Part 2. The testing of Scott: Liberals in the Age of Imperialism (1872-1932)

C P Scott defined the philosophy of the Guardian. Scott was a liberal MP for 10 years at the turn of the century, and this was liberalism in its purest form. “Comment is free, but facts are sacred. Propaganda is hateful. The voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard. It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair.” These words, from the essay Scott wrote to mark the Guardian’s centenary in 1921, continue to resonate.

Scott edited the Manchester Guardian for a record-breaking 57 years. From 1905 he was the owner too. Before that date, Edward Taylor had continued to own the paper, even though he had given up the editorship to concentrate on his business interests and on building up one of the great private art collections of his day. Taylor’s death in 1905 prompted an ownership crisis because, although he intended the paper to go to his cousin, his will was ambiguous about the terms. The Scott family pooled all their resources to buy the paper from Taylor’s trustees, and were able to borrow what they couldn’t put up themselves.

By then C P Scott was himself famous, not least for his stand against the Boer war. So unpopular was his opposition to the war that Scott and the Guardian offices were given police protection. Many readers – and advertisers – deserted the paper. But this perhaps more than any event until then made people think of the Manchester Guardian as “the provincial paper with the international reputation”. Scott aligned the paper with great causes – home rule for Ireland, votes for women, and the search for a homeland for the world’s Jews, a movement in which he and several members of his staff played a key part.

Another crisis occurred with the deaths in quick succession in 1932 of CP Scott and his son, Ted Scott, to whom he had handed over the editorship in 1929 – although he had kept a shadowy presence. Ted’s death left his brother John Russell Scott as sole proprietor of the paper. J R Scott was a man who had, like his more famous father, dedicated his life to the Manchester Guardian, but as a manager, not a journalist. With the paper now threatened by a double dose of death duties, J R Scott – one of the unsung heroes of the Guardian – did something that remains unique in newspaper history. He gave away all “beneficial interest” in the paper and persuaded all other members of the family to do the same and so, in 1936 created the Scott Trust. It means that the editor and all journalists working for the Guardian have an unusual freedom. There are no shareholders, no megalomaniac tycoon. The paper and its journalists have a direct relationship with its readers – and a responsibility to them.

28 C P Scott

Scott, who was then in his mid-20s, became editor in 1872 after a brief induction period. It was an act of nepotism on the part of Edward Taylor to give the job to his cousin, but an inspired one. Taylor, busy negotiating deals to use material sent by electric telegraph and helping to establish the Press Association, had scant time to edit his own paper and was frequently in London. The paper’s editorial quality had declined, and it had backed the wrong side in the American civil war. Taylor wanted someone to give the paper distinction, and believed he had found the man. Scott became editor on New Year’s Day 1872, and remained in the post for 57 years, a record for the editorship of a major newspaper.

29 Scott, Taylor and PR

Taylor gave Scott a largely free hand, knowing that in most matters they would see eye to eye. But there were occasional differences. Scott, for instance, supported proportional representation whereas Taylor did not, and in a letter in 1884 the latter asked him not to “ride that proportional representation hobby too far” because “you know I have not much affection for the principle”.

30 The first Bayreuth festival

In August 1876, the Guardian published an impressively long and detailed account of preparations for the first Bayreuth festival, which included a delightful description of its progenitor in action during rehearsals: “Wagner, as stage director, sat normally in a chair at the side of the stage. He was dressed in light clothes, and wore a velvet cap. Suddenly he would shuffle across the stage with his hands beneath his coat-tails, gesticulate violently to put more force into the orchestra, or rush up to a singer in the midst of his or her part and say, in a light, sharp voice, ‘No, no, no; not so; sing it so’; and, suiting the action to the direction, would sing the part as it should be, or throw the necessary dramatic fire into the acting.”

