Charlie Wilson Obituary, Death – Charles Wilson, who served as the former editor of the Times and passed away last week at the age of 87, was a newspaper man through and through. He began his career when he was a teenager, working as a copy runner in Fleet Street on the Sunday People. Throughout the course of his later career, he held the editorship of seven newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic at various times.
Universally known as Charlie or, to Private Eye magazine, “Gorbals” Wilson and occasionally, to the disgruntled, Jock MacThug, he made the most of his Glaswegian background to convey an image as a hard-nosed, ruthless, and irascible tabloid news editor. He was also known as “Gorbals” Wilson. Those who knew him, on the other hand, came to recognize a more affable and compassionate persona, one who collected porcelain, lived in Holland Park, one of the most expensive areas of London, and in his spare time was an enthusiastic racegoer and horse rider.
“one of the toughest, sharpest, and most all-round newspaper men in London, maybe the world,” said Peter Stothard, one of his successors at the Times. “He was one of the toughest, sharpest, and most all-round newspaper men in London,” said Peter Stothard.
He was occasionally moved to deny the hardman image, as he did when he told an interviewer for Scotland on Sunday in 1994 that “I never actually threw a typewriter at anyone.” If I had only been a Glasgow thug, I never would have been able to accomplish what I have… In order to succeed in this line of work, you need to have a sense of humor.
Rupert Murdoch’s decision to appoint him as the 18th editor of the Times in 1985, a position that is typically held by patrician Oxbridge types, was nonetheless an unusual one. He had been an editor at the New York Times. The overt goal was to change all of that by energizing the paper and broadening its appeal, edging it downmarket in the direction of the Daily Mail, tackling a wider range of particularly human interest stories, and consciously attracting more women and less stuffy readers. This was the open purpose behind the change.
The covert objective was to select a resolute and combative editor so that they would be better equipped to deal with the impending conflict with the print unions and the move to Wapping. When that conflict arose, Wilson and his Scottish countryman Andrew Neil, both of whom worked for the Sunday Times, did what they could to strengthen Murdoch’s resolve to stay in the fight even as it became more difficult.