Readers’ letters were invented right there in the office, just like on Answers. Fake notices were even placed on the personal column that read like micro-novellas: these were Tweets almost, a full century before Twitter.
‘Uncle Jim – Come home at once. All is forgiven. Bring the pawn tickets with you. Niece.’ The next day Uncle Jim replied – ‘Am sending the tickets, but cannot come home just yet for reasons of my own.’ In another, ‘Oak’ told ‘Ivy’ that he was off to Africa, leaving her for ever. Ivy replied, ‘If you go to Africa, I shall follow.’
Besotted young men placed ads for women they’d seen in ‘grass green hats’ or holding a red parasol, and asked them to write in with their name and address. The reader felt they’d stumbled upon a secret. Everywhere, on every single page, time and thought and effort was spent keeping the reader engaged.
George Steevens soon became the paper’s star foreign correspondent, first writing a series of dispatches from the 1896 US Presidential election before becoming a war correspondent. ‘The strange thing about war is that it is so wonderfully like peace,’ he wrote in ‘What War Feels Like’, his first experience of armed conflict, the Thirty Days’ War between Greece and the Ottoman Empire.
Going to war is like coming of age. You expect to wake up one morning and find everything changed – a new self in a new world. You do wake up, and you are very much the same sort of boy at twenty-one as at twenty. So with war. You are rather disappointed to find yourself doing exactly the same things in war as you did in peace. You wear very much the same clothes; you eat very much the same amount of breakfast; your disposition is no harder nor bloodthirstier than before. The horrors of war, of which you expected so much, leave you quite unmoved – just because you did expect so much. 9
There was an altogether different kind of struggle being fought out back home that would go down in Fleet Street legend as the ‘Battle of the Bladders’, a comedy played out to the amusement of Sunny and K. J. and all the other Mailmen in the office. A journalist called S. J. Pryor believed he’d been offered the editor’s chair on the Daily Mail, answering directly to the proprietor, circumventing part-owner Kennedy Jones – who took an instant dislike to the man. So when trouble flared up into a full-blown crisis in faraway South Africa, it was decided to open a bureau in Cape Town. Pryor had worked for a press agency in New York and had once even been a telegraph operator. The best man, surely, for the task; he was shooed, reluctantly, out of the door by Sunny’s right-hand man K. J. and caught a slow boat to Cape Town, only to return a few months later to find someone else in the editor’s chair.
Mailman Thomas Marlowe had developed a reputation as a bit of a bar-room brawler in the pubs in and around Fleet Street as a young hack and had once even tried to take on a famous boxer until a friend pulled him clear. Born to Anglo-Irish parents, Marlowe grew up in Portsmouth and had initially set out to be a doctor before giving up medicine for ink. He’d been the news editor on the Evening News before moving over to the Mail when it launched.
A daily battle ensued, with each man hurrying into the office ever earlier to be first to plant his buttocks in the editor’s chair. Marlowe carried himself like a diplomat, Pryor shuffled around like a busy little clerk, and a trip to the toilet could be career suicide. Pryor had brought a bayonet back from South Africa as a souvenir and he’d lay it on each desk at which he ended up sitting, elbowing away some lesser Mail mortal when he lost that day’s dash for the seat. Marlowe won; he had a cast-iron bladder and, despite lacking a bayonet, he was better armed for battle: his wife Alice made him sandwiches. Mailman Pryor quit and later became Buckingham Palace’s first ever press officer.
Marlowe might have won the ‘editor’ title but there was only one man who was ever really in charge: Alfred C. Harmsworth. Sunny would stride through his newsroom on busy nights with a big box of cigarettes, scattering them by the handful in front of toiling subs, issuing his three commandments for his editorial staff: ‘Explain, simplify, clarify!’
