This successor was R. M. Barrington-Ward. He was the son of a clergyman, educated at Westminster and Balliol. He was part of the warp and woof of The Times. He had first joined its staff in 1913 at the age of twenty-two. He spent eight years away at the Observer. That and World War I apart, the paper had been his whole life. He had refused the director-generalship of the BBC in 1938. Yet, although very much an inside appointment, he was an editor of note. Some thought that had he succeeded ten years earlier he would have avoided the excesses of the late Dawson period. He never sought to detach himself from them, but as editor he moved the paper firmly to the left.
He was enthusiastic about the Beveridge Report and other plans for post-war reconstruction. He believed in 1942 that Cripps might easily become Prime Minister within a short time. He employed E. H. Carr to write leaders advocating the closest postwar Anglo-Russian partnership. True to this view he opposed the British Government’s resistance to the Greek left-wing revolutionary movement at the end of 1944, and infuriated Churchill by so doing. To loud Conservative cheers, the Prime Minister, with the editor sitting prominently in the gallery, delivered a virulent parliamentary attack upon The Times in January 1945. Barrington-Ward was shaken but undeflected. His proprietors, Astor, then MP for Dover, and Walter, were embarrassed but gentlemanly. He was denounced by a less gentlemanly Conservative MP (Sir Herbert Williams) for producing ‘the threepenny edition’, this time not of the Daily Mail but ‘of the Daily Worker’.
When the Attlee government came in, The Times under Barrington-Ward accepted it as a natural government for Britain in the epoch. His criticism was sometimes sharp but basically friendly. His reward was scant. He was excoriated by many Conservatives, and called in and denounced by Ernest Bevin for the ‘spineless’ and ‘jellyfish’ attitude of The Times towards Russia. It was neither for him nor against him, Bevin typically complained. ‘Why should it be?’ Barrington-Ward very reasonably retorted, but to his diary, not to Bevin. Again he was shocked rather than influenced. Those who saw him when he returned to Printing House Square thought that he looked as though he had been in a nasty traffic accident. Bevin could be a fairly roughly driven articulated lorry. And Barrington-Ward was a natural St Sebastian of journalism. He carried the arrows without much complaint. But they hurt a great deal. And they may even have helped to kill him in 1948 at the typically early Times age of fifty-six.
His successor, William Casey, was both the oldest and the most obvious stop-gap to be appointed to the Times chair. He was Anglo-Irish and from a background not dissimilar to that of Northcliffe. But he had been to Trinity College, Dublin, and he was a calm man. At first it was thought that he might merely be there for a year. In fact he lasted five, and was rather a good editor in a quiet way.
Then came Sir William Haley, the first editor to be born (just) in the twentieth century, the first since 1803 not to have been to a university, the only one to arrive with a title and perhaps the last to believe intermittently that he commanded the thunderbolts of Zeus. His most famous leader was entitled ‘It is a Moral Issue’, and was a rather holier-than-thou lecture on the Profumo scandal of 1963 and the climate out of which it had sprung. Previously he had been critical of the Suez adventure, although not as vehemently so as the Observer, the Manchester Guardian or the Daily Mirror, had presided very uneasily over the successful but unappetizing ‘Top People Take The Times’ advertising campaign, had been affronted by the Lady Chatterley verdict, had urged a Conservative victory but an upsurge of Liberal votes in the general election of 1964, and had put news on the front page in May 1966. He was a successful but reluctant editor of transition.
His reign of fourteen years came to a voluntary end in 1967 together with the withdrawal of the Astors from principal proprietorship. A successful new proprietor (from the point of view of the paper if not of his family fortune) was found in the shape of Lord Thomson of Fleet, and William Rees-Mogg became editor and the best editorial leader-writer since Barnes. Thomson’s disadvantage was that he provided no dynasty of loss-absorbers. He and his son lasted barely as long as Northcliffe. Of the paper since then it is impossible to write with perspective or objectivity. Harold Evans has written his own pièce justificative after the briefest editorship in the history of the paper. Rupert Murdoch and Charles Douglas-Home (editor from 1982 to 1985) are too contemporary to appraise, at any rate in their own columns.
They are the heirs to a long but fluctuating tradition, which mostly worked best when editors were strong and proprietors were quiescent. This is not an invariable rule. Buckle, left entirely to himself, might have run the paper quietly into the sand. Dawson might have benefited from some proprietorial arm-jogging. The Times has no record of impeccability. Other newspapers have quite frequently been better. But none has on average been so good for so long.