Abstract
Blum and Taff, aka Ralph David Blumenfeld and Howell Arthur Gwynne, were great editors who have been undeservedly forgotten. If you have the bad luck to coincide in Fleet Street with sacred monsters like Beaverbrook and Northcliffe, you can expect to be pushed to the back of the historical stage. And if you're upright and well behaved in both your public and private life, you won't provide the material for the anecdotes and myths that guarantee some kind of journalistic immortality.
Take this encounter in 1921 between the Daily Express proprietor and editor. ‘One day Beaverbrook stormed into Blumenfeld's office and shouted: “Where the hell's RDB?” and swept everything off the table on to the carpet. Blumenfeld came in and said quietly: “Who did that?” Beaverbrook replied: “I did. Now look here, I want to talk to you.” Blumenfeld: “Then pick these things up and put them back on the desk first, Max. Then I'll talk to you.” Beaverbrook's face broke into a swift dawn of impish laughter. His mood vanished like snow in June. “Sure I'll pick them up.”’ It's unfair, but it's the diva you remember from that rather than the straight man.
Blumenfeld, born in Wisconsin in 1864 to German Jewish immigrants, had a distinguished career as a young journalist with the Chicago Herald and James Gordon Bennett Junior's New York Herald. With a direct and lively style, and a nose for news, he made his reputation as a special correspondent. He was based in London when he fell out with the capricious Bennett in 1894. After six years manufacturing and selling linotype machines, he was in a barber's shop in Fleet Street when Alfred Harmsworth, who was in the next chair, broke into his doze with: “I say, Blumenfeld, when are you going to give up your stupid, soul-destroying task of making and selling machinery and go back to your proper place on a newspaper?” That afternoon Blumenfeld became news editor of the Daily Mail; in 1902 he joined the Daily Express as foreign editor and two years later was appointed editor – a job he held until 1924 when Beaverbrook kicked him upstairs as editor-in-chief.
Although he began as a moderniser who made his paper readable, Blumenfeld became rather set in his ways. Naturalised in 1907, he would become the embodiment of a modest English gentleman, enduring with grace during the war the slurs that his surname attracted. In 1915, the home secretary had to defend him in the House of Commons against an MP complaining of his “alien origin”.
“Blumenfeld,” wrote Beverley Baxter, “had charm enough for four men, a caustic wit and an easily roused kindliness. I suppose he was the best-loved man who ever walked the pavements of the Street, and he was equally popular with men and women. He had every quality of the successful journalist except intellectual ruthlessness and passion.”
There was no lack of passion in his great friend and Sussex neighbour H.A. Gwynne. Born in 1865 near Swansea, at 25 he abandoned school-teaching to seek a journalistic career. Briefly Balkans correspondent for The Times, he moved to Reuters and reported from Romania, Asante, Sudan, Greece (during the Greco-Turkish War) and Peking. His big adventure began in South Africa in 1899 where he was in charge of Reuters’ coverage of the war and embarked on a life-long friendship with Rudyard Kipling.
When in 1904 Arthur Pearson made him editor of The Standard with the remit to fight for tariff reform, Gwynne had never even visited a newspaper office. It was Blumenfeld who became his “mentor, guide and friend” and Kipling whose backing got him in 1911 the editorship of the Morning Post, with which he stayed until in 1937 it was swallowed by the Daily Telegraph.
Under him the paper was uncompromisingly imperialist, unionist and protectionist. A dark side of the extreme patriotism he displayed during the war was his anti-semitism, which led him infamously in 1920 to publish in the Post the “Protocols of the elders of Zion”, but did not damage his close relationship with Blumenfeld. Despite his die-hard views and prejudices and his penchant for elaborate political plotting (he was a key mover in the deposition of Balfour, Asquith, and Lloyd George), he was a principled man of courage and integrity who, as Dennis Griffiths put it, “had conducted a great newspaper which scrupulously maintained the highest British traditions of honour and fair play.”
As pioneers of the new journalism, Blum and Taff were key figures in the heady decades when newspapers were opened up to a vast new readership. They deserve to be remembered and Griffiths deserves our thanks for giving them – in this labour of love – their place in press history.