TWENTY YEARS AFTER

This is 200, Grays Inn Road. The home of The Sunday Times, twenty years ago. This was my home for nearly 30 years. The Guardian occupied one floor, and this is the newspaper for which I worked continually for a couple of years. The picture editor of The Guardian trained me, a young kid knowing exactly nothing. But he always had faith. I was so green that I didn't know that I could have have used their film, and they would have paid my train fares. So for a couple of years I paid for myself. Saving the Guardian a lot of money, and they never told me what I was entitled to. I wouldn't have cared, I was having my photographs published day after day. Tthe Sunday Times photographers used the same darkrooms, and eventually their picture editor grabbed me and I began to work for The Sunday Times, having to give up the odd assignment for The Observer. In 1966 Harry Evans had arrived and alsthough he doesn't remember, he sent me to photograph Cassius Clay, soon to be Mohammed Ali. Clay was having a practice bout in Wembley, and all the press were invited. I was the only woman. I was always the only woman. It was that wonderful day I took one of the best photographs of my life. All the press were invited into his dressing room to see him being rubbed down. However I was forbidden, but he chatted to me later and said he'd never seen a woman photographer before. In 1968, I joined the staff of the Sunday Times. At that time this newspaper under the leadership of Harold Evans became the best in the world. To cut the longest story short, as time passed the print unions would disrupt the paper and we never knew whether there would be a paper or not. So Saturday after tense painful Saturday nights, we would all wait listening for the sound of the printing presses. Often there was just nothing. Eventually after ructions and anguish, the management closed us down. We the journalists were paid all the time the paper was closed. We would go to our meetings, and some of us produced a newspaper for the press so they would know what was happening. Apart form working on our newspaper, I cleared wastepaper baskets. The stoppage drew all the staff closer together. After nearly a year, the paper came back. Then the journalists on The Times lead by Paul Routledge, who had been paid throughout the stoppage went on strike. This was a disaster. Lord Thomson who had been a benevolent proprieter had had enough and we were up for sale. Everything seems a bit of a blur now, but rumours of an Evans led buy out and a lot of other stories abounded and speaking for myself it was an agonising time. January 22nd. 1981, I was sent to a press conference. It was hush hush. I arrived early in a large room filled with TV crews from all over the world.....I sat myself in the front row, shaking like a leaf. In walked Rupert Murdoch, The Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, and the Times editor William Rees Mogg. I was weeping. It was all over. And it was. Our move to Wapping was a nightmare, and even now I can't talk about the riots, the coffins arriving at various homes, a lot of journalists left. But I stayed. Our building was sold, and before it was vacated I went in with a pile of huge industrial pens...felt tipped..in black and red...and drew weeping hearts over every white wall, writing silly loving words. One day on the way to Wapping, passing our building in Grays Inn Road, I saw it was being knocked down, I stopped and took this photograph. 200 Grays Inn Road is now home to ITN, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News. P.S . When Harry Evans saw my photographs of the press conference, when it was announced that Murdoch had purchased The Sunday Times, he told me to hide them as they could not be published or even seen as they said something which could be detrimental !! Murdoch was very clever, he knew Wapping was was his guarded secret and he moved Harry away from The Sunday Times, to edit The Times, therebye isolating him away from his loyal army so there would be no possibility of Evans and us refusing to go. After a few years, Murdoch sacked Harry, and he(Harry Evans) scrawled a note to me, written on the way to Heathrow, (which I still have)....saying it was my photographs which foretold the awful truth....and please could he have them. So I posted them to New York. where he was living. About 18 months later, when Andrew Neil was editing our paper, I telephoned the newsroom at The Sunday Times late Saturday night as I wanted to know if a particular photo had been used. The answer shocked me to the core "We are all stunned because there is a huge photograph of yours right over the front page of The Observer, which was publishing the first extract of Harry's book, "Good Times Bad Times." I nearly fainted. I though I'd get sacked, but I didn't. The Sunday Times sent The Obsever a huge bill, and the Observer's picture editor took me out to lunch !! This particular photograph is now framed in Harry's office in New York ! It is also on my website.