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What Bell is probably most famous for, or infamous in
Page 23
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certain quarters, is his involvement in the initial planning and subsequent move of the printing of The Sun and other News International papers out of Fleet Street, leading to a bitter, sometimes violent, dispute with the print workers who were losing their jobs.
Rupert Murdoch was determined to make the move on terms that the two main print onions, the NBA and SOGAT, wouldn't accept. Over 6,000 people picketed outside Wapping to halt the TNT delivery trucks leaving the plant, but Bell ensured that the newspaper delivery continued.
"For tour months I worked from a garage in Atherstone and people actually thought that I had left the company," he says. "The wholesalers wouldn't release the distribution lists so I worked under the pretence that I had a bakery delivery — eventually we had 44,000 newsagents in agreement. On the first day of the move there were pickets outside but we knew that we had to get the trucks out. The next day Brenda Dean, the union leader, declared it had been a disaster because there were no papers in the Isle of Wight We knew then that we had won."
But while the operation heralded the move of News International titles from rail to road distribution, it wasn't without risk to TNT; during the dispute there were more than 1,200 attacks on vehicles and many depots were burnt down.