The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  An espousal of the high imperial ideal is not inconsistent with the pursuit of profit; but sometimes the Harmsworth papers made money in a way which was less noble than the defence of Britain’s colonial greatness. The Evening News, in the early months of Harmsworth ownership, increased its circulation from 187,000 to 390,000 in seven days. That remarkable growth was achieved as the result of the way it covered the execution of James C. Read. ‘The man who is executed in Chelmsford is pinioned in his cell, is walked quickly from there to a strange little room with gaudy dark paint and unpleasantly clean whitewash and is sunk into eternity in less than sixty seconds.’

  By the time that Edward VII came to the throne, the success of New Journalism was so obvious and extensive that the Harmsworths’ particular brand of populism was bound to attract competition which rivalled his Daily Mail and Evening News for sensationalism and triviality. It was provided by Arthur Pearson, another Newnes protégé. Like Harmsworth, Pearson had made his fortune from promotions – most notably a ‘missing word competition’ which offered a prize of £20,000, the whole sum received in entrance fees, to the first reader correctly to complete a specially commissioned poem. More ingeniously still, Pearson responded to an influenza epidemic by spraying his magazine with eucalyptus – a sovereign cure, he claimed, for the ailment. And like Harmsworth, Pearson used his profits to launch a newspaper. It was called the Daily Express and, in one particular, it launched a revolution. The front page was devoted to news, not to advertisements – the source of £1,400 in income to each issue of the Daily Mail. Pearson gambled on his readers’ interest in the world around them – and won.

  The Boer War enabled Alfred Harmsworth to establish, beyond popular doubt, his reputation as the spokesman for patriotic Britain. His attempts to represent respectable society while at the same time appealing to its more prurient instincts were temporarily damaged by his decision to follow the Daily Telegraph’s example and publish the Daily Mail on every day of the week. An expert on double standards should have known better. At the turn of the century a Sunday Telegraph was acceptable to middle-class opinion. A Sunday Mail was not. The seven-days-a-week paper was abandoned after six Sunday editions and Harmsworth returned to a safer way of increasing the number of copies sold – jingoism.

  The idea that the Daily Mail and Rudyard Kipling worshipped the same gods had stuck in his mind, so the Poet of Empire was recruited to compose verses which would tug at every loyal heartstring. Kipling did better than rouse patriotic spirits. His poem was also a financial appeal. What posterity remembers is,

  Duke’s son – cook’s son – son of a hundred Kings –

  Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay

  But what gained most credit for the Daily Mail, in which ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ was published, was the last couplet:

  Pass the hat for your credit’s sake and

  Pay, pay, pay!

  At its outset the war went badly for Britain, and the Daily Mail naturally responded with attacks on the government in general and the War Office in particular. The conduct of a military campaign had not been assaulted with such vehemence since The Times had exposed the incompetence of the campaign in the Crimea. Attacking the way in which a war is fought is always a dangerous business. For it is open to the criticism that it damages the morale of troops under fire. The Daily Mail was careful to make clear that it was the champion of the private soldier. ‘Both Krupp and Canet turn out guns which … are able to fire projectiles of equal weight more accurately and at greater range. For want of these guns, the Ordnance Department (in order to save its own skin) is prepared to greatly prolong our campaign in South Africa, to risk the lives of men and the morale of the Army.’14

  When the War Office announced a plan to improve the quality of British artillery, the Daily Mail wasted only a moment in celebration of what it called the victory for its ‘Guns! More Guns! Better Guns!’ campaign. Prolonged satisfaction would not have met its needs. The rearmament programme would be ‘marred by the same military authorities who have bungled the question of our field guns’. And, what was more, the British Lee-Metford rifle was inferior to the Boers’ Mauser. Accusations that Harmsworth had betrayed our boys at the front were met by what the Daily Mail hoped was irrefutable proof that its complaint was against the government, not the Army. A personal attack was launched on the competence of ministers: ‘The birthday book of our War Cabinet shows that nearly all its important members are past the prime of life. At an age when, in every other kind of enterprise, men are laying down their work, a number of men, approaching or past three score years and ten, are embarking upon one of the largest military and political operations in history.’15

  Even that did not fully exonerate Harmsworth from the charge of undermining the confidence of the Army, so, for a while, the Daily Mail concentrated on lurid despatches from the front. They included graphic, if slightly laconic, accounts of life in Mafeking during the siege, sent to London by Lady Sarah Wilson, sixth daughter of the Duke of Marlborough and wife of the ADC to Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, the officer commanding the garrison. But Harmsworth needed a more spectacular story to maintain his leadership in the market of mindless chauvinism. It was provided towards the end of the war by Emily Hobhouse, an English Quaker and social worker.

