SOURCE: Powell, Anthony. “The London Charivari.” In To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, Vol. IV, pp. 47-65. London: Heinemann, 1982.

[In the following excerpt, Powell describes Muggeridge's contentious tenure as editor of the English humor magazine Punch.]

Not long after moving to the country I lunched at the Authors' Club with Malcolm Muggeridge …, then Deputy Editor of The Daily Telegraph. The job seemed to suit him pretty well, his heart being in ‘news’ journalism, while the particular gradation of rank—so to speak third in command—represented a reasonably powerful sphere of influence not oppressively incommoded by too much responsibility.

During the course of luncheon Muggeridge told me that he had been offered the editorship of Punch. Foreseeing amusing possibilities he had decided to accept, notwithstanding the satisfactory nature of his position at the DT and its good prospects. He suggested that I might follow him to Bouverie Street as Literary Editor. We talked this over at the time, and after further discussions about detail it was settled that I should begin work on Punch in the spring of 1953.

When my parents were living in St John's Wood … my father had acquired in a saleroom a bound set of Punch running from the paper's début in 1841 to the end of the century; so that from the age of about twelve or thirteen I used to spend a good many hours of what seemed on the whole rather uneventful holidays brooding over these volumes.

Back-number Punch reading at an early age now appears to have been a drug shared with more of my contemporaries than I ever guessed at the time: a powerful narcotic inducing reveries that shifted about among heavy swells, blue china aesthetes, lion-hunting hostesses, patriotic Rifle Volunteers, and—something that bound all classes together in an egalitarian haze—the ubiquitous Victorian drunk.

None of these elements would have come to life so vividly in print. Punch letterpress, except for a few stray odds and ends, chiefly verse, was on the whole far less entertaining than the pictures, then in the hands of a dynasty of ‘comic artists’ later never equalled. Even as a boy I was conscious of the sharp change of gear when—with burlesqued Beardsley drawings and parodies of Ibsen's plays—the Nineties arrived bringing portent of the old order's briskly accelerated demise.

By the time Muggeridge suggested my taking over the literary editorship I had scarcely opened Punch—among highbrows a byword for philistinism and stuffy conformity—for years, while retaining a certain affection for the 19th-century volumes that had once been such a solace. In short I was well informed about past Punch, wholly ignorant as to the current paper. I liked the idea of working with Muggeridge, the job would not be badly paid, some days in the week would remain free for my own writing.

While the second war was still in progress the problem for all periodicals had been to obtain paper itself, rather than persuading the public to read whatever was thereon printed. The public would do that pretty well regardless of subject matter, reading material being in such short supply. In wartime and immediately after, Punch circulation (I speak from memory) was said to have reached a hundred and eleven or a hundred and twelve thousand. Since then an increasingly rapid descent had begun, the circulation (again I speak from memory) by now at the middle to lower end of the ninety-thousands, and steadily decreasing. About thirty thousand of these copies (something the management preferred to keep quiet) went to America.

The rise and fall in circulation of weekly papers is a complicated affair, apparently depending almost as much on how many of such periodicals are available on the market at a given moment as on the quality of what any particular weekly magazine can offer. Nonetheless, even if a determined stayer may automatically increase sales with the disappearance of even roughly similar rivals, obviously the contents must have at least some effect on the paper's standing with the public.

At this period Punch, still owned by Bradbury, Agnew & Co, was more or less a family concern. The offices were housed in a dignified and relatively historic building, 10 Bouverie Street, which runs south from Fleet Street. Its proprietors, hoping for some magical formula which would halt this steep decline, had now taken the hitherto unprecedented step of recruiting an editor—in short Malcolm Muggeridge—from outside the Punch staff, rather than make the traditional promotion from within.

This innovation was naturally looked on without much enthusiasm on the part of anyone on the spot who saw himself as a potential editor; being almost equally disesteemed by members of the staff not aspiring to such heights.

Of what the Punch staff actually consisted I had at that time little or no idea. I did not know personally by any means all the people responsible for Night and Day—designed in 1936 to put Punch out of business—a very mixed gang …, but when it came to producing a comic paper I could make a goodish guess where most of the Night and Day crowd stood. The same awareness was even reasonably true, anyway on the literary side, of those employed on the ‘serious’ weeklies. Punch, on the other hand, represented an entirely unknown quantity, something altogether unexplored.

