As the Mailman on the spot reported: ‘Ordinary visitors to the central lobby of the House of Commons yesterday afternoon were persuaded that they had been suddenly transported to the parrot house at the “Zoo”.’ ‘Shrieks, inarticulate calls, and a shrill phrase monotonously repeated caused the illusion. It was the Suffragettes engaged in their task of persuading the Legislature that they are fit to be given the franchise.’22
It must have made a welcome break from the usual plodding Parliamentary proceedings for the Mail ’s lobby correspondent, who wrote: ‘That they knew they were doing something seriously against order could be seen from their pale and rather frightened faces.’ Twenty or so protestors were bodily removed, ten were arrested.
One of the women, as the burly, handsome inspector picked her off the seat, threw her arms round his neck and clung to him with seeming fondness. ‘It is not every day she gets a chance of hugging a good-looking police inspector,’ said a Cabinet Minister to the Daily Mail representative as they witnessed the scene together. Spectators after the first astonished moment were convulsed with laughter. The women themselves made it very hard for the police to remove them. They struggled violently and threw themselves about so that the policemen had to clutch their dresses as if they were so many drabs being put out of a public-house. One of the Suffragettes passing one of the mildest-mannered journalists in the House shook her fist fiercely in his face and said: ‘You coward!’ It was a favourite phrase. ‘Call yourself a man and treat women like this!’ remarked one grey-ringleted old lady to the Daily Mail representative.
In February 1907, Lady Charlotte from the Mail ’s women’s pages wrote a feature under the headline ‘When Women Vote – What Will Happen?’ that caused quite a stir among Mail readers, who bombarded the paper with letters. The piece was illustrated with a drawing of an indecisive lady sitting with her head spinning back and forth between two politicians. ‘Nothing, I do truly believe, very terrible will happen when we obtain the vote . . . Why are men so jealous of their exclusive position as voters? Why should they strive to keep us from the polling booths almost at the point of a bayonet?’23
The paper was filled with letters for days after. Many were, of course, from women who had no desire to be given the vote. Readers also mused about what would happen if females were indeed enfranchised – would war be abolished, would divorce courts close and would men be left to care for babies? Alfred C. Harmsworth himself, in 1912, made it clear that his papers were not in favour of women’s suffrage in a letter to his friend Lord Curzon. ‘I am one of those people who believe that the whole suffrage movement is a bluff’, adding he had ‘strong reasons . . . for believing that there are very few people who are sincerely anxious about the securing of suffrage for women. If it were not for the support of one or two wealthy women of my acquaintance we should hear very little of the matter.’24
It would not be until after the Great War that women were given the right to vote, but women readers were surely a conundrum for Sunny Harmsworth; if the Daily Mail had truly captured the female market, he wouldn’t have created a newspaper written exclusively by and for women in 1903. The Daily Mirror was a paper for women who were passionate about making their husband’s dinner and frilly bonnets. It bombed.
‘There was consternation at Carmelite House,’ said Sunny’s brother Cecil. ‘Alfred had for once completely misinterpreted the popular mind.’25 The Mirror was only saved when its all-female staff were fired and it was turned into a picture paper – a process its new editor, Hamilton Fyfe, said was ‘like drowning kittens’. Its editor, Mary Howarth, the Mail ’s women’s page editor whom Alfred liked to take on fast drives in his cars, was spared. Photographs in the Mirror were crude at first but it stabilized and its circulation began to rise. Sunny had, said Fyfe, ‘dramatically disappointed all who believed that his career was broken. He had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.’26
Harmsworth himself even turned defeat into a boast: ‘How I dropped £100,000 on the Mirror,’ he wrote in the Mail, confessing to ‘flat, rank and unmitigated failure.’27 But Sunny never loved his Mirror like he loved his Mail – perhaps because it was a reminder of when his touch had failed him. He later sold it to Bunny. A generation later, under their nephew Cecil Harmsworth King, the paper would dominate the working-class market in the same way the Mail had captivated the middle classes.
3
Mr Leonard Brown
By the turn of the century Sunny Harmsworth was a millionaire many times over in today’s money,1 yet he was still only plain old Mr Harmsworth . . . and it rankled.