  General Kitchener, the new commander-in-chief, was gradually clearing the veld of Boer commandos and the civilians who supported them by ‘concentrating’ the farmers’ wives and families in overcrowded detention camps. By the time the war ended, 20,000 women and children had died of enteric fever, pneumonia and the attendant diseases of bad sanitation and poor food. Emily Hobhouse, reading reports of the conditions, travelled to South Africa with the explicit purpose of investigating the camps. What she discovered resulted in the formation of ‘ladies’ committees’ by the English churches and expressions of outrage by that substantial section of opinion which had always assumed that the British fought its wars in a more gentlemanly fashion.

  The feeling of outrage was not shared by Alfred Harmsworth. His righteous anger was reserved for Emily Hobhouse herself. She was ‘not impartial’ and had ‘no balance in her judgements’ and did not ‘know anything about the war and its history’.16 According to J. A. Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, Harmsworth, when challenged about his excoriation of the gentle Quaker social worker, sent for the circulation ledger and, pointing to the improvement in sales figures, said (without a hint of embarrassment), ‘You see, we were right.’

  Sensationalism carries with it the inherent danger of going too far, and Alfred Harmsworth was not the man to resist that temptation. In the summer of 1901 Edgar Wallace, formerly a Royal Army Medical Corps orderly, was sent to South Africa to report on the war. Daily Mail correspondents never need to be told what is expected of them. So Wallace must have anticipated how enthusiastically Harmsworth would welcome the despatch which claimed that the Boers were shooting wounded British prisoners. The story was published in late June and immediately denied by St John Brodrick, the Secretary of State for War, who told the House of Commons that Kitchener himself had said that there was no foundation whatever for the allegations. The Daily Mail, under Edgar Wallace’s by-line, repeated the accusations.

  To everyone’s astonishment, Kitchener then recanted. Reports of executions had been made to his officers and he had received letters from men who had witnessed them. Nevertheless, the government continued to repudiate the story. Daily Mail correspondents were obliged to leave South Africa because, according to the War Office, they had offered junior civil servants money in exchange for classified information. Harmsworth made the usual demand that the accusation be made outside the House of Commons. His bluster was based on a well-known trick. The libel against which he threatened to proceed was the claim that ‘the Daily Mail has purloined public documents’. That was not Brodrick’s charge. The House of Commons added more confusion to an already confused situation. Alfred Harmsworth’s threats against the Secretary of S
tate for War were adjudged to be a breach of privilege, but he was spared the usual punishments and humiliations.

  Harmsworth, forced to rely on agency reports of the war, struck back. Wallace, sometime editor of the Rand Daily Mail, returned to South Africa without the handicap of official accreditation from the Daily Mail. His technique for collecting information was based on exactly the method about which Brodrick had complained. He bribed soldiers. One of the sentries on guard at the peace treaty negotiations sent him signals about the progress of the talks – red for stalemate, blue for a measure of agreement and white for complete success. As a result, the Daily Mail was first with the news that the war was over.

  Not surprisingly, Wallace became Harmsworth’s star reporter, sent out to cover the sensational stories on which circulation depended. When they turned out to be not sensational enough, Wallace could be relied upon to supply the missing ingredient. In the case of the soap-cartel, he remedied the deficiency with an enthusiasm which cost the Daily Mail record damages of £50,000.

