There was outrage at the Daily Mail ’s sedition, and 3,000 members of the Stock Exchange assembled after lunch to give three cheers for Kitchener and burn a copy of the paper. Police guarded Carmelite House in case Northcliffe was attacked and circulation even fell, briefly, by 100,000.
Northcliffe caused more trouble a few months later with the help of a young reporter called Keith Murdoch, who had been sent to Turkey from London by an agency that covered the war for newspapers back in his native Australia, to investigate if the post was getting through to the men. Murdoch would return to London with an explosive letter of his own. Winston Churchill’s plan to bring the war to a swift end by opening a new front against Germany’s allies the Turks in the Dardanelles had turned into a bloody catastrophe at a place called Gallipoli. The only solution was a massive evacuation, but military censors would not let this unpalatable truth out and a letter Murdoch was carrying back to London from a Daily Telegraph correspondent addressed to the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was confiscated by a British officer. So Murdoch sent a letter of his own to the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, as fighting men from Australia and New Zealand – ANZACS – had, after all, been slaughtered in their thousands.
The offices of the press agency Murdoch worked for were in the Times building and Northcliffe heard of the letter through the paper’s editor. ‘I should not be able to rest until the true story of this lamentable adventure was so well known as to force immediate steps to be taken to remedy the state of affairs,’ Northcliffe told Murdoch. ‘The matter has haunted me ever since I learned about it.’15
Murdoch’s letter was published as a secret state paper and the troops were evacuated and, as an aside that still resonates a century later, Northcliffe became Keith Murdoch’s benefactor. Murdoch – nicknamed ‘Lord Southcliffe’ – was one of the few men who could stroll into Northcliffe’s office without knocking. Keith Murdoch’s son, of course, is Rupert Murdoch, a boy of intergalactic ambition who’d put newspapers on shelves, films on cinema screens and satellites into space to beam down football matches and twenty-four-hour news.
The Mail continued to harry and hassle the Government but newsprint rationing meant his newspapers were shrinking in size. ‘It will mean going back to the cult of brevity which we started twenty years ago,’ he said in an internal message to Daily Mail staff, adding later, ‘What with the price of paper and the calling up of married men, it looks as if we shall have nothing to print, and no one to print it.’16 His Daily Mail also asked its readers to report suspected draft dodgers to the authorities. But Lord Northcliffe wasn’t about to be accused of being a slacker – he made frequent trips to the Western Front himself. In February 1916 he headed for the French town of Verdun, which had become the focal point for the German attack, and boarded a small boat to cross the Channel with Times chief foreign correspondent and its future editor Wickham Steed. ‘I had never travelled with Northcliffe before, and his cheerfulness and patience under discomfort won my admiration and that of our companions,’ wrote Steed in his autobiography. ‘There were but three berths left. He insisted on tossing for them, and, having lost the toss, curled himself up in a macintosh on a seat.’ It was a struggle to reach Verdun; they headed in the direction of the mortar fire in a taxi that had to frequently be cooled down with snow and then ‘thumbed a lift’ the last part of the way to General Pétain’s headquarters in a French military truck. When Northcliffe climbed up into the cab, typical of Sunny Harmsworth, he recognized the driver as a garage owner he’d met during happier times in Biarritz.17
‘Though not an exceptionally strong man,’ wrote Steed, ‘he had borne exceptional strain and fatigue, with little sleep and less food from the Thursday afternoon until 2.30 a.m. on Sunday, his mind constantly on the alert and his pencil continually jotting down impressions in his notebook.’ Steed was fascinated by the man, whose mind, he said, ‘worked curiously’ – they both saw exactly the same things but whereas Steed would see them in a mundane way, Northcliffe naturally saw and recorded them ‘in a form which the public would understand . . . which might be called the public eye in miniature’.
Northcliffe wrote a 5,000-word piece, with the help of Steed, but collapsed before he could finish it. Steed finished it for him. It appeared in the Mail under the puff ‘Lord Northcliffe on the Battlefield of Verdun’ on 6 March and was syndicated to newspapers around the world. ‘That the sufferings of the wounded lying out through the long nights of icy wind in No-man’s Land between the lines would be great probably did not disturb the [German] Crown Prince,’ he wrote. ‘Yet it is a gruesome fact in the history of the war that the French, peering through the moonlight at what they thought to be stealthily crawling Germans, found them to be wounded men frozen to death.’18
These trips were not, however, without their moments of comedy: a visit to British HQ was a reminder that the ennobled Sunny Harmsworth, at fifty-one, was no longer the ‘Adonis of Hampstead’ when he was taken to see ‘the newest form of arm’, the tank. ‘Northcliffe tried to enter one of them through the manhole on the top,’ wrote Steed,‘but as his girth was some inches larger than the hole, he stuck midway and had to be hauled down to the inside by the feet while I sat on his shoulders above. Getting him out again was an even harder matter.’19
On his return from the front, his family were concerned for his state of mind. Lady Northcliffe was moved to write to the ever-loyal George Sutton, who was now running the Amalgamated Press – the new name for Sunny’s massive magazine empire. ‘The Chief strikes me as being far from what he should be,’ she told him, ‘much too excitable and beginning his old habit of abusing his friends at his own table if they venture to disagree with him. It is most painful – and he looks puffy and generally wrong and is not very wise about his diet.’ And after he abused the Daily Mail editor Thomas Marlowe in an editorial conference in front of his senior editors, the other Mailmen dispersed muttering, ‘Something’s wrong with the Chief.’
