August 14th: The Day the Chiefs Died
Stop Press.
August 14th is a red-letter day in the history of newspapers.
Or perhaps a black-letter day.
Because on August 14th, 1951, in Beverly Hills, California, William Randolph Hearst died.
Hearst.
The great American press baron. Newspaper proprietor. Politician. Millionaire. Art collector. Builder of San Simeon. The man whose newspaper empire made him one of the most powerful men in America.
And, famously, the barely disguised model for Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
One of the giants of newspaper history.
But hold the front page.
Because exactly twenty-nine years earlier, to the day, another titan of the press also gave up the ghost. Not in Beverly Hills.
In London.
At 1 Carlton Gardens, just off the Mall.
August 14th, 1922.
Alfred Harmsworth.
Lord Northcliffe.
The Chief.
And the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives him quite an epitaph.
It calls him “the greatest figure who ever walked down Fleet Street.”
That’s quite a sentence.
And quite a man.
Because Alfred Harmsworth didn’t just own newspapers.
He changed newspapers.
Changed what went into them. Changed what they looked like. Changed how they were printed. Changed how they were sold. Changed who read them.
In large measure, Alfred Harmsworth invented the popular press.
And he did it here.
In London.
So let’s go back to the beginning.
Alfred Harmsworth was born near Dublin in 1865. The family moved to London when he was two. Their fortunes declined. They moved from St John’s Wood to Hampstead.
And there, at Henley House School in Hampstead, you can already see what’s coming.
Young Alfred starts a school magazine.
Journalism has got him.
By the time he’s about fifteen he’s doing occasional reporting for the Hampstead and Highgate Express.
Think about that.
The boy who will one day own The Times starts out reporting Hampstead news.
And his education, in the formal sense, is not especially distinguished.
Indeed, one of the fascinating things about Harmsworth is that he understands very early something that the grand old men of Victorian journalism don’t entirely understand.
There is a huge new reading public out there.
Millions of them.
They’ve been to school. They can read. They want to read.
But they don’t necessarily want four leading articles, three columns of parliamentary speeches and something learned about the Bulgarian question.
Harmsworth said these young people were “aching to read.”
The trick was to give them something they actually wanted to read.
And there’s a wonderful London moment when the philosophy of Alfred Harmsworth comes into focus.
He’s standing on the steps of the British Museum, talking to the writer Max Pemberton.
And Harmsworth says what journalism needs is:
“Less British Museum and more life.”
There it is.
You could almost put those six words over the entrance to the twentieth-century newspaper industry.
Less British Museum.
More life.
Harmsworth himself was certainly getting plenty of life.
As a very young man he got a maidservant pregnant. His mother was appalled and sent him packing from the family home.
So in 1882, still only seventeen, he took rooms at 6 Pump Court in the Temple.
There’s another London address for us.
Hampstead to the Temple.
And he hustles.
He writes for The Globe. The Morning Post. The St James’s Gazette. Boys’ papers. Girls’ papers. Cycling magazines.
Cycling was huge.
And Harmsworth nearly killed himself doing it. He contracted pneumonia after cycling from Bristol in the rain without enough food.
His doctor ordered him out of London.
He recovered, saved £1,000, and in 1887 came back.
Now watch him go.
He sets himself up at 26 Paternoster Square, right beside St Paul’s Cathedral.
And in 1888 he launches Answers to Correspondents.
The idea is beautifully Harmsworthian.
Questions.
Answers.
Short items.
Things people actually want to know.
One of the questions in an early issue was:
“How madmen write.”
You can sneer.
Plenty did.
But within five years Answers was selling more than a million copies a week.
Harmsworth had found the nerve.
He knew where to press.
And he had something else going for him.
A brother.
Harold Harmsworth.
Alfred had the ideas. Harold had the financial brain.
It was one of the great partnerships in publishing history.
And then, in 1894, they bought a failing London newspaper.
The Evening News.
Price: £25,000.
They turned it round.
But that was just the warm-up act.
Because on May 4th, 1896, Alfred Harmsworth launched the newspaper that changed British journalism.
The Daily Mail.
And he didn’t just wake up one morning and print it.
There were more than sixty-five dummy runs before the first real issue appeared.
Sixty-five rehearsals.
Harmsworth knew exactly who his reader was.
