Alastair Hetherington, who has died aged 79, was one of the foremost journalists of his generation. He was editor of the Guardian for 19 years (1956-75), which included a period in the 1960s when he had to struggle for its survival. He wrote with vigour and required the paper to serve high purposes at home and abroad. He showed in his person and his writing fairness and frankness.
He brought physical stamina as well as intellectual precision to his work. He loosened up, and made less stratified, the internal workings of the paper. When he made mistakes, he acknowledged them. His quirks either mildly irritated or, more often, mischievously endeared him to his staff. They saw in him a straightforward and generous man and a chief they could follow, respect, and, especially in his fighting moods, admire.
The transition from Manchester to London, after his first five years in office, was not only one of geography but of attitude. It involved, over time, big changes in editorial content, notably in the number and style of features and other material. At the time, Hetherington defined the paper's first concern as "government in the widest sense" - that is, the shaping of public policy and the influences on it. His Guardian took a highly informed outsider's part in all the arguments which beset the governments of Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Heath, and Wilson again. Its comments were read in President Kennedy's White House.
At the same time it coped with - and became identified with - all the social changes of the time. It now seems that virtually every question Hetherington and his paper came to tackle was one never met before on the same scale: CND, the pill, the Beatles and all that came in their train, large-scale immigration from the Commonwealth, the satire industry, the "death of God", fear among the young.
By 1975, Hetherington's vigour was still unimpaired but his time and attention were increasingly taken up by worries at the fringe of editing. Those included a difficult, though polite, argument with the National Union of Journalists' chapels about worker participation (which he favoured, and on which his record was already in advance of anyone else in Fleet Street); Michael Foot's closed shop rules for editors; a threat by Denis Healey's Treasury to the continuation of the Scott Trust, the independent owners of the Guardian; and a nasty little attack on him by detractors in the Central London NUJ.
In addition, he would be due to retire in four years and would need something to do. He had already rejected a safe Labour parliamentary seat in Glasgow, a government post under Wilson and at least one university vice-chancellorship. He took the job of controller of BBC Scotland. He and the BBC, however, found they were by no means temperamentally attuned, and in 1982 he began a third career in Scottish academic life, where his origins lay.
He was born the second son of Hector and Alison Hetherington. His father was professor of logic and philosophy at University College, Cardiff, and, as Sir Hector, became principal at Glasgow University, from 1936 to 1961, chairman from 1943-47 and 1949-52 of the committee of vice-chancellors and principals, and a key figure in the links between Commonwealth universities.
After Gresham's School, Holt, Alastair Hetherington's studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, were interrupted by the war. On volunteering in 1939 he failed the eyesight test, but was called up to the Royal Army Pay Corps ("dreary work, with no prospect," he wrote in a letter) in August 1940. The following year a change in Army Council policy provided that anyone in a non-combatant unit who applied for active service could not be refused. This enabled him to join the Royal Armoured Corps in 1941. After various regimental transfers he was sent to the 2nd Northamptonshire Yeomanry ("snobbish and incompetent lot - didn't know how to handle their tanks and never learned").
With the rank of captain, he was serving as part of 11 Armoured Corps shortly after the Normandy landing, during an advance towards Vire, when his tank was destroyed; one crew member was killed and two wounded. As Major Hetherington, he took part in the relief of Antwerp and completed his military career in 1945 by writing the 100-page Military Geography Of Schleswig-Holstein, of which about 100 copies are said to be located as classified documents in the vaults of the ministry of defence.
In 1940 Hetherington had spent three months in the sub-editors' room at the Glasgow Herald. On the strength of this experience he was, to his surprise, asked by the British Control Commission in Germany to become editorial controller of Die Welt, the first nationwide newspaper to be produced in the British zone in 1945. "Those months at the old Broshek plant in Hamburg," he wrote many years later, "were tremendous experience, with otherwise an almost wholly German staff. A vital thing was to get them enough food, so that they could work at night, since Hamburg was not far from starvation."
After Hamburg, Hetherington went back to the Glasgow Herald, joined the Guardian from there in 1950, and was foreign editor and defence correspondent from 1953 to 1956. On the retirement, and almost immediate death, of AP Wadsworth in the autumn of 1956, he was the successful candidate from four possible choices as editor.
