New Hand at an Old Tiller

By Fleet Street standards, London's respected independent Sunday Observer (circ. 384,000) is not a very big paper, but it is accounted a very good one. It has only a twentieth the circulation of the garish, picture-strewn Sunday News of the World, but at least 20 times the influence. The sedate, 157-year-old Observer is only six years the junior of the hoary London Times,* and proud of its past. It missed the boat by giving the battle of Trafalgar a scant squib, but scooped the town on the outbreak of the Crimean War. In 1820 it broke the law by printing news of a trial before it was over. Fined -L-500, the paper refused to pay; the law was soon forgotten.

Last week, in the musty old Observer office, there was hardly a ripple when a bright young man took over as editor. He was forthright David Astor, 36, whose grandfather bought the paper from Lord Northcliffe one year before young David was born. He took the tiller from Editor Ivor Brown, who returned to his favorite pursuits of drama critic and essayist. In Brown's six-year term, the Observer had gone nonpartisan, and become a better all-round paper (except to Tories) than Lord Kemsley's rival Sunday Times.

Eye-Openers. As editor, David Astor had more to recommend himself than the family name. No man to let his schooling interfere with his education, he took six months off between Eton and Oxford to roam Germany. In Heidelberg one day in 1931, he saw and was shocked by a prenatal symptom of the police state: lines of trucks packed with truncheon-bearing police, ready to charge if unionists clashed with rowdy Nazi paraders. His mother, Nancy Astor, and her Cliveden Set didn't want to be beastly to the Germans during the Munich era, but David Astor was already firmly anti-Nazi.

On two visits to Russia, one with his parents and Bernard Shaw, he had his eyes opened to the Communist side of the coin. The Soviet system did not measure up to his standards of liberty. "I was anti-Russian," he says, "even before it was fashionable to be anti-Russian." Astor worked in a Glasgow factory and a London bank before becoming a junior reporter on the Yorkshire Post. In 1945, demobbed as a captain in the Royal Marines (with the Croix de Guerre), Astor joined the family's Observer as foreign editor. He is a hard-working boss, on a first-name basis with most of his staffers.

Sunday Punch. For 34 years, until he quit in 1942 after a quarrel with the Astors, hawk-nosed Editor J. L. Garvin had thrust his greatness upon the Observer and thumped British breakfast tables with his stubborn leaders, often three or four columns long. "The English Sunday," said a rival, "would be incomplete without his weekly thunderstorm." When Garvin parted with the Astors, Fleet Streeters bet that the Observer would collapse. But today, a team rather than a one-man show, the Observer is a sounder paper, if a less disturbing one.

*Whose proprietor, John Jacob Astor, is a brother of the Observer's proprietor.

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