Chapter One – From strength to vulnerability

Chapter Thirteen: The move to Greyville

Returning now to Argus interests in Durban, it is time to focus on a problem that had bothered Argus for years. Its premises at 85 Field Street in the central city had long been a prominent and convenient position for doing business at the city’s hub . . . except for the growing problem of the delivery vans needed for distribution of the Daily News every afternoon.

As Durban grew, its traffic problems in the central city grew commensurately, and the build-up of newspaper vans on weekdays for loading the Daily News became a major concern and irritant for the city’s traffic authorities. Traffic congestion also slowed up delivery times, to the inconvenience of Argus.
For some years, the problem had been raised at high level, but had remained unresolved. It was something that urgently needed to be settled, even before the merger brought the Mercury into the equation also. The Mercury’s premises as 74 Devonshire Place were even more central and convenient for business, with the gathering of newspaper vans causing no problem, because distribution hours were at night. Devonshire Place was, however, no alternative printing and distribution point for Argus, first because the building was not included in the merger deal, and also because Devonshire Place’s central city position made distribution just as difficult as from Field Street for afternoon deliveries.
After the merger, the presses of the Daily News were used for printing both the Daily News and the Mercury (with the Mercury’s new Goss press being sent to Argus’s Johannesburg site at The Star), so the build-up of newspaper vans outside Field Street extended over an even longer period of the day.
When I interviewed Peter McLean, who had headed the Natal branch long before the merger, before going on to head office, I raised the question of what Argus had thought it could do about the problem. He remembered the Mercury’s Alf Rowley urging a printing merger between Argus and Robinson in the early 1970s, but said: “I think there were good reasons why the printing merger didn’t come about at that time. And I think they were mainly to do with the fact that the Daily News was still in the old building. And we were just about in the process of moving out to Greyville. So there was going to be a press in limbo for about a year.”
He confirmed that Argus’s decision to move to Greyville had not been taken as a result of the merger with the Mercury, although the move was executed after the merger. The merger also affected the kind of premises the company needed for its Durban base.
Ed Booth, who became managing director of Natal Newspapers, was directly involved in decision-making at the time. From the 1970s, when John Gittins had been in charge of the branch, and with all subsequent managers, there had been pressure to move. Booth remembers that a move from Field Street had been turned down by head office more than once, even though the traffic police were constantly harrying the company’s van drivers and telling them to move on in the peak hour traffic conditions in the afternoons.
The need to move premises was obvious for the traffic problems being experienced, but there were other reasons also why a move would be beneficial. The company was eventually operating out of four different sites – the Field Street newspaper premises, a warehouse, Allied Publishing premises in a separate building and then the Mercury - so centralisation into one site would certainly help business efficiency.
Booth said: “To communicate with people, like the works people at the Mercury building, was a nightmare. There was staff duplication as a result, and time delays in doing anything. We were continually moving stuff from our building to the Mercury building and vice versa.”
Even previous to John Gittins’s efforts, Peter McLean had tried to motivate a move, but he had not succeeded. He had told Booth of this when Booth was trying to persuade him at head office to agree to a move. Booth says that, in his time in Durban, he also pushed very strongly for the move, but was also turned down more than once. “I remained motivated for the move and continually built up a stronger and stronger case. Eventually my driving it got us through.”
While motivating for a move, the management had been examining alternative sites for suitability and ease of distribution. “We drew up our needs, which were: good access to freeways, ability to get into the centre of town fairly quickly, and with the priority being on the northern side of Durban, because there were so many of our subscriptions in that area. We did look at areas south of Durban also, but in our deficiency analysis, this Greyville site came up best.”
The Greyville site was a section of vacant land known as Block AK, on the opposite side of the Greyville racecourse from the central city, and only a block from the railway station. The land was owned by the Department of Coloured Administration, which had taken control of it after the apartheid government had used the Group Areas Act to expropriate the land from poor Indian families who had previously lived there. The city council had to grant Natal Newspapers a special zoning to allow it to erect business premises there. The rest of Block AK remained zoned as “single residential” while the hiatus over its use continued in a climate of political tension. The government was keen to sell to Natal Newspapers, because it wanted the area to develop rapidly as a business area overflowing from the central city.