Even his Tit-Bits rival had become Sir George Newnes in 1895, and Sunny’s publishing successes had long since eclipsed those of Newnes. Never shy, Sunny pestered government members for years arguing that Newnes’s elevation somehow gave his rival a competitive edge. And in July 1904, sure enough, Harmsworth was made a baronet; the new King had decided to apply the golden grease that kept the wheels of the Establishment rubbing smoothly against each other and raised up the self-made men from the end of his mother’s reign. But Sunny was Sir Alfred C. Harmsworth, Bart, for less than eighteen months; soon after, he was made a baron at the age of forty, the lowest rank in the peerage with a seat in the House of Lords, a body with real political power at the time – Lord Salisbury had even governed as Prime Minister from the Lords. Incidentally, Sunny had actually tried to enter Parliament through the other door the year before the Mail ’s birth when he had failed to get elected as Tory MP for Portsmouth; his attempt had even delayed the paper’s birth for six months or so. The experience, he once told a private secretary, was ‘like wading through a sea of filth’;2 simply being handed a seat must have felt so much cleaner.
Alfred struggled with what name to give this new lord. Elevated men tend to be lords of an actual physical place on a map and he wanted a link to the seaside he adored. Baron Elmwood was rejected as it was the wood from which coffins were made. Baron Broadstairs was suggested, which would have made Alfred lord of the seaside, but that didn’t appeal either. So he invented a place: Northcliffe – after the north cliff near Elmwood where he would take long strolls with his dogs. He could now even sign himself with a Napoleonic ‘N’.
Sunny Harmsworth – Lord Northcliffe, the brand new peer of the realm – ruled over his folded-paper empire from Room One, a massive office on the first floor of his imperial headquarters in Carmelite House, a brand-new purpose-built building on the Embankment that held most of his printed organs. ‘Big rooms,’ Sunny the Press Lord liked to say, ‘big ideas.’3
Room One reflected his lack of coherent taste: it was a boudoir with a mismatch of furniture from across the empire planted in luscious thick carpet. A bust of Napoleon stared in from a windowsill as Sunny, Lord Northcliffe, sat behind a leather-lined barge of a desk with his back to the window, facing leather-bound volumes of his publications. Editors and executives would file in and find him reclining in an armchair or lying down on a dark green couch with his back to the light.
Sunny could be a sweet and charming, kindly boss and promoter of talent who would remember an employee’s birthday and send around flowers to a sick reporter. But he was a hard taskmaster and when he became angry, his lip would draw back on his lower teeth as if about to deliver a bite and his bland, accent-free voice would drop to a whisper. The Mail had a reputation as a tough, brutal place to work; it was relatively easy to get a job there but damn hard to keep it.
Mostly, though, Northcliffe simply wasn’t in Room One. He wasn’t even in London. He was away travelling or down at Elmwood. His family and senior employees would dutifully stay with him there and watch the beam from the North Foreland lighthouse scan across the ceiling of the guest rooms before it spun out over the north cliff and away from England’s shores. The sabre of light would then cut across the German Ocean, the name of the North Sea on some older maps, and return again to Elmwood; reporting all was well – for now.
