The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  In 1905, Associated Newspapers Limited was formed as the parent company to own and manage the Daily Mail, the Evening News and the various provincial papers which he had picked up along the way. A month after the incorporation Northcliffe bought the Observer (the oldest newspaper in Britain) for £5,000. He immediately invited J. L. Garvin – the editor of Outlook, an intellectual journal and an advocate of tariff reform – to join the paper. In 1908, Garvin was made editor and given a one-third interest in the paper. Northcliffe believed, correctly, that he had acquired the services of the most brilliant journalist in London.

  Northcliffe was notoriously indulgent with those he favoured. Rightly believing that his new recruit could improve the Daily Mail, he suggested that Garvin should attend its afternoon news conferences. The suggestion was rejected in language that Northcliffe would have found intolerable from any other subordinate: ‘I will be responsible for nothing but what I direct.’21 Garvin was quoting from the Earl of Chatham – lese majesty in itself. Instead of sacking him, Northcliffe asked him to accept, in addition to the Observer, responsibility for the political pages of the World, and agreed that he should also write regularly for the Daily Telegraph.

  For three years the relationship flourished. Then, on 5 February 1911, the Observer attacked the Daily Mail for what Garvin called ‘a campaign against Imperial preference’.22 Once again Northcliffe drew back from the punishment which would have been imposed on any other employee. Instead of instant dismissal, Garvin was offered the chance to acquire full ownership of the Observer and given time to find a backer who would put up the two-thirds of the paper’s equity that Northcliffe still held. Waldorf Astor bought the Observer outright, insisting (as a matter of principle) on complete, rather than partial ownership. But although Garvin was obliged to sell his shares, he was given – and received for thirty-six years – absolute control over the paper’s editorial policy.

  Northcliffe’s generosity towards Garvin was not the result of any decline in his appetite for acquiring new titles. The Times was a natural target: it was a legend, a challenge and, because of its managerial incompetence, an affront to modern journalism. William Randolph Hearst, resenting Northcliffe’s challenge to his title as the undisputed champion newspaper mogul of the world, got very close to understanding the urge to occupy Printing House Square as well as illustrating his contempt for the Daily Mail and Evening News. ‘Harmsworth is trying to buy the London Times. He wants to own “a great paper; the greatest paper”. Therefore he knows that he owns no such paper now. May he get the Times and, when he does, may he show the real Harmsworth, editing a real newspaper.’23

  Northcliffe did not need the added incentive of Hearst’s mockery to convince him that The Times must be his. He saw the most prestigious of all British newspapers as both a potential symbol of his status and as an asset which others had wasted and he could exploit. The suspicion that it needed new management was confirmed by the discovery that the editor, the legendary G. E. Buckle, opened his own letters. The inefficiency was compounded by a failure to recognise a good story when it found one. ‘Did you know that there was a sub-editor at The Times who spiked an elephant? An elephant escaped from a circus in South London and went careering about the streets. When the sub-editor received an account of the incident, he stuck it in the waste file with other rejected copy.’24

  The Times’s financial position was as precarious as its journalists were unimaginative. Acquisition of the rights of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the publication of a new edition, had only postponed the inevitable. Both ownership and management had to change hands. In December 1906, a wrangle over the legal definition of the paper was resolved and The Times was declared a limited liability company. The proprietor, Arthur Walter, realised that he could not raise the capital necessary for its successful survival, but he was determined to keep it out of the hands of Northcliffe. Rumours that it might be taken over by such a vulgar parvenu were dismissed as ‘so absurd in themselves, and so utterly baseless in point of fact, that it might seem unnecessary to pay any attention to them’.25

  At first, Moberly Bell, the general manager of The Times, agreed that the paper which was also a national institution ought ‘never to be trampled in the dirt by men of the Tit-Bits school’.26 Since Newnes showed no interest in such an expensive acquisition, it was clear that Bell was setting out his opposition to both Northcliffe and C. Arthur Pearson, whose career – Evening Standard, Daily Express and Pearson’s Weekly – almost exactly mirrored Northcliffe’s Standard, Daily Mail and Answers.

