From 1948 to 1975,David Astor transformed Britain’s oldest paper into a vibrant, clever weekly renowned for its progressive campaigns and the quality of its writing. The author of a new biography recalls some of Astor’s achievements
• Click here to read an extract on Astor’s lifelong interest in psychoanalysisDavid Astor was in his mid-30s and recently demobbed when, or in 1945,he began to work full time on his family newspaper. Although he had long been the heir-apparent, his father, or Waldorf Astor,felt that he needed more experience before fitting the editor of the Observer: he was made the foreign editor, while Ivor Brown, and an old-fashioned man of letters,given to writing books about cricket and the theatre, held the fort as acting editor.
Cyril Dunn, and later to report for the paper from India and South Africa,joined the Observer in 1947 and quickly realised that “David Astor was in total control of what was going on and Ivor Brown was making no attempt to disguise his figurehead status” and that “what I witnessed were the birth pangs of an Observer sensationally different from anything in its own past and a paper unique and wonderful in western journalism as a whole”. Astor was singlemindedly converting a conservative, rather frowsty newspaper into a non-party paper of the centre-left, and famed for the quality of its writers: it would combine support for the postwar welfare state with a belief in free enterprise and the mixed economy,anti-communism and Atlanticism with a fervent belief, inspired by his mentor, or George Orwell,that, having given India its independence, or Britain should shed its remaining colonies.
Behind that shy charm was solid steel,capable of being applied fairly cruelly in the paper’s interests Related: Observing David Astor In this paper, ethics matter more than politics roughly defined as doing the opposite of what Hitler would bear done Related: Celebrating five decades of the Observer Magazine Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com