31 Irish Home Rule

The first great test of Scott’s editorship came with Gladstone’s Home Rule bill for Ireland. The bill split the Liberal party and lost Gladstone the 1886 election. Most of the previously Liberal regional papers abandoned the prime minister, but Scott stayed firm and came out in support of home rule, a far-sighted policy which might have tempered Ireland’s violent history in the century which followed. The brief editorial from May 1886 shown above is prophetic.

32 A new home for the Guardian

In 1886, new offices and print works were built on the site in Cross Street, in the centre of Manchester, which the paper already occupied. This building, with its famous corridor for the editor and his senior staff, was to be its home for the next 84 years. When the Guardian moved to Kings Place, the door frames from the Cross Street corridor were placed in the wall opposite the present editor’s office – a nice nod to the paper’s heritage and the commitment to continuity.

33 The curious incident of the Mahdi’s head

After the battle of Omdurman in 1898, which secured Sudan for the British, General Kitchener had the tomb of the Mahdi – the leader of the original Sudanese uprising – opened and his body thrown into the river. Kitchener wanted the Mahdi’s head sent back to England as a trophy, to avenge the death of general Gordon at the hands of the Mahdi’s forces a decade earlier, though his order was ultimately not carried through. The desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb and the business of the head leaked out, and amused neither Queen Victoria nor C P Scott (pictured above in a contemporary cartoon from the Westminster Gazette). Scott lambasted both Kitchener and the government in an editorial in February 1899. It was a war crime, and Scott had no hesitation in saying so.

34 The Boer war

Scott’s Guardian was anti-imperialist at a time when the country had succumbed to jingoism. Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, the high water mark of imperialism and the South African war of 1899-1902 produced a hysteria which Scott, who had been elected as MP for Leigh in 1895, was determined to resist. In June 1901, welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse (whose brother Leonard was a leader writer on the Guardian) wrote a powerful and moving account of one of her visits to a concentration camp being used to incarcerate women and children caught up in the war. Later that year, the paper launched a powerful attack on the entire concentration camp system, which was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 26,000 captives.

35 ‘The best thing the Guardian has done in my time’

In 1902, to show their gratitude for his courageous stand, the Boers presented Scott with a wooden newspaper turner (see original item in display cabinet upstairs). Emily Hobhouse is lionised in South Africa to this day. The Guardian’s opposition to the war and its exposure of atrocities was unpopular with many of its readers, and circulation fell by almost 15%, but Scott was undeterred. Later he said that opposing the Boer war was “the best thing that the Guardian has done in my time”.

36 Football frenzy

Scott took a puritanical line when it came to sport. He didn’t like horse racing because of its association with betting. As a result, being racing correspondent for the paper was likened to being an admiral in the Swiss navy, and it was not until the arrival of the great racing journalist Richard Baerlein in 1968 that the Guardian began to feel comfortable with racing. But there was also concern about the example being set by other sports, and a report on a football match in October 1900 became a sermon about footballing ethics.

37 The death of Queen Victoria

The Guardian responded to the death of Queen Victoria with an evocative piece reporting on the scenes of mourning in London, a host of short reports detailing how the news was received in Eccles, Worsley, Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool, and a lavish 12-page supplement covering the queen’s early life, her marriage and foreign visits, and her relationships with the many prime ministers of her 64-year reign. The text, decorated with line drawings, is dense and the length of a short book. Readers then were expected to read.

38 A visit to Tolstoy

H W Williams was the Guardian’s correspondent in Russia at the time of the 1905 revolution, and contributed a series of evocative reports. In a more reflective moment in February of that year, he interviewed Leo Tolstoy, who was 77 at the time of the interview and died five years later. “He was very calm, with the calmness of one whose time of struggle is past,” wrote Williams, “and though he talked freely about current events and was kind and courteous after the gracious manner of Russian noblemen of the old school, one knew that his real life was hidden in some remote world of quiet contemplation. ‘Governments are maintained by violence and the threat of violence, and violence is opposed by freedom [he said]. A man is only free when no one can force him to do that which he believes to be wrong.”

