Fifty years ago this summer the much loved and respected editor of a provincial morning newspaper lay terminally ill. Within four months the world would be convulsed by two simultaneous military and political crises. The editor would die at the climax of events, not knowing that his paper had played a crucial part in national and international affairs.
The editor was AP Wadsworth. The two crises were the Russian crushing of the Hungarian uprising and the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt over the nationalisation of the Suez canal. The paper was the Manchester Guardian.
To call the Manchester Guardian "provincial" demands a short annotation for anyone too young to appreciate the paper's postwar history. It was, indeed, a morning paper printed in Manchester. But, even in the mid-1950s, two-thirds of the paper's readership lay outside the city and its influence was already international. One of the extraordinary aspects of the paper's role in the build-up to the Suez crisis was the private back channel between the US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and the editor of this Manchester broadsheet, owned by a family trust and with sales of well under 200,000. This was, in short, no ordinary provincial paper.
Wadsworth, who had edited the paper since 1944, was to die on November 4 - the day British and French troops embarked in Cyprus for the invasion of Egypt and Russian tanks suppressed the Hungarian revolution. By then the new editor had been officially in place for four days: a 36-year-old foreign editor (and former tank commander) named Alastair Hetherington.
Between them, Wadsworth and Hetherington had set the Guardian on collision course with the British government, defiantly indifferent as to the damage this stance might cause the paper. The same was true of David Astor, proprietor and editor of the Observer - now sister paper to the Guardian, but then under separate ownership.
The Guardian's coverage proved so uncomfortable for the prime minister, Anthony Eden, that he tried to prevent the BBC from quoting from it and wanted the paper's diplomatic correspondent, Richard Scott, banned from the airwaves. He also floated a plan to take control of the corporation in the event of an invasion of Egypt.
Then there was the Times, which, in its own way, played an equally remarkable role in the crisis. Eden regularly called in its editor, Sir William Haley, to tell him - on a strictly confidential basis - operational secrets that he had denied most of his own Cabinet. Haley, initially supportive, was eventually so appalled by what Eden told him that he moved the paper away from outright support of government policy. Equally, he felt that it would have been bad faith either to tell his readers what was going on or to move the paper to a position of hostility towards Eden. "The result," said one historian, "was that the Times played dumb." Such were the gentlemanly terms of trade between press and politicians in that age.
Writing nearly 50 years later, Harold Evans, the former editor of the Sunday Times, applauded the courage of the Guardian and Observer, while questioning the commercial risks their editors took. "For sheer guts, it is hard to top the Observer's Astor and Hetherington, new to the Guardian chair in 1956. In the furore of their unpopular dissent over the Suez crisis, they pressed on with an incendiary investigation as well as denunciation, trying to document what was vehemently denied but is now an established fact - that Britain colluded with Israel. But the episode raises the question: is it great editorship or reckless indulgence to hazard the viability if not the very life of your newspaper?"
The story of how both editors risked their papers for such a cause is worth revisiting, if only for the light it sheds on the duties of government and press at times of great international tension and/or war.
The build-up to the Suez crisis began in late July 1956, with President Nasser's announcement that Egypt was nationalising the Suez canal. The Guardian's first editorial response (this was an age when 85% of readers read the main editorial of the day) urged people not to lose heads, nor to "underestimate [Nasser's] adroitness". It added: "The west can hardly use military power as a means of guaranteeing the oil supply."
Within a week Hetherington had received the first of his back-channel messages from the paper's Washington correspondent, Max Freedman, who had ready access to Dulles. The message jolted Hetherington. It confided that Dulles had been told (by the president's special envoy in London) that the British government was preparing for war.
The Guardian did its best to monitor the covert military preparations throughout August - subject to delicate negotiations over the official "D notices" that restricted all British press coverage. Freedman kept up a stream of private memos to Hetherington, one of which (August 10) summarised Dulles's feelings: "[Military action against Egypt] was being planned by British and French ... Felt case would not be understood in world. Morally indefensible. Would destroy United Nations if armed intervention ... A very, very grave situation."
The official history of the Times records that, during this period, Eden was regularly briefing the paper's editor, giving him so much secret information that Haley found it impossible to have free discussions even with his own staff, never mind pass it on to the readers. Eden told Haley he was glad the Times was not repeating its own appeasement stance of the 1930s. He confided in Haley and other editors that he was "encouraged" by Dulles's stance.
Over the coming weeks, the Times and Guardian furiously debated the legality of Nasser's behaviour and the threat of military retaliation. The arguments reflected the bitter divisions in the country as a whole - the most polarised since the Munich crisis of 1938.
The other national papers lined up in the pro-Suez camp (Express, Mail, Sketch, Evening News, Evening Standard, Telegraph, Sunday Times, Sunday Express) and the anti (Mirror, News Chronicle, Morning Star, People, Reynolds News), though the historian Richard Cockett has written: "Only the Manchester Guardian and Observer argued consistently against [military action] throughout the crisis (accompanied by the Economist, which came out against it in the plainest of terms on November 2 as the British assault on Egypt started)."
