A Hack's Progress by Phillip Knightley Cape, 267pp, £17.99 in UK
The Writer's Handbook says, correctly, that the Sunday Times, founded in 1820, has a "tendency to be anti-establishment, with a strong crusading investigative tradition." In recent years, under Murdoch editors, when even the more respectable London newspapers have offered an increasing amount of gossipy entertainment, as if to compete with magazines and television, Sunday Times investigations often seem intended to subvert by scandal the monarchy, church and state. In the late 1960s, however, under the editorship of Denis Hamilton and Harold Evans, Sun- day Times investigations sometimes really were crusades with altruistic purposes and beneficial results, and one of the paper's star reporters was Phillip Knightley.
"I was lucky," he writes in this enlightening and entertaining volume of autobiographical shoptalk, "in that I had arrived at what turned out to be the beginning of the golden age of the Sunday Times."
Soon after joining the staff, he became an important member of the team that eventually compelled Distillers to compensate families whose children were born deformed because their mothers had taken the drug Thalidomide during pregnancy. Knightley writes that the compensation paid for damages was initially inadequate, but four years later, in 1972, the paper renewed the campaign. Though he deplores that it took so long, the fact that it was waged, and waged at great cost in time and money with such persistence, is one of the most honourable success stories of modern journalism.
He is obviously proud of his part in this and other major investigative enterprises, but nobody should accuse him of immodesty. The book's title is unduly self-deprecatory, with its allusions to Grub Street and Hogarthian decline. In fact, Knightley is a witty and eloquent writer whose career has been continuously ascendant.
Phillip was born in Sydney in 1929 into a big, working-class family whose forebears had migrated to Australia from England and Ireland. His first job was that of a copy-boy, carrying typescript from desk to desk to composing room, a functionary that newspapers no longer require.
He had to go to Lismore, a dairy town in northern New South Wales, to get his first job as a reporter. "The Northern Star taught me to be accurate, that people had feelings, and that you could not use your privileged access as a journalist to come into their lives, suck them dry, and then leave again. You had personal and civic responsibilities."
Ethics and ambition did not obviate the possibility of having fun. Apparently forgetting temporarily the morality of Lismore, as the only reporter on the Oceania Daily News in the capital of Fiji, he wrote a gossip column, "Round the Town with Suzanne". A typical item: "Who was the lady in the red polka-dot dress seen emerging from bushes near the Cable and Wireless station in the early hours last Thursday accompanied by Mr R. And did her husband know?"
"The column," he soon discovered, "turned out to be a terrible error of judgement." After a report of heavy drinking at the Suva Yacht Club, drunken yachtsmen threw Suzanne into the sea. "When I clambered out, they gave me a rum and told me to be careful what I wrote lest I confirm the Fijians' worst views of the whites." Fortunately, the paper soon went out of business.
After a short interlude trying to sell vacuum cleaners in Sydney, he got another foothold in journalism, on the Daily Mirror. An assignment to cover Queen Elizabeth's tour of the Antipodes in 1953 enabled him to meet members of the British press for the first time.
"A lot of the men," he observed, "were either half drunk all the time or fully drunk half the time." Shortly after this beguiling experience, Knightley, in the steps of many another talented and restless young Australian journalist, moved to Fleet Street.
After the frivolity of the first hundred pages or so, Knightley the journeyman reporter tells of his experiences covering stories such as the Profumo affair and penetrating the secret world of MI6, the CIA and the KGB.
With the Sunday Times as a powerful base of operations, he was able to gather material for several successful books, including one debunking Lawrence of Arabia and one on Philby, KGB Masterspy.
Knightley's most interesting conclusion drawn from his expert knowledge of espionage is that spies on both sides of the Cold War played a relatively insignificant game. What won the war was the West's ability to out-spend the Soviet Union on the armed forces. The enemy went broke. Not many newspapermen are willing so honestly to down-play the importance of their special expertise.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic