On This Day in 1865: Lord Northcliffe, godfather of the tabloids, was born
Alfred Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail, was born into poverty on this day and went on to change the face of the British media and become enobled as Lord Northcliffe, writes Eliot Wilson
Newspapers go back as far as the early 17th century, with general agreement that the first was the Strasbourg-based Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, first published in 1605. But it would be another three centuries before the world would see the first newspaper magnates.
Max Beaverbrook, Arthur Sulzberger, Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell, Jeff Bezos, even William Randolph Hearst: all of these media titans trod a path first taken by Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, born today in 1865 in Chapelizod, on the outskirts of Dublin.
Harmsworth was the first child of 28-year-old barrister Alfred Harmsworth and Geraldine Maffett, 26, daughter of a land agent. Before he reached his second birthday, the Harmsworths had left Ireland and moved to London, but their fortunes became increasingly dire because of Alfred Sr’s “fondness for alcohol”. Their poverty was not alleviated by the fact that 13 more children followed Alfred Jr; to keep them warm at night, they were sometimes wrapped in – ironically – newspaper.
He began his life in the milieu of genteel poverty. His education went from Stamford School to the tiny Henley House School in Kilburn, run by JV Milne, father of author AA Milne. The elder Milne encouraged Harmsworth to start a school magazine, and in 1880, aged 15, he attended his first meeting of the Sylvan Debating Club, a still-extant free speech discussion group co-founded by his father in 1868.
Harmsworth was not especially well placed for any of the more mainstream careers of the Victorian gentleman; instead he became a freelance journalist. But what marked him out very quickly was not a facility with the written word but an acute understanding of news as an industry. He was not quite 23 when in 1888 he set up his first publication, Answers to Correspondents, a weekly paper based on questions submitted by readers.
Answers to Correspondents was not high brow. The questions – many not from readers at all – included “Can Monkeys Smoke?”, “How Madmen Write” and “Why Jews Don’t Ride Bicycles”, and some were lifted from equivalent American newspapers. Harmsworth rewrote some of the serialised fiction himself so that each episode ended in a cliffhanger.
But the 12-page paper cost a penny and, while it failed initially to be profitable in its own right, Harmsworth’s commercial nous drove up the circulation by including branded novelties, fountain pens, patent medicines and pipes. By 1906, Answers had a circulation of 830,000 in a country of then around 42m: two per cent of the entire population was buying it.
Harmsworth’s sense of what the broad public wanted was near-uncanny. With younger brother Harold handling finances, he launched a series of (mostly ha’penny) comics like Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, and story papers including Union Jack and Pluck. These swept away the Victorian penny dreadfuls and effectively took their territory.
The Daily Mail changes the game
Alfred and Harold had entered the newspaper market in 1894 by acquiring The Evening News, a London paper which became the capital’s biggest selling. But they changed the game with the launch of The Daily Mail on 4 May 1896. It cost ½d. when its rivals were a penny, adopted a markedly more populist and patriotic tone and was an instant success; Harmsworth had expected to print 100,000 copies on its first day but it sold 397,215. By 1902, its circulation was one million, the best-selling newspaper in the world.
The critique of The Daily Mail 130 years ago mirrors today’s. It was robustly patriotic, accused of lacking objectivity, keen on human interest stories and sometimes played fast and loose with the facts. The Conservative Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, a gloomy reactionary, growled that it was “by office boys, for office boys”. Perhaps so; but an office boy’s ha’penny was as good as anyone else’s. Harmsworth also saw the potential of female readers, and the paper had a dedicated women’s section.
Harmsworth proved that The Daily Mail was no fluke when he bought The Weekly Dispatch and made it the country’s best-selling Sunday newspaper; in 1903, he launched The Daily Mirror explicitly as a paper for women, with a female editor, Mary Howarth; and during the 1900s he saved from financial collapse The Observer, The Times and The Sunday Times.
He was now a powerful man. He was made a baronet in 1904. When the First World War began in 1914, Northcliffe controlled 40 per cent of morning newspapers, 45 per cent of the evening press and 15 per cent of the Sunday circulation; from The Times to The Daily Mail, he held the attention of “the classes and the masses”.
Alfred was part of an extraordinary brood. His brother Harold, initially managing his finances, became Viscount Rothermere and a Cabinet minister, then took on his brother’s stake in the newspapers when Northcliffe died in 1922. Cecil was a Conservative MP then ennobled as Lord Harmsworth. Leicester sat as a Liberal MP and was made a baronet. St John bought Perrier, designed its distinctive green bottle and made it a commercial success. Christabel married a Wicklow-born army officer who became chairman of one of the biggest inter-War public relations firms.
There is a contradiction in Northcliffe’s position. He was undoubtedly a political actor: the drumbeat of The Daily Mail’s jingoism had helped start the First World War; The Times’s coverage of the Shell Crisis of 1915 undermined Asquith’s Liberal government and eventually Asquith himself; and the Northcliffe stable championed a peace settlement which became the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.
Yet Northcliffe had succeeded through commercial means, and that success rested on one overarching idea which had never been so ruthlessly exploited before: give your readers what they want, not what you think they should have.
Northcliffe was a limited man. His education had been adequate but he was neither erudite nor intellectually curious. He spoke no foreign languages, knew little about history, literature and science. Financial matters he delegated to his brother. But he had blazing ambition, fearsome energy and fingerspitzengefühl—that innate “fingertip sensitivity”—for what appealed to the reading public. This was the beginning of the populist press, the tabloids, a feedback loop between the governed and those who govern: where does the balance of power lie now? Write to Answers to Correspondents…
Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian