Alfred Harmsworth-later to become Lord Northcliffe, was born in Chapelizod in 1865, and went on to become the richest and most powerful man in British journalism. His father a moderately successful barrister and alcoholic, but Alfred had a close relationship with his mother, whom he worshipped and wrote to almost every day. He took her advice on every important decision he ever made, and even named one of his offices after her.
Harmsworth was educated at a public school, however was not very academic. He was athletic and liked following modern crazes such as lawn tennis and cycling. He left school early and started work on an illustrated magazine for boys, before becoming a reporter for The Illustrated London News, a successful weekly picture magazine. At the age of 21 he was appointed editor of Bicycling News, a magazine of mass circulation; however he hated working for other people and was soon planning to launch his own publications.
Alfred’s big break came when he stole some paper and created his first magazine, using the printing presses from Bicycling News. This was “Answers to Correspondents on Every Subject Under The Sun” (Answers), similar to the current best selling weekly magazine: Tit-Bits.
Answers was a “mishmash of amazing facts” a scrapbook of bizarre happenings and antics from around the world, and the strap line promised it would be “Interesting, extraordinary and amusing. The circulation of the magazine began to grow, boosted by Harmsworth’s ability to think up clever competitions and giveaways: enticing to the audience, yet near-impossible to win. For example: £1 a week for life if you can guess the exact amount of gold in the Bank of England”. The odds of winning the competition were astronomical, yet attracted 700,000 entries, sending circulation through the roof.
Harmsworth first national daily newspaper was the Daily Mail, launched in May 1896, after much researching, planning and testing. It was promoted with the slogan “a penny paper for half a penny”. The rule on the Mail was that no article should be longer than 250 words, and the staff was told that they were writing for an entirely new type of audience. Boarding schools were turning out “hundreds of thousands of children who can actually read” for the first time ever. Alfred aimed the Mail at them, believing that “they have no interest in society, but want anything which is interesting and sufficiently simple”.
On the first day of publication it sold 397,215 copies, far more than expected, and far more than needed to make a profit.
Alfred made himself editor-in-chief of the Mail, and left the day-to-day editing to Kennedy “KJ” Jones, a hard-worker and hard-drinker, feared by the other staff. KJ learned his trade in New York, working for William Randolph Hearst’s “The Journal” and so was a veteran of the Yellow press circulation wars between Hearst and Pulitzer.
Harmsworth introduced a women’s section to the Daily Mail- the first of its kind in national newspapers-filled with features previously only available in expensive weekly magazines. This was such a success that he decided to create a half-penny paper aimed solely at women: The Daily Mirror.
KJ was put in charge of the Daily Mirror project, which was promoted with a money-no-object idea. The launch cost £100,000, and the paper was so well advertised that Alfred claimed that anybody who didn’t know about its launch must be “deaf, dumb, blind, or all three”.
The first edition was on Sunday November 2nd 1903, and 276,000 copies were printed. However, after the first day, sales of the Daily Mirror began to dramatically decline. After 8 weeks, the paper was selling less than 25,000 copies and was so generously staffed that it was losing £3000 a week, eating up the Daily Mail’s profits and threatening to sink Harmsworth’s business completely.
Harmsworth’s office: Carmelite house-the headquarters of the Daily Mail, The London Evening News, and several specialist magazines.
Hamilton Fyfe, editor of the Morning Advertiser is on the brink of being fired, and Harmsworth offers him a job on the Daily Mirror. The Mirror had only recently been launched, and was a complete disaster. Northcliffe says that the paper was “the laughing stock of Fleet Street”-the first paper in 20 years to be unsuccessful in terms of finance and publishing.
The Mirror was aimed as a paper for women, but this idea was not successful, as Harmsworth claims that “women can’t write and don’t want to read” therefore, gave Fyfe the job as editor, which he accepted without hesitation.
Fyfe’s first role was to get rid of the female journalists and Northcliffe’s cousin: Geoffrey Harmsworth said that the change happened over the course of one weekend. Friday evening, the editor’s room was “like a women’s boudoir”, by Monday morning, masculinity had taken over and the place was filled with pipe smoke and cynical laughter.
Fyfe had no issue firing the female journalists, but was not keen on sacking Mary Howarth, the first female editor of a daily newspaper in modern times, and the Daily Mirror’s first editor. Fyfe later wrote that the women were “squawking like chickens”, begging to stay. “It was a horrid experience…like drowning kittens”.
Fyfe described KJ as being “an intelligent man with no charm of manner or expression”.
Hannen Swaffer was one of the first journalists hired by Fyfe to transform the Daily Mirror, when in 1904 it was re-launched as “The Illustrated Daily Mirror”. Swaffer took the position of picture/art editor, in charge of photos and the overall image of the paper. The first edition featured photos of King Edward VII and his family, trebling the circulation to over 71,000 overnight. Swaffer transformed the Mirror into a picture paper and pushed sales from 25,000 to almost a million within a few years.
After the triumph of the first edition of the Illustrated Mirror, Fyfe and Swaffer followed it up with pictures of actresses, sportsmen, babies and animal pictures.
