Portraits and Miniatures(97)

His personal qualities and interest exceeded the range of his middle-rank political career. He was a very small man of wide vision. He was probably the most authentic political heir to Alfred Milner: intellectual, imperialist, a votary of the temple of public service, agreeably vain yet never besotted by his own self-interest, either material or careerist, a little over-serious. He was thought of as right-wing, but he was affronted by Neville Chamberlain’s narrow partisanship, he cared deeply for social reform and little for business values except in so far as he could harness them to his imperial cause, and he had more Labour Party contacts than did most Conservatives of that deeply divided decade of the 1930s. He was a rather Bismarckian figure, but unlike that prince of the German Empire he was untouched by aristocratic connections or aspirations. He occupied an impressive London house -112 Eaton Square - in which undivided vastness his younger son Julian, now Lord Amery, still lives, but he never sought a country estate. There was more of Buddenbrooks than of Bismarck about this. He was a man not so much of government as of ideas and public concern. He would be ill at ease in any party today and he was altogether rather admirable.





David Astor and the Observer





Newspaper Anniversaries are tricky events. Even the celebrations of personal birthdays can have their problems, although there can be reasonable assurance that the person concerned has lived for the seventy or eighty years or whatever is being celebrated under a single continuous identity. Most old newspapers on the other hand have been changelings in infancy. This was true of the Glasgow Herald (the Glasgow has since been dropped), which celebrated its 200th birthday eight years ago, but which had to get over the fact that it began by appearing on Mondays and Fridays and was called the Glasgow Advertiser and Evening Intelligencer for its first twenty years. And The Times, the Observer’s other rival in venerability, spent its first three years from 1785 under the even more unrecognizable guise of the Daily Universal Register, and only settled down into its ‘Thunderer’ role when Thomas Barnes became editor in 1817.

The Observer, however, has always been the Observer and has throughout been a Sunday newspaper, although it would be difficult to deny that it has experienced several changes of role and style amounting almost to a change of identity even if not of title, during the past two hundred years. It has, however, had a remarkable stability of editorship: only eight since the first decade of the nineteenth century. And the twentieth century has been memorably marked by the long and disparate reigns of J. L. Garvin from 1908 to 1942 and of David Astor from 1948 to 1975. Astor was the proprietor as well, but it was his editorial role that was in my view the more important, although the confluence gave a stability of purpose and prospect of continuity. I wrote for the paper a lot from the middle of his period onwards and also at about this time, from, say, 1955 to 1975, first came to know well the upper reaches of Fleet Street in general. There were then three other interesting editorial and/or proprietorial combinations. There was the Newton/Drogheda Financial Times, there was the King/Cudlipp Mirror, and there was the Hamilton/Evans Sunday Times.

Each of them, as did the David Astor Observer, produced higher quality journalism than is to be easily found today, although they did so through utterly different methods and personalities. Cecil King eventually succumbed to the megalomania that he may have inherited from his uncle Northcliffe, but in his heyday he made a wonderful partnership with Hugh Cudlipp, who had the rare quality of being a popularizer of genius and a responsible and civilized man. At the Financial Times Garrett Drogheda as manager was feline and Gordon Newton as editor seemed an uninspiring individual, although he had some touch of talent which enabled him to preside over the widening of the paper from a stockbroker’s sheet to more or less its present form.

Denis Hamilton revitalized the Sunday Times with the quiet efficiency of a staff officer, using to do it the serialized memoirs of some of the generals and air marshals he might have served so well, but also the agency of Harold Evans, who was half a crusader against scandals and half a radical liberal who liked sophisticated politics. Evans had in him something of a young Cudlipp, who happened to be operating at the other end of the market.

The newspaper world in which David Astor had to operate was not therefore an easy or uncompetitive one. And, unlike the others, he had no partner. He had of course a number of distinguished writing collaborators. Indeed, his fostering of them was one of his outstanding achievements. Rather in the way that General de Gaulle’s leading adjutants were known as the barons of Gaullism, not because they thought of imposing a Magna Carta upon the King or because they were a fawning court, but because they combined loyalty with some independent position of their own, so there developed a group of Observer barons. When they started they had mostly not been brought up with the taste of newsprint in their mother’s milk, or served heroic stints on the Glasgow Daily Record or the Manchester Evening News. They were men of letters or ‘intellectuals’ in the continental sense, and indeed several of them came from the mainland of Europe. They contributed greatly to the unique quality of the paper, but they did not take any of the central responsibility off Astor.