Tit-Bits had been around longer, and had sold more copies, and hobbyist Newnes was proving to be no fool in the face of competition: he would hide buried gold and print clues in a serialized story. A Tit-Bits reader won a house and one young lad even won a job as a junior clerk in the Tit-Bits office; the boy, Arthur Pearson, would later found his own magazine and then the Daily Express newspaper.
Sunny already had an idea for a new competition, but that was the easy part: he’d read a paragraph in The Times about the exact amount of coinage inside the Bank of England, and the winner would simply need to guess the amount on any given day – the number was posted outside the Bank anyway. But what could be the prize? The game itself didn’t matter very much; it was the prize that counted.
The tattered old tramp stopped them and asked for money. Bunny recoiled from a man who probably smelled of stale urine and the cheap gin that was the alcoholic’s preferred poison of the day, but Sunny stopped to chat and gave what was going on inside his head a good airing.
‘Oh!’ said the tramp. ‘There’s only one prize I want.’
‘Yes?’
‘A pound a week for life!’
The tramp’s words hit Sunny Harmsworth like a flurry of punches. The brothers each tossed him a coin and dashed back to the office, Sunny working out how to present it and Bunny worrying about how to finance it; if the winner lived a long life it could add up to a substantial sum. The bum just slipped back under his bridge – he may even have seen the sandwich-board men passing through the throngs of people a few weeks later carrying bright orange signs but he probably couldn’t read the words printed across in huge black type:
A POUND A WEEK FOR LIFE! ‘The Most Gigantic Competition The World Has Ever Seen!’
It was another game-changer for Sunny Harmsworth. The competition lifted the collective imagination and sparked debate in lower-middle-class homes everywhere. Entries had to be on a postcard and include the signatures and addresses of five witnesses who weren’t relatives or living in the same house in order to qualify. It was a genius plan. Bunny understood the power of numbers; five more people would get to know the magazine, and these new readers would then need their own five witnesses in order to enter.
One delivery of 255,000 postcards to the Answers office was such a phenomenon it got a mention in the Postmaster-General’s annual report, and the police had to control the crowd in Threadneedle Street when the figure was posted up outside the Bank of England on 4 December 1889. The Christmas edition of Answers that published the name of the winner sold over 200,000 copies. The winner guessed to within two pounds of the correct figure and he proved to be an excellent investment; he died only eight years later from tuberculosis.
Yet a pound a week for life was always a poor man’s dream. There was never any chance Sunny’s ambitions could ever be so easily contained. In 1890, at twenty-four, Sunny was a handsome and successful young man behind a big desk in his own ‘extremely luxurious chamber’19 at the new Answers premises on Fleet Street, looking out on to the spire of St Bride’s, the journalists’ church. But he wanted more.
Inside the Answers office, the editorial room fizzed with youthful energy. His staff were all youngsters serving up interesting things to a hungry public, and most of his brothers were involved too, now Sunny had given jobs in the firm to those of employable age, sending them off in all directions with wheelbarrows full of the magazine or having them write and edit copy. Sunny was, after all, now the head of a very large Harmsworth household. Harmie was dead. He hadn’t lived to see his eldest boys fulfil his every fantasy, and then some. He didn’t see them raise the Harmsworth name all the way up forever into the upper ranks of Britain’s titled aristocracy. If he’d survived just a few years he could have sat, as Mrs Harmsworth was to do, in the manicured garden of a country estate as a white-gloved butler brought out his breakfast and his son’s Daily Mail newspaper on a solid silver tray, unfolding it and tut-tutting gently at its more vulgar yarns. A few years more and he could have taken his son’s Times, an organ much more suited to his standing. Harmie never did become the literary figure he’d dreamed of when he’d first set sail for Dublin, nor did he become the dream his perpetually pregnant wife had sold him – the solid and solvent lawyer. Harmie became a broken drunk with a blistered liver, the bills and bitter claws of defeat pulling him under. One Saturday afternoon when Answers was a year old, Mr and Mrs Harmsworth went to a garden party where Harmie was jolly and genial, good company as ever, but when they got home he felt ill and went to bed early. He was soon screaming for his wife and vomiting blood.
