A MAN of a wide breadth of interests and deeply held opinions, which he could express in limpid but forceful prose, Teddy Hodgkin made a remarkable contribution to journalism. For 20 years from the early 1950s he was a pillar of The Times — for most of that time in the pre-byline era — exercising knowledge and skills for which its readership could be grateful. Sensation or the ephemeral gloss of fashion were anathema to him. The purpose to which he adhered was to uphold the standards of The Times in a manner informative and persuasive and, above all, not at all given to self-importance.
He had learnt what it meant to be an all-round journalist on the prewar Manchester Guardian, where he took pride in developing his skills as a sub-editor. Thanks to a thorough historical grounding and an original taste in literature, he could write at speed on any subject that might be required by the events of the day. This gift was exemplified in assignments as different as the unerringly authoritative leader he wrote on the death of Charles de Gaulle in 1970, and the beautifuly crafted obituary he produced in a couple of hours for Gavin Astor in 1984.
In spite of his great qualities, Hodgkin’s was an uncompetitive spirit. For much of the time he appeared to be an ego in retreat, his manner diffident and apparently shy. But when the press of events demanded the mobilisation of his talents, they were applied in a most surprising way, like the energies of a torrent suddenly released.
Perhaps his personality was a reaction against the abilities of his forebears and contemporaries. His grandfather, Thomas Hodgkin, was a successful banker who found time to be an historian as well. His father, R. H. Hodgkin, was an historian and Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford. His mother’s father, A. L. Smith, was Master of Balliol at the turn of the century.
Edward Christian Hodgkin was born in 1913. The death, at the age of 12, of a younger sister to whom he had been devoted, was a shattering blow, reported to him as it was, awkwardly and curtly, in his first term at Eton. His inability to share his grief fully with his parents or elder brother left a wound that was never completely healed.
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From Eton he went to Balliol, where he took a first in history. Lacking any clear idea of a career he took up his tutor’s suggestion of a thesis on Edward I’s crusade, which gave him the opportunity to spend six months in Palestine, where his brother, Thomas, was in post as a colonial servant. The thesis never got written, but the foundation had been laid for Hodgkin’s affection for the Arab world.
On his return to England in 1935 his godmother, Margery Fry (Roger Fry’s sister), introduced him to Crozier, then editor of the Manchester Guardian. There he quickly found himself in a milieu that exactly suited his temperament, and he had no doubt that journalism in some form would occupy him.
Like many of his contemporaries in the 1930s he saw the emergence of Hitler’s Germany as the insistent threat. When war was declared in 1939 he enlisted in The Manchester Regiment, but was disappointed to be posted to India, where the regular Indian Army seemed to him to be scarcely aware of the issues at stake in Europe.
Fortunately he was able to return to England after a year, and was commissioned in the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry in 1940. He was posted to the Special Operations Executive in Cairo and then, in 1943, to Baghdad, where he was attached to the British Embassy.
His three years there did much to expand his knowledge of the Middle East. When the war ended he was appointed head of the Near East Broadcasting Station (Sharq el-Adna) the biggest station in the region, broadcasting from Jerusalem. This extended his journalistic experience, since he soon found himself at home at the microphone. It was in Jerusalem that he married Nancy Durrell.
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Returning to England in 1948 — there was then no job for him on The Times, where Barrington-Ward, a relative, was editor — he became assistant editor on The Spectator. Then in 1952, on Peter Fleming’s introduction, The Times found a place for Hodgkin to write leaders on Western Europe and the Middle East, where his talent for clear writing and thorough background knowledge helped in Sir William Haley’s reshaping of the paper.
But the Middle East was soon to find Hodgkin in the position of having his advice discarded, as a result of The Times’s initially robust approach to the Suez crisis. By contrast with Haley, Hodgkin could understand Nasser’s nationalism. He thought Eden’s escapade was a mistake, and since the paper adopted a position which he deplored it was thought easier in discussion of the paper’s policy to leave him out.
