Circles of Time by Phillip Rock

Author:Phillip Rock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

THE Daily Post building loomed over Fleet Street, its myriad glass windows and thin, fluted stone columns giving it the appearance of some vast Victorian railway station. Broad stone steps flanked by two cast-iron lions led to cathedral-size doors of gray-green bronze. Fleet Street wags called the place “The Golden temple.” And it was. Harry Golden’s monument to his journalism. Harry Golden—the great Lord Crewe.

“I’m just a Hebrew lad from Whitechapel who made his way in the world” was how Lord Crewe had described himself once to a magazine writer. There was no one who would dispute that claim, although the impression of a barefoot lad roaming the streets of the East End was far from the truth. Only the highly profitable family printing business had been in Whitechapel. Young Harry had grown up in a pleasant suburban house in Hampstead. But he had definitely made his way in the world, taking over, in 1885 at the age of thirty, a near-moribund newspaper called the London and Provinces Daily Post and Times Register, shortening its name and turning it by 1900 into the largest daily paper in England. He had done it by copying the style of journalism as practiced so successfully in America by Pulitzer and Hearst. He had pleased the masses with lurid stories of murders and love nests and had delighted the Tories by bolstering their vision of imperialism and empire. His jingoistic editorial policy regarding the rebuilding of the Royal Navy, the take-over of the Sudan, and outrage at the Boers had earned him a peerage. As a yachtsman of unsurpassed skill, Lord Crewe always knew which way the wind was blowing.

There was no day or night in the Daily Post building. Lights burned constantly and the giant presses in the cavernous basement rumbled on unceasingly. A uniformed page boy met Jacob and Martin in the foyer and escorted them to the private elevator that whisked them to the building’s top floor.

“Brings back a few memories,” Jacob said as they walked down a marble corridor toward the private suite of Lord Crewe—known within the building simply as “the Guv’nor.”

“Yes,” Martin said quietly.

It did indeed. Nineteen fourteen. Jacob had been a reporter on the paper, a specialist on the Byzantine complexities of Balkan politics. Jacob had liked some of Martin’s humorous travel sketches of England and had persuaded his father to give Martin a job as a feature writer. A year later Martin had been sent to Gallipoli as a war correspondent, but his association with the paper had ended when he had returned to London from the Middle East. He had been angered by the fact that none of his pieces criticizing the Dardanelles campaign had been printed. He had not known then to what extent the press barons of both England and America would subdue the grim truths of war. As he walked down the corridor now, past Lord Crewe’s vast collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, he could almost hear the Guv’nor’s booming sailor’s voice

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