we get onto the Evening Post (now, incredibly upmarket of the Echo); the editorial level now adopted by the Mail (significantly downmarket of both Northcliffe’s Western Morning News (Plymouth), and the Eastern Daily Press (Norwich)).
Quick checking of circulation figures for the Post and the Echo shows that the Echo is performing significantly worse than the Post Perhaps there is a lesson there about going too hard for Sun readers, and forgetting those who prefer the Daily Mail and the former broadsheets.
A more careful comparison of circulation would be valuable for the morning papers. As well as for their content. Before the Western Mail slipped in its standards, that paper was comparable with both the Norwich and Plymouth offerings; all were major “regional” papers, much of the same ilk. Clearly superior to, for instance, the papers in Bristol, Liverpool (I refrain from mentioning Llandudno), Ipswich and Newcastle.
It has been argued for long that the Mail’s place is upmarket. Neil Fowler seemed to have been appointed to go in that direction. Unfortunately, he knew far too little about the country he came into which meant the exercise was somewhat misdirected. Because the Eisteddfod was clearly different, he went overboard for it. That dealt with one week of the year; for the rest, he looked at Wales through English eyes, thus missing much that was different about the country and which an upmarket readership would desire to know about. And that was before we reached his dislike of the entire idea of an Assembly (might he have called it a “country council on stilts”?).
I don’t understand your comment about Mr Dye’s evidence to the Assembly culture committee; I wrote about it extensively at the time in UK Press Gazette.
John may claim that the step-change was ordered from London, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that you agree with him, Clive.
After discussing his successors’ contributions, you go on to comment: “The big policy turn taken by the Western Mail on London’s orders is to dumb down.” That places the change in the present, not some 15 years ago, when John was editor.
I don’t accuse John of lying. I am simply questioning your relaying of his claims without rigorous investigation. I have inferred, from your piece, that it suits your agenda to air them, rather than use the comments as the jumping off point for a discussion on the general state of the Welsh media. A case of tail wagging dog, methinks.
I guess my point – and those of journalists that I regularly speak to across Wales, in a wide number of media organisations – is that all this talk of the English invading all aspects of Welsh life, and particularly its media, with some kind of co-ordinated agenda that works against this country – is a rather anachronistic and irrelevant point to make when jobs are once again at risk, and for far more immediate reasons.
However, it once again (and, sadly, not for the first time) raises yet more questions about how Wales will be served by its media.
Cheers.
There was no need for rigorous investigation of JK’s claims. Firstly, the WM is controlled by Trinity Mirror, and it is usual in large companies for a beady eye to be kept from the centre on whether the peripheries are following (centrally-decided) policies which will lead (it is hoped) to greater profits.
The Welsh media is in a poor state – and the main reason is that London papers almost entirely ignore the country. That doesn’t happen in Scotland, in Ulster, or in Eire – where even the Mail gives page lead to a parade which centres around shooting British soldiers…
The Welsh Mirror was a very welcome arrival, but surely lasted only until the nasty Nats had failed to win the Welsh general election …
Wales used to have regional editions of the Sun (the old Herald, admittedly), the Express and perhaps more.
For the sake of democracy, pressure should be brought on London for their resurrection.
The fight needs to be led from the Assembly … but everyone there seems afraid of saying anything which in any way might be construed as anti-Trinity Mirror (JH makes the point and we all remember the fate of Alun Pugh when he criticised the Mail).
You may have never noticed, but the British press is anti-Welsh, not in that it is plain nasty, but in that it fails to cover the country, and assumes we are all English living in a totally-integrated part of England.
Jobs are certainly important, as well as whether evening papers are printed overnight. But local dailies in Canada are printed overnight … and they manage to combine local and national news. Who is Britain has been courageous enough to try that mix ?
Cheers
I worked with John Humphries on the Mail, on a peer basis, many years ago – he news editor, when I was chief sub-editor. He was a brilliant journalist who has my lasting respect. I am unaware of subsequent machinations on the Mail (after 1966) but even in my day there was a habit of importing senior staff who either knew little of Wales, its culture and history, or had no vision of producing a newspaper resolute in advocating Welsh interests. Did John Humphries suffer because he was too much of a Welsh patriot?
Glyn Williams, Perth, Australia.