7 - ‘The World of Music’: Essays in the Sunday Times, 1920–1958

Summary

IN 1918, Newman was plunged into grief after his first wife, Kate, died from kidney disease. When he emerged from despair some months later, Newman married his second wife, Vera, and decided on a career change: he left the Birmingham Daily Post and moved to London. According to Vera, Newman ‘spoke of his determination to leave Birmingham as soon as possible. His years there had seemed an endless time of frustration and misery’. In Newman's letter of resignation to the Post's editor, he wrote:

I am sorry to have to give you notice of my intention to leave the Post on the expiration of the present agreement. I feel that this town will never do anything in music, and I am very tired of struggling to rouse it. I feel, too, that I must settle somewhere where I shall have more opportunities of hearing new things and keeping my knowledge up to date.

Feeling trapped and intellectually stale Newman wanted a change, and an opportunity soon presented itself. J.L. Garvin, editor of London's Observer and creator of ‘serious Sunday journalism’, wrote to Newman offering him a job. Newman ‘felt he could take the plunge and move to London’, even though he was not given a contract. Newman first wrote for the Observer in late March 1918, contributing articles on an ad hoc basis, until he began a weekly column entitled ‘Music and musicians’ on 15 September 1918, which ran until 15 February 1920. However, Newman's term on the Observer was short-lived.

In January 1920, he was invited to join the Sunday Times for five years with an annual salary of £850. The contract prohibited Newman from writing on music for other London papers but he could contribute on other subjects for publications, regardless of their location. He continued to write a weekly column for the Manchester Guardian until late 1923.

Newman joined the Sunday Times during a period in which the newspaper experienced spectacular growth. In 1915, four years before Newman started to work on the Sunday Times it had a modest circulation of 50,000. By 1932 it had risen to 187,000, and it had soared to 270,000 by 1937. At the time of Newman's retirement in November 1958, the Sunday Times’ readership numbered 900,000 in a market where there were 30 million readers of Sunday papers, up from 15 million in 1937.