Fortunately this attitude did not last, and Hodgkin’s reputation as an expert on the region was relied on in the later 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, he sometimes felt that it was necessary to challenge the influential pro-Israeli lobby, as when, in a visit to the region in 1969, two years after the Six-Day War, he wrote an article severely criticising what he saw as the iniquities of the treatment of the Arab population of the West Bank under Israeli occupation. This caused a furore, but it was followed by articles written after a visit to Israel by then Editor, William Rees-Mogg, which supported Hodgkin’s position.
In 1961 Hodgkin had become assistant foreign editor and later became one of a three-man rota sharing the late duty of seeing the paper’s first edition to press — a task he particularly relished. In 1966 he succeeded Iverach McDonald as foreign editor and was particularly valued for his handling of the foreign correspondents. In 1967 he was promoted to assistant editor, while retaining his foreign editorship, and in 1969 to deputy editor.
In August 1970 he relinquished both foreign editorship and deputy editorship, and was given the post of associate editor (foreign). In July of that year he had been one of the principal signatories of what became known as the “White Swan letter” to Rees-Mogg, signed by 29 influential members of the editorial staff. The letter, so called from its having been decided upon at a meeting in an upper room of the White Swan tavern in Farringdon Street, was an attack on what its signatories saw as a diminution in the “authority, independence, accuracy and seriousness of The Times” since Rees-Mogg’s appointment to the editorship, on the acquisition of the paper from the Astor family by the Canadian magnate Lord Thomson of Fleet in 1966.
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The attack was aimed principally at the popularising influence of those Rees-Mogg had brought over from The Sunday Times to help him, notably the energetic night news executive Michael Cudlipp, stigmatised by Hodgkin to senior colleagues as having “no conception of what a responsible newspaper should be”. Though Rees-Mogg summoned the rebels — who included the future Times Editor Charles Douglas Home; Hugh Stephenson, soon to be appointed editor of the paper’s business news; and the future religious affairs correspondent Clifford Longley — to his office and gave them a severe dressing-down, he nevertheless treated most of them with extraordinary magnanimity thereafter. According to the sixth volume of the History of The Times: The Thomson Years 1966-81 he was most hurt by Hodgkin, his deputy and foreign editor, whom he had furthermore solidly backed over his controversial article on the West Bank.
In 1972 Hodgkin retired early. Perhaps the cut and thrust of journalism in London had begun to create more pressure on him than he relished. He also had other interests he wanted to pursue. Pinned to his office noticeboard a card inscribed “first prize for begonias” was a clue to his horticultural tastes.
His serious historical reading had always been flanked by the inexhaustible pleasure he took in the books of P. G. Wodehouse. And his writing expressed itself in jeux d’esprit like his mock-serious essay on the location of Anthony Hope’s Ruritania, pieced together from continental railway timetables of the period; and his pastiche of Milton’s Nativity Ode, very privately circulated at a birthday lunch given by Thomson soon after his acquisition of The Times. On a more serious note he had in 1966 published The Arabs, part of an OUP series The Modern World.
Hodgkin’s journalism did not end with his retirement from The Times. He had earlier been a regular broadcaster on Middle-East affairs in the BBC World Service. He was an interested collaborator with Mohamed Heikal in the books he wrote on his experiences as editor of the newspaper al Ahram, and as Nasser’s confidant. He also assisted in the fifth volume of the History of The Times: Struggles in War and Peace 1939-1966, to which he contributed an epilogue of the period from 1966 until the year of the paper’s bicentenary, 1985.
He was for long the chairman of the London committee which organised support for the Arab Development Society, an agricultural scheme for Palestine refugees established in Jordan by Musa Alami.
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His wife, Nancy, a gifted sculptor, who spent her last years as a prison visitor, died in 1983. Two daughters survive him, one a stepdaughter from his wife’s first marriage to Lawrence Durrell, the novelist.
E. C. (Teddy) Hodgkin, journalist, was born on August 25, 1913. He died on September 6, 2006, aged 93.