The paper was still small enough for the editor to assimilate all of it, but as it grew Hetherington increasingly sub-contracted the features department to a succession of later famous journalists - John Rosselli, Brian Redhead, Christopher Driver and Peter Preston. He, meanwhile, concentrated on its political direction in home affairs.
In one area, down-to-earth social reform, Hetherington's radicalism told him the paper had much new work to do. He promoted several series of articles about the gap between rich and poor, and north and south, and directed much of the paper's energy into exposing bad living conditions, shortcomings in the social services, and industrial inefficiency. His reporters joined in these campaigns with a will, and, from 1957, they found a powerful exponent in John Cole as labour correspondent.
Politically, Hetherington's closest contact was Harold Wilson (before him Gaitskell) and his closest friend Jo Grimond. This balance was reflected throughout his time in the support given to the two parties. In 1959, he wrote in his eve-of-poll leader: "We should like to see Labour in office and the Liberals strengthened," and that remained substantially true until 1974. But the Guardian was not to be taken for granted. Before the first 1974 general election, Hetherington raised at meetings with his senior staff the prospect of supporting Heath, whom he thought had been right in his conflict with the miners. By the time of the second election of 1974, a formidable band of Labour stalwarts on the paper - John Cole, Ian Aitken, Jean Stead, Keith Harper - got together to keep him strictly in line.
Hetherington, however, was determined to bring up to date a cause he had spent many leading articles in promoting: Lib-Lab cooperation to defeat the Tories. Coalition, even a government of national unity, was preferable, in his view, to continued Tory hegemony, with a disunited and squabbling left. In spite of the tug of history - and of his staff - he wanted to preserve the paper's freedom of action. He advised a Liberal vote and would have been happy with a government of the three major parties or a Lib-Lab-Scot Nat coalition. In foreign affairs and defence, bipartisanship was generally accepted as the norm. Perhaps Hetherington's yearning for domestic consensus owed something to that experience.
Consensus in foreign affairs was emphatically not, though, the way his editorship began. The Suez explosion in October 1956 happened at the moment of his taking office. With no hesitation, he launched the Manchester Guardian into total opposition to that "act of folly, without justification in any terms but brief expediency" - and maintained the attack day after day.
The assumption was that the paper lost circulation at Suez. Both the proprietor Laurence Scott and Hetherington thought it was doing so, and to Scott's credit he told his new editor not to worry but to do what he thought was right. When the figures came in at the end of November, the circulation had gone up, not down.
Hetherington's leaders were written with high passion, certainly, but, more importantly, they were written with the knowledge supplied by his foreign correspondents about the effects of Anthony Eden's actions in the United States, at the UN, and in the Middle East. Hetherington's strict observance of the facts and the avoidance of self-delusion or polite pretence in assessing either Britain's new role in the world or the actions of his natural allies at Westminster were crucial to the paper's standing.
When he went to Vietnam and switched the paper's policy line - arguing that having committed itself America should stay to finish the job - he did so out of commitment to the facts as he had discovered them. His loneliness in the face of strong opposition - inside and outside the office - spoke of his courage in taking an unpopular line. In his memoirs, he half-apologised; he had no need. If he was wrong on that occasion, his error did credit to his honesty.
Hetherington was in at the founding of CND, or at least at preparatory meetings held at the house in Didsbury of Lord Simon of Wythenshawe, with Bishop Greer, Sir Bernard Lovell and Bertrand Russell. He did not, however, go along with CND, thereby causing one of his not infrequent confrontations with a bevy of hard left leader-writers.
Instead, he put forward plans for what he called a non-nuclear club. Britain would give up the bomb in exchange for an undertaking by the other nuclear powers not to export their technology, and a renunciation of the bomb by all the countries not then (1957-58) possessing it. Labour and the TUC were enthusiastic, but the club perished with the return of a Conservative government in 1959. Hetherington later wrote that the idea was one of the most creative acts of journalism in his time.
Hetherington might have been content if all he had to do was edit a national newspaper. In 1959, the paper had dropped Manchester from its title, and in 1961 the printing operation in London began. But the scale of the change, and particularly the culture of Fleet Street newspaper production, had been misjudged. The editorial staff, particularly in the middle ranks, lost its self-confidence. Editions were missed. Circulation was sluggish. The high hope of competing with its rivals on equal terms had to be put aside.