Yet outside the office, some were pushing him on towards real political power. The Bishop of Birmingham wrote that he hoped that ‘before long we may see you directly responsible for the policy of this country’. Even H. G. Wells, weirdly, seemed to suggest in a letter that Sunny should become some kind of dictator.20
Around this time, the Daily Mail ’s news editor, Tom Clarke, had a friendly face-to-face relationship with his proprietor that few mere heads of an editorial department today enjoy, and it showed just how hands-on Northcliffe still was at the Mail after twenty years and despite owning countless other organs – including Britain’s most respected newspaper, The Times. Clarke would frequently be summoned to Northcliffe’s house in St James’s Place, where he’d discuss attacks on what he saw as the ineffective war Government of Herbert Asquith. As he entered the room on 2 December 1916, Northcliffe looked over his spectacles at Clarke ‘like a somewhat benevolent mandarin’.
‘I thought you were dead,’ Northcliffe told Clarke.
‘Dead?’ Clarke replied.
‘Killed. I thought there were no young men left.’
They then discussed the next day’s leader page and Northcliffe ordered that the word Government be put in quotes and a contents bill that screamed ‘Asquith a National Danger’. Northcliffe then added: ‘That will shake them up. It will make things lively for you tomorrow. The police will be after you all.’21
The rival Daily News responded with an attack of its own on ‘the colossal vanity of this neurotic child Northcliffe . . . If the present Government falls, it will fall because Lord Northcliffe decreed that it should fall, and the Government that takes its place, no matter who compose it, will enter on its task as the tributary of Lord Northcliffe.’ The Asquith Government, of course, fell a week later and David Lloyd George – Northcliffe’s favoured man, whom he called ‘the little wizard from Wales’22 – became Prime Minister. Lloyd George had already, with the support of Northcliffe’s papers, taken over from the hated Kitchener at the War Office after Kitchener�
��s ship was torpedoed as he made his way to Russia in June that year. Sunny had stormed into his mother’s drawing room at a family event and declared, ‘The British Empire has had the greatest stroke of luck in its history – Kitchener is dead, drowned at sea!’23
‘Fashioning the New England’ was a long portrait around a big photograph of the new premier ‘By Lord Northcliffe’ for his Weekly Dispatch. ‘He is constantly referred to as “the little Welshman”, but he is not at all little. You probably have his portrait before you as you read these lines. The head is not that of a little man, mentally or physically. It is the head of a man with the sparkle of genius, combined with Celtic energy and intense industry.’24 Sunny Harmsworth, still measuring a man by the size of his skull. But the alliance between Prime Minister and newspaper proprietor wouldn’t hold.
On the other side of the North Sea, the German high command were taking the Daily Mail seriously – even, perhaps, personally.
In 1916, an undercover Mailman managed to sneak into a banquet with the Kaiser at the German headquarters in the Balkans, and the paper even printed the menu to prove their man had, for sure, been there. The Mailman found the Kaiser ‘a tired and broken man. The hair is white, though the moustache is still suspiciously dark.’
