Part 4. Broadening horizons: Pop goes the Guardian (1960-94)

Alastair Hetherington, who had taken over as editor in 1956 and quickly established himself by taking an independent line on Suez, had two huge tasks as the Guardian sought to complete the transition from a Manchester paper to a fully fledged national one. The first was to move the Guardian and its main printing plant to London, which he did after a nightmare year virtually living on the London to Manchester train. The other was saving the Guardian from a merger with the Times in a financial crisis in the mid-1960s. It would have meant the end of the Guardian and that came very close.

Hetherington’s great ally in saving the Guardian from that fate was Richard Scott, the teenager who swam ashore on Windermere in 1932 in the boating accident which killed his father. He was now the paper’s Washington correspondent and chairman of the Scott Trust. He and Hetherington decided the Guardian would go on alone, to sink or swim. It swam.

Hetherington’s successor was Peter Preston. He became the editor in 1975 when the Guardian was still in its first home in London in Gray’s Inn Road, where it shared with the Sunday Times. It was the last building the Guardian occupied where the paper was printed on the premises – actually in an underground annexe. Even so, the building vibrated as the giant premises got up to speed. Preston’s immediate task was to move the whole show to the Guardian’s first London home of its own, just a few hundred yards away in Farringdon Road.

The move to Farringdon Road in 1976 coincided with a deep recession. The paper came through and during the 1980s, the Thatcher years, Preston presided over a period of the highest circulation the paper has ever had, with the figure rising well over 500,000. Preston presided over the Guardian during the revolution that came with the new technology after Murdoch’s fight with the unions over his move to Wapping in 1986.

Later that year the Independent started. For some time it looked as though it would overtake the Guardian, but it never did. Preston brought in the radical redesign of 1988, carried out by David Hillman of Pentagram. The Weekend Guardian started shortly afterwards and G2 four years after that. Both of those innovatory sections were launched by the person who was to succeed Preston, Alan Rusbridger. In 1993 the Guardian bought the Observer, beating the Independent which would have almost certainly closed it.

111 Lady Chatterley acquitted

Lady Chatterley may, conveniently, be said to have ushered in the 1960s. In an editorial from 3 November 1960, the Guardian welcomed the acquittal of D H Lawrence’s novel in a case brought by the director of public prosecutions under the Obscene Publications Act. It called the verdict “a triumph of common sense – and the more pleasing because it was unexpected”. The six-day trial had gripped the country, and witnesses for the defence included E M Forster, Richard Hoggart and Rebecca West. Prosecution counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones did not help his cause by asking the jury: “Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?” His was the authentic voice of a disappearing world. Penguin immediately published the book, which sold out in a matter of hours.

112 The Guardian’s first fuck

The first recorded use of the word “fuck” in the Guardian was in a column by Wayland Young published on 4 November 1960. He was quoting the evidence Richard Hoggart gave at the Lady Chatterley trial when emphasising the honesty of D H Lawrence’s prose: “Simply this is what one does – one fucks.” The Guardian was censured for printing the word by the Press Council, which said doing so was objectionable and unnecessary.

113 A day in the life of the Guardian

In 1960, Merton Park Films made a 20-minute mini-documentary called News Story about a day in the life of the Guardian. It captures life at the paper just as it was poised to move from Manchester to London. Significant figures in Guardian history – Hetherington himself, Russian expert Victor Zorza, features editor Brian Redhead – make appearances amid a fug of tobacco smoke. Truly, this is a vanished world – when men with pipes ruled the roost, copy was phoned in from public call boxes, and, because of the reliance on the “hot metal” process of making up pages, journalism was as much about light engineering as story gathering.

114 The paper’s fight for survival

In 1961 the Guardian started printing in London as well as Manchester, using the Sunday Times’ presses and installing a small sub-editing team in Gray’s Inn Road. The move, initiated by managing director Laurence Scott, was a financial disaster. Losses mounted, the circulation target of 300,000 was met far more slowly than the management of the paper hoped, and Scott became convinced of the need to merge with the Times. Hetherington opposed the move, in September 1966 the Times was bought by Lord Thomson instead, Scott was sidelined and a new management team installed which embarked on the task of shoring up the paper’s financial position.

