CHARLES DOUGLAS- HOME
THE Times has had some extraordinary editors. But few have been more remark- able than Charles Douglas-Home. His tragic death at the age of 48 after a long illness has left Fleet Street a flatter and duller place. He was a restless, energetic man who never ceased to upset expecta- tions. As a schoolboy, he had been a roly-poly figure of melting charm who almost seemed to fit Cyril Connolly's equally inaccurate prognosis of his uncle Alec as 'honourably ineligible for the struggle of life'. After his first serious illness, in his twenties, the steel and rock in his character soon showed through. His health remained wretched for the rest of his life; his cheerfulness remained unfalter- ing. He was quite unlike someone whose curriculum vitae read Eton — the Scots Greys — the Times, and even less like some-
one who could also be described as 'the only man who hunts with the Pytchley and wears a caftan for dinner'. He was robust, practical and unpretentious. His affection- ate nature was unblurred by grandeur.
When he became editor of the Times, it was certainly the realisation of a dream. But the Times he dreamed of and, in a miraculously short time, created, was not the old, shuffling Times of the 1930s and 1940s. It was brisk, aggressive, occasional- ly vulgar (or jolly, to put it another way), sometimes wrong, but never, if he could help it, bland. And people wanted to read it. There were complaints that his unmis- takably downright leaders too often sup- ported the Government. But that is the Times tradition. The difference is that the old Times tended to support a government only when it was taking an easy way out. For two years, he had been both editing the paper and entertaining family, friends and colleagues from his hospital bed, delighting in the Citizen Kane aspects of dictating a leader with a leg in traction, demonstrating to the end his zest for action and his gift for cheering people up.
Previous page
