Death of Riddell

In London last week Death, in the form of pneumonia, came to George Allardice Riddell, First Baron of Walton Heath. Lord Riddell left neither title nor barony. He was childless and the seat of his title was one bare room at his suburban golf club. Thus abruptly came an end to the career of an amiable British gentleman who was one of the most successful publishers the world has ever known.

Born in 1865, George Riddell was admitted to the bar at 23, and that very same year turned to journalism when he bought part-ownership in the local Western Mail. The turn of the Century found him in London, the proprietor of News Of The World. An insatiably curious man, with a reputation of being able to bewitch a stranger's life story from him in ten minutes, Publisher Riddell capitalized on the universal craving for information about crises in other people's lives. Few British dailies have Sunday editions, and in 1900 few dailies anywhere had learned the trick of scandalmongering as a circulation-builder. Published on Sunday only, News Of The World under Riddell management became a bulky budget of news from the British police courts. Maintaining only a small editorial staff of his own. Publisher Riddell drew the mass of his material from reporters on daily papers who were encouraged to furbish up their most sensational stories of the week and send them along to News Of The World's offices in Bouverie Street. It was not long before News Of The World was as common a phenomenon of the British Sunday morning as church bells. Full accounts of the nation's latest divorces, accidents and murders were devoured downstairs by goggle-eyed scullery-maids. Upstairs in her boudoir the lady of the house was feasting on the same spicy journalistic fare, for to the upper crust the paper's selling point was that it presented the week's scandal news in toto and in one lump. Up, up, up climbed circulation. By last week News Of The World had reached the record total of 3,350,000. And the current issue was typical of the paper's output for the past three decades.

Page One headlined:

HEAVY SENTENCES IN BIG DAIRY SWINDLE

Adjacent was a story about a London police official who shot himself because he was tortured by an "anxiety neurosis." The U. S. reader discovering an "Overseas Edition" for the first time, might well suppose from the succeeding 20 pages of rapine and violence that Britain had been struck by an unprecedented crime wave. A vast police court blotter, the pink pages of News Of The World shrieked:

BABY'S BONES SHOWN AT TRIAL ALLEGED MURDER ON WEDDING EVE

CHIEF ACCOUNTANT'S DOUBLE LIFE

DANCE GIRL WHO DIED WITH SECRET

GIRL STABBED IN HOTEL

TRAGEDY ON TOWPATH

DEAD ON LIME-KILN

Peeping up timidly through conflicting human passions were a few stories about rugby matches, some theatre and cinema reviews, a feature story on "slim-fitting undies," a romantic build-up on the recent royal wedding and, on the front page, a scholarly prognostication about the new Indian constitution.

The weekly political story in News Of The World has long been the paper's only claim to respectability. For years these serious articles have been amazingly sound and often just as amazingly forehanded. They are a lasting epitaph to that quality in Lord Riddell's personality which made him the companion and confidant of Big People.

David Lloyd George early made him a personal friend, golfed with him every week, saw that he was knighted in 1909, made a baronet in 1918, finally raised to the peerage. Publisher Riddell's brazen career in yellow-journalism was blandly overlooked when War was declared. He was appointed liaison officer between the Government and the Press and for four years kept the relationship as amicable as military censorship would permit. The Versailles Conference found him the affable go-between of the British signatories and the Press. A newsman at heart, Lord Riddell was disappointed when Clemenceau truculently refused to have the signing ceremony take place at the historic hour of 11 a. m. because the "Tiger" was hungry and wanted to get to lunch.

The Riddell tact, kindliness and news-sense were first demonstrated in the U. S. at the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1921. At his own expense, Lord Riddell accompanied the British mission headed by Foreign Secretary Balfour. Elaborately disclaiming any "official" standing Lord Riddell acquired a room in the U. S. Navy Department's stucco building on the Mall, proceeded to "dope" the conference for U. S. newshawks twice a day. Even during the long periods ot closed sessions, Lord Riddell's "unofficial" well of information, always extremely accurate, never went dry. His presence was a Godsend to correspondents who had to turn out daily conference stories whether the sessions were closed or open. That the world was flooded with press stories which did Great Britain's standing no harm seemed, at the time, a cheap price to pay for such daily assistance from the publishing peer.

Advertising space in News Of The World costs $11,000 a page.* To this extremely profitable publishing property, Lord Riddell added Strand Magazine, Country Life, a string of small provincial dailies. Almost austere in his personal habits, he never smoked or drank. His frailty, however, did not prevent him from doing prodigious amounts of work. His hands full with his own and the nation's business, he nevertheless kept an "inside story" diary of the War years, the third volume of which appeared this autumn. Intimate as this book is, many passages were omitted by Lord Riddell as "unsuitable for publication at the present time." "I work all day," he once said "because I like it better than anything else." The Riddell hobby was hospitals. So extensive was his philanthropy that British Medicine made him an Honorary Member of the British Medical Association and Honorary Fellow of the British College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

*Satevepost: $7,200 black & white; $10,350 four-color.

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