An expensive, shiny carriage pulled by a pair of well-groomed horses arrived under the sign and Sunny Harmsworth, in a light-coloured coat and top hat, sprang from the carriage and helped his expensive-looking wife down to the pavement.
Kennedy Jones was a foul-tempered man at the best of times but had been especially angry lately; K. J. and Louis Tracy, a colleague on the Sun newspaper, had an option to buy a London evening newspaper called the Evening News and Post. But they had not been able to raise the funds and their option to buy it expired in a couple of days.
‘They tell me young Harmsworth has got more money than there is in the Bank of England,’ K. J. shouted over to Tracy.‘Go right over and talk to him.’25
Not long after, on 30 August 1894, Sunny became a newspaper proprietor for the first time after agreeing to back K. J. and Tracy, even though the Evening News and Post had been bleeding blue Tory Party money all over Fleet Street for years. Sunny admitted laterthat the ‘white elephant of the press that proved the ruin of so many . . . looked like being an unpleasant handful for us’.26
The paper’s ramshackle building and tired old presses had come with the deal, and Sunny and Bunny Harmsworth and K. J. and Tracy would meet every night under a broken skylight to work out what to do with the damn thing. They ripped it up and started again, grabbing the ‘new journalism’ and ringing it for all it was worth. Bunny slashed the costs of paper and ink using the stone-faced negotiating tactics he’d honed in the magazine trade; staff would often joke that when Bunny had five minutes spare he’d call in the paper merchant to shave a few pence off the price the ever-expanding firm paid for paper. The quality of the paper too never seemed to matter much to Harold Harmsworth (it would be Bunny’s lack of care for the quality of their ‘rags’ that later pushed the brothers apart). He went out on the streets with his pocket watch and examined the busiest spots across the city. He worked out at what time the crowds peaked, worked backwards and organized deadlines and distribution to put the fresh paper in the right place at exactly the right time.
K. J.’s new journalism and Sunny’s popular journalism blended well inside the pages of his Evening News; a sensational murder more than doubled the paper’s circulation to almost 400,000 during the trial. Sunny decided to take a break in Paris; he liked France and he had a fascination with Napoleon his entire life. On one trip to Paris with his mother he even tried on the little Emperor’s hat, and it fitted. Sunny’s mind was fizzing with ideas as he enjoyed the sites of the city, especially after he met the owner of a morning daily paper called Le Petit Journal, that sold more than all the London morning and evening papers put together.27 It was making a fortune despite selling for half the price of its competitors.
Sunny began to doodle inside his Schemo Magnifico folder, drawing up plans for a new morning newspaper of his own along the same lines as his Evening News.
2
Newspaper Man
It’s hard now, 120 years later, to see what all the fuss was about.
The first Daily Mail 1 on that bright sunny morning of 4 May 1896 was not – at first glance – hugely different from the penny London dailies. It was a broadsheet with small ads and notices on the front page. It was printed on high-quality white paper, exactly the same, if not better, than the penny papers. Its masthead was the same as the Daily Mail of today except that the curly ‘ye olde English’ style serif font was a little more ornate. The lion and the unicorn of the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom – emblazoned in gold on the front of every British passport – stood then, as now, between ‘Daily’ and ‘Mail’.
It was eight pages thick, with content printed in long thin columns on each side, seven columns a page, the same as every penny newspaper. And it had ‘ears’ on either side of the title, the box on the right containing the words:
THE BUSY MAN’S DAILY JOURNAL.
On the other side it read:
A PENNY NEWSPAPER FOR ONE HALFPENNY.
This was precisely the point. It looked like a penny paper, it felt like a penny paper. It was a penny paper. But it only cost a halfpenny. Yet it was so much easier to read, and its selection and placing of stories was all about the reading experience. The reader, from day one, issue one, was always kept in mind.
