Part 20
The cult of anonymity has persisted longer in Britain's responsible and reliable newspapers than in the United States. Although Fleet Street knows the names of _The Times_'s reporters, the public does not. Richard Scott, the Diplomatic Correspondent of the _Manchester Guardian_, has no byline, nor has Hugh Massingham, the brilliant Political Correspondent of the _Observer_. The influence wielded in the United States by columnists still is reserved in Britain almost entirely to the anonymous "leader"-writers of the responsible British newspapers. Working with the editorial-writers are hundreds of industrious, well-educated, experienced reporters. They are good men to talk to and to drink with, and they are tough men to beat on a story.
But they and the newspapers they represent are not a part of the bubbling, uproarious, pyrotechnical world of the popular London dailies. Here is a circus, a daily excitement for anyone who enjoys newspapers. The _Daily Express_, the _Daily Mail_, the _News Chronicle_, the _Daily Herald_, the _Mirror_, and the _Sketch_ compete hotly for news and entertainment. Their headlines are brash, their writing varies from wonderfully good to wonderfully bad, and their editorials are written with a slam-bang exuberance that is stimulating and occasionally a little frightening. This is the true, tempestuous world of Fleet Street.
In this world the great names are not confined to the writers and editors. The publishers, called "proprietors" in Britain, tower over all. Of these the most interesting, successful, and stimulating is Lord Beaverbrook, who runs the _Daily Express_, the _Sunday Express_, and the _Evening Standard_ with a gusto undiminished by seventy-eight active years.
"The Beaver" occupies a unique place in British journalism and politics. No one has neutral feelings about him. Either you like him or you hate him; there is no middle course. I suppose nothing gives him more satisfaction than knowing that when he arrives in London, men in Fleet Street pubs and West End clubs ask one another: "What do you think the Beaver's up to now?"
Is "what the Beaver is up to" really important? The enmity of the _Express_, which is the enmity of Lord Beaverbrook, can make a politician squirm. But does it really lower his standing with the voters? I doubt it. Lord Beaverbrook is an incorrigible Don Quixote who has tilted at and been tossed by many windmills. He is, incidentally, a more powerful writer than most of his employees. Early in 1957 he was prodding his newspapers to the attack against the government's plans for closer economic association with Europe. The headlines were bold and black, the indignation terrifying. Will the campaign itself alter government policy? I doubt it.
Lord Beaverbrook once remarked that he ran his papers to conduct propaganda. Just before the retirement of Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Beaverbrook was asked why his newspapers were so critical of Sir Anthony Eden, the heir presumptive to the premiership. He replied that Sir Anthony had never supported the policies of the Beaverbrook newspapers. As no other leading politician had thrown his weight that way, this seemed a rather weak reason for attacking the new leader of the Conservative Party. The political affiliation of the _Daily Express_ is Independent Conservative.
But the Beaverbrook campaigns perform a real public service by fixing public attention upon issues. I do not think the editorials convince--I have yet to meet a _Daily Express_ reader who confused the "leader" column with pronouncements from Sinai--but they encourage that discussion of public issues which is essential in a democracy. Of course the _Express_ newspapers' tactics annoy nice-minded people. But the tradition of a free press includes not only such august journals as _The Times_ but the rip-roaring, fire-eating crusaders as well. There is not much chance that the popular press in Britain will model itself on _The Times_, but if it did so, the result would be a loss to journalism and to the nation. And as long as the Beaverbrook tradition survives--as long, indeed, as Lord Beaverbrook himself is around to draw on his inexhaustible fund of indignation--one section of the popular press is bound to remain contentious and vigorous.
The _Daily Express_, the morning paper of the Beaverbrook empire, is technically one of the best newspapers in the world. Its layout is admirable, and its headline-writers often show a touch of genius. In its writing and its presentation of news it has been much affected by such divergent American influences as _The New Yorker_ and _Time_.
The _Express_ is brightly written (too much so at times), and its tastes in policies and politicians are incalculable. Along with a liberal helping of political, foreign, and crime reporting it offers two of the best features in British journalism: Osbert Lancaster's pocket cartoon on the front page and the humorous column of "Beachcomber" on the editorial page. "Beachcomber" and Lancaster are sharp and penetrating commentators on the daily scene. In many instances their references to the occasional inanities of the British society are more cogent than anything to be found in the editorial columns of the _Express_.
