Shooting History: A Personal Journey

There were builders everywhere, carpenters putting up partitions, electricians laying cables. It was hard to find where my interview was supposed to take place. I was standing in the bowels of the building in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, where Britain’s first commercial radio station, the London Broadcasting Company (LBC), was to start broadcasting in eight weeks’ time. It’s an incredible thought these days, but as late as 1973 there was no legal radio alternative to the BBC. Radio Luxembourg had beamed in from across the Channel for years, and there were a number of illicit ‘pirate’ stations like Radio Caroline with seasick operatives broadcasting from outside territorial waters, but otherwise there was only the Beeb. A year earlier, Prime Minister Ted Heath finally changed the law, breaking the BBC’s monopoly and allowing the development of commercial radio. Now the race was on between LBC and Capital Radio as to who would be on air first. LBC was looking for a hundred or more journalists to run a twenty-four-hour news station.

I suspect that I secured an interview purely on the basis that Peter Snow, by now established as a correspondent at ITN, was my cousin. They were also looking for someone who had some sort of handle on social issues. Rather riskily, LBC was going to pioneer late-night ‘phone-ins’. Experience in America had revealed that a lot of people with serious problems phoned in, and any responsible programme would have to have someone available to deal with them. In the event I seemed to fit the bill, and was hired for a salary of £2650, double what I had been earning at New Horizon. Better still, I was veering towards a career in journalism. Maybe this would prove to be the route back to Uganda.

Two days before we went on air, the station had failed to appoint any newsreaders. Given that there was to be a news bulletin every half-hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, this was a bit of an omission. The managers had a problem. Very few people from the BBC had applied to work at LBC. Most BBC staff seemed to think that our commercial venture would be short-lived, and they preferred the safety of where they were. Hence a good number of Canadian and Australian voices had been hired, but very few Brits. The existing employees were all summoned for voice trials, and somehow I got the job. The welfare back-up for the phone-ins was abandoned, and I was scheduled to make my first broadcast on the first day of transmission.

Six a.m. on 8 October 1973 was an electric moment. The station hit the air running. At 10 a.m., with embarrassingly upper-class vowels, I delivered the news. ‘Israeli tanks are heading for the Golan Heights …’ We had come on air at a real instant of history, amid the Yom Kippur war, the last Middle East war in which it was possible to imagine that Israel’s very existence was at stake.

The whole style of LBC was fresh, the journalism was keen, and we were constantly running rings round staid old Aunty. But it couldn’t last, and within a few months of opening the station ran out of money. Advertisers were cautious about whether commercial radio would ever catch on. People had to be sacked, and the management went for the most expensive first. I survived, but the new editor Marshall Stewart, who’d been poached after successfully reinvigorating the BBC’s Today programme, called me into his office. ‘You can go on reading the news until you drop,’ he said, ‘but if you want to make a difference in life, you’ve got to get out onto the road.’

The road in 1974 was becoming increasingly cratered. The IRA had already started its bombing campaign on mainland Britain, and for what was almost my first reporting adventure I was sent to Northern Ireland. I arrived in Catholic West Belfast on 17 May 1974, during the Protestant workers’ strike that was to bring the attempt to allow Northern Ireland to govern itself to an end. I was stunned by what I saw. I had had absolutely no prior sense of the scale of the deprivation and discrimination suffered by the Catholic population. But the poverty proved undiscriminating: the squalor and sense of hopelessness on the Catholic Falls Road were matched on the working-class Protestant streets around the Shankill Road. I’d never seen so many Union flags. Those who wished to remain British had a sense of Queen and country that I couldn’t even begin to identify with. ‘Pig’ armoured cars careered around the streets, and groups of British squaddies patrolled with automatic rifles at the ready.

As the strike ended on 29 May, I remember standing outside the Harland & Wolff shipyard watching the exclusively Protestant workforce returning to their jobs. Not only had they destroyed a courageous attempt to share governing power between the two religions, but they passed through the factory gates as if nothing in their lives would ever have to change to accommodate the 40 per cent of the population who were not of their faith and not of their workforce. I could not believe that my own country had sustained and encouraged such a grossly unjust state of affairs.

