The Press: Guardian’s Milestone

In a lobby of the Manchester Guardian’s smoke-grimed Victorian building, a bust by Jacob Epstein glares down on the editorial floor, where a few stubborn oldsters still scribble in longhand amid the clacking typewriters of fresh-faced Oxonians. It is the image of Charles Prestwich Scott, the Guardian’s late, greatest editor, who built a provincial Whig organ into English liberalism’s bravest voice.

C. P. Scott is as fierce-eyed and commanding in bronze as he was in life. Last week, under his stern, still eyes, his survivors passed a milestone: the 100th anniversary of his birth. The big news about it was that the Guardian was still, unmistakably, one of the world’s half dozen great newspapers.

What gave the Guardian its high place was implicit last week in the long leader for the day by the veteran John Lawrence Le Breton Hammond, Scott’s biographer, who broke his retirement to write of his former chief:

“He insisted on treating his audience as an audience that respected reason and wished to be convinced and instructed, and not merely to be excited and entertained. . . .”

Decline & Rise. Since Scott’s death in 1932—and the inevitable decline that ensued—his paper had regained not only its old courage, and much of its old influence, but its circulation had recently jumped from 80,000 to a record 105,000 when paper restrictions were removed (TIME, Oct. 7).*The Guardian, however, never confuses circulation with influence: in its own city it is fourth in a field of four. Its foreign staff, shattered by the war. and its crack London bureau were getting back^ to full strength. And in a new overseas edition, an airmail version of its weekly, the paper was making its voice heard overnight to a select and growing audience (now 1,644) in the U.S. and Canada.

All too often, in the first decade after Scott, Editor William Percival Crozier rested on the paper’s proud and withering laurels. C.P.S. and the brilliant C. E. Montague, his son-in-law and chief leader writer, had built the Guardian’s reputation the hard way. They had fought against the Boer War, and fought for Home Rule for Ireland, when it was all but suicidal for a paper to do so.

Two and a half years ago, on Crozier’s death, a firmer hand took the helm. Short, bristle-haired Alfred P. Wadsworth, 55, had joined the staff in 1917, covered the Irish “trouble” when Scott was exposing and flaying the misdeeds of the British.

High Aims, Low Pay. In a tiny office outside Scott’s empty one, Wadsworth set out to retake lost ground. At first a few cynical staffers called the industrious new editor “Alfred the Ant” behind his back. The impertinence soon gave way to respect. Wadsworth plugged the gaps in the London and local staffs with serious youngsters who wanted independence more than money (average pay of Guardian reporters is only $48 a week). For his right-hand man and chief leader writer he chose slender, 35-year-old John M. D. Pringle, an Oxford graduate and foreign affairs expert who had been with the Guardian and the BBC before the war. To expand his U.S. coverage, handled for 19 years by the New Republic’s Editor Bruce Bliven, he hired BBCman Alistair Cooke, now the Guardian’s U.N. correspondent.

As head man, Wadsworth gets to his Cross Street headquarters in midafternoon, has supper sent up from the office canteen. He directs the brief 5 o’clock news conference, assigns the leaders, manages to turn out one long leader himself each week. He is careful to see that the Guardian’s news is displayed with grace and readability, but has no intention of putting news on the ad-covered front page. “We think that what the hasty reader loses,” he says, “the careful reader gains from a nicer inside make-up.”

Lower-Case Liberal. Today no hasty or careful reader can doubt where the Guardian stands. The paper would like to see a strong Liberal Party revived. But since that is unlikely, it gives Labor “critical support,” judges each piece of Labor’s legislative program on its merits, leaps to the attack whenever it sniffs out doctrinaire measures. It wants Britain to get out of Greece, wishes the U.S. would get out of China, favors the partitioning of Palestine.

“The Guardian,” says its editor, “is better called today a progressive independent paper. Or a liberal paper with a small ‘!,’ having gone far beyond Manchester liberalism. To us, American liberals seem sentimentally unrealistic on Spain, Greece, Palestine, Russia and ‘British imperialism.’ … We hold Wallace-like criticisms to be hypocritical unless Americans are ready to assume a joint, constructive responsibility with Britain.” Like all good Mancunians, the Guardian family is proud that theirs was the first British newspaper to be barred from Germany (in 1933). In the dark summer of 1940, the heads of the family knew that if Britain were invaded, their blacklisted paper would fall into Nazi hands. So they made Paul Patterson, president of the Baltimore Sun, a trustee and sent the deed to the property across the Atlantic for safekeeping. Patterson returned it last August, an occasion which seemed to the Guardian a proper time to redefine its goal: “It is simply an attempt to secure the fulfillment of C. P. Scott’s aim that his newspapers should be carried on ‘as a public service and not for private profit.’ ”

*While the world’s biggest weekly paper—which is by no means one of the world’s best—gained 922,239. This week London’s smirky, sexy Sunday News of the World claimed a new record: 7,412,382. Biggest U.S. paper, the New York News, has 4,650,000 Sunday circulation.