  It is by no means certain from which direction Arthur Walter hoped the help would come – though it was rumoured that hard necessity had reconciled him to doing a deal with Pearson. Bell, who, like G. E. Buckle, the editor, had not been consulted about Walter’s plans, became convinced that he had been kept out of the discussion because the new owner did not intend to employ him. He decided that if Pearson was the favoured suitor, he would do all in his power to ensure that the match was not made.

  Northcliffe saw and grasped the opportunity and embarked on a remarkably audacious campaign of black propaganda. On 5 January 1908, the Observer announced that The Times was about to acquire a new proprietor. The immediate assumption was that it was Northcliffe himself. Two weeks later the Observer, at Northcliffe’s suggestion, published the ‘news’ that Pearson had made an offer for The Times which Walter had accepted. It concluded that ‘Mr Pearson is to be warmly congratulated upon acquiring The Times at a point comparatively early in his career.’ Northcliffe added his ‘best wishes’ for Arthur Pearson’s ‘Newest and greatest enterprise’.

  Pearson was touched. ‘A thousand thanks for your best wishes, which I am glad to have.’27 His message crossed with a letter to Bell from Lord Northcliffe. ‘I am going to buy The Times. With your help if you will give it to me. In spite of you if you don’t.’28 To the general manager the message seemed to offer at least a chance of prolonged employment. It took him six weeks to convince Walter that he had found a more suitable buyer than Pearson. Then the proprietor agreed that The Times should go to a mysterious ‘Mr X’ for £320,000. Northcliffe became the proprietor on 16 March 1905.

  Technically Bell remained in full control. Northcliffe had shown his faith in his new ally’s probity by depositing £320,000 in Bell’s bank account and leaving him to complete the transaction with Walter, but no such risk could be taken with The Times’s reputation. The man who had made his fortune from peddling tittle-tattle insisted on a unique clause being entered in the articles of association. ‘It shall be a fundamental principle of the company that the efficiency, reputation and character of The Times shall as far as possible be maintained at the present high standard, and that on all existing political questions the independent attitude of the paper shall be maintained as heretofore.’29

  The hope of acquiring The Times had been the apogee of Pearson’s ambition. By nature a businessman rather than a newspaper tycoon, he nevertheless held strong political views which he hoped to propagate through the Evening Standard and the Daily Express. His support for tariff reform was so extreme that many Conservatives welcomed The Times becoming the property of a man who had the grace to equivocate on the issue.

  Pearson had become an acolyte of Joseph Chamberlain and an active participant in the political campaign for ‘tariff reform’ – a role revealed to the Duke of Portland when Chamberlain asked for his help to carry the battle for imperial preference into Nottinghamshire. ‘He asked me to allow a meeting to be held at Welbeck in order that he might explain the scheme to a large number of farmers and others interested in agriculture in the Midlands counties. I agreed to his request but stipulated that he should send some experienced person to help with the organisation of the meeting. “Certainly” said Mr Chamberlain “I will send you the finest hustler I know.’”30

  The description stuck. Pearson became a knight, principally in recognition of his work in helping to found St Dunstan’s Hospital for the Blind. But he r
emained, in public esteem, the ‘finest hustler’ in Great Britain. His hustling was not always successful. Attempts to promote his imperialist ideal (and to advertise colonial products) in a new daily paper, the Standard of Empire, failed. And the collapse of that newspaper, combined with the gradual deterioration of his sight, made him lose enthusiasm for, if not interest in, the newspaper business. He began to sell his shares, tranche by tranche. By 1911 Max Aitken was a major shareholder in the Daily Express and poised to become its proprietor.

  On the day in 1905 when Northcliffe acquired The Times, its circulation was 35,000. He immediately set to work to increase sales by improving news coverage. The Times was reluctant to change, and he realised that the changes could not be made at the expense of the paper’s distinguished reputation. His enemies accused him of attempting to create an ‘edition de luxe of the Daily Mail’. In fact, he resisted the more extreme suggestions for reform with the complaint that too much ‘popularisation would be like putting on a Punch and Judy show in Westminster Abbey’.31 Instead of changing the paper, he attempted to change the habits of its staff – mastering The Times ‘by mastering its principal members’.32 The stratagem failed. Three years after the acquisition, the circulation had still only risen to 47,000.