39 At last, photographs

The Guardian has always prided itself on being a writers’ paper, but in its reluctance to embrace photography it took things rather too far. The first half tone – the image shown above of the Angel Stone in Manchester Cathedral, based on a photograph by William Ellis – did not appear until February 1905. That paved the way for the paper to start using photographs, and three years later Walter Doughty was engaged as the Guardian’s first staff photographer (the camera he used is shown in the display cabinet at the Guardian’s headquarters in King’s Cross).

40 Early days at the Abbey Theatre

The poet John Masefield (pictured above) was on the staff of the paper from 1903-05, and later recalled it as “a most romantic delight”. He wrote leaders, devised the Miscellany column, and in January 1905 wrote a review praising the opening performances of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. “With these young, unselfish Irish artists it is only the play that counts,” he wrote. “With an art of gesture admirably disciplined and a strange delicacy of enunciation, they perform the best drama of our time in the method of a lovely ritual … Their art is unlike any to be seen in England. It is never common, it is never derivative. One thinks of it as a thing of beauty, as a part of life, as the only modern dramatic art springing from the life of a people.”

41 Manchester life in pictures

In 1906, in an unusual departure for the paper, the artist Jack B Yeats (brother of the poet W B) was commissioned to do a series of drawings of Manchester life. The success of the Daily Mail and Daily Express, both founded around the turn of the century, was prompting Scott’s Guardian to loosen its stays just a little.

42 Scott in his pomp

In 1907, following the death two years earlier of Edward Taylor, Scott also became the paper’s proprietor. Taylor’s will included a provision that Scott should be offered the opportunity to acquire the paper, though the Manchester Evening News was sold separately and did not return to Guardian ownership until 1924. Taylor’s will also stipulated that “the newspaper shall be conducted in the future on the same lines and in the same spirit as heretofore”, words which later took on a totemic significance. Scott had left the House of Commons in 1906, and was now once again able to devote himself fully to the paper. The photograph of Scott cycling round Manchester shows him in modest guise; the Epstein bust (from 1928) next to the Scott Room upstairs in a more monumental one.

43 A day out

The staff of the Guardian were a close family, as this wonderfully evocative photograph from 1910 of an outing to the village of Alderley Edge, near Manchester, suggests. C P sits proudly atop the first carriage.

44 The sinking of the Titanic

“The maiden voyage of the White Star liner Titanic, the largest ship ever launched, has ended in disaster,” the Guardian announced on 16 April. On page 9! The inflexibility of printing arrangements was such that material had to go where it could be fitted in, and this late-breaking (as we would now say) story had to take its chance. The late-working leader writers – ironically, deadlines for the paper were later then because of the restricted circulation area – did, though, manage an editorial comment, and found the words to express the magnitude of the event: “It is more than a great shipping disaster; it is one of the most terrible sea tragedies of all time – tragedy not merely in the magnitude of the losses, but in the cruel overthrow by Fate of human pride and achievement.”

45 The Suffragettes

The Guardian supported votes for women, but Scott believed the militant tactics adopted by the Suffragettes was likely to harm the cause. Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst lobbied him to change his mind.

46 The Derby and the suffragette

In June 1913 the suffragette Emily Davison walked in front of the king’s horse Anmer as the field rounded Tattenham Corner during the Derby. The Guardian carried a dramatic account of the incident: “They had just got round the Corner, and all had passed but the King’s horse, when a woman squeezed through the railings and ran out into the course. She made straight for Anmer, and made a sort of leap for the reins. I think she got hold of them, but it was impossible to say. Anyway the horse knocked her over, and then they all came down in a bunch. The horse fell on the woman, and kicked out furiously. It was sickening to see his hoofs strike her repeatedly.” Davison died of her injuries four days later. It is unlikely that she intended to kill herself, and the fact she was carrying a suffragette flag has led some to suggest she intended to pin it to the horse.