Before going there as Literary Editor I think the only Punch figure I had ever come across in the flesh, that only once or twice, was A. P. Herbert. Then in his sixties, Alan Herbert, though his name appeared from time to time in the paper's pages, could no longer be called a very active contributor. To have met only him among the Punch group was no mere chance. Herbert, author, publicist, MP, with connexions at the Bar, in the Theatre, even with certain forms of academic life, moved through a wide orbit very different from the restricted beat of his contemporary Punch colleagues; yet more from the generation (one tending to be in their early forties) succeeding those. Few of these younger people—so I found—cared to mix with anyone except other members of the Punch staff.

The younger Punch journalists were inclined (not wholly without cause) to find Herbert's general demeanour at Bouverie Street something of an embarrassment; especially on such supposedly festive occasions as the Punch Christmas Dinner, when without the least provocation Herbert would rise from his seat at the port-and-brandy stage to sing a lengthy old-time comic song. Indeed after one such Yuletide reunion the Punch Christmas Dinner was abolished out of hand by Muggeridge, to whom in any case all traditional or collective merrymaking of whatever nature was utterly abhorrent.

Herbert's fullblooded unconventional toryism was also inimical to these younger Punch colleagues, most of whom (B. A. Young one of the few exceptions), so far as politics played any part in their lives, being mildly Leftish. They had never questioned the virtues of such institutions as the United Nations or the British Commonwealth, far less satirized their humbug. Muggeridge's anarcho-anti-Left-anti-Churchill-anti-intellectual-nihilistic-sex is fun/sex is sinful-diatribes against everything and everybody, expressed in a copious flow of political paradox, and four-letter-word imagery, naturally caused some astonishment, even dismay, at first onset.

In short so far from hearty Falstaffian mirth setting the tone at Bouverie Street the immediate impression given by the Punch ambience was one of lowish vitality sustained by a fairly dogged and longstanding complacency. That at least was my own first judgment; not an altogether fair one, because without much direction from above a coherent magazine was at least coming out every week, something that in itself required a certain degree of energy. Besides, the sitting tenants might understandably feel sulky as to criticism or innovation on the part of Muggeridge (no less his henchmen), more especially as one of their own number had now been passed over for the editorship a second time.

Nevertheless others as well as myself were struck by the peculiarly muted atmosphere of the Punch office, the apparent physical enervation, the inward-looking personal exchanges; a surrounding despondency alleviated only by an unusually charming team of girl secretaries. John Raymond, for instance (whose taste for the bottle and early death prevented him from fulfilling his promise as a literary journalist), observed that when he entered the Punch office he had the impression of arriving in a convalescent ward; no one seriously ill or crippled, indeed all likely to be out and about fairly soon, but still none of them quite A.1 at the moment.

It was, however, the health of the paper itself rather than its staff—some of whom were hale and hearty even to the point of actual athleticism—that needed urgent attention before its state reached palsied infirmity. What the cure should be was by no means obvious.

In one form or another most journalism depends on ‘news’, even a comic paper partaking to some extent of that need if its life is to be sustained. News may suffer thin periods, but, where ‘serious’ periodicals are concerned, never dries up entirely. A comic weekly, on the other hand, carries the additional weighty burden to that of merely reporting or commenting on the events of the day: it is expected to stimulate humour; be funny; make people laugh.

One might compare a paper like Punch with a human body subject to a recurrent weekly deficiency in certain essential cell-tissues, organisms only to be nourished by an inoculation of jokes: preferably good ones, but even indifferent or actively bad ones better than none at all. The more powerful the restorative, the better the patient feels in any given week, but, from the nature of the disease, even the utmost stringency of tonic injection can be calculated to last no more than seven days; when once again the ghastly symptoms of inanition begin to make themselves plain.

This incurable malady persists as long as the body's circulation shows a flicker of movement. The strain on practitioners called in to remedy the case can be severe. The different forms of treatment prescribed at earlier periods over more than a century are well set out in R. G. G. Price's A History of Punch (1957), which takes the story as far as the early impact of Muggeridge as editor.

The essence of the matter, as remarked, is that every week someone or other must fill the pages of a comic paper with at least relatively comic material: prose: verse: drawings. If an editor judges these slaves of the Lamp of Humour wanting in their duties they can be sacked, but—by an inexorable law if the paper is to continue—another chain-gang must be engaged to take up the hebdomadal burden of being funny.

