A Woman’s place in Reuters

I won’t reminisce here over the great and glorious scoops Reuters has made in the last 150 years. From D Day to the Six-day war to the Fall of the Berlin Wall and Mandela’s release from jail, Reuters has reported first hand and often first on almost every major world event. Earlier this year a veteran Reuters reporter scooped the opposition to break the important news that Madonna had become Mrs Guy Ritchie. But you can read all of that in the book. No, this an unashamedly personal account and the spur was the following exchange over lunch recently at a private writer’s’ club gathering.

Retired senior Reuter executive to assembled authors: “Of course, Anne was a very good journalist but the thing she’ll always be remembered for is refusing to do night shifts. She said her husband wouldn’t let her.”
My throat burning, I rose to my own defence and, just as Reuters had trained me, tried to tell ‘the other side’ of the story.

“In fact,” I began, “I was the woman who nearly died doing night shifts.”
In those days, (it was 1973 but perhaps it’s the same now) the shift lasted from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m., Sunday to Saturday and on London Bureau, came around approximately once every six weeks. By the second day of one of these week long duties I started to feel sick. Soon I had a temperature, flu-like symptoms and a pain in my chest. But I carried on, acutely conscious not only of how unpopular I would be if I gave up in the middle but how easy it would then be for the rest of the desk to say: “You see, women just can’t cope with night shifts.” On Saturday morning, my duty fulfilled, I staggered to Paddington Hospital casualty where I was diagnosed with pneumonia, pleurisy and Bournholm’s Disease and was dangerously ill for several weeks. Would I have had to have died for this particular fiction never to have circulated?

I might have looked upon this as an isolated episode had it not followed close on the heels of an equally egregious example of the way male myths about women in the workplace gather their own accretions, becoming more impregnable with time.

Shortly after my book about Mother Teresa was published - by a coincidence, not only in the week that she died but also the week of Princess Diana’s death - I was flattered to be invited to address a Reuter Society Meeting twenty years after leaving. I felt this was a real sense of ‘coming home’ -- until another retired executive greeted me with: “I remember you because we always had to arrange the timetable on World Desk to give you Wednesday afternoons off to be with your baby.”
“How could this be?” I asked. “I left before I had any children.”

The Culture
These encounters set me thinking about what an extraordinarily male culture Reuters was, right on into the last quarter of the last century, an atmosphere which I obscured at the time presumably through a heady mixture of finding 85, Fleet Street such an exciting place to be and my own naiveté. Having worked previously only briefly in the Arabic department of the BBC Overseas Service - a much more relaxed and informal place because it was not competitive - I had little to compare it to. It wasn’t that I was sent out to cover flower or fashion shows - I might have objected to that. Nor did I really mind that my hair, clothes and make-up were daily and relentlessly scrutinised. There was one occasion in 1975, as the Sex Discrimination Act became law, when I was duly frog-marched by my male colleagues into El Vino, the Fleet Street Wine Bar, so I could write the story which began obviously enough: “I was today refused a drink from the bar …” But I rather enjoyed being a part of that particular history and otherwise wrote as many articles about disasters, politicians and cricket matches as the rest. This was a culture - let me call it chivalrous - that admitted women had their uses but could not see that these would be anything other than detrimental in a frontline situation where danger was involved.

But the culture was nurtured in London, not from reporters on the spot. There were two distinct parts to Reuters World News: Head Office in Fleet Street, which concerned itself with processing news and was staffed largely but not exclusively by older journalists, and the overseas bureaux, which were happy to use whatever staff they could get their hands on - man, woman or hermaphrodite. Although foreign correspondents often spent time in the former cooling their heels until new postings arose, they did so under sufferance as if this was not what they joined Reuters for.

In 1972 Reuters, like many other organisations, was nervously edging its way in the new feminist climate and I recognise now what a brave decision it was to chance its arm and hire a female - me - for the first time on its graduate trainee scheme. They had had other women working for them, most notably perhaps Adrienne Farrell, considered a talented journalist who reported on the 1953 Everest Climb and, according to the official Reuters history “played a vital part in organising the communications”. Then there was Patricia Clough, taken on only after she had gained experience at the Bolton Evening News, and Anna McKane, who worked for many years as their Lobby and Parliamentary Correspondent. A handful of others had worked in the news room as copytasters and subeditors or were hired locally as stringers. But accepting a woman as part of a training scheme was important for the company psyche as it was formalising what it could no longer avoid. I was not yet 21, was not an Oxbridge graduate (I had taken a history degree at King’s College, London) and was asked in my interview by the then General Manager, Gerald Long, how I’d cope if sent into battle and faced with a marauding army who had not seen a woman for months. How could I possibly have known how I’d have coped (or not)?. But then Long had himself been a soldier in the Intelligence Corps before becoming a journalist. He, too, had joined Reuters on what was then the new Graduate Training Scheme, an initiative of one of Reuters’ most illustrious general managers, Sir Christopher Chancellor.

I did not then and do not now consider this question offensive; patronising perhaps. But it was clearly indicative of the belief that the best work at Reuters is dangerous and demanding and women may only ever be able to play an auxiliary role.

