John Martin Douglas Pringle, usually known as John Douglas Pringle 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 it did not stimulate our creative powers 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.
Life in Australia
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 "a frank discussion of Australian attitudes, politics, cultural and social mores". He moved back to London to become deputy editor of The Observer from 1958 to 1963. He returned to Australia in 1963. He spent a year hosting a public affairs television program on ATN7 in Sydney, Seven Days, but was uncomfortable on camera and soon decided "that most of the claims made for television were false and that there was something inherent in the medium which made superficiality and triviality inevitable". He became managing editor of The Canberra Times from 1964 to 1965, and editor of The Sydney Morning Herald again from 1965 to 1970, this time with control over the whole paper, not just the leader page. He resigned after disagreements with the managing director, Sir Warwick Fairfax, and retired from full-time journalism. In his memoirs of his life in newspapers he said of the role of the editor:
It is more important to be reasonable than to be right.... In a democracy a newspaper may be doing a useful service if it argues, fairly and logically, a view which may subsequently prove to be wrong.... An editor is not god; he is part of the democratic process by which a nation argues and blunders its way towards the truth.
After retiring he wrote several books, and continued to write articles for periodicals, including Quadrant. He also developed an interest in ornithology, and wrote three books on Australian birds.
In December 1936 he married Celia Carroll. They had a son and two daughters. She died in 1997, and he died on 4 December 1999 in Sydney. The John Douglas Pringle Award, given to Australian journalists, is named after him.