Fyfe said in his memoirs that the new Mirror was designed to “provide customers with something to look at on their journey to work, to entertain them, occupy their minds and prevent them from thinking”. Pictures are easier on the eye than words.
Circulation reached 140,000 within a month of the re-launch, and on its first anniversary, it was selling 290,000 copies, and was once again called the Daily Mirror.
In 1907, Fyfe left the paper to be replaced by Alexander Kenealy-also from Hearst’s “The Journal”. Kenealy was in charge of the words, and Swaffer was in charge of the pictures. Swaffer was willing to pay huge sums for photos depicting accidents, disasters, crime, royalty or sporting heroics.
Story of the pit pony: Aim was to improve the conditions suffered by pit ponies. A reporter was sent out to buy one, so that the paper could rescue it from its fate of “being born, living and dying without once seeing sunlight.” Northcliffe agreed to finance this on the condition the pony was featured in the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, which resulted in the pony being bought and looked after by the Lord Mayoress of London.
Swaffers approach to photography was revolutionary. Cameras were bulky and exposure meant subjects had to remain completely still. But Swaffer and his assistant: Harry Guy Bartholomew and other technical experts made cameras more portable. He encouraged photographers to get into dangerous situations in order to get action shots, and so a team of Mirror photographers were the first to climb inside the smoking mouth of Mount Vesuvius. Another photographer was the first non-crew member to fly on board a Zeppelin airship.
Kenealy specialised in stunts, which he learned from Hearst in New York. He put a beehive on the roof of Carmelite House to prove that it was possible to make honey in London. 50,000 bees were then coated in white flour, and it became a craze of 1909 to find a “Daily Mirror Bee”.
The Mirror also offered £5 for useful suggestions on how the improve the paper, but all the ideas were useless.
The papers greatest scoop was photos published of the death of King Edward VII, after Kenealy and Swaffer had overheard 2 Daily Express reporters talking about a set of pictures that had been taken. Swaffer worked out who must have taken the photographs, and asked for £100 from Kenealy. An hour later, he returned with the photos.
The next day, the front page was taken up by a picture of the King on his deathbed, and the paper sold out the minute it arrived on the shelves. Extra editions were printed and rushed out, but it was impossible to satisfy the demand. The day after the funeral, the Mirror ran the picture again, but kept 3 lines of presses printing more copies, supplying what was then a world record newspaper sale of 2,013,000 copies.
People awaited the reaction from Buckingham Palace, and some believed the paper would be arraigned for treason, but Queen Alexandra said that she allowed the photos to be printed because it was her “favourite paper”.
Northcliffe was coming to dislike the Mirror more and more, and since the Mail went to press earlier than the Mirror, he demanded that Swaffer give his best pictures to the Mail, however, Swaffer hated this arrangement.
Swaffer heard about the disaster of the Titanic early in the morning on April 15th, 1912, and remembered that a set of prints were in a local photographers shop. He rushed out and bought them all before anyone else heard the news, and so the Mirror had pictures of the liner that no other publication had. This caused sales to soar once again.
After more rows between Swaffer and Northcliffe, Swaffer “sacked” himself and joined the rival “Daily Sketch”. While there, he took great delight in scooping the Mirror, but only lasted a year before landing himself a libel writ and leaving to follow a career as a freelance feature writer, theatre writer and critic.
Eventually, Swaffer gave up drink and embraced spiritualism, conducting interviews with famous people “from the other side”. After Northcliffe died in 1922, Swaffer got his final revenge, but publishing a book called Northcliffe’s return: containing a long conversation transmitted through a medium, stating that Swaffer had been right in every disagreement the pair had had. This book still remains a classic and a bestseller in psychic circles.
For a time in the 1930s, Swaffer claimed to be the most famous and successful journalist in the world. He earned more than a million pounds a year, and his work became increasingly left wing. His columns were printed in dozens of papers on 4 continents, and picked up the nickname “The Pope of Fleet Street”. After he died, the annual awards for excellence in British Journalism were named after him, until the 1970s, when he became forgotten.
In 1905, Harmsworth became Lord Northcliffe after donating money and giving political support to the Liberal Party. On his 40th birthday, already one of the richest men in the country, he decided that politics was his ultimate destiny, and not newspapers. However, he had no ambition to become Prime Minister, as that carried the danger of being voted out of office.
The year of his ennoblement, Northcliffe bought the Sunday Observer, as part of his quest for political influence and establishment acceptance. 3 years later he bought The Times- the only paper in the country that was reputably read by the King, the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Ideally, he would have disposed of the Mail, but couldn’t afford to, because he needed the profits to pay for the losses made by the Times. Instead, he resolved to turn the Mail into a more “serious” paper and sell the Mirror.
The Mirror was beyond redemption, and Northcliffe felt that it didn’t have the same political clout as the Times, as it was still mainly read by women, who didn’t even have the right to vote. He began to cut his links with the Mirror in 1910, soon after Swaffer had printed the pictures of King Edward VII on his deathbed. 4 years later, on the eve of the First World War, Northcliffe sold his remaining shares for £100,000 to his younger brother, Harold Harmsworth, who became Lord Rothermere in the same year.