I had always used a bicycle in London, and now my reporting life began to depend upon one. There were no mobile phones in those days, but we had clunky Motorola radios, which within five miles of the office could transmit a just-about viable signal. So when on 17 June 1974 an IRA bomb went off in the confines of the Houses of Parliament, while other reporters were clogged in the back-up of traffic caused by the emergency I was able to hurtle through on my bike, sometimes broadcasting as I pedalled. I could dash under the police tapes that closed off roads, and be in mid-broadcast by the time the police caught up with me. This meant that throughout this year of mainland bombings LBC was almost invariably first on the secne, and developed a kind of ‘must-listen’ quality that radio in the UK had never enjoyed before. The bomb in question had gone off against the thousand-year-old wall of Westminster Hall – you can see the scorch marks to this day; the stonework remains a discoloured pink. Eleven people had been injured in the blast.

The IRA clearly wasn’t going to go away. Resolving how to reach an accommodation with people the state regarded as terrorists was to be another feature of the unfolding story. The low point of the IRA’s wholesale killings of civilians came later that year, with the bombing of pubs in Guildford and Birmingham, in which twenty-six people were killed. The state responded by jailing the wrong people for both bombings.

Among all the bombings, two general elections were held in 1974, one in February followed by another in October. Amazingly, I found myself co-anchoring the second. Only one year in journalism, and I was already interviewing politicians from both front benches. It was an intense and ‘on the job’ introduction to journalism. Neither then nor at any time later did I ever receive a single day’s training. I swotted up on the constituencies, the names and faces of the politicians, and the swings needed to take each seat. Harold Wilson’s Labour Party scraped in in the first election, although they failed to win a majority of seats in the House of Commons until the second election, eight months later. There were suddenly people in government that I had worked with at New Horizon. David Ennals was Secretary of State for Health and Social Security: he and I had been trustees on the Campaign for the Single Homeless, a grouping that brought all the projects working with single homeless people under one umbrella and which survives to this day, renamed Homeless Link. My contacts were growing, and rather against my will I found myself creeping onto a lowly rung of the British Establishment.

In between those two elections I was dispatched to northern Portugal. Revolution had taken hold, a revolution that was going to have a huge effect in Africa. One of the seeds of the ‘new world disorder’ was being sown before my very eyes. Yet at that moment I could see no downside. Liberation it was, and heady was it to be there. I arrived on the morning of 5 April, hours after the fifty-year dictatorship of Salazar and his successor Caetano had been overthrown. All planes to Lisbon were full, but there was one seat left on a flight to the northern Portuguese town of Porto, so by mid-afternoon I found myself in the northern town of Braga. An industrialised concrete place, it proved to be an excellent vantage point from which to observe this most noisy and joyous of revolutions. I had hoped to grab a sandwich and then go looking for the revolution, but revolution was all around me. The streets were heaving with people; women pushed carnations into the barrels of soldiers’ guns. At one moment there was an enormous explosion, and I said to my translator, ‘Here comes the killing spree.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s just a gas canister exploding in one of the celebration bonfires.’

A day and night of intoxicating freedom followed. The death of empire in Britain had never witnessed scenes like this – but then, despite empire, we had at least been spared dictatorship.

The overthrow of half a century of dictatorship in Portugal was completely bloodless. Which could not be said of what happened next in Portugal’s colonies. Angry Portuguese settlers in Mozambique and Angola drove their tractors into ravines, smashed key capital equipment and ruined their factories and homes. Nevertheless, their return from the African colonies to their homeland would represent little short of a modern miracle – a small European state reabsorbing the equivalent of 10 per cent of its population without serious consequence. But while Portugal seeped back into being a comfortable corner of Europe, Angola and Mozambique erupted into two of the bleeding sores that would define Africa’s emerging disorder in the 1980s and 1990s.