The new brooms, especially if untried, may prove to possess less staying power than their predecessors, however much open to criticism, even crack beneath the strain. That must always be borne in mind. This particular problem, the regular weekly stint, is perhaps the main conundrum with which an intruding editor is faced.

Except for a few minor changes among out-of-office contributors in specialized fields Muggeridge retained the staff that had been producing Punch under the previous editorship. At the same time he introduced—a fairly mixed blessing—the practice of using a sprinkling of comparatively well-known extraneous writers to sharpen up the tone of the paper. So far as new blood in the actual office was transfused, apart from myself as Literary Editor, the only addition was Leslie Marsh, an old colleague of Muggeridge's on The Evening Standard, a veteran journalist brought in to collate and administer Punch ‘copy’.

The cartoonists—using the term loosely to denote all Punch draughtsmen rather than limiting it to those who executed the weekly cartoon—did not present quite the same potential for making drastic change as the various forms of writer.

There are of necessity fewer capable comic artists from whom to choose. A high proportion of the best of these are bound to be under contract to daily newspapers, organs in a position to pay much higher rates than any weekly magazine. Although the individual cartoonist can undoubtedly be galvanized by the attention of an acute Editor (over and above what may be had from the Art Editor) editorial problems in relation to cartoonists are not altogether comparable with those affecting the letterpress.

The Punch ‘Table’ (an inner circle of the staff, promotion to which was often achieved only after long years of hard service) met at Bouverie Street for luncheon once a week. At this meal (ample to eat and drink) the political cartoon was discussed. Formerly the paper had sustained two such illustrated weekly comments, the more weighty termed ‘the big cut’. By then only one survived, and at the moment of writing has been abolished.

The Agnews, father and son, partook of this weekly luncheon. Although not precisely skeletons at the feast—that would be going too far in speaking of a repast that was fairly lugubrious anyway—they inevitably constituted a faintly alien element among professional journalists who were their employees. The Agnews themselves never joined the debate to any noticeable extent, far less attempted to influence politically or otherwise the way things were going. I was on appointment to my job created a member of the Table.

2

Literary criticism, journalistic no less than academic, is by its nature bound to consist in some considerable degree of persons who can't write laying down the law to those who can. Literary Editors, whatever their own qualifications, are in a position to do no more than attempt to neutralize this perennial current (if not well disposed to its flow themselves) by eliminating so far as possible ungifted reviewers. That process is less easy than might be supposed, but just as Dr Arnold (I think) said the first, second, and third duty of a headmaster was to get rid of unsuitable boys, unsuitable reviewers are to be dispensed with just as expeditiously, as they do equal harm to a paper.

The literary editorship of Punch—anyway in my eyes—carried with it no obligation to be ‘funny’, although at first I had to resist certain pressures, internal and external, from those who assumed the book pages of the paper were principally dedicated by prescriptive right to humour. My view was—and is—that very little doubt exists each week as to which books ought to be noticed. Naturally length and manner of treatment must vary a good deal from paper to paper, but (except in specialized periodicals) not the books themselves.

So far as space allowed, the books I myself thought deserved attention would in future be reviewed in Punch. This meant imposing a relatively highbrow standard on a magazine with a long and obstinate tradition of active philistinism. Such a tradition, anyway so far as book notices went, was now to undergo a change.

In fact Punch book reviews, short and few in number, had been for many years on the whole tolerably if unadventurously written. The book pages—rather archly captioned Booking Office, a heading which perhaps too pious a regard for ancient usage prevented me from altering—almost universally a poor relation of the main body of any periodical, now gained a little status by the institution of a full-page weekly review. I usually wrote that myself, though from time to time Muggeridge would want to deal with a volume of political memoirs or something of that sort, while R. G. G. Price—a great standby for his accomplished short notices—might suggest some book he preferred to discuss at greater length. A few others also appeared on this opening page of the literary section.

Short notices were normally constricted to one hundred and eighty words. That just gave room to say what the book was about, express a coherent opinion as to worth, and—ideally—make some sparkling comment. Such notices were accommodated in a manner to convenience the printer (rather than the Literary Editor) when the paper was ‘made up’.

I would send the book out for review, the reviewer would then return the ‘copy’ (not always punctually), but when the proof had been checked by the reviewer and returned once more, the notice itself (except in some special case) would be inserted only when just the right amount of space was available at the back of the paper. For book notices the extent varied. They had to take their chance. Thus a book could be reviewed in its week of publication, or (especially if the reviewer had gone a short way beyond the bounds of one hundred and eighty words) might wait for weeks before seeing light.