Though there was active development of business premises in the blocks on the railway side of Block AK, Block AK itself remained vacant. With the political transformation of the 1990s, there was a clash of interests between, on the one hand, politicians wanting to return the land for residential settlement, and on the other, business interests who felt low-income residential housing would be detrimental to business. It was also felt by business that this area had become the natural extension of the central business district.
Wrangling over the future of Block AK continued for many years, but in the meantime, Natal Newspapers was granted permission to build there before political transformation began, and was up and running on the Greyville site from shortly after the ANC was unbanned and Nelson Mandela released from jail.
The decision by Argus to proceed with developing the Greyville site was certainly not taken as an act of support for the apartheid government, but entirely to relieve its own critical problems of newspaper distribution and office efficiency in whatever way was permitted by the authorities.
The merger with the Mercury, according Tony Hiles, sales and marketing director of Natal Newspapers, was the final spur which forced the company to make a move. He says the move was “an absolute direct result of the merger”. Other sites which had been considered when, for a time they thought they couldn’t get the Greyville site, were in Pinetown, and on the Springfield flats. There was even consideration given to building over the railway station.
Once the Greyville site was agreed on, Natal Newspapers management got its chief engineer, Hilton Hoffenberg, to draw up on paper the ideal way in which a newspaper would operate in terms of flow of materials, flow of information and work flow. Booth said he did a “fantastic job” and must have saved the company a fortune.
“We decided that a building on one level would be so long that the communication time from the extremities would be too great. So we decided it needed to be stacked, with a ground floor and two other floors being ideal. When we finished that, we went to an architect, John Apsey, and asked him to ‘put an envelope around that’, saying: “Here’s the work flow. That’s how we’ve got to operate. Now you build the building around it.” Booth said Apsey did that, and did it extremely well.
When Apsey had finished his draft, he, Booth and Hoffenberg went overseas to look at other modern newspaper buildings in Britain, Europe and America. “We came back and slightly modified our plans, but basically Apsey had done such a good job, we didn’t need anything else.” Subsequently people had come from overseas to see the building, and had raved over the design.
Hiles remembers that the Durban town planning department insisted that the whole design be turned round to face Block AK instead of, as originally planned, facing away from Block AK onto Kolling Street. “They said the long-term planning was that this was to be a residential area and they didn’t want the back of the factory to face the residential area. We agreed to that only after we got assurances from them that the original idea of linking this overpass over the station with Kolling Street was not going to go ahead. We said it would create huge problems getting vehicles onto the road if that overpass was built.
One of the features of the Natal Newspapers building in Greyville is the high-ceilinged atrium, an idea Hiles said was obtained from America. Booth said the idea was decided on because of his insistence that most of the staff should use stairs to get to the upper floors instead of waiting for lifts. One lift was included “for geriatrics and crocks”. The rest of the staff used stairs to the upper two floors. Booth said he felt so strongly about getting away from reliance on lifts, because in the Field Street building, all the staff seemed to wait for lifts, even if they only had to go up one floor. “No one ever walked up floors. I timed it, and it was a total waste of time. The time taken to move between floors was ridiculous. So this building designed those things out. It designed easy access.”
Another feature was the open-plan design, which at first bothered the rival editorial departments of different newspapers, who felt their confidential information might not be safe. In practice this did not turn out to be a big problem.
The decision not to have a basement in the building was because of the very high water table in the ground in that area of town. Buildings with basements were always having problems with pumping water out. “We decided this was not the way to go. The preferred way would be to go from the ground up.”
Looking back after several years, Booth feels the planning of the building was “very close to being right”. “I would have loved to have more space. We actually wanted rest areas for staff. One thing I regret is that head office cut our building budget.”
The new premises were owned 52,5% by Argus Holdings, 35% by the Argus Pension Fund and 12,5% by the TML Pension Fund (administered by Old Mutual). Independent Newspapers took over Argus Holdings share, and the Independent Pension Fund took over Argus Pension Fund’s share after Independent’s purchase of the company. TML Pension Fund retained its share in ownership of the premises even though it sold out of Natal Newspapers altogether.
