BOOKS OF THE DAY
" The Times " Out of Joint
THE history of The Times is the history of England—and of much else besides. That fact makes this volume in one aspect remarkable. It spans a period of twenty-eight years, the twenty-eight years of George Earle Buckle's editorship. He was appointed by John Walter III, he was got rid of by Lord Northcliffe ; thus briefly may the vicissitudes of The Times in the period here covered be epitomised. The length of the book is immense, its contents for the most part fascinating—for the most part, for the tortuosities of Hungarian politics as seen by Wickham Steed, or of Balkan intrigues as interpreted by Bourchier, tend frankly to become a little tedious. But there is no escaping them, for the purpose of the writers of this third, and presumably penultimate, instalment of the Thunderer's history, so far as this generation is concerned, is to depict The Times as an unofficial (and therefore untrammelled) Foreign Office, often better and earlier informed than the institution in Whitehall, with its hierarchy installed in Printing House Square and its correspondents posted like ambassadors at all the key-points in Europe and beyond, both reporting current events and helping to mould them.
It was an astonishing organisation. The Foreign Department, first under Mackenzie Wallace, then under Valentine Chirol, functioned in almost complete independence of the editor, instructing corre- spondents, writing long letters to them, getting, long letters back, setting the tone of all the leaders on foreign affairs. These letters, much more than the published despatches—letters from Saunders at Berlin, from de Blowitz at Paris, from Steed at Rome and then at Vienna, from Morrison at Peking, from Bourchier at Sofia, from Walter Harris at Tangier—illuminate the whole of the tangled history of European politics in all but two of the thirty years that preceded the First World War. Few, if any, of them were letters to Buckle. By no means all were to Wallace or Chirol. For dominating every- thing in the background till the catastrophic irruption of Northcliffe in 1908 was the unique personality of Moberly Bell, who joined the staff as correspondent in Egypt in 1882 and died pen in hand in his office at Printing House Square in 1911. For most of that time he bore the title merely of Assistant-Manager under one or other of the Walters. Actually he was the force behind the whole machine, on the editorial at least as much as on the business side. He ap- pointed foreign correspondents ; he kept in constant touch with them, praising, suggesting, criticising, reprimanding, sometimes, particu- larly towards the end, with no adequate co-ordination with the titular head of the Foreign Department. It is to him that many of the most important letters from correspondents abroad are addressed. But there was one great difference. Bell was not a traveller ; Wallace and Chirol were. Bell's contacts in London were numerous and invaluable ; the successive heads of the Foreign Department coursed periodically over Europe and Asia, making contacts with correspon-
dents, interviewing statesmen and sometimes sovereigns, linking Printing House Square with the political centres of the world.
Yet the history of The Times is, or should be, the history of England, and what makes this volume remarkable is that, apart from
one historic incident in which the paper was deeply concerned,
it would never be gathered that England between 1884 and 191, had any domestic history at all. Virtually nothing about home
politics—nothing about Home Rule except in connection with the Pigott letters and the Parnell Commission, nothing about the Pro- tection controversy, nothing about the social reform programme of 1906-10, nothing about the Parliament Act except as distracting atten- tion from foreign affairs. The omission, manifestly, is deliberate, but it is hard to account for. Even though the preface to the first volume stated that there was no intention to write a history of current politics the contrast between the treatment of home affairs and of foreign affairs is striking. To what, then, is the rest of the
book devoted? To the engrossing inner history of The Times itself, The Times staggering financially under the Lzoo,000 which those fatal forged letters of Richard Pigott's cost it first and last, The Times slipping steadily into insolvency, to be rescued temporarily by the American expedients of Messrs. Hooper and Jackson, The Times with a circulation down to 38,000 copies, The Times finally and irretrievably in the market.
The story of its ultimate purchase by Northcliffe, which meant snatching it from the jaws of Arthur Pearson, whose title to it was complete- all but a loophole, is far better reading than most fiction.
At the heart of it all is Moberly Bell, labouring like a Titan to reach some arrangement that would save the paper financially without
surrender of its traditional independence. The position was fan- tastic. The buildings at Printing House Square, and the printing- works and machinery, were owned by the Walter family quite separ- ately from The Times itself ; the Chief Proprietor of The Times was also owner of the printing business and as such was paid for printing the paper ' • and of The Times there were about eighty fractional owners, as the result of subdivision of original shares. The litigation initiated in 1901 by a lady who owned three-twenty-fifths of three- sixteenths plus one-twenty-fifth of one-sixteenth of the capital led in the end, after a series of incredible negotiations and manoeuvres, to the acquisition of the paper in 1908 by an impenetrably anony- mous "X," revealed in due time as none other than Alfred Harmsworth himself. His reign lasted fourteen years—ten years beyond the limits of this volume ; it will lie with its successor to tell the story of another struggle, hardly less exciting, after North- cliffe's death for possession of the greatest paper in the world.
What is told here is the tragi-comedy of Northcliffe's first four years at Printing House Square, involving the transformation of the "X " who was to find the capital and let the paper go its own way into the " Chief " whose summary methods Carmelite House already knew so well. Valiantly as Bell had striven, he had in one fatal moment conceded everything. When the deal with Northcliffe had almost gone through in 1908 Bell set down at length the conditions for the future conduct of The •Times as he understood them. The result was to bring Sutton on Northcliffe's behalf to Bell's house on a Sunday morning before he was dressed. An ultimatum was delivered. Bell took paper and wrote a short note of which the salient sentence ran: " I shall act as your Managing Director and carry out your absolute instructions." After that all was lost ; Bell died three years later of the attempt to reconcile his pledge with his loyalty to the traditions of the paper he had served for thirty years. Northcliffe went to work systematically, establishing his own men, first and foremost Kennedy Jones, in Printing House Square, ousting the old gang, Buckle, Chirol and the rest, one by one. The story ha, the quality of Greek drama. But only the first act is here. For the continuation and climax we shall have to wait three more years, for Vol. IV is not expected before then. WILSON HARRIS.
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