Buckle’s good fortune were his fine late nineteenth-century intellectual good looks (he was the first handsome editor of The Times), and his health, which enabled him again to break another pattern, by surviving for twenty-two years after a twenty-eight-year editorship - to write the last three and a half volumes of the six-volume biography of Disraeli (which Moneypenny had begun) and to edit Queen Victoria’s letters. His misfortune was that he presided over a paper with falling circulation and falling profitability which met a journalistic disaster early in his editorship and a drastic change of proprietorship near its end.
The circulation loss was not huge, but enough to be mildly depressing. The journalistic disaster, which was much worse, was the publication of forged letters allegedly written by the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell.
The débâcle did The Times great damage, both material and moral. Buckle and MacDonald, the manager, who was dead within the year, offered their resignations, but John Walter III, whose own responsibility was equally great, refused them. The costs, falling upon the newspaper and the Walter family, of the 129-day Special Commission of inquiry exceeded £200,000 (the equivalent of £6 million or £7 million at today’s values), and the blow to its prestige was at least as great. ‘Something of the awe of holy writ, which from the days of Barnes had clung about its columns, now faded away’ is the judgement of the official History of The Times.
Oddly perhaps, the principal whose equanimity best survived the Parnell case was Buckle. He was never an editor of the force of Barnes or Delane but there was no question of his spending a quarter of a century as a lame duck. There was a considerable, and perhaps necessary, touch of self-righteousness about him. Not long after the débâcle he was rebuking the Leader of the House of Commons (W. H. Smith) for criticism of The Times, and he continued to exercise substantial influence throughout the long years of Conservative hegemony. He supported both the imperialism and protectionism of Joseph Chamberlain, provided he was not too disruptive within the union ist Party, while carrying on a mild flirtation with Rosebery and his Liberal Imperialist associates. He was hostile to Campbell-Bannerman and not much more enthusiastic about Asquith. He kept up a good, self-confident right-of-centre ‘non-partisanship’. His humiliations were that by 1908, when Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail was selling nearly two million, an unheard-of circulation for any newspaper when Buckle became editor, The Times was down to 38,000 and that, partly as a result, the paper was sold, to Northcliffe, so completely over his head that he was dependent on Observer paragraphs for news of what was going on.
Alfred Harmsworth, made a baronet one year and a baron the next by the self-consciously fastidious Balfour, twelve years before being made a viscount by the less fastidious Lloyd George, was a bizarre man even by the high standards set by generations of newspaper proprietors. He was the eldest of fourteen children of an Irish barrister and compensated for this profusion of siblings by producing no heirs: he was the only Northcliffe.
His father omitted to educate him. At the age of seventeen he was a reporter in Coventry. Throughout his life he regretted that he had not been at Oxford ‘for one year’. A year, he thought, would have given him ‘poise’; longer would have been a waste of time. He was at least half a genius and he was at least half not a vulgarian. More important, he was the greatest journalistic innovator of the past hundred years. He was, of course, a megalomaniac who, unlike most people to whom that label is loosely applied, did literally go mad before he died at the age of fifty-seven.
He was a character of operatic quality and his methods of acquiring control of The Times, to which role a few decades earlier a man of his stamp would have been considered as likely an aspirant as Bradlaugh to become Archbishop of Canterbury, were rich in farce and melodrama. His rival was C. Arthur Pearson (no connection of the Pearsons who became Cowdray), the owner of the Daily Express and the Standard, and at stages in the battle Northcliffe sent him telegrams of false congratulation like a tenor singing one message across the stage and another to the audience. He embellished the farce by retiring for most of the period of negotiation to a hotel in Boulogne, to and from which communications passed in code, he himself having assumed the rather grand name of Atlantic, while his chief man of business, who had the unreassuring real name of Kennedy Jones, was Alberta. Walter was Manitoba. Buckle did not qualify even for a town, let alone an ocean or a province.
Whatever the methods, Northcliffe had secured control of The Times by March 1908, although this fact did not become public knowledge until several months later. There was an element of apprehension as well as fascination and impatience in his proprietorial approach to the queen of British journalism. There were jibes that it was going to be merely the threepenny edition of the Daily Mail. In time, however, Northcliffe scotched that by reducing its price to Id (and even playing with ½d), so that The Times became as cheap as its new stablemate.