Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal

CHAPTER 8England

ARRIVING IN LONDON for the first time in early January 1950, I joined The Wall Street Journal’s three-man London Bureau—Englishman George Ormsby, the elderly, kindly, capable bureau chief who had served through the war and early postwar years, and reporters John Leonard, an American, and Frank Linge, another Englishman.

My first London interview was with Sir Eric Vansittart Bowater, chairman of the Bowater Paper Corp., Ltd. He was impressive—lean, ramrod-straight, starched in a high-collared shirt and tight-fitting Savile Row suit, the very image of the English aristocrat he was, right down to his spats, even then an anachronism from an earlier age. He predicted that if Labor won the coming election, the unions would unleash ...