No book's reception by the public can ever be predicted with certainty (the main reason why people can always be found prepared to gamble on the publishing business), but all connected with the writing of books will have their own ideas on this aspect. Let me give an example of a literary editor's hazards in this field.

After glancing through the pages of the review copy of L. P. Hartley's novel A Perfect Woman (1955) I decided the theme would not attract very sympathetic notices. Accordingly (conforming to the worst suspicious of those who denounce all literary criticism as a racket) I sent this friend's book to another friend (of mine not Hartley's) Jocelyn Brooke, who would, I supposed, feel well disposed towards Hartley as a writer; and let down an indifferent novel fairly lightly.

My judgment proved wholly at fault. A Perfect Woman received rapturous notices on all sides. Jocelyn Brooke, unusual in him, did not send his review within a week or ten days. On the contrary he delayed so long that I was about to dispatch a reminder, when it arrived with a covering letter. The note enclosed said that Brooke was sorry to be late with his ‘copy’, had thought Hartley's novel ridiculously over-praised, and done his best to redress the balance by pointing out some of the faults. In short Punch was practically the only paper to give A Perfect Woman a shabby welcome.

Two years later when Hartley's The Hireling (1957) appeared I thought the sinister undercurrents of the story (a hire-car driver makes advances to a rich young widow who employs him) might appeal to Maclaren-Ross as showing a more robust development; Maclaren-Ross allowing Hartley's abilities but demurring at the mildness of the plots.

That also turned out a misjudgment. Apart from differences in style, Brooke's review of A Perfect Woman was repeated in a slightly varied form by Maclaren-Ross's treatment of The Hireling. Such can be the consequences (and a good thing too some will mutter) of attempting to accommodate one's friends in the literary world.

Maclaren-Ross himself raised yet another problem. His daily life was in general designed in a manner to dodge a voracious pack of creditors, whose legal representatives in the form of bailiffs were for ever on his track. When the comparatively regular visits of Maclaren-Ross to Bouverie Street to collect review copies became known, a covey of bailiffs came into being outside, where they hung about ominously on the steps of the Punch office.

At last Agnew fils, with some justification as he had found physical difficulty in pushing his way through the mob of debt-collectors at, so to speak, his own front-door, came to me to complain. He asked if Maclaren-Ross could be dispensed with as a reviewer so that free egress might once more be established.

My answer was that I perfectly saw his point. As part of the proprietorship he was clearly in a position to lay down that Maclaren-Ross was no longer persona grata at Bouverie Street owing to the inconvenience his intermittent presence brought about. If Agnew fils stated that as an instruction from above, I was prepared to bow to the ruling without raising objection. But it must be an order. I was not going to abandon a good reviewer on my own initiative. There the matter rested.

3

‘St Agnew's Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!’ Leslie Marsh used often to lament on the day of the Table luncheon, but if the Agnews did not enfold the assembled company conversationally in a blaze of wit, they did their best to be co-operative, and were patient about voicing disquiets that must from time to time have afflicted their minds during the birth-pangs of Muggeridgian Punch. It was indeed nearly five years before the Agnews became visibly restive, heralding Muggeridge's own resignation.

I liked Marsh, with whom I shared a large room, but if the Beadsman's fingers were numb, his breath frosted from the chilly atmosphere of the office, that was just as likely to have resulted from contact with Marsh's own cosmic despair as any frost-bound demeanour imputed by Marsh to St Agnew. On his more genial side Marsh was a connoisseur of beer, could give useful information about pubs not only in London but all over Great Britain, especially the Welsh Marches which he knew well, also possessing an encyclopaedic knowledge of Victorian and Edwardian music-hall ‘artistes’ and their songs.

Severely conventional in outward appearance, Marsh was not without his own inner fads. Like not a few journalists he nourished within him a passionate hatred of Fleet Street, every cranny of which was long familiar to him. I have been told (though cannot confirm the truth of the story) that—showing more enterprise than most romanticizers of rural life—Marsh had actually abandoned journalism for a time in favour of working in the fresh air as a hedger-and-ditcher or some such category of bucolic employment.

