CI IRISTOPIIER BOOKER writes:
1 don't know whether a CBE would ever have been regarded as worth. the equivalent of £12,000, even in Lloyd George's day. But when the Daily (*graph announced last week that its city edi- tor, Mr. Francis Whitmore, had been left £12,000 in the will of a late director of the Salvador Railway Company--`which I calculated is the sum I have made through his excellent financial advice'—it was a pleasant fancy to see in the bequest a parallel to the CBE awarded earlier this year to Mx. Richard Fry, the city editor of the Guardian, for his 'services to financial journalism.' For these two men, both in their sixties, both appointed more than twenty-five years ago, are among the last representatives of the 'old school' in what is becoming a surpris- ingly young man's profession.
In the past few years the tremendous expan- sion in coverage of 'business news' at all levels of journalism—from the Daily Mirror City page to the new 'depth-reporting' of industrial affairs in the heavy Sundays- -has seemed to throw up a whole new race of brilliant young financial minds to unravel the economic mysteries for an avid new public. Passengers in London taxis are transfixed by the earnest young faces of William Rees-Mogg, Michael Shanks and Anthony Vice and exhorted to read the Sunday Times Business News Section. The Director, in its current issue, can unearth no fewer than eight city editors under the age of forty-five, and lump them to- gether (for some obscure reason) as 'The Young Inquisitors.' If, of the two city editors of 'popular' Papers who seem to be best regarded by the experts, one Patrick Sergeant of the Daily Mail —is actually as old as forty-one, he at least cuts a smooth dash as a man who `likes gardening— by which I mean walking up and down . . . with a dry Martini in one hand and a pair of secateurs in the other' and with a breezy, well- informed column full of such paragraphs as `Wool has seemed warm and comfy while the Harrisons and the Hymans and the Keartons have been taking cotton apart and merging it up again.' While the other, William Davis of the Evening Standard, is only thirty-two.
But it is the three heavy Sundays which have most obviously typified the revolution in 'busi- ness coverage'--and which, at first sight, seem to have been responsible for producing most of the new, university-educated, economic hauts vulgarisateurs—such men, for example, as the Observer's Andrew Shonfield (now running Chatham House), Samuel Brittan (now 'working for George Brown) and Robert Heller; the Sunday Times trio of Shanks, Vice and Rees- Mogg; the Sunday Telegraph's ex-city editor, Nigel Lawson. I say 'at first sight' because, in fact, all these men and• more owed their first real start in journalism to one paper and one man—Gordon Newton, the editor of the Finan- cial Times.
Few papers can ever have been such a seed- bed ,for new talent as the Financial Times has been since, and just before, Newton took over the editorship in 1950. By systematic recruit- ment through the University Appointments. Boards CI don't just look for brains but for other achievements as well'), he has kept up a steady flow of new blood, much of which already seems headed for the highest places, and not only in journalism. But this remarkable record can only be looked at as an integral part of the building-up of the Financial Times as a whole, since it merged with the old Financial News in the summer of 1945, From being little more than a 'City sheet,' full of share prices, it has been estab- lished not just as a really solid all-round 'business' newspaper--but as a paper which, for instance, in Ronald Butt, has one of the two or three best political correspondents in the country, and which, in its well-known 'arts and entertainment' page, has one of the fullest, most readable and least philistine anthologies of criticism in any paper. Circulation has more than trebled, to a still-rising 155,200. And if, with the end of national service and the lowering age of graduates, recruitment is, in future, as Newton admits, likely to be difficult to maintain at the same standard, while the outflow inevitably will continue (Butt, for instance, is- shortly taking a sabbatical year at Nuffield College, John Murray, the current 'Lex,' is joining the John Lewis Partnership), it is hard to see any immediate like- lihood of a downturn in the paper's fortunes. As a staff member describes Gordon Newton: 'Although he's probably not as intelligent and can't write as well as a lot of people he's dis- covered—firstly, it was he who discovered them; secondly, he can always see through a half- baked idea; and thirdly, he knows what people want to read tomorrow.' Which sounds just about the recipe for an ideal editor.
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