by Roy Jenkins
Delane was more of an operator, less of a scholar than Barnes. He was more social, dined out a good deal with the grand, instead of waiting for them to call upon him, and quite often stayed with them in the country, where he could indulge his passion for hunting. In London, however, he worked immensely hard, never lived more than a mile away from Printing House Square, and habitually stayed in the office until five in the morning. The Times was the whole of his life in a way that it was not with Barnes. The Dictionary of National Biography offers some pointed and not wholly expected comments: ‘Though never erudite, Delane was very quick in mastering anything which he took in hand … He was not a finished scholar; he was not as brilliant as Barnes; he hardly ever wrote anything except reports and letters, both of which he wrote very well … He saw 13 administrations rise and fall … he met all statesmen on equal terms … Lord Palmerston, whom he resembled in temperament, was the statesman he liked best, Lord Aberdeen was the one he most respected.’
In the Barchester novels Trollope portrays Delane under the name of Tom Towers, editor of the Jupiter, in terms that are more a tribute to his influence and grandeur than to his judgement or humanity. In The Warden (1855) Towers played some considerable part in driving the good Mr Harding out of his somewhat archaic benefice. In Barchester Towers (1857) he is an occasional ally of the oleaginous and scheming Reverend Obadiah Slope. But it is in Framley Parsonage (1861) that he reaches his apogee. He appears at an evening party given by Miss Dunstable, the patent medicine heiress, who was none the less in the centre of fashionable society and a lady who combined astringent comment with a heart of gold: That the two great ones of the earth were Tom Towers and the Duke of Omnium need hardly be expressed in words,’ Trollope wrote.
The paper was tolerably disposed towards the great Peel Government and particularly towards its foreign policy, because it was conducted by Aberdeen, but was uncharacteristically detached on the great mid-century issue of the Corn Laws. Lord John Russell was a man Delane could never abide and his 1846-52 administration was therefore treated coolly, even while Palmerston was Foreign Secretary, for Delane’s love affair with his alter ego (if the DNB is to be believed) did not begin until about 1857. When the Russell Government fell in early 1852 as a result of Palmerston’s ‘tit-for-tat with Johnnie Russell’ and the first of the several brief Derby-Disraeli administrations came in, Delane was much courted by Disraeli. But the courtship was not very successful. When Disraeli led his government to defeat in the House of Commons by proclaiming in a phrase more memorable than sensible, that ‘England does not love coalitions’, The Times answered that ‘Nothing suits the people to be governed and the measures to be passed so well as a good coalition.’ It quickly got what it wanted, in the form of one headed by Aberdeen. And it received its reward by being able to publish exclusively on Christmas Day, 1852, a full list of the unannounced Cabinet appointments, a tribute as much to the regularity of The Times’s nineteenth-century publication as to the quality of its sources.
Its influence, however, was set immensely high. Cobden claimed it never entered his house, but Clarendon in 1853, while complaining that ‘I can’t understand why it should be considered the organ of the Government’ and expostulating that ‘The ways of The Times are inscrutable’, nevertheless reluctantly recorded that ‘As its circulation is enormous and its influence abroad is very great a Government must take its support on the terms it chooses to put it.’ Abraham Lincoln’s tribute was still more fulsome but was not reciprocated, for The Times thought the Gettysburg Address made the dedication ceremony ‘ludicrous’.
In the years that followed, The Times became disillusioned with Aberdeen because of his lack of bellicosity in the approach to the Crimean War, and lack of vigour in its conduct. The war correspondent William Howard Russell, who there made his reputation, denounced the inefficiencies of supply and generalship and played a significant role in the replacement of Aberdeen by Palmerston in 1855. The Times, however, took a year or two to adjust to its new loyalty. Delane did not become an habitué of Broadlands or Cambridge House until the end of the decade, and amongst the first acts of the new government was one which was thought to be highly inimical to the interests of The Times. This was the abolition of the newspaper tax.
