Richard Lance Keeble is Professor of Journalism at Lincoln University. He was a journalist on local newspapers in Nottingham and Cambridge and editor of The Teacher from 1980 to 1984. He was a lecturer at City University, London, for 19 years. He was Chair of the Orwell Society for seven years and co-edits the biannual journal George Orwell Studies. He has written and edited over 50 books including The Newspapers Handbook, Ethics for Journalists, Secret State, Silent Press.
Cherwell: So, looking back on your early life, what stands out to you in light of your later career?
Keeble: Well, I went to a grammar school in Nottingham. I played the piano. I was sporty. I was one of these kind of very successful school boys, and as a result, I think I got five A levels. I went to Oxford immediately after school. And I think that was a mistake. I should really have taken at least a year out, because when I got to Oxford in 1967 which probably seems to you like a prehistoric time, I was very immature, and didn’t really benefit from the Oxford education as I should. I was the first person to go from my school to Oxford on the arts side. And why did I choose Keble College? Well, you see, they hadn’t got anyone else into Oxford, and my name was Keeble, and I knew Keble because of rowing, every year the boat race featured Keble people.
I got all the grades by the time I was 15, and I did music A-Level, and composed a piece, which I still play to this day, actually, and I played it there. I met the music tutor, and he said I could do either music or history. But I chose history because from a very early age, I’d say maybe 13 I knew what I wanted to be a journalist. When I said that to my teachers, they say, ‘What do you want to be?’ I said a journalist. Their faces dropped. You know, it wasn’t to do, you know, all the tabloid scares and it’s not proper literature and all that, but I had no doubt, and I loved history, so it was a natural subject for me to take to Oxford, and everything I’ve done writing ever since has been rooted in history, really. So, if you’re asking me, how important was my schooling? Well, I think it was. I had a humanities education. I did English and History, Latin, Music, General Studies at A-level, and I think that provided me with a kind of intellectual background to be a journalist.
Cherwell: Your time at Cherwell in Oxford would have helped with that as well?
Keeble: Well again, instinctively, I moved to journalism at Oxford, you’re right. I was the Features Editor of Cherwell. And then I was the Union correspondent. And I went under a pseudonym of Mark Question – very boring, because if you put it the other way around, it’s question mark – hardly original. Before computers we just used to send copy to the printers, and they sent us proofs, and that was it. But I was able to write in a rather elaborate, literary, pretentious way about the Oxford debates, in an almost poetic, crazy way. I don’t think it was actually permitted at the time. But anyway, I went ahead, and I really enjoyed that.
Cherwell: What was the Union like then? Were there still hacks? What do you remember?
Keeble: I remember Paul Foot. A very famous investigative journalism socialist worker party, a relative of Michael Foot. I remember seeing the poet W.H. Auden— I passed him in the corridor in the Union, and his face was the craggiest, sort of broken up face I ever have seen, and it was rumpled. I was too intimidated to say anything. He and Orwell knew each other, only through correspondence and through arguing. But of course, Auden was slagged off by Orwell, you know, as one of these pansy lefties, but then they came to admire each other’s work.
Cherwell: Was there anyone else famous that you were here at the same time as?
Keeble: The most famous would be Christopher Hitchens. He was celebrated even then. He worked for Isis more than Cherwell, so we didn’t mix at all. And Gyles Brandreth, you may know, a kind of television celebrity. He was a celebrity even then. He had a column in Isis so he was able to spout his views even at Oxford.
In my year actually, at Keble, there was a guy called Keith Best. I knew him reasonably well as one does get to know people in your same year, and he went on he was the cox of the boat that won the Boat Race. Every year they would burn the wooden toilet seats from the boats. They’d make a big fire in the middle of the quad in Keble. They’d burn the boat, they burn all the toilet seats, and they throw a scantily clad Keith Best over it. And you know, that was Keith Best. Anyway, he became a Tory MP.
