News on Sunday

With the third edition of London's Sunday Telegraph safely tucked into bed, its bone-weary parent and editor in chief climbed into his secondhand Morris station wagon at 1 a.m. and headed for his Buckinghamshire country estate. Behind the Hon. William Michael Berry, 50, second son of the first Viscount Camrose, stretched 20 weeks of late Saturday nights --and the special satisfaction of having succeeded when his competitors were smugly certain that he would fail. In less than five months, the Sunday Telegraph, London's first new Sunday paper in 42 years,* has clearly established its capacity to survive in an overcrowded field.

Fleet Street snickered last February when Berry introduced his new paper, designed to "fill the gap" in a Sunday field that seemed all ends and no middle--one that ranged from the cerebral approach of the Sunday Times to the News of the World, with an appeal that is blatantly visceral. At sight of the upstart Telegraph, a paper advertised as being neither "weightier than you wanted" nor "more frivolous than you fancied,'' the frivolous Sunday sheets smiled indulgently. The Sunday Times could not resist predicting that the newcomer might prove useful as a primer for fledgling intellectuals "not yet quite up to the high cultural and political standards which the Sunday Times characteristically maintains."

Sunday Dose. But Berry knew what he was about. "Sunday papers have become all views and no news," he said. Though tradition forced it to carry the interminably serialized memoirs of the great and near great that are a staple of British weekend reading, Berry insisted on brevity elsewhere. Last week's issue packed 19 stones on Page One, more than any of its competitors. Editorials are equally spare--ten bite-sized specimens--in refreshing contrast to the uncorseted "leaders" of some other Sunday papers.

More important, Berry's paper has a generous Sabbath dose of straight news--to the amazement of Fleet Street, which has long been satisfied that little happens on Saturday. This month, after a gunman shot three London bobbies and then handed the story--by telephone--to the Sunday Express, the Sunday Telegraph collected information from eyewitnesses and Scotland Yard, stitched a story that made the Express's account (1 TRAP WANTED MAN ON THE TELEPHONE) sound like a Beaverbrook promotion.

Succinct Conservative. This same devotion to succinctness and the news distinguishes the century-old daily paper from which the Sunday Telegraph sprang. The Daily Telegraph, a listless, conservative has been of 84,000 circulation when Publisher Sir William Ewert Berry took it over in 1928, has surged to success on that very formula. By dropping the price of the paper to a penny, Berry put it within reach of Britain's tradesmen, tailored its contents to the middle class's conservative but aspiring tastes. Under Berry, the first Viscount Camrose, the Telegraph dispensed both news and editorial opinion with such an even hand that a critic once complained that the paper "ignores nothing--and explains nothing."

Before Camrose died in 1955, his paper had passed 1,000,000 in circulation (it has 1,255,441 today). Inheriting editorial custody of the Telegraph, William Michael Berry, who had started work in 1946, was willing at first to let things run on their own momentum. "I was chiefly content with keeping an established paper on the rails," said he. Staffers saw the distant engineer so rarely that they called him "The Fifth Floor."

But when his uncle, British Publisher Viscount Kemsley, sold the Sunday Times in 1959, Berry was released from a gentleman's agreement not to publish a Sunday edition, and the Sunday Telegraph became the first important move he made on his own. Excited and pleased by the new venture, Berry came down off the fifth floor, has guided the new paper with a skill that has earned him the admiration of London's newspaper row. Still a David (circ. 701,000) among Goliaths whose circulations range downward from the News of the World's 6,664,035, the Sunday Telegraph is making all seven of its competitors take respectful notice. "I hate to say it," said an opposition editor last week, "but I think they're doing a damn good job."

*The last: the Sunday Express, b. 1918. In the past year, three Sunday papers have died.

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