The Press: Lord Vigour & Venom

Through the abbey-like halls of the London Times, in the spring of 1908, ran a tremor of genteel horror. The "gentlemen scholars" who were used to running the Times as if it were a hereditary and self-perpetuating priesthood heard shocking news: the paper's control had been bought by Lord Northcliffe,* first lord of Britain's yellow press. "Ye Black Friars," as Northcliffe called them, feared the worst, and it soon came. The Times, said the new chief proprietor, might be what the "monks" called an institution, but it was not a newspaper.

northcliffe, whose own screaming, halfpenny Daily Mail was flourishing, saw no reason why a paper as old and influential as the Times should have only 40,000 circulation and be almost bankrupt. How he shook things up occupies the bulk of the latest and final volume of the fascinating Times-sponsored History of the Times, on which scholarly Stanley Morison, 63, has spent the last 20 years. As in the previous volumes (TIME, Feb. 23, 1948), Timesman Morison trots out all "the Thunderer's" skeletons, glories and stupidities with an unsparing candor seldom equaled by official chronicles anywhere.

Distinguished Nuts & Flappers. His task, said Northcliffe, was "to get the old barnacle-covered whale off the rocks and safely into the deep water." He promptly fired George Earle Buckle, editor for 28 years, and put in Geoffrey Dawson, who had been one of the paper's top foreign correspondents. Northcliffe, who seldom worked from the Times office, harried Editor Dawson by phone, cable and mail from watering places all over the Continent. He bombarded his staff of "weaklings" and "dullards" with denunciations and demands, called himself "the Ogre of Fleet Street," and often signed his orders "Lord Vigour & Venom." Once he cabled: THIS MORNINGS ARTICLE IS ALRIGHT BUT IS LARGELY A RECAPITULATION OF WHAT MY OTHER PAPERS SAID DAYS AGO. THE TIMES SHOULD LEAD AND NOT FOLLOW PUBLIC OPINION.

He demanded more new stories, shorter articles and every day a "light" leader (e.g., editorial), now the Times's famed and whimsical "fourth leader" (TIME, Dec. 4, 1950). Northcliffe badgered the staff to give the paper a personality, sneaked in the first byline the Times had printed in 137 years. "There should be nothing," he chided Dawson, "like the 'Scottish History Chair at Glasgow,' which is of no interest to the distinguished Nuts and Flappers we are trying to pursue."

Beneath the bombast was an inborn genius for divining and whetting the public's curiosity ("once having made the readers talk, you can soon tell them what to say"). He warned his editors that he did not "believe in hobnobbing with politicians," demanded that the paper be independent and make up its own mind. When circulation gains were slow, Northcliffe slashed the price from threepence to a penny, overnight tripled sales. "I hear that the Old Lady of Printing House Square," he chortled, "gathered up her skirts and shrieked as at the sight of a man under the bed in the face of a real increase in demand for the Times for the first time since her middle age."