The Press: The Rumble of Thunder

Quaint old Printing House Square, home of the, London Times, is the closest thing to a shrine that journalism has built. For 163 years its editorial sanctum has been a cradle for Olympian thunderbolts, and its correspondents, often better informed than Whitehall's diplomats, have helped shape British policy as well as interpret it.*

While living up to its traditions, Printing House Square has had to live down some scandals and Hearst-like intrigue. In 1895, when Jameson's raiders were poised to strike at the Transvaal, the Times told its correspondent "to impress upon [Cecil] Rhodes that we hope the New Company will not commence business on a Saturday." The Times had no Sunday edition, and didn't want to miss out on a well-plotted scoop. (The raid started on a Sunday afternoon and the Times got its scoop.)

Last week the Times, with a candor born of maturity, opened the door on its trophy case—and a closet of skeletons. In the third volume of its autobiography (The History of the Times, 1884-1912, Macmillan; $6.50), it told how it once blundered to the brink of bankruptcy.

Breakers Ahead. The Times, founded by Printer John Walter in 1785 to help keep his printing presses busy, in 1884 was "a stately East Indiaman of a newspaper, sailing under a still almost cloudless Victorian sky." But the glass was dropping: circulation was down to a puny 48,000. The barnacle-crusted Times was hopelessly old-fashioned for an age of steam.

Then the Times rashly accused Irish Patriot Charles Stewart Parnell of condoning murder by Irish terrorists, and as evidence printed a letter supposedly written by Parnell. The government inquiry that proved the letter a forgery cost the paper £200,000, wrecked its reputation and left it without capital to repel the privateers of the penny press.

To keep it afloat Assistant Manager Charles F. Moberly Bell, onetime Cairo correspondent, teamed up with two high-pressure Yankee salesmen, Horace Hooper and William Jackson. They put the Times into the book business, with special editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Times Book Club. The Times won back its reputation chiefly by its foreign coverage, which it could ill afford.

"A correspondent," Foreign Assistant Editor Donald M. Wallace wrote to one of them, "should listen to all prominent politicians and attach himself to none; he should always be in the orchestra stalls, but never jump on the stage." Some could not resist jumping. In 1899, the Paris correspondent reported Queen Victoria's indiscreet telegram to her embassy, expressing horror at the verdict against Alfred Dreyfus. The exclusive story would have created an international sensation, but the dispatch was killed. "It was not for the Times," says the history, "to indulge in such triumphs."

But such censorship of correspondents was rare. "The office either trusted a correspondent or it did not. If it trusted him it printed him," even though his views— as sometimes happened—were diametrically opposed to Times leaders.