A crossword in The Daily Telegraph helped recruit wartime codebreakers
During the Second World War, solving The Daily Telegraph crossword in under twelve minutes could earn you a mysterious invitation to do special war work. The newspaper quietly helped Bletchley Park find codebreakers. It had begun life ninety years earlier as one colonel's vehicle for a personal grudge.
Colonel Arthur B. Sleigh founded The Daily Telegraph and Courier in June 1855, largely to air a grievance against Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, the future head of the British Army. The first four-page edition appeared on 29 June and cost twopence. It flopped, and Sleigh could not pay his printer, Joseph Moses Levy, so Levy took the paper over. He wanted a cheaper daily to grow the London market, and his son Edward Levy-Lawson relaunched it as the largest, best and cheapest newspaper in the world. Co-editor Thornton Leigh Hunt set out a principle of explaining science and invention so ordinary readers could see how they affected daily life.
Its reputation spread. Jules Verne's 1876 novel Michael Strogoff features a daring Telegraph war correspondent, Harry Blount. In 1908 the paper printed an interview-style piece with Kaiser Wilhelm II that damaged relations with Germany in the years before the First World War. In 1939 a novice reporter, Clare Hollingworth, delivered her eyewitness account of Germany's invasion of Poland, sometimes called the scoop of the century.
The war shaped it in other ways. With Fleet Street under almost daily bombing from November 1940, printing shifted to Manchester, which often produced the entire run. The crossword competition organised for Bletchley Park led to successful solvers being asked whether they would take on a particular kind of work for the war effort. Earlier, in 1937, the Telegraph had absorbed The Morning Post, briefly carrying both names on its masthead.
Ownership passed from the Levy-Lawson family to the Berry brothers in 1928, then to the Canadian businessman Conrad Black in 1986, and to the Barclay brothers in 2004. A Sunday sister paper followed in 1961. Later scoops included the 2009 exposure of MPs' expenses, which brought political resignations and a Newspaper of the Year award. Its motto, Was, is, and will be, appeared on its emblem for more than a century from 1858.
Source: The Daily Telegraph
