I have always enjoyed writing obituaries. It gives me a chance to indulge simultaneously my passion for both journalism and contemporary history. And as a child I always enoyed talking to old people. When I was a boy there were still plenty of people around who remembered what it was like before the age of the motor car. When the roads were polluted with horse muck, not oil patches. When men commonly walked eight or nine miles to work every day. When you went to bed early because there was no electric light, and who could tell me of their excitement when they first got gas lighting, which came a few years before electric lighting. And, then of course, there were people like my ‘Uncle Bill’, who had actually been in the trenches in France in the First World War.
You get a different kind of evidence from such personal reminisces than you get from reading books. You get the full emotional reality of how it was then. You get it as much from what they don’t say, as from what they do say. With my Uncle Bill, usually quite talkative, it came from his silences, when I pressed him to tell me more. The remember pain was still there, in his eyes, some forty years later. Writing this reminds me of another younger man who used to talk endlessly about his experience fighting along side the Gurkhas in World War Two. Unlike my Uncle Bill he enjoyed all the killing, and particularly when it was face to face.
So I was delighted when in Wednesday morning when I discovered when I was looking for something else via Google, that Lord Catto had died. He was a much more important man than most people realised. And when I read the long obituary in The Independent that I had happened upon, I realised that I had something to say about him, that was not in this obituary.
I did a lot of work on my story. Although I knew him quite well, I got down the Shawcross biography of Rupert Murdoch and checked the references. I would find Bruce Page’s book on Murdoch, so I rang a friend who had it, and got him to read me the references over the phone. I was not satisfied with my first headline, ‘The man who brought Murdoch to Britain‘, so I cogitated and came up with ‘Catto the king maker’ instead.
The minute before I posted I needed to do a last check on something, so I went back to The Independent obituary. To my horror I realised that the date I had focussed on was the date of my search. In much fainter type at the head below the article headline was the date of the death. 2001. Egg all over my face. What a total waste of time.
Until this morning, when I realised, that my story is not totally without interest. So I have decided to post it below.
The only thing I had to change was to report that Lord Catto died aged 78, not aged 84.
Catto the king maker
Lord Catto, who died aged 78, has a lot to answer for. For it was he who befriended a brash young Australian, called Rupert Murdoch, who was beginning to transform his father’s string of Australian newspapers, into a force which was challenging the Australian press establishment. In Britain, 1968, he was virtually unknown, except to a select few, like Professor Asa Briggs, his tutor at Oxford University, and Edward Pickering, who had helped him learn journalism working at the Daily Express, which in those days sold over four million copies a day. No-one at all knew him in the United States, and all parts east, where today his television channels broadcast to millions of sitting rooms.
Murdoch came to London in the autumn of 1968 with the intention of buying the Daily Mirror, a pretty cheeky move, since the Mirror was the Britain’s best selling newspaper, selling over five million copies a day. Catto gently told him that his idea was a non-starter, because the Mirror was owned by International Publishing Corporation, then the most powerful British media group. So the young Rupert decided to buy that instead providing £2 million, so that Catto’s bank could start buying the shares on his behalf.
Had Murdoch pursued that objective he would have almost certainly fallen flat on his face. IPC was simply far too rich and powerful. Had Murdoch met anyone else that year, he would never have ended up owning Britain’s best selling popular daily and Sunday newspapers (The Sun and the News of the World) as well as the still influential Times and Sunday Times), let alone the string of foreign newspapers and the television channels (Sky, Fox, Star), book publishing companies, etc which now constitute the much loved and much hated Murdoch empire.
Catto was uniquely qualified to help the young Australian. He had recently launched an equally abrasive and ambitious young man, Arnold Weinstock, on to the national stage. In the space of a few years Weinstock, a poor Jew from the East End, had risen to control all three giant British electrical companies. With Catto’s help he had taken over AEI in 1967 and in September 1968, he grabbed English Electric too. He became the most talked about English businessman of the time, the man whom the Wilson government thought was going to modernise British industry.
Only a few people knew just how influential Catto was. He was never a self publicist. He was a young Turk in gent’s clothing. Moving easily amongst the elite with great personal charm, able to talk eloquently over a wide range of subjects, so that many did not notice the shrewd business mind. He steered Murdoch away from the Mirror to the much more achievable target of the News of the World, which he knew was up for sale. The ruling family, the Carrs, wanted to sell out. To win his prize Murdoch had to fight one of the nastiest takeover battles in British history. Because, a rising young Labour MP and scientific publisher, Robert Maxwell, was equally determined to get his hands on a national newspaper.
If Catto has a lot to answer for, then so do I. In 1968, I was just as impressed as Catto had been, with the qualities of the youthful Murdoch, whom I thought had the courage and the skill to shake up the managements of Fleet Street newspapers. And I was thrust into this battle on the Murdoch side, because I had been probing Maxwell’s business affairs, since the time I had first visited him at his combined headquarters/country house on the outskirts of Oxford in 1964.
To be fair, neither Catto, nor myself in 1968, could possibly have forecast that we were helping to Murdoch to acquire far greater power than that held by the legendary press barons of the 1930s. The outgoing Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is going to rewrite history on the back of a rumoured £4 million advance from Murdoch. The Prime Minister in waiting, Gordon Brown, is courting him assiduously, worried that Murdoch might switch his allegiance to the new Conservative leader, David Cameron.
If you want to read more about his rise to power, Murdoch by William Shawcross (Chatto & Windus. 1992) is the best source. If you want to know more about Catto and Weinstock’s rise read Anatomy of a Merger by Robert Jones and Oliver Marriott (Cape 1970, Pan 1972). If you want to know more about the many other things Catto did read the obituary in The Independent written by Nicholas Faith. It combines a lot of facts with a penetrating character study of this complex man.
But even Faith does not quite over the whole man. Catto had a gift for personal friendship, which he bestowed not only on potential rich clients for Morgan Grenfell. He gave unstinting help to Marriott and myself in unearthing the untold story of the attempt by GE of America to grab control of the British electrical industry in the late 1920s. Without his help we might never have got enough documentary evidence to write one of the most interesting chapters of Anatomy of a Merger.