The peacetime spectacle of a great nation audibly, visibly, reportably in crisis is seldom presented to working journalists. The anatomy of its disaster is usually exposed to the world's view only through the hindsight of historians.

Such a spectacle was tragically exhibited last week to TIME'S London bureau, which took full journalistic advantage of it (witness the eleven columns of copy on Britain's coal crisis in last week's TIME). Early in the week London Bureau Chief John Osborne cabled TIME'S editors that he planned to devote the week's work of his entire staff to covering it. The editors agreed.

By that time the London bureau was itself very much a part of the crisis. Its offices in Dean House were stone cold, and people in the inside rooms worked by candlelight. Not being classified "essential," the bureau could not use lights or heaters during the forbidden hours. Osborne made his assignments and told his staff to go anywhere they could find warmth for that one afternoon, anyway.

On Wednesday he sent his top political reporter, Eric Gibbs, to circulate in Commons and the Ministries. His was to be the job of presenting and analyzing the political and economic effects of the crisis. (One of his and Osborne's first firm predictions was that the Labor Government would not form a coalition with the Conservatives.) Cynthia Ledsham went to Coventry to record the crisis' effect on a single industrial community. Constance Lailey, who had wired queries to the bureau's stringers in the blacked-out cities throughout Britain, requeried the main ones by telephone. June Rose took a deep breath and vanished into the cold of London's East End to see what the crisis meant to the people living there.

For those doing the legwork, it was a matter of finding and questioning a lot of people, big & little, who had the vital big & little facts. Gibbs groped through candlelit corridors buttonholing Government and opposition M.P.s, listened to the Commons debating fuel with four of the ten light clusters in the chambers symbolically turned off, and, to get the political reaction, read the 17,000 words sent in by the stringers in the stricken cities of Manchester, Sunderland, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Bradford, Blackpool, etc.

By Friday the story was shaping up. Ledsham arrived from Coventry with a first-rate story. June Rose turned up with a blue nose, some warm and revealing local color, and an anecdote: the "blinking coal crisis" did not deter a fish porter she interviewed at Billingsgate from offering her mussels, which she loathes but "swallowed-in the interest of TIME," giving a brief resumee of the history of the 400-year-old market and, as a parting shot, bestowing a calendar upon her which told among other things the price of fish in the reign of Edward I.

By Saturday most of the 9,000 crisis words were on their way to the Foreign News writer in New York who was to do the story. Late that night Gibbs and Osborne (who had been doing his own interviewing of Government and utilities officials, etc. all week, as well as coordinating the coverage) managed to get through to a Government official so closely and highly involved that they had given up hope of reaching him. They talked for an hour. Said Osborne:

"My sharpest memory of the week is of that official, so tired that his voice trembled, quietly telling the inside story of disaster in his cold unlighted office. That night when I got home for a late supper, I was scared witless by a BBC voice saying down the hall: 'Coalition ... coalition ... coalition' and thought for a wild moment that our limb had been sawed off. It was the report of Attlee's speech, confirming all our dope that coalition was unthinkable."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.