Like the penny papers, it had plenty of City news, sport and racing, and lots of snippets from the courts, such as a story about a man divorcing his wife for her adultery with a curate. Its reports from overseas were first class: natives were rebelling in Bulawayo, the British cavalry had routed Dervishes on camels in the Sudan, Hungary was celebrating its thousandth birthday and there was an update from Tehran on the Shah’s assassination.
However, the Daily Mail was, crucially, so much easier to read than the long screeds of text in The Times of the same day. Whereas the Times editorial staff seemed happy to send their text to the head printer for him to decide what went where, infinite care was taken on every single page of the Daily Mail. The difference between the two approaches was most marked from day one, in a crime story that was shocking the nation. While all the papers covered the Amelia Dyer case, that of a murderer believed to have killed up to 400 babies, the Mail used a much more immediate and narrative style.
‘Mrs. Dyer’s entry had not been in the least degree sensational. Unexpectedly the door had been opened and she walked in, and without looking round simply plumped down at the end of the seat adjacent to the door,’ wrote the Mailman in court. ‘It was in vain that I endeavoured to realize that this woman was the author of those almost incredible crimes, crimes which have already made her name notorious throughout the civilized world, and will raise her to an evil eminence in the history of human wickedness.’
It was not until page seven that the Mail truly took an entirely different course in terms of the choice of content from the other morning papers, under an amateurishly scrawled masthead:
THE DAILY MAGAZINE. No 1 – AN ENTIRELY NEW IDEA IN MORNING JOURNALISM.
It looked like the Henley House school magazine and the first edition of Answers. They were fruit fallen, for sure, from the same mind. This was where Sunny Harmsworth could let his love of useless information spew forth; it was Answers in daily form.
The first ever daily magazine page started with a note from Sunny himself: ‘The object of the “Daily Mail ” is to give every item of important news . . . The object of the “Daily Magazine” is to amuse, interest, and instruct during the leisure moments of the day.
‘The “Magazine” is designed to appeal to both sexes. Movements in woman’s world – that is to say changes in dress, toilet matters, cookery, and home matters generally – are as much entitled to receive attention as nine out of ten of the matters which are treated of in the ordinary daily paper. Therefore two columns are set aside exclusively for ladies.’
Across the page under ‘Woman’s Realm’ were dinner tips, an illustration of a make-it-at-home school frock and a drawing of a lady in a pretty bonnet. Stories on how Boers courted each other and the earnings of the Australian cricket team got the Sunny touch. At the foot of the page there was a serialized story.
A woman had been appointed to run the department; she’d visit the best shops in London, Paris and Brussels to report on fashion and she’d attend society weddings. The other newspapers seemed to be solely for men, they were written and run by men and covered a world in which women barely existed at all. The brothers knew this would work – their female-focused magazines sold well. Experts would be commissioned to write about children and home management. A note followed, aimed at people like K. J. – who thought all this fluff for women was madness and wanted more racing but later admitted Alfred was right: ‘Perhaps the best thing about the “Daily Magazine” is that it occupies its own corner, and yet crowds-out nothing that is expected in a newspaper. The man who has not time for this class of reading can leave it severely alone and lose nothing.’
The magazine page became the most expensive on which to advertise, as a woman’s hand was invaria
bly on the purse strings at home. Bunny, of course, upped the rates for this page.
Leader pages, which would take up huge swathes of dead trees in The Times and the Morning Post, were stripped back. There had even been arguments in the Mail ’s office for dropping them altogether, but they were only kept, said K. J., to act as a platform ‘to explain the drift of events’. But long screeds of political speeches and Parliamentary reports never appeared.
‘It is essentially the busy man’s paper. The mere halfpenny saved each day is of no consequence to most of us,’ wrote Alfred. ‘The economy of the reader’s time effected by the absence of the usual puzzling maze of advertisements is, however, of the most importance.’
Sunny hated adverts and he thought they spoilt his publications, and as he aged, he’d grow to hate the adman ever more. However, with his plan to reach ever greater numbers of the aspirational middle class, he did more to facilitate the rise of the adman than anyone else, except perhaps his brother Bunny. Harold adored the adman and all the lovely money he generated but Bunny wasn’t seen much around the Daily Mail office in the early days.