When I returned, Britain was in the throes of the build-up to the referendum on whether or not to remain a member of the European Community. In a sense a kind of revolution was taking place here too. The Tories under Ted Heath had taken Britain into Europe a couple of years earlier, and Labour had promised a vote as a means to resolve their own ambivalence and division on the issue. Many saw the referendum as a post-imperial struggle for the soul of Britain. Should we slide off into the transatlantic alliance and take up our position as Uncle Sam’s fifty-first state, or embrace the heart of Europe and become part of the European continent? Truth to tell, I had decided to vote ‘no’, on the basis that I saw Europe as a rich man’s club that was bound to end up screwing the Third World.

I was more involved than I pretended. My friend Ed Boyle, the political editor of LBC and one of the most gifted journalists I ever worked with, had agreed to put together some radio ads for the ‘no’ campaign. I guess he did it more to make trouble and to even out what he regarded as an unbalanced campaign than out of any very strong belief. He was a real original, mad as a hatter and the creator of brilliant, funny and informative journalism. His trouble was that he was too brilliant, too funny, too bright for his editors; he was therefore denied the profile and standing he richly deserved. Knowing that I was pretty strongly against EC membership at the time, he asked me to help out on the ads.

The fifty-first state argument held no sway for me. It was the love of Uganda and an awareness of how the North intersected with and affected the South that combined to convince me that Europe would thrive to the detriment of the emerging markets and nations of the South. I wanted out of this kind of a Europe with a passion. Michael Foot, at that time Secretary of State for Employment, was my comfortable leader in the cause, and the ‘no’ campaign enabled me to meet him for the first time, in what was to become a friendship that still endures. My uncomfortable leader was Enoch Powell, who was further right even than Michael was left, and against whom I had demonstrated at university. But he and Michael shared a love of Parliament and sovereignty, one of the causes which bound them both to the ‘no’ campaign.

The campaign itself was a complete shambles. We started with a substantial lead in the opinion polls, which we then proceeded to fritter away. Ed and I were so unpoliced that our radio ads only featured the ‘no’ views that reflected our own – references to the Third World and other ways of arranging a new Europe predominated. But the referendum itself, which took place on 6 June 1975, was nevertheless a defining moment in the emergence of post-imperial Britain. In voting to remain in Europe, which the British people did by a margin of two to one, many of us thought we had at least buried the Little Englander vote for all time – how wrong we proved to be.

Alas, we never actually embraced the Europe for which we had voted. Nor were we entirely to shake off our status as America’s fifty-first state. We wanted to be for Europe, but not of it. And that condition dogs us to this day. My own position was to evolve gently from outright hostility then, to an ardent desire now to be much more a part of Europe than any British referendum has ever dared contemplate. But it has taken me three decades to travel so complex a journey.

It was only a month after the referendum, in July 1975, that my foreign news editor at LBC bellowed across the newsroom, ‘Anyone ever been to Uganda?’ One hand went up, and it was mine. ‘We’ve got a free seat on Callaghan’s plane,’ he said. ‘Get your bag and go.’

It seemed that the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, had been involved in some madcap dialogue with the by-now leader of Uganda Idi Amin over a white British lecturer, Denis Hills, who’d published unflattering references to the Ugandan dictator in a book called The White Pumpkin. Among other things, he’d called him a village tyrant’. Tyrant he had indeed become, aided and abetted by the British government. Amin had seized power in a military coup on 25 January 1971, while the democratically elected President Milton Obote was in Singapore attending a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. Obote’s use of secret police and informers, and his intimidation and worse of his political opponents, had rendered him unpopular both inside and outside Uganda. Above all, Britain was concerned at the rise of ‘African socialism’, as espoused by Obote and by Tanzania’s Julius Nyrere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda.