This rustic calling, whatever its nature, turned out less attractive in practice than to muse upon in Fleet Street, and, having naturally lost professional headway by the experiment, Marsh returned to journalism an embittered man. On that account there were those at Punch who found him hard to get on with. Personally I thoroughly enjoyed his harsh response to his surroundings.

Marsh's gloomy humours were not decreased by his job, the truly Herculean labour of bringing a modicum of order to the administrative chaos which had hitherto prevailed in an office where, for instance, some of the old hands had been accustomed to despatch their ‘copy’ direct to the printer without its passing under any editorial supervision whatsoever. In this area—or rather preAdamite formless void—Marsh did a great deal to pull Punch together. As an all-purposes journalist he would occasionally contribute a piece himself from the extensive medley of odds and ends at the back of his mind.

What Marsh did not cover in the way of administration was mostly dealt with by Peter Dickinson, a young man who also had his being in our room. A poet and Old Etonian he too sometimes contributed to the paper, usually verse. Later Dickinson escaped to earn an independent living as a successful writer of detective stories. Years afterwards he told me that, as one might have nightmares that one were back at school, he sometimes dreamt that he was still in Bouverie Street trying to straighten things out.

The Punch office had indeed something of school about it—perhaps a common-room from which some of the more disgruntled masters ran a typewritten magazine—the scholastic atmosphere enhanced by bookshelves filled with rows of bound records of past sporting and athletic events; useful for checking up on the sometimes dubious claims to athletic distinction, ‘blues’ and the like, claimed by acquaintances.

Among the ablest of the Punch staff was B. A. Young. He had remained in the army after the war, completing some ten years service in all, three years of which had been in different parts of Africa. Young possessed a capacity to write readably and knowledgeably about almost every subject required by journalism: politics, painting, music, books, sport, economics, naval and military matters. He was at home at a NATO exercise as at Prokoviev concert or an exhibition of Braque.

A similar journalistic universality is attributed to Bagshaw in Dance, but no other resemblance in the smallest degree exists to Young, who was made caretaker editor when Muggeridge left some months before his contract was up. Young would indeed have made a talented—for once unphilistine—editor of the paper, but the management took another choice. Later Young went to The Financial Times to edit the arts pages, where possibly he was more at home than at Punch. Freddie Young, incidentally, provided some useful hints in defining the music likely to be played by General Conyers on his 'cello.

Another adroit Punch writer to help with speialiized information for Dance was Basil Boothroyd, who, having worked in a Lincolnshire bank in his early days, could supply just that smattering of professional jargon necessary for indicating the civil life employment of Territorial officers nearly all of whom came from banks. For a novelist to obtain such arcane trimmings, anyway in just the form needed, can be unbelievably difficult. Although there may be many bank clerks (or any other particular group) by no means every professional can provide from a given background the instances that carry conviction.

Boothroyd himself always retained a touch of the Three Men in a Boat trio, escaped from their London bank for a weekend, having a high old time on the upper reaches of the Thames. One could well imagine him in the straw boater and high straight collar of the period. It was a book for which we both had an affection, with its extraordinary mélange of knockabout farce combined with Walter Pater's most Pateresque prose. Like Freddie Young, Basil Boothroyd possessed musical aptitudes; once humming for me Vinteuil's ‘little phrase’, which, isolated and interpreted in such an individual rendering, deserved at least a few thousand additional words of Proustian analysis.

On the book pages Richard Price was an auxiliary with an unusually sure touch in undertaking the fairly thankless task of writing short notices; managing to convey what a novel was about (an essential sometimes disregarded by seasoned novel reviewers), make a joke, convey a word of warning to the potential reader without egregiously insulting the author; an action only rarely required.

I once discussed newspaper interviewers with Price, remarking on the sameness of their questions whatever writer was being interviewed, particularly the invariable enquiries about routine: ‘Do you write with a pen or a typewriter, do you sit down at 9 o'clock every morning, etc?’ Price replied: ‘All people have a fantasy they could write a novel if only they knew the trick. They think that cunning interrogation might take a novelist off guard—cause revelation of the secret—a particular sort of pen, brand of typewriter, format of paper. Once that is accidentally divulged, the interviewer, all shrewd readers of the article, will themselves be able to become novelists.’

On this matter of interviews a military parallel strikes me. In the army it is not uncommon for a soldier to keep certain items of kit purely for the eye of the inspecting officer. Small odds and ends that are a trouble to clean or to assemble are stowed away for daily use, an unsullied example presented. That is rather like what writers usually hand out at interviews.