The clerk.
The City worker.
The commuter.
The man hurrying to work in London who didn’t have forty minutes to wrestle with a leading article.
This was, in the paper’s own phrase:
“The busy man’s paper.”
And Britain was becoming a busy man’s country.
More trains. More commuters. More literacy. Faster printing. Faster communications.
Harmsworth brought all of it together.
Short paragraphs.
Catchy headlines.
Human-interest stories.
Pictures.
A women’s page.
And price.
Always price.
The first Daily Mail sold 397,213 copies.
Within four years sales were nudging a million.
The British newspaper had become a mass-produced consumer product.
And Harmsworth was obsessive about the machinery behind it.
He understood that journalism wasn’t just writers and editors.
It was presses.
Paper.
Telegraphs.
Linotype machines.
Distribution.
Railways.
Technology.
Speed.
At one point his presses could turn out as many as 90,000 copies an hour.
He established a direct wire to the end of the transatlantic cable on Valentia Island.
He linked London and Paris.
He created a Manchester operation so the paper could be produced closer to its northern readers.
In 1902 the firm moved into Carmelite House, just off Fleet Street.
There, in the basement, Harmsworth installed new rotary presses and slashed his production costs.
The Chief had arrived in Fleet Street.
And he was called the Chief.
His employees called him that.
Fleet Street called him that.
He even liked to sign himself simply:
N.
Northcliffe.
Napoleon.
Because by now Alfred Harmsworth had become Lord Northcliffe.
Though he had once said that if he wanted a peerage he would “buy one, like an honest man.”
And he was ferocious.
Demanding.
Restless.
Nothing was ever finished.
Nothing was ever quite good enough.
Pictures could be better.
Headlines could be better.
Distribution could be better.
Tomorrow’s paper had to be better than today’s.
There’s a wonderful Fleet Street story about a young reporter who happened to answer the telephone when Northcliffe rang the news desk.
“Who’s that?” demanded the Chief.
The terrified young man replied:
“My name is Fish, sir.”
Northcliffe hung up.
Then rang the news editor and ordered that Fish should be put on duty every night.
Why?
Because from then on Northcliffe could ring the news desk and ask:
“Anything fresh, Fish?”
That’s the Chief.
And the empire kept growing.
In 1903 he launched the Daily Mirror.
And here’s another extraordinary thing.
It was conceived as a newspaper for women.
With an all-female staff.
In 1903.
It flopped.
And this is where you see another Harmsworth characteristic.
He didn’t sit around mourning his mistake.
He changed the paper.
Quickly.
It became the Illustrated Daily Mirror.
Pictures.
Photographs.
Sales recovered.
Fail fast, as they say today.
Harmsworth was doing it 120 years ago.
And then came the great prize.
The Times.
The Thunderer.
The newspaper of the Establishment.
The sort of newspaper, you might have thought, that represented everything the young Harmsworth had rebelled against when he said:
“Less British Museum and more life.”
He bought it in 1908.
For £320,000.
The Hampstead schoolboy now owned The Times.
And naturally he started tinkering.
Advertising.
Typography.
Staff.
Price.
In 1914 he cut the price to a penny.
Average sales shot up to 145,000.
Nothing was sacred.
Not even The Times.
And then there was politics.
Because when millions of people read your newspapers, politicians start returning your telephone calls.
Prime ministers start worrying about you.
Governments start wondering whether you can bring them down.
Northcliffe believed he could.
Sometimes he probably could.
During the First World War his newspapers attacked the government over the shortage of high-explosive shells.
The famous shells scandal.
The Daily Mail went for Lord Kitchener.
Sales actually fell.
Northcliffe was denounced as an ally of the Hun.
But the political crisis helped bring about the reconstruction of Asquith’s government.
Then in 1916 Asquith himself fell and Lloyd George became prime minister.
How much did Northcliffe have to do with it?
Historians still argue.
But here’s the important bit.
People at the time thought he had a great deal to do with it.
Northcliffe’s younger brother Cecil asked him, in effect:
Who killed Cock Robin?
And supplied the answer.
You did.
The newspaper proprietor had become a kingmaker.
And that’s where the Harmsworth story becomes darker.
Power.
The intoxicating stuff.
Politicians feared him.