115 The Grauniad

The difficulties of preparing half the paper in London and half in Manchester, and the primitive system of remote typesetting adopted, meant the paper was littered with typographical errors, leading Private Eye to start calling it the Grauniad, a name which quite unfarely has stuck. Poor copytaking added to the problems. Theatre and opera critic Philip Hope-Wallace once wrote a review in which his description of Tosca as being “like a tigress robbed of her whelps” became “like a tiger robbed of his whelks”. Neville Cardus intended to call a singer at the Edinburgh Festival “a quite elegant vocal interpreter of Berg ”; it appeared as “the white elephant vocal interpreter of Berg”. There is no record of her suing.

116 Save the Guardian!

Hetherington’s campaign to save the Guardian was backed by a number of leading politicians, as the letter above shows. Liberal leader Jo Grimond, who later became a trustee of the paper, is on the list, as are Roy Hattersley and David Marquand, both of whom are still contributing to the Guardian almost 50 years later.

117 The pop revolution

The Guardian was quick to latch on to the Beatles. In June 1963, in a long feature with photographs by Guardian staff photographer Graham Finlayson, Stanley Reynolds charted their remarkable rise: “When they first played at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, now a sort of D’Oyly Carte of what the cognoscenti call the Liverpool Scene, they received a note from the management saying: ‘If you play another rock number you’ll have to leave.’ ” Reynolds reported that in the wake of the Beatles’ success, there were now 200 rock groups in Liverpool.

118 Assassination of President Kennedy

The Guardian had two correspondents in the US in the early 1960s, the political analyst Max Freedman and Alistair Cooke, who was a superb general reporter. It was Cooke who wrote the front-page story on the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963, albeit from his apartment in New York. Despite – or, as he thought because of – having to follow events on TV, his story had his characteristic immediacy. “This is being written”, he wrote, “in the numbed interval between the first shock and the harried attempt to reconstruct a sequence of fact from an hour of tumult. This is the first assassination of a world figure that took place in the age of television, and every network and station in the country took up the plotting of the appalling story. It begins to form a grisly pattern, contradicted by a grisly preface: the projection on television screens of a happy crowd and a grinning president only a few seconds before the gunshots.”

119 Robert Smithies

Smithies had a career unique in the Guardian – or indeed anywhere else. He was a wonderful photographer who succeeded Walter Doughty in 1955 and took a huge range of photographs for the paper for almost 20 years before becoming a television presenter on Granada TV. But he had a second Guardian life as a much-loved crossword setter under the name Bunthorne. The clue of which he was most proud was: “Amundsen’s forwarding address (4)”. Answer: Mush!

120 First strip cartoon

The paper’s first strip cartoon was introduced in 1964 – what would C P Scott have thought? It was by the Australian cartoonist Arthur Horner, and followed the attempts of his cartoon creation Colonel Pewter (who had had a previous life in the News Chronicle) to come to terms with the 1960s.

121 The editor comes to London

Alastair Hetherington had been determined to keep his base in Manchester, even though many of the editorial staff were now in London. However, in 1963 the Profumo affair forced a change of heart. Profumo, the minister of war, was forced to resign when details emerged of his relationship with Christine Keeler, a showgirl who also happened to be sleeping with a naval attaché at the Soviet embassy. This was heady stuff, and the Guardian was almost alone in accepting Profumo’s initial denials. Hetherington realised being in Manchester made it harder to stay in touch with metropolitan gossip, and relocated early in 1964. As Geoffrey Taylor, historian of this period in the paper’s history wryly notes, “The privilege of turning the Guardian into a fully national newspaper belongs to Christine Keeler.”

122 The 1966 World Cup Final

If England won the football world cup today, the occasion would be marked a 96-page supplement. Back in 1966, it received a column on the front page (which concentrated on arguments over whether England would get their £1,000-a-man bonus) and half of page 10, which combined a match report by the long-serving and famously tetchy Guardian football writer Eric Todd with a somewhat pedestrian summing up of the tournament. Todd lives up to his reputation with an oddly grudging acknowledgement of England’s success. His criticism that England had no forward able to deliver a “killer punch” seems a little bizarre in the light of Geoff Hurst’s hat trick.

