Changing Standard

When Lord Beaverbrook made greying, ascetic-looking Herbert Gunn the editor of his London Evening Standard in 1945, his instructions were brief: jack up the circulation, lift it from 600,000 to at least 1,000,000. An eager Beaverman for 15 years, Editor Gunn brightened up the Standard with new features, improved the news coverage, made the paper more talked about.

Under Gunn, circulation started up and he kept it climbing. He also kept the paper in plenty of hot water. When Parliament launched an investigation in 1947 into charges by M.P. Garry Allighan that certain M.P.s were selling parliamentary secrets to the press (TIME, Aug.11, Nov. 10, 1947), it turned out in the end that Allighan was the secret-peddler--and that Gunn's paper was paying him for the news beats. Allighan was ousted from Parliament while the British press frowned on Gunn. The next year, the Standard broke the release date on a poll of British doctors on the nationalization of British medicine, and brought down the wrath of the British press for what the angry News Chronicle called the "most unethical journalistic achievement of the financial year."

Six months ago the Standard got in even hotter water when it launched a campaign to kick John Strachey out of the government because he had once been a party-liner. When Strachey was appointed Secretary of State for War the same day that Spy Klaus Fuchs was sent to prison, the Standard headlined: FUCHS AND STRACHEY: A GREAT NEW CRISIS. For Coupling Fuchs and Strachey, the British press jumped on the Standard so hard that the doughty Beaver began to worry. At the start, he and Gunn had both agreed that the campaign was a fine idea, but the Beaver soon cooled. Not so Editor Gunn. There was no doubt that the whole affair had seriously hurt the Standard's professional prestige.

Two months ago, Editor Gunn did it again. Over a dispatch from Korea, the Standard headlined: PEASANTS OUTCLASS THE MIGHTY U.S.A. Canada-born Lord Beaverbrook, who considers himself a staunch friend of the U.S., was furious, especially when the headline was quoted in the U.S. press as an instance of British ill will. The subeditor who wrote the headline was fired and the Beaver scorched Gunn for good measure. Gunn stood firm, argued that the headline was "no more than a quotation" (but not an exact one) from the story under it by Chicago Daily News Correspondent Keyes Beech. But the Beaver had had enough.

Editor Gunn was called back from his vacation fortnight ago and summarily sacked. In addition to the dust-up over Strachey and the Korean headline, Gunn last week told fellow journalists that he and Beaverbrook had had an even more important disagreement: they had quarreled over fundamental policy for the Standard. He went into no details, but the word on Fleet Street was that the Beaver wanted to change the paper's style, tone down its strident voice and make it something like the conservative Daily Telegraph. At week's end the Beaver was still looking for a man to fill Gunn's job.

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