Through the abbey-like halls of the London Times, in the spring of 1908, ran a tremor of genteel horror. The “gentlemen scholars” who were used to running the Times as if it were a hereditary and self-perpetuating priesthood heard shocking news: the paper’s control had been bought by Lord Northcliffe,* first lord of Britain’s yellow press. “Ye Black Friars,” as Northcliffe called them, feared the worst, and it soon came. The Times, said the new chief proprietor, might be what the “monks” called an institution, but it was not a newspaper.

northcliffe, whose own screaming, halfpenny Daily Mail was flourishing, saw no reason why a paper as old and influential as the Times should have only 40,000 circulation and be almost bankrupt. How he shook things up occupies the bulk of the latest and final volume of the fascinating Times-sponsored History of the Times, on which scholarly Stanley Morison, 63, has spent the last 20 years. As in the previous volumes (TIME, Feb. 23, 1948), Timesman Morison trots out all “the Thunderer’s” skeletons, glories and stupidities with an unsparing candor seldom equaled by official chronicles anywhere.

Distinguished Nuts & Flappers. His task, said Northcliffe, was “to get the old barnacle-covered whale off the rocks and safely into the deep water.” He promptly fired George Earle Buckle, editor for 28 years, and put in Geoffrey Dawson, who had been one of the paper’s top foreign correspondents. Northcliffe, who seldom worked from the Times office, harried Editor Dawson by phone, cable and mail from watering places all over the Continent. He bombarded his staff of “weaklings” and “dullards” with denunciations and demands, called himself “the Ogre of Fleet Street,” and often signed his orders “Lord Vigour & Venom.” Once he cabled: THIS MORNINGS ARTICLE IS ALRIGHT BUT IS LARGELY A RECAPITULATION OF WHAT MY OTHER PAPERS SAID DAYS AGO. THE TIMES SHOULD LEAD AND NOT FOLLOW PUBLIC OPINION.

He demanded more new stories, shorter articles and every day a “light” leader (e.g., editorial), now the Times’s famed and whimsical “fourth leader” (TIME, Dec. 4, 1950). Northcliffe badgered the staff to give the paper a personality, sneaked in the first byline the Times had printed in 137 years. “There should be nothing,” he chided Dawson, “like the ‘Scottish History Chair at Glasgow,’ which is of no interest to the distinguished Nuts and Flappers we are trying to pursue.”

Beneath the bombast was an inborn genius for divining and whetting the public’s curiosity (“once having made the readers talk, you can soon tell them what to say”). He warned his editors that he did not “believe in hobnobbing with politicians,” demanded that the paper be independent and make up its own mind. When circulation gains were slow, Northcliffe slashed the price from threepence to a penny, overnight tripled sales. “I hear that the Old Lady of Printing House Square,” he chortled, “gathered up her skirts and shrieked as at the sight of a man under the bed in the face of a real increase in demand for the Times for the first time since her middle age.”

Skilled Intriguers. Dissatisfied with Dawson, Northcliffe forced his editor to take “vacations” so he could put over editorial changes the staff was resisting. Northcliffe’s likes changed with mercurial swiftness; he helped elect Lloyd George Prime Minister, then opposed him when Lloyd George refused to submit his cabinet appointments for Northcliffe’s approval. Lloyd George remarked: “I would as soon go for a Sunday evening stroll around Walton Heath with a grasshopper as try and work with Northcliffe.” When Lloyd George was reelected, Northcliffe blamed Editor Dawson for not fighting him vigorously enough. “I beg you to do either one of two things,” Northcliffe wrote Dawson, “endeavor to see eye to eye with me, or to relinquish your position.” Then Northcliffe fired him, saying: “Parting with poor Robin is a personal grief to me,” but he was a “child in the hands of skilled intriguers.”

Northcliffe put in Wickham Steed, the foreign editor, but undermined him from the beginning. Northcliffe chivvied Steed with scathing criticisms, forced vacations, veiled threats. Then he genially invited Steed to accompany him on a trip to the U.S. where they both met President Harding and traveled as if there never had been any friction (see cut). When they returned, Northcliffe sent what the staff called a “stink bomb”—a memo charging Steed and his assistants with sins of incompetence and mismanagement.

Northcliffe, who knew no master, never mastered the Times. Before he could do so, his restless, driving mind crossed the fine line separating eccentricity from madness. When Steed went to see Northcliffe in Paris in the spring of 1922, he found him in bed, gabbling excitedly of plots on his life. He had a loaded pistol in one hand and a “book of piety” in the other, drew a bead on a dressing gown hanging on the door under the impression that an intruder had entered the room. He made Steed accompany him to Southern France, where hotel employees lined up to honor the visiting millionaire, only to be driven away by his insults. After Steed warned the editors to ignore any unusual messages, Northcliffe wrote a cable to one top staffer: YOU ARE A RASCAL AND A THIEF. I WILL HAVE THE LAW ON YOU. IF YOU DON’T LEAVE THE OFFICE IMMEDIATELY I WILL COME WITH THE POLICE AND TURN YOU OUT.

Taken back to London, he was confined to his room, but used four bedside phones to keep up the threats to his editors. He warned he would order the police to rout them out, and the editors themselves asked for police protection. But at the end, Lord Northcliffe, dying at 57, made one last, lucid request: “A full-page [obituary] and a leader by the best available writer on the night [side].”*

Appeasement & Surrender. If Northcliffe had upset the Times’s venerable traditions, he also made it a better newspaper, gave it a commanding influence which it never regained after his death. Ex-Editor Dawson was brought back by the proprietors who took over on Northcliffe’s death.† Where Northcliffe had led public opinion, Dawson weakly followed what he took to be the will of the electorate, was swayed by the timid arguments of men like Baldwin, Chamberlain, Halifax, supinely rubber-stamped their appeasement of Adolf Hitler. Perhaps the lowest tide of the Times’s career was reached on Sept. 7, 1938, when Dawson published a leader approving the dismemberment of Britain’s ally, Czechoslovakia. “The electorate was not sensible,” concludes the history, “statesmen were not wise and the Times came near to abdicating its function of leadership.” As to whether the present Times has retrieved these blunders, that is a question which the present historians, with Times like caution, leave future Times historians to decide.

* Born Alfred Harmsworth, proprietor of his own newspaper at 22, he had said: “When I want a peerage I will buy one, like an honest man,” at 40 did so. His younger brother, Harold, became Lord Rothermere, another famed British press lord (Evening News, Sunday Dispatch, the present Daily Mail and others). When he died in 1940, his son Esmond took over the chain and became the second Lord Rothermere.

* Editor Steed, in spite of old wounds, wrote the leading article himself.

† Brought together by Minority Stockholder John Walter IV, descendant of the Times’s founder. In Northcliffe’s will, Walter got an option to buy control, which he was able to do with money from John Jacob Astor, who became and is still the Times’s chief proprietor.

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