The Press: Dickens’ Baby

At 2 a.m. one morning in 1846, Charles Dickens hurried home through London’s silent streets to wake his wife and proudly show her a still damp copy of the first Daily News. In the leading article, he had committed it to the demands of rising, powerful, 19th-Century Liberalism: for “progress and improvement of education, civil and religious liberty, and equal legislation. . . .”

As editor, 34-year-old Novelist Dickens lasted 17 days. Then he quit, told the proprietors (a radical industrialist and the publishers of the then radical weekly Punch) that he was “tired to death and quite worn out.”

Last week his newspaper, now the News Chronicle, was 100 years old, and unlike the tired-to-death Liberal Party it champions, still going strong. Its birthday party in the swank Dorchester Hotel was England’s biggest tie-&-tails turnout since 1940.

Peerless Paper. Today the infant of 1846 is a giant of Fleet Street, fifth in circulation (with 1.5 million) among London’s nine “national” newspapers, and known as the highbrow of the mass-readership field. Heading its high command is dry, aging Chocolate Tycoon Laurence J. Cadbury, whose father bought shares in 1901 (at David Lloyd George’s behest) to keep them out of the clutches of Boer War imperialists. As chairman of Daily News, Ltd., Quaker Cadbury, a publisher without a peerage, leaves its operations to a devoutly Liberal triumvirate: Sir Walter Layton, quondam Cambridge don who once edited the Economist; pedantic, competent Editor (since 1936) Gerald Barry, a Saturday Review alumnus, and tack-sharp Robin J. Cruikshank, 47, a big, curly-haired six-footer who is regarded the top newspaperman of the lot.

Cruikshank, a Fleet Streeter since his teens, was the News Chronicle’s U.S. correspondent for eight prewar years, then returned to edit the Cadburys’ evening Star (which, with its morning sister, is known as the “Cocoa Press”). In 1941 Brendan Bracken drafted him to head the American Division of the Ministry of Information.

Roaring Century. When he became a director of both papers last summer, Robin Cruikshank began an idle perusal of the 1846 file of the Daily News, intending to write a centenary leader for last week. He soon became convinced that 1846, the paper’s first year, was, for England, as Bernard DeVoto had found it to be for the U.S., a “Year of Decision.” The article grew into a forthcoming book (Roaring Century: 1846-1946),

Like its competitors, the News Chronicle of 1946 is still on a four-page austerity diet. Like them, it has gained in readability from the newsprint shortage that forced British editors to sharpen their pencils and their wits. Less flamboyant than Lord Beaverbrook’s huge (circ. 3,376,000), shrieking Daily Express, far livelier than Lord Camrose’s Daily Telegraph, the News Chronicle puts a higher value on good writing than on scoops. At its best, the News Chronicle has some of the calm balance and Olympian clarity of that staid old thunderer, the Times (circ. 196,000), although in all England only the Manchester Guardian comes close to the Times’s great, impersonal prestige. If the Times suddenly vanished, most of its London readers would probably turn to the News Chronicle. The difference, as London wags put it: “The Times is for reading in an overstuffed chair, the News Chronicle for reading in a rocking chair.”