Word: randolphs
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Last week some of the toughest hides on Fleet Street were smarting cruelly from Churchill's thrusts. It was Randolph who punctured the inaccuracies in a series on his father begun (and abruptly dropped) by the Daily Mail (TIME, Dec. 12). Next to feel the sting was the Sunday Pictorial (circ. 5,466,255), whose blatant stories about a modern "virgin birth" created an uproar in the whole British press, until Journalist Churchill, under his frequent pen name, Pharos, in the weekly Spectator, exposed the fact that the hard-boiled Pic had been taken in by a prankster. Then...
...Though Randolph carries on a special vendetta against what he regards as the invasion of his own family's privacy, he campaigns outspokenly in columns, speeches and letters to the editor against all that riles him about British journalism, from the accent on sex and crime in the "popular" press (which led him to brand the press lords "important pornographers and criminologists"), to the smugness of the august Times...
...Randolph takes on all comers. When most dailies ignored his speeches attacking "the river of pornography" in the press, he printed the talks in a shilling pamphlet called "What I Said About the Press." Later he stung the Press Council, the British newspapers' own watchdog on press ethics, into scolding Daily Sketch Editor Herbert Gunn for changing an adverse criticism of a movie that his wife helped make into a favorable review. By then Randolph was busily battling the trade weekly, World's Press News for suppressing the story of that dispute because, wrote Randolph, its boss...
...Randolph's one-man campaign is a flagrant breach in the conspiracy of courtesy that by long tradition keeps Fleet Street mum about its own foibles. "It is a curious thing," he has written, "that wealthy men who own papers set themselves up to criticize every kind of institution, but they themselves are the one institution which is totally immune from criticism . . . Dog don't eat dog. That is one of the reasons why some of the London press...
Natural Gifts. As a boy under a doting father's eye, Randolph was taught to air his opinions. He sat at the family table, often monopolizing conversation and contradicting distinguished visitors. As he grew older, handsome young Churchill's assurance was taken successively for brashness, arrogance, and what the Sunday Observer called his "natural gifts in the unfashionable art of rudeness." After Eton and 18 months at Oxford, his assurance helped him pull off a seven-month, $12,500, U.S. lecture tour at the age of 19. It also helped him to lose six elections for Parliament from...