ALASTAIR Phillips’s bicentenary history of this newspaper - Glasgow’s Herald, 1783-1983, published 37 years ago - describes James Holburn as the widest-travelled of all Herald editors, and with good reason. “He has been,” Phillips wrote, “on speaking terms with more heads of state than all his predecessors and successors put together.”

Holburn cut his teeth as a Herald sub-editor before joining The Times, where for the better part of 20 years he was a globe-trotting correspondent. He spent several years in Germany, and, when temporarily accredited to the Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, Phillips observes, “was near enough to Guernica to make an eye-witness report that does not totally agree with what has become the received history of the incident.” He lunched with Hitler, Hess and Ribbentrop at Nuremberg in 1938. Just before war broke out, he transferred to Moscow; he later worked as a war correspondent in Africa and the Middle East, and then spent periods in Turkey and India. At the time he became editor in 1955, he was a diplomatic correspondent in London.

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Herald Diary

Holburn, who is seen here being interviewed by the actor Jameson Clark for the BBC on the occasion of The Herald's m175th anniversary, was editor for the last 10 years of his active newspaper career. He gave Herald journalists individual bylines, created an exclusive features department, put news on the front page (breaking a tradition that had lasted for 107 years) and put women into senior editorial positions. He also, Phillips noted, experienced the intrusion of a team of management consultants (reported to have cost a small fortune), who lived with the paper’s staff for six months without discovering the slightest inefficiency in the way he ran the editorial department.