by Roy Jenkins
The death of Northcliffe was a relief to almost everybody, including Steed, who fell soon after him. The Times moved curiously but not causally in step with British politics. This provides perhaps the best evidence of its position as a national journal. In Lloyd George’s time it was febrile. Coincidentally with his fall it moved into a period of Baldwinesque calm. The ownership gap left by Northcliffe was filled by the junior branch of the Astor family, Major (later Colonel) J. J. Astor, later still Lord Astor of Hever, providing most of the money and moving into a partnership with a revived John Walter IV. Dawson was brought back as editor and stayed for another nineteen years, until 1941. Together with John Reith of the BBC and Archbishop Lang of Canterbury, Dawson of The Times formed a tripod of slightly self-righteous respectability which sustained the British establishment of the inter-war years.
The Times’s semi-official position, never exactly sought, sometimes embarrassing both to the government and to the paper, but sometimes valuable too, particularly for the prestige that it gave its correspondents abroad, was strengthened during this period. So was the pre-eminence of some of its features, most notably the correspondence columns. In 1917 it had rejected (by decision of Dawson, not, as was commonly thought, Northcliffe) one of the most resonant, if to some eyes infamous, letters to the editor in British political history. The Lansdowne ‘peace letter’ went to the Daily Telegraph instead. In 1919 this was compensated for by Baldwin’s ‘FST letter’ (he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury at the time and used the initials to achieve at least the appearance of anonymity), in which he announced that he was giving a fifth of his fortune to help reduce the national debt, and by two extraordinary effusions from Bonar Law. In one he sounded the death-knell of Lloyd George’s Coalition. In the other, written during his brief period as Prime Minister, he castigated under the curious pseudonym of ‘Colonial’ the American debt settlement his Chancellor had just negotiated.
Dawson was always an appeaser, in the better as well as the worse sense of the word. Therefore he liked Baldwin’s general approach to politics, and Baldwin in turn was always close to him. On a crucial morning in August 1931, having reluctantly returned to London from Aix-les-Bains to deal with the crisis that led to the formation of the National Government, Baldwin was ‘lost’ for several hours. He had, in fact, slipped away to consult his trusted friend Dawson. As a result he missed a summons to see the King before Herbert Samuel did so, and plans for a coalition gathered almost irresistible momentum. By the time he had his own audience, Baldwin, against his better judgement, could only acquiesce. British politics were distorted for a decade, and the new balance which Baldwin had devoted the twenties to achieving was seriously upset. The incident was a tribute to the drawing power of Dawson, but not an indication that a politician is always best employed in calling on the editor of The Times.
The paper was far from being alone in its support of Neville Chamberlain’s foreign policy. It did, however, carry its enthusiasm beyond the call of duty. For Christmas 1938 it offered its readers the opportunity to buy cards showing the Prime Minister waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on his return from Munich. It opposed Churchill’s inclusion in the government as late as July 1939. And it had the power, unlike most of its contemporaries, to help make policy as well as merely to comment upon it. The most famous (or notorious) example was the leader of 7 September 1938, which first advocated the handing over of the Sudetenland to Germany. The Foreign Office disowned it to the Czech government, but there is evidence that the article had been inspired by Halifax, the Foreign Secretary. His contact with Dawson was intimate and continuous.
As appeasement collapsed war came, and the Chamberlain Government tottered towards its fall. The Times inevitably suffered somewhat for its over-commitment. Stephen Koss in his Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain makes a fine distinction: ‘Its influence had declined but not yet its reputation.’ The period of The Times’s being almost a great Department of State and its editor almost an honorary member of the Cabinet was over, and not merely for Dawson’s day.
His long day came to an end on 1 October 1941. The History’s ‘obituary’ says: ‘He gave lifelong adherence to his chosen leaders, above all Milner, Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax.’ It was not an eclectic choice of friends. In particular it left his successor, who had been his co-adjudicator for the previous fourteen years, somewhat isolated from the War Coalition, and indeed the Churchillian Conservative Party.
