Portraits and Miniatures (28 page)

Buckle was not Northcliffe's man. He did, however, survive for more than four years before being replaced by Geoffrey Robinson
(the only man to occupy the editorial chair twice and who made the story more complicated by doing so under different names, changing from Robinson to Dawson in order to inherit from an aunt a substantial landed property in Yorkshire). Although Buckle's going, partly because it closely followed the deaths of Moberly Bell, the long-serving manager, and Valentine Chirol, head of the foreign department, marked a considerable clearing out of the old gang, Robinson came from a roughly similar stable. He was, indeed, not only Northcliffe's but also Buckle's choice as successor, although Buckle did not welcome the speed with which he achieved the chair.

He had been at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, was a fellow of All Souls, and had been Lord Milner's private secretary in South Africa. He was thirty-eight when be became editor and had been on the staff of
The Times
for eighteen months. His first stint as editor lasted six and a half years until he in turn, having had a moderately rough ride, fell foul of Northcliffe. It embraced the whole of World War I, a period of great press influence, partly because the House of Commons, then as now almost totally geared to a two-party system, was thrown into limbo by coalition government.

The Times
was central to this period of journalistic politics, but to an extent that had not been seen since the advent of Barnes it was
The Times
of the proprietor rather than
The Times
of the editor which called the game. This was largely because of the extraordinary symbiotic relationship between Northcliffe and Lloyd George. Their periods of high power almost exactly coincided. Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer in April 1908, and was driven out of the premiership in October 1922. Northcliffe acquired
The Times
in March 1908, and died in August 1922. They both had daemonic energy, rootlessness, and inner irresponsibility.

This did not mean that they liked each other. Lloyd George told Beaverbrook in November 1916 that he would ‘as soon go for a sunny evening stroll around Walton Heath with a grasshopper as try and work with Northcliffe', and Northcliffe had little sooner helped to make Lloyd George Prime Minister than he was talking
about destroying him. Each deserved the other, and there was considerable mutual fascination.

The Times,
through its military correspondent's reporting of the shell shortage in France, played a substantial role in the forcing of the 1915 Coalition. But the apogee of its influence in wartime political intrigue was reached during the manoeuvrings of December 1916, which led to the replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George. Its main leader of Monday, 4 December made it publicly clear to Asquith that the concordat he had reached with Lloyd George was, and would be interpreted as being, a humiliation of himself. Accordingly he withdrew from it, overplayed his hand, and ejected himself from 10 Downing Street after eight and a half years' tenancy. The article was thought to be Lloyd George-inspired. To some extent it was. Northcliffe had been flitting heavily between the pillars of the Whitehall scenery. It had, however, been written by Robinson, mostly at Cliveden, but titivated after a Sunday evening dinner with Northcliffe.

This was the high point of their collaboration. Their relationship was sometimes eased by Northcliffe's absences in America, but otherwise they grew increasingly incompatible. Dawson (as he had then become) was sacked three months after the armistice and replaced by Henry Wickham Steed. In contrast with Dawson, an Empire-orientated, conventional English scholar-squire, there was a touch of the continental adventurer about Steed, which made him more acceptable to Northcliffe. He had been on the foreign staff of
The Times
for twenty years, but the combination of his education (Sudbury Grammar School and the Universities of Jena, Berlin and Paris), his elegant beard, and his involvement with the intricacies of Balkan politics, set him a little apart. His greatest qualification, however, was that he shared what had become Northcliffe's detestation of Lloyd George. The paper survived the next three and a half years under this unstable partnership better than might have been expected. J. L. Garvin of the
Observer
at this time considered it ‘far and away the best morning paper'.

The death of Northcliffe was a relief to almost everybody, including Steed, who fell soon after him.
The Times
moved
curiously but not causally in step with British politics. This provides perhaps the best evidence of its position as a national journal. In Lloyd George's time it was febrile. Coincidentally with his fall it moved into a period of Baldwinesque calm. The ownership gap left by Northcliffe was filled by the junior branch of the Astor family, Major (later Colonel) J. J. Astor, later still Lord Astor of Hever, providing most of the money and moving into a partnership with a revived John Walter IV. Dawson was brought back as editor and stayed for another nineteen years, until 1941. Together with John Reith of the BBC and Archbishop Lang of Canterbury, Dawson of
The Times
formed a tripod of slightly self-righteous respectability which sustained the British establishment of the inter-war years.