The change meant much cheaper newspapers, and in the possibly exaggerated language of John Bright set The Times ‘howling, and splashing about like a harpooned whale’. It was assumed that the move would damage the oligopoly, with The Times as clear market leader, which a few established journals enjoyed. This was true to the extent that The Times fairly quickly lost, and never regained, its position as the paper of greatest circulation. By 1861 the Daily Telegraph was selling about 140,000 against The Times’s regular 65,000. The abolition of the tax also led to a substantial, but not permanent, shift in the balance between the London and the provincial press. Before it there was little of substance published in England outside the capital. By 1864 the circulation of the provincials was nearly twice that of the London papers.
But the change did not damage the influence of The Times, or its profitability, and increased its circulation in absolute terms. Its 1861 figure was about a third up on that of a few years before and concealed occasional surges: 89,000 on the day after the Prince Consort’s death and 86,000 when it published a nine-column obituary of Palmerston.
The gain in circulation was far from being worth the loss of Palmerston. The Times had not been his client, but Delane had certainly done well out of the connection. Palmerston had supplied him with information and given him a government and a statesman he could mostly support with a good conscience. He had even offered him the permanent under-secretaryship of the War Office in 1861 when he heard that his eyes were failing through too much night work. Now Delane was left without a lodestar. Lord John Russell, who succeeded, was as unattractive to him as he had been twenty years before. Gladstone had not hitherto been much of a favourite in Printing House Square. And the efforts of the third and last short Derby-Disraeli Government to get Delane on their side proved as abortive as on the previous occasions. The paper, largely due to the influence of Robert Lowe, MP for Calne, and a Times leader writer for fifteen years, was also cool in its approach to the second Reform Bill, in marked contrast to its ‘thundering’ in 1831, and somewhat to the annoyance of John Walter III.
The Times soon reconciled itself both to reform and to Gladstone. It supported him with an unwonted partisanship, both in 1868, when he won, and in 1874, when he lost. Delane, who always had exceptional gifts of seeing what was likely to happen, correctly and exceptionally foresaw the result of the Franco-Prussian War. Yet throughout the twelve years from Palmerston’s death in 1865 to Delane’s retirement there is a distinct sense of a slowly declining sun. Even the circulation, often the last index to respond to a decline of quality, dropped below 60,000 by the turn of the decade. Despite the offer of a pension of £2000, munificent by the standards of the age, Walter had to assert himself in 1877 to get Delane out and Thomas Chenery in. ‘But who will look after the social side of the business?’ Disraeli asked when he heard of the change.
Chenery was the least successful of The Times’s nineteenth-century editors. He was, however, the first of a series of gentlemen scholars to occupy the editorial chair. He was the first editor to be an Etonian (there have been two subsequent ones). He was a graduate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and since 1868 had been Professor of Arabic at Oxford while continuing his long-standing leader-writing role on the paper. He was fifty-four when appointed, but this long period of waiting did not give him longevity. True in this respect to the tradition of Barnes and Delane, he was burnt out before he was sixty. His years were notable mainly for the employment of the remarkable Blowitz to cover the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and for swinging the paper, which had been critical of the demagoguery of the Midlothian campaign, into a mildly pro-Gladstone position for the beginning of his second administration in 1880.
George Buckle, with two o
r three years’ experience in Printing House Square, succeeded in 1884 at the age of twenty-nine. He was the son of a cathedral-close clergyman with strong academic connections. He went to Winchester and New College, and was a Fellow of All Souls, thus beginning a link between The Times and that peculiar Oxford institution which was to last, with a short break, until Geoffrey Dawson’s retirement as editor nearly sixty years later.
Buckle’s good fortune were his fine late nineteenth-century intellectual good looks (he was the first handsome editor of The Times), and his health, which enabled him again to break another pattern, by surviving for twenty-two years after a twenty-eight-year editorship - to write the last three and a half volumes of the six-volume biography of Disraeli (which Moneypenny had begun) and to edit Queen Victoria’s letters. His misfortune was that he presided over a paper with falling circulation and falling profitability which met a journalistic disaster early in his editorship and a drastic change of proprietorship near its end.