123 The Aberfan disaster

The Aberfan disaster of 21 October 1966, when a slag heap overlooking a mining village in South Wales collapsed, burying a school and killing 116 children and 28 adults, traumatised the country. Tony Geraghty filed a moving report of the frantic search for survivors: “ ‘Stop the machines. Stop walking about now, will you.’ No explanation is needed. We are all listening for signs of survival somewhere under that beastly, oily black mound. After perhaps a minute’s pause the whistle blows once more. It is the signal to continue digging.” Peter Johns, a Guardian staff photographer in the 1960s and a brilliant chronicler of the period, produced a powerful series of portraits of the aftermath of the disaster.

124 Papas

Bill Papas was the Guardian’s chief political cartoonist of the 1960s, and combined superb draughtsmanship with razor-sharp commentary. His spelling was, however, terrible, and colleagues had to double-check every word he used in his drawings. Papas took a year-long sabbatical in 1970, saying he was bored with cartooning and drinking too much. He returned briefly in 1971, but complained that the stories he was having to illustrate hadn’t changed in his year away and promptly left, to spend the next decade cruising round the Aegean.

125 The Vietnam war

The paper’s coverage of the Vietnam war proved contentious internally. Alastair Hetherington was more favourably disposed to the US than many of his colleagues, and they were not slow to criticise his stance. One senior member of staff told him: “Generals and politicians have your ear more than historians or students of Asian behaviour.” Hetherington’s view that “unqualified condemnation of what the Americans are doing in Vietnam is unjust” did not stop the paper running a series of six decidedly sceptical reports from veteran war reporter Martha Gellhorn in 1966. “This is indeed a new kind of war,” she declared in her opening salvo, “and we had better find a new way to fight it. Hearts and minds, after all, live in bodies.”

126 The Permissive Society

In the autumn of 1967, the Guardian ran a series of articles about the Permissive Society which had been ushered in by ready availability of the Pill. The aim was more to boost circulation than set pulses racing, but it helped to identify the Guardian with the so-called swinging sixties. An interview with Mary Quant spelt out the credo of the Beautiful People: “Good taste is death, vulgarity is life.”

127 Drugs

When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were given prison sentences in 1967 (Richards’ was overturned on appeal), Hetherington wrote a leader on the issue of drugs which argued that a line had to be drawn somewhere. It was essential for science to establish the precise effects of different drugs, so that “soft” and “hard” drugs could be separated for purposes of classification The Guardian’s liberalism was not to be confused with libertarianism. It may be telling that Keith Richards is spelt without an S in the leader. Perhaps the self-confessedly academic Hetherington was confusing him with another popular beat star.

128 Mary Stott and ‘Mainly for Women’

Long-serving women’s page editor Mary Stott fought a perpetual battle in the 1960s against the Guardian’s commercial department, which felt – no doubt rightly – that it would be easier to sell advertisements next to articles about food and fashion than pieces detailing the plight of battered wives and unmarried mothers. However, in her commitment to letting readers speak through her “Mainly for Women” page, and in the incredible number of organisations the pieces she ran prompted – the National Housewives’ Register, the Pre-school Playgroups Association, Invalids at Home, the National Council for Carers, Erin Pizzey’s Shelter for Battered Wives and Their Children – she was ahead of her time. This was mutualisation in action, Mumsnet 60s-style.

129 Richard Gott and death of Che Guevara

Richard Gott was a key figure at the Guardian for almost 30 years. A political radical who had written a seminal text on South American guerrilla movements and stood as an anti-Vietnam war candidate in a byelection in Hull in 1966 (he polled 253 votes), he was in Bolivia when Che Guevara was captured and killed, and even played a role in identifying the revolutionary’s body as he had met him four years earlier in Cuba. His report, from the town of Vallegrande, was displayed boldly across the top of the front page on 11 October 1967. In 1994, Gott was forced to leave the Guardian because of accusations that he had been an “agent of influence” for the KGB during the Soviet period – accusations he strenuously rejected, arguing that they had been run-of-the-mill journalistic contacts, while acknowledging that he should have told the editor that the contacts were taking place.

