The Press: Thunderer's Triumvirate

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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.