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This self-effacingness was partly a matter of standard practice in the daily journalism of the time, though it was already becoming rare in literary periodicals. It also reflected the personality and views of Bruce Richmond who, after a start had been made by his Times colleague J. R. Thursfield, became the Supplement's first long-serving editor. In the words of one of his successors, John Gross, Richmond (1871-1960) `was a self-effacing man, who was content to work behind the scenes and whose name never meant much to the literary public at large; but he deserves to be remembered as one of the most remarkable editors of his own or indeed of any epoch.' He remained editor through political dramas and economic crises, whether international or local to The Times, for thirty-five years. He created and sustained one of the most durable of modern British institutions, an achievement officially recognized with a knighthood in 1935. Yet in his brief entry in Who's Who he was content to summarize his career as no more than that of a 'Journalist' who had 'joined editorial staff of The Times, 1899.' Richmond was a quintessential member of the high-cultural establishment. He had won scholarships both to Winchester—then, as now, intellectually the most demanding of the English 'public' schools—and to New College, Oxford. After reading for the bar he joined The Times, remaining there until he retired. To many people of his formation, anonymity was a virtue in itself, not least because it helped to give the impression of a still greater one: unanimity. The Times and institutions like it aimed to speak with a single voice: intelligent, considered, unexcitable, slightly aloof - the kind of voice which, once the power of radio was recognized, was also required of people talking on the BBC. It was the voice of authority in the sense both of expertise and of another, more collective kind of power: that of members of a club. Literally so. More than 20 per cent of TLS contributors in this period belonged to the Athenaeum and as many more to other gentlemen's clubs in central London. It's easy to find fault with freemasonry of this kind, which certainly involved risks: of undetected favouritism; of the secret settling of scores; even of a kind of self-promotion the more flagrant for being furtive. In 1903, the Rev. Dr Charles Cox, reviewing the Hampshire volume of the Victoria County Histories, used the cover of anonymity to compliment himself on the readability of his own contribution. In 1911, Lieutenant-Colonel S. H. Hooper seems to have achieved a (unique?) double by publishing a book anonymously and then reviewing it anonymously in the Literary Supplement. Doubtless these instances were practical jokes rather than abuses, and a few such pranks among tens of thousands of sober, responsible reviews must have cheered things up at Printing House Square (the Colonel was a military correspondent of The Times, which was how the author of the book he reviewed was described). But to people outside the club, what went on inside could sometimes look less venial. In the decades after the Second World War, when widening social and educational opportunity had made readers less respectful of authorities and establishments, attacks on the continuation of anonymous reviewing in the TLS became frequent and increasingly vociferous: nowhere more so than in F. W. Bateson's article in a 1957 issue of his journal Essays in Criticism, which became the locus classicus of the argument that 'the reviewer's name is an essential part of the meaning of the review.' From the beginning, a small number of pieces were in fact published under their authors' names. We don't know what determined these decisions, though they seem in some cases to have anticipated Bateson's assertion: signed pieces by, for example, Max Beerbohm, Sir Arthur Evans, George Moore, Edith Wharton and Henry James (the last two of whom also wrote anonymously) clearly carried extra clout, in a way that ones by then unknown authors would not have. But Bruce Richmond's belief was that anonymity more often protected than it endangered good judgement. Anonymous reviewers were less tempted to show off, and in many cases people who would write well about a book but who might have refused to do so under their own name—whether because of modesty, for professional reasons or just out of the kind of reticence which Richmond himself embodied—could be persuaded to do so by knowing that their identity would be protected. Under anonymity, talent could come before acknowledged expertise. As T. S. Eliot was to put it, 'one gradually became an authority in the field allotted.' It was for the TLS that the young Eliot wrote some of his most influential essays on seventeenth-century drama and literature, benefiting along the way from what he called 'the discipline of anonymity': 'I am firmly convinced that every young literary critic should learn to write for some periodical in which his contributions will be anonymous… I learnt to moderate my dislikes and crotchets, to write in a temperate and impartial way.' Famously, too, the future Virginia Woolf wrote very often for the paper from her early twenties—even more often than was previously known, as our index of contributors reveals. The index also gives access to previously unattributed pieces by scores of other well-known writers. Even the idea that Richmond himself never wrote for the paper turns out to have been untrue.
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