The circulation loss was not huge, but enough to be mildly depressing. The journalistic disaster, which was much worse, was the publication of forged letters allegedly written by the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell.
The débâcle did The Times great damage, both material and moral. Buckle and MacDonald, the manager, who was dead within the year, offered their resignations, but John Walter III, whose own responsibility was equally great, refused them. The costs, falling upon the newspaper and the Walter family, of the 129-day Special Commission of inquiry exceeded £200,000 (the equivalent of £6 million or £7 million at today’s values), and the blow to its prestige was at least as great. ‘Something of the awe of holy writ, which from the days of Barnes had clung about its columns, now faded away’ is the judgement of the official History of The Times.
Oddly perhaps, the principal whose equanimity best survived the Parnell case was Buckle. He was never an editor of the force of Barnes or Delane but there was no question of his spending a quarter of a century as a lame duck. There was a considerable, and perhaps necessary, touch of self-righteousness about him. Not long after the débâcle he was rebuking the Leader of the House of Commons (W. H. Smith) for criticism of The Times, and he continued to exercise substantial influence throughout the long years of Conservative hegemony. He supported both the imperialism and protectionism of Joseph Chamberlain, provided he was not too disruptive within the Unionist Party, while carrying on a mild flirtation with Rosebery and his Liberal Imperialist associates. He was hostile to Campbell-Bannerman and not much more enthusiastic about Asquith. He kept up a good, self-confident right-of-centre ‘non-partisanship’. His humiliations were that by 1908, when Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail was selling nearly two million, an unheard-of circulation for any newspaper when Buckle became editor, The Times was down to 38,000 and that, partly as a result, the paper was sold, to Northcliffe, so completely over his head that he was dependent on Observer paragraphs for news of what was going on.
Alfred Harmsworth, made a baronet one year and a baron the next by the self-consciously fastidious Balfour, twelve years before being made a viscount by the less fastidious Lloyd George, was a bizarre man even by the high standards set by generations of newspaper proprietors. He was the eldest of fourteen children of an Irish barrister and compensated for this profusion of siblings by producing no heirs: he was the only Northcliffe.
His father omitted to educate him. At the age of seventeen he was a reporter in Coventry. Throughout his life he regretted that he had not been at Oxford ‘for one year’. A year, he thought, would have given him ‘poise’; longer would have been a waste of time. He was at least half a genius and he was at least half not a vulgarian. More important, he was the greatest journalistic innovator of the past hundred years. He was, of course, a megalomaniac who, unlike most people to whom that label is loosely applied, did literally go mad before he died at the age of fifty-seven.
He was a character of operatic quality and his methods of acquiring control of The Times, to which role a few decades earlier a man of his stamp would have been considered as likely an aspirant as Bradlaugh to become Archbishop of Canterbury, were rich in farce and melodrama. His rival was C. Arthur Pearson (no connection of the Pearsons who became Cowdray), the owner of the Daily Express and the Standard, and at stages in the battle Northcliffe sent him telegrams of false congratulation like a tenor singing one message across the stage and another to the audience. He embellished the farce by retiring for most of the period of negotiation to a hotel in Boulogne, to and from which communications passed in code, he himself having assumed the rather grand name of Atlantic, while his chief man of business, who had the unreassuring real name of Kennedy Jones, was Alberta. Walter was Manitoba. Buckle did not qualify even for a town, let alone an ocean or a province.
Whatever the methods, Northcliffe had secured control of The Times by March 1908, although this fact did not become public knowledge until several months later. There was an element of apprehension as well as fascination and impatience in his proprietorial approach to the queen of British journalism. There were jibes that it was going to be merely the threepenny edition of the Daily Mail. In time, however, Northcliffe scotched that by reducing its price to Id (and even playing with ½d), so that The Times became as cheap as its new stablemate.