The Mailmen with the weaker knees were dazzled by Sunny Harmsworth to the point of hero-worship; some copied the way he dressed and the more shameless sycophants even wore their hair patted down with a gentle curling lock falling on to their foreheads. ‘It is difficult to convey the almost adoring respect in which Alfred Harmsworth was held by some of the younger members of staff,’ wrote a junior reporter.‘There was a little chap called Mildred who said to me in an awe-stricken tone: “Do you know, I think Mr Alfred is such a great man that when I hear him coming up the stairs, I tremble all over!”’10
After a few years, almost everybody in the office simply called Sunny ‘the Chief’, after the habit in the US of the actual boss being called ‘chief editor’ to differentiate him from the countless minions with the word ‘editor’ in their job title. Even the printers and linotype operators were used to seeing the Chief around, standing in the basement in his shirtsleeves with his waistcoat pocket full of pencils, quick to take a dislike to a page when the damp yellow proof was handed to him. He’d scribble out changes and ask for another to be made.
The Chief’s Midas touch had carried over from his magazines and even the Manchester Guardian – which later became simply the Guardian – liked the Mail in these early days, saying it ‘made life more pleasant, more exciting, for the average man . . . Even those journals which decided not to try to compete with the Daily Mail by imitating it had to improve their news services, their make-up, their typography, their commercial arrangements; those that would not or could not improve usually perished.’11
By September of the first year, the Daily Mail ’s circulation was steady at around 222,000 and within a couple of years it was selling well over 500,000 copies a day. But it would take war to push it up to a million.
War tends to be good for newspapers. And the second Boer War at the very death of the nineteenth century nailed the three-year-old Daily Mail ’s reputation as a player truly equal to any other newspaper on the newsstand.
Sunny Harmsworth had spent much of the Mail ’s profits on constructing probably the most effective foreign newsgathering operation in Fleet Street – he even drew £19,000 (over £2 million today) in personal cheques shortly after the paper’s launch to pay the bills and he was happy to keep funding the fight in his own war: against every one of those other newspapers. It was money well spent. He also knew his readers would enjoy a good war. ‘The British people relish a good hero,’ he’d often say, ‘and a good hate.’12
Farmers in faraway South Africa were daring to try to wrestle themselves free of the British yoke, and absolute faith in the British Empire was a pillar upon which the Daily Mail stood: an Anglo-Saxon people from a rainy little island off mainland Europe was absolutely born to rule the world absolutely. As far as Sunny was concerned, it was simply the natural order of things. And Sunny’s new newspaper proprietor status was attracting people who wouldn’t have wasted their time on the owner of a few silly magazines.
One new friend was the megalomaniac miner Cecil Rhodes, the empire-builder who wasn’t content to have a street named after him – it had to be a whole country: Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Sunny was smitten by strong men like Rhodes who shared his binary view of the world; grey intricacies and subtle political currents could never hold Sunny’s focus. ‘We are the first race in the world,’ said Rhodes. ‘And the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.’13
Britain at the time ‘owned’ half of Africa, thanks largely not to the might of the British Army but to people like Rhodes and murderous mercenaries paid for by Nathan ‘Natty’ Rothschild of the Rothschild banking clan. Their thumbprints were all over the Maxim guns Natty bought to shoot fat holes in semi-naked black Africans, mostly for the mineral wealth under their soil.
The Boers were different from the black natives. For a start, these farmers were crack shots who learned to hunt just about the same day they learned to crawl. Also, the Germans were playing power games in the veldt, a prelude to the mo
nstrous conflicts to come, meaning the Boers also had been supplied with their Maxims and the latest Mauser rifles. The Boers were of the soil, same as the black Africans had been for millennia. There had already been a tepid Boer War, but then the biggest gold deposit in the world was discovered on Boer land at the white water ridge – Witwatersrand, in Afrikaans – making the want-away Boers a real threat to British supremacy in the region.
George W. Steevens was, by now, the Mail ’s best foreign correspondent and was dispatched to cover the conflict.
They [the Boers] are big, bearded men, loose of limb, shabbily dressed in broad-brimmed hats, corduroy trousers, and brown shoes; they sit their ponies at a rocking-chair canter erect and easy; unkempt, rough, half-savage, their tanned faces and blue eyes express lazy good-nature, sluggish stubbornness, dormant fierceness. They ask the news in soft, lisping Dutch that might be a woman’s; but the lazy imperiousness of their bearing stamps them as free men. A people hard to rouse, you say – and as hard, when roused, to subdue.’14
As the war progressed, star Mailman Steevens found himself under siege in a town called Ladysmith, after a humiliating British defeat. He was trapped for weeks and was frustrated and bored, scribbling his reports in tiny handwriting and handing them to a native runner, who would dash through the enemy lines to the British positions. It was a slow process. He penned articles in November 1899 that would not appear in the Mail until the next century, January 1900. But by then he’d paid the price demanded of so many war correspondents then as now.