Long had two overriding ambitions during his time at Reuters (he left in 1981); to make it profitable and to make it truly international. When he took over in 1963, following the premature death of Editor-in-Chief, Walton (“Tony”) Cole, the institution was still seen as an outpost of the British Empire, an attitude largely deriving from the time when, during World War I, Sir Roderick Jones, Reuters Chief Executive, had also worked for the Department of Information. Even as recently as the Falklands War the company had had to issue a statement insisting that Reuters was not a British News Agency.

In his rigorous pursuit of objectivity, impartiality and profitability through expanding the financial news services, Long, a postman’s son, may have made enemies among the staff, some of whom ‘moved on’. But it was this demanding atmosphere, with the emphasis always on speed above literary merit, that made Reuters such a sought after training ground for writers such as Freddy Forsyth and Tim Sebastian in which to hone their talents. No newspaper could offer anything similar.

Posted Abroad
And so when, six months after I was hired, I was summoned to Long’s office and told I was being posted to Rome, I was far too nervous to point out that I did not actually speak Italian. I spoke French, German and Russian but, others explained to me with a knowing wink, Italy was the sort of country where a woman would be able to function most effectively as a news reporter. Did the ploy work? I recall the tense weeks of the Getty grandson kidnap when eventually the boy’s ear was cut off and sent to a Rome newspaper as proof they had the heir and could do worse. The day this happened, the police station closed for the afternoon but I was sent there anyway and told to do a ‘damsel-in-distress’ act in the hope that I might thus elicit information the others couldn’t reach. I just spent hours in the cold waiting outside. On another occasion I was invited to a film producer’s house for Sunday lunch and only after I arrived discovered how Italian “Sunday lunches” differed from their English counterparts, for this was a nude swimming party where Roman Polanski was one of the six guests. When I told the office about it the next day they were furious with me for not conducting a nude interview. He had been on their ‘wanted’ list for months.

Almost as memorable was the Reuters Board meeting, held within weeks of my arrival in the Italian capital, when Long took the opportunity to remind me of the enormous responsibility I owed to my sex.

“The standard of your work and behaviour will determine whether or not Reuters hires other women in the future,” he told me crisply on the steps of the Campidoglio, the Michelangelo masterpiece which our dashing Slav Bureau Chief, Christopher Matthews, had taken over for the occasion.
“And never accept any invitations to have lunch or dinner with Soviet diplomats without telling your colleagues where you are going,” he warned.
These remarks became part of my emotional baggage throughout my Reuter years. But that night, as I see in the photographs, I was smiling, honoured to be seated at the top table between Gerald Long and his chief accountant, Nigel Judah, the man he chose to put the company on the road to financial profitability.

I was honoured, too, to be included in the party which, later that evening moved on to a nightclub. It was there that I became aware that an elderly gentleman peer, owner of another newspaper and Reuter Trustee, clearly suffered from a nervous tic as his hand kept wandering onto my knee. At 21, I accepted this as the sort of thing that happens to girls privileged enough to be taken on by such an august organisation. My own daughter, now the same age, would slap a senior director who rested his hand on her knee…… with a writ.

Pregnant with my first child, I left Reuters in 1978 not because I wanted to. I tried to stay and take maternity leave but the (male) personnel officer suggested I would not need a job any more as my husband worked for (and therefore surely owned?) a bank. When my husband was subsequently posted to New York and I asked for a sympathetic transfer, I ended up paying back my maternity leave allowance (I can hardly believe I am actually typing these words) and started a freelance life, thus fulfilling what many had always prophesied. For some in Reuters, I was always viewed as one who would give up work as soon as she got married and had babies - a ditzy blonde, not to be taken seriously. It was this attitude that prompted the hitherto anonymously taciturn telex operators in London to send me a message in Rome one evening which they would never have sent to a male reporter.

I had transmitted the usual sort of boring one liner closing down the Bureau for the night but giving a number where I could be reached in an emergency. Seconds later, realising I’d sent an old number, I had to send a chaser. ”Would Miss Rubinstein (as I then was) please make up her mind where she is spending the night,“ they promptly responded.

The Future
In 1993 I wrote a history of women reporters and, as I researched in a more academic, less personal way some of the gender issues involved in women working in media, I began to fine tune my own political antennae. In twenty years things have changed dramatically. Maggie O’Kane of The Guardian told me then that the reporters she worked with in Bosnia were far too busy staying alive to worry about what gender their colleagues were. O’Kane’s brilliant style of war reporting, echoing Martha Gellhorn before her, may focus on children in orphanages, young girls satisfying soldiers as prostitutes or women scavenging for food - stories once demeaningly referred to as ‘soft news’ are now not simply regarded as the norm, but often as the only news that really matters. Recognising that, you can only sympathise with 1970’s man for seeing the writing on the newly introduced screen. Feeling threatened, he invented myths about women not being prepared to work long hours.

These days Reuters has women bureaux chiefs and senior women managers. But now that the group is a global business deriving some 78% of its revenue from selling its services to the financial community around the world and less than 10% from sales to the media, perhaps none of this matters any more. Reuters has moved on.