4

Muggeridge was always rightly determined that the weekly spread of pictures should not be reduced in number, an excellent principle to check what is for some reason always a tendency. He acquired Michael Cummings, a cartoonist with a keen political grasp, to draw for the Parliamentary pages. That was not easy owing to Cummings's other commitments. The next Editor on taking over sacked this very capable commentator.

Increased space was also given to the work of another excellent cartoonist, Ronald Searle, whose line had a real originality. Nonetheless—so it seemed to me—not enough was done to reorganize the ‘art’ side of the paper in the manner Punch required. Muggeridge was by temperament not sufficiently interested in drawing, as such, but even in pictures too the Muggeridge years provide at least some meat between the pretty dry crusts of bread that make the sandwich enclosing them.

The main political cartoonist was Leslie Illingworth, who had worked for Punch for many years and was then in his fifties. An efficient draughtsman in the John Tenniel/Bernard Partridge tradition, Illingworth brought something of his own to a dying convention of cartooning that could have become hopelessly wooden, and was at best oldfashioned enough. Although of Yorkshire extraction Illingworth had been brought up in South Wales, thereby having become a complete South Welshman in appearance, manner, sentiment, humour, and passionate attachment to the Vale of Glamorgan.

Wholly apolitical in outlook himself, Illingworth was in a chronic state of having to illustrate political contingencies of every kind both for Punch and The Daily Mail, which also employed him as main cartoonist. The Daily Mail by no means necessarily propagated the same political gospels as Muggeridgian Punch, indeed often took a precisely antithetical standpoint.

Illingworth, who liked to be instructed down to the smallest detail as to what he should draw (directions that he would follow with consummate attention, always adding a certain development of his own) used to laugh about this appearance of double-facedness. He would ask people if they thought it mattered advocating one policy in one paper, its converse in another, but I don't think the problem ever kept him awake at night.

There was something very sympathetic about Illingworth's gnomelike features, body, and demeanour. I used often to sit next to him at Table luncheons. He was not a great talker, but his opinions were always worth hearing, at moments unexpectedly phrased. On one occasion he said he had seen John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger.

‘How did you like it?’

‘Oh, I liked it very well, but some of the time I had to stuff my handkerchief into my mouth so as not to laugh.’

Illingworth once remarked to me: ‘You can take it from a comic artist that, if any artist turns to comic drawing, something has always gone wrong in his life.’

I have often wondered what Illingworth blamed in his own case.

5

If the proprietors of Punch did not attempt to interfere on the editorial side of the paper, the same could not be said for some of the heads of department other than editorial. These, making up a convocation of perhaps a dozen souls, sat down together once a month at the same table where the weekly editorial luncheons were held, this time to discuss ‘business’ matters. At first, as Literary Editor, I was required to attend these joyless gatherings, but in due course Muggeridge decided that the Literary Editor's presence was not needed—something only too clear—and I was thankfully released.

Nonetheless I am glad to have witnessed the pressures to which an editor is subjected from some undercover elements within his own organization; something of which no notion can be grasped by merely working among these responsible for writing letterpress and drawing pictures; as opposed to printing, marketing, advertizing, space-selling, and the rest. Those concerned with such departments of Punch, no doubt quite properly from their own points of view, regarded their individual branch as of paramount importance in producing the paper each week. Accordingly not one of them hesitated to pontificate on how Punch ought to be run at the editorial end.

Members of the editorial staff, indeed all writers and cartoonists contributing to any periodical, may—almost certainly will—disagree to a greater or lesser extent with some of the decisions of their editor. Where Punch was in question, especially, an Editor could veer in individual policy between building up the relatively ‘comic’ and relatively ‘serious’ tone. At the same time Editor and editorial staff are likely to find some common basis from which to debate disagreements if these are voiced. In any case both parties are (or should be) all the time in touch with each other about the material making up each weekly issue.

Such common ground was often patently lacking during these ‘business’ talks round the Punch dining-table, where certain of those present appeared wholly unaware (some readers might have urged justifiably) that the magazine was at least intended to make people laugh. I remember, for example, one head of department firmly putting forward the opinion that a stimulating effect on sales would be achieved by a series of articles (practical rather than humorous) on such subjects as How to Build a Boat.

