Portraits and Miniatures (36 page)

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.

There was therefore a position in which one man, still relatively young, without much training or academic or other achievement behind him at that stage, had undiluted ultimate responsibility for the financial and editorial direction of a newspaper with a long history, but without, at the end of the Garvin era, much drive or high circulation. The scene might so easily have been set for a rich man's dilettantism, leading soon to boredom for the proprietor and to decline for the paper. On the contrary, it led to thirty years of inspiring editorship as well as proprietorship. It made the
Observer
for me, and I believe for many others, the paper with which, across the whole spectrum of British journalism, daily, Sunday and weekly, they most identified and were most proud to be associated. I may be prejudiced, for I know how much David Astor's
Observer
contributed both to developing me as a writer and to sustaining the causes for which I cared in politics, but I regard his civic service as being the most outstanding amongst the distinguished company which I previously mentioned.

In my autobiography I wrote of Astor as being ‘the greatest non-writing editor/proprietor of the thirty post-war years'. To describe him as ‘non-writing' is not perhaps entirely fair, although he was even better at inspiring other people's pens than using his own. But he did rewrite the crucial opening sentences of the 1956 leader on Suez, which both helped to turn the issue into the most divisive national controversy since Irish Home Rule and cost the
Observer
heavily in circulation and advertising, although not in repute. Probably the most damaging and resented of these sentences was the simple ‘We had not realised that our Government was capable of such folly and such crookedness.'

The commemorative volume for the
Observer's
bicentenary was good at bringing out the vicissitudes as well as the achievements in the paper's history. It was also skilfully selected so as to give a fine ride through the landscape of changing styles as well as providing a lot of information of inherent interest and a lot of writing of inherent quality, as well as very good pictures. What emerged was that the well-turned essay of a thousand words or more has been much more a feature of the post-1945
Observer
than it ever was in the nineteenth century or even in Garvin's day.

The items from the first hundred years of the paper's life were much more news snippets, often interspersed with good laconic comment. I found the following few lines on the death of George IV coolly penetrating, particularly as they were written at, as it were, the heat of the moment: ‘Although a scholar, a gentleman and a patron of arts, our Sovereign, however worthy of being regretted, was neither a great King, an enlightened statesman, nor a national benefactor.'

I also thought that considerable prescience was shown both by: ‘The wide-spread habit of smoking has not yet had due medical attention paid to its consequences' (1846); and the demand for an underpass to relieve the weight of traffic at Hyde Park Corner (1877). I was less impressed by the
Observer's
championing of the right of every newspaper to be represented at prison executions (1879). Any sensationalist sin here was, however, more than expiated by the paper's leading role against the death penalty eighty years later, when a series of mind-jerking articles from Arthur Koestler operated with the uncomfortable efficacy of a dentist's drill.

Looking at the collective evidence I am persuaded that there was something of an
Observer
house style in the post-1945 quarter century. There were inevitable variations in how it was executed, but it encouraged the normally tight-lipped Lord Attlee to be quite expansive on King George VI, and even the Central Europeans such as Sebastian Haffner, Isaac Deutscher, Lajos Lederer, who were a great post-war feature, were persuaded by it to write remarkably unheavy English. (Koestler needed no such persuasion, for hardly anyone, unless it be Joseph Conrad, has written so well in a language not his own.)

The
Observer
stylist who stood out, however, was Patrick O'Donovan (1919-81). His piece on Churchill's funeral was as near to a perfect example of gossamer writing as it is possible to imagine. It was not written to convey any great message. Nor was it written to express deep emotion. As O'Donovan frankly said: ‘We were not sad … And we did not weep - that is not
fitting for great old men - but we saw him off and because he was us at our best, we gave him a requiem that rejected death and was almost a rejoicing.' What it was written for was to fill an 800-word space, and to do so elegantly, grippingly, with occasional fresh insights, and without striking any false notes. And the simultaneous achievement of these objectives is a good part of the art of high-class journalism.

O'Donovan was buttressed by striking pieces from John Gale, William Millinship (on de Gaulle), Cyril Dunn and Kenneth Tynan, while Edward Crankshaw's farewell piece (1968) on the future of the Soviet Empire was of the same quality of writing with more of a message. Anthony Sampson and Colin Legum were two of the knights of the de-colonization crusade, in which the
Observer
played as notable a role as
L'Express
did in France.

The regular
Observer
contributor of this period who is somewhat under-represented in the collection is Hugh Massingham. He was not taut enough to be a great stylist, but he did invent a new form of political journalism. While his opposite number on the
Sunday Times,
shrewd and respected though he was, was still playing out the last act of the old forelock-touching, hat metaphorically on the back of his head, cigarette-in-mouth, pencil-poised-above-notebook style of deferential relations with politicians, Massingham was developing the funny iconoclastic style, which no quality paper would now dream of being without. The
Observer
owes much to him for innovation just as it does to Patrick O'Donovan for style and to David Astor for direction and inspiration.

This is based on a 1992
Observer
review of
Beaverbrook: A Life
by Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie (Hutchinson).

William Maxwell Aitken, First Lord Beaverbrook from the age of thirty-seven to his death at eighty-five in 1964, was a figure of wealth, glamour and would-be influence (the wish occasionally turning into reality) over five decades. As a multiple newspaper proprietor he was never on the scale of Rothermere or Kemsley, let alone Murdoch, but the three horses (the two Expresses and the
Evening Standard)
to which he confined his stable, were to an unparalleled extent his personal creatures, reflecting his whims from social gossip to political causes.