The Times's
semi-official position, never exactly sought, sometimes embarrassing both to the government and to the paper, but sometimes valuable too, particularly for the prestige that it gave its correspondents abroad, was strengthened during this period. So was the pre-eminence of some of its features, most notably the correspondence columns. In 1917 it had rejected (by decision of Dawson, not, as was commonly thought, Northcliffe) one of the most resonant, if to some eyes infamous, letters to the editor in British political history. The Lansdowne ‘peace letter' went to the
Daily Telegraph
instead. In 1919 this was compensated for by Baldwin's ‘FST letter' (he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury at the time and used the initials to achieve at least the appearance of anonymity), in which he announced that he was giving a fifth of his fortune to help reduce the national debt, and by two extraordinary effusions from Bonar Law. In one he sounded the death-knell of Lloyd George's Coalition. In the other, written during his brief period as Prime Minister, he castigated under the curious pseudonym of ‘Colonial' the American debt settlement his Chancellor had just negotiated.

Dawson was always an appeaser, in the better as well as the worse sense of the word. Therefore he liked Baldwin's general approach to politics, and Baldwin in turn was always close to him. On a crucial morning in August 1931, having reluctantly returned to London from Aix-les-Bains to deal with the crisis
that led to the formation of the National Government, Baldwin was ‘lost' for several hours. He had, in fact, slipped away to consult his trusted friend Dawson. As a result he missed a summons to see the King before Herbert Samuel did so, and plans for a coalition gathered almost irresistible momentum. By the time he had his own audience, Baldwin, against his better judgement, could only acquiesce. British politics were distorted for a decade, and the new balance which Baldwin had devoted the twenties to achieving was seriously upset. The incident was a tribute to the drawing power of Dawson, but not an indication that a politician is always best employed in calling on the editor of
The Times.

The paper was far from being alone in its support of Neville Chamberlain's foreign policy. It did, however, carry its enthusiasm beyond the call of duty. For Christmas 1938 it offered its readers the opportunity to buy cards showing the Prime Minister waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on his return from Munich. It opposed Churchill's inclusion in the government as late as July 1939. And it had the power, unlike most of its contemporaries, to help make policy as well as merely to comment upon it. The most famous (or notorious) example was the leader of 7 September 1938, which first advocated the handing over of the Sudetenland to Germany. The Foreign Office disowned it to the Czech government, but there is evidence that the article had been inspired by Halifax, the Foreign Secretary. His contact with Dawson was intimate and continuous.

As appeasement collapsed war came, and the Chamberlain Government tottered towards its fall.
The Times
inevitably suffered somewhat for its over-commitment. Stephen Koss in his
Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain
makes a fine distinction: ‘Its influence had declined but not yet its reputation.' The period of
The Times's
being almost a great Department of State and its editor almost an honorary member of the Cabinet was over, and not merely for Dawson's day.

His long day came to an end on 1 October 1941. The
History's
‘obituary' says: ‘He gave lifelong adherence to his chosen leaders, above all Milner, Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax.' It was not
an eclectic choice of friends. In particular it left his successor, who had been his co-adjudicator for the previous fourteen years, somewhat isolated from the War Coalition, and indeed the Churchillian Conservative Party.

This successor was R. M. Barrington-Ward. He was the son of a clergyman, educated at Westminster and Balliol. He was part of the warp and woof of
The Times.
He had first joined its staff in 1913 at the age of twenty-two. He spent eight years away at the
Observer.
That and World War I apart, the paper had been his whole life. He had refused the director-generalship of the BBC in 1938. Yet, although very much an inside appointment, he was an editor of note. Some thought that had he succeeded ten years earlier he would have avoided the excesses of the late Dawson period. He never sought to detach himself from them, but as editor he moved the paper firmly to the left.

