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London Day By Day by Peterborough, usually referred to simply as Peterborough, was a diary column in The Daily Telegraph from the dying days of the Roaring Twenties until 2003.
Origins[edit]
The Telegraph's diary column began about 1929 as London Day by Day,[1] with the anonymous byline of "Peterborough", a name chosen because the home of the newspaper was Peterborough Court,[2] on the north side of Fleet Street, the first passage west from Shoe Lane. The name can be further traced to the Bishops of Peterborough, who had a town house on the site from the Middle Ages. In 1711, a committee of the House of Lords declared one Andrew Hind, "living in Peterborough Court, near Fleet Street" to be the true printer of Jonathan Swift's "false and scandalous" lines beginning "An Orator dismal of Nottinghamshire". In 1863, the lease of the bishops expired and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners sold the reversion of the property to the Daily Telegraph.[3][4]
History[edit]
On 13 July 1962, the Night of the Long Knives, Bill Deedes was in the middle of editing the Peterborough column, in the absence of Salfeld, when he was called away to an urgent meeting with the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, at Admiralty House, and was invited to join the Cabinet as Minister without portfolio with immediate effect.[5]
Journalists[edit]
In 1945 Bill Deedes joined the Telegraph and was put to work on Peterborough under Hugo Wortham, the column's editor at the time. Deedes later described Wortham as "an irascible Edwardian with a warm heart, well versed in literature and the arts, and a wine buff."[6] Sir Charles Petrie later said he found Wortham to be "easily the best-informed columnist I have ever met".[7]
In 1959 Frederick Salfeld became the fourth Peterborough, taking over from Wortham.[1] In 1960 the young Auberon Waugh got his first Fleet Street job working for Salfeld on the column, and stayed for three years. Thirty years on, he commented that "I did not really feel restless and if left to my own devices would probably still be there today". [8]
Deedes worked on the Peterborough column for thirty years, in and out of Parliament, ending his contributions only when serving in the Cabinet between 1962 and 1964.[2]
When Quentin Letts joined Peterborough in 1987, it was his first job in Fleet Street. By 1993 he had risen to become editor.[9]
One of the last to work on the column was Sam Leith. The final Peterborough editor, Charlie Methven, continued editing the diary under its new name.[10]
Reception[edit]
In 1955, the Advertising Review told its readers
The Daily Telegraph enters its second century possibly more prosperous than ever before. With Viscount Camrose as Chairman, the Hon. Michael Berry as Editor-in-chief, Major-General Lord Burnham as Managing Director, Colin R. Coote as Editor, and Donald McLachlan as Deputy Editor, it has a very strong and well-organized staff. Among its many interesting features, one may perhaps point to its outstandingly brilliant gossip column 'London Day by Day' conducted by 'Peterborough'."[11]
In 1994, Gourmet magazine called the column "a popular mix of political gossip and topical commentary".[12]
Demise[edit]
In February 2003 Charles Moore, editor of the Telegraph, decided to rejuvenate the paper’s image, and one of the changes he made was to drop the title of "Peterborough", changing it to "London Spy". In response, Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, appropriated the name for a new Peterborough page and was reported to be "tweaking Moore’s nose", egged on by Max Hastings, Simon Heffer, and Quentin Letts.[13]
Nevertheless, in his book Editor (2003), Max Hastings reflected that
The gossip column, 'London Day By Day by Peterborough', was time-warped in the early 1950s, full of stories about the Speaker of the Commons finding his flies undone, or a witch doctor in Sudan who had held up famine-relief supplies for a fortnight. I wondered how we should ever get around to changing all these things. Old Telegraph hands declared proudly that it was the serendipity of the paper, the randomness of its arrangement, that won readers. We thought otherwise.[14]
The Guardian commented on the change that it would bring the diary "one step closer to the modern phenomenon of celebrity gossip columns".[10]
Bibliography[edit]
- Changing London; drawings from the "Peterborough" column of the Daily Telegraph, with Preface by Peterborough (F. J. Salfeld)
Notes[edit]
- ^ a b Frederick Salfeld (obituary) in Daily Telegraph dated 08 May 2001, accessed 2 March 2018
- ^ a b RIP Peterborough: By Jove! It's the end of an era in The Independent dated 25 February 2003, accessed 28 February 2018
- ^ Gillian Bebbington, London Street Names (1972), p. 253
- ^ Henry Benjamin Wheatley, Peter Cunningham, London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions (2011), p. 77
- ^ W. F. Deedes, Dear Bill: W.F. Deedes Reports (Pan Macmillan, 1998), p. 147
- ^ W. F. Deedes, Brief Lives (2013), p. 33
- ^ Sir Charles Petrie, A historian looks at his world (1972), p. 208
- ^ Auberon Waugh, Will this do?: the first fifty years of Auberon Waugh (1991), p. 154: "CHAPTER TEN Chester Row 1961-1964 I stayed working on the Peterborough column of the Daily Telegraph for another two years before beginning to feel restless."
- ^ Country Life, Volume 187, Issues 26-30 (1993), p. 106
- ^ a b Ciar Byrne, Telegraph takes Peterborough off the map dated 25 Feb 2003 in The Guardian online, accessed 2 March 2018
- ^ Charles W. Cousland, Advertising Review, Volumes 2-3 (1955), p. 31
- ^ Pearl Violette Metzelthin, ed., Gourmet, Volume 54, Issues 7-12 (1994), p. 102: "Quentin Letts writes the " Peterborough " column — a popular mix of political gossip and topical commentary — for the London Daily Telegraph."
- ^ Brian MacArthur, Peterborough makes its lovemark in the Mail, in The Times dated 19 September 2003
- ^ Max Hastings, Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers (2003), p. 43