John Douglas Pringle
| John Douglas Pringle | |
|---|---|
Pringle in the 1960s
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| Born |
John Martin Douglas Pringle 28 June 1912 Hawick, Roxburghshire |
| Died | 4 December 1999 (aged 87) Sydney, New South Wales |
| Occupation | Editor |
| Spouse(s) | Celia Carroll (m. 1936; her death 1997) |
| Children | 3 |
John Martin Douglas Pringle, usually known as John Douglas Pringle (28 June 1912 – 4 December 1999) was a Scottish-born journalist who moved in 1952 to Australia where he became a prominent newspaper editor and social commentator.
Pringle was born in the town of Hawick, Roxburghshire, not far from the border with England. His father had inherited a part-ownership of Robert Pringle and Sons, a family knitwear business.
Between the ages of 14 and 19 he was educated in England at Shrewsbury School, where he received a classical education consisting almost entirely of classes in Latin and Greek. It taught, he said, "the accurate use of words and the ability to concentrate on difficult subjects [but] it did not stimulate our creative powers (if any) or even our curiosity". He went up to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he took a First in Greats.
In August 1934 he joined The Manchester Guardian. He soon discovered that he had "no nose for news": he tried but failed to learn shorthand, loathed pursuing leads over the telephone, and lacked the push to get interviews from people in the news. However, he succeeded as a leader writer.
During the Second World War he served as an officer in the King's Own Scottish Borderers. He saw action in France in 1940, then spent most of the rest of the war training troops in Inveraray in western Scotland. In 1944 he returned to The Guardian as assistant editor, then in 1948 he went to The Times as a special writer, chiefly on foreign affairs.
Pringle was tempted to go to Australia by the challenge of editing The Sydney Morning Herald, which was then considered the country's best newspaper, but also for health reasons: for a year from early 1950 he underwent treatment for tuberculosis and, for the rest of his life, survived on one working lung. He edited The Sydney Morning Herald from 1952 to 1957, but was frustrated by the paper's management, who insisted on confining the editor's power to the editorial and leader page, with no control over the news pages. To Pringle, this was "responsibility without power" and, when his five-year contract expired in 1957, he did not renew it. Before he left at the end of 1957 he wrote what remained his "best-known and most influential book", Australian Accent (published in 1958) "a frank discussion of Australian attitudes, politics, cultural and social mores".
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