The _Express_ successfully caters to the new middle class that has arisen since the war, especially that part of it which is involved in the communications industry. The young advertising manager from the provinces who has "arrived" in London may find _The Times_ too verbose and the _Telegraph_ too stodgy. The _Express_, with its bright features on the theater or London night life, attracts him. But, oddly, three principal features of the _Express_ cater to very different tastes. Osbert Lancaster's subject matter is drawn usually from the upper middle class--his Maudie Littlehampton, after all, is a Lady. The humor of "Beachcomber" appeals to tastes that reject the average in British humor, and Sefton Delmer, the peripatetic foreign correspondent of the _Express_, often writes stories on international issues which are much more involved and adult than would seem suitable for the majority of the newspaper's four million readers.
This divided approach is not so obvious in the _Daily Mirror_, which has the largest circulation of any of the London dailies. This is an important newspaper in that it is the most accurate reflection I know of the tastes and mores of the new working class in Britain. There are many indications elsewhere that Cecil King, its proprietor, and his chief lieutenants have pondered long and earnestly about Britain's problems. The _Mirror_'s pamphlet on trade unions and an earlier pamphlet on Anglo-American relations are solid contributions to the literature on these subjects. But the _Daily Mirror_'s customary approach to policies and issues is as robust and sharp as that of a policeman to a drunk. It is belligerent rather than persuasive; it loves big type.
But the _Daily Mirror_'s handling of certain types of stories, particularly those involving industrial disputes and crime, is excellent. (British crime reporting in general, although circumscribed by the libel laws, is of high caliber.) The _Mirror_'s editorials, with their GET OUT or PASS THIS BILL approach to politicians and measures, may alienate as many as they win, but the editorials are alive, dealing often with problems--such as automation and wage differentials--that are of the keenest interest to the industrial working class.
The _Mirror_ is much closer to the thinking of this class than is the _Daily Herald_, usually considered the official Labor newspaper. The Trades Union Congress owns 49 per cent of the stock in the _Daily Herald_, and Odhams Press Ltd. owns the remainder. Once powerful and well informed on industrial and labor-movement happenings, the _Herald_ no longer seems to represent either the movement or the industrial working class that supports the movement. Its approach is stodgier than that of the _Mirror_, less in keeping with the tastes of the new working class.
The _Mirror_'s most renowned features are "Cassandra" and "Jane." The former, written by William Connor, is one of the hardest-hitting and most provocative features in British journalism. Connor has evoked the wrath of statesmen of both major parties. The Communists hate him. He is a deflator of stuffed shirts, a pungent critic, and a stout defender of the British worker.
The _Mirror_'s other salient feature is a comic strip called "Jane." Jane is a well-proportioned young lady whose adventures nearly always end in near nudity. She is a favorite of British troops abroad and their families at home. The information value of this daily striptease is nonexistent, but a _Mirror_ employee once defended the strip on the grounds that "the bloke that buys the paper to look at Jane may read Bill Connor or the leader."
The London press enjoys an advantage that does not exist in the United States. This is the presence of a remarkably well-informed critical opinion in the weekly reviews that are also printed in London. The _Spectator_, the _New Statesman and Nation_, _Time and Tide_, and, occasionally, the _Economist_ are careful, if sometimes pecksniffian, critics of the national newspapers. Fleet Street is one big family (it would be stretching things to call so tumultuous a community "happy"), and the inner workings of the great dailies are laid bare to the weeklies often through the agency of disgruntled reporters. Consequently, "Pharos" in the _Spectator_ and Francis Williams in the _New Statesman_ are authoritative and knowledgeable critics of the newspapers and their proprietors.
The weeklies themselves are a valuable supplement to the newspapers. They have time to reflect and space to discuss. In many cases they are often slightly ahead of public opinion, more so than the daily papers, and they are not afraid to criticize tartly such sacred cows of British journalism as the Crown.
Since the end of the war the tendency among the popular newspapers has been to entertain rather than to inform. This recognizes what I believe to be one of the fundamental truths of the communications business in Britain: the majority of the people get their news from the British Broadcasting Corporation's radio and television services and from the news services of the Independent Television Authority.
Readers of the more responsible London and provincial newspapers listen to the news on the BBC and then turn to their papers for expanded stories and ample interpretative material. But the average reader does not read _The Times_ or the _Manchester Guardian_ or the _Observer_. When he turns off the radio in the morning and picks up his "popular" newspaper, he is confronted with gossip columns, comic strips, newsless but beguiling stories about the royal family, sports stories, and, in some papers, a dash of pornography.
