George Ward Price, the Mail’s star reporter, landed a series of scoops in the 1930s. But who was he really working for?
S
ome years ago, a colleague on the Irish Times took the columnist Nuala O’Faolain to lunch. Nuala was famous, and feared, as a controversialist who specialised in attacking popular pieties, unless it was the pietests who were under attack, in which case she would spring immediately to their defence.
The pair had hardly finished their starters when the colleague, who had been in newspapers long enough to know better, heard himself asking Nuala how she managed to have so many opinions, enough to fill 52 columns yearly, as well as the odd special assignment. Nuala, cutlery suspended in mid-air, looked at him incredulously and said: “What are you talking about? I haven’t any opinions – I’m a journalist.”
Richard Evans, although a former newsman himself, does not seem to have grasped the first commandment in the journalist’s catechism: stop at nothing in pursuit of a story. His subject, George Ward Price, certainly adhered to it. Dubbed by Ernest Hemingway “the Monocled Prince of the Press”, he was one of the most successful and most famous journalists of his time. Born in 1886, the son of a clergyman, he lived for 75 years, and died largely forgotten but extremely rich, leaving more than £125,000 in his will, “at a time when”, Evans writes, “the average annual UK salary was around £1,000”.