  He was, therefore, left with the last desperate expedient. In March 1914, he lowered the cover price to one penny. The circulation rose within days to 165,000. Geoffrey Dawson, who by then had become editor, did not receive the message of congratulation which he might have expected. Instead Northcliffe wrote, ‘I hear that the old lady of Printing House Square gathered up her skirts and shrieked at the sight of a man under her bed in the face of a real increase in demand for The Times for the first time since her middle age.’33 Northcliffe naturally took the credit, though the increase in sales was only partly the result of his policy. The prospect of war had stimulated interest in hard news. And Northcliffe anticipated the ‘German menace’ with a vehemence that none of his competitors could (or chose to) match.

  Northcliffe was a weathervane who pointed in a different direction every time the wind blew. His instinct – as a Tory, a would-be gentleman and a peer – was to oppose the Asquith government’s plan to limit the power of the House of Lords.* He changed his mind shortly after Lloyd George’s Limehouse Speech – the most controversial episode in the whole constitutional campaign – for reasons that the Chancellor of the Exchequer set out in a letter to his brother: ‘Lord Northcliffe came to see me last night. He told me that the Budget has completely destroyed the Tariff Reform propaganda in this country. He said that they had all miscalculated the popularity of the Land Clauses. He wants to trim.’34

  It was, surprisingly, their first meeting – though Northcliffe had turned down a previous invitation to 11 Downing Street on the slightly spurious grounds that ‘journalists should be read and not seen’.35 The two men got on so well that the Chancellor described the details of the Development of Roads Bill to his guest, even though they had not been reported to Parliament. The friendship did not last long. Garvin, having caught wind of Northcliffe’s volte-face, wrote him an impassioned letter.

  … my sixth sense tells me that a Unionist Surrender upon the Budget is much more probable … The Government is, of course, less popular than last year. If they pass the Budget as it stands, they will have scored a parliamentary triumph as brilliant as any in our recollection. That alone will impress democracy, always more attracted by pugilistic force than by anything else … Men like Lloyd George and Winston Churchill will do anything to win. Upon the lines of the Budget they will keep winning if we submit now … Our Dukes should be warned to keep off the grass … In short the Budget ought to be rejected. That was not formerly my opinion. But now [we should] not encourage, by indirect means, … thoughts of surrender.36

  The strictures were accepted in remarkably good part, and Northcliffe returned to the party of true Unionism. His papers denounced both Lloyd George’s budget and attempts to prevent the House of Lords from frustrating the will of the Commons. But opposing the instincts and inclinations of his readers always disturbed him. He was at his happiest, if not his best, reinforcing prejudices which he shared with the readers of the popular press. It was his capacity for rousing existing but dormant fears which made his enemies accuse him of the most cynical circulation stunt in newspaper history – starting the First World War.

  As early as 1900, when the Kaiser was still pledging his undying fealty to his grandmother, Northcliffe had no doubt that Queen Victoria’s Hohenzollern grandson was up to no good: ‘This is our hour of preparation, tomorrow may be the day of world conflict … Germany will go slowly and surely; she is not in a hurry; her preparations are quietly and systematically made; it is no part of her object to cause general alarm which might be fatal to her designs.’37

  Northcliffe’s apprehension grew with the years and the German battleship programme, and in 1909 he commissioned Robert Blatchford, the socialist author of Merrie England and editor of the Clarion, to visit Germany and prepare a series of articles on ‘the secret and insidious enemy’. Blatchford, as is the habit of journalists recruited for such enterprises, found that his sponsor’s suspicions were totally justified. Attacked for working for the Northcliffe empire, he justified writing for the Daily Mail with the explanation that he wrote not for reward but because he believed ‘that Germany is deliberately preparing to destroy the British Empire and because [I know] that we are not able or ready to defend ourselves’.38 He went on to explain, irrelevantly, ‘I am ready to sacrifice socialism for the sake of England, but never to sacrifice England for the sake of socialism.’39