130 Victor Zorza

Victor Zorza, the paper’s east European expert, was named journalist of the year in 1968 for his coverage of the Prague spring and his accurate prediction that the Soviet authorities would crush the uprising. Zorza, a refugee from Poland who was fluent in Russian, was one of the UK’s leading Kremlinologists, and got many of his stories (see him in action in the 1960 film shown as part of this exhibition) by listening to radio broadcasts from eastern Europe or studying what Soviet newspapers said – or more likely didn’t say. He moved house to be close to Heathrow so he could be first to study air-freighted newspapers from the east.

131 The Prince of Petomane

In July 1967, Peter Lennon, who contributed cultural articles to the paper from Paris, wrote perhaps his best-known piece, a tribute to the late 19th-century French celebrity Joseph Pujol. Lennon was not coy about the reason for Pujol’s fame: “Not to beat about the bush, Pujol’s talent was that he could fart like nobody else in the world, before, then or since. He could fart tenderly (le petit pet timide de la jeune fille) or aggressively (le pet rond du macon); rapidly like a machine gun; or he could produce a deep, slow cannon-roar lasting up to 10 seconds. He could give a very good account of a do-ra-me-fa derrière-wise, imitate a violin, a bass, or the timbre of a trombone.” The article was a sensation and there were reports, possibly apocryphal, of copies of that day’s paper changing hands at several times its face value.

132 Moon landings (1969)

“ Men are on the moon. At 3.56 this morning Armstrong [why no first name?] stepped from the lunar module and set foot on lunar ground.” The Guardian did a good job of recording man’s first steps on the moon in July 1969. There was just one problem: only Manchester got the news; it was too late to update the London edition. The Guardian’s giant leap would have to wait for further refinement to its production methods.

133 Les Gibbard

Les Gibbard started drawing political cartoons for the Guardian in 1969, and worked for the paper for 25 years. “The Guardian I joined was a dream shop-window for any cartoonist, using the cartoon on either the front or back pages,” he later recalled. “The cartoon was drawn at the very last minute, long after most other Fleet Street cartoonists with their allocated inside spaces had gone home, and the drawings complemented, summed up and competed with the latest news coverage. I was able to draw to any shape I fancied, the page being designed around the drawing.” His sketchbooks show the fertility of his imagination.

134 A new design

By the end of the 1960s, the Guardian was becoming more assertive, and in 1969 it was redesigned with a chunkier masthead and heavier headlines. It also ran a clever teaser ad campaign, asking “How far will the Guardian go?” and hinting at Playboy-style centrefolds, a daily horoscope, and a weekly spot-the-ball competition involving a lacrosse match, to be judged by Neville Cardus and John Arlott.

135 John Arlott – ‘Why I’m off the air’

The broadcaster and cricket writer John Arlott was a long-time opponent of South Africa’s apartheid regime, and when the South Africans were due to play a Test series against England in the summer of 1970 he told the BBC he was unwilling to commentate on the matches. He was the Guardian’s cricket correspondent from 1968-80, and in this piece from April 1970 he explains his stance to readers. In the event, the opposition to the tour was so widespread that it was cancelled, and England played a five-match series against a Rest of the World XI instead.

136 Araucaria arrives

John Graham, doyen of crossword setters, had been contributing the occasional crossword to the Guardian since 1958, but from 1971 he became a regular setter under the byline of Araucaria (the Latin name for the monkey puzzle tree). Crossword cognoscenti believe him to be the greatest of all crossword setters. This puzzle, from January 1971, is his first bylined puzzle. Now 90, he is still sets complex, often themed puzzles for the Guardian.

