JOHN COLLIER was a print union leader who moved into senior management with News Group Newspapers, later becoming joint general manager of Times Newspapers, and a member of the board.
He was born to John and Margaret Collier in Salford in 1921. His first job was a milk round, but when he was old enough — at 14 — he was taken on to the staff of the Manchester Evening News as an office boy. His service there was broken only by his years with the RAF in India during the Second World War. From 1945 to 1970 he held clerical positions on the paper, also rising through the trade union ranks to become clerical branch secretary of the clerical print union Natsopa in Manchester and the North West.
Brenda Dean (then a rising young union official, later to become Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde) had first met Collier when he was involved on behalf of the union, supporting free speech, in the Lady Chatterly book trials. She soon discovered that “he had a sharp tongue, but a great sense of humour. He was one of the newer breed of union official who didn’t feel the need to be macho — and as one of the few young women in the union movement at the time I found that exceptional.”
Like his other colleagues in those days, Dean was upset when Collier crossed over to the employers’ side. But she was able to appreciate that his potential must inevitably be frustrated by the union movement as it then was.
The two met again years later when as president and general secretary of Sogat ‘82 Dean led negotiations with News Group or Times Newspapers. She regarded him then as “an employer whose eyes we couldn’t pull the wool over”.
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It was an era when in-house print union officials carried such grand titles as “Imperial Father of the Chapel”. They were enormously powerful and with the backing of their union’s hierarchy they could threaten the management with walkouts every night. Under the pressure of deadlines, managements generally caved in.
When Rupert Murdoch was buying the News of the World and The Sun in the late 1960s, Collier, as a union boss, had impressed him with his negotiating skills, common sense and forward thinking. Murdoch therefore hired him to become labour relations manager of the News of the World in 1970.
In 1981 Kenneth Thomson, of the Thomson Group, decided that he had had enough of trying to publish The Times and The Sunday Times amid a maelstrom of strikes and walkouts. When he sought a sale, Murdoch quickly became the principal bidder.
The experienced printer and union negotiator Bill O’Neill was brought in from Sydney to lead management negotiations with the unions — essential before anything could be signed and sealed — and he asked Murdoch for help from Collier, who was by this time general manager of News Group Newspapers, the Bouverie Street publisher of The Sun and the News of the World. O’Neill was aware that Collier’s knowledge of the British union scene, and his understanding of what drove many of those “on the other side”, would be vital.
At the time Murdoch was hesitant: he did not want his existing newspaper group to be drawn — however tangentially — into negotiations with new union chapels. O’Neill’s view prevailed, however, and he and Collier set out to complete 54 chapel agreements in the meagre 21-day period that Thomson’s had allowed for the bargaining process.
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O’Neill recalled that Thomson’s outgoing labour relations executives seemed to relish pointing out that there were more than 600 work grievances still pending at that time. He was convinced that “without John Collier we would not have reached agreement with the chapels — and the sale would not have gone forward”.
When the deal was done and the agreements signed — with O’Neill and Collier achieving in three weeks what the Thomson executives had failed to do in many years — it was Collier who held aloft the signed agreement as he, O’Neill and Mur- doch announced the sale to the media. Collier and O’Neill were made joint general managers and board directors of Times Newspapers.
Collier subsequently took over the industrial relations role across News International. The Fleet Street practices of those days are legendary, from shift payments and expenses paid to “Mickey Mouse”, to agreements for the mysterious “fire-spotter” — this was someone who was supposed to watch for German aircraft, even though the war had been over for nearly 40 years.
Disputes with unions were compounded by the fact that Fleet Street managements were themselves not universally in harmony. In all this, Collier gained a reputation for diplomacy and loyalty, a stout ally to have on side. He was involved in the run-up to the dramatic move of the Murdoch titles to Wapping, retiring in 1986.
Rupert Murdoch recalled Collier’s “exceptional negotiating skills”: “As one of the team working on the purchase of Times Newspapers, his patience and innate sense of the possible made the whole process very much easier. As long as the stories of those remarkable days are told, John will be a central figure. I think of him with gratitude and affection.”
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Collier was for many years the chairman of the Berkhamsted branch of the British Legion, whose ideals of comradeship, selfessness and service echoed his own.
Collier is survived by his wife Norma, whom he married in his later years, and his daughter, Jean, from his previous marriage to Mattie, who died in 1988.
John Collier, former trade union leader and joint general manager of Times Newspapers, was born on June 28, 1921. He died on May 25, 2005, aged 83.