This successor was R. M. Barrington-Ward. He was the son of a clergyman, educated at Westminster and Balliol. He was part of the warp and woof of The Times. He had first joined its staff in 1913 at the age of twenty-two. He spent eight years away at the Observer. That and World War I apart, the paper had been his whole life. He had refused the director-generalship of the BBC in 1938. Yet, although very much an inside appointment, he was an editor of note. Some thought that had he succeeded ten years earlier he would have avoided the excesses of the late Dawson period. He never sought to detach himself from them, but as editor he moved the paper firmly to the left.
He was enthusiastic about the Beveridge Report and other plans for post-war reconstruction. He believed in 1942 that Cripps might easily become Prime Minister within a short time. He employed E. H. Carr to write leaders advocating the closest postwar Anglo-Russian partnership. True to this view he opposed the British Government’s resistance to the Greek left-wing revolutionary movement at the end of 1944, and infuriated Churchill by so doing. To loud Conservative cheers, the Prime Minister, with the editor sitting prominently in the gallery, delivered a virulent parliamentary attack upon The Times in January 1945. Barrington-Ward was shaken but undeflected. His proprietors, Astor, then MP for Dover, and Walter, were embarrassed but gentlemanly. He was denounced by a less gentlemanly Conservative MP (Sir Herbert Williams) for producing ‘the threepenny edition’, this time not of the Daily Mail but ‘of the Daily Worker’.
When the Attlee government came in, The Times under Barrington-Ward accepted it as a natural government for Britain in the epoch. His criticism was sometimes sharp but basically friendly. His reward was scant. He was excoriated by many Conservatives, and called in and denounced by Ernest Bevin for the ‘spineless’ and ‘jellyfish’ attitude of The Times towards Russia. It was neither for him nor against him, Bevin typically complained. ‘Why should it be?’ Barrington-Ward very reasonably retorted, but to his diary, not to Bevin. Again he was shocked rather than influenced. Those who saw him when he returned to Printing House Square thought that he looked as though he had been in a nasty traffic accident. Bevin could be a fairly roughly driven articulated lorry. And Barrington-Ward was a natural St Sebastian of journalism. He carried the arrows without much complaint. But they hurt a great deal. And they may even have helped to kill him in 1948 at the typically early Times age of fifty-six.
His successor, William Casey, was both the oldest and the most obvious stop-gap to be appointed to the Times chair. He was Anglo-Irish and from a background not dissimilar to that of Northcliffe. But he had been to Trinity College, Dublin, and he was a calm man. At first it was thought that he might merely be there for a year. In fact he lasted five, and was rather a good editor in a quiet way.
Then came Sir William Haley, the first editor to be born (just) in the twentieth century, the first since 1803 not to have been to a university, the only one to arrive with a title and perhaps the last to believe intermittently that he commanded the thunderbolts of Zeus. His most famous leader was entitled ‘It is a Moral Issue’, and was a rather holier-than-thou lecture on the Profumo scandal of 1963 and the climate out of which it had sprung. Previously he had been critical of the Suez adventure, although not as vehemently so as the Observer, the Manchester Guardian or the Daily Mirror, had presided very uneasily over the successful but unappetizing ‘Top People Take The Times’ advertising campaign, had been affronted by the Lady Chatterley verdict, had urged a Conservative victory but an upsurge of Liberal votes in the general ele
ction of 1964, and had put news on the front page in May 1966. He was a successful but reluctant editor of transition.
His reign of fourteen years came to a voluntary end in 1967 together with the withdrawal of the Astors from principal proprietorship. A successful new proprietor (from the point of view of the paper if not of his family fortune) was found in the shape of Lord Thomson of Fleet, and William Rees-Mogg became editor and the best editorial leader-writer since Barnes. Thomson’s disadvantage was that he provided no dynasty of loss-absorbers. He and his son lasted barely as long as Northcliffe. Of the paper since then it is impossible to write with perspective or objectivity. Harold Evans has written his own pièce justificative after the briefest editorship in the history of the paper. Rupert Murdoch and Charles Douglas-Home (editor from 1982 to 1985) are too contemporary to appraise, at any rate in their own columns.