  On 18 October 1906, a letter from Alfred Harmsworth to William Lever, MP, announced that the Daily Mail intended to campaign against the ‘soap-trust’ which, the paper was right to conclude, was keeping prices unreasonably high. Harmsworth also thought it necessary to promise the ‘strictest impartiality’ between the various companies in the presentation of the story – although it must have been clear that Lever, the only well-known soap manufacturer, would receive more publicity than any of its rivals. A number of flamboyant headlines followed. ‘Trust Soap Already Dearer’ was followed by ‘How Fifteen Ounces Make a Pound’, a reference to Lever Brothers’ decision not to increase the price of a bar of soap but to reduce the weight. Then Wallace was brought in to write a ‘human interest story’. It concerned a widowed washerwoman in Liverpool and carried the headline ‘Cruel Blow to the Poor’.

  The widow supported her children by taking in washing – the family’s only means of support. According to Wallace, by reducing the size of his soap bar and persuading other members of the trust to do the same, Lever had cost the widow an extra one and sixpence a week. As a result, her children no longer had butter on their bread. Lever sued on the advice of F. E. Smith, who stated, ‘There is no answer to this action for libel, the damages must be enormous.’17 By the time that the case came to court, the trust had collapsed and the Daily Mail, without any justification, claimed the credit for its demise. But that did little to soften the blow of the humiliation which followed. Acting for Lever Brothers, Sir Edward Carson read the operative sentence from Edgar Wallace’s story. The widow ‘lost one and sixpence a week through the increase in the price of soap’. That, he added, could only be true if she used ninety-six pounds of soap a week. The damages were set at £50,000.

  By the turn of the century, many of the men and women who had benefited from the 1870 Education Act were approaching middle age and, it was assumed, likely to want both the information and the entertainment that only newspapers could supply. The consequence, motivated sometimes by greed and sometimes by a genuine hope of increasing understanding, was a glut of new titles and the constant amalgamation and relaunch of old. Between 1900 and 1914, ten evening papers were at one time or another available in London. The Evening Times lasted for barely a year. The Evening Standard is on sale today. The Star, the Evening News and the Pall Mall Gazette had periods of real prosperity and genuine influence. The St James’s Gazette, the Westminster Gazette, the Globe, the Sun and the Echo are forgotten.

  Morning papers, many of them created for the specific purpose of supporting a political party, proliferated as freely and died with the same depressing frequency. The Tribune (high-mindedly liberal) failed, according to Philip Gibbs, one of its feature writers, because it was ‘too good and there was too much of its goodness’. Stead’s Daily Paper failed for much the same reason. The Majority, ‘The Organ of all who work for Wages or Salary’, was doomed from the start. So was the Picture Paper (produced in Sheffield), the Daily Citizen and the Daily Call. The Daily Sketch, which amalgamated with the Daily Graphic and the Daily Herald, lasted for half a century. But even Harmsworth, with his unscrupulous eye for scandal and sensation, made a major error in the foundation of the Daily Mirror – a penny paper for women.

  The Daily Mirror, with an ‘all woman staff for an all woman readership’, was led by the unusual innovation of a woman editor, Mary Howath, who was transferred from the features desk of the Daily Mail to produce a paper which promised to advise about ‘flowers on the dinner table [and] the disposition of forces in the Far East’. In fact it specialised in the worst sort of Daily Mail stories. ‘Mother’s Tragic Fate’ and ‘Baby in the Dustbin’ were juxtaposed with ‘Beauty in the Bath’ and ‘Dainty Frocks for Children’. The first issue sold 276,000 copies. After six months the circulation had fallen to 24,000 and the net losses exceeded £100,000. A new editor (male) was appointed and the ‘first daily newspaper for gentlewomen’ (price one penny) was sold for a halfpenny and became London’s first experiment in tabloid journalism.

  In 1904, Harmsworth bought the Manchester Courier and told his friends that the object of the purchase was not so much commercial as personal. He had acquired an unreciprocated affection for A. J. Balfour and hoped, by providing him with local support, to guarantee his re-election. The Tory Party lost the election on a landslide and Balfour lost his seat, but Harmsworth, at the age of forty, was made a peer in the Dissolution Honours List. His elevation signified both hope of future favours and gratitude for past help. The newspapers owned by the new Viscount Northcliffe had taken a lively, if equivocal, interest in the issue which had brought the government down – tariff reform.

