Daily telegraph

As the Telegraph moves slowly towards Arab ownership – 15 per cent to start, and who knows what in the future – I must declare my interest. I’m a Berry, the daughter of Michael Berry, who founded the Sunday Telegraph and became Lord Hartwell, and granddaughter of William Berry from south Wales, who bought the Daily Telegraph in 1928 and became Lord Camrose. They owned and ran it, hands on, for a big part of the 20th century – 58 years. My mother, Pamela Berry, daughter of F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was the political hostess who wielded the Telegraph soft power. My brother Adrian Berry was the paper’s science correspondent

Letters to a daily newspaper have a curious power to gain an impetus of their own. ‘I owned a Triumph Herald many decades ago,’ wrote Robert Brown of Crosby to the Telegraph in January. ‘She was my first love. On cold winter nights I would keep her warm with an old mackintosh thrown over her engine under the bonnet. Perhaps it was this that protected her from a thief one night. She was driven off our drive on to the road but steadfastly refused to go any further.’ It soon became clear that we’d hit a seam of experience in recent history, when lives and loves were expressed through small