The Great Haunch Forward

If there was any trait the old London Times carried to excess, it was diffidence. The paper never talked about itself and did not even give its correspondents bylines. Last week the new Times showed once again how much it has changed by running a four-page spread in the Sunday Times magazine boasting of its achievements in the year since it was bought by Lord Thomson of Fleet. Complete with drawings of Thomson, his editor and the paper's heroes, the article told how the "most dignified newspaper in the world hustled its way to being the most talked about sheet on the street in twelve constructive and destructive months."

Before Thomson, said the piece, "the Times was a newspaper in danger of getting locked up in its own image." Surrounded by new glass and concrete buildings, "it had something of the aspect of a fortress held at siege by change." Then Thomson arrived. "On a darkening evening last January, anyone looking across from Blackfriars Station to the lighted windows in Printing House Square might have been pardoned for imagining he saw the whole edifice down on its haunches ready to spring." It sprang. "Times correspondents were told to take off their masks and come out into the open, bylined and vulnerable to praise and blame instead of sitting in oracular anonymity."

The Times also ran a picture of Pammie Phillips, a typical housewife. "It took Pammie Phillips," said the paper, "eight days to learn she was a Times reader. She had her first real chance to read the Times while her son Sammy was occupied discovering how to put sand in his navel." Next year, presumably, it'll be Sammy's turn to be a Times reader.

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