  Although the Daily Mail and Evening News were regularly accused of imposing the proprietor’s principles on an unthinking readership, there were times when their policy slavishly followed, rather than sought to determine, public opinion. In 1903 ‘spies and ferrets’ were sent out into the provinces to gauge the national mood.18 The reports from the ‘Walking Enquirers’, as they were officially called, appeared in the Daily Mail on 29 August 1903. Twenty per cent of the people interviewed had never heard of tariff reform. The rest were solidly against it. The editorial announced that the paper was ‘not against food taxes per se but against food taxes which would raise the cost of living – in other words against stomach taxes’. The ambiguity was emphasised by the publication of extracts from both Joe Chamberlain’s most recent protectionist speeches and his ancient advocacy of free trade. Throughout the summer the Daily Mail faced both ways at once.

  During the autumn it defined its position more precisely. ‘Any Unionist Member of Parliament who has been among his constituents recently must know that, almost to a man, they are in favour of putting a tax on manufactured imports.’ A week later, when Arthur Balfour published his Economic Notes on Insular Free Trade, the Daily Mail declared a victory. ‘Light at Last’ it triumphed. ‘Mr Chamberlain … unfortunately confined himself to exactly that form of tariff which it is madness to attempt. The taxation of foodstuffs was … one on which we have ever spoken in no doubtful language … We are a manufacturing country and must buy our bread in the cheapest market.’19

  The Daily Mail announced that it would be ‘polling the public … for the purpose of testing public opinion on the great fiscal question of the hour’. The initiative, like all Northcliffe’s schemes, was more concerned with circulation than with democracy. Voting papers were issued with the paper and on 7 October the proprietor made his position clear. ‘The taxation of foreign manufacture should precede … not the taxation on food.’ Not surprisingly, the ‘general election in advance’ ended in a landslide victory for the opponents of ‘stomach taxes’.

  Chamberlain, whose principal object was binding the Empire together, made a subtle change to his policy. A tariff was necessary to protect home-grown food. ‘Agriculture’, he said on 7 October, ‘has been practically destroyed.’ The new emphasis allowed Northcliffe to edge closer to Chamberlain
’s position while claiming that Chamberlain was accepting the arguments of the Daily Mail. When the tariff reform position was again adjusted, with the announcement that import duties would cut rather than increase the cost of living, Northcliffe again declared a victory. ‘Dealing with food taxes Mr Chamberlain proved that he has advanced further in the direction which the Daily Mail has demonstrated to be necessary.’ Always anxious to avoid understatement, Northcliffe concluded the editorial, ‘He has set out to accomplish the work which Cavour fulfilled for Italy and Bismarck for Germany.’20

  Northcliffe’s conversion to tariff reform was inevitable because it was espoused by Joseph Chamberlain, and Chamberlain had all the characteristics of a ‘man of destiny’ – qualities which Northcliffe later found irresistible in Hitler and Mussolini. On 31 December 1903 the Daily Mail announced, ‘In politics and the whole realm of national affairs it has been Mr Chamberlain’s year.’ In the first month of the New Year Northcliffe described, in the stilted prose which was his trademark, how the hero of 1903 was going to achieve another triumph in 1904 by promoting the Commission set up by the Tariff Reform League. ‘Under a drooping palm tree, symbolical of the Colonial Empire and in a blaze of electric light typical of the modern industry of Old England, Mr Chamberlain yesterday opened the Commission which has been charged to draw up a scientific tariff for Greater Britain.’

  Northcliffe never became a thoroughgoing member of the Establishment. Both his background and his temperament made that impossible. But his alliance with Joe Chamberlain – or at least with Chamberlain’s imperial ambitions – awoke interest in more than income and circulation. Respectability called. Despite his lurid personal life – several illegitimate children and the acceptance that his neglected wife would find solace elsewhere – the appearance of propriety was essential to Northcliffe’s peace of mind. When the Daily Mirror ran a summer-long feature on Mary Kellerman, a Channel swimmer, he issued firm instructions that she was to be photographed either fully clothed or up to her neck in water.