47 The coming of war

Scott was a reluctant warrior, but had gradually come to accept the case for war and, once it had been declared, believed it had to be prosecuted vigorously, though he insisted Britain should not seek to make territorial gains. He put his case in this letter to anti-war journalist E D Morel on 24 August 1914. Emily Hobhouse, who had exposed conditions in the concentration camps during the Boer war, was so furious with Scott’s pro-war stance that she gave up reading the paper.

48 D H Lawrence on the oubreak of war

In August 1914, D H Lawrence wrote a prophetic article on the mechanised death which characterised modern warfare. Lawrence, who was just establishing himself as a novelist, was paid two guineas for the article. The Guardian managed to byline the piece H D Lawrence.

49 Christmas truce on the Western Front

On 6 January 1915, the paper carried a moving report by a writer described as “a subaltern at the front”, describing the brief truce at the Christmas just past – a hiatus in fighting on the Western Front to allow both sides to bury their dead. There is humour in the officer’s despatch, but horror too.

50 A letter from Bertrand Russell

Responding to a column by “Artifex”, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote to the paper in March 1917 defending conscientious objectors. Russell was too old to be conscripted, but supported the right of men to refuse to serve.

51 Gallipoli

H W Nevinson accompanied the disastrous expedition to the Dardanelles in 1915. He was wounded, but returned to give an account of the evacuation of Gallipoli in December. Censorship of military material during the first world war was very tight, and the paper was not permitted to publish details of the operation until the following April.

52 Armistice

The declaration of piece on 11 November occasioned news reports of German capitulation, a photograph of cheering crowds in Manchester, and a nicely written sketch by Francis Perrot of the scenes in central London. “Hawkers appeared as from trap-doors with armfuls of hand-banners,” he reported. “The schoolchildren each had one in a twinkling, and went singing and dancing westward, leading a long procession from east to west that went on getting busier and more cheerful all day. Like magic the buses converted themselves into moving grandstands for the show. Nobody paid any fares – indeed very soon the conductresses gave up hope of collecting them.”

53 C E Montague

C E Montague, a novelist and essayist as well as a brilliant leader writer and critic, was day-to-day editor of the Guardian while Scott was a Liberal MP from 1895 to 1906. Though opposed to the war, Montague (pictured second from left in the top row, with other directors of the Manchester Guardian) insisted on joining the army in 1914, despite being 47 and having to dye his hair black to fool the recruitment office. He survived the fighting (many of his colleagues did not – see the roll of honour at the end of this hallway), but his proximity to the frontline served only to confirm his view that the war should not have been fought. His book Disenchantment, published in 1922, was one of the first attacks on its conduct, and influenced the succession of anti-war books which appeared later in the 1920s.

54 The Russian revolution

The Guardian got itself into difficulties in reporting Russia in the run-up to the revolution of 1917. Its correspondent, Morgan Philips Price, was seen as too sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, so Scott had taken on David Soskice to act as a counterweight. Soskice was in the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to witness the fall of the Kerensky government, and supplied a powerful – if one-sided – report. “The palace was pillaged and devastated from top to bottom by the Bolshevik armed mob, as though by a horde of barbarians,” wrote Soskice. “All the state papers were destroyed. Priceless pictures were ripped from their frames by bayonets. I will refrain from describing the hideous scenes which took place in the wine-cellars, and the fate to which some of the captured women soldiers were submitted.”

55 An interview with Lenin

In 1919, the Guardian’s new correspondent in Russia, W T Goode, managed to secure an interview with Lenin. A great coup, achieved by Goode in the face of considerable danger, though the style in which it is written – more about the securing of the interview than what Lenin says – would now be rather frowned upon. “One clearly cut impression he left on me,” wrote Goode, “was that here was a clear, cold brain, a man absolutely master of himself and of his subject, expressing himself with a lucidity that was as startling as it was refreshing.”

56 The famine on the Volga

Arthur Ransome, author of the Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books, also reported on Russia for the Guardian. Here, he writes about refugees displaced by the civil war, and the famine which killed hundreds of thousands. The conclusion of the piece is novelistic in its brilliance, numbing in its bleakness. Ransome was later to contribute a regular Friday column about fishing called “Rod and Line”.