Under Rothermere, the Mirror suffered “sudden budget cuts, self-defeating economy drives and constant editorial interference”. The outbreak of the First World War meant that Rothermere was more preoccupied with the stock market than the editing of the newspaper.
After Swaffer left the paper, his assistant Harry Guy Bartholomew had taken over as picture editor and continued his mentor’s success. The First World War increased circulation from 1.2 million to 1.7 million within the first year. Ed Flynn, the editor who had taken over when Kenealy died in 1915, set out to make the Mirror “the forces paper” and had it distributed in the trenches.
The Mirror came out of the war in a strong position-it had the highest sales of any daily paper, a reputation for reliable reporting, and an unbeatable position as the pioneer of “photojournalism”.
In the next 20 years, national newspaper sales doubled from 5 million to 10 million as people switched from reading local to national papers. Despite the economic depression of the 1930s, ad income also trebled to nearly 60 million in 30 years. However, Rothermere neglected the Mirror, mainly because in 1922, he inherited the Mail from his brother, and so once again, the Mirror became the poor relation inside a large newspaper empire.
By April 1922, Northcliffe had begun to go completely insane. Swaffer commented “his vitality had gone, his face was puffy. His chin was sunken, and his mouth had lost its firmness. He lost his temper during a speech, because someone dropped a plate. He was a different man. The fires that burned within him had burned too fiercely all those years. People who heard him knew it was the end”.
Others realised something was wrong when Northcliffe began to object to the number of coarse, abominable and offensive” adverts in the mail, and gave orders for them not to be let into the building.
By June 1922, Northcliffe had fallen into a deep state of psychotic paranoia, babbling constantly about supposed attempts to assassinate him, and began to carry a gun around with him. He once shot his dressing gown after mistaking its shadow for an intruder.
He died on August 14th 1922, age 57. The official cause of death was given as heart disease brought on by a rare infection which also causes brain damage; however it is more likely that he died from tertiary syphilis, which he has been being secretly treated for since 1909.
In 1922, as Northcliffe died and Rothermere inherited his papers, there was another change in the newspaper industry, which would have a deep impact on the Mirror and the shape of the national press. The Daily Herald was taken over and began “buying readers” with insurance offers and competitions. The Herald spent 3 million a year on promotions at the peak of its campaign. Part of this cost was an army of canvassers.
Between 1924 and 1935 the number of people employed by the newspaper industry increased by 75%, 2 out of 5 people being door-to-door canvassers.
Lord Beaverbrook, owner and creator of the Daily Express vowed to “fight them till the bitter end” in the free-gift war. The Express began turning copies of the paper into numbered lottery tickets; however this was outlawed in 1928.
Rothermere was also sucked into this war, and begun spending heavily on promotions, to protect the Mail’s readership. The promotions war was costing at least £3 million a year, and wiped out the operating profits of the entire industry. The Mirror also joined in, but Rothermere was less prepared to spend money on the picture paper. Circulation declined and the paper looked like it would soon cease to print.
Rothermere refused to invest in the Mirror, and instead used its reserves to buy other business: Daily Mail shares, paper mills, and a mining company, making investments of £8 million in 1929.
Every available money and talent was diverted away from the Mirror and put into the Mail, in the hope that maintaining the Mail would stop Rothermere’s empire from complete ruin.
In 1919, Rothermere replace Mirror editor, Ed Flynn, for Alexander Campbell. The years that followed were the worst in the history of the Mirror, with the Free Gift circulation war, falling sales, and lack of investment.
In 1929, Rothermere joined with Lord Beaverbrook to launch the United Empire Party.
In the summer of 1934 came the peak of the fascist movement-massively advertised and promoted in the Mail and the Mirror. After 6 months of supporting the Blackshirts, both papers fell silent on the matter.
Rothermere Supported Hitler! “A simple and unaffected man who was obviously sincere in his desire for peace in Europe” He also described Hitler as “a perfect gentleman” a gentle ethical vegetarian who didn’t drink or smoke.
When war broke out, Rothermere was sent on a meaningless mission to Canada on aircraft ministry business, and was then almost forced exile to the Bahamas, where he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1940. His last words were “there is nothing more I can do to help my country now”.
Harry Guy Bartholomew took control of the Daily Mirror in 1934, and changed the paper beyond all recognition, creating the modern Daily Mirror and the model for popular journalism throughout most of the world for the rest of the century.
Bart’s greatest technical achievement was the “Bart-McFarlane system”. It was used to transmit photos by radio, meaning that the Mirror could obtain pictures from America within a matter of hours.
Bart was very touchy about his early life, only mentioning his mother or grandfather. Some even claimed he was one of Northcliffe’s illegitimate sons.
When Bart took over the Mirror, circulation was falling, and would hit zero by 1940. Cecil Harmsworth King, nephew of Northcliffe and Rothermere, lead the demands for change. King and Bart formed an alliance, soon to become the “New Lords of Fleet Street”. Within a few short years they created “the biggest selling newspaper in the universe” and lay the foundations of Tabloid Britain.
Sources:
Tabloid Nation: Chris Horrie
www.wikipedia.com
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/tabloid-nation
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