Part 3. A world gone mad: Fascism, war and the Age of Austerity (1933-59)

That the Guardian survived the deaths of the two Scotts in 1932 and instituted a trust which secured its future was a significant achievement. The new editor, William Crozier, a classical scholar of note, edited the paper with selfless distinction from 1932-44, the last of those years through a long period of illness. No paper paid closer attention to the rise of Nazism in Germany and its accompanying atrocities, and to the persecution of the Jews there and elsewhere, than Crozier’s Guardian, which in this respect, according to one Israeli historian, ‘stood in a class by itself’.

While other papers were eager to appease, the Guardian was quick to recognise that the Nazis were unappeasable. Much of the credit for that is due to Frederick Voigt, who had been the paper’s correspondent in Germany in the 1920s and became diplomatic editor in 1933. Voigt had quickly seen that Nazism was in essence terroristic.

Crozier steered the Guardian through the war – sales increased considerably despite the thin issues necessitated by wartime rationing – and after his death in 1944 it fell to another old hand known by his initials, A P Wadsworth, to guide it through postwar reconstruction and the beginning of the cold war. Wadsworth, universally mourned as a great editor and a great radical, died on the very day in 1956 that British and French troops were embarking on the ill-fated Suez adventure.

It was the severest of tests for new editor Alastair Hetherington, and he responded to it in remarkable fashion, describing the attack on Egypt as ‘hideously miscalculated and utterly immoral’ and calling for prime minister Anthony Eden to resign. Hetherington’s anti-government line at a time of military action lost the paper a few fairweather readers but won it many long-term friends. Three years later, eyeing national sales, the Guardian dropped the name of its birthplace from its title.

73 W P Crozier

C P Scott’s son, John, was a business manager and had no wish to be involved on the editorial side of the paper. W P Crozier, the paper’s long-time news editor, was chosen as editor. He was seen by some as unwilling to delegate and criticised for putting pedantry before style. But, as David Ayerst points out in his history of the paper, his grasp of foreign affairs made him well suited to lead the Guardian as Europe plunged into a decade dominated by Hitlerism.

74 Style book

Crozier, who had been a schoolmaster before joining the paper in 1903, was a stickler for correct style (see the copy of a Guardian style book from 1928 in the display case). “I reckon”, he wrote to the chief sub-editor, “that in the last four years I have sent to you personally not less than a hundred notes on ‘both – and’ and ‘either – or’ alone (say one per fortnight) and not less than fifty (I think far more) on the misuse of ‘otherwise’. And roughly speaking, all wasted.”

75 Malcolm Muggeridge

Muggeridge had a brief, brilliant but turbulent few years at the Guardian from 1930, writing leaders and foreign reports. He was a little too flamboyant for Crozier’s taste and inclined to spice his reportage with commentary. His novel Picture Palace, which satirised life at the Guardian, was also a source of annoyance, and had to be withdrawn in 1934 because of the threat of libel actions. It was eventually re-published in 1987. The original edition is shown in the display cabinet. This copy belonged to John Scott. His manuscript annotations identify staff at the Guardian, including his father as the character “Old Savoury”.

76 Muggeridge on the Soviet famine

Muggeridge reported on the Guardian from Russia – the galaxy of writers sent to cover the country after its revolution was remarkable, though most were there to grind one axe or another. He had communist sympathies in the early 1930s, but was already beginning to have doubts, and what he correctly interpreted as the deliberate famine Stalin inflicted on the people of Ukraine and the Caucasus deepened his disaffection.

77 The Great Depression

“Probably only in the United States could one see the phenomenon of beggars in automobiles,” wrote New York correspondent Bruce Bliven in an evocative report in October 1932 on the impact of the Depression in the US. “Americans have always been a migratory people, but the number of those who are on the move from necessity, not from choice, has increased probably tenfold. In the old days these migrants were practically all men and boys, but today there are many thousands of women and children among them.”

78 The Jarrow March

Reporter R H Chadwick joined the marchers from Jarrow, near Newcastle, on one leg of their famous protest march.

79 Frederick Voigt on the rise of Hitler

Frederick Voigt was the Guardian’s correspondent in Germany in the 1920s, and had been quick to recognise the Nazi danger, though hopeful that the left in Germany would be able to combat Hitler’s rise. At a time when many in the UK were keen to do business with Herr Hitler, Voigt was making it clear that the Nazi system was built on terror. As a consequence, the Guardian was banned in Germany. In 1938, Voigt published the influential book Unto Caesar, whose thesis that Nazism was a secular religion still has currency today.