The arrival, albeit by military coup, of the seemingly more pliant, British-trained erstwhile Sergeant Major Idi Amin was greeted as something of a relief. Amin can perhaps be seen as an early volunteer for Western-supported regime change’, with all its harrowing consequences. Within a year of the coup he’d appointed himself Field Marshal and ‘President for Life’, expelled sixty thousand Asians, and started killing his opponents. The Utopian Uganda of my late adolescence was fast evaporating. Amin soon took on more self-styled epithets, including ‘Big Daddy’ and ‘Conqueror of the British Empire’.

Idi Amin was already renowned for humiliating the few whites still in Uganda. Denis Hills was languishing in Luzira prison, the notorious block in which Amin, and Obote before him, both kept and disposed of their opponents. Amin had had Hills sentenced to death for sedition, and had announced that unless the Queen apologised for his behaviour and Jim Callaghan came personally to rescue him, Hills would be summarily executed.

Looking back today, the idea that only three decades ago some African dictator could summon the Foreign Minister from one of the G8 nations to rescue a solitary eccentric from the hangman’s noose beggars belief. Even then the trip had a distinct whiff of the absurd about it. Only a few months earlier Amin had had some of the remaining whites in Uganda carry him in a great sedan chair through the centre of Kampala.

The trip was inevitably to provoke in me a strong wave of nostalgia. On 10 July 1975 the RAF VC10 touched down at Entebbe, on an airfield looking only slightly more decayed than it had on my first landing. From the aircraft I could see that the grass was still long and unkempt, but that there were many more troops and guns about. The old terminal building had shed its last remnants of whitewash. The heavenly aroma of Africa wafted into the plane as the door opened. Here I was, back in my beloved Uganda, almost eight years to the day after I had left her. There really did seem to be some divine pattern to it all. Chance had delivered me ‘home’, even if only for a matter of hours.

There was no Amin at the airport. Instead we were hustled onto a bus at gunpoint by sweaty young soldiers and driven at speed to Kampala. We passed the gorgeous bougainvillea and mown lawns of State House, where President Obote had lived during my time here. Our destination was Amin’s official residence in the capital, the ‘Command Post’.

By the time we reached the bustling suburbs of Kampala it was noon, the sun was high and the light outside was fierce to our unaccustomed English eyes. The Asian shops had become less tidy, less well-stocked African outlets. Amin’s wholesale ejection of the Asians three years earlier had taken its commercial toll. The smell, the sweaty greenness, the puddles, the red-brown murum roads told me that this was unmistakably Africa, unmistakably Uganda. The jacarandas were in full blue bloom, bananas dangled in ripe bunches, everywhere was lusciously productive.

There were perhaps twenty journalists aboard our bus, not one of whom apart from me had ever set foot in the country before. Suddenly, as we neared the end of the road leading to the Command Post, I caught sight of a dishevelled white man being marched along by two guards. It was obviously Denis Hills. He was dressed in the fly-buttonless, stained remnant of the tropical suit he must have been taken to jail in. I told the bus driver I needed a pee and would walk from there. He stopped and let me out. I ran across to Hills and immediately started interviewing him, using the heavy reel-to-reel Uher tape recorder slung over my shoulder.

‘How does it feel to be free, Mr Hills?’ I asked.

‘Better than being dead,’ he replied, ‘which I should have been at eight o’clock this morning if Mr Callaghan hadn’t come for me.’ He seemed to have some teeth missing, but despite his run-down appearance was apparently in one piece.

‘What’s happening now?’ I asked.

‘I’m being taken to be handed over.’

Amin’s Command Post was ostensibly a simple, square-built 1930s-style suburban house with spectacular views over Kampala. The white stucco walls sporting a green mould here and there were assaulted by vivid splashes of red, pink and purple bougainvillea. But when we got closer there was a distinct air of menace about the place, radio aerials protruding out of windows, wires hanging about, and sandbagged gun emplacements peering from the flat roof. Although there were guns everywhere, and paranoid figures looking at us suspiciously, there was no formal security cordon. I was able to approach cautiously and to enter, rejoining the other reporters. Callaghan and Amin were out on the lawn at the back. No sign yet of Hills, but Amin was already thanking the Foreign Secretary for coming, booming his words of satisfaction. I recorded the lot.