Similar textures of thought—though admittedly here ‘comic’ effect was to some extent taken into consideration—were given expression by discussions preceding the abandonment of the celebrated Punch cover, executed by Richard Doyle more than a century before, and continuously used since that period.

Arguments against Doyle's long established cover, however unappealing such might be to persons with any sense of continuity or appreciation of versatile design, were by no means out of reach; the most cogent being that a contemporary public for a comic paper had grown insensitive to the potency of Doyle's phantasmagoria (surprisingly erotic when closely examined), notwithstanding its long and popular reign. That such obtuseness could exist was made painfully clear by the comments of those sitting round the table.

Public indifference, however, was not urged as primary motive for supplanting Doyle's picture. Indeed sheer lack of interest one way or the other might have been advanced as a reason for retention. Muggeridge himself—in whom nostalgia for tradition would have been hard to detect with even the most delicate instrument—felt, I think, without parti pris in the matter; neither anxious for a new cover nor objecting to the old.

The proposition put forward by the adherents of change was a far more extraordinary one than allegation of public torpidity. On the contrary it was insisted that the Doyle cover was ‘not popular’ with bookstall assistants, because, being uncoloured, the magazine ‘could not be seen’ alongside other periodicals lying on the counter.

This—if, which seems highly unlikely, based on any form of enquiry over and above the hungovered daydreams and fevered nocturnal reveries of ad-men, running counter as it did to the simplest and most basic principles of camouflage—was extremely hard to swallow.

At that particular moment, doubtless in response to the ad-man doctrine being currently preached, multicoloured covers for weekly illustrated papers had become almost universal, Punch perhaps alone in sticking to its black-and-white (occasionally lightly tinted) cover. At the same time the Punch cover, a century or more old, was quite a different matter.

If those at Bouverie Street in favour of jettisoning Doyle had said: ‘We cannot hold up our heads among our fellows because our illustrated weekly does not look exactly like every other illustrated weekly’, they would at least have been nearer the truth. As it was, the argument put forward was manifestly absurd. Among piles of scarcely distinguishable covers in bright colours Punch and his Dog Toby in black-and-white engraving could not fail to stand out. In any case the Doyle design could easily have been topped up in bright colours had colour been everything. The fact was that Doyle was too good and had to be got rid of.

The postscript was that some Punch writer—possibly Richard Price—undertook a rough survey among bookstall assistants in his own neighbourhood some months after the change was made. He found none of them in the least aware that an alteration in Punch's outward appearance had taken place.

6

Muggeridge showed himself perfectly capable of dealing with snipers from behind his own lines. He had knocked about the world much more than most Punch editors, and possessed not only wider experience but sharper wits and not a little guile. If an unacceptable suggestion was pressed by Production, Advertising, any other business branch, Muggeridge usually had at hand a serviceable technique for shelving unwanted projects in a manner calculated not to give undue offence to those who had begotten them.

Indeed, with his ingrained political instinct for bypassing an awkward problem, Muggeridge was possibly more at ease in such extraneous spheres than in editing proper, when editing came to tedious weekly routines. In any case every Editor has his own foibles (a previous incumbent at Punch had objected to advertisements for alcoholic drink appearing in the paper), and at best ‘humour’ must be largely subjective. Muggeridge had a far keener sense of what was ‘funny’ than his predecessor or successor, indeed stratospherically outdistancing either, but bees buzzed with increasing fury in his bonnet; public affairs and political personalities tending more and more to cause insensate rage than satirical laughter.

Although he never ceased to inveigh against the Press and the ‘Media’, Muggeridge believed devoutly (to use one of his own favourite adverbs) that everyone truly thought and acted as Press and Media represented them to think and act. The notion of an individual wholly uninterested in politics was inconceivable to him, and—although he might have denied this—he would be irritated by the view that such sources of information were themselves often wildly misinformed and conspicuously wrong in judgment about what the public thought.

I remember Muggeridge being quite incensed by George Orwell saying that the depressing thing about political canvassing was not that people wanted the opposite party to be elected, but that they did not know that an election was taking place, what an election was, nor what happened in the House of Commons when you got there.

This complete confidence in the existence of a universal passion for politics, expressed by reading the newspapers and devouring the Media, seemed to me at times too great; the Editor's personal fascination with such things leading to jokes in the paper unintelligible to people whose minds and bodies were not confined to Fleet Street.