137 Bloody Sunday

Simon Winchester was named journalist of the year in 1972 for his reporting from Northern Ireland, and his work alongside Simon Hoggart and Derek Brown was generally recognised to be unmatched during the Troubles. His report on the Bloody Sunday shooting in which 13 civilians were killed got the facts – as eventually established – exactly right. “One came away with the firm impression, reinforced by dozens of eye witnesses,” he wrote, “ that the soldiers, men of the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment, flown in specially from Belfast, may have fired needlessly into the huge crowd … Army snipers could be seen firing continuously towards the central Bogside streets and at one stage a lone army sniper on a street corner fired two shots towards me as I peered around a corner. One shot chipped a large chunk of masonry from a wall behind me.”

138 Varoomshka

John Kent’s cartoon character Varoomshka (derived from the celebrity model Verushka) was a gorgeous young woman asked perfectly innocent questions which tied the caricatured politicians of the day in knots. It was a brilliant conceit and ran throughout the 1970s, just about keeping ahead of feminists who didn’t see why there should be an assumption that beautiful women in bikinis should be dumb. “Varoomshka was a comic-strip Candide for the 1970s,” wrote Guardian assistant editor Michael McNay in his obituary of Kent in 2003. “A wide-eyed, lissom innocent abroad, who defined the second coming of Harold Wilson and the dog-eared hypocrisies of the Heath and Callaghan years.”

139 Peter Preston and the ‘zing’ factor

Alastair Hetherington decided to give up the editorship in 1975 after almost two decades in the chair. The succession came down to a choice between the distinguished political commentator (and strong Labour supporter) John Cole and the consummate journalistic all-rounder Peter Preston (whose politics were a good deal harder to read). Preston had made it known his brief would be to add “zing” to the paper, and he got the job. Cole moved to the Observer and then to the BBC, where as a charismatic, overcoated political editor he made politics accessible to a mass audience.

140 Move to Farringdon Road

The move in 1976 to new offices in Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell, was crucial to the Guardian, and heralded the start of a successful period of expansion. Space in the newly built building was cheap (£3 per square foot) and plentiful. Many more staff came down from Manchester, and thereafter only a small editorial team was preserved in the paper’s birthplace. There had been some tension between the Mancunian and the metropolitan teams in the 1960s. The metropolitans had won.

141 Jill Tweedie

In the words of Guardian historian Geoffrey Taylor, Jill Tweedie “blazed her way through the women’s page during the 1970s and for much of the 1980s … She stood in relation to what had gone before as heavy metal did to Handel.” In a piece in November 1975, she described her sudden realisation that sex is not meant to be enjoyed.

142 Posy Simmonds

Posy Simmonds’ first illustration appeared in the Guardian in 1972, but it was her wonderfully funny and sharply observed Silent Three cartoon strip in the late 70s which won her a wide following. The strip satirised an archetypal Guardian-reading family called the Webers, and those lovingly lampooned readers adored it.

143 San Serriffe

There are April Fool jokes and then there is San Serriffe, the seven-page supplement published on 1 April 1977 in the form of a special report covering a little known archipelago of semi-colon-shaped islands in the Indian Ocean. Everything connected to the island is named after typefaces and printers’ terms – the country’s ruler, who came to power in a coup, is General Pica. The supplement parodies the special reports, frequent in the 1970s and 80s, giving positive courage to dodgy countries in a bid to drum up advertising. The San Serriffe spoof ran to seven pages because advertisers loved the idea and were eager to be associated with it. The Guardian phones were busy all day with calls from readers wanting to know more about San Serriffe. Some even tried to book holidays there.

144 Rural scenes

For all the change occurring in the paper as consumerism and zing were added, one thing didn’t alter: the paper’s love of timeless photographs of rural scenes. Lambs gambolling on snow-clad fells, frozen lakes, steam trains on distant viaducts – all happily retained their place in the new, harder-nosed world. In 1978, Denis Thorpe a magnificent photograph of the Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge in the snow whcih is still frequently reprinted.

145 Mrs Thatcher

The Guardian tried to be fair to Mrs Thatcher – Peter Preston was wary throughout the 1980s of the dangers of looking like a kneejerk oppositional paper – but it never learned to love her. From the beginning it saw her brand as conservatism as divisive, as the editorial which greeted her election victory in 1979 made clear.