Northcliffe constantly worried for the future o
f the British Empire and, ever since his first edition of Answers, he’d nursed a dislike of those Germans. Sunny Harmsworth was a man pursued by personal demons but never self-doubt; he had felt the conditions for the coming war building like a human barometer. He visited Germany in 1902, arriving in the fatherland by train from Strasbourg to Stuttgart, and told a friend he thought the country ‘new, masterful, alive, brutal, and horribly nouveau riche . . . I shall never forget the first sight of Germany,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘as we approached it from the other side of the Vosges mountains.’4
‘I have German relatives,’ he wrote to a colleague in 1908. ‘I know them, they will bide their time, but Der Tag will come. Remember what I say.’ Harmsworth liked to think he was an expert on Germany partly because of these relatives; two of his mother’s sisters were married to Germans and had emigrated there. One of the men told him: ‘We are a nation of land crabs. If you advance, we retreat. If you retreat, we advance.’ Harmsworth claimed that even the Kaiser himself had tried more than once to get in ‘personal touch’, but ‘I prefer to keep away from him.’5
Harmsworth was fascinated by Germany. Many people were; its strict discipline and militaristic culture – its cleanliness, its efficiency – were both appalling and appealing. The Daily Mail was not the only newspaper keeping tabs on the rise of Germany but its tone stood out; whereas other papers worried, the Mail raged. From the beginning, for instance, the Mail had been formulating its argument for compulsory military service to match that of the Germans, and began calling for it openly from 1904. Many liberals of the day accused Harmsworth of doing more, through his newspapers, to create the conditions for war than any other man. He was regularly called a warmonger and even an ‘enemy of the human race’. But to his friends and his supporters – maybe even his readers – he was up there in the crow’s nest of the flagship Daily Mail pointing his telescope at the horizon. And he had visions of the British fleet – so glorious under Nelson only a hundred years before – finally being defeated out there in those cold waters near his seaside home. So in early 1909 his paper harried the Government to build more Dreadnoughts, a symbol of national power and at the core of the escalating arms race with Germany.6 The Royal Navy’s first ship of this brand-new class, HMS Dreadnought, was the fastest, deadliest battleship in the world when she entered service in 1906. The heavily armed, steel-armoured sea monster made all other warships look like hapless wooden tugs in her wake. In 1908 the Liberal Government was trying to decide how many Dreadnoughts to lay down, four, six, or eight – ‘We Want Eight, We Won’t Wait’ was a popular slogan at the time for those who wanted more of these vessels. Sunny had no doubt – he drew up a bill to sit outside newsagents and newsstands selling his Daily Mail which had just one numeral on it: 8.
Sunny was, of course, heavily armed himself. He owned the Evening News, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Observer and the Weekly Dispatch as well as dozens of magazines. Then, in 1908, he bought the rustiest old cannon of them all: The Times, a newspaper imbued with the deep, resonating voice of British authority, founded in 1785 by John Walter as the Daily Universal Register. The Monks of Blackfriars, as Northcliffe called the Times staff, felt themselves to be of a higher calling than mere mortal journalists. But the paper then, as now, could never pay its own way for long without a generous proprietor covering the bills with the cash skimmed off more profitable titles. And the Monks of Blackfriars never did warm to their new abbot. Its acquisition was, arguably, Sunny’s biggest mistake, draining his already fickle energies and taking his hands away from the tiller of his beloved Daily Mail. Even his mother thought it a bad idea, telling him when he dashed in to tell her about his new toy: ‘I’m sorry, Alfred. You have lost your horizon.’7
At the Mail ’s launch in 1896, to the man on the Clapham omnibus the British and the Germans were family not foes – Germany’s Kaiser was Queen Victoria’s grandson. The Kaiser himself said that one of the most significant events of that year was the birth of the Daily Mail. And George Steevens, the Mail ’s biggest gun in those first years, was aimed squarely at the German leader when he travelled to Germany to write a series titled ‘Under the Iron Heel’ and watched the Kaiser on parade.8
He looked like a man without joy, without love, without pity, without hope. He looked like a man who never laughed, like a man who could never sleep. A man might wear such a face who felt himself turning slowly into ice . . . He may boast, but his boasts are no way empty ones. As near as any man can be absolute, he is absolute lord over fifty million souls.
The series concluded with ‘Hostility to England is the mission of young Germany . . . for the next ten years, fix your eyes very hard on Germany.’ Steevens hadn’t been far wrong in 1897; it only took a few extra years for war to come.
By 1914 Sunny Harmsworth, the handsome Hampstead schoolboy with a love of ink and paper, had truly morphed into Lord Northcliffe – a man with a loud voice heard by millions of people every day through his newspapers and periodicals. And Northcliffe used this voice to warn his country of impending danger. He was ready for war.
