BECALMED
1-1HE TIMES has not been published since Friday, March 1 25. Up till then it had appeared with unbroken regularity since January 1, 1785, though on the first day of the General Strike in 1926 it did so in a multigraphed edition of 48,000 copies. (If you possess a specimen of this collector's piece, look and see whether the first two words, 'WEATHER FORECAST,' are misprinted as 'WEATHER ORECAST'; if they are you have got a copy of the first impression, which must be a great rarity.) All newspapers are in a sense, institutions, but none would claim either the status or the responsibilities which devolve upon The Times. As a record of the community's activities it discharges, almost as a side-line, a number of prosaic duties with an efficiency which the community has come to take for granted; and its readers' initial reactions to its non-appearance were flavoured with a certain incredulity. It was almost as though one of the walls of the room in which they lived had been suddenly removed.
Saturday, March 26, was, it will be remembered, an important day in the sporting calendar, and almost all the people who rang up Printing House Square that morning did so because they wanted to know what The Times expected to win the Grand National. The Times gave Mariner's Log (which fell at the first fence) with Quare Times, the winner, as the most promising alternative. Later that day the family archives of sixteen young oarsmen and two coxswains were somewhat unfairly impover- ished; and all over the country on Monday morning crossword addicts glumly faced the realisation that 27 Across ['What price a charming policewoman? (1, 6, 5)'] was the last clue they were going to be invited to solve, for the time being, and that meanwhile they could not even be certain that they had solved it correctly.
The present generation of Britons is too well schooled in deprivation. Meat, petrol, street-lighting, coal—there is almost none of the essentials of life which we have not stoically learned to do very largely without. I suspect that it is partly because we are so used to being denied things by forces 'beyond our control that so many citizens claim to find the absence of daily newspapers an easily supportable state of affairs. When, in the palmiest days of planning, Mr. John Strachey introduced potato rationing, a lot of people found it easy to convince themselves that they were better off without potatoes anyhow; and the same semi-reflex reaction may be governing the fatalistic acceptance of the newspaper strike by many members of the public.
But the nation cannot do without The Times, because it cannot do without a printed record of what is happening to it.
No strike can interrupt the processes of life and death, and only The Times provides the kind of public notice-board on which arrivals and departures are recorded. You may say that it doesn't matter whether 'a brother for Rosemary' gets into print, and that nobody need know that an old lady has died peacefully in her eighty-fifth year. But in fact the Births and Deaths columns are a convenient medium of intercommunica- tion on which the community has learned to rely, and the community feels vaguely unhappy without them. The backlog at Printing House Square (which will one day be printed in full, whatever its eventual dimensions) is already well on to its second page, and the question of whether or not to delete 'No flowers' from announcements of funerals which have now taken place is typical of the small problems which bedevil life for the staff of The Times.
The Forthcoming Marriages run to more than five columns, and we shall never know whether the two couples, who have both announced and broken off their engagements since March 25 would have taken the second step if the strike had not given them so good an opportunity of taking it without attracting attention. The Obituaries, too, are piling up and all will appear in due course; for it seems only fair that when men and women die their achievements should be recorded in what are, in a sense, the tribal archives.
Historians, not alone or even predominantly of this country, have cause to view with alarm the suspended animation of The Times. Into what pregnant (but unwarranted) speculations might not a scholar of the distant future be led if he relied for his list of the guests at Sir Winston Churchill's farewell dinner party on the Manchester Guardian, who omitted from it the Leader of the Opposition but included Mrs. Attlee?
Here and there, presumably, there are beneficiaries from the immobility of the presses. Three busy members of three different professions have written to The Times confessing that its absence has made it for the first time possible for them to read their professional journals from cover to cover; and New Zealand has cause to be grateful for a situation in which the smallest score ever compiled in a Test Match (26) had no headlines to hit.
But the net effect has been frustrating and bad. Art exhibitions, concerts, first nights, new books—in all such cases, individuals have suffered, in some cases severely, from the fact that their efforts went unappraised; and whereas an obituary will 'keep' without losing its purpose or its value, printed appreciation of an artistic or, a literary performance needs, if it is to help the person on whom it is bestowed, to come close on the heels of the private view or the first night or whatever it is. Nobody minds the football pools losing money, but it seems a shame that those who want to raise some for good causes, by organising charity balls and other entertainments, should be almost completely thwarted. Most citizens are news- paper-users as well as newspaper-readers. If you are interested in the result of an examination or the time of a matinee, if you want to protest against an injustice, place a bet on a horse or apply for a job, you need a newspaper to help you.
The fact of the matter is that everybody suffers by any interruption of any useful form of intercommunication. It is facile to allow small mercies—such as freedom from any obligation to read about Lady Docker or Miss Zsa Zsa Gabor or Mrs. Gerald Legge—to anaesthetise the hurt; it is like accepting compulsory vegetarianism because one has always detested tripe. But the least curious of us lives in a world about which he has, and generally acknowledges, some responsibility for informing himself; and to be prevented from discharging that responsibility is bad for him, and could be very dangerous for the'community.
No dangers, but only inconveniences, have so far become apparent as a result of the newspaper strike; but perhaps this cursory survey of some of its incidental, its almost (as you might say) tribal, impacts upon the readers of The Times may stimulate thought. Can any modern society or State afford to allow its normal activities to be carried on, even for a short period, off the record? The short answer is : No.
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