John Walter II

English journalist

  • Born: February 23, 1776
  • Birthplace: London, England
  • Died: July 28, 1847
  • Place of death: London, England

The son of the founder of The Times of London, Walter fought to establish principles and practices that are fundamental to modern journalism, above all the freedom to report and interpret the news independent of financial sponsorship or government pressure. Under his leadership, The Times became the leading newspaper of Europe and created a body of informed public opinion that had the power to move government.

Early Life

John Walter II was the second son and fifth child of John Walter and his wife, Frances Landen. His father, a London businessperson who turned to printing in middle age after losing his shipping business in the American Revolution, had started The Daily Universal Register in 1784 as a way of publicizing a new printing technique, “logography.” The newspaper prospered more than the process: By 1792, the paper—by then renamed The Times—had one of the largest circulations among English morning papers. “Logography” had been abandoned.

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Walter attended Merchant Taylor’s School in 1787. At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to the London printer Thomas Longman but soon transferred to work under his father in Printing House Square. In 1796, he went to Oxford with the intention, apparently, of studying for the church but was recalled by his father the following year to work in the printing house. Walter’s father had handed over the management of his business and newspapers to his eldest son, William, in 1795, but this arrangement was evidently not a success. On Walter’s return, he was made an equal partner with his father in the printing end of the business, while William remained editor of the papers. In 1801, at the age of twenty-five, Walter was given a sixteenth share of profits from The Times and from his father’s other paper, The Evening Mail. From 1803, he became sole manager and editor of The Times. His father, though still principal shareholder, did not interfere with his management of the paper. Indeed, he had been contemplating closing it down because the circulation had again dropped.

Life’s Work

Walter quickly put his stamp on The Times . At this time, newspapers were assumed to be venal, and journalism was considered hardly a respectable profession. It was customary for newspaper printers to cover some of their printing costs through political favors of one sort or another, whether to politicians or to customers. The elder Walter allied himself with William Pitt the Younger, newly in office, and sang his praises in the paper. He also sought and won the post of printer to the Customs Office in 1787, accepted from the Treasury three hundred pounds a year as “reward for the politics of the paper” from 1789 to 1799, routinely took payment for printing corrections and retractions to unflattering news reports, and as regularly accepted payment for theatrical puffs written by theater management (masquerading as impartial reviews).

Walter’s son took every opportunity to break with this practice, struggling doggedly with the authorities and others whose interests were vested in the existing system. After some years, he succeeded in shaping a paper whose reputation for integrity brought it a circulation large enough to give financial independence, and thus political freedom. In a remarkable statement of principle in a leading article of The Times (February 11, 1810), Walter spelled out his objectives and his experience in trying to reach them.

An early opportunity to take a stand concerned the position of printer to the Customs, which his father had lost in 1799 after printing words critical of the House of Commons. In 1806, Walter was invited to petition for return of the post. It was understood that its return would be considered a favor of government, to be repaid in due course. Though Walter certainly had hoped to recover the position, he refused the terms on the grounds that he did not want The Times to carry an obligation to any office of government.

For most London newspapers foreign news was derived from foreign journals that were sent to the English Post Office, translated there, and distributed at a price to the newspaper offices. From 1805, Walter began building his own foreign news service. The apparatus included dispatch agents and foreign correspondents and translators, and was on a scale unheard of at that time. The service, however, was unacceptable to the postal officials, and Walter found that dispatches addressed to him were being held up at ports, on orders of the Home Office. He protested, but to no avail: He was told that the delays would cease if he wrote in support of the government. He had his mail sent undercover to other offices in London, and with the Napoleonic blockade of English ports Walter hired smugglers to bring his packages to Great Britain. At this point, however, the government had the same difficulties as Walter, so he made a deal: His own blockade-runners, unmolested, would supply foreign journals to the government also.

Walter himself was described as proud, reserved, and high-principled: an able businessperson who was hard on himself and strict with others. He believed in hard work, thrift, and self-reliance; thus, he never allowed “combinations” of his workmen and in 1810 broke a strike among his men by helping at the press and case himself. His friends contrasted him with his father, a man who “never did an honest act in his life.” A family man, he had few close friends and little liking for social or political circles.

Walter established among the writers at The Times a system of anonymity in keeping with his own character, and that was said to have something of the quality of a secret society. Contributions to the paper were unsigned; positions on the staff of the paper were strictly confidential. Even within the organization writers might not know one another’s names. The result was a degree of unity and protection that was important for a paper that had put itself at war with entrenched elements of authority. It also protected the reputation of writers who had some social standing, and who would not want their association with a newspaper to be known.

In 1812, John Walter I died. His will made John II sole owner of the premises at Printing House Square, sole and salaried manager and editor of The Times, and holder of a share in its ownership. This will has been interpreted variously as an expression of faith in his son’s ability and as an act of revenge for the loss of the Customs Office.

With his father’s death, Walter’s work took a different direction. The Times had by now a reputation for serious news and comment, as well as a solid financial footing. Walter gradually withdrew from direct management of the editorial side of the paper and turned his attention to running the printing business. His greatest contributions to journalism over the next decade were in two areas: pioneering the use of steam in the newspaper printing house, and separating the work of newspaper editing from management.

