The Press: Thunderer’s Triumvirate

While Hitler was marching east last week (see p. 16), Central European Correspondent G. E. R. Gedye published in World’s Press News (British equivalent of Editor & Publisher) a blistering attack on the English press. After telling how he had to resign from the London Telegraph for criticizing British foreign policy in his book, Betrayal in Central Europe, Correspondent G. E. R. Gedye published in evidence of censorship: “Today one great Conservative newspaper is actually binding its foreign correspondents to write nothing whatever outside its columns without permission.” Everybody knew he meant the London Times.

A century ago the press of England, if not its Government, was made of tougher stuff. The Times was not the Government organ it is now but a muckraking, anti-aristocratic, jingoistic sheet. In 1854 it helped to push the country into the Crimean War, then ribbed the Government for all its blunders and published such thorough accounts of British strategy that the Russians were tipped off on it in advance. The Foreign Minister, Lord Clarendon, complained:

“Our army is not only melting away but our national position is doing the same, that ill bird The Times wh. daily fouls its own nest contributes powerfully to the decline of England. . . . Things are bad enough Heaven knows in the Crimea but the glowing colors in wh. every detail is painted have excited the people of this country almost to madness & have led among other things to a ministerial crisis.”

Last week The Times published the second volume of its history.* (Volume I, the story of Bohemian Thomas Barnes, its first great editor, whose blasts against the aristocracy won The Times its cherished nickname, “The Thunderer,” was published three years ago.) Volume II is the story of the triumvirate that shaped The Times’s policies between 1841 and 1884:

Chief Proprietor John Walter III (grandson of the founder) ; sturdy, gregarious Editor John Thadeus Delane; shy, lettered Manager (managing editor) Mowbray Morris. During those years The Times made itself the paper of every middle-class Englishman’s breakfast table by vociferously championing the bourgeoisie that was climbing to power on the shoulders of a decaying aristocracy.

“Atrocious,” gasped Queen Victoria of The Times. “Wicked,” clucked the Prince Consort. “Insolent,” sniffed Mr. Gladstone. Lord John Russell wrote to Lord Clarendon: “. . . If England is ever to be England again, this vile tyranny of The Times must be cut off.”

Hated and feared by the ruling classes, The Times was nevertheless always first to print stories of ministerial crises (often before they occurred), got first copies of dispatches from diplomats abroad, read the Queen’s speeches before the Queen herself had read them. Editor Delane made Cabinet members so scared of The Thunderer that often they hurried to tell him their most vital decisions to save themselves from attack.

Incorruptible, impervious to social lionizing, Delane had one weakness as an independent editor: he would do almost anything to maintain his supply of exclusive news. When Lord Palmerston, one of his favorite whipping boys, became Prime Minister in 1855, Delane made peace to keep his sources of information secure.

The Government tried to muffle The Times by abolishing the newspaper tax, giving rise to a flock of penny papers. Publisher Walter decided that a Times that was not worth threepence was not worth publishing, met the new competition by building up a great foreign news service. Special Times steamers ran regularly from Belgium, France, Ireland; special trains sped across half of Europe; camel convoys crossed the deserts.

As biased in its handling of foreign news as in its domestic policies, The Times stirred up trouble wherever it could.

Mowbray Morris wrote to his Rome correspondent: “Let us bring the Pope and his cardinals to trial, make a specific charge against them and prove it. That should be your task. It is in the hope that you will execute it that The Times has sent you to Rome.”

Manager Morris had been born in the West Indies, and during the American Civil War both he and Delane helped to swing England’s sympathies toward the Confederacy. Morris sent William Howard (“Bull Run”) Russell to the U. S., featured his brilliant account of the Federal debacle at Manassas. Russell went back to England, sympathetic toward the North. The Times remained pro-South to the end.

Morris resigned in 1873. Delane retired in 1877 and died two years later. Thomas Chenery, who succeeded him, was a smaller man and the English middle class had by then won its bloodless revolution. The Times’s relations with the Liberal Government were friendly and fairly serene. As the 19th Century drew to a close The Thunderer lowered its voice.

*Macmillan ($5).