But The Times was to a large extent
responsible for the setting up of the Roebuck commission, which
investigated the conduct of the war and found that most of The Times's
criticisms were justified; the way was opened for the army and civil
service reforms of mid-Victorian years. The Times emerged from the war
with enormous prestige; it was no longer "the bloody blackguard and
despotic old Times"; it was "the fourth estate of the realm."
The trappings of John Walter III's portrait at Bear Wood firmly place him
in his setting. A copy of The Times is
View of the Chimney stacks from the South Fields.
under his right hand, the bust of
John Walter II over his right shoulder.
Remote
, reserved and cool, he has the air of a man who knows he is a power in
the land, the heir of a great tradition and the administrator of a great
trust.
Round-a-bout on North Court and view of Chimney stacks.
He
was a small man, sober, religious, hard working, sensible rather than
brilliant and entirely dedicated to The Times. He concealed a kind heart
beneath a diffident and rather forbidding exterior;
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according to his obituary "he was seldom playful and not often
familiar, even with his intimates, outside his own family circle." Delane
and Dasent, at The Times, called him "the Griff" --short for griffin.
By the time the new Bear Wood was started in
1865 the Crimean agitations were over and England had entered upon the
mutually-admiring partnership of upper and middle classes which was the
basis of mid-Victorian society. John Walter III, M.P., High Sheriff, with
his great house rising in the middle of 8000 acres, was superficially an
established member of the landed classes. Most Victorians who made money
and bought land were anxious--over-anxious, perhaps-- to merge into county
society. But one gets the impression that John Walter thought of himself
not so much as the member of a class as holding in trust an independent
principality, to be jealously preserved from corruption by the outside
world. It was typical of his independent attitude that he refused a
peerage, probably once and perhaps twice.
Tom Mozley, one of his leader writers on The Times, referred to Bear Wood
as "his little temporal sovereignty." He would probably have been secretly
South Terrace, Binnacle, South Fields,
and Lake
pleased by its half-serious nickname of "the
. second palace in Berkshire." But
his sovereignty really had two halves, at Bear Wood and Printing-house
Square. Together they formed a self-contained and partly self supporting
community. The Bear Wood estate was a recruiting ground for The Times.
office and printing -works. The Editor assistant-editor and manager of The
Times bought or built smaller country-houses a few miles from Bear Wood.
John Walter III was not a social man, and his house-parties at Bear Wood
seem to have been mostly confined to family and the senior staff and
contributor of The Times; on great occasions all The Times employees came
down on a mass day-outing
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