Politicians courted him.
Lloyd George said the press had to be either squashed or squared.
And when Northcliffe was given a wartime propaganda job, Lloyd George remarked that he was safe as long as he was occupied.
There’s a sentence.
Keep the Chief busy.
Because otherwise the Chief might come after you.
And Northcliffe knew exactly what made newspapers powerful.
Emotion.
Fear.
Anger.
Resentment.
He is widely credited with summing up one ingredient of his journalism in three chilling words:
“A daily hate.”
Give the reader a daily hate.
There’s something horribly modern about that.
Indeed, there’s something horribly eternal about it.
But Northcliffe wasn’t simply a purveyor of outrage.
That would make him much less interesting than he was.
He was fascinated by the future.
Aeroplanes.
Wireless.
New printing technology.
New communications.
When Alcock and Brown flew the Atlantic in 1919, Northcliffe understood the importance of it.
In 1920 he helped persuade the great Australian soprano Nellie Melba to sing in a pioneering wireless broadcast from Chelmsford.
And the next day he was telling his readers that wireless wasn’t merely for governments and business.
It was going to be entertainment.
Think about that.
The great newspaper man sees broadcasting coming.
He even installs a wireless set in The Times office to get news faster.
This is a man perpetually sniffing the wind.
What’s next?
What do people want?
How can I get it to them faster?
He once observed:
“Smiling pictures make people smile.”
And:
“I personally prefer short leading articles.”
And, wonderfully:
“People like to read about profiteering. Most of them would like to be profiteers if they had the chance.”
He knew his readers.
Or thought he did.
But by then the Chief was failing.
And this part of the story is grim.
He was only in his fifties but looked prematurely old.
He had a persistent cough and sore throat.
His behaviour became increasingly erratic.
There were rumours that he was going mad.
Lloyd George attacked his “diseased vanity” in the House of Commons and even tapped his own head to make perfectly clear what he was suggesting.
For years afterwards there were stories that Northcliffe had syphilis.
He didn’t.
The medical evidence eventually demolished that story.
What appears to have happened was a blood infection, possibly originating in his teeth, which spread to his brain and damaged his heart valves.
The Chief was dying.
In 1921 he set off on a world tour.
Everywhere he went people wanted to see him.
He came home in February 1922 looking desperately ill.
And finally we come back to London.
To St James’s.
To 1 Carlton Gardens.
A grand London house just behind the Mall.
Think about the journey.
The boy in Hampstead producing his school magazine.
The teenage reporter on the Hampstead and Highgate Express.
The seventeen-year-old lodger at 6 Pump Court.
The young publisher at Paternoster Square.
The newspaper revolutionary at Carmelite House.
The owner of the Daily Mail.
The Daily Mirror.
The Times.
The man governments feared.
The Chief.
And on August 14th, 1922, at 1 Carlton Gardens, Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, died.
He was 57 years old.
Fifty-seven.
And there’s a lovely London coda to the address.
In later years No. 1 Carlton Gardens became the official London residence of the Foreign Secretary.
And almost round the corner, at 11 Carlton House Terrace, would be the headquarters of the Foreign Press Association.
The press seems reluctant to let the Chief get very far away.
He was given a funeral at Westminster Abbey.
Then taken north through London and buried at North Finchley.
And before he died he left instructions.
He wanted to lie near his mother.
Nothing grand on the grave.
Nothing sticking up from the ground.
Just his name and the years.
Touchingly modest.
But then came the other instruction.
And this one is pure Northcliffe.
The newspaperman to the last.
He said:
“In The Times I should like a page reviewing my life-work by someone who really knows and a leading article by the best man on the night.”
Wonderful.
He’s dying.
And he’s still commissioning copy.
Still thinking about the page.
Still worrying about who’s writing the leader.
Still editing tomorrow morning’s newspaper.
The Chief to the very end.
And remember the date.
August 14th, 1922.
Because twenty-nine years later, on August 14th, 1951, William Randolph Hearst died in Beverly Hills.
Two newspaper empires.
Two continents.
Two men who understood the enormous power of giving millions of people something they wanted to read.
And the same date on the death certificate.
August 14th.
The day the Chiefs died.
And on that note, sign-off time.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
Disconnecting time for today’s episode of London Calling.
See you tomorrow.