Man of letters

Neil Sinclair

Geoffrey Woolley is a gentle, self-effacing bachelor in his fifties who receives as many as 500 letters a day from strangers. He must also be among the most influential men in British journalism.

Mr Woolley is Letters Editor of the Times, keeper of the great reservoir of Correspondence that flows into New Printing House Square every day from the famous, the obscure, the ambitious, the Vain, the scholarly and the mad.

'At 9 o'clock (the Opera began at 8) a lady came in and sat down very conaPicuously in my line of sight. She remained there until the beginning of the last act. I do not complain of her coming late or going early; on the contrary, I wish she had come later and gone earlier. For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly as if someone had killed it by stamping on its breast and then nailed it to the lady's temple which was presumably of sufficient solidity to bear the operation.

'I am not, I hope, a morbidly squeamish person; but the spectacle sickened me. I presume that if I had presented myself at the doors with a dead snake around my neck, a collection of black beetles pinned to my shirtfront and a grouse in my hair, I would have been refused admission. Why, then, is a woman to be allowed to commit such an outrage?'

Why indeed. Still, George Bernard Shaw, the apoplectic opera fan, got the matter off his chest in his long, bitter tirade against sloppy evening dress published in the Times's Letters Column in 1905.

The Letters Column is the heart of any great newspaper. If the paper is a poor one the letters will be poor too. Lucid letters are highly prized. Indeed, some journals actually offer money for them—but not the Times, although Mr Woolley occasionally receives postscripts which say 'you may use my letter free of charge'.

The only Letters Column which it is absolutely essential to read each day is in the Times. There is simply no better guide to what those who rule our country—from the foothills to the peaks of our beknighted zealotocracy—are thinking about and shouting about ... 'The jungle drum of the Establishment' as Esquire magazine once called it.

The American journalist Anthony Lewis wrote: 'There is nothing like it in the United States. There could not be, for we have no publication which covers the whole country every morning and reaches just about everyone that matters. It is an intimacy that so astonishes Americans witnessing the British phenomenon: a few thousand well-placed men and women, who instinctively know each others' feelings, signal to each other in print. They argue politics and morals, they exchange private jokes, they ride their hobby horses.'

Mr Woolley, a man you might imagine to be a letter writer himself if he ever had the time, is the dam keeper. He must read each letter with care, sifting, always sifting, and pondering the claims for printed immortality with patience and justice. From the 300 to 500 letters a day he can seldom print more than twenty. But, kind man that he is, he acknowledges each letter, assuring its author that the missive's contents have been 'noted' and that it was read with 'interest'.

Naturally, there is fierce competition to get letters into the paper. Some corres pondents deliver their contributions by hand, typed on fine vellum by an IBM `golfball', but the crank in the Frog and Nightgown scrawling on his Basildon Bond writing paper has every chance of taking precedence. What the great Mr Woolley is looking for is almost indefinable: an alchemy of proposition and declamation, a shooting star of reason, a dark vein of English eccentricity, a merciless slash of common sense—a Times letter.

Perhaps one like this: 'Several years ago I bought a very ingenious mousetrap which actually caught one mouse. The cheese was placed in a cage and approached through a small doorway. When the mouse had entered, the door automatically closed behind him. And when, bored with trying to get at the cheese, he sought to depart, the only way open was up a sloping tunnel.

At the top he came out onto a platform, which tipped over under his weight and deposited him in a tank of water. As the platform returned to level, it released a catch which opened the front door for the next victim. It is only fair to the mice to say that the one caught by this apparatus was too young to know any better.'

It is easy to see why that letter made it. The fact that it came (in 1931) from Colonial Office Under-Secretary Sir Charles Jeffries is beside the point. Sir Charles was an eminent figure but he had, perhaps unwittingly, stumbled on one of the access routes to fame in the Letters Column.

First of all, he had clearly no axe to grind. He was not concerned in the manu facture of mousetraps. And he had told a story with a beginning, middle and end. He had also written about an animal—a small animal—and this was sure to seduce the English reason. He had also succeeded in describing, in commendably simple terms, a technical feat. Finally, as a gentleman, he had tempered his justifiable pride in capturing the mouse by the modest allowance that it was 'too young to know any better'.

Of course, there is no lack of peevishness and ill-feeling among those who get snagged in Mr Woolley's sifting nets. The poor man is badgered by letter and by telephone from angry failures. Often, these bitter men (usually they are men) impute sinister reasons for their downfall: the cause they espouse is one which the Times is seeking to discredit ; they are not persons of sufficient distinction; they do not write from the Reform Club; their faces do not fit, and so on.

One correspondent wrote: 'The criteria by which you recognise your correspondents are no more to be bandied about by ordinary people than those governing the nomination of bishops, Royal Commissioners, Presidents of the MCC or even newspaper editors'.

We must surely hope that the great tide keeps flowing, bearing news of left-handed kipper-eating, reading in bed, luminous owls and the first cuckoo. People will tell their tales, dish their enemies, present their schemes or simply raise their voices from that vast, slumbering mediaeval land that lies to the north of Potters Bar and the south of the old Croydon Aerodrome. Serious matters will be revealed, and other papers will once more chase the night away after another big story which started in the Times Letters Column. (Mr Woolley, conscious of his page's integrity, will not give Times newshounds an early start : they follow up after the first edition, too.) At the centre of the tide sits Geoffrey Woolley, a former Washington correspondent (of the salaried variety) and a happy man whose one ambition, to become Letters Editor of the Times, was realised twenty-two years ago.

This conscientious man—he rarely takes luncheon, a bizarre self-denial in the newspaper world—reads all the letters, answers all of those not used, attends to the printing of successful entries and clears everything with William Rees-Mogg, the Editor. Mr Woolley also makes sure that every letter is appropriately filed. And, if it is on a subject on which the Times has a staff specialist, then he passes the letter on for 'information'.

I have been looking through some past Letters Columns and they really are lodestars of information. But, alas, one is always tempted to choose the letter which is funny. My favourite concerned reading in bed: 'I am surprised that none of your correspondents have posed the obvious solution—the provision of a series of slits in the bedclothes through which the hands may be projected in the manner of the old-fashioned Turkish bath box.

'When not in use the slits may be closed by zips or buttons, or even a handful of straw, barley for preference, as being softer than wheat or oats. It should, however, come from the binder as the combine generally breaks it up and makes it rather untidy for indoor use.'

An anthology of Times letters is to be published next month by George Allen and Unwin. [predict that now the news is out, a letter to the Times along the following lines will turn up: 'Dear Sir: It is not my purpose to advance my own name in any way, but when I heard that you were to bring out an anthology of letters, I naturally felt, in my position as one of those fortunate enough to have had a letter published in your estimable page, that my advice to you on which letters to select for the book might be welcome ...'