Tribune's Ten

A decade ago a gloomy band of British socialists met in Edinburgh. The Ramsay MacDonald government had collapsed. Their movement was wasted by feuds, weighted by inertia; socialism in Britain was moribund. Something had to be done. In desperation they decided to start a tuppenny weekly. To get it going, people like Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan, Ellen Wilkinson, George Russell Strauss and John Strachey chipped in -L-10 apiece to buy stock.

Last week their Tribune was ten years old. None of its founders had ever seen a dividend check, but they counted their money and time well spent. The little (circ. 20,000) journal had gradually won a place of influence in British politics and journalism out of all proportion to its circulation or bank balance. Though it ranked well below the Economist or the New Statesman, the Tribune was must reading in Fleet Street and the Ministries.

The Tribune survived its first days, as a militant "workingman's weekly," by changing its garish typography for quieter dress, increasing its literary and art criticism, tripling its price and courting the "out-at-elbow middle class." The phrase came from its prize, unpredictable Critic-Columnist George Orwell.

Fie on the Finns. Early in the Tribune's career, it had narrowly escaped abduction by the Communists, while Cripps and Bevan weren't paying enough attention. Publisher Victor Gollancz, then a fellow traveler (now safely home again), began sharing the deficits with Stafford Cripps in 1938, and Konni Zilliacus, now a pro-Soviet M.P., blossomed as the "Diplomatic Correspondent." In 1940, when the Tribune went so far as to accuse the Finns of aggression against Russia, Nye Bevan woke up and rushed to the rescue.

He has been the guiding spirit ever since. Today, as Health Minister, he cannot exercise direct control, but remote control is good enough. Energetic Jennie Lee, his dark-haired wife, is a Tribune director, and many a friendly tea at their house could pass for an editorial conference. Other directors: bright, up-&-climbing Michael Foot, leftish M.P., and Patricia Strauss, wife of another founder who is now under secretary of transport.

During the war the Tribune was the one British weekly that felt free to criticize Churchill's government,* managed to do it without ever opposing the war.

Victor's Spoils. The election brought the socialist weekly an embarrassing wealth of ministerial connections, and at first it leaned over backward to avoid taking advantage of it. Then, says Jennie Lee, "we said 'the hell with it'; anything we got by our own efforts we'd print, and that's what we do now." Now that they are breaking even, they pay their contributors a guinea a column. Says one editor: "It varies only for our really distinguished ones, who are allowed (as H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw were) to write for nothing."

Nye Bevan, bound by the rule which forbids Ministers to write for publication, got into the anniversary number with what was euphemistically called an "interview." He gave it with a chip on his left shoulder: "We have traveled quite a distance from those frustrated days in Edinburgh. . . . But we have not yet a Socialist Britain. . . . In defending the Government where . . . justified, Tribune is not called upon equally to defend that portion of private enterprise that our political strategy leaves for the moment untouched."

* A wartime series by one "Colonel Thomas Rainsboro," attacking Churchill's military strategy, stirred the greatest tempest in the Tribune's decade. It was widely attributed to Field Marshal Wavell, but was probably written by cocky, brilliant Frank Owen, like Foot a onetime Beaverbrook boy and now acting editor of the Daily Mail.

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