. The press
Lessons from the past
Paul Johnson
he British Museum is notoriously bad about publicising the many excellent special exhibitions it stages within its caver- nous depths. For instance, there is at the moment a wonderfully instructive and en- joyable show of British watercolours in its print room, accompanied by a fine and modestly priced catalogue. Who knows about it? But that is not what I am writing about this week. Also in the BM, tucked away in the little exhibition room at the back of the King's Library, there is a show devoted to the first 200 years of the Times. I only discovered about it last Wednesday, though it has been on since 22 March (it closes on 30 June). I do not know who was responsible for this exhibition, because no catalogue was available and there was no indication I could discover in the show itself; but whoever it was, he or she is to be Congratulated: one can learn a lot about the history of British journalism by spend- ing a pleasurable half-hour browsing around.
There are some curious items to be seen. For instance, there is a fan which Blowitz, the famous Times correspondent in Paris, brought back from the Congress of Berlin (`Peace with Honour') in 1876. He got all the chief delegates to sign it, and the signatures of Bismarck, Disraeli and Salis- bury can be plainly seen. Then there is the typewritten letter which James Morris (as she then was), the paper's special corres- Pondent with the Everest expedition of 1953, sent to the foreign editor, giving the elaborate code to be used in his cable Messages, designed to deceive the competi-
tion, who did not have the special rights the Times had paid for, but who were Presumably capable of bribing Nepalese Post office clerks. There is the letter which Pigott forged in the name of Charles Stewart Parnell. And there are some of the messages and cables which whizzed about between Cecil Rhodes, Flora Shaw, the _
imes's African expert, and Moberley Bell, on the eve of the Jameson Raid. Incidentally, the text of the exhibition is unfair to Miss Shaw. It is not true she emerged from this episode with discredit. At the subsequent parliamentary inquiry, as is brilliantly recounted in Elizabeth Longford's book on the raid, she con- ducted herself with superb skill and
aplomb, protecting both her paper's repu- tation and her own. And is it not arguable that, had the Jameson Raid succeeded, it would have averted the disastrous Boer War and fundamentally changed the whole course of events which produced apart- heid?
What struck me about this exhibition is that we are quite wrong to get too toffee- nosed about newspapers, even august ones like the Times. When a paper is taken over these days, the new proprietor's record is examined as though he were going to take over — well, an Anglican bishopric. In fact, when John Walter set up the paper in 1785 he was a man who had recently gone bankrupt. He had been in trade as a coal-seller, and later as a man who insured colliers, accepting premiums but unable to fork out on claims.
Again, people sneered at old Lord Thomson when he called the news the stuff you ran between the advertisements. But it was exactly this attitude which started the Times in the first place. It was a vehicle for ads, and it survived and prospered because the mid-1780s was a time of expanding trade and it was the shipping ads which paid the paper's expenses and put it on a firm basis. It is true that the Times began to take a high-minded view of itself from the 1820s onward. But one way or another it has been involved in quite a number of controversial operations, the Pigott forgery, the Jameson Raid and the doctor- ing of dispatches to align them with its 'Well at least her father's not living in Paraguay!' Appeasement policy being only three ex- amples. I don't think it's possible for a newspaper to become great, and stay great, without involving itself in sensation- al episodes. As Hugh Cudlipp put it, the press is a 'dangerous estate', involving the necessity to take risks; and some of the risks are bound to end in disaster. (That, by the way, is no excuse for the Times! Sunday Times falling for a patsy like the Hitler diaries.) The exhibition put two other thoughts in my mind. First, all the major episodes in which the Times has been involved, whether they enhanced its reputation or detracted from it, concerned news, and usually foreign news. One or two involved leaders too: thus we see exhibited the fatal alterations, on a proof of the first edition, which Geoffrey Dawson, returning from holiday, made on a leader about the Sudetenland, and which led Germany to think that the British Government would back a dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. But most concerned news itself. We find nothing about features. Now here is a big contrast with the Times today (and the Guardian too). Only last week, an able and energetic Times foreign correspondent was complaining bitterly to me about the diffi- culty he found getting serious copy into the paper: 'Not enough space, old boy'. Yet the paper is awash with features, both `hard' and 'soft', as the current jargon has it, and many of them are of second-rate quality. How many more times must one reiterate Christiansen's cry, 'You cannot beat news in a newspaper'?
The second point concerns technical innovation. Walter may have been a for- mer bankrupt, but he was abreast of the latest printing technology. He started the paper to take advantage of a new logotype process which involved having whole words pre-set in type, thus accelerating composition. Moreover, the paper had not been in existence 20 years before it was introducing the new steam press, made in Germany. During all its period of sup- remacy the Times was in the forefront not just of journalistic innovation but of tech- nological improvement. That was one im- portant reason why it was great.
Today, the Times is just like any other Fleet Street newspaper: forced to continue outdated, wasteful, inefficient and indeed contemptible methods of printing by the greed, selfishness and obscurantism of monopoly trade unions. New technologies which are used all over the civilised world are strictly forbidden in Fleet Street. Tech= nologies which are already installed, accepted and working successfully in the British provinces are banned in Fleet Street. A further point is worth making,
The present Government have beep in office nearly six years. Yet in all that time
they have done nothing to help proprietors and editors hasten the introduction of new methods in Fleet Street. If Mrs Thatcher is going to brag about teaching the unions a lesson, she ought to bear this lamentable failure in mind.
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