Bad News: The Wapping Dispute

by John Lang

In January 1986, some 5,500 workers employed by four of Britain’s national newspapers were sacked.The Sun, News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times were all owned by Rupert Murdoch’sNews International Limited, and the bitter industrial dispute that followed was to last 13 months. Although generally referred to as a print workers’ dispute, many of those sacked were not printers at all, but managers, clerks, secretaries, librarians, copy typists and messengers who were members of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT). In the year following the dispute the authors of this book, themselves previously librarians at The Times and The Sunday Times and active participants in the strike, interviewed many of the clerical workers involved in an effort to document their experiences. Having spent more than a year recording these testimonies and transcribing the tapes onto the backs of discarded fast-food del

191 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2011

About the author

Born in Australia in 1816, John Lang - novelist, newspaper editor and barrister, now best known for having defended the Rani of Jhansi in court against the British East India Company - spent a large part of his ife in India, and died in Mussoorie in 1864. A keen traveller and observer of human nature, Lang was also a raconteur par excellence.

His grave was found after much tribulations in the cemetry on Camelsback Road in Mussoorie by none other than the ace writer Ruskin Bond himself.