The "popular" papers do print hard news. Correspondents like Sefton Delmer of the _Daily Express_ and William Forrest of the _News Chronicle_ send interesting, factual, and frequently important stories from Germany or Russia. But such stories are increasingly rare. The trend even in this sort of writing is toward entertainment.
For example, not long ago a London popular daily, once renowned for its foreign staff, sent a reporter to Communist China. This was an opportunity for objective reporting. Instead the readers got a rehash of the reporter's own political outlook plus a few flashes of description of life in modern China.
This tendency toward entertainment rather than information is deplored by those who believe that a democracy can operate successfully only on the foundation of well-informed public opinion. In Britain, however, newspapers are customarily considered not as public trusts but as business, big business. If entertainment pays, the newspapers, with a few exceptions noted above, will entertain. Unfortunately, the BBC cannot provide the time necessary to give the news that the newspapers fail to print. Obviously the great mass of the British people will become less well informed about the great issues at home and abroad if the present trend continues.
During the thirties the critics of the British press liked to repeat a cruel little rhyme that ran:
_You cannot hope to bribe nor twist, Thank God, the British journalist, But, seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there's no occasion to._
Yet, from a knowledge of the type of man who writes for the popular press and a thorough acquaintance with his product, I would say that the blame rests not with the reporter but with the management.
It is certainly within the power of the proprietors of the popular newspapers to change the character of the papers. Some editors in Fleet Street habitually sneer at American newspapers and their practices, although these men are not above adopting some American techniques of news presentation which they think will sell newspapers. But the amount of factual information about national and foreign affairs in many small-town American papers is far greater, proportionately, than that provided by some great "national" newspapers in London.
Those who are interested in the improvement of relations between the United States and the United Kingdom must be concerned about the reporting of American news in the popular press. More space is devoted to news from the United States than formerly, and correspondents for the London dailies travel more widely than they did in the past. Men like the late Robert Waithman of the _News Chronicle_ did their best to get out of Washington and New York and see the country. But too often the correspondents devote time and space to the more frivolous aspects of American life. From the standpoint of international relations, the space devoted to the stream of stories about the royal family might be better spent on a frank discussion of why the mass of Americans feel as they do about the Communist government in Peiping.
Some good judges of the national character believe that the great mass of the British working class would not read such information even if the newspapers provided it. They see this group as complacent and politically lethargic, no longer willing to be stirred, as it was a generation ago, by great events in the outside world. If this is true, the future is dark indeed. For more than at any time since the summer of 1940 the British people must take a realistic view of their position in the world. They cannot do this if, beyond a few perfunctory headlines, their newspapers provide only the details of the latest murder or the bust measurements of Hollywood stars. To an observer from abroad, it is only too evident that the great problems of our times are not being brought to the people of Britain by their popular newspapers in a serious manner.
THE OLD SCHOOL TIE
Few institutions in Britain are more difficult for Americans to understand than the public schools. Yet a knowledge of the system, how it works, its influence upon British society, its traditions and customs, even its sports is essential to a knowledge of modern Britain. We are going to hear a great deal about the public schools in the coming years, for one of the great battles between the egalitarian, socialist Britain and the traditional, conservative Britain will be waged over the future of these schools.
The "public school" is in fact a private one. The public-school system includes all the schools of this type in Britain. As an influence on the national character it has been and still is extraordinarily potent. This influence is social and political as well as educational. It is, I think, fair to say that to hundreds of thousands in the upper and middle classes, attendance at Eton is regarded as more important than attendance at Oxford.
There are about two hundred public schools in Britain. They range from old established institutions like Eton, Harrow, Charter-house, Winchester, Rugby, Haileybury, and Wellington to smaller schools whose fame is local and whose plant, equipment, and teaching staff are little better, and in some cases inferior, to those of the state schools.
What keeps the public-school system alive in an era that has seen the fall of so many bastions of class and privilege? To begin with, the public schools represent a well-established, wealthy, and acute force within British society. Such a force fights to maintain its position against the public criticism and political maneuverings of its enemies. The fight is led by men who are sincerely convinced that the continuation of the public-school system is necessary to the maintenance of Britain's position in the world, and they will devote time, money, and effort to win the fight. One of the mistakes made by the Socialist groups that attack the public-school system is to underestimate the wit and energy of those who defend it.
Yet the existence of a powerful institution is no guarantee of its future life in a country that has changed and is changing so rapidly as Britain. The public schools survive and even flourish because of the conviction widely held throughout the upper and middle classes that such schools provide the best type of education for their boys. Indeed, the conviction goes even deeper in the class structure: it is noteworthy that as new groups move up the economic scale into the middle class, these too seek to send their boys to a public school.