But it was not as popular. The Daily Mail sold fifty times as many copies as The Times. If he had had to send one to the abattoir there is no doubt which Northcliffe would have chosen. But he did not have to choose. He lived on the Daily Mail. He half admired and half despised The Times. How could a newspaper be regarded as a serious enterprise when most of its senior staff never used the telephone, and the editor opened all letters submitted for publication with his own thumb? Before Northcliffe had thought of reducing the price the former chief proprietor suddenly asked him what he would do with the paper. ‘I should make it worth threepence, Mr Walter,’ was his rather good reply.
Buckle was not Northcliffe’s man. He did, however, survive for more than four years before being replaced by Geoffrey Robinson (the only man to occupy the editorial chair twice and who made the story more complicated by doing so under different names, changing from Robinson to Dawson in order to inherit from an aunt a substantial landed property in Yorkshire). Although Buckle’s going, partly because it closely followed the deaths of Moberly Bell, the long-serving manager, and Valentine Chirol, head of the foreign department, marked a considerable clearing out of the old gang, Robinson came from a roughly similar stable. He was, indeed, not only Northcliffe’s but also Buckle’s choice as successor, although Buckle did not welcome the speed with which he achieved the chair.
He had been at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, was a fellow of All Souls, and had been Lord Milner’s private secretary in South Africa. He was thirty-eight when be became editor and had been on the staff of The Times for eighteen months. His first stint as editor lasted six and a half years until he in turn, having had a moderately rough ride, fell foul of Northcliffe. It embraced the whole of World War I, a period of great press influence, partly because the House of Commons, then as now almost totally geared to a two-party system, was thrown into limbo by coalition government.
The Times was central to this period of journalistic politics, but to an extent that had not been seen since the advent of Barnes it was The Times of the proprietor rather than The Times of the editor which called the game. This was largely because of the extraordinary symbiotic relationship between Northcliffe and Lloyd George. Their periods of high power almost exactly coincided. Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer in April 1908, and was driven out of the premiership in October 1922. Northcliffe acquired The Times in March 1908, and died in August 1922. They both had daemonic energy, rootlessness, and inner irresponsibility.
This did not mean that they liked each other. Lloyd George told Beaverbrook in November 1916 that he would ‘as soon go for a sunny evening stroll around Walton Heath with a grasshopper as try and work with Northcliffe’
, and Northcliffe had little sooner helped to make Lloyd George Prime Minister than he was talking about destroying him. Each deserved the other, and there was considerable mutual fascination.
The Times, through its military correspondent’s reporting of the shell shortage in France, played a substantial role in the forcing of the 1915 Coalition. But the apogee of its influence in wartime political intrigue was reached during the manoeuvrings of December 1916, which led to the replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George. Its main leader of Monday, 4 December made it publicly clear to Asquith that the concordat he had reached with Lloyd George was, and would be interpreted as being, a humiliation of himself. Accordingly he withdrew from it, overplayed his hand, and ejected himself from 10 Downing Street after eight and a half years’ tenancy. The article was thought to be Lloyd George-inspired. To some extent it was. Northcliffe had been flitting heavily between the pillars of the Whitehall scenery. It had, however, been written by Robinson, mostly at Cliveden, but titivated after a Sunday evening dinner with Northcliffe.
This was the high point of their collaboration. Their relationship was sometimes eased by Northcliffe’s absences in America, but otherwise they grew increasingly incompatible. Dawson (as he had then become) was sacked three months after the armistice and replaced by Henry Wickham Steed. In contrast with Dawson, an Empire-orientated, conventional English scholar-squire, there was a touch of the continental adventurer about Steed, which made him more acceptable to Northcliffe. He had been on the foreign staff of The Times for twenty years, but the combination of his education (Sudbury Grammar School and the Universities of Jena, Berlin and Paris), his elegant beard, and his involvement with the intricacies of Balkan politics, set him a little apart. His greatest qualification, however, was that he shared what had become Northcliffe’s detestation of Lloyd George. The paper survived the next three and a half years under this unstable partnership better than might have been expected. J. L. Garvin of the Observer at this time considered it ‘far and away the best morning paper’.