Walter’s first encounter with improved printing presses was in 1804, when he underwrote the cost of developing a new “self-acting” printing system consisting of four presses driven by a single machine. After spending fourteen hundred pounds on the idea Walter abandoned it: He realized that, like his father’s “logography,” the invention would not work. In 1808, and again in 1812, he was approached by a German engineer, Friedrich Koenig, who was attempting to harness steam power to presses.

The demonstration of 1812 was convincing: Walter ordered two double cylinder presses and two steam engines at a total cost of twenty-eight hundred pounds. In 1814, the presses were assembled and installed in the printing office in complete secrecy, for fear that the regular employees would see them as a threat to their jobs and destroy them. The old presses were capable of printing about 240 sheets an hour; the new ones could print 1,100. There were also savings in composition costs, for with the old presses Walter had been obliged to set type in duplicate for any edition of over forty-five hundred in order to get the daily papers out in time. The Times (combined with Walter’s thrice-weekly The Evening Mail) was for some years the only paper with a circulation large enough to justify the cost of Koenig’s machines.

After the new machines were installed, Walter looked for someone to take over the responsibility of editing the papers. His first appointment was John Stoddart, but Stoddart proved too inflexibly Tory for either Walter or his readers. Later, he promoted one of his own writers, Thomas Barnes, and this choice was most successful. With Walter as editor The Times had been known for the high quality of its foreign, legal, and parliamentary reporting. Under Barnes, its domestic news and forceful leading articles became equally famous. During this period, the paper earned its popular name, “The Thunderer.”

With Barnes in the editor’s seat, Walter was developing a life for himself outside the newspaper business. His first wife died within a year; in 1818, he married again and his son John Walter III was born. He had bought land and built a house at Bear Wood in Berkshire. Over the next ten years, Walter gradually removed himself from direct responsibility for The Times. This retreat probably had to do with his new ambition to sit in Parliament: Journalism was not yet considered a gentlemanly pursuit, and association with a particular paper would cast doubt on the impartiality of a man’s judgment. Walter gave up the salary of one thousand pounds allowed him by his father’s will and sold most of his shares in the paper to employees. In 1832, he was returned as the Whig member for Berkshire, a seat he held until 1837. He was known as a plain speaker and reluctant debater, but a vehement opponent of the Whig Party’s oppressive Poor Laws: a better representative of the people than of his party. In 1841, changing to the Tory Party, Walter sat briefly as the member for Nottingham.

Walter did not interfere with Barnes’s editorial policy, though he never gave up his ultimate responsibility for the management of The Times or for the hiring and firing of his staff. In 1841, Barnes died and Walter appointed John Thaddeus Delane his successor. Delane, the second great editor of the paper, held the position until 1879.

John Walter died of cancer in London on July 28, 1847. His son, John Walter III, who had worked alongside the father for the last years of his life, succeeded him as proprietor of The Times.

Significance

John Walter II’s outstanding achievement was to establish an honest daily paper at a time when such a thing was almost inconceivable. Not only was bribery commonplace, but also most printers assumed that there was no other way to cover costs. Walter met and overcame each aspect of venality in his trade and finally demonstrated that a truly independent newspaper could indeed be supported by no more than advertising and the subscriptions of its readers.

Walter was not alone in his beliefs. His success in building the paper’s circulation showed that the public was ready to pay for serious reporting. When he refused to print theatrical puffs and printed candid theater reviews instead, Walter found allies among the young liberal writers of weekly and quarterly journals. When he found himself wrestling with the Post Office he published, on behalf of all newspapers, an account of the existing system whereby editors were obliged to pay the Post Office for foreign news. He was sued and lost the case, but the penalty was minimal and it was generally considered that The Times, and journalism, had won a moral victory.

The principle of editorial independence that Walter introduced is by no means invulnerable and has been tested again in many new circumstances. However, Walter demonstrated that a truly independent paper is a force with which government must reckon: a force that had not been seen before.

Bibliography

Evans, Harold. Good Times, Bad Times. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1984. A personal and angry account of Evans’s career as editor, first at The Sunday Times and then, for one stormy year, at The Times. Walter himself figures little, but the principles of editorial responsibility that he established become central to the tale and are reexamined in the modern context. Includes a bibliography, but it is mostly for the twentieth century.

Fulton, Richard D. “John Walter (1776-1847).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Academy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000. Edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. The recently revised, authoritative reference source contains biographies on each of the four proprietors of The Times: John Walter I, II, III, and IV. The Dictionary is also available in an online version.

The History of “The Times.” 4 vols. London: The Times, 1935. A work in four volumes of which the first, subtitled “The ’Thunderer’ in the Making, 1785-1841,” deals extensively with Walter and his two great editors, Delane and Barnes. This, the “authorized” history, was written by staff of The Times (anonymously, in their own tradition). It is thoroughly researched, indexed, and documented and supplies a list of published and unpublished sources. Remains the best published source available on its subject.

A Newspaper History, 1785-1935: Reprinted from the 150th Anniversary Number of “The Times,” January 1, 1935. London: The Times, 1935. A companion of sorts to The History of “The Times” and published on the same day, but by no means the same material. This book consists of a series of thirty-three studies of different aspects of The Times and journalism over 150 years: readership, reporting, the “agony” column, London newspapers, presses, type, and many other subjects. Walter has only a few pages to himself, but his work and era play a part in many of the essays. Illustrated and indexed but without bibliography or footnote references.