Change at the Guardian

Britain's Manchester Guardian, which rose from a provincial weekly to become one of the world's most famed newspapers, will mark an event this week that has occurred only four times before in its 101 years as a daily: the debut of a new editor. To replace shy, stubby (5 ft. 5 in.) A. P. (for Alfred Powell) Wadsworth, who is stepping down at 65 because of ill health, the Guardian will install 36-year-old Foreign Editor Hector Alastair Hetherington, a journalist for only ten years and a staffer for six.

In taking over the Guardian's leather-and.-mahogany sanctum, Scotsman Hetherington will find the paper at the peak of its power. In his twelve-year regime, a short one as Guardian editors go, Wadsworth trebled circulation (to 167,000) and challenged the London Times in the influence of its editorial voice. He swept the clutter of classified ads off the front page, launched an international weekly airmail edition (circ. 37,744), watched advertising and circulation spread to make the Guardian Britain's only national daily published outside London.

Side of the Angels. Wadsworth imbued the Guardian with his own puckishness, his donnish verbosity, his love for the elegant phrase. The paper often exasperates other newsmen with its quill-pen essayist's approach to the day's hard news, is designed for those who lounge as they read. It often irritates politicians with toplofty editorials suggesting that the paper is not only on the side of the angels but right alongside them in heaven. Snorted Winston Churchill in 1950: "What a remarkable position of superiority!"

Nevertheless, the frequent brilliance of its specialists, e.g., U.S. Correspondent Alistair Cooke, and the wide latitude given to staffers under the late, great Editor C. P. Scott's dictum "Comment is free, facts are sacred," help to make the Guardian the British newsman's newspaper.

From the time of its Liberal Party allegiance to its latter-day attachment to plain liberalism, the Guardian has been a political maverick, with a constitutional tendency to travel the left side of the political road. It opposed the Boer War, losing almost a quarter of its circulation and requiring its reporters to take police escorts to work; it fought for Irish home rule when anti-Irish riots threatened in Manchester; it opposed Britain's entry into World War I. Under Wadsworth the paper, a nonprofit-making trust, switched its support from Labor to Tories as it deemed fit, fought British policy on Cyprus and Suez, roasted the U.S. for McCarthyism. It is a strong supporter of Adlai Stevenson, is cool toward the Eisenhower Administration and often angrily critical of it.

The Comer. Editor Hetherington last week ordered an extra telephone for his desk, making a total of three, but that was the only change in sight under the new regime. The son of Sir Hector Hetherington, principal of Glasgow University, he took honors in English at Oxford, went straight into the tank corps in World War II. His first newspaper job was on the British military staff putting out Hamburg's Die Welt. After the war Hetherington worked on the Glasgow Herald, spent five months at Princeton as a Commonwealth Fellow in 1952. When he switched to the Guardian in 1950, Wadsworth and others quickly tagged him as a comer. Since 1953 he has had a virtually free hand with editorials on defense and foreign policy. He plans to keep the Guardian independent and devoted to "the strongest possible friendship with the U.S."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.