80 ‘A noble exception’

In July 1935, the influential political thinker Harold Laski wrote to the Guardian attacking those who sought to appease Hitler. He exempted the paper from his general criticism calling it a “noble exception”. “A number of well-known Englishmen,” wrote Laski, “have visited Herr Hitler and been assured by him of his pacific intentions … [They] are leading the nation into a fool’s paradise. They sacrifice to their illusions not merely the fate of men – silence about whom means torture and even death – but, in the long run, the fate of Europe too. We shall pay a heavy price for these self-constituted ambassadors before they have done.”

81 Voigt and European fascism

In 1933 Voigt became diplomatic correspondent, and was invaluable to Crozier as his eyes and eyes in Europe. In this letter, he briefs the editor on the growing influence of Nazi ideology on Mussolini’s Italy.

82 Spanish civil war

Gerald Brenan, an authority on Spain and later to become famous for the book South from Granada, wrote intermittently on the civil war for the Guardian, but his were essentially colour pieces and the paper lacked consistent coverage of the conflict that became a testing ground for the second world war. Editorially, the paper was critical of the UK government’s inertia, arguing in August 1936 that “The certain alternative if the rebels win is a Fascist dictatorship, and does anyone suggest that that could conceivably make for peace?”

83 Guernica

The absence of a correspondent on the spot meant the Guardian relied on agencies to cover the fighting, but in the devastating attack by German planes on the town of Guernica the unnamed Press Association reporter rose to the occasion. The attack prompted the paper to write an editorial denouncing “the brutal thoroughness of totalitarian warfare”, though there is no sense of the attack being a watershed. The editorial seems more concerned with the continuing bombardment of Madrid. It was Picasso’s painting which gave Guernica its fabled status.

84 The Munich agreement

While the country rejoiced that prime minister Neville Chamberlain had rescued Europe with the Munich Agreement allowing Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, the Guardian thought the peace of paper he waved on his return to the UK almost worthless. “No one in this country who examines carefully the terms under which Hitler’s troops begin their march into Czechoslovakia today can feel other than unhappy,” said an editorial on 1 October 1938. “Certainly the Czechs will hardly appreciate Mr Chamberlain’s phrase that it is ‘peace with honour’. Politically Czechoslovakia is rendered helpless, with all that that means to the balance of forces in eastern Europe, and Hitler will be able to advance again, when he chooses, with greatly increased power.”

85 Exit Chamberlain, enter Churchill

The Guardian welcomed the resignation of Chamberlain and his replacement by Winston Churchill. “In Mr Churchill’s administration”, it said in an editorial on 11 May 1940, “we have the promise for the first time of a truly National Government. At its head is the only man whom the country would hold comparable as leader in war with the Mr Lloyd George of 25 years ago. He has the boldness, the imagination, the sense of social justice, the capacity to rouse the enthusiasm and devoted service that we need to bring us through the hard and gruelling times that lie ahead.”

86 Standing alone

After the fall of France in June 1940, the Guardian published a long and learned leader (who now quotes Milton in editorials?) spelling out the task ahead, bemoaning the failures of the years of appeasement, putting its faith in Churchill and anticipating the eventual entry into the war of the United States.

87 Dunkirk

C E Montague’s son, Evelyn, distinguished himself as a war correspondent for the paper before falling ill with tuberculosis in 1944. In June 1940, he reported on the “miracle” of Dunkirk, doing his bit to turn humiliating defeat into the illusion of victory: “In the grey chill of dawn today in a south-eastern port [military censors forbade him to name it], war correspondents watched with incredulous joy the happening of a miracle. By every canon of military science the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] has been doomed for the last four or five days. Completely outnumbered, outgunned, out-’planed, all but surrounded, it had seemed certain to be cut off from its last channel of escape. Yet for several hours this morning we saw ship after ship come into harbour and discharge thousands of British soldiers safe and sound on British soil.”

88 Coventrated

The Luftwaffe’s blitz on Coventry in November 1940 was so thorough that it invented a new verb – to “conventrate”. The Guardian ran a moving report by Donald Blyth on one of the mass funerals which followed the bombing.

89 The Blitz in Manchester

Manchester was itself a frequent target for German bombers, and in December 1940 came under sustained assault. The paper was forced to remove the word “Manchester” from the signs on its building in Cross Street because it was thought it might be spotted from the air and confirm to the Germans that they had reached their target. Cross Street had several lucky escapes. “First day of the great Blitz on Manchester,” Crozier noted in his diary on 22 December 1940. “Eleven incendiaries on our own roof – all put out.”