For almost the only time in my reporting life, my cousin Peter was one of the other correspondents on the trip, reporting for ITN. I took him to one side. ‘Peter, I’ve got everything, interviewed Hills, done the lot.’

‘But Hills hasn’t appeared yet,’ he said.

‘Oh yes he has, and I’ve got his first interview as a free man. Trouble is, Callaghan’s people want us straight back on the bus and off to Entebbe and the take-off. But I know where the international telephone exchange is here, and I could phone this stuff through to London and get a scoop on everyone else – including you.’

‘Go on,’ said Peter, ‘take a risk. They may leave without you, but we won’t be able even to phone until we get to the departure lounge at Entebbe, so you’ll be at least an hour or even two ahead of anyone.’

I ran back out on to the road, flashed some pound notes and got a lift to the exchange half a mile away. This was the self-same building from which whilst on VSO I had been able to phone home. Somehow I managed to cajole them into giving me a line to London. I got everything fed from my Uher, using crude crocodile clips to connect the tape machine directly to the phone line. I also recorded a description of Hills’s release. Twenty minutes later I was out on the street trying to get a taxi back to the Command Post, but no one dared go anywhere near the place, especially with a muzungu, a white man.

I decided the best solution was to head for Entebbe Airport directly in a service taxi, in the hope of reaching the plane before the bus did, or at least before take-off. So with a clutch of breastfeeding mothers, two goats, and at least five or six live chickens flapping about with tied feet, I set off in battered old Peugeot 606 station wagon. The trouble was that our journey was constantly interrupted by the need to disgorge a mother, a goat, a chicken, or sometimes all three at once. Then another lot of human and animal cargo would board the taxi to inflict further stops on us.

As bits of Uganda flashed past, I considered the place’s weird predicament. Here was a country that Britain had had charge of until just over a decade before. Yet Uganda had been prepared in no way for independence. What cynicism could deliver a thuggish, paranoid Sergeant Major to lead its armed forces? The colonisers had believed in an imported white officer class until almost the day of handover. The country’s institutions were remorselessly British in their make-up, and took no account of sophisticated local practice. Britain effectively prepared Uganda for failure. It’s a telling insight into the British way of doing things, which was to be repeated in every corner of Africa that was ever pink.

After what seemed like hours we turned into the airport road. Proceeding in the opposite direction was our empty bus, returning to Kampala. I had nowhere near enough money to buy a ticket to London, I had no visa, the British High Commission had taken our passports upon landing, and I suddenly had visions of taking up Denis Hills’s vacated death cell at Luzira prison. For sure, honest Jim Callaghan would not make a second rescue flight.

We swung round the high pampas grasses on to the airfield, and there was the plane, still on the ground. My cousin Peter was gesticulating wildly from halfway up the steps. ‘Come on, we’re going in seconds!’ he shouted above the engine roar. Inside the cabin, there was Callaghan, in his tropical hat, looking red and impatient. Hills was separated off, crumpled up in a seat well back, and then came the journalists. They looked grim-faced and angry with me.

I asked Peter what the problem was. ‘Bloody phones are down to Kampala,’ he said. ‘No one got to file a sodding thing. You’ve got yourself an epic’

What a start, I thought. One year a journalist, and I’ve got a scoop of mythic proportions: ‘British Foreign Secretary Saves White Man’s Life in Africa!’ I settled complacently into my seat. Our ten-hour flight, with a stop-off in phoneless Tripoli, should keep me well ahead of the game, I thought.

Fortunately the lines from Brize Norton, the Oxfordshire military air base where we landed, were working. ‘Well?’ I asked the foreign editor when my turn for the phonebox came and I got through.

‘Well what?’

‘My scoop.’

‘What scoop?’

‘Haven’t you run my Denis Hills story?’ I shouted.

‘No.’