Cherwell: When you left Oxford in 1970, over the next few decades, you took on a number of editorial, academic posts. Which ones stand out to you most, and why?
My first one was on my local paper. It’s an interesting story, because at the time, the trade unions were powerful, and there was, effectively, the industrial agreement that everyone did indentures for three years. It was a kind of training program, apprentice programme, you did that for three years. You got your proficiency test, as it was called, and then you could, in theory, move around. You could apply for Fleet Street, for instance. Well, I got into journalism because the editor of my local newspaper, The Nottingham Guardian journal, was the husband of the arts teacher at my grammar school, right? That’s why I got it. And not only did I get a job, but they dumped me on the sub-editor’s desk, above the reporters, in effect, and I was a kind of pawn in a management attempt to say two fingers to the Unions. “We can do what we like. We can appoint this guy straight from Oxford and put him in the subs, contrary to national agreement. Okay?”
Well, the management had a bit of a shock, because I’ve been committed since my teens to two things, particularly a lot of things, but pacifism and trade unionism. I’ve always been a solid trade unionist; I was a solid trade unionist. And at Nottingham, this was the early 70s. It was when new technology was being introduced, the old letter press, the hot metal, was being replaced by this other new-fangled system. And Nottingham Evening Post and Guardian journal broke the national agreement and imposed the new system on the trade unions. There was the first major strike in the journalism industry over so-called new technology at the Nottingham Guardian journal, and I was involved in that, of course, that was in around 72/73 and it’s after that that people left. The union was destroyed because the management was able to bring out the newspaper with a small management team and a few journos who went in. So, I think it sort of lasted about five weeks, and after that caved in.
So, I left then for Cambridge Evening News, but my time at Nottingham Guardian journal was interesting. It’s the journal at which Graham Greene started his journalism career. I was brought up in the centre of Nottingham, in a really rough area, and it was called All Saints Street, and there was a terrace called All Saints terrace, and that’s where Graham Greene had digs. He was converted to Catholicism by his wife whilst he was in Nottingham. And he said, if he ever wanted to imagine hell he would think of All Saints, terraces under fog, which is funny, because that’s just where I grew up.
It was interesting because my first job was unusual in that I worked from five in the afternoon until about one in the morning. Well, I was working with these old blokes who talked about three subjects in this order. Remember, this was 1970s – the War, Second World War and finally women, the 3 ‘W’s that would be the gossip around the table. That was quite an introduction to journalism. But for some reason, for some strange reason, I knew I wanted to be a journalist, so I stuck to it. So, I went to Cambridge Evening News.
Cherwell: When did you start writing books?
My Newspapers Handbook included some of the stuff I wrote at Cambridge. My question before writing the Newspapers Handbook was this: How can a radical lefty sort of write a critique of the corporate media without offending all these corporate journalists were who were academics teaching and shocked these innocent young students? I had to be very diplomatic effectively in how I wrote it. But I wrote it in a way that was critical of everything. So I, for the first time, incorporated the local press. Up till then, all journalism textbooks just looked at Fleet Street. So, I looked at the local press, but I also looked at the alternative press, the ethnic minority press, the leftist press, the progressive press, the feminist press and critiqued them all. And I thought, Well, I’m critiquing everything. I better critique myself. So, I deconstructed articles from the first word to the very last, seeing what was going on journalistically. And I deconstructed. For instance, I went to a bingo hall in Cambridge and wrote with great pleasure. I have to admit, a kind of eyewitness feature participatory is the jargon, because I played bingo. It’s called in the jargon, participatory. I didn’t just witness it. I played it. I did this thing in Cambridge, and that was the kind of thing I wanted to do, and really enjoyed it and moved then to London.
