The oldest (and once the best paper) of all

Desmond Albrow
THERE is both a commercial and ideological logic about the decision of The Guardian to take over the Observer newspaper. If The Independent had got its avaricious tentacles around the neck of what we journalists always call Britain's oldest newspaper (in the same way as we always refer to Portugal as Britain's oldest ally) the soul of the Observer would have expired in anguish. That, at least, is the conventional wisdom among liberalminded media folk.
But, I suspect, for me and quite a few other readers the newspaper lost its soul a good few years ago. What The Guardian acquisition will mean is that the Observer will retain its left-ofcentre general view of the world. That is a different matter: a question of hard politics, not of soft metaphysics.
There is no doubt, however, that the Observer once had an enchanting soul. In the 1950s, at its Tudor Street premises that from the outside resembled a high-class shop rather than the headquarters of a worldrenowned newspaper, it was, without doubt, the supreme quality Sunday under the inspired, if sometimes idiosyncratic editorship, of David Astor. It was a brave, radical, bizarre and typographically aesthetic product.
Like The Guardian of those times, it had opposed the Suez adventure of 1956 and subsequently suffered a heavy loss in readership and advertising revenue. But, and I write as one who worked in both papers, there was a vital distinction then between The Guardian and the Observer. The latter exuded a spirit of enjoyment and lust for life while The Guardian's highmindedness could be prissy and puritanic. It still set its face against the betting odds for horse-racing. There was no Mancunian methodism about the Observer. I was never a full-time member of the Observer staff. I worked for it on Saturdays to earn some valuable extra guineas (ten, to be precise). My fulltime job was with the Daily Telegraph. And what a contrast. The Telegraph was, in the best sense of the word, highly professional.
The Observer, in the best sense of the word, was supremely amateur. Its writers (John Gale, Patrick O'Donovan, Paul Jennings, Philip Toynbee, Ken Tynan., Mark Arnold-Forster, Anthony Sampson et al) had both the daring freshness and the sophistication of an unstuffy officers' mess.
Yet if the set-up was ideal for the talented amateur there were just enough hardened professionals (Ken Obank and Ronald Harker, for instance) to keep the amateurs in formation and the shop from foundering as deadlines approached.
• The Observer and its soul went marching on. It was the darling of the eggheads and those who cherished certain liberal values, a voice that could certainly be wrong, but a voice that spoke without.. commercial prompting. David Astor's deep pockets saw to that.
The 1950s, although we did not know it at the time, were the last years of innocence for the quality Sunday market. The Observer then had only one rival the Sunday Times. After Suez it outsold the Observer but in contrast was about as stimulating as its pompous owner, Lord Kemsley. Newspapers then were comparatively small in paging so that editors could truly edit them. Sunday quality journalism was essentially a
gentlemanly business. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s two things happened that changed all that.
Kemsley cynically sold the Sunday Times to Roy Thomson instead of to the Telegraph. The Telegraph retaliated early in 1961 by launching its Sunday sister to the Daily Telegraph.
The Observer had to fight for its share of the market. Its paging had to increase and eventually if had to enter the bogus world of colour-supplement
It became trendy and dangerously like any other newspaperDavid Astor honourably retired from the battlefield. First an A merican oil company took the Observer over before Loluiro took command. The paper no longer drove the sellers out of the temple. Somewhere along the road to survival it lost its way and its soul.
Perhaps it will regain it under the Guardian canopy.