For a newspaper to have any chance of survival it must strive to reflect the spirit of the age and to capture the imagination of its readers. When The Observer first emerged one cold December morning in 1791 it was aiming to do just that, proclaiming that it would be 'Unbiased by Prejudice, Uninfluenced by Party' and that its 'whole object was Truth and the dissemination of every Species of Knowledge that may conduce to the Happiness of Society'.
When he wrote those ringing words, the paper's first owner and editor,WS Bourne, was deliberately establishing the paper's DNA, the founding principles that have been at its core since the Age of Enlightenment and sustained it through the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Empire and the tumult of the 20th century.
But Bourne did more than just set out his paper's aims: he drew up the blueprint for all future Sunday journalism by promising that The Observer would report on 'the fine Arts... Science, the Tragic and the Comic Muse, the National Police, fashion and fashionable follies' - topics still liberally covered in the 21st century.
But founding principles and lofty aims aren't enough to sell newspapers. Robust reporting, sharp commercial sense and a willingness to grasp the latest technical innovations are essential to stay ahead. WS Bourne quickly lost money and turned to his brother for help, and, despite a tremendous scoop by the paper's star reporter Vincent George Dowling (he witnessed the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in the House of Commons and apprehended the killer), they sold to William Innell Clement, an early press baron who really understood Britain's burgeoning newspaper industry.
Clement expanded the staff, encouraged Dowling's adventurous reporting (he crossed the Channel in a rowing boat to be first with a royal scoop) and instinctively understood the power of pictures. Woodcuts appeared and circulation rose.
In 1821, a rival paper called The New Observer was launched in a deliberate attempt to cash in on Clement's success. Eight months later it changed its name to The Independent Observer and finally, in 1822, became the Sunday Times, this time trying to bask in the growing popularity of the Times. It had no more connection with the Times than it did with The Observer and had to wait until 1969 until it became a bed-fellow with 'The Thunderer'.
Clement's editor, Lewis Doxat, prided himself on never writing 'an article on any subject under any circumstances whatsoever'. He introduced new typography, more woodcuts and improved the content until 1857, when the ownership and editorship passed to Joseph Snowe. He championed the cause of the North in the American Civil War, heading this leader from October 1861 'The Moral Issue'.
All our sympathies are necessarily with the North. We should deplore, in common with all friends of humanity, the result of any struggle, long or short, that would end in leaving four millions of our dusky brothers in hopeless and confirmed servitude.
We have an early stirring here of the campaigning zeal that was to become such a feature of The Observer, but it caused a circulation decline that was not to recover until 1870, when Frankfurt-born Julius Beer bought it and appointed Edward Dicey as editor, who improved the arts coverage and raised the standard of foreign reporting and analysis. Under his editorship the paper took on a new tone, so that J Grant, a reporter in the days of William Innell Clement, was moved to remark that The Observer was now 'one of the safest contemporary papers to be put in the hands of ladies'.
Unease at Britain's imperial behaviour would become a hallmark of The Observer in the last half of the 20th century, but Dicey blazed something of a trail, roundly condemning the declaration of Victoria as Empress of India in 1877. Beer died in 1880, leaving the paper to his sickly son Frederick, who married a rich heiress, Rachel Sassoon, in 1887. She was far more interested in the paper than her ailing husband and by 1893 she was to own and edit both The Observer and the Sunday Times - something unthinkable today.
By 1905, circulation had plunged to 5,000 copies a week and closure loomed again, but for a second time a press baron rode to the rescue. Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, describing the paper as 'lying in the Fleet ditch', bought it to add an upmarket broadsheet to his popular, mass- market Daily Mail and Evening News.
He installed JL Garvin as editor and set the paper on a meteoric course, sprinkling some of his undoubted skill as a newspaperman on the paper. Here's a typical letter to Garvin:
'If we are to get a circulation of 70,000 or 100,000 it is essential that we should interest more people. Remember the women. If we can get this paper into 70,000 homes every week it will become a great power.'
But by 1911 Garvin and Northcliffe were having serious disagreements, and when Northcliffe found his own views under attack in his own paper he telegrammed Garvin 'EITHER YOU GET OUT OR I DO!' and gave Garvin three weeks to find a buyer.
The editor moved swiftly and the paper was sold for £45,000 to WW Astor, the American multi-millionaire, who gave it to his son, the Conservative MP Waldorf Astor. WW had moved to England in 1890 (with the famous remark that America was 'not a fit place for a gentleman to live') and bought Hever Castle in Kent and later Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, which he gave to Waldorf as a wedding present when he married Nancy in 1906.
Garvin thundered away in lengthy leaders on social reforms, MPs' pay, and, famously, on the conduct of the First World War (like so many others, he lost his son in the trenches). Prophetically, he warned that the Treaty of Versailles left no real hope for the Germans 'except in revenge'.
The modern quality Sunday newspaper is a descendant of Garvin's post-First World War creation, which sold 200,000 copies. He recast the paper, making strict divisions between news and comment, introducing new layout and typefaces and, in the spirit of the paper's original address to readers, he nurtured writing on the arts and books, theatre and music, and recognised film as a potent new force. He appointed CA Lejeune as film critic in 1925; she stayed until 1960. And EP Mathers, as Torquemada, devised a fiendishly difficult crossword, which lives on today as Azed.
When war came again, Garvin found himself at odds with his proprietor over Winston Churchill. Astor felt he should not be be both Prime Minister and Defence Minister. Garvin disagreed and stood by his friend. At the same time, Astor persuaded Garvin to make room for a feature entitled 'The Forum', to be edited by his son, David, which was to provide a leavening of liberal thinking on pages that had been dominated for years by the high Tory Garvin.