He was dead.
Yet it wasn’t a Boer shell or a sniper that killed George W. Steevens on 15 January 1900. It was typhoid. Sunny Harmsworth was crestfallen. He dashed round to his friend’s widow when he heard and broke down in tears, saying he couldn’t forgive himself for sending her husband to Ladysmith. Steevens had already asked to get off the road and be based at Mail headquarters.
The war continued and the biggest number of British troops that had ever been sent on an overseas campaign amassed on South African soil to counter the defeats of previous months. Around 180,000 pairs of British boots were on the march, all to subdue a population about the same size as Brighton. The Boer farmers kept on doing what they did best: they would hit and run and then dissolve away into the veldt. The Boers knew they could never face down such superior numbers, so they stopped trying. But they didn’t surrender.
Hounded by the Daily Mail and other newspapers at what was starting to smell like defeat, the powers that be decided to change tactics and took a decision that would forever stain Britain’s reputation for fair play and decency. The British military began a scorched-earth policy, driving women and children off the land and burning down their homes, poisoning wells and destroying crops and slaughtering livestock. Then Commander-in-Chief Horatio Kitchener decided in December 1900 to ‘concentrate’ Boer and native African families in camps to stop them supplying the guerrillas. It would also weaken the will of husbands, sons, brothers and fathers to keep fighting. So women and children were pushed into cattle trucks and taken away.
Kitchener’s decision added a new phrase to the English lexicon: the concentration camp. It was an administrative, managerial, manpower-sapping nightmare for the British soldiers on the ground. It was, as the coming man in Westminster David Lloyd George said, ‘a war not against men, but against women and children’.15
Yet it would lead to the end of the conflict when public support for the war evaporated, thanks, largely, to the work of just one woman that the ‘female-friendly’ Daily Mail treated like a traitor. Emily Hobhouse, a vicar’s daughter from Cornwall, was the first to highlight what would result in the deaths of almost 28,000 Boer women and children. Through disease, exposure and starvation, half the entire Boer population of children perished.
Hobhouse returned to England in the summer of 1901 and her report put the Government on the defensive, and galvanized the Stop the War campaign. The Daily Mail thought she was a troublemaker who was ‘not impartial, has no balance in her judgements and does not know anything of war or its history’.16 But a ‘ladies commission’ – because it was all female – set up by the Government to look into the conditions in the camps largely confirmed everything Hobhouse had reported, and when the running of the camps was taken away from the military and put under civilian control conditions rapidly improved.
Sunny Harmsworth, however, seemed to see the war rather like an entertaining drama played out in the pages of his newspaper almost like a serial story. In a story headlined ‘Pandering to Sentiment’ in the Mail in July 1901, the paper attacked the creation of the Ladies’ Commission, quoting doctors who said the mortality in the camps was actually lower than the Boers had suffered when they’d lived in their own homesteads, and he implied that Boer mothers were simply neglecting their children.17
It was a photograph of a dying child in one of the camps, an emaciated little girl named Lizzie Vanzyle, that proved to be the tipping point in Hobhouse’s campaign when she showed it to people who attended her ‘drawing-room meetings’ opposing the war. Yet the Mail ’s stance didn’t change. Sunny Harmsworth was always one for staying the course – he was a man absolutely sure of himself even when he was surely wrong. To the Daily Mail, the tent cities on the scorched South African plains sounded almost like holiday camps.
‘The unscrupulous nature of pro-Boer methods is illustrated by the facts with regard to a Boer child named Lizzie Vanzyle which appear in our columns today,’ the paper said in January 1902, in a voice that may well be familiar to Mail readers today.