They are the heirs to a long but fluctuating tradition, which mostly worked best when editors were strong and proprietors were quiescent. This is not an invariable rule. Buckle, left entirely to himself, might have run the paper quietly into the sand. Dawson might have benefited from some proprietorial arm-jogging. The Times has no record of impeccability. Other newspapers have quite frequently been better. But none has on average been so good for so long.
Bologna’s Birthday
This was an article in Oxford, the dons’ periodical, written shortly after the Bologna celebrations.
The University of Bologna, which has a well-authenticated claim to be the oldest in the world, celebrated its 900th anniversary in the autumn of 1988. The festivities, while not perhaps quite up to the 800th when Giuseppe Verdi was chairman of the organizing committee and Giosuè Carducci delivered the principal oration, were none the less splendid. Nearly four hundred rettori, which was the generic term under which all of us, chancellors, vice-chancellors, presidents, principals, and genuine rectors, were lumped, were assembled for the main open-air ceremony in the Piazza Maggiore in front of the great basilica of San Petronio in which the Emperor Charles V was crowned in 1530 and Rossini’s Stabat Mater was first performed in 1839.
A wide variety of academic dress was favoured by this throng. Some, mainly from Eastern Europe and down through the Caucasus to the borders of India, looked more like judges than academics, and judges of a tribunal which had been engaged for many centuries in handing out cruel and unusual punishments to students and teachers alike. One British chancellor was bedecked in his gold regalia and the vice-chancellor of Cambridge was impressive in fur. I decided, however, influenced by the combination of the reluctance of the Oxford authorities ever to allow the cancellarian robe to go more than half a mile from Carfax, the problems of luggage, and the likely heat of an Italian September sun, that the University of Oxford could afford to dress down. I made do with white tie, bands and the cool silk of a DCL black gown, and felt rather like a notary in an elaborately costumed Mozart opera. The status of Oxford was however preserved, and Cinderella asked to the ball (to vary the operatic metaphor), when the President of the Italian Republic arrived and paused in his procession across the square to exclaim to me ‘il mio cancellario’, thereby illustrating the value which those in authority abroad place upon having been honoured in the Sheldonian.
In general, however, I had the rare experience for a representative of Oxford of not being pre-eminent at a festival of age. ‘The University of Oxford is not used’, I began my short speech, ‘to saluting institutions of greater venerability than itself, but when it has to recognize an indisputable claim does so with the greater enthusiasm and respect.’ Having made that obeisance I then felt able to point out that we had far more remaining mediaeval academic buildings than either Bologna, although they are very splendid from about 1550, or the Sorbonne, which achieved second place to our third, and that in Merton we have the fount of collegiate living, where people had slept, eaten, read, taught, and prayed together in an entity with clear continuity since the very early fourteenth century.
There had to be a certain finessing to enable me to make that speech at all. Obviously all four hundred could not speak without the proceedings lasting some considerable way towards the millennial celebrations. So it was decided that there should be an oration of greeting from the head of the senior university in each continent. This was interpreted sufficiently rigidly that the Americas were not split and Harvard was relegated to a silent role behind Lima.
It should also have had the effect of leaving Oxford to be represented by Paris and hearing Sydney speak as the representative of the venerability of Australian academic life. Oxford’s reputation as a talking rather than a listening university was judged by the Bolognese authorities to be too strong for this to be possible and my European position (which Bologna was anxious to stress because of their leading role in the Erasmus scheme and consequent close relationship with the European Commission) was amalgamated with our semi-seniority to create a special slot. This sleight of hand passed off without hostile demonstrations from Paris, Coimbra, Salamanca, Prague, Cambridge and St Andrews and other near competitors. Cambridge and St Andrews had more reason to complain the next morning when Paris and Oxford headed a column of twenty European ‘venerabili’ and they were relegated to the kindergarten, although the 1592 upstart of Trinity College, Dublin, got in because it was from a separate and sovereign state.