Their fourth son, Leicester – ‘Puggy’ – dashed for the family doctor. The physician took one look at Harmie and ruled that there was no hope. Harmie died a few days later, the day after his eldest boy’s twenty-fourth birthday. Sunny knew nothing. He was at the Harmsworth family’s favourite holiday destination, down by the seaside at Broadstairs. Alcoholism may or may not have a genetic link, but drink killed both Harmie and his father Charles at the age of fifty-two; they had matching death certificates that read ‘cirrhosis of the liver’. There’d be evidence of this on Bunny’s corpse too, half a century later.
Outside the Answers office, the old men of Fleet Street were predicting the imminent demise of Sunny’s ‘penny phenomenon’, but they underestimated Harmie’s boy. His Schemo Magnifico folder on his desk had plans percolating inside that reached far beyond one mere magazine and, from May 1890, a new publication began to appear every six months or so. ‘I foresaw that our policy was to rain paper after paper upon the public,’ Sunny would later say,‘and thus raise our prestige and block competition.’20
First came a magazine targeting the humour market. A thrusting young Answers staffer named Houghton Townley was pulled aside and given four days to set Comic Cuts up from scratch; poor Townley found the task so stressful he was up most nights vomiting, but he pulled it off. Though given the tagline ‘amusing without being vulgar’, Comic Cuts was considered by many of the self-appointed upholders of Victorian values to be as vulgar as any of the lurid fiction inside the ‘penny dreadfuls’.
Sunny Harmsworth was a genius at turning what was, at its root, a hypocrisy into a commercial advantage – even a crusade: Comic Cuts and a whole host of subsequent publications were sold as ‘pure healthy tales’ for young minds, even an antidote to juvenile delinquency, yet were not so different from those which they attacked. Comic Cuts only cost a halfpenny and within a few weeks it was outselling Answers. So Sunny created a competitor – before someone else did – called Illustrated Chips, soon shortened to Chips. The magazine published crude cartoons and was a forerunner of the comic strip; it was another huge success. When a later Harmsworth publication called ‘Marvel’ was at the planning stage, a note from Harold to Alfred suggesting the boring ‘Boys’ Weekly Reader’ as a title gave the game away. ‘It sounds respectable,’ Bunny wrote in a memo to Sunny, ‘and would act as a cloak for one or two fiery stories.’21
Any policeman or magistrate who blamed a penny dreadful for corrupting a youngster’s mind could be assured of a glowing write-up in the Harmsworths’ publications, and authors of penny dreadfuls were ‘miserable beer-swilling wretches’. A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh author and son of Alfred’s kindly schoolmaster at Henley House, wasn’t impressed. ‘Harmsworth killed the penny dreadful,’ he said,‘by the simple process of producing the ha’penny dreadfuller.’22
Young women were another overlooked market. The newsagents sold magazines such as The Lady for upper-class females but there was nothing at all for the shop girls, so Sunny created ‘a pictorial journal for ladies’ wrapped in a light blue cover, the colour of the forget-me-not flower after which the magazine was named.
Each magazine in the empire publicized the others, in a process of cross-pollination that would often include a serial story beginning in one paper and then continuing in another, much to the annoyance of the newsagents, who were slapped down in the pages of all these papers if they obje
cted.
The family firm was gathering unstoppable momentum and Sunny was also gathering the ingredients, though he surely as yet didn’t know it, for his Daily Mail newspaper.
Bunny, meanwhile, would bounce up the stairs to the office two at a time before pacing around the room with his hands jammed in his pockets, trying to find ways to cut costs and pay as little as possible for ink and paper. He kept costs so low that the actual physical quality of the products was often appalling. Harold’s two favourite words were ‘grab’ and ‘knife’. They needed to grab the profits quickly and knife any magazine that didn’t do well on the newsstand. He grabbed the chance to push out the investors who’d helped bring Answers to life, Bunny’s brutal instincts putting the Harmsworth boys in absolute control where they needed to be. He also invented the ‘net sales certificate’ – a device whereby external accountants verified how many copies were being sold, a cornerstone of how much they could charge advertisers. While Sunny genuinely adored his magazines and would give them time to grow, to Bunny they were just ‘rags’.
