Australian Dictionary of Biography

John Pringle, c.1960s

Courtesy of The Canberra Times/ACM

John Martin Douglas Pringle (1912–1999), journalist and editor, was born on 28 June 1912 at Hawick, Roxburghshire, Scotland, second child and only son of John Douglas Pringle, part-owner of the knitwear company Robert Pringle and Sons, and his wife Muriel Annie, née Martin, both Scottish-born. John recalled that he enjoyed ‘a comfortable and privileged childhood’ (Pringle 1973, x), despite his father retiring early while suffering from depression. Where his mother looked to England, his father ‘and perhaps I, myself’ (Kepert 1999) felt more attached to Scotland. He retained throughout his life a strong sympathy for Scottish, Irish, and Welsh cultural nationalism.

Over twelve years of schooling Pringle experienced ‘one of the last 100 per cent, simon pure, undiluted classical educations available in the 20th century’ (Pringle 1972, 60). At preparatory school in Scotland he began learning Latin at nine and Greek at eleven. He received redoubled instruction in these languages at Shrewsbury School in Shropshire, England, along with the clear message that the English–Scottish border ‘marked the frontier between civilisation and barbarism’ (Pringle 1976, 31). By his own account he matriculated still ignorant of modern history, politics, and economics.

At Lincoln College, Oxford, Pringle received a First in Greats in 1935 (MA, 1948). He had hoped to teach philosophy, but settled for journalism after neither Oxford nor Edinburgh offered him a job. ‘Perhaps it was as well,’ he wrote wryly, as ‘however absurd, frustrating, superficial and dishonest journalism may be, it has at least one advantage over all other careers: you are practically never bored’ (Pringle 1973, ix). In 1934 he joined the Manchester Guardian as an assistant editor and a leader writer. His focus on foreign affairs led to his authoring in 1939 a Penguin Special, China Struggles for Unity, which proved popular despite his never having visited that country. On 19 December 1936 he had married Celia Caroll at the Church of the Oratory in Kensington, London. They had three children, Caroline, Margaret and John.

Pringle had a ‘safe, inglorious but interesting war’ (Pringle 1973, 25) as an officer in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. After brief service in France in 1940, he spent most of the rest of his war in Scotland training soldiers in combined operations. He returned to the Guardian in July 1944, where his foreign affairs specialisation took him on visits to North Africa and postwar Europe, including several weeks during 1946 reporting from the Paris Peace Conference. In 1948, gripped by a need to broaden his horizons, he joined the London Times, where his lucid prose resulted in his being spoken of as the ‘finest leader writer of his generation’ (Miliken 1999). Before writing an important editorial he ‘would spend half-an-hour reading one of the great prose writers whom I most admired—the essays of Hazlitt, the prefaces of Bernard Shaw or the works of Hume or Bishop Berkeley’ (Pringle 1973, 13).

In January 1952 Pringle was invited to meet the Sydney Morning Herald’s managing director, Rupert Henderson, who, on the basis of recommendations by British acquaintances, offered him the job of editor. Henderson was persuasive, the salary generous, and a fresh start after the near-mortal illness of one of Pringle’s children was attractive. He was also drawn by a hope that the Sydney climate would help his own recovery from the tuberculosis that had confined him to a sanatorium for nine months from 1950 to 1951.

Soon after arriving in September 1952 he discovered that ‘life in Sydney was going to be a good deal more stormy than it had been in London or Manchester’ (Pringle 1973, 84). He was confronted by issues of corruption, police brutality, and State government harassment. John Fairfax & Sons Ltd’s acquisition of Associated Newspapers Ltd and move in 1954 to Broadway south of the Sydney central business district diverted energy and money, leading to a slow decline in the Herald’s quality and circulation.

The Herald’s organisational arrangements also troubled Pringle. As editor he had authority only over the leader page and ‘those few other parts of the paper which expressed opinions’ (Pringle 1973, 91) such as book and theatre reviews. All other pages were controlled by a news editor reporting directly to the board of Fairfax, leaving the nominal editor with ‘responsibility without power’ (Pringle 1973, 92). ‘He chafed under the system,’ his future deputy recalled, ‘but he made the Herald leader page the most exciting in Australian journalism and himself the most talked-about figure in newspapers’ (Bowman 1973, 17).

Pringle’s new colleagues found him to be an engaging conversationalist who ‘readily made friends among the staff and was generous with praise and thanks’ (Kepert 1999, 2). His greatest triumph as editor arose from his early grasp of the background to the split in the Australian Labor Party. He was unusually knowledgeable about its causes, his curiosity having been piqued by hearing in London that the then almost unknown Catholic activist B. A. Santamaria was one of the ‘two most brilliant men in Australia’ (Pringle 1973, 117), the other being the jurist Sir Owen Dixon. After visiting Santamaria in Melbourne and canvassing Sydney Catholic opinion he built up a dossier on the Catholic Social Studies Movement that enabled him to write quickly and knowledgably when in October 1954 the Opposition leader, H. V. Evatt, made explosive allegations about the influence of the Movement within the ALP. The Herald quickly produced ‘the first coherent account of what had been going on beneath the surface of the political and industrial labour movement’ (Souter 1981, 336).