57 A Jewish state

Scott’s Guardian was strongly pro-Zionist and supported the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government committed itself to a national home for the Jewish people. Scott wrote a leader in November 1917 in support of the Declaration. He showed some regard for the Palestinian communities settled on land likely to be absorbed by a Jewish state, but far from enough, and one sentence is shocking to 21st-century sensibilities: “The existing Arab population of Palestine is small and at a low stage of civilisation.” If Scott was prophetic in his view of Ireland, here he was blind.

58 Manchester Guardian Weekly

The Manchester Guardian Weekly was launched in 1919, in the wake of the Versailles peace treaty, with the explicit aim of furthering democracy amid the chaos in postwar Germany. In its first issue on 4 July 1919, the Weekly included a statement of intent: “We aim at presenting what is best and most interesting in the Manchester Guardian, what is most distinctive and independent of time, in a compact weekly form. We aim at securing that the readers of the weekly edition shall miss nothing of substance in its record and nothing of value in its interpretation of them.”

59 Langford on Mahler

Mahler was not much played or appreciated in the UK until the 1950s. Samuel Langford (above), the Guardian’s influential music critic, was an early disciple. “In composition Mahler kept the naivety of the child throughout his days,” Langford wrote, “and his music is still, on that account, a stumbling-block to the learned and the men of taste in our public musical life.” Neville Cardus, who succeeded Langford as music critic following the latter’s death in 1927, said of him: “Langford reigned supreme in the music of the North of England. Everybody knew him. He was a great man and a writer on music without parallel.”

60 Walter Doughty

Walter Doughty joined the Guardian as its first staff photographer in July 1908, and worked for the paper for more than 40 years. Glass-plate negatives of photographs Doughty took during the Irish civil war of the early 1920s, which were rediscovered by the late Don McPhee, are now recognised as crucial documents of that conflict. McPhee found them when the old darkroom in the Guardian’s Manchester office was being closed down. “I was having a last nostalgic look around,” McPhee later recalled, “and found the box of glass-plate negatives on the floor. I picked them up, still in their protective wrapping, and was amazed by what I had found. The clothes gave away the age of the pictures, but the quality matches that of any taken in a contemporary conflict.”

61 Scott’s centenary essay

In May 1921, to celebrate the centenary of the Guardian and his 50th anniversary as editor, a special issue (see display cabinet) was produced to which Scott contributed a short signed essay (shown above). One famous sentence from the essay, “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”, endures as the ultimate statement of values for a free press and continues to underpin the traditions of the Guardian today. William Haslam Mills, one of the paper’s reporters, wrote a long survey of the paper’s history for the centenary number, and in due course it became a slim but elegantly written book (see display cabinet).

62 A year of celebration

The paper seems to have spent much of 1921 partying. At a celebratory dinner to mark the centenary, the diplomat Lord Robert Cecil describes C P Scott’s work as “to make righteousness readable”. At a staff celebration, Scott’s son John, the paper’s business manager, said his was “to make readable righteousness remunerative”. The most thoughtful and inclusive part of the celebrations was the compilation of a book of photographs of the paper’s staff, including everyone from the directors to the cleaners and porters.

63 Women’s page

The Guardian’s women’s page was introduced in May 1922, but this was no proto-feminist outpost in the masculine world of the postwar Guardian. It announced that its principal interests were “domestic economy, labour-saving, dress, household prices, and the care of children”, though from the beginning it went outside this remit and looked at careers for women. Its first editor was Madeline Linford, who many years later recalled her brief: “The page must be readable, varied and aimed always at the intelligent woman … There must be no concessions to popular jargon … Words like ‘perambulator’ were to be given all their syllables, and none of the terms loved by fashion writers – ‘chic’, ‘modish’, ‘ensemble’ – could be allowed.”