146 The Gang of Four

The Guardian of the early 1980s disliked the left-lurching Labour party even more than it disliked Mrs Thatcher’s government. It was convinced that there was space for a new centre party and gave a fair wind to the so-called Gang of Four of Labour defectors – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers – when they formed the SDP in 1981. The party saw Guardian readers as its natural constituency, and placed ads seeking funds and supporters (see above). Many members of the Guardian staff supported the attempt to break the political mould, and no fewer than four – all prominent figures on the paper – stood as SDP candidates in the 1983 election. Ironically, in the light of her later ideological odyssey, social policy leader-writer Melanie Phillips gave continued backing to Labour.

147 The Falklands war

Attitudes in the Guardian to the Falklands war were complex. For some years before the Argentinian invasion of the islands in 1982, the paper had been running leaders suggesting they were a relic of empire and should eventually be handed back to Argentina. After the invasion, the paper supported the sending of a task force to reclaim the islands, arguing that “the Falklands issue is not Suez … The fleet sails now in restitution.” But it attacked the government’s diplomatic failings in the run-up to the war, while Steve Bell – who had started drawing cartoons for the paper the previous year – maintained a waspish commentary on the conduct of the conflict in his If cartoon strip.

148 Sarah Tisdall

The great crisis of Preston’s editorship came in 1983-84 when Sarah Tisdall, a clerical officer at the Foreign and Commonwealth, leaked documents to the Guardian revealing when cruise missiles would be installed at Greenham Common airbase in Berkshire. It produced an electrifying front-page story, and a year-long court battle in which the government attempted to force the Guardian to hand back the leaked documents, complete with distinguishing marks which would enable the whistleblower, whose identity was known to no one at the Guardian, to be traced. The government won its battle and Preston gave back the incriminating evidence, to the dismay of both staff and readers. Preston, who offered to resign, admitted that he should have destroyed the documents at the outset rather than allowing himself to be drawn into a legal battle.

149 Miners’ strike

The Guardian had little time for either the government or the National Union of Mineworkers during the bitter miners’ strike of 1984-85. But it did sympathise with the plight of the footsoldiers – the miners themselves, trying to protect their jobs, and the police, protecting the rights of miners to work if they wished. This famous photograph by Guardian staffer Don McPhee captures that more personal aspect of the struggle.

150 Awayday to Moscow

In 1983 Guardian features editor Richard Gott (in the back row wearing a scarf in this Denis Thorpe photograph) took a 15-strong team to Moscow on a £200-a-head package tour. The numerous pieces they produced were published under the banner “A week in Moscow”, in what Gott billed as “a search for the Russia beyond the rhetoric”. The Guardian has developed a taste for these mob excursions: Belfast in 1980 was followed by this ambitious expedition to Moscow. Later came South Africa, New York and Shanghai. With money now tighter than ever, Barnstaple may be next.

151 ‘Points of view’ ad

The Guardian’s circulation went beyond half a million in the mid-1980s. It had the self-confidence – and the money – to run brand awareness ads on TV, and a commercial (see the screen in the canteen) conceived by legendary adman John Webster perfectly captured the paper’s ethos. We see what we think is a smartly dressed businessman being attacked by a thug; the truth seems simple. Then the camera pans back: the apparent thug is saving the man from a load of bricks which is about to fall on him. Beware instant “truths”, snap judgments driven by prejudice; the Guardian, so this award-winning commercial suggests, tries to see the whole story.

152 Nancy Banks-Smith

Nancy Banks-Smith celebrates her 60th year in journalism this year; she has been writing for the Guardian for more than 40 years, mostly about television; she is an incomparable stylist and the funniest writer alive; she is a link with the past and more of the moment than anyone at the Guardian; she once turned down an OBE; she is some Dame and quite scary. You could fill several books with her reviews, but she resists being anthologised. This one, on the death of Dallas’s Bobby Ewing, appeared in 1985.

