Trusty steed
Sir: As Stephen Glover says (Media studies, 4 May), Henry Wickham Steed emerges badly from S.J. Taylor's (or any other) account of his dealings with Northcliffe. He first sucked up to his proprietor while he was editing the Times from 1919 to 1922, and then denigrated Northcliffe after he had been sacked by him (and after North- cliffe had died). The pity of it is that this is how Wickham Steed is now remembered by the few who know his name at all.
He was in fact a brilliant journalist, so long as he stuck to his métier, which was foreign correspondent. As the Times's man in Berlin, he had an historic scoop: an anonymous article in the Hamburger Nachrichten revealed the existence of the secret Russo-German reinsurance treaty of 1890, and only Wickham Steed identified Bismarck as its author. Then, after five years in Rome, he was Vienna correspon- dent from 1902 to 1913, when he published The Hapsburg Monarchy. It is one of the best books of its kind by a journalist that I have ever read.
Wickham Steed's tragedy was that he was a fine reporter and writer who didn't have the personality for editing and for coping with a proprietor; an object lesson to others in our trade.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Daily Express, London SE1
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