In 1965 Laurence Scott lost heart and decided to merge the paper with Lord Astor's Times. Talks began, but they came to nothing because of the obvious incompatibility between the two papers. The next year, however, Lord Thomson bought the Times, and Scott, in a desperate attempt to keep his old idea alive, set up a consortium to oppose Thomson before the Monopolies Commission and put in a rival bid. Then, while Hetherington was making a quick trip to Israel, Scott carried out a coup. He convened a meeting of the Scott Trust, under his cousin Richard, which agreed to give him a free hand in negotiating a merger.
It was Hetherington's furious reaction on returning to London and insisting that the trust (of which he was not a member) be reconvened and the decision reversed that saved the Guardian from, at best, humiliation and, at worst, submergence in a triumphant Times.
The upshot was a reorganisation of the company and the arrival of a new and highly competent set of managers. The two sides enjoyed working together and the rejuvenated paper went on to succeed editorially and commercially. In 1971, Hetherington was named Journalist of the Year in the National Press Awards. He rarely missed an opportunity to say how much of the paper's success depended on the Manchester Evening News, whose profits had for so long kept it afloat.
Alastair Hetherington lived an ascetic life - plain food, no tobacco, alcohol only when to abstain might appear conspicuous, never a taxi for a mile or two if there was time to walk. He spent long days walking the Lake District and Scottish mountains, and long evenings making full notes of his political conversations, running into millions of words, to be circulated to senior staff. His Downing Street notes often included a tally of how much Harold Wilson had had to drink.
These predilections, his academic upbringing, and his membership of the intellectual establishment evidently persuaded him that he didn't know much about ordinary people. Yet when the 60s burst open he showed no doubt about how the Guardian should respond to each new wave of liberty, licence or frivolity; he took it to be what people wanted and therefore, provided Lord Wolfenden's horses didn't mind, should have. He gave evidence for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial and became the first editor to allow the word "fuck" into his paper.
And so to his quirks. The clock in his office was on the wall opposite his desk; his eyes constantly flicked to it over the left shoulder of whoever was talking to him. He made a point of bounding upstairs to the third floor while others took the lift; he assumed that everyone else shared his enthusiasm for racing up hillsides. He refused cream at lunch because he was on duty that night and needed a clear head. He once tried to organise a London-Manchester meeting at Watford Gap on Boxing Day on the ground that those concerned had already had Christmas Eve off. He liked to have the last word in an argument. He found personal relations difficult and used hearty language to disguise that fact.
But the irritants were far outweighed. Hetherington did not put people down. He never publicly issued a rebuke. He made suggestions rather than issued orders, and, although the effect was the same, there was room for discussion. He ran the paper as a corporate enterprise. He and his wife Miranda, whom he married in 1957, were generous hosts.
The Guardian he left in 1975 had been relaxed and informal. Scottish television, he soon found, was very different, full of hierarchies and procedures. The thing he most enjoyed was learning new techniques and applying them. Two programmes which he was proud of promoting were a series about the deprived Lilybank area of Glasgow and another about walks on Scottish mountains, including those on Arran, where he eventually retired in 1989. But he fell foul, mainly about the permissible degree of devolution, both of the director-general, Charles Curran, and of his own predecessor, then managing director of BBC-TV, Alasdair Milne. The new DG, Ian Trethowan, reluctantly sacked him.
Like a deposed Soviet minister, Hetherington was sent to be station manager for Highland Radio at Inverness. His last five working years were spent as research professor in media studies at Stirling University.
He retained a close link with the Guardian through membership of the Scott Trust, of which he became chairman from 1984 until his retirement. He brought a new style to that office as a hands-on and interventionist chairman, giving critical support to his successor as editor, Peter Preston. He also played a substantial part in the appointment of his successor as chairman, Hugo Young.
Hetherington's Guardian was the pioneer of the modern quality broadsheet. All of them - Times, Independent, FT, even Telegraph - owed a debt to him. He transformed the very worthy, very civilised, but, it must now seem, anachronistic Manchester Guardian into a type of paper new to English readers. But he knew how far he wanted to carry this revolution and where he wanted it to stop. He still liked a degree of decorum.
His marriage to Miranda Oliver, with whom he had two sons and two daughters, was dissolved in 1978, and the following year he married Sheila Janet Cameron, with whom he inherited three step-children.
Hector Alastair Hetherington, journalist, born October 31 1919; died October 3 1999
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