As with all grand celebrations there were elements of theatre about the occasion. But it was also a moving and genuinely splendid event. The notes of the slaves’ chorus from Nabucco swelling into the great square was a suitable accompaniment to the signing by us all (including the Rector of Leningrad) of a ringing declaration of the independence of universities which had certainly not been drafted in the Department of Education and Science - nor even in Mr Gorbachev’s Kremlin, for that matter.
There are also always experiences and problems in common between universities. As the large, ebullient, and resplendently besashed Communist Mayor of Bologna, a serious commercial (and gastronomic) city which looks after its art treasures but does not allow itself to be dominated by tourism, said to me as he drove me back to my hotel from the Prefect’s lunch for President Cossiga: ‘There is a tradition of hostility between town and university here, but we have recently decided that, as a substantial part of our reputation seems to come from the university, we had better strengthen our links with it.’ I have noted with pleasure that, in my short experience, the Lord Mayor of Oxford has never missed an Encaenia. I doubt, however, if he (or recently more frequently she) would have emulated the Bolognese Sindaco’s feat of responding with pride to my remark that his city was famous for its large pedestrian zones by proceeding to drive me through them at approximately 60 m.p.h.
Anniversaries in Pall Mall
This essay is based on parts of two talks: one a lecture given in 1986 for the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Reform Club and the other a dinner speech in 1992 for the twentieth anniversary of the amalgamation of the Oxford and Cambridge and the United Universities Clubs.
The Pall Mall clubs were born in a different century from the St James’s Street ones and were to some extent a reaction against them. Those who founded them saw themselves as part of an age of improvement and not of imitation. They were unimpressed by the fashionable rakishness of Brooks’s, White’s and Boodle’s, and wanted to create something newer, grander, more wholesome, with less gambling, less debauchery, and perhaps fewer cockroaches as well. The bourgeois palaces of Pall Mall were to outshine the louche if aristocratic stews of St James’s Street. To paraphrase what W. S. Gilbert was to write in Iolanthe half a century later:
Hearts for more pure and fair
May beat down Pall Mall way
Than in the squalid air
Of rich St James’s.
The origins of the Reform Club, which eventually achieved the greatest of all the palaces, epitomized this approach. The first Reform Bill and the new politics that flowed from it obviously provided the first strand of inspiration. Paradoxicall
y, however, it was the Tories who reacted first to the new need for political organization and in 1832 established the Carlton Club only a few yards from what became the site of the Reform Club. There it remained until it was severely bombed in December 1940.
The Liberals were three and a half years behind. This was partly due to the Radical/Whig dichotomy, and partly due to the complication of relations with Brooks’s. The Whigs did not much want the Radicals in Brooks’s, but were even less keen on their forming a club of their own. The Radicals, notably Molesworth, Parkes and Hume, determinedly wanted a club and did not want to be in Brooks’s anyway, despite or maybe because of the fact that it provided every single member of Melbourne’s 1834 Cabinet. They were in a semi-Groucho Marx position. Eventually the Whigs, notably Edward Ellice, Lord Grey’s brother-in-law and his Chief Whip at the time of the Reform Bill, later Secretary of State for War, decided that unless they wished the Radicals to go off on their own, they had little choice but to join with them in forming a new model club. And out of that decision the Reform Club emerged, as an entity in 1836, as a complete and splendid edifice by 1843.
The ‘reformers’, however, although they did not want to imitate the old, aristocratic, proprietary gaming clubs, were not looking for the simple life. ‘The family motto is service,’ said a recent Lord Rothschild, ‘and by God we get it.’ The ‘reformers’ were looking for the best, and by God they got it. The names most naturally associated with the first twenty years of the Club are neither Ellice nor Molesworth, nor even Russell or Palmerston, but Charles Barry, the architect, and Alexis Soyer, the cook. And what remarkable jobs they both made of their confections, Barry’s happily the longer lasting. It makes his neighbouring creations, the Travellers Club and Bridgewater House, look inferior, the first too cautious, the second too imitative, and his most massive monument the Palace of Westminster too undisciplined.