90 Paper rationing

Shortage of paper meant that issues were smaller during the war, averaging around eight pages a day. A typical wartime issue is shown above.

91 Sales boost

The desire for news about the war gave papers a considerable sales boost. By 1941, circulation stood at 60,000, up 10,000 on the prewar sale. According to David Ayerst, “as many Guardians could be sold as could be printed”. There was a even a waiting list of 3,000 would-be purchasers who, with paper rationed and the presses working at full capacity, could not be supplied.

92 D-Day: ‘We are history’

The Guardian’s David Woodward was one of three British war correspondents who was landed in France from the air during the D-Day landings. He was wounded, but still able to file this report, which appeared on 9 June 1944.

93 The concentration camps

Details of the Holocaust and the Nazis’ death camps were sparse – leaked out from occupied Europe in nightmarish eyewitness reports – and it was not until liberation that the full horror of Hitler’s killing machine began to emerge. This account of what the US army discovered at Buchenwald is the first detailed description of one of the camps to appear in the Guardian. Buchenwald was not, strictly speaking, an extermination camp, functioning principally as a forced labour camp, but more than 50,000 inmates died there.

94 VE Day

The Guardian celebrated the end of the war in May 1945 with scenes of celebration in London and Manchester, and a host of short reports marking the cessation of hostilities across Europe. It also included a brief announcement which may surprise those used to today’s rolling news: “VICTORY HOLIDAYS: The Manchester Guardian will not be published tomorrow (Thursday).” Digesting what the end of the war meant would have to wait for 24 hours.

95 The Atomic bomb

The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, wiping out a large part of the city and killing 80,000. The Guardian, in an editorial published the following day, accepted that the use of the bomb was legitimate, but was fearful of the consequences.

96 A P Wadsworth

Crozier had died just before D-Day and been replaced by another man invariably known by his initials, A P Wadsworth, a much-loved and long-standing Guardian member of the Guardian staff. Alistair Cooke, who joined the Guardian as a foreign correspondent in 1947, described Wadsworth in one of his radio Letters from America: “AP Wadsworth was just about the best editor a foreign correspondent could pray for. ‘You’re on your own in America,’ he said to me. ‘Don’t wait for assignments, make them your own. I want you to report America, not just Washington. And pay no attention to the paper’s editorial line.’ ” When Wadsworth (shown above in a caricature by David Low) died on the eve of the Suez crisis in 1956, the historian A J P Taylor said of him: “A P W has been a great editor. Every page of the Manchester Guardian for the last 12 years bears witness to it. His radical spirit has never faltered even when he stood alone – perhaps then least of all.”

97 A welcome for Beveridge

The war – and the collective effort from the nation it necessitated – radically changed views of state provision, and prompted William Beveridge’s “Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services”. A long leader (written by Wadsworth) in December 1942 welcomed the vision of a new welfare settlement. The role of the state has always been a central issue for the liberal Guardian. Here it began a shift from the centre to the left that became more marked in the 1960s and 70s.

98 The Attlee landslide – a ‘silent revolution’

An editorial of 27 July 1945, while regretting “the submergence of the Liberal party” and pointing out that proportional representation would give it a greater chance of survival, showed confidence in a socialist government and called on it to act boldly.

99 The Berlin blockade

Europe moved swiftly from hot war to cold war. In an account published on 5 October 1948, long-serving reporter Terence Prittie (who had joined the paper to write about cricket and ended up in eastern Europe) marked the 100th day of the Berlin blockade, in which the Soviet Union attempted to gain control of the western-controlled sectors of Berlin. He said the success or failure of the anglo-American airlift would determine “whether two and a quarter million people can be bullied into submission or whether their late but nevertheless wholehearted espousal of the cause of western democracy can win them elementary freedom”. In May 1949, after almost a year, the blockade was lifted.

100 The first step to apartheid

An editorial from May 1948 lamented the success of the nationalists in South Africa in the 1948 elections and condemned the segregationist policies they espoused. Some of the language of “native races” and “white civilisation” now seems embarrassing, but the analysis is spot on. “Perhaps one may hope, in the long run, that the segregation policy will be the rope that hangs the Nationalists, or brings them to their senses,” the editorial concluded, “but it may be a costly way of learning.”