  By 1912, even the most complacent members of the Liberal government were beginning to worry about Germany’s naval building programme. Northcliffe, with newspaper correspondents in Hamburg and Stettin, reported to the Cabinet that all German merchantmen were built under the supervision of the Admiralty in Berlin. ‘It is necessary to build gun platforms into a ship while it is under construction, and I am assured that all the fast German liners have these platforms – invisible to the ordinary ocean passenger’s view but capable of being uncovered and having guns mounted immediately the emergency arises.’40

  Northcliffe, true to his nature, not only knew that the war was coming. He knew how it could be won. Perhaps the greatest of his Edwardian campaigns – transcending the urgent call for telephones to be installed in police boxes, the demand to abandon investment in electric tramcars when the petrol-driven omnibus was available and pleas to accept the importance of providing the London fire brigade with longer ladders – was his espousal of what he called ‘the motor car of the air’. One day, he predicted, the ‘sky would be darkened by flights of aeroplanes’. And in the very near future, he had no doubt, ‘aerial power will be an even more important thing than sea power’.41 Aeroplanes could become Britain’s protection against Germany.

  In 1906, when Alberto Santos-Dumont got his premature plane off the ground and flew it for two hundred yards, Northcliffe found it hard to believe that the Daily Mail, unimpressed by a flight of two hundred yards, buried the story at the foot of an inside page. ‘It does not matter how far he has flown’, Northcliffe raged. ‘He has shown what can be done.’42 Thereafter, showing what can be done became an obsession. The Daily Mail offered a prize of £ 1,000 for the first cross-channel flight, Calais to Dover, and £10,000 for the first flight from London to Manchester. Northcliffe wrote of roads being scrapped when everybody moved from place to place in ‘a voyage through space’. But his immediate concern was air defence.*

  The Daily Mail staff took up the theme. W. F. Bullock, cabling from America on the Wright brothers’ early flights, thought ‘AEROPLANE PRIMARILY INTENDED WAR MACHINE STOP … SHOULD HAVE NO DIFFICULTY DROPPING BOMB GREATEST NICETY ON ANY OBJECT ATTACK STOP’.43 Agonised by what he thought to be the government’s indolence, Northcliffe complained, after making a private visit to the Wrights’ exhibition site, ‘I notice that the Germans and French have military
representatives here.’ He then gave the War Office unsolicited and unwelcome advice:

  As I am constantly being chaffed by these foreign gentlemen with regard to the British army aeroplane, which they have nicknamed ‘the steamroller’, it occurs to me that, if it is worth the while of France and Germany to be on the spot, one of your young men might be sent down here to find out why it is that this aeroplane gets off the ground, and can fly for ten minutes or ten hours, if it chooses, and your Aldershot aeroplane … is unable to leave the ground.44

  Richard Haldane, the Secretary of State for War, was both profoundly unimpressed and mightily annoyed at the impertinence. Northcliffe was easy to dislike. Indeed his behaviour often alienated people from the causes which he supported. He was right about air power, but his campaign failed. It sold newspapers but it did not change policy. The great populist and supreme judge of the national mood did not really understand the British attitude to newspapers and politics. His readers enjoyed angry editorials and fearless exposures. But journalists rarely changed the public’s minds. The halfpenny dreadfuls made money by following public opinion. They rarely made policy by influencing it.

  *See Chapter 8, ‘Who Shall Rule?’

  *For a fuller account of the development of the aeroplane, see Chapter 20, ‘The Shape of Things to Come’.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Shape of Things to Come

  British motorists, believing themselves to be the harbingers of the brave new mechanical world, were determined to celebrate the arrival of the twentieth century in appropriate style. They were also anxious to convince doubters – almost certainly a majority of the population – that, despite the dust and fumes which it created, the automobile was the safe and reliable transport of the future. So the Automobile Club of Britain was persuaded to organise what, today, would be called a rally. In an unconscious concession to the doubters, they called it a ‘trial’. And trial it turned out to be. In April 1900, sixty-five vehicles left Hyde Park Corner on a 1,010-mile journey which would take them to every major town and city in England and Scotland. To the organisers’ relief – and the astonishment of the general public – all sixty-five completed the course.