64 Celebrating Proust

Proust’s great novel sequence A la Recherche du Temps Perdu was still struggling to win acceptance when Thomas Moult’s review of Scott Moncrieff’s translation of The Guermantes Way appeared in October 1925. Moult saw the point immediately, describing it as “a triumph in experimental letters” and “a feast”. Phew!

65 Fascists in Manchester

In December 1925, staff reporter Howard Spring produced this brilliant account of an early gathering of British fascists in Manchester.

66 The General Strike [1926]

Scott was strongly opposed to the general strike. In a letter to the home secretary William Joynson Hicks in May 1926, he wrote: “You and I at one time were rather serious opponents, but in this case we both see that this strike, which is really an attack upon constitutional and parliamentary government, must be met and fought. I am trying throughout to be fair to those on the other side, but still at the same time very firm in the protection of the rights of those who are willing to work.” NUJ members on the paper considered joining the strike, but in the end decided that getting reliable information out at a time of panic and rumour was the key consideration. Production and distribution were seriously disrupted. At the start of the strike, on 5 May, just a brief typewritten bulletin was produced; for the following week it was a single printed page.

67 The first crossword

The Guardian’s first crossword appeared on Saturday 5 January 1929, at the top of page 7, which otherwise contained news. It ran as a prize competition, on Saturdays only, until May 1929 when it went twice-weekly. It proved so popular that it became a daily item in January 1930.

68 Eisenstein’s Potemkin

Film reviewing was in its infancy, but Robert Herring gave Battleship Potemkin, being shown in the UK four years after it was made, close scrutiny and hailed Eisenstein’s new, “kinematic” method.

69 Cardus on Bradman

Neville Cardus joined the Guardian in 1917, and was to be associated with the paper for more than 50 years, writing about his twin loves – cricket and music. Here, he pays homage to Donald Bradman’s celebrated triple hundred, scored in a mere five and a half hours, against England at Headingley in July 1930. Cardus’s cricketing prose was thought masterful at the time, but can now seem rather over the top in its lyricism, as in the introduction to the piece above. Yet just when you start to wonder on what his prodigious reputation was built, he produces a marvellous sentence such as: “Bradman’s bat hammered perpetually; when he ever did stop scoring for a few balls it was as though he had merely run out of nails momentarily.”

70 The coming of television

Robert Herring witnessed two early experiments in television transmission and, despite having little evidence to go on, wrote a brief report in August 1930 in which he declared that TV was the medium of the future. Phew again!

71 C P Scott retires

C P Scott finally retired in 1929, though he remained editor-in-chief while his son Ted became editor. In 1930 he became a freeman of Manchester (see silver casket in display cabinet), but he resolutely refused all grander baubles, including becoming a Companion of Honour. Scott died on New Year’s Day 1932, and the huge attendance at what amounted to a Mancunian state funeral attested to the regard in which he was held. C E Montague, who had died three years earlier, had left an appreciation to be used at Scott’s death: “Without any glamour of beauty or wit in writing or speech, without any skill in the study of his readers’ prejudices, with unfashionable politics and a cold side for the strongest emotions of crowds, he pursued his own slowly chosen and frankly declared line in total indifference to what people might say about it or him. And yet the further he went the more influence did he gain over those to whom he made so few concessions.”

72 Death of Edward Scott

Ted Scott, who had waited patiently to become editor in more than name, only had a few months in which to enjoy that freedom. In April he was drowned when the boat in which he and his 17-year-old son Richard were sailing capsized on Lake Windermere. Richard survived by swimming to the shore. The deaths in quick succession of the two Scotts (commemorated here by plaques which used to be in the Guardian’s Cross Street office) led John Scott, C P’s surviving son, to give his shares over to a trust to ward off the danger that death duties would endanger the survival of the Guardian. The trust, which still controls the Guardian, was finally established on 10 June 1936. As Peter Preston, who edited the Guardian from 1975-95, wrote: “Would there have been a trust without the squall on the lake? Probably not.”

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