The Press: Death of a Tradition

Before the publishing house of George Newnes Ltd., just off London’s Strand, a hansom cab stopped and out stepped an elegant young man in top hat and frock coat. He was Arthur Conan Doyle, come to deliver the manuscript of a short story entitled A Scandal in Bohemia. Published in the six-month-old Strand magazine, in July 1891, the story’s hero was a sleuth named Sherlock Holmes. He was an instant hit and so was the Strand.

For 36 years, Conan Doyle wrote exclusively for the Strand, in a literary company that has seldom been equaled by any periodical. Shrewd, mustached Herbert Greenough Smith, the Strand’s editor for four decades, gave his readers the best in Britain to provide “wholesome and harmless entertainment to hard-working people.”

It was the Strand that first published Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon and W. W. Jacobs’ “Night Watchman” stories; it gave a head start to such other up-&-coming writers and illustrators as P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, A. E. W. Mason, George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Osbert Lancaster and Sidney Paget.

Had We Lived. Under Greenough Smith, the magazine also spurred the Edwardian spirit of adventure and empire by travelogues, picture biographies of famous men and foreign correspondence by Winston Churchill (see THE HALF-CENTURY). The Strand’s notable scientific articles were usually written by nonscientists. When Greenough Smith wanted an article on orchids and the writer protested that he “hardly knew an orchid from a geranium,” the editor replied: “Just the thing. I will give you an introduction to the greatest of orchid growers, and if you will write an article on what interests and enlightens you, then [it] will interest and enlighten the public in general.” The Strand became a part of British life, from drawing room to below stairs, and colonials fondly regarded it as “a bit of London” in their far-off homes.

When Captain Robert Scott was preparing for his second expedition to the South Pole, the Strand signed up his exclusive story. After Navyman Scott and four of his party died of cold and hunger on the way back from the Pole in 1912, the Strand scored a major international beat when a search party found his dramatic diary: “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale . . .” On the tale, circulation soared to 300,000 in Britain and 100,000 in the U.S.

Where Are They Now? Editor Greenough Smith, rich in journalistic honors, died in 1935. Deprived of his sure touch, the Strand declined rapidly. In World War II, the shortage of good fiction—and paper to print it on—hit the magazine even harder. When the Strand’s traditional format and cover were discarded in favor of a pocket-sized, sophisticated approach, the magazine lost the last traits of its old character without developing a new one. Complained new Editor MacDonald Hastings, who took over in 1944: “Where are the Conan Doyles today, and where are the readers who want them anyway? What people want today is imaginative reporting; the day of fiction has gone.”

With costs soaring and circulation down to 100,000, the directors of richly profitable George Newnes Ltd., which publishes 54 other magazines (biggest moneymaker: Woman’s Own, circ. 1,500,000), last week decided to close out the Strand “rather than mar the glorious record . . .”At the news, hundreds of veteran Strand readers flooded the magazine with expressions of grief and protest. Wrote one nostalgic old timer: “The Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress and the Strand were my first three books . . .” But at week’s end, though they had begun to regret their decision a bit, the directors were standing pat: the Strand will die with the March issue.