A photograph was taken of this child upon her admission to hospital to show the condition to which she had been reduced by the criminal neglect of her mother. The mother, it seems, left her seven children to look after themselves . . . The woman had food in plenty in her tent; she had only to apply to the medical officers to obtain every delicacy that generosity could supply. Yet she did absolutely nothing. It will scarcely be believed that this case has been paraded by the pro-Boers as an instance in which Boer children were starved to death of the deliberate inhumanity of our army. Miss Hobhouse, whose peregrinations in South Africa have tended to blacken the reputation of this country, has used this photograph at her drawing-room meetings, with telling effect upon those who were not in a position to expose her methods. Miss Hobhouse and her pro-Boer friends may explain this as they please, they cannot remove the impression that they were willing to make use of any weapon that could be turned against their country.18
Nevertheless, by now, the British Government wanted out of the war and an honourable peace for the Boers was a political necessity. A treaty was signed, leaving the Boers effectively in control of their republics and providing financial relief. The war had taken three years, involved almost 450,000 British and Empire troops, 22,000 of whom died (16,000 from disease). And all for no result. It did immense damage to Britain’s reputation abroad, and made her look weak and far from invincible. It was, arguably, the tipping point that sent the British Empire into its steep decline.
However, the Boer War had been good for Sunny’s now five-year-old Daily Mail. The paper had regularly broken through the million circulation barrier but, perhaps more importantly, it had cemented its reputation as a formidable newspaper. It had become a presence on the newsstand.
The Boer War had been a prelude of what was to come in the Great War a little over a decade later, as the Mail prophesied on its leader page at the turn of the century: ‘It is not for South Africa that we go on. Great powers look with greedy eyes on our prosperous dominions, our world-wide dependencies. A sudden change of a Continental Ministry, or the death of a great ruler, may force on us a conflict compared with which our present campaign would appear trifling . . . This is our hour of preparation; tomorrow may be the day of world-wide conflict.’19
It was the clerks that had driven up the circulation, not so much their wives. The Mail was far more surefooted with war than with women, and that would remain the case until the tabloid
-era of the 1970s. Women in the Daily Mail ’s world (to be fair, in Victorian society at large) were not quite members of the human race. Inside the Daily Mail office, the women’s editor, Mary Howarth, was – in the beginning – the only female member of the editorial staff. She’d been with Sunny since his Answers days, writing serial stories, Sunny pacing up and down and insisting her villains had sinister names and her heroes noble ones. Her ‘Women’s Realm’ section in the Mail was daintiness in folded paper form. Even the font for the title would be wrapped with sketches of birds or cherubs or flowers. It was tame stuff, but at least the Mail was aware the wives of shopkeepers, clerks and civil servants actually existed. Most papers ignored them completely.
While the Mail viewed women as simple, sexless creatures, the reality was a lot more earthy for Sunny Harmsworth. He had sexual relations with countless women other than his wife and would sire at least four illegitimate children. His secretary George Sutton had been making discreet payments for years to help raise Alfred Benjamin, his illegitimate son from his teenage liaison with the nurse, Louisa. He even paid for him to live in Hampstead with a private tutor. It was top secret, as scandal was a real risk. Sunny would occasionally turn up at the door in dark glasses and walk the streets at night with the tutor, whispering plans for the boy’s future.
Votes for women, in particular, was to prove tricky ground for the ‘female-friendly’ paper to negotiate. A month after the paper’s birth, a Mailman was sent to a women’s suffrage meeting at Westminster Town Hall, where ‘The Hall was fairly filled, and the proceedings began with quite unfeminine punctuality.’20 It was a calm and quiet affair. Ten years later, things got a lot louder. In October 1906, the paper carried a story headlined ‘Suffragettes in Parliament – Riotous Scenes in the Lobby – Police Carry Out Shrieking Women’. It was a report of a protest led by campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. The word ‘suffragette’ – from the word ‘suffrage’ – had, incidentally, been coined by Mailman Charlie Hands in January of that year as a mocking term to distinguish the new militant wing of the votes-for-women movement, as distinct from the ‘constitutional’ suffragists. The Pankhursts defiantly accepted the label as their own.21
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