Alfred had kept his kid brother away from his most precious project from the start and Harold was never put in charge of the management; he was, effectively, relegated to be the buyer of high-quality ink and paper, signing the kind of cheques he loathed. If Harold had been in financial control, younger brother Leicester quipped, they’d have ended up with a farthing paper (a quarter penny) for a halfpenny.
‘The chief reason for Alfred’s monopoly of decision regarding the new paper was his fear of Harold’s ideas of economy,’ said Leicester. ‘Alfred planned great expenditure on foreign telegrams and the getting of news in general. Harold, he had no doubt, would work against such a policy.’2
Harold had argued for it to be printed on tinted paper instead of white because it was cheaper, but Alfred pulled rank and insisted it be printed on the best white paper to allow for better illustrations. Yet it would still be sold at the cheapest price. Between February 1896 and the paper’s first day on the streets, at least sixty-five experimental ‘dummies’ were produced with no expense spared. For eleven weeks, stories were covered by reporters, costly cables were received ‘for real’ from overseas. Offices were opened in New York and Paris. Everything was carefully sub-edited and put in the mock newspaper, which had a fake, roman-style masthead. The presses would be stopped and the results analysed. Then binned. These were endless dress rehearsals for the opening night.
Sunny also bought the best, state-of-the-art machinery.
‘When we were digging the pits for the great rotary presses,’ he wrote later, ‘a waggish enemy spy, who came over “to see what those Evening News people were doing”, was good enough to remark that they had an ominously big look and were large enough to swallow up all our arduous work in the establishment of many periodicals and the Evening News itself. “Better be satisfied with what you have done,” he said.’3
Bunny agreed – he thought Alfred’s grandiose Mail scheme was nuts and those pits must indeed have looked like a vast grave for the family fortune, which had, after all, been built on the cheap. Yet Alfred had studied the costs of the penny papers and, even using his fingers and toes, he knew the maths could work. ‘It became clear that most of the existing dailies were really halfpennyworths sold at a penny,’ he wrote.‘The proprietors had simply pocketed the difference instead of sharing the advantage with the public.’4
It was financially feasible to produce a classy paper for a halfpenny, and still make money. From those first scratched notes in his Schemo Magnifico – he’d actually first planned to call it the ‘Daily Arrow’ – Sunny’s plan for his morning paper was always for something different from the family’s other publications.
Sunny’s vast army of readers from his other publications were key to the Mail ’s rapid initial success. A news vendor at King’s Cross station told a trade magazine that he’d sold the paper to commuters to whom he’d never before sold a morning newspaper, adding that ‘There is no doubt that the Daily Mail has discovered a new reading public.’
But they weren’t new at all. It was the same folk who bought Answers and the rest of the Harmsworths’ publications. They’d known the Mail was coming, as it had been promoted in all these organs and in the Evening News for weeks. The clerks hadn’t bought a daily paper before because there wasn’t one written for them. Previously, the morning papers had been for clever people such as the Westminster elite, City types and the clergy. They were for people who could somehow keep their focus on the dense text of The Times; words that just left them staring at the page as if they’d never learned to read.
K. J., ever the cynic, speculated that these new newspaper readers were ‘the children, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of a people accustomed to public hangings, public whippings, pillories, ducking stools and stocks . . . Was the taste engendered by such sights during the centuries to be outbred by the cheap schooling of a single generation?’5
The Daily Mail was born on K. J.’s thirty-first birthday and it was a fantastic birthday present to watch people give newspaper sellers a penny and be surprised to be given a halfpenny change – they’d thought it was worth a penny. Seven and a half per cent of this baby was his. K. J. liked a bet most days but, instead of backing some three-legged nag, he’d soon buy a stable of his own. And he did, with his horses running in the blue and yellow colours of early Daily Mail posters.
