Press: Happy Birthday, London

Abraham Lincoln compared its power to the surging Mississippi River. Jane Austen found it so indispensable that she ironed it out when it was damp. Thackeray endured its “rather shabby pay,” Coleridge tried in vain to join its staff, and Dickens endured its critical contempt. It accompanied the Light Brigade to the Valley of Death in the Crimea, and climbed with Edmund Hillary up Mount Everest. Although it proudly displays the royal coat of arms on its masthead, in an 1830 obituary it described the standard of conduct of King George IV as “little higher than that of animal indulgence,” and when Queen Victoria wrote a letter answering its criticism, the editors declined to publish it on the ground that they had printed one letter from her already.

The subject of this veneration and occasional abuse is the London Times. Founded in 1785, it still commands the attention of Britain’s highest and mightiest. Last week, at the acme of a 200th-anniversary celebration that has already included two TV shows, a souvenir book and numerous encomiums from rivals, the paper played host for four hours to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Dressed in a plaid suit and mauve hat, Her Majesty visited the freshly painted newsroom, known as “the pit,” and chatted with dozens of employees, from reporters in white shirts to pressmen in working clothes. The paper’s labor editor caused a brief commotion when he told BBC radio listeners that the Queen had commented on the cause of a protracted miners’ strike; the royal family is expected not to discuss politics, and the paper quickly retracted the remarks. The Queen Mother still plans to come to lunch. And Prince Charles and Princess Diana are scheduled to attend an outdoor Times gala complete with fireworks at Hampton Court Palace in July.

The jubilation has been made all the more exuberant by the recollection that the paper has repeatedly seemed likely to die. A money loser, the Times was shut down for a year in 1978 and 1979 by striking craft workers, who opposed the installation of modern technology. In October 1980, faced with mounting deficits, then Owner Lord Thomson said he would fold the Times unless he found a buyer within five months. When he found one, his choice seemed to much of the staff, and to many of the Times’s top-drawer readers, a fate worse than death: Australian Press Lord Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of the tabloid daily Sun, which features screaming headlines and photographs of naked women, and the equally lowbrow Sunday News of the World. As proof of his good intentions, Murdoch recruited Harold Evans, for 14 years the esteemed editor of the separate Sunday Times, to run the daily edition; within 13 months, Murdoch sacked him. Like his predecessor, Murdoch confronted unions and threatened to shut down forever.

During 1984, however, daily circulation jumped 23.6%, to 457,000, and advertising grew to 33% of the total page space (compared with 28% three years ago). Indeed, Murdoch now projects that the Times will go into the black by June, for the first time since 1977.

Editorially, the paper has shifted to the right and takes a hard line against the Soviet Union, but is not inflexible. Much of the renascence has come from Murdoch’s popularizing influence: pictures are bigger and crisper, and sober news coverage is offset by lively squibs on crime, popular culture, celebrities and human interest. Murdoch has even added a circulation-boosting cash-giveaway game, patterned on bingo but given the dignified appellation Portfolio. As a result, the paper seems more up to date and less august. Journalist Anthony Sampson contends that the Times “has lost interest in international news and become more parochial, obsessed with day-to-day happenings. I find it depressing, like a stately old home that has been thrown open to the public.”

Still, the Times retains much of its prestige, and the devotion of its readers, renowned for the variety, scholarliness and eccentricity of their letters to the editor. Former Labor Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson, now Lord Wilson, calls the Times “an essential newspaper. I read it with . enjoyment, although I have never really agreed with it.” His old rival, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, pointed up the paper’s unique status during a toast last month at the British embassy in Washington. At a dinner to honor the 200th anniversary of U.S.-British diplomatic relations, with President Reagan in attendance, Thatcher said, “I should also mention that 1985 marks the 200th anniversary of a famous British institution, the Times newspaper.”