Editorial
Another book I have read this week is a volume of memoirs by Sir Colin Coote (Editorial, just published by Eyre and Spottiswoode). Sir Colin was of course the managing editor of the Daily Telegraph. But I found myself reading with parti- cular interest his account of his, years on The Times as a leader-writer. They were clearly difficult years because Sir Colin was strongly opposed to the 'pro-German policies' of the then editor, Geoffrey Dawson. (Leader-writers do not necessarily agree with everything printed in their papers, either : cf. my first paragraph.)
During the years of appeasement Dawson con- ceived it to be his duty to suppress items likely to annoy the Nazis, and to encourage items likely to please them. The relationship was awkward for Coote. Eventually an arrangement was made which left Coote responsible only for leaders on the undisputed topic of British rearmament. This at least preserved him from the mortifying ex- perience of a fellow leader-writer, Leo Kennedy, who awoke one morning to find that the last paragraph of his article had been entirely re- written so as to suggest the immediate cession of the Sudeten lands of Czechoslovakia to Germany!
But under the Dawson regime even this arrangement did not save Coote from embarrass- ment. One night the editor added something to a leader Coote had written about Lloyd George. He based his addition on a couple of outrageous sentences which he had spotted in a press cutting apparently reporting a speech by Lloyd George. What Dawson had not realised was that his 'source' was in fact a comic lampoon of Lloyd George. It was a classic Fleet Street gaffe and perhaps there is a moral for editors in-the story somewhere.
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