One of my colleagues, a guy called Henry Clother, a very wonderful, dignified old school Labour Party journo, had gone to teach at City University, which was one of only two places at the time offering journalism. And as I mentioned, I thought, well, maybe I’d like to enter teaching, and they’d set up an international journalism MA at City, and I applied and got the job. And the moment I walked into City University, which, as you may know, is the kind of Oxbridge of journalism teaching, I felt that this was for me. The excitement, writing, the contact with colleagues, not only in city, but around the country, around the world. It was for me. I was very, very, very lucky, because I’ve combined my critical love of journalism with my critical love of teaching, yeah, on top of which I have the amazing contact with students.
Cherwell: Later you taught journalism at Lincoln where you still are. You also started writing lots of journalism pieces, I’ve had a look through sort of your very prolific CV and found, for example, you discussed media constructions of war, particularly in the context of the Gulf Wars.
Keeble: I’m a pacifist, I write peace journalism. In 1991 there was the Gulf War, and I just couldn’t understand it. For me, it was a manifestation of high-tech barbarism that profoundly shocked me. Took me a while, really, to come to terms with the barbarism that was manifest in that long-forgotten conflict, and I wanted to understand it, so I just set about researching the media coverage of it in both Britain and America. I joined City in 1984 the year of the birth of my son, Gabriel, and in ‘91 I was lucky to have a sabbatical. I was living near Cambridge, so I buried myself in Cambridge University Library. 1991 is before the internet. So, I was able not only to read all the background on the extremely complex conflict, but there I would order, say the Observer for February 1991 and it would be on my desk within 10 minutes, the hard copy. I was able to, in effect, made notes on the whole of the coverage in the corporate media, because it was brought to me so I had a good grasp of what was going on.
My argument in Secret State, Silent Press was that it wasn’t a war – a war suggests two competing armies – it was a series of massacres. It’s typical American foreign policy. It was an opportunity to destroy the Iraqi state. In 42 days, 250,000 Iraqi soldiers were slaughtered by American bombing. The Americans lost 152 soldiers, 52% of which were so-called ‘friendly fire’. It was horrendous. Worse than that was the media coverage of it. I would sit in Cambridge University Library, crying. They would describe these Iraqi conscripts as animals, as pigeons or pheasants flying in a pen. This was monstrous, the military rhetoric which the media absorbed. That was my thesis, essentially.
Cherwell: You’ve been actively involved in Orwell Studies. What is your interest in the field?
Keeble: I’d been writing and editing about Orwell before then and when I found out the Society had been formed, with Orwell’s son Richard Blair as chairman, I, like everybody, was intrigued and see to meet him. I attended two committee meetings and they said, “Okay, we’ll have you as chair.” From 2013 to 2020 I immersed myself in Orwell as Chair of the Orwell Society.
Orwell was essentially a reader. He wanted to share his enjoyment of reading, and that was the function of his journalism. It was a very open sharing of what he found out through his reading and his personal experience. It’s a metaphor for teaching: as a teacher, you want to share what little you know with these people who you come in contact with. Orwell’s polymathic knowledge was phenomenal, he covered so much in not many years, 1929 to 1949. Like all of us he had his limitations, he had his prejudices, but he tried to confront them. His generation in relation to women was very, very distant from ours, but what I’ve written about is his relationship with his son. He was a ‘new man’, he was hands-on, and the love that he showed was far ahead of his time. It helped his son Richard Blair throughout his life.
Cherwell: What are your aims for the future? More journal editing? More peace journalism?
Keeble: I’ve got a lot of projects. With Tim Crook I’m doing a forty-one chapter, 320,000-word Routledge Companion to George Orwell. I’m doing a book with a Canadian friend, who I’ve worked with before on books on journalism and humour – the first books written on that subject. I did one on journalism and prisons with him. I’m doing one on literary journalism and death which had brought in some fascinating abstracts. I’m doing a book with my great friend John Mair. I’d like to do a biography of Orwell looking at ten of his works which encapsulate his development over those years but which are often marginalised or about which I could give my own original insights. I’m not going to stop, I’m going to keep on going, absolutely.
