Monday, Mar. 02, 1959

Femmes of Fleet

Anne Edwards remembers well the counsel an editor gave her in 1947 when she began her column for the London Daily Express: "Write it so that every woman will say, 'What a bitch Anne Edwards is.' " For the next dozen years, blonde, blue-eyed Columnist Edwards was as sassy as she could be for Lord Beaverbrook's bustling Daily Express (circ. 4,084,603). Her weekly 8-in. column grew to a half page as she worked over tempting targets, from Labor's formidable Dr. Edith Summerskill ("Flossie bang-bang") to Queen Elizabeth; she once ran a picture showing the rumpled derriere of the Queen's gown, cattily commented that wrinkleproof fabric evidently was unknown at Buckingham Palace. Drawn by Anne's sharp, sure feline touch, women formed fully 46% of the Daily Express' readership by 1956.

Last week her skill in attracting readers--both male and female--catapulted Columnist Edwards, 48, into the top woman's job in British journalism: assistant editor of Lord Rothermere's Sunday Dispatch (circ. 1,834,859). The Sunday Dispatch won Anne away from Beaverbrook with the fanciest offer ever made an English newswoman, including a pale blue car, an endowment policy that will put away some of her salary tax-free for old age, a fat expense account, and well over $20,000 a year.

Anne's ascension is the most spectacular result so far of the British press battle for female readers. Driving the combatants is the solid economic fact that British advertisers spend more than $17,000,000 weekly luring women v. a paltry $3,000,000 on men. All Fleet Street is chasing petticoats, from the grand and gouty Times, whose Monday women's page creaks like a corseted dowager, to the Daily Worker, which regularly runs features on fashions.

Out of the scramble has come a golden chance for British newswomen to feather their nests as never before. Old hands for new jobs: chic, leggy (5 ft. 111n., 130 Ibs.) Anne Scott-James, 44, who left the Sunday Dispatch fortnight ago to fill the specially created post of adviser to the Beaverbrook empire (four papers with a total circulation of more than 8,000,000); buxom, blonde Eileen Ascroft, forty-sixish, who will leave Beaverbrook's Evening Standard in April to primp up the score of dowdy women's magazines that Press Lord Cecil King (the Daily Mirror-Sunday Pictorial group) got when he bought Amalgamated Press.

Pondering the new responsibilities of a woman with high editorial authority, Anne Edwards kissed off her saucy past as belonging to an England that was "bored, bored," now talks earnestly of giving her women readers "real events and people, the things that really happen.''

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