On 15 February 1942 a Forum piece headed 'What's Wrong?' called on Churchill to quit as Defence Minister. The next week Garvin wrote a leader denouncing the idea. His contract was due to expire the following week and Astor decided not to renew it, so ending a spectacular reign. Garvin, at nearly 74 years of age, had had an unparalleled 34 years at The Observer.
David Astor was to recall some 40 years later that 'as far as there was an editor in those dreadful weeks, it was me in my lunch-hour'. In 1942 he was a Captain in the Royal Marines, on the staff of Mountbatten's Combined Operations Headquarters, and could fully attend to The Observer only in his spare time. Nevertheless he took classified advertisements off the front page, replacing them with news and photographs, and began to nudge the paper away from Garvin's conservatism.
In announcing these changes he echoed the paper's founding principles, and added his own: that the paper must stand FOR something: 'The Observer is not a party paper. It is tied to no group, no sect, no interest. Its independence is absolute. But merely to stand alone, challenging and bracing as that attitude may be, is not enough. One must also stand for a system of ideas and for a pattern of constructive reform ...'
Astor had grown up in the intellectual hothouse of Cliveden, where the greatest minds of the day were often entertained and where thinkers, writers, politicians and journalists would gather on the terrace to argue away the long summer afternoons. It was an intoxicating atmosphere for the young Astor, and one that years later Observer journalists were to come to recognise, as the editor ran the paper like a Cliveden talking-shop, shaping the content through a series of conferences with the day's most interesting minds gathered round the table.
In 1942 he set out to hire new writers and met George Orwell and Arthur Koestler through Cyril Connolly. Orwell, who proved a distinguished war correspondent, was to have a profound influence on Astor and The Observer and they were to remain firm friends. Sebastian Haffner was one of a handful of brilliant Central Europeans who joined the paper in the Forties, along with Jon Kimche, Isaac Deutscher and EF Schumacher. Astor took the editor's chair permanently from 1948 and ushered yet more distinguished writers into the fold: Patrick O'Donovan, Hugh Massingham, Cyril Dunn, Robert Stephens, Michael Davie, Alistair Buchan, Colin Legum, Edward Crankshaw, Kenneth Harris and Nigel Gosling all brought style, authority and wit. Vita Sackville-West wrote on gardening; John Davy on science and Kenneth Tynan's dramatic criticism was required reading. Terence Kilmartin's literary pages won awards for 'unwavering upholding of quality'.
The paper set new standards in reporting on Europe, on the third world and on Britain's colonial interests. It challenged readers' assumptions about Britain's place in the world, its relations with Africa and the Middle East and it asked hard questions about living in a post-war world dominated by two nuclear superpowers.
Circulation rose as more readers turned to The Observer for a radical, intelligent view of the world; its reporting on Africa proved prophetic, and, at home, it led the way on penal reform, race relations, education and the emerging health service.
The year 1956 is a special one in Observer history. In that year the paper launched its long campaign against the death penalty; it cleared an entire edition to publish all 26,000 words of Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin (one letter-writer thought it 'a grave mistake to underestimate your readers and not publish it in the original Russian'); and it famously stood against the Suez campaign, calling the government 'crooked'. Thousands of readers cancelled their subscriptions (including newlyweds Mr and Mrs Denis Thatcher, of Chelsea). More damagingly, several large corporations withdrew their advertising, dealing a severe blow to the already precarious financial position of the paper. Yet Suez was probably Astor's finest hour, and future revelations (and the resignation of Prime Minister Anthony Eden) vindicated the paper's stance.
Circulation had risen to an all-time high of 907,000 by 1967, but papers with deeper pockets were starting to steal a march. Yet it continued to make waves politically, becoming the principal supporter in the British press of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, and campaigning to establish Amnesty International. But the increasingly competitive nature of the newspaper market exposed the 'gentleman amateur' nature of the The Observer, while the liberal consensus that the paper had done so much to form collapsed under the strain of a strike-bound Britain in the early Seventies.
Financial crises and labour problems dogged the paper and in 1975 the chairman, Lord Goodman, announced that a third of the staff would have to be made redundant. David Astor decided to step down, and, after a ballot of staff, the trustees appointed his deputy Donald Trelford as editor, though Goodman warned him that the paper might not last another six months.
The trustees approached Rupert Murdoch in 1976, but he soon backed away after staff mounted a concerted campaign against the idea, and the paper was eventually sold to Atlantic Richfield, a US oil company. Its tenure was short-lived and RW 'Tiny' Rowland, of Lonrho, bought the paper in 1981, ushering in an uncomfortable 12 years, with the editor being threatened with the sack several times for running unfavourable stories about African leaders who were personal friends of the proprietor.
Rowland's long-standing feud with the Fayed brothers over the ownership of House of Fraser featured prominently in the paper and led to a special midweek edition, containing the text of a leaked Department of Trade and Industry report into the Fayeds' takeover. That report vindicated the paper's reporting, but the midweek edition was to damage The Observer and its reputation.
Rowland began to lose his grip on the Lonrho board, and in 1993 The Observer was put on the market. A sale to the Independent looked inevitable, with the danger that the paper would disappear into the fledgling Independent on Sunday. However, Rowland was prevailed upon to sell to the Guardian Media Group, and once again the paper was saved from extinction.
To look back at editions of those days is to realise how much the paper has expanded since it joined the Guardian stable. They have not always been comfortable times, with several changes of editor until the appointment in 1998 of Roger Alton, who with a strong team steadied and then increased circulation, and added the popular monthly magazines.
Now the paper stands at the beginning of another chapter in its long history, but in some ways it is returning to its roots. The new Berliner format is not unlike the size of the paper that emerged onto the streets that December morning in 1791, promising to be 'Unbiased by Prejudice, Uninfluenced by Party'. It's obviously in our DNA.