Elsewhere I have mentioned the sacrifices that the old middle class makes to preserve its position in British society. Nowhere are these sacrifices more evident than in the struggle to raise the money to send the son or sons of the family to a public school. The Continental holiday may be given up in favor of two weeks at an English seaside resort. The car must be patched up and run for another year. Father will go without a new overcoat, and mother will abandon her monthly trip to "town" to see a play. But John will go to his father's old school. Why?
At the best public schools the formal education is excellent. But when the middle-class Briton speaks of the education his son gets at a public school he is referring only partially to what the boy learns from books. Principally, he is thinking about the development of the boy's character at the school, about the friends he will make there, and about how these friends and attendance at this old school will help the boy later in life.
Critics of the Foreign Office have often charged that British diplomacy is filled with the products of the public schools and that the representatives of the great mass of the nation are excluded from the Foreign Service because they have not attended public schools. Lord Strang, a former Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and thus head of the Foreign Office, answered this criticism in his book _The Foreign Office_.
"The Foreign Office," he wrote, "can move no faster towards fully democratic methods of selection than the State as a whole is moving in its educational policies, though it has already moved far at the pace set for it by these wider policies of political evolution. The fact is that the Foreign Service always must and will recruit from the best, in brains and character, that the prevailing educational system can produce."
Note that "character" is coupled with "brains" in this indirect reference to the public schools.
What does the middle-class Briton mean when he says that Eton or some obscure public school in the Midlands will develop his son's character? There is no complete answer. But I would say that he includes in character such traits as willingness to take responsibility, loyalty to the class conception of the nation's interests, readiness to lead (which implies, of course, a belief that he is fit to lead and that there are people willing to be led), truthfulness, self-discipline, a love for vigorous outdoor sports. I have heard all these cited as reasons why boys should go to public schools and why fathers will give up smoking or limit their drinking to a small sherry before dinner to provide the money for such schooling.
In considering the development of character in the public schools it should be remembered that these schools often represent the third phase in the education of a British boy. The boy's first preceptor will be a nanny or nursemaid, often chosen from the rural working class. At eight or nine he goes away to a preparatory school. At twelve or thirteen he is ready for his public school. Because of economic pressure only a wealthy minority can follow this system today, but it was the system that produced the majority of the leaders of the Conservative Party and not a few prominent Labor Party leaders.
Direct paternal influence is much less evident in the education of Britons of the middle class than it is in the United States. One argument for the system maintains that the boy learns self-reliance; when in his twenties he is commanding a platoon or acting as Third Secretary of Embassy in a foreign country he is not likely to be wishing that Mom were there to advise him. This argument implies acceptance of the proposition that people will consent to be led by the public-school boy or that his education and character will fit him for a diplomatic post abroad.
Critics of the public schools charge that the concept of public-school leadership was exploded by World War II. This does not jibe with my own experiences with the British forces from 1939 to 1945. I found that most of the young officers in all three services were products of the public schools and that, on the whole, they provided a high standard of leadership in the lower echelons. Their earlier training had enforced upon them the idea that they were responsible for their men, not only in battle but elsewhere. So they would tramp through the Icelandic sleet to obscure posts to organize amateur theatricals or sweat through an African afternoon playing soccer with their men because this was part of the responsibility. They were told that they had to lead in battle, and they accepted the obligation without doubts.
A great many of them were killed all over the world while sociologists and reformers were planning how to eliminate the public schools. Those who were killed were no more intelligent, no more attractive in person, no more energetic than those they led. But when the time came to lead, they led. These remarks, no doubt, will annoy critics of the public schools and public-school leadership. When I am informed how wars are to be won or nations to be governed without leaders I will be properly contrite.
The public school's place in British society rests basically upon this conviction that a public-school education provides character-training that will equip a boy for leadership in business, in politics, in the military services, and in society. But the system as it appears in British society is composed of much more than formal education and character-building. The public schools also mean a body of traditions and customs often as involved and as unrelated to the modern world as the taboos of primitive man.
The Old School Tie is one. Almost all middle-class and some working-class institutions in Britain have a tie striped with the colors of the institution or ornamented with its crest. There are ties for cricket clubs and associations of football fans, there are ties for regiments and clubs. But the tie that generally means most is the tie that stands for attendance at a public school. It is at once a certificate of education and a badge of recognition.