In Fleet Street

Early each morning from a slinky Rolls-Royce that glides up to a dingy row of buildings on London's Long Acre, there steps a sandy-haired, neat, London-born Jew, 67-year-old Julius Salter Elias, chairman and managing director of Odhams Press Ltd. He is the most diligent figure in Britain's newspaper world. In his silver-&-black modernistic office he works 16 hours on weekdays, eight on Sundays. Every night at 10 he telephones his press superintendent to get last-minute details of headlines, pictures, stories. Austerely aloof, this lone wolf of Fleet Street, who envies Press Barons Beaverbrook and Rothermere only their titles, seldom talks to them direct, receiving their messages through a lieutenant.

Elias is a manufacturing printer as well as a publisher, has one entire company devoted to the printing of outdoor advertising posters. Last week, while he lay ill of a gastric complaint in a nursing home, Fleet Street learned that Elias had outbid Beaverbrook and Rothermere, had bought for a reputed -L-600,000 cash controlling interest in British Illustrated Group. He thus took over control of the cut-glass society weeklies Tatler, Bystander, Sphere, as well as the Illustrated London News, Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News and the monthly Britannia & Eve.

Odhams lately built a new printing plant of Goss high-speed color gravure presses, as used by New York's Dally News and Crowell Publishing Co. Undoubted reason for last week's purchase was that Elias was planning something extra to print on these presses though he already prints some 100 periodicals in all fields--newspapers, medical papers, trade papers. His range of publications includes such variety as the Daily Herald, with a 2,000,000 circulation, Weekly Illustrated, Debrett (Britain's social register), The People, Passing Show, and John Bull. Editor-in-chief of every organ put out by Odhams is John Dunbar, a Scot with a rich brogue. Elias, who has never written a newspaper story in his life, is the firm's financial spearhead. His wealth is impossible to gauge for he never publishes a financial statement. Odhams ranks so high, however, that when Elias put out a big bond issue last year is was oversubscribed in five minutes.

Fleet Street, which has long grown weary of Elias' successes, was last week much more absorbed in a campaign to throttle "sensationalism," launched by the National Union of Journalists containing some 6,100 newshawks, two-thirds of the total number in Britain. The Union sent strong protests to the Newspaper Proprietors' Association (representing national dailies and Sunday papers) and the Newspaper Society (representing 1,000 provincial papers).

By last week the issue had developed into a Parliamentary campaign. Among those urging the Government to impose some sort of censorship were a large number of M.P.'s who feel that the Government, under the excuse of throttling ghoulishness, can control "indiscreet"' news about the Royal Family and other public figures.

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