Soon enough, Sunny and Bunny Harmsworth found they had built the biggest magazine empire in the world; by Answers’ fifth birthday in 1893, the firm’s seven major publications sold almost 1.5 million a week and the brothers Harmsworth were pretty much millionaires in today’s money. Yet even with all this success, Sunny was bored with his plush office and worked mostly from home. His fuse would burn bright but then his energy would flicker and wane, his health as fickle as the English weather. Sickness, real or imagined, was never far away. He became an enigmatic figure who caused all these creations to arise in the world but then stepped away before he got ink on his clothes.
He hired a secretary called George Augustus Sutton, a man born to be at Sunny’s side. Sutton was discreet, deferential, quiet and reliable, just like his coachman father, from the class of people Sunny had decided were a bit thick because they ‘all’ wore small hats. Sutton was a tall, skinny, uncomfortable man who spoke with a slight stammer and had the irritating habit of pulling his necktie sharply to the left before straightening it again when he couldn’t make up his mind – which was all the time. The rest of Sunny’s staff loathed Sutton. They thought there was a diabolical air to the man, and his eyebrows did have a distinctly Mephistophelian slant; his name was soon corrupted to Satan.
Sutton would join his master in the attic at home in West Hampstead shortly after breakfast and stay until late, taking down his thoughts and relaying instructions back to base. Some days they’d take Sunny’s fox terrier Bob for a walk on Hampstead Heath, Alfred speaking more to the dog than to ‘Sutkins’, the stammering coachman’s boy.
London too began to frustrate Sunny, so in the autumn of 1890 he bought a house near Broadstairs in Kent, called Elmwood. Doctors always prescribed Sunny fresh air for his endless ailments, and Elmwood’s fresh salty air came straight in from the sea. As these sweet early years of rapid success fell by, writers and editors, family and friends would flow down to the court of the boy editor at Elmwood, where they were greeted in the hall by a stuffed polar bear from a North Pole expedition Answers had sponsored and would then wander out on to the lawn to eat cucumber sandwiches in a white lifeboat sunk in the ground. Sunny would lead expeditions down to the beach for a stroll or organize shooting matches with toy pistols.
It wasn’t the most convenient place for a man in the communications business to live, but the telephone allowed Elmwood to become his command centre as well as his refuge. It would remain his favourite home even when he owned grand estates. Page proofs and manuscripts, printers, make-ups and memos, ideas for articles and new serials poured in and out of a Canadian-style wooden homestead he’d had erected in the garden, where he’d sit behind the cheap desk he’d had at the first Answers office. Secretary Sutton sat behind a curtain like a stagehand and even took his summer holidays in Broadstairs just in case ‘Mr Alfred’ might need him.
The biggest politicians in the land were starting to take notice too; Liberal leader William Gladstone did more than most men to bring the printed word to the masses – he’d introduced the Education Act and, earlier in his long career, abolished the tax on paper. ‘I consider the gigantic circulation of Answers an undeniable proof of the growth of sound public taste for healthy and instructive reading,’ he told the magazine.‘The journal must have vast influence.’23
Yet all Sunny had done was print things he found interesting and jokes he thought funny; the office boys and the shop girls laughed along with him on trains and buses, pubs and parlours, sitting on park benches or deckchairs at the seaside. Sunny nailed the popular taste like no other publisher before or since, aside, perhaps, from Rupert Murdoch.
To those who knew him he had a sharply defined, overpowering personality and could be arrogant and self-opinionated but also charming and humorous; he was easy to be attracted to yet very difficult to get to know. Sometimes he bit his nails until his fingers bled, and he was a secretive, slippery man who revealed nothing about his inner feelings, not even in his private diaries. But he clearly had an unbalanced, unquiet mind.
