The Press: Thunderer’s Milestone

At a sentimental editorial conference one day last week the London Times’s famed Geoffrey Dawson, now 67, retired after 25 years’ service, handed his editorship to his assistant, spare. 50-year-old Robert M’Gowan Barrington-Ward.* The Times marked the occasion as an important milestone in its 156-year history as one of the world’s great newspapers. Likewise milestone-minded about the Times were other members of the British press —but for different reasons.

For Fleet Street the big milestone was the Times’s bloodless revolution. Said the leftish Sunday paper Reynolds News: “The Times recently has been showing refreshing signs of an independent spirit which, expressed with a brilliance unmatched in journalism, may win back the press leadership it lost in that long dark moment of mental aberration in which it confused the interests of a small class with the welfare of the whole community.”

Emerging from the shadows of its pro-Chamberlain appeasement period, the Times last week was credited with throwing away its old-school tie. getting a bead on the 20th Century instead of the 19th, reclaiming its right to be called “The Thunderer.”

Consensus was that new Editor Barrington-Ward would liven up the editorial page, might even print news instead of ads on the front page, that his new first assistant, blue-eyed, white-haired W. F. Casey, will have a chance to write editorials for readers under 40. The Times has lately plumped for social and economic reforms, exorcised the Red bogey, almost earned title to “Thunderer on the Left.”

But if the Times has dropped its prewar Neville Chamberlain attitude it does not completely approve of that disturbing man Churchill. Suavely the Times scolds Churchill for hogging work, instead of sharing it, for failing to pick a successor in the event that “some accident of bus or bomb should suddenly remove him from the scene.” After one such editorial Editor Geoffrey Dawson was warned that it would bring down a host of complaints. “That’s all right,” said he. “We don’t mind a few complaints.”

Though its pre-war staff of 100 foreign correspondents is much depleted, the Times still has the best foreign coverage in Britain. Paper restrictions have forced circulation reduction from 203,000 (prewar) to 167,000. But demand is far above that, despite a price increase from tuppence to threepence. Although it once printed a quarter-million words an issue, the Times, now paper-rationed to ten pages, does not complain of paper rationing. But privately, of course, Timesmen see little sense, or justice, in the fact that the Times, which is in a class by itself, should be rationed as severely as the mass-circulation sensational press.

“The newspaper lights the way of freedom,” was the slogan of National Newspaper Week, celebrated in 5,000 U.S. towns and cities. Most telling of many thousand expressions of the idea: the Phoenix Arizona Republic (circ.: 35,823) appeared with its first and second pages blank except for a small box containing the words: “. . . This is all the news you would be able to read if the daily newspaper were not uncensored, unfettered, in free America.”

*A London wit suggested that Editor Dawson should be elevated to the peerage and take the title of Lord Dawson of Ink—to distinguish him from Lord Dawson of Penn (George VI’s physician-in-ordinary).