He was a spider at the centre of a somewhat rackety web, who held his insects in place by a mixture of charm (which could be dazzling, particularly as it was mostly accompanied by great courtesy), bribery and ruthlessness. His primary purpose in life was probably to combat boredom and to still the mounting fear of his own extinction. As a result, there was a rootlessness about him which irresistibly recalled Keynes's immortal description of Lloyd George: ‘One catches in his company that flavour of final purposelessness, inner irresponsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good or evil.'

Nevertheless, he was a serious Minister of Aircraft Production at a crucial time in Britain's history; he was a fluctuating but often sought-after friend of the two most exciting Prime Ministers of this century (Lloyd George and Churchill); he was the subject of Graham Sutherland's best portrait, and provided the central character for novels by Arnold Bennett and William Gerhardie, as well as being a somewhat more peripheral model in books by H. G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh. He employed a galaxy of disparate journalistic talent such as has rarely been assembled.

In addition, through five books of his own, particularly the two written in his late seventies and early eighties, he showed himself to be a narrative historian of compelling power even if of somewhat partial interpretation. On top of this he had a string of lady friends ranging from Diana Cooper and Barbara Cartland (to me a new and amusing revelation) to Tallulah Bankhead, Rebecca West and the pianist Harriet Cohen, which would have kept any modern gossip columnist in copy for months at a time. Needless to say, these friendships did not appear in the columns of his own papers. But nor did those of other people, for he was not prurient in print and respected the privacy of private lives in a way that is unimaginable today.

He liked to convey the impression of great manipulative power, but was saved from the megalomania of a Citizen Kane by the fact that he had genuine wit, and was a considerable provoker of laughter, both intentionally and unintentionally. It was well summed up by the claim of a mutual friend (probably apocryphal) that when after his death she had sent condolences to his second wife (of only a year's standing, and known as Christofor), she had received in reply a cable transmitted through a possibly slapdash West Indian telegraph office, which said ‘Your sympathy is much appreciated. (Signed) Christ for Beaverbrook'.

It was thus not surprising that he attracted a number of books about him (as well as by him) in his later years. The most troublesome was a 1956 biography by Tom Driberg, who was deeply indebted to Beaverbrook for journalistic opportunities, legal protection and direct subventions when in financial trouble, but was a good biter of the hand that fed him. The most hagiographic was a posthumous one by A. J. P. Taylor, which for that reason, as well as for some others, could not be accused of being calculatingly sycophantic. Taylor became spontaneously besotted in the last five years or so of Beaverbrook's life, although he had written of him with dismissive disapproval in a review of Driberg's book. (And, to round the circle of paradox, Taylor is on record as having thought Driberg one of the few really good men he had known, which is, to say the least, an unusual judgement.)

Since Taylor in 1972, however, Beaverbrook has fallen into
the crevice of disregard which is an almost invariable fate in the second and third decades after death. He is indeed now lucky to have interest in him revived by such a fair and substantial biography as has been written by Michael Davie and his wife Anne Chisholm. It opens with a brilliant
pas seul
by Davie. This is a riveting and funny contemporary 4000-word account of Davie (then a member of the
Observer
staff) being summoned in 1956 to Beaverbrook's villa in the South of France in order that he might be poached as
Evening Standard
New York correspondent. For the rest the spousely couple seem to have performed the difficult feat of joint authorship without undue marital strain or it ever being obvious which had written which particular passage. They manage to combine journalists' eyes for what is interesting with scholars' respect for what is accurate. They write with geographical sensitivity both about Canada and England, and indeed re-create Beaverbrook's restlessly changing physical surroundings with great vividness.

This is important in a life of Beaverbrook. In the introduction to his
Men and Power
he sets the tone by writing: ‘It may be asked “Were you there? I was there!” ‘The authors enable us to feel ‘there' with him, whether on the deck of the
Queen Mary
or on the terrace of Cherkley, his ugly house with a fine view in the Surrey hills. But they paint the unfolding landscape of Beaverbrook's long life somewhat flatter than the landscape looking south from that terrace. The many events are treated too equally.

Yet the authors capture the conflict between his relentless energy and his sense of ultimate futility. When Arnold Bennett died Beaverbrook uttered one of the sadder, most self-deprecating remarks of his life. ‘How I loved my Arnold, and how he loved my champagne.' (Bennett probably liked him more for himself than he realized.)

He was equally uneasy with the great chunks of twentieth-century history (in the form of private papers) that he had bought. Having bought history, what do you do with it? Exhibit it freely or keep it under wraps? This dilemma he failed to solve. To escape from a dour manse background in a remote part of the Canadian Maritimes into commanding the most brittle aspects of
café society of the early and mid-twentieth century is not perhaps the best recipe for philosophical calm or moral certainty. Although these desirable states conspicuously eluded him he compensated with an exceptional vitality and magnetism which persisted throughout his long if unadmirable life.

This essay is based on an
Observer
review of Dick
Crossman: A Portrait,
by Tam Dalyell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), and of
Crossman: The Pursuit of Power,
by Anthony Howard (Jonathan Cape, 1990).

R. H. S. Crossman and C. A. R. Crosland, like multi-initialled amateur cricketers, were two great middle-order batsmen of the last years of Labour in government, and the last years too of amateur cricketers. They were sometimes (but not often) confused with each other, and each of them at least once expressed envy of what they saw as my own more monosyllabic and mnemonic name.