Telegraph Sold

August, moneyed peers of the race of Baron Rothschild were annoyed, last week, when the great financial Jewish-sporting newspaper The Daily Telegraph passed from its traditional family ownership into the hands of a mere though potent syndicate.

Since 1903 the sole direction of the conduct and policy of the Telegraph has been in the hands of Harry Lawson, Webster Lawson, now Viscount Burnham. His father had managed the property before him, and Lord Burnham has retained the family tone and tempo.

Each morning thousands of Britons turn to the Telegraph's sporting page and scan attentively whatever appears above the enigmatic signature "B. B." Under that monogram writes jovial, astute Benjamin Bennison--and on the staff there have been constantly not a few journalists of nearly equal fame.

Through the years these men have come to know tubby, dynamic Viscount Burnham as an employer who labored no less conscientiously than they, and yet found both time and opportunity to chairman innumerable public welfare committees--for example, the King's Fund for Disabled Ex-Service Men.

The syndicate which bought the Telegraph last week is that of Sir William Berry, who controls the Daily Graphic, Sunday Times, and a great bloc of Midland newspapers, and who last year acquired a large interest in the publishing properties of the late Sir Edward Hutton.

The sale of the Telegraph--a transaction known to have involved more than one million pounds--elevates Sir Edward Berry still higher in his rank with the two greatest newspaper proprietors of England. Both these men chance to be in the U. S. at present. They are: 1) Harold Sidney Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Evening News), brother of the late and greatest British news titan, Viscount Northcliffe; and 2) William Mawell Aitken, Baron Beaverbrook (Daily Express and Evening Standard), a self-made Canadian, still sometimes referred to as "that bounder", but generally accorded the respect due a man who has made a cool -L-1,000,000 in business and then "retired" to enjoy the sport of maneuvering himself into the peerage.