K. J. pushed his way through the crowd of news vendors queuing for more copies outside the Mail ’s offices down by the river. Alfred C. Harmsworth – the paper’s founder, father, editor – was already there. He’d hoped to sell 150,000 copies, but four editions had to be printed and the presses of three other newspapers were standing by to meet the demand.
‘Well,’ K. J. asked, ‘how goes it?’
‘Orders pouring in,’ Alfred replied. ‘We’ve struck a gold mine!’
The final count for the first ever edition of the Daily Mail was 397,215 copies, another massive success for Sunny Harmsworth.
Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, dismissed the new paper as ‘run by office boys for office boys’, in a tone only to be expected from the offspring of a long line of aristocrats and royal courtiers. Whatever he said, the Mail ’s ‘office boys’ were actually the brightest of British journalism’s bright young things. Many were Oxford graduates attracted to a new way of doing things and had previously joined her elder sister, the vibrant and revitalized Evening News.
Most of the top Mailmen had known each other for years, arriving at the Harmsworths’ well-paid door via the ‘new journalism’ school of London evening newspapers and, though they were often older and tougher newspaper hands, the magazine boy Sunny Harmsworth was most certainly in charge.
His second-in-command, Kennedy Jones, cracked his tongue like a whip around the ears of his sub-editors as they toiled inside a smog of cigarette smoke, translating all the staff and agency copy into readable stories. The glory days of the ‘sub’ had arrived. A writer was free to find his own voice but the subs were the ones who forged the paper.
‘Before the Daily Mail was published, journalism dealt with only a few aspects of life,’ Sunny said.‘What we did was to extend its view of life as a whole. This was difficult. It involved the training of a new type of journalist. The old type was convinced that anything which would be a subject of conversation ought to be kept out of the papers. The only thing that will sell a newspaper in large numbers is news, and news is anything out of the ordinary.’6
Sometimes it was precisely the ‘ordinary’ that became news, as early Mailman George Warrington Steevens understood instinctively. As boisterous folk crowded into stations and squeezed into stifling carriages headed to the seaside for the bank holiday in the summer of 1896, for instance, Steevens – a small and shy intellectual who wore a fine moustache that curled away to the tips – walked the empty City streets alone and somehow saw a story through his pince-nez sp
ectacles.
The first Monday in August is the holiday of the London streets – the only one they ever get. At Easter and Whitsun tide and Christmas, even more than on ordinary days, they are hammered with iron horse-shoes, and chafed with rubber tyres, and ground under leather shoes. But on the first Monday in August, everybody goes away, and leaves them a little rest for their aching bones. As they stretched themselves out yesterday in the warm sunlight, they looked wider and flatter than usual. Monday is a poor day of the week at the best: it is something once or twice in the year to put it off until Tuesday.7
Steevens somehow personified this new breed of journalist. He wasn’t just some office boy: he was a bank clerk’s son but he had excelled at school and had gone on to become a brilliant scholar at Oxford University, where he had been known as ‘the Balliol prodigy’. Steevens, who married a woman thirty years his senior in his mid-twenties, planned to become a historian before deciding to become a journalist instead. Sunny hired him from the Pall Mall Gazette to pen leading articles but, when he realized he was no good at it, Steevens asked if he could write more general pieces.
He became the best of a bunch of writers that could turn bland little tales about people traipsing to the seaside or a horse race into vivid pictures in the days before photographs could be reproduced effectively on newsprint. His words were impressionistic and often short on fact but Sunny adored him; he was, in a way, exactly what he wanted the Daily Mail to be. ‘He showed genius in this extraordinary power of observation,’ Sunny wrote, ‘and his entirely new way of recording what he had seen.’8
The Daily Mail covered far more than just events. These new Mailmen were corralling and organizing the news. Mailmen would drum up ‘talking points’ which would be the most important thing in the world for a day or two, stories such as ‘Will Men Fly?’ or about ‘Dancing Curates’.
Mail Men Page 4