A shortage of parking space is one of the problems the company has wrestled with, almost from the time the building was first occupied. Staff members who resorted to parking in the adjacent roads have suffered thefts. The company was eventually forced to rent a section of Block AK for a guarded parking area.
If the new premises seemed to offer the company a care-free new beginning, the fate of Block AK became a worrying problem for it by the late 1990s. While business (and Natal Newspapers) would like to see Block AK developed under commercial zoning, political sensitivities over the expropriation of the land from Indians at inadequate compensation rates in the 1960s has left a conscience-stricken overhang that has forced residential zoning in one form or another to remain on the agenda for the area. The company has remained uncomfortable with the idea that its premises may end up adjacent to a low-income residential area, where the crime rate is high and security risks for staff and property are greatly increased.
The taxi rank down Osborne Street in the direction of the station has already been a major problem for the company, because of periodic outbreaks of warfare between rival taxi groups. Bullets have struck the building, actually entering the office of the editor of the Mercury, and in another incident some years later, glancing off the window of the editor’s secretary. An ambush assassination of a taxi driver and his passengers occurred outside the office of the managing director, though on a Sunday when he was not at work. A company delivery van was hijacked in the road a block or so from the premises.
Besides the decisions relating to the choice of the site, the company had logistical problems in moving from the central city to Greyville without disrupting production.
The Harris presses had to be moved in stages so there was always a press available to keep the newspapers running. Hiles said the move of the presses went “unbelievably well” and once the company had two presses up and running at Greyville, the rest of the move went more quickly than anticipated. “Our disruption was over three to five days, maximum. Classified Advertising closed down at lunch time on a Saturday and were operating here in Greyville on the following Monday morning.”
Hiles remembers that the biggest problems were with the third Harris press, which the company bought to replace the Goss that went to Johannesburg. It gave them lots of problems on quality. It didn’t have the same register mechanisms as the two other Harris presses and never functioned as well as the two others. The Natal Newspapers management had been very unhappy not to keep the Goss press which went to Johannesburg, but were simply told by head office that the decision had been made. There were hard feelings in the works about this decision. But Hiles admitted it made sense to take the Goss to be with The Star’s other Goss presses, and said the company was given a good deal on it.
Editorially, the Mercury staff were the first to have to face the move to Greyville, and actually had to work in a building that was still in the last stages of construction. In May 1990, they moved in. Anne Stevens recalls the atmosphere: “It was very strange. We had to get used to walking into the building over planks, a different way to get into the building almost every day, depending on where they were working. We were just plonked down, no air conditioning or anything. We went to work with fans. We bought our own fans.” Stevens admitted that the Mercury staff bore the brunt of the move to Greyville. “The building wasn’t furnished when we moved in.”
Greg Dardagan, by then news editor of the Mercury, said: “The move from the old building was quite a heart-wrenching thing. There were a lot of memories and a lot of history wrapped up there.” On top of that, the staff were not very happy at having to move out of the central city area, which had many advantages for individuals.” We couldn’t walk down to the bank very easily. We couldn’t pop out to the shops in the lunch hour.
“Just after we got here, there were never-ending moves. The paper was forever moving and changing. Desks were being moved, offices being built and knocked down again. The open plan office was a big shock to me. It has a lot of advantages, but there are a lot of disadvantages as well.”
Dardagan was one member of staff who did not think the open plan worked well. “One sees offices being created all the time, and little turfs (personal demesnes) are created throughout the floor. It has been turbulent most of the time. And very little time for feeling settled.”
The relative isolation of the new Greyville site was an inconvenience for staff who commuted to work. To overcome this problem, the company had to introduce a shuttle bus from the central city to Greyville, travelling back and forth several times a day. Even with the shuttle bus, staff found the new headquarters of Natal Newspapers inconvenient to reach, and many resorted to taking their own private vehicles to work, to improve the convenience. This caused traffic and theft problems round the outskirts of the building.
From this, it is apparent that the planners of the new building thought the move went particularly smoothly, but the workers were not convinced. In fact, they felt particularly inconvenienced in several ways. A move of this sort, however, could not reasonably be expected to take place without disruption to old lifestyles, but matters were made worse by the fact that the building was not completed before the first part of the move was made.
