LORD THOMSON OF FLEET Author Sees Press Baron As ‘Great Reformer’

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30886, 20 October 1965, Page 18

LORD THOMSON OF FLEET Author Sees Press Baron As ‘Great Reformer’

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LONDON, Oct. 18.

Lord Thomson of Fleet was “one of the great reformers of the journalistic world,” the Australian author Russell Braddon said in a book published here today. The book —“Roy Thomson of Fleet Street”—is the story of the rise of the Can-adian-born newspaper baron.

Braddon wrote that Lord Thomson had been responsible for two revolutions: the doctrine of total editorial independence and the creation of the quality colour magazine.

“He has shattered the feudal concept that editors owe unquestioning allegiance to the policies of their baron. . . . By reiterating a thousand times that he personally operates newspapers only to make a profit, he has enhanced both the meaning and the integrity of every editorial word published in every newspaper he owns.” Braddon summed up the story of Lord Thomson’s life in a sentence used by his subject when congratulated on his elevation to the peerage. Thomson, he wrote, “beamed immodestly, and in a phrase typically candid and succinct, said ‘well, we finally made it.” Thomson, born the son of a Canadian barber, left school

at 14, according to the book. Three years later he announced: “I’ll be a millionaire by the time I’m 30.” He wasn’t. But it was not for want of trying as a clerk, farmer, car parts and radio salesman, and in broadcasting.

“ . . . Plant”

Braddon traced the growth of Thomson’s Canadian newspaper empire and told of a day when a Canadian Cabinet minister remarked in a speech that whenever he entered a strange town he always bought a newspaper. “Thomson, grinning broadly, interjected: ‘me too—and its plant’.” Braddon said that a Canadian constituency’s voters played a significant part in changing the pattern of British newspaper ownership. For it was when Thomson was rejected in 1953 as Conservative candidate for the riding of York Centre that he decided to leave his homeland for Britain.

The electoral defeat of “the fat, cheerful Canadian with spectacles of binocular thick-

ness” denied him what he most wanted at that time, said Braddon —a step into federal rather than provincial spheres of prestige. “His wish to go to Ottawa denied, checked in the course that he had set for himself, aged 59 and quite alone, Thomson decided to leave Canada and start again in Great Britain.” Defeated at York Centre on a Tuesday, he was ready by the Friday morning to leave for Scotland, having learnt during his election campaign that a majority shareholding in the “Scotsman” might be available. A condition of the paper’s proposed sale was that it must not go to an Englishman.

Braddon told of the negotiations with the financial adviser, of the “Scotsman” James Whitton.

“Let’s Toss”

“When only £25,000 separated Whitton’s price from Thomson’s offer, Thomson said: ‘Let’s toss.’

“If you can afford to toss,” the Scot remarked unsportingly, “you can afford to pay.” Thomson commented later, according to Braddon: “If my name had been spelt with a ‘p’ I’d never have got it.” For. the author pointed out. the English spell Thompson with a ‘p.’ Another Thomson comment —ll years before his elevation to the peerage last year—was: “What I want more than anything in the world is a knighthood. With the ‘Scotsman’ I should get it.” With the opening in 1956 of Scottish television came, said Braddon, “the years of Thomson’s greatest triumphs.” Thomson's oft-quoted statement. “it’s just like having a licence to print your own money” was recalled, and so were his frequent rebuffs in getting financial backing. “As usual it was Thomson’s policy that, at the earliest possible moment, the bank would be repaid and the debentures redeemed, which then would leave in the company only i 40,000 ordinary £1 shares (of which he himself Would own, 32,000) to which would accure all, if any, of the profits of his venture.

“That nobody except Thomson really expected there to be any profits is made clear by the manner in which both Scotland and Canada avoided any participation in the project.” But within two years “Those 40,000 ordinary £1 shares became so valuable that they made possible the purchase of Lord Kemsley’s entire chain of British newspapers, in consequence of which the Thomson empire in Britain alone, at the beginning of 1964, was worth £4B million, and Thomson himself was elevated to the House of Lords.” Reviews Lord Thomson “has taught several complacent British newspaper proprietors that they have got to start learning all over again,” says Francis Williams in the “Sunday Times.” Williams, author of the book on British newspapers “The Dangerous Estate,” was reviewug “Roy Thomson of Fleet Street.” He was but one of several noted reviewers of the Thomson biography in the Sunday newspapers. Others included Malcolm Muggeridge, Randolph Churchill and, in the "Sunday Mirror,” Donald Zee.

Williams writes: “He (Lord Thomson) has taught Fleet street a great deal, as much I suspect as ever Northcliffe and Beaverbrook did: and perhaps ultimately something of more value.

“He has shaken It up, helped to drag it complainingly into the second half of the twentieth century—this amiable brash small-town Canadian with a rather absurd desire for a title when at a time titles mean less than they ever did, who against all the odds has shown himself wholly at hotaie in the big league. . . Muggeridge, writing in the “Observer” said he opened Braddon’s offering “with pleasurable anticipation, my appetite whetted by lavish extracts which have already appeared in one of the sul> ject’s many newspapers. “I was not disappointed. In a genre which has borne a particularly luxuriant crop in our time Roy Thomson of

Fleet street must be accorded the highest award.” “Monotonous” However, Muggeridge said the tale of Lord Thomson’s take-over bids for newspapers and other interests tended, in spite of Mr Braddon’s best efforts, to be “as monotonous as the successive seductions in a novel like Peyton Place. “This is a new style of press lord. Lord Northcliffe, the first of the species, tried desperately hard, to the point in the end of going mad to translate his power as a newspaper proprietor into political power. Beaverbrook at times deluded himself into thinking he had done it.

"Lord Thomson, for his part Mr Braddon tells us, just measures up the columns of advertising and looks round for more newspapers to buy.” In the “Sunday Telegraph,” Churchill said the great merit of Lord Thomson as a newspaper proprietor was that he did not interfere in the editorial policies of his newspapers. “He properly considers that to be the province of his editors. He looks after the business side. He has a simple-minded attitude to politics. “I once asked him: What are you politics?” “I am a Tory,” he said. “Why?” “I’ve got money.” “He chooses good people and lets them get on with the job. That is why he prospers.” Zee called Thomson “the Barnum and Bailey of Fleet street.” “Boss of an insatiable newspaper empire worth at least £1000,000,000, he bestrides the world of newsprint like a silver-haired colossus, eye on the main chance, cash in hand. “Not even the most inspired Hollywood script writer could dream up a rags-to-riches tale to match the astonishing success of this one-man El Dorado.” Robert Pitman, in the “Sunday Express" described the book as “extraordinary.” No Other “l can find no other instance of such staggering candour in any official biography of an important and successful man. That it should be written when the hero is still alive and in action is entirely without parallel.” Pitman said Thomson’s failings were human “and let’s face it, there is probably a Barnaby in every success story. Thomson is only different because he admits it.

“Perhaps the myth is accurate after all. Perhaps he really is a simple man. No one certainly was ever less pompous. He has got all he wants now and he no longer gives a damn.”