He was enthusiastic about the Beveridge Report and other plans for post-war reconstruction. He believed in 1942 that Cripps might easily become Prime Minister within a short time. He employed E. H. Carr to write leaders advocating the closest postwar Anglo-Russian partnership. True to this view he opposed the British Government's resistance to the Greek left-wing revolutionary movement at the end of 1944, and infuriated Churchill by so doing. To loud Conservative cheers, the Prime Minister, with the editor sitting prominently in the gallery, delivered a virulent parliamentary attack upon
The Times
in January 1945. Barrington-Ward was shaken but undeflected. His proprietors, Astor, then MP for Dover, and Walter, were embarrassed but gentlemanly. He was denounced by a less gentlemanly Conservative MP (Sir Herbert Williams) for producing ‘the threepenny edition', this time not of the
Daily Mail
but ‘of the
Daily Worker'.

When the Attlee government came in,
The Times
under Barrington-Ward accepted it as a natural government for Britain in the epoch. His criticism was sometimes sharp but basically friendly. His reward was scant. He was excoriated by many Conservatives, and called in and denounced by Ernest Bevin for the ‘spineless' and ‘jellyfish' attitude of
The Times
towards Russia. It was neither for him nor against him, Bevin typically complained.
‘Why should it be?' Barrington-Ward very reasonably retorted, but to his diary, not to Bevin. Again he was shocked rather than influenced. Those who saw him when he returned to Printing House Square thought that he looked as though he had been in a nasty traffic accident. Bevin could be a fairly roughly driven articulated lorry. And Barrington-Ward was a natural St Sebastian of journalism. He carried the arrows without much complaint. But they hurt a great deal. And they may even have helped to kill him in 1948 at the typically early
Times
age of fifty-six.

His successor, William Casey, was both the oldest and the most obvious stop-gap to be appointed to the
Times
chair. He was Anglo-Irish and from a background not dissimilar to that of Northcliffe. But he had been to Trinity College, Dublin, and he was a calm man. At first it was thought that he might merely be there for a year. In fact he lasted five, and was rather a good editor in a quiet way.

Then came Sir William Haley, the first editor to be born (just) in the twentieth century, the first since 1803 not to have been to a university, the only one to arrive with a title and perhaps the last to believe intermittently that he commanded the thunderbolts of Zeus. His most famous leader was entitled ‘It
is
a Moral Issue', and was a rather holier-than-thou lecture on the Profumo scandal of 1963 and the climate out of which it had sprung. Previously he had been critical of the Suez adventure, although not as vehemently so as the
Observer,
the
Manchester Guardian
or the
Daily Mirror,
had presided very uneasily over the successful but unappetizing ‘Top People Take
The Times'
advertising campaign, had been affronted by the Lady Chatterley verdict, had urged a Conservative victory but an upsurge of Liberal votes in the general election of 1964, and had put news on the front page in May 1966. He was a successful but reluctant editor of transition.

His reign of fourteen years came to a voluntary end in 1967 together with the withdrawal of the Astors from principal proprietorship. A successful new proprietor (from the point of view of the paper if not of his family fortune) was found in the shape of Lord Thomson of Fleet, and William Rees-Mogg became editor
and the best editorial leader-writer since Barnes. Thomson's disadvantage was that he provided no dynasty of loss-absorbers. He and his son lasted barely as long as Northcliffe. Of the paper since then it is impossible to write with perspective or objectivity. Harold Evans has written his own
pièce justificative
after the briefest editorship in the history of the paper. Rupert Murdoch and Charles Douglas-Home (editor from 1982 to 1985) are too contemporary to appraise, at any rate in their own columns.

They are the heirs to a long but fluctuating tradition, which mostly worked best when editors were strong and proprietors were quiescent. This is not an invariable rule. Buckle, left entirely to himself, might have run the paper quietly into the sand. Dawson might have benefited from some proprietorial arm-jogging.
The Times
has no record of impeccability. Other newspapers have quite frequently been better. But none has on average been so good for so long.