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 -L-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.

Pilot Dropped. In 1908 the Times was again about to go under. This time Manager Bell kept body & soul together by selling both (for -L-320,000) to a mysterious "Mr. X," whose identity was guarded for three years. "Mr. X" turned out to be Alfred Harmsworth, owner of the Daily Mail and first lord (Northcliffe) of Britain's yellow press. Bell thought he could keep control but wily Alfred Harmsworth outfoxed him and grasped the wheel.

How Northcliffe and his bright young crew ran the circulation up to 200,000 before his death in 1922 is another story; the Times is saving it for Volume IV, which it hopes to publish in three years or so. (Then it will halt the history for a generation so it can see the postwar period in a truer perspective.)

Reviewing this history, sometimes as suspenseful as an Oppenheim thriller, sometimes as tedious as legal notices, the Manchester Guardian marveled at "the justice (almost, sometimes, to the point of cruelty) of the personal estimates." But scholarly Stanley Morison,* the typographer-historian who designed and supervised the group of Times men who wrote the book, maintains that "you can't take credit for the good that the Times has done unless you own up to its mistakes."

* Britain's Foreign Office lets the Times see more of its confidential correspondence than any other publication. "This information is shared with the Times," said a London newsman, "not for direct use but to inform its editors and leader writers, and to keep it from saying things that might embarrass the government. In short, the Times is not official, but is treated as though it were, in order to prevent misunderstandings based on the erroneous assumption that it is." * Not to be confused with U.S. Historian (Admiral of the Ocean Sea) and Proper Bostonian Samuel Eliot Morison.

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