Not content to remain a figurehead, Pringle decided in July 1956 that he would leave at the end of his contract in August the following year. ‘Your work has been first class … and we had hoped your future would be with us,’ Henderson responded (Souter 1981, 339). As his departure loomed and he resisted management pressure to feature material of more popular appeal on the leader page, the paper’s circulation recorded a modest increase, the first in several years.

Back in Britain and while preparing to become deputy editor of the London-based Observer, Pringle wrote Australian Accent (1958), ‘probably the first serious attempt by a British observer to come to grips with modern Australia’ (Milliken 1999). He lamented Australian materialism and sectarianism, the lack of an educated class, and the depressingly low collective quality of Australian politicians, yet also conveyed affection towards the country and its people. ‘The snarls that have greeted his book,’ wrote Donald Horne, ‘have sounded uncomfortably like symptoms of outrageous, even frightened, colonialism’ (Horne 1959, 103).

With its seven-day production cycle, the Observer provided Pringle with a more relaxed working environment than had the Herald, including long meetings discussing political and economic and social developments: ‘if Mao Tse-tung invented the permanent revolution,’ then ‘the Observer in those days perfected the permanent conference’ (Pringle 1973, 143). Under siege from the well-funded Sunday Times, however, the paper was forced to become efficient while also, he felt, becoming less distinctive.

An increasingly restless Pringle was approached again by Henderson in September 1962: would he be interested in editing a proposed new national daily or weekly, and in the meantime help launch a television current affairs program called Seven Days on ATN–7, Fairfax’s Sydney station? Missing ‘the hot sun, the brilliant light, the crackle and glitter of the Australian bush’ (Pringle 1973, 154), he returned to Sydney in October 1963.

Pringle’s career as a television presenter proved short lived. He found it hard to relax on camera and felt burdened by what he described as ‘one of those narrow faces with a big nose that photograph badly,’ not to mention a ‘long, thin lugubrious figure’ (Pringle 1973, 159). Henderson soon sent him to Canberra as managing editor of the Canberra Times, in response to Rupert Murdoch preparing to use the capital as a headquarters and base market for his new national daily, the Australian. This was a direct challenge to the Canberra Times, which had been acquired by Fairfax and was seen by Henderson as the basis of its own national daily. Pringle, with the Canberra Times editor David Bowman, successfully fought off the interloper, and in March 1967 the Australian departed for Sydney.

In mid-1965, as the Murdoch threat in Canberra was abating, Pringle accepted an invitation from Fairfax’s new managing director, Angus McLachlan, to again edit the Sydney Morning Herald, the idea of a national Fairfax publication having been put on hold. He insisted on controlling all of the paper’s editorial departments and answered competition from the Australian by modernising the Herald’s layout and broadening its coverage, particularly of foreign affairs. His most important early innovation, he thought, was to appoint a Herald correspondent in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. Female journalists were no longer confined to the social pages: in 1966 one of them, Margaret Jones, became the Herald’s first Washington correspondent. Others he supported included Helen Frizell, Sandra Jobson, and Lillian Roxon.

Although Pringle considered his first three years back at the Herald ‘some of the most satisfying in my career’ (Pringle 1973, 168), relations with the company board—in practice with Sir Warwick Fairfax—eventually deteriorated. An editorial in 1969 suggesting that Australia might become a republic caused friction, as did an editorial the following year that offered a humanist interpretation of Easter. The board’s support for Australia’s intervention in the Vietnam War increasingly distressed Pringle. Having promised to comply with this, he grew dismayed by the United States of America’s conduct of the war. ‘To some extent it was the Vietnam War which destroyed my self-confidence,’ he reflected later, as ‘I did feel I was on the wrong side’ (Pringle 1992). Tired and fed up, he gave twelve months’ notice to the board in December 1969, but after a terse exchange of memoranda he and Sir Warwick agreed on an immediate departure. On 24 April, after writing the following day’s Anzac Day editorial, Pringle left the office without a formal farewell.

Australia nonetheless now seemed ‘a very much more attractive country’ (Pringle 1978, 7) than when Pringle first arrived in Sydney. He remained a local resident, living at Darling Point while maintaining his enthusiasm for Australian birdlife and his friendships with well-known artists and writers. He had published Australian Painting Today in 1963 and went on to produce On Second Thoughts: Australian Essays (1971), a memoir, Have Pen: Will Travel (1973), and The Shorebirds of Australia (1987). Increasingly proud of his Scottish persona, he wrote a biography of the Gaelic scholar Angus Macdonald, The Last Shenachie (1976). He also wrote book reviews and a short-lived column for the Sydney Morning Herald in which he confessed to being an agnostic, and essays for Quadrant.

Pringle died of mycetoma in the Sacred Heart Hospice in Darlinghurst on 4 December 1999, predeceased by Celia the previous year, and was cremated. He was survived by their children. Although Pringle professed to lack the ‘physical, mental and moral toughness in a high degree’ needed to be a good editor, Fairfax’s historian concluded that his gifts of ‘rationalism, liberalism and humanism’ made him ‘by far the best editor the Herald had ever had in all its hundred and thirty-nine years’ (Souter 1999).