Meanwhile an exterior element loomed. This was the moment when television was developing at headlong pace, calling into being as it did so a new genus of popular figure, the ‘TV personality,’ something now as familiar as—though much more powerful than—what used to be called a matinée idol.

The role of television personality—one judges merely by a row of striking examples—seems to impose an intense strain on its virtuosos. Perhaps (to adapt Lord Acton) all publicity is disturbing to the nervous system of the individual, total publicity totally disturbing. The peculiar characteristic of the television personality is freedom from responsibility, that apparently providing its own peculiar and acute pressures.

The actor is governed by the disciplines of art, the politician by the exigencies of political survival. The television personality is positively encouraged by the condition of existence to be answerable to no one but self, under no sort of restraint other than remaining a recognised ‘personality’. The impression often given is that prolonged expenditure in that manner of the personality (as the Victorians used to suppose of masturbation) is cruelly hard on mind and body.

As television bounded into popularity Muggeridge, a born commentator in that medium, found himself more and more in demand. To invoke the image of Hercules—a potential television personality if ever there was one—the serpents so easily strangled in TV infancy finally gave place to a Hydra-headed monster, which, with its ferocious and multiple attacks on time and energy, might be said to have got the best of the battle so far as Muggeridge's (no less than Herculean) labours at Punch were concerned.

Interludes when the Editor could be pinned down in his room gradually became ever more fleeting. In my early Punch days some of the morning would almost always be spent talking of this and that in Muggeridge's office, a fusion of business and gossip that quite often produced features for the paper. Snap decisions, once characteristic of getting the week's number under way, were no longer on tap, while a pile of typescripts on the editorial desk grew ever more mountainous.

In short a rather different Muggeridge was now coming into being, a metamorphosis finally resulting in a parting of the ways with the proprietors; the casus belli being an old Muggeridgian stumbling-block, the deeply ingrained inability to grasp that toute la verité n'est pas bonne à dire.

Muggeridge was one of the most agreeable of men to work with; easy-going; quick on the uptake; aware of the absurdities of human life and human beings, most of all when concerned with journalism. Perhaps this latter perception became a little blurred as time went on, anyway if journalism be held to include television.

Muggeridge's nature had formerly seemed to me dual, indeed not much more complicated than the comparatively common dichotomy in many individuals between the frivolous and the serious. Now it appeared visibly (or rather televisibly) more nearly to approach triune form: the three persons making up the Muggeridgian Trinity each pulling violently in a different direction from the other as they took on an increasingly separate state.

In the beginning (such my own experience of the demiurge) was the sceptical wit mocking all, and the wit was with Muggeridge and the wit was Muggeridge. This First Muggeridge—never wholly exorcised but undergoing long terms of banishment from the Celestial City of the personality—would sometimes support, sometimes obstruct, what then seemed his sole fellow, Second Muggeridge.

Second Muggeridge, serious, ambitious, domestic (in fits and starts and when not led away by First Muggeridge's insatiable leaning towards licence), with a strain of Lawrentian mysticism (albeit D. H. Lawrence himself always coming in for Muggeridgian obloquy), had a spell-weaving strain and violent political or moral animosities (animosity rather than allegiance being essential expression of Second Muggeridge's teachings), both forms of vituperation in the main aimed at winning a proponderant influence in public affairs.

Third Muggeridge—doubtless always present in the spirit even when in the past invisible (at best faultily transmitted) to the eye of sinful man—was effectively made flesh during the later Punch period; a time when Second Muggeridge had initially seemed to be gaining in stature at the expense of First Muggeridge.

In due course, more than ever after Punch had been left behind, Third Muggeridge became manifest at full strength, hot-gospelling, near-messianic, promulgating an ineluctible choice between Salvation and Perdition. He who was not with Third Muggeridge was against him, including First and Second Muggeridge.

In this conflict without quarter First Muggeridge, who treated life as a jest—now so to speak a thief crucified between two Christs—came off worst (anyway for the moment, alternative avatars always possible), ending as a mere shadow of his former self.

The inner tensions of this trio of Muggeridgian personalities coursed like electricity through the Punch office during the last days of the Muggeridge reign at Bouverie Street. Indeed latterly I could sense an immediate buzzing in my own nerves on crossing the threshold of the Editor's door, so galvanic were they.

I stayed on a year after Muggeridge abdicated, being sacked at the end of 1959; release from a routine that was becoming increasingly unsympathetic, indeed decidedly irksome.