The Collector

"I believe in the hellfire and brim-stone," said Lord Beaverbrook as he tried to engage Fellow Publisher Roy Thomson in a religious discussion. "Well, I'll tell you my idea about that," replied Thomson, who had purchased a newspaper in Edinburgh a few years back. "When I first got to Scotland, a fellow said, 'Are you a Presbyterian?' and I said, 'I am now.' " "Oh my God," groaned Beaverbrook, giving up.

To Beaverbrook, practical, plain-spoken Thomson was a new and alarming enigma in the publishing world. With disarming candor, Thomson always admitted that he was in the newspaper business only for profit. "I buy newspapers to make money to buy more newspapers to make more money," he once announced. "As for editorial content," said the Canadian-born publisher who at 71 owns 128 newspapers and 80 magazines, "that's the stuff you separate the ads with."

Dimes for Tips. In Roy Thomson of Fleet Street, Thomson's first biography, Australian Writer Russell Braddon skillfully retraces the publisher's dedicated pursuit of the dollar. Thomson is not an easy man to write about, but Braddon has made the most of meager information. Myopic but energetic, Thomson went to work at 14 for a rope factory, where he soon exhibited a "passionate devotion to money." He took time off only to marry a red-haired girl named Edna. "One of the best selling jobs I ever done," he commented.

At 24, Thomson decided to become a farmer in Saskatchewan, but the bleak and lonely life sent him scurrying back east. "Goddam, what a fool I am," he berated himself. He turned to selling radios in desolate northern Ontario, then discovered that people heard only static. So he built his own radio station. When the Timmons, Ont., Citizen pressured him to drop a certain news program, Thomson angrily bought out the paper for $6,000. Inadvertently, he had started his publishing empire.

Anxious to improve the paper, Thomson mailed 100 dimes to small town papers around the U.S. and asked for copies. He pored over them for days looking for tips. He began to buy up other small Canadian newspapers, but he insisted that each paper be the only one in town; if it was not, he forced the competition to sell out by cutting ad rates to the bone. He applied the same stringent budget to every paper, keeping tabs even on glue and pencils. But editorially, he left the papers alone. "If any of our editors were to come out against either God or the monarchy, I guess we'd have to do something, but failing that . . ." he shrugged. When he ran for Parliament in Toronto in 1953, some of his own papers did not support him. He lost the election by 2,400 votes.

Dazzled by Color. Everywhere he went, the genial Canadian chilled fellow publishers by eagerly asking "Wanna sell?" At first, they usually said no, but later they often said yeah. When he ran out of papers to buy in Canada, Thomson shifted overseas and bought Edinburgh's venerable Scotsman. He took advertising off the front page and perked up the news coverage. He waded into television, setting up Scotland's first commercial channel. He bought Lord Kemsley's newspaper chain in 1959 and found himself on Fleet Street as the proprietor of the august Sunday Times.

From Fleet Street, Thomson moved in every direction, gobbling up papers in Africa, the West Indies and the U.S., as well as in England. Thomson started a Sunday Times color supplement in 1962. He lost $2,000,000 the first year, but after that the Times's circulation jumped 120,000. Desperately, the other London papers rushed to get their own color supplements into print.

Lately Thomson has begun to change his image a little. "I am not," he protests, "a very charitable man." Nevertheless, he set up a $14 million foundation for education in Africa. In 1963, he celebrated the first birthday of his color supplement by flying a group of British businessmen to Moscow to meet Khrushchev. "Under our two systems," Thomson told Khrushchev, "I am a capitalist and have come up, and you're a Communist and have come up." Thomson takes his self-appointed role as a broker between East and West so seriously that he went to Moscow again last September to have a chat with Kosygin.

Thomson was also determined to have a peerage. When he discovered that Canadians are not eligible for that honor, he became a British citizen and kept badgering everyone he knew in British politics, including Prime Minister Macmillan. Finally, last year he got his peerage and decided to call himself Lord Thomson of Fleet. Why had he gone to all the trouble? "It was the best way to prove to Canadians that I'm a success."

*A sampling: Max Lerner, Senator William Dodd, Senator Hugh Scott, Roger Hillsman, Representative Emanuel Celler.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.