Oldest to Camrose

There is no newspaper in America that can compare with the London Morning Post. Oldest daily in the British Empire, it was established three years before the American Revolution. Coleridge, Lamb and Wordsworth were among its writers. Imperialist and conservative, it snorted bitterly against any change even in its own party. Alongside this crusty diehard, the New York Herald Tribune might easily be mistaken for the Communist Daily Worker. Sad was the day in plush British drawing rooms when the Morning Post began to limp. After the Depression it reduced its price from twopence to the vulgar level of the penny press in an attempt to restore circulation. This year it was down to 116,000 and everybody in Fleet Street knew it was for sale.

Lord Camrose (William Ewart Berry), who with his brother. Lord Kemsley (James Gomer Berry), has built up an $80,000,000 publishing empire in the last three decades, bought the Morning Post last week for a reported $750,000 (probably less) from a syndicate headed by Sir Percy Bates, board chairman of Cunard-White Star. On Aug. 27 Lord Camrose plans to merge the oldster with his Daily Telegraph. The name Post is likely to be dropped entirely, unless Lord Camrose should decide to launch an Evening Post, a name he had the foresight to register in 1926.

The Daily Telegraph in eight years under the Berry Brothers went from 80,000 to 532,000 circulation, without using the stunts and free insurance schemes which have been standard promotion practice with many of the big British dailies. But it was one of the first British class papers to reduce its price (in 1930) from twopence to a penny to compete with the popular press. It still has a long way to go to reach the huge figures of the Daily Express (2,162,979), Daily Herald (2,000,000), Daily Mail (1,717,133). But in prestige and influence the Daily Telegraph has come up to rank with its matutinal colleague, the Times, which has 192,000 circulation at twopence.

Wearer of a daily carnation, owner of a quarter-million-dollar yacht, Lord Camrose is a Conservative with his eyes open, plays cricket with the Government, pursues a middle course in his papers and keeps his personality out of them. In a merciless four-year war for supremacy in the provinces, fought paper by paper, Lord Camrose trounced beefy Lord Rothermere, whose publications are often used as personal sounding boards. It was no accident that the rise of his Daily Telegraph coincided with the slow death of the ostrich-eyed Morning Post. Lord Camrose's empire now includes 21 newspapers and more than 100 periodicals, which he divided last winter with his brother, Lord Kemsley, who took the Daily Sketch, Sunday Times (no connection with the Times), several provincial and Scottish papers.

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