One Week With John Gulliver - Newspaperman Sir Ray Tindle says " local newspapers will last another 200 years"

YOU have to bend slightly to hear Sir Ray Tindle as he presses his neck and talks in a loud whisper through his voice box.

But this silver haired buccaneering newspaperman – now 84, and one of Britain’s biggest weekly paper publishers – would never, I am sure, allow any physical impediment to get the better of him.

He was in fine form at a recent newspaper conference when he pilloried the “doom-mongers” who moan that Britain’s local weeklies are dying.

To him, local newspapers are “rock solid” and will serve readers for another 200 years.

He wouldn’t say what has been responsible for the closures of titles and the dismissal of hundreds of journalists in the past year, but he obviously doesn’t think much of the big regional publishing chains such as those that dominate London’s locals.

He has succeeded because he has “no debts, no bank loans, no overdraft, no investors, no shareholders”.  His is not a public company, He is a one man band.

If he has one prescription for a successful local paper, it is that it must make sure it covers the sort of parochial and humdrum news that is the bloodstream of a community.

As I watched him at the rostrum at the conference at Kingston University – organised by the UK Press Gazette – he struck me as a romantic figure, a newspaperman of the old school, who loves the feel and smell of newsprint.  

In the best sense he is more of the 19th century, a genuine entrepreneur, than of the 21st.

He started on a newspaper after being demobbed from the army at the end of the Second World War, and years later bought his first weekly paper for a small sum. From there, he went onto own more than 150 titles.

He doesn’t strike me as a person who loves collecting titles from an obsession of ownership, but out of a kind of love of the trade that links him with the great journalists as far back as the 18th century – a very English sort of man, 

He stands out as a newspaper owner from the scurrying crowd of today’s chief executives of the big regional chains who are obsessed with bottom lines and shareholders.

Enlightened thinking could save the lives our prisons waste

IN the suburbs of Philadelphia stands a former, small, detached YMCA hostel that has been turned into another kind of hostel – one for early-released prisoners.

It’s carrying out an experiment that may interest Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, who is more free-thinking than his predecessor.

With a record number of 86,000 prisoners packed into our jails, some politicians see the need to cut the numbers of offenders and save millions of pounds. 

I came across this hostel – it acts as home for early-release offenders and parolees – accidentally at a discussion at the city’s prestigious university of law.

Topic: How to reform the penal system, and cut the budget.

Chatting to a man next to me I discovered he ran a not-for-profit hostel which housed paroled prisoners and some released before their time – all of them serving less than a two year sentence.

James Graham, in his 70s, explained that when his charges found jobs they contributed 20 per cent of their earnings for bed and board, and that in general the system worked – the men and women got acclimatised to civilian life and found a way back into society. 

If they wanted to talk about their problems, counsellors were on hand to help them.

Mr Graham showed me around two buildings – one for men, the other for women.

They were clean, comfortably furnished, a bit like a good YHA hostel in Britain.

Most of the rooms, which contained two or four bunks, were empty – the inmates were at work. But a man lying on a bed in one of them was black, like several other men I saw in the corridors – reflective of the fact that one in ten black males in the US are in jails.

While Mr Graham was entertaining a couple of visiting Pennsylvania politicians, he introduced me to his “thinker”, Ira Bellew, also in his 70s, who once worked for the government as a physicist and then in his 60s switched professions.

Drawing on his knowledge of inmates at the hostel, Mr Bellew, who likes to think beyond the boundaries, sent me an email on Tuesday setting out his theory about recidivism and his belief that prison acts as a “surrogate family” for inmates.

He quoted heavily from works by the famous intellectual Eric Fromm, who often wrote about the dehumanisation of man in this society. 

If the US government provided hostels like Mr Graham’s all over the States its prison population would shrink. 

For that matter, his kind of hostel in Britain would save lives as well as money – in large numbers and quantities.

The striking case of a ‘private’ baker

HE was a main player in the Margaret Thatcher government, helped mastermind the 1987 election campaign, and worked closely with arch neo-liberal Keith Joseph to spearhead the privatisation plans that saw companies such as British Airways, British Telecom and British Gas taken out of public ownership and hived off to those who could afford to play the stock market.

So it may come as a surprise to learn of Lord Young of Graffham’s family connections with the trade union movement. 

Lord Young, who was this week appointed president of the Jewish Museum in Albert Street, Camden Town, revealed to me that his favourite item in the newly re-opened institute is a banner dating from the 1910s of the Jewish Bakers Union.

“My father was a baker, and so was my grandfather, in the East End,” he says.

“They were involved in the Jewish bakers strike of 1916. It lasted six weeks until it was broken. They were striking for 16 hour days, instead of the 18 they were doing.”