C. P. Scott

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Prestwich Scott (26 October 1846 – 1 January 1932) was a British journalist, publisher and politician.

Born in Bath, Somerset, England, he was the editor of the Manchester Guardian from 1872 until 1929 and its owner from 1907 until his death. He was also a Liberal Member of Parliament and pursued a progressive liberal agenda in the pages of the newspaper.

Scott was connected to the Manchester Guardian from birth. The paper's founder, John Edward Taylor, was his uncle, and at the time of his birth his father Russell Scott was the paper's owner, though he later sold it back to Taylor's sons under the terms of Taylor's will. C. P. Scott went up to Corpus Christi College, Oxford and was still an undergraduate there when Edward Taylor offered him the editorship of the Guardian in 1867. He took a first in Greats in the autumn of 1869, then in 1870 went to Edinburgh to train on The Scotsman. He joined the Guardian in February 1871 and became its editor on January 1, 1872.

As editor Scott initially maintained the Guardian's well-established moderate Liberal line, "to the right of the party, to the right, indeed, of much of its own special reporting" (Ayerst, 1971). However, when in 1886 the whigs led by Lord Hartington and a few radicals led by Joseph Chamberlain, split the party, formed the Liberal Unionist Party and gave their backing to the Conservatives, Scott's Guardian swung to the left and helped Gladstone lead the party towards support for Irish Home Rule and ultimately the "new liberalism".

In 1886, Scott fought his first general election as a Liberal candidate, an unsuccessful attempt in the Manchester North East constituency; he stood again for the same seat in 1891 and 1892. He was elected at the 1895 election as MP for Leigh, and thereafter spent long periods away in London during the parliamentary session. His combined position as a Liberal backbencher, the editor of an important Liberal newspaper, and the president of the Manchester Liberal Federation made him an influential figure in Liberal circles, albeit in the middle of a long period of opposition. He was re-elected at the 1900 election despite the unpopular stand against the Boer War that the Guardian had taken, but retired from Parliament at the time of the Liberal landslide victory in 1906, at which time he was occupied with the difficult process of becoming owner of the newspaper he edited.

In 1905, the Guardian's owner, Edward Taylor, died. His will provided that the trustees of his estate should give Scott first refusal on the copyright of the Guardian at £10,000, and recommended that they should offer him the offices and printing works of the paper on "moderate and reasonable terms". However, they were not required to sell it at all, and could continue to run the paper themselves "on the same lines and in the same spirit as heretofore". Furthermore, one of the trustees was a nephew of Taylor and would financially benefit from forcing up the price at which Scott could buy the paper, and another was the Guardian's manager, but faced losing his job if Scott took control. Scott was therefore forced to dig deep to buy the paper: he paid a total of £240,000, taking large loans from his sisters and from Taylor's widow (who had been his chief supporter among the trustees) to do so. Taylor's other paper, the Manchester Evening News, was inherited by his nephews in the Allen family. Scott made an agreement to buy the MEN in 1922 and gained full control of it in 1929.

In a famous 1921 essay marking the Manchester Guardian's centenary (at which time he had served nearly fifty years as editor), Scott put down his opinions on the role of the newspaper. He argued that the "primary office" of a newspaper is accurate news reporting: in his now-clichéd words, "comment is free, but facts are sacred". Even editorial comment has its responsibilities: "It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair". A newspaper should have a "soul of its own", with staff motivated by a "common ideal": although the business side of a newspaper must be competent, if it becomes dominant the paper will face "distressing consequences".

C. P. Scott remained editor of the Manchester Guardian until July 1, 1929, at which time he was eighty-three years old and had been editor for exactly fifty seven and a half years. His successor as editor was his youngest son, Ted Scott, though C. P. remained as Governing Director of the company and was at the Guardian offices most evenings. He died in the small hours of New Year's Day 1932. In 1874, he had married Rachel Cook, who had been one of the first undergraduates of the College for Women, Hitchin (later Girton College, Cambridge). She died in the midst of the dispute over Taylor's will. Their daughter Madeline married long-time Guardian contributor C. E. Montague; eldest son Lawrence died in 1908, aged thirty-one, after contracting tuberculosis; middle son John became the Guardian's manager and founder of the Scott Trust; and youngest son Ted, who succeeded his father as editor, drowned in a sailing accident after less than three years in the post. John and Ted Scott jointly inherited the ownership of the Manchester Guardian & Evening News Ltd.; after Ted's death John passed it on to the Scott Trust.

[edit] Quotations

  • "[A newspaper's] primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted."
  • "Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it."
  • "Truth like everything should be economized." (quoted in Europe: Grandeur and Decline by A.J.P. Taylor p.237)
  • "Comment is free, but facts are sacred."

[edit] References

  • David Ayerst, Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper London: Collins, 1971

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Media offices
Preceded by
Edward Taylor		 Editor of The Manchester Guardian
1872 - 1929		 Succeeded by
Edward Taylor Scott