There seemed - to the watching world - to be a lull during September and early October while diplomacy continued. No one - including most of Eden's closest colleagues - knew that the French had proposed a secret Franco-Israeli plan whereby Israel would attack Egypt, allowing the British and French an excuse to occupy the land on either side of the canal under the pretext of "peacekeeping". By October 24 Eden was covertly committed to the sham war.
The Israeli attack was duly launched on October 30. Hetherington - still not yet officially editor - immediately sat down and wrote the most uncompromising leader, which began with an unforgettable flourish: "The Anglo-French ultimatum to Egypt is an act of folly, without justification in any terms but brief expediency. It pours petrol on a growing fire. There is no knowing what kind of explosion will follow." David Ayerst's history of the Guardian, published in 1971, notes: "Most leading articles are fugitive pieces, but some of the young Manchester Guardian men of 1956 can still quote these words, verbatim, unrehearsed."
Ayerst also records that because of the paper's position, its reporters "often met with hostility as they went about their business". Now that British troops were committed to military action, the charge of treason was flung at those newspapers that didn't support the boys in khaki. The north Manchester circulation manager, Norman Shaw, was one of the first to flag up alarm signals at the number of cancellations by readers. "[The Manchester Guardian] became a dirty word," he recalled later. "It became the fashion to stop the thing. People used to say, 'I'm never going to have it in the house.' It hit me in the pit of the stomach."
But the popular mythology that both Guardian and Observer suffered a massive haemorrhaging of circulation doesn't stand up to scrutiny - not that the editors knew it at the time. The Guardian did sustain some losses in the north-west, but more than made up for it in the south. The Observer sales continued their previous growth - though the paper was hit by an advertising boycott, the effects of which were long-lasting and debilitating.
Though Anglo-French-Israeli collusion was widely suspected, all three governments lied about the matter and there was a shortage of concrete proof (though the Times had by now been let into a secret so closely guarded that Eden tried to persuade the French and Israeli governments to destroy their written agreements).
At the Observer, David Astor independently worked out what must have happened and asked Dingle Foot, a barrister and former Liberal MP, to draft an editorial excoriating Eden. Astor's contribution was to add one sentence: "We had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and crookedness." Like the Guardian, the paper was denounced in parliament and accused of treason.
It was the Guardian that, just over two weeks later, produced the first irrefutable proof of Israeli-French collusion - in a dispatch filed from Cyprus by James (now Jan) Morris. His front-page report on November 20 asserted that French pilots had played a key role in the Israeli attack on Egypt. Kennett Love's history of the Suez war captured the full impact of Morris's report: "Morris ... despatched French pilots' accounts of attacking Egyptians in the Sinai, of flying cover over Israeli territory, and of dropping supplies to Israeli paratroopers at Mitla Pass. Morris attributed to French flyers a 'ghastly accuracy' in napalm attacks on Egyptian war vehicles he saw burnt out in the desert. He said the French role was possibly decisive in Israel's Sinai victory.
"Against all this he reported [Israeli chief of staff General Moshe] Dayan's official - and false - denial of French participation. The French and Israeli Defence and Foreign Ministries, too, promptly denied Morris's dispatches. British cabinet ministers, in general, evaded parliamentary questions about collusion by answering questions that were not asked instead of giving concrete replies to questions that actually were asked ... Eden gave the House a false statement on December 20: 'There was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt.' "
Last week I asked Morris how she could have been so certain in her reporting in the face of such widespread and blank denials. She replied: "Having been with the Israeli army in the Negev, I was in Cyprus, escaping the Israeli censorship and, killing time while awaiting my flight back to Tel Aviv, I wandered about the airfield. It must have been quite an elementary field in those days, because I seem to have strayed into an unfrequented corner where I came across some French aircraft, with their crews.
"They told me quite frankly that they had been in action in support of the Israelis during the Negev fighting, and had used napalm. The stuff was new to me, but its awful effects I had seen for myself. You ask me how I could report the fact of collusion with such confidence: well, I suppose I was perfectly convinced by what the men had told me, and also, I fear, I was prepared to take a gamble."
She added that, before Suez, she had not always been sympathetic to the Guardian, which was a little leftwing for her tastes. "Suez changed all that. Can you imagine another paper staking so much on the word of a reporter? After Suez my feelings about the paper changed completely."
Over the following 20 to 30 years the main participants in Suez published memoirs that finally revealed the extent of deception at the time and corroborated both the Guardian's reporting and judgment. Hetherington remained convinced that, even at times of war, newspapers have a duty to remain critical of their political leaders. "It mattered that Eden and his colleagues were known not to be speaking for the whole British people," he later wrote. "When the time came to restore relations afterwards ... it was more readily possible because within the United Kingdom there had been a vigorous and vocal resistance to the government's aggressive action."
It may well be significant that both the Guardian and Observer were owned by family trusts. At the Observer, four of the paper's trustees - half the board - resigned within a fortnight of the November 4 editorial. They could in theory have rebuked Astor, or even sacked him. Astor's biographer noted: "The fact that these resignations made no discernible difference to the policy of the paper tells its own story."
Laurence Scott, who was responsible for the business side of the Guardian, broke the news to Hetherington of the initial slump in sales - and simultaneously told him not to let the figures affect his editorial judgment in any respect. A grandson of the great editor CP Scott, he understood as well anyone in the entire saga that comment was - and should remain - free.