The building had been designed with the idea that the editor of the Mercury and his team would be at one side of the building (facing the station) while the editor of the Daily News and his team would be at the other (facing the racecourse). The editors’ offices were designed to have their own private toilet facilities. But Mercury editor Jimmy McMillan threw a spanner in the works of this plan by choosing an office for himself at the First Avenue/Osborne Street corner, leaving the private toilet for the use of his female staff.
Jimmy McMillan’s view of the move was this: “It was a change. All associations and memories were tied to the old building. To go into a new building was not traumatic, I don’t think. People were looking forward to the experience of a freshly designed new home.”

Chapter Fourteen: Ripples from the death knell for apartheid
Just as Athol Campbell and David Robinson were reassessing the longer-term future of newspapers as an investment in the late 1980s, so were the politicians reflecting seriously on the future of apartheid policies as a way forward for South Africa.
Campbell and David Robinson concluded there was no long-term future for newspapers in the expected difficult days forward, and chose to get out. They appear to have been wrong in that assessment, although they have both done well by investing elsewhere. The media appear to have a great future in a world where information technology has become the key to communications of the future, but at the end of the 1980s, the political storm clouds obscured much of that view, and it was not an unreasonable assessment the owners of Robinson made. Many would have agreed with them.
Politicians, on the other hand, were right to see no future in continuing apartheid policies. For much of the 1980s, they had been trying to find ways of backing away from apartheid by removing its most cruel and unfair provisions aimed at protecting white privilege. But what they did not have in their minds was a clear picture of what could replace it.
White politicians were still obsessed by the need to protect white interests from being overrun by a black majority if full democracy were introduced, knowing white privilege would not survive. They were also fearful of communist expansionism in Africa, and the prospect that the Soviet Union would seek to use a black majority for its own ideological purposes in southern Africa. Such a development would have been particularly harmful to white interests.
Black liberation movements were more concerned with mounting campaigns of various sorts to overthrow the apartheid regime – by violence, by disorder, by boycotts and international pressure – than with the final form of government to be adopted if they managed to sweep apartheid away.
Therefore, as 1989 dawned, the confrontation between white and black continued. But signs of the logjam beginning to break up were not long in coming, most especially through the stroke P.W.Botha suffered in January, which immediately put his continued leadership of the National Party in question.
He strove to retain his presidency as he recovered from the stroke, but played into the hands of the mounting throng of doubters in his caucus when he suggested the state presidency be divorced from the leadership of the NP. That opened the door for F.W.de Klerk to win a tight contest against Barend du Plessis and to begin a process of radical change within the ruling party.
De Klerk has admitted that he had been convinced of the need to abandon apartheid from at least three years before he became party leader. His somewhat conservative, centrist image, which had secured him the leadership had obscured from the public the sea change that had taken place in his thinking.
But first he had to battle with P.W.Botha, who though relinquishing the party leadership, certainly had no intention of relinquishing the seat of power. It was only much later in the year that Botha was eventually persuaded to stand down.
On de Klerk becoming party leader, the Mercury’s editorial observed that “what will be worth watching for – and closely – is whether the new party leader starts asserting himself or whether he has simply been voted chief puppet of Tuynhuys.” De Klerk, in his maiden speech as leader, showed the direction he was moving in when he asked whether the time had not come “for us to negotiate a new, realistic model for the non-discriminatory maintenance of community rights in the social sphere”.
While the struggle for power and policy was going on inside the National Party, atrocities were still being committed on civilian citizens, none worse than the drive-by shooting of Wits lecturer David Webster, an ANC sympathiser but not a revolutionary, by unknown gunmen. Years later it was to emerge that the murder was the work of men within the apartheid security establishment, operating a dirty tricks game without authority.
Adding to the political uncertainties of the times was the decision of P.W.Botha to call (as early as May) an election on September 6 for all three chambers of the tricameral parliament. It was not long before it became clear that the faces of the future in South African politics would be different from the past. P.W.Botha’s right hand man, Chris Heunis, decided not to stand for re-election. And Helen Suzman, long the leading parliamentary figure of the opposition, also threw in the towel after 35 years.