153 New design for the Guardian (1988)

The status quo among the quality press was irrevocably altered by the launch of the Independent in 1986. Eyeing the centre ground between the Guardian on the left and the Times and Telegraph on the right, the Independent had a modern design and distribution network that made the most of the post-union market. Within a few years the circulation of the Independent rose to within touching distance of both the Times and the Guardian, and the previously stagnant market was provoked into a frenzy of defensive activity to retain readers. In 1988 the Guardian made a bold and innovative attempt to reassert its position on Fleet Street, with a major redesign that began the modern period of success in the history of the paper. Critics initially mocked Hillman’s design, which followed a grid system and allowed for generous white space around headlines, but it was soon recognised as a classic.

154 Guardian Weekend

The late 1980s were years of rapid change in the make-up of the paper. Alan Rusbridger launched the Weekend section in December 1988, initially in black and white (with a photograph of feature writer and humorist Richard Boston naked on the cover of the launch issue). The daily paper was now in two parts, and the branding of the paper’s key job markets – media, education and public sector appointments – gave it a significant financial boost and helped it weather the recession of the early 1990s.

155 Revolution in eastern Europe

The late 1980s were dominated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet satellites in eastern Europe and, in 1991, the break-up of the Soviet Union itself. Jonathan Steele and Martin Woollacott provided peerless coverage of this great unravelling, but the Guardian was also fortunate to be able to call on the draughtsmanship of the Polish-born illustrator Andrzej Krauze, who had experienced repression at first hand and understood what the destruction of the old order meant.

156 Freedom for Nelson Mandela

The Guardian’s David Beresford covered the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990, and succeeded in producing a report where you feel the heat, the impatience of the crowd, the even greater impatience of the media scrummagers, and ultimately the joy at having Mandela back in the world.

157 The first Gulf war

Alan Rusbridger succeeded Richard Gott as features editor in 1989. An instinctive innovator, Rusbridger was always looking for new ways of covering events, as with this remarkable poem by Tony Harrison which ran on the comment page. The poem was inspired by the grisly images of a charred column of Iraqi military vehicles, and in particular one skeletal corpse leaning from a tank and appearing to gesture.

158 Civil war in Yugoslavia

The Yugoslavian civil war was the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the end of the second world war – a bitter ethnic struggle in which civilians on all sides were the victims. Maggie O’Kane and Ed Vulliamy provided penetrating coverage of the conflict of the Guardian. In this report from May 1992, O’Kane’s movingly records the death of a young Spanish photographer in a mortar attack during the siege of Sarajevo.

159 G2

There was a further burst of design innovation in the early 1990s, greatly helped by the fact that the Guardian had now caught up with the technological revolution in newspaper production. G2 was launched in October 1992, bolstering the paper’s fight with the price-cutting Times and still buoyant Independent. Weekend became a colour magazine, and in 1993 it was joined on Saturdays by the new pocket-sized Guide, which over the next three years was rolled out nationally. Saturday had traditionally been a problematic day for sales; now it was on its way to becoming the biggest-selling day. Meanwhile, the Scott Trust formally set out its central objective for the first time: “To secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to its liberal tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.”

160 Expansion

In 1993 the Guardian bought the Observer from Lonrho. The Independent had been trying to purchase it, to merge it with its own struggling Sunday paper. There was the danger that the Observer would disappear, though it was not philanthropy which drove the Guardian’s thinking. It feared that a greatly enhanced Sunday Independent would, in turn, boost the daily paper, the Guardian’s principal rival. This was also the year in which the Guardian and Manchester News changed its name to Guardian Media Group, to reflect the fact that it now owned part of GMTV and radio stations, as well as other regional newspapers.

161 The Daily Me

In the summer of 1990 a product development unit (PDU) was set up under Tony Ageh, later a key figure in internet develoment at the BBC, as part of the Guardian’s commitment to innovation. PDU was instrumental in engineering the hugely successful Guide, but was also encouraged to “think the unthinkable”. In 1994, as a one-off experiment designed to show what the future might hold, it produced a printed-on-demand newspaper, The Daily Me. It was carried as a supplement to the Guardian on Saturday 1 December 1994, but dated a decade later. Printed on tear-proof, waterproof material, it included several spoof articles which proved remarkably prescient: Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California, Labour winning the 1997 election, the introduction of a minimum wage and a smaller-sized Guardian.

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