Blackout in Britain

Fleet Street's ink was running dry, and throughout the British Isles newspapers and periodicals were closed or closing. Reason: Great Britain's worst printing strike in more than 30 years. Started last month, when members of ten printers' unions walked off their jobs, the strike last week spread to 38 firms making ink for the nation's presses, including those of London's mass-circulation dailies.

Originally at issue were demands by the printers, who average $40 to $50 for a 43 1/2-hour week, for a 10% raise and a 40-hour week. Employers' groups flatly rejected them, later made an unacceptably low offer. The unions refused arbitration, called the walkout instead. Most provincial papers--about 1,100 weeklies and 87 dailies--soon were forced to suspend operations completely. Others put on the old school try, produced truncated editions using midnight oil and ingenuity.

"Eh, Mate." In Clackmannanshire on the Firth of Forth, Editor John Ogilvie sat up all night setting type himself, brought out his weekly Alloa Circular and Hillfoots Record on time. Girl typists helped keep the Birmingham Mail on the streets by having a go at the Linotype machines ("Eh, mate. Can't we have overalls like you?" called one begrimed girl to a man, gasped when she recognized Eric Clayson, chairman of the board, who had donned work clothes to help out). In Devon, an ironmonger's wife who works as a stringer correspondent for several regional papers decided to put out one of her own, used foolscap and duplicating machines to publish the Chulmleigh Chimes. In such villages as Honiton and Devizes, town criers polished their bells, walked the streets belting out the news.

Directly hit by the strike were London's influential weeklies. The liberal New Statesman got into hot water with its labor friends by printing in Dlisseldorf, but was back in England a week later with union approval to hire a printer in Essex. The Economist, which was printed in a Swiss nunnery during a lesser strike in 1956, found a printer in Brussels, moved to Paris a week later, after Belgian unions expressed sympathy for the British strikers and threatened a boycott.

"The Most Intractable." The "national" papers, i.e., the London dailies, had worked out separate deals with the printers' unions and remained little affected until the ink-manufacturing workers, whose own wage scale is based on that of the printers, joined the strike. With only a few days' reserve supply of ink, the national dailies were immediately forced to cut their size. At week's end they pooled their ink reserves, but could hardly hope to keep publishing much longer. And with publishers and strikers reluctant to compromise ("This," said an official of the Ministry of Labor, "is the most intractable strike we have known in years"), England faced the melancholy prospect of a near-complete newspaper blackout, with only two daily papers likely to continue publishing. The exceptions: the Manchester Guardian and London's Communist Daily Worker, which have ample reserves of ink.

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