100 Years Young

The Bank of England's standoffish Governor Montagu Norman very rarely can be induced to make a speech anywhere. But he will make one this week at a London luncheon which will be attended by an assortment of bigwigs -- Cabinet members, Members of Parliament, businessmen, foreign ambassadors. Later the same day there will be a frilly "sherry party" at the Savoy Hotel. The occasion for all this decorous festivity: the 100th birthday of the London Economist, a sedately liberal, authoritative British weekly which ranks with such respected and influential British newspapers as the London Times and Manchester Guardian.

Propaganda. The Economist was not always respected and influential. When James Wilson, an ambitious politician (later Finance Minister to India), founded it, his primary purpose was to propagandize against the British corn laws (regulations on the import of grain) and support the laissez faire movement. He shrewdly mixed some political and business articles in with the propaganda, managed to gather some 3,000 readers, a small profit and a journalistic reputation before he died in 1860, leaving his paper to his six picturesque, strictly Victorian daughters. They and their descendants, apparently endowed with Founder Wilson's zeal and luck, retained control through years of small prestige, even smaller profit, until 1928, when they sold the paper to a syndicate of London bankers and publishers (including Brendan Bracken, now British Minister of Information).

Editor today, and largely responsible for the Economist's prestige, is plump, affable Geoffrey Crowther, 36, who studied at Cambridge, at Yale on a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship (Rhodes scholarship in reverse), then at New York's Columbia University. In the U.S. he acquired, besides an education, a wife. He worked in Wall Street (as a messenger for J. W. Seligman Co.), returned to London in 1932 to join the Economist. He became editor in 1938, when he was 31.

Top-flight staff members include classically beautiful Barbara Ward, who handles most of the foreign news; onetime economics professor Donald Tyerman; Walter Hill, the Economist's German-educated industrial and trade expert. Staffers work in complete anonymity, submerging their own personalities to the paper's. Result: many a bigwig who would not condescend to see rank-&-file newsmen enjoys confiding in Economist writers.

In May 1941, the Economist's fusty old offices in Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street, were bombed, gutted by fire. Lost were: 1) a famous and enormous brown teapot named "Alice" from which the staff for 40 years had had afternoon tea; 2) the paper's yellowed, irreplaceable morgue; 3) all the week's copy, a disaster that was repaired so deftly in three days of wild staff work that subscribers discovered that something had been amiss only when the bombing was announced weeks later.

Profits. Editor Crowther's Economist in appearance is much like Founder Wilson's. Many of the 30-odd pages are a stew of statistical tables and arid business advertisements, the latter inserted at high rates by such concerns as the Lisbon Electric Tramways, the Hudson's Bay Co., the National Bank of Egypt. Economist ads are never avidly solicited. They are accepted by two low-power salesmen who wear black striped trousers, black Eden (Homburg) hats, call formally on prospective space buyers.

Circulation is still low, by U.S. standards: about 8,000 British readers, 2,000 more in the U.S., Spain, Turkey, Portugal, Sweden. Readers pay a shilling (20-c-) a copy or -L-3 ($12) a year. Profits are always scanty and staff members are admittedly paid somewhat less than the Fleet Street daily paper minimum--nine guineas ($37.80) a week. Many pad their incomes with outside writing.

Plagiarism. But despite its tiny audience, its lack of wealth, the Economist is influential in British affairs.

One reason is that the people it reaches are powerful and influential--bankers, editors, businessmen, politicians. Another: Economist articles, though clothed in decorum, are also virile, outspoken, intellectual. The leading article each week--usually written by Editor Crowther--is invariably a clear, cool, calm, careful analysis of the world's ills or blessings.

Result: Members of Parliament, Cabinet members and small-fry civil servants in Britain have been stealing Economist stuff for decades. Many a Parliamentary speech is loaded with Economist facts & figures; many a neat British phrase is pilfered from Economist columns. Example : the now-famed phrase, "soft underbelly of Europe," appeared in an Economist article on military strategy before Winston Churchill seized it for his own.

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