In the event, the election returned the National Party comfortably to power, but with a drastically reduced majority as the government’s opponents on both right and left grew. One of the first signs of a new approach from the government came only a week after polling, when de Klerk allowed a protest march to take place in Cape Town. The march of thousands, one of the biggest mass demonstrations ever seen in South Africa, proved a triumph of peaceful protest.
A few days later, de Klerk produced a five-point plan for peace in South Africa, saying time was of the essence. The government would seek to bridge the gulf of mistrust between South Africans, the negotiation process would receive incisive attention, economic prosperity would be a goal, a new constitutional dispensation would be created in which everyone would participate without domination, and unrest violence and terrorism would be dealt with. The Mercury greeted this five-point plan by saying de Klerk had “opened the door to participation in the search for peace”.
Quite apart from developments within South Africa, the major international event of the year – the breaking down of the Berlin Wall signalling the collapse of communism – had a direct impact on the southern African situation. It ended the communist push in Africa, leading to the recall of Cuban troops from Angola and a settlement of the decades-old dispute over the future of Namibia. It also meant that, with communism no longer a threat to South Africa, a settlement between the races was at last possible.
De Klerk’s February 2 speech in 1990 caused a sensation, earning for the Nationalist government the first international accolades in 40 years of rule. The unbanning of the ANC and PAC, and the unconditional release of Nelson Mandela, particularly opened up the way for negotiating a new future. The lifting of the state of emergency was soon to follow. The Mercury joined in praising de Klerk for crossing South Africa’s Rubicon in “one bold leap”. Looking ahead, it warned that “the real work of compromise, reconciliation and the shaping of a new society must be done. And it is not going to be easy.”
It showed some pique at the “yes, but . . .” attitude of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose first reaction was euphoric, saying de Klerk’s statement “takes my breath away”, but three days later suggested in Cambridge Massachusetts that sanctions against South Africa should not only be kept in place, but should be intensified. The Mercury commented: “So much, one could say, for Christian charity, and at the same time ask just how long these sanctioneers – and others who cling to this madness – are going to keep up their campaign to bring down South Africa and turn the country into an economic wasteland . . .”
Mandela, on his release, made a good impression by picking up on de Klerk’s theme of “reconciliation, not recrimination”, but received a bad press for committing himself to a policy of nationalisation. It was, fortunately, an error which he came to realise quite soon, so over time the threat of nationalisation actually disappeared from the agenda. Nationalisation was a slogan of the left in South Africa in the 1960s before the ANC was banned. Because of the collapse of communism, it was an idea completely out of date by 1990 when Mandela was released. It took the ANC time to adjust to the change, now that it was active as an accepted political movement again.
If hopes were high that de Klerk’s moves would quickly bring a new peaceful, fully democratic dispensation, then they were partially dashed by the emergence of tactical play by the various parties all striving for maximum benefit for themselves. It was to take four years, and some of the worst acts of violence and terror atrocities of the political transition, before that goal could be reached.
The mood of optimism in South African society, however, survived these several setbacks, and a continuous process of searching and finding a new democratic order became the dominant theme of the ensuing years.
The process was one in which the press played its part as a vehicle for public debate and as an agenda-setter for negotiations, but politicians took the lead. Political threats against the press from the government and other parties largely evaporated, leading to public debate becoming much freer and less structured by party attitudes, which were themselves in a state of rapid adjustment to the new times that had arrived.
It took a little time for new groupings to emerge and new pressures to be felt, such as the pressure of right-wing white vigilantism, the dirty tricks train killings, and the no-go zones in Natal for ANC and IFP supporters.
In 1990 there were rumblings of trouble in the Middle East over Iraq’s Saddam Hussein unilaterally annexing Kuwait, an act that led first to warnings from the Western world, and finally the following year to warfare and the forcible wresting of Kuwait from Iraqi hands, and the imposition of long-running international sanctions against Iraq while Saddam Hussein maintained his rein of terror. The effect of this new crisis was to move international attention away from South Africa to other hot-spots in the world.
In this atmosphere of freeing up from old positions, Jimmy McMillan announced in September 1990 his intention of retiring from the Mercury early the next year. By then he was the longest-serving editor of a daily newspaper in South Africa, having been continuously in the editorial chair for 19 years.