A Mailman named Lovat Fraser was Sunny’s big pen now. Fraser was a living, breathing ‘John Bull’ character, a caricature of an Englishman similar to America’s ‘Uncle Sam’. Rotund, with a thick black moustache, he peered out at the world through round glasses wondering what the hell was going on. Northcliffe thought him ‘the brightest exponent of English journalism in the British Empire’.9 They were bound to get on, as their views were in perfect harmony. Fraser warned from the start that Britain would soon have to face her enemies. ‘Great Powers are drifting towards a collision like ships whose anchoring cables have parted in a tideway,’ he wrote at the end of 1912. Apathetic Britain faced her greatest threat since Napoleon. The Triple Entente between Britain, France and Russia would lead to war with the opposing Triple Alliance bloc of Germany, Austria– Hungary and Italy, he argued, over an issue that was not even a British problem; these blood pacts would have to be honoured. And he was, of course, right. ‘The real answer rests, or ought to rest, with the man in the train. Does he want to join in Armageddon? It is time that he began to think about it for his answer may soon be sought.’10
Fraser had a vision that foretold of a conflict in which the obliteration of cities and slaughter of innocent civilians became the object – terror the goal; over and above the destruction of mere armies. His story ‘A Dream of War in the Air – A True Record’ appeared in June 1914, six weeks before war was declared.
‘Aerial warfare,’ I thought, ‘means the end of our civilisation . . . Victory must be won through terror. Why smash an army or a fleet when they can smash a capital. No laws can overcome the temptation, and humane constraints will not do it, for war is bound essentially to be inhuman. They will smash and smash each other’s cities until our civilisation is smashed too.’11
Yet the news of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand crossed the Daily Mail ’ s deck with no impact. The archduke was just one man, and not even a very popular man among his own people at that. Few Mailmen, the Mail ’s news editor Tom Clarke wrote later, spotted it as the spark that ignited a trail of gunpowder that would explode into the Great War a few weeks later.12 ‘Great Britain at midnight declared war upon Germany,’ said the Mail on Wednesday, 5 August 1914.
Thus in the short space of three days Germany has attacked or driven into war no fewer than four Powers, three of them of the first class. She declared war upon Russia on Saturday evening, upon France on Monday night, upon Belgium yesterday afternoon, and last night her invasion of Belgium compelled the British Government to take action. Nothing like this has ever been seen since Napoleon’s time. But not even Napoleon quarrelled with his neighbours at such a mad rate.13
The Daily Mail came of age; the paper had only just turned eighteen when the war with Germany arrived, and soon Earl Kitchener, his moustachioed face and finger pointing out from Army recruitment posters, was firmly in the Mail ’s cross-hairs. There was a shortage of
high explosive shells at the front and the Mail said it was simply the Secretary of State for War’s fault. The paper accused Kitchener of still fighting the Boer War (and it wasn’t an unfair accusation, as he was secretly sceptical, for instance, of a new armoured vehicle called ‘the tank’ which was being developed away from his deadening hands by Winston Churchill’s Admiralty). Northcliffe penned the attack himself in May 1915, under the headline ‘The Tragedy of the Shells – Lord Kitchener’s Grave Error’. Fiery and strident, he wrote that the country was now facing the threat of actual foreign feet marching upon British soil for the first time since the Norman Conquest of 1066.
The admitted fact is that Kitchener ordered the wrong kind of shell – the same kind of shell which he used largely against the Boers in 1900. He persisted in sending shrapnel – a useless weapon in trench warfare. He was warned repeatedly that the kind of shell required was a violently explosive bomb which would dynamite its way through the German trenches and entanglements and enable our brave men to advance in safety. The kind of shell our poor soldiers have had has caused the death of thousands of them.14
Britain also required more fighting men and the Daily Mail had published an advertisement the day before, with Kitchener urging married men of forty to enlist, but Northcliffe vowed not to publish the ad again, as he sought the compulsory conscription of all able-bodied men, not husbands and fathers.
We invite him [Kitchener] on Sunday to take a stroll down Oxford Street to the City and return by the Strand. He will meet some thousands of capable young ‘slackers’ who are staying at home, and, as one of our correspondents said yesterday, ‘stealing the businesses of married men who have gone to the front’.
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