With the death of J. L. Garvin the last of
the great editors of the twentieth century goes. Not that there are not highly competent editors in office today, but there are none, I think (for reasons which it would be interesting and easy to develop) who impress their personalities on their papers like the men of the generation that is now passing, C. P. Scott and Massingham and Spender and A. G. Gardiner and others of whom the public know rather less. Even among these Garvin had his place apart. Some of them were editors who wrote, others writers who edited. Garvin was among the latter. He wrote in the Pall Mall and edited it ; he wrote in The Observer and edited it. It was there, in the columns consecrated to him on the leader-page Sunday by Sunday that he made the name that will endure. Not that all the articles will endure, or deserve to ; the wealth of words, tumbling out torrentially, yet never so torrential as to be chaotic, often clothed an argument that looked by no means convincing when clothed in the language of common men. And when Garvin and The Observer parted company (there is a story worth telling to be told about that) and the famous article was transplanted into other soil it never looked the same ; there is ecology in journalism as in Nature. As a talker Garvin was admirable, though his convictions sometimes had a way of surmounting or circumventing facts. About his own career he was strangely uncommunicative. In his Who's Who entry there was nothing to indicate that he was ever born or ever educated or ever married. But when he once told me how J. A. Spender gave him his start in journalism at Hull the story was fascinating.
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