Inside Elmwood he would go to bed early and get up late; he ordered servants to wear shoes that didn’t squeak and to make sure soft blue and black pencils were kept sharpened on his bedside table at all times, in case an idea hit him in the night. He had a morbid fear of fire, so he had an oversized fish pond sunk in the garden to create a large body of water just in case it was required. Just like any self-respecting boss of a modern-day drug cartel, out beyond the manicured lawns and rose gardens was a hot-house where Florida alligators wallowed in mud.
Sunny also kept an aquarium with two compartments in his bathroom at Elmwood; on one side of a glass partition was a pike, on the other a goldfish. The pike is an aggressive fish and has been known to turn cannibal. Sunny’s magnified face would watch the gentle show for a while, his hand rising to the lid of the tank; the dark green, military-looking pike could see the goldfish on the other side gently meandering by. Harmsworth watched the pike, the pike watched the goldfish and the goldfish probably tried to look at neither. Sunny would whip away the partition between the two tanks and ‘study the results’.24
Sunny Harmsworth had ‘arrived’; he had even got there early – he was not yet even thirty – and he yearned for more.
A man named William Kennedy Jones was to prove a crucial figure in turning magazine boy Sunny Harmsworth into Alfred C. Harmsworth the newspaper man, and K. J., as he was known, was possibly the last journalist Harmsworth ever really viewed as an equal.
One summer’s afternoon in 1894, K. J. was sitting at his desk in a newspaper office slashing sense into clumps of miserable text, his lungs pulling their way through one rank cigarette after another, and cursing the writer of the story he was editing. The reporter’s words were chronological and deferential, focusing on the judge’s lineage far more than the criminal or the crime. But there was a story in there, somewhere.
So K. J. ripped the blood and guts from the prosecution barrister’s opening statement and splattered them all over the top of the story. He began to carve a lively read fit to fill two columns of the news pages of a London evening paper called the Sun (long defunct and not the current Murdoch paper), where he worked as its chief sub-editor. He was the last man between editorial and the printers; the chief sub is the man through whom every word of a newspaper must flow before metal is set and ink spilled.
K. J. was a leading exponent of a new kind of newspaper journalism that put real craft into the telling of a tale as well as how it was laid out on a page. Whereas in the old newspapers stories were pretty much just sent to the head printer to decide what went where and the editor slipped on his coat and hat and headed for his gentleman’s club, this ‘new journalism’ was different. Screeds of text were broken up into wonderful things called ‘paragraphs’, and the most interesting elements were lifted to the top. Headlines were crisp and readable. Maps and diagrams were used to illustrate the story, and further sub-
deck headlines within the body of the story were used so the eye of the jostled passenger on the bus could return more easily to the same spot.
Kennedy Jones lit another cigarette and looked out on the street and its endless flow of coaches and marching gentlemen in silk hats. K. J. had risen from rocky ground: he’d sold newspapers as a boy on the streets of Glasgow and become a sub-editor on the Glasgow News at the age of nineteen. He could have been any one of those nice young gentlemen out there in the street, except, with his tar-black hair and unexplained scars across his forehead, K. J. looked like a man who carried a knife. And he did, in a way. He’d slash the face of any journalist who came within reach of his razor-edged tongue. K. J. had many enemies and few friends and he even took it as a compliment to be called ‘the most hated man in Fleet Street’.
‘Boy!’ K. J. barked, and a youngster ran and grabbed the story from his raised fist and sped off to hand it to the men who made the metal pages in the composing room.
As K. J. sat in the low, choking fug of the sub-editors’ room, the office across the street looked especially charming, with its pretty flower boxes on the window-sills holding radiant red geraniums and yellow calceolarias. It could have been a whitewashed hotel in a pretty little Home Counties village instead of an editorial office on drab Tudor Street, the next street down towards the putrid River Thames from Fleet Street. Its shiny gilt sign spelled out just the one golden word: Answers.
Mail Men Page 3