101 Hold the front page – for news!

In September 1952 the Guardian put news instead of advertisements on the front page – “an adaptation to modern newspaper habit which should increase its usefulness to its readers without modifying its character,” as it explained in an editorial. The change was the initiative of managing director Laurence Scott, who thought the mainly Manchester-based advertisers had little relevance for the growing readership in other parts of the UK. Wadsworth accepted the change reluctantly, telling typographer Allen Hutt, who was advising on the design of a new front page: “It’s not a thing I like myself, but it seems to be accepted by all the newspaper pundits that it is preferable to be in fashion.” The pundits were right: the move gave a healthy boost to circulation, which quickly rose to 168,000 copies a day, up from 50,000 at the outbreak of the second world war. The Guardian was well on its way, as Laurence Scott had anticipated, to becoming a truly national paper.

102 But don’t hold your horses

This was clearly a period of dramatic change. In 1952 the Guardian retired its delivery horses – only half a century after the arrival of the motor car.

103 The Bedside Guardian

The Bedside Guardian, an end-of-year anthology designed for the Christmas-gift market, was launched in the autumn of 1952. “Good readers”, said the critic Ivor Brown in his introduction to the volume, “are natural addicts of good writing; and the Manchester Guardian has had a long tradition of excellence in this kind.” It has had its ups and downs – even losing the name “Bedside” for a benighted period – but happily survives and will celebrate its 60th birthday next year. A selection of Bedsides is shown in the display cabinet.

104 The Coronation

David Low’s morning-after-the-coronation cartoon in June 1953, in which he drew attention to the huge spending on the event in a country still racked by poverty and austerity, caused a furore and led to cancelled subscriptions among angry readers. Wadsworth was embarrassed by the controversy and could point to much loyal coverage elsewhere in the paper, but it was an early sign of the Guardian’s uneasy relationship with the monarchy.

105 Suez

Alastair Hetherington succeeded Wadsworth as editor in the autumn of 1956, just as the storm of Suez – when forces from the UK, France and Israel attacked Egypt to secure passage through the Suez canal – was about to break. Hetherington, who had been foreign editor, wrote a powerful editorial on 1 November calling Eden’s policy “a disaster of the first magnitude … wrong on every count – moral, military and political”. A few days later, in another leader which described the attack on Egypt as “hideously miscalculated and utterly immoral”, he demanded that the government resign, and advised readers to lobby their MPs. Critics of Hetherington’s anti-government line were vocal, but in his history of the post-Suez Guardian Geoffrey Taylor says the supposed heavy loss of readers is a myth. There were some losses among traditional readers in the north-west, but sales in the south grew as a result of the controversy. Far from damaging the Guardian, the independent line Hetherington pursued on Suez accelerated its move from being a Manchester paper to a national one.

106 Low on Suez

David Low had brilliantly captured Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez canal – the act which precipitated anglo-French action – in a cartoon in July. The pleased-looking fellow with the fishing rod is Soviet foreign minister Dmitri Chepilov. Low, widely acknowledged as the greatest cartoonist of the 20th century and surely the only one ever to be knighted, worked for the Guardian from 1953 until his death 10 years later.

107 Look Back in Anger

John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, with its protagonist Jimmy Porter railing against the complacency of middle-class life, perfectly caught the mood of a new order struggling to make itself heard. It revolutionised British theatre, though few critics recognised it at the time. The peerless (if sometimes perverse) Philip Hope-Wallace, without giving it quite the ecstatic welcome of Kenneth Tynan in the Observer, recognised Osborne as a significant new talent.

108 Munich disaster (self-contained caption)

The Munich disaster of 6 February 1958, in which a plane carrying the Manchester United team home from a European Cup match in Yugoslavia, devastated the city. Twenty of the 44 people on board were killed. Eight Manchester United players died, including 21-year-old Duncan Edwards who had already played 18 times for England, and eight journalists. Donny Davies of the Guardian (whose pen name was “An Old International”) and Tom Jackson of the Manchester Evening News were both killed. Neville Cardus wrote a brief appreciation of Davies for the paper. “ ‘Old International’,” said Cardus, “was the first writer on soccer to rise above the immediate and perishable levels of his theme … [He] saw a great game against a living, not to say agitated, background. And he saw that the players were characters, too.” In the photograph above, crowds mark the return of the bodies of the dead to Manchester.

109 Tom Stuttard

Photographer Tom Stuttard joined the Guardian in 1925 and was still producing wonderful pictures such as a famous one of a couple in Derbyshire with their collection of grandfather clocks almost 40 years later. It was taken in 1959, when one world – of deference, stiff upper lips and order – was about to give way to another.

110 Goodbye Manchester (in name at least)

In 1959 the paper changed its title from the Manchester Guardian to the Guardian. “It acknowledges an accomplished fact,” readers were told. “Nearly two-thirds of the paper’s circulation now lies outside the Manchester area.”

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