. . . had I been recognised by one of the secret service officers who are around the Kaiser, or by any other person who had happened to see me before (for this was not my first journey to the Near East), there would have been a short and simple ceremony against the wall of the town hall in which I should have played the principal part . . . Lord Northcliffe and The Daily Mail are as much disliked by the Germans in Germany as by the pro-Germans in England.25
The Mail ’s Berlin Correspondent reported that the establishment German newspaper Vossische Zeitung credited the part Lord Northcliffe and ‘his powerful press’ had played in Britain’s war efforts, especially during the Battle of the Somme.26 German archives containing notes of conversations between German officers and hundreds of captured British soldiers revealed that some were irritated during the latter stages of the battle by ‘Letters from the Front’ from serving soldiers published regularly in the Daily Mail. At the end of 1916 when, as one captured soldier put it, ‘the so called walk over has turned into a steeplechase with an infinite number of obstacles’, many soldiers had had enough and some were even glad to have been captured as the battle slithered on through the mud and rotting corpses towards winter. ‘Every single man expresses his disgust at the unconscionable machinations of the British press and the lies that it constantly publishes in the guise of “news”,’ wrote one German intelligence officer in his report at the end of 1916, after interrogating British prisoners. ‘And in particular the so-called “Letters from the Front” that appear in the Daily Mail which are evidently written by someone who has never set foot in France.’27
Yet, still – three months after the Somme slaughter ended in a bloody draw – it must have seemed an odd mission for the commander of the German destroyer as he aimed his guns at a specific little scratch of Kent countryside, the beam of the North Foreland lighthouse gently scanning the black night over the North Sea before returning to cross the north cliff. The patch of coastline near Broadstairs was of zero military significance; it wasn’t fortified nor were its waters well patrolled. It was just a strip of crusty shore of an island with 12,000 miles of crusty shore. Silencing the press baron must have been the mission, and shells began to burst around Elmwood on 26 February 1917. ‘Incidentally, the paper was nearly deprived of its chief Proprietor last night, a source of mingled feelings among the staff,’ Northcliffe wrote in his daily staff communique.
At 11.30 my house was lit up by 20 star shells from the sea, so that the place was illuminated as if by lightning. Shrapnel burst all over the place, some of it hitting the Library in which these notes are prepared every day, and killing a poor woman and baby within 50 yards of my home and badly wounding two others. The bombardment lasted from 6 to 10 minutes according to various estimates, and was the result of a Destroyer raid. The Authorities have no doubt that my house was aimed at and the shooting was by no means bad. I understand that the Destroyer was three miles out.28
During the bombardment, Northcliffe had refused to get out of bed, telling his secretary, ‘If we are to die, we will die in our beds.’29 Northcliffe would later frequently be seen peering out from a gap in the fence at Elmwood and down to the North Sea. His refuge must never have felt quite the same again.
The Daily Mail ’s theme from the very start of the war was, in effect, that Germany be annihilated, with the charge being led by Northcliffe himself and Lovat Fraser. But another Mail contributor, H. G. Wells, disagreed.
Why, then, does this waste and killing go on? Why is not the Peace Conference sitting now? Manifestly because a small minority of people in positions of peculiar advantage, in positions of trust and authority, prevent or delay its assembling . . . I ask Mr. Lovat Fraser if it is not his intention, and I ask your readers if it is not their intention, to leave the German people chastened, perhaps, but alive, independent, and in the possession of economic resources. What is the alternative? Are we out for a massacre of the entire German population? Do we propose to end this war with all Germany in a sort of prison cut off from all the rest of mankind? 30
Northcliffe and Fraser wanted Germany crushed, penniless. Seven weeks before the war ended, Fraser wrote under a headline that had been used many times in the Mail, ‘Why Prussia Must Pay’.
We have nothing to discuss with either Germany or Austria. We shall never discuss peace with them. We shall drive their armies headlong, march into their country, state the terms we intend to impose, and compel their acceptance . . . Prussia must pay. She must pay to the uttermost mark . . . The German is a bully and has all a bully’s cowardice . . . If we warned the Germans that for every town they destroy in France the Allies will wipe out one in Germany, if we named the towns we intended to raze, if we advertised our intentions, if we told the German armies exactly what we meant to do, I believe the enemy would slink out of France – without knocking another brick off a wall.31
Northcliffe and Fraser held a somewhat short-sighted view that is probably best illustrated by the fate of the tiny British Channel Island of Sark a few years later. Sark was Lovat Fraser’s hideaway, about which he wrote lovingly in the Mail, it was a place to potter around drawing in his sketch pad, where he’d stroll over the beach and peer through his round spectacles at the life forms that lived in the rock pools – a fat chap with a moustache enjoying a smoke of his pipe. ‘One goes there not to idle from mere laziness but to take breath, to tranquillise the nerves, to stand aside and regain perspective, to try and discern how far these marchings of great armies and these cries of overwrought politicians really matter, to be alone with the stars.’32 Yet all Northcliffe and Fraser’s talk of trampling the bloodied Germans into the dirt only fertilized the soil in which Hitler’s Nazis would later grow. Just a couple of decades later German jackboots landed on Sark and it was one of the few clumps of British turf the Germans ever conquered during World War Two.
Then the war was over. The abdicated Kaiser was on the run and the Daily Mail was branding itself ‘The Soldiers’ Paper’ under its front-page masthead. ‘A Glorious End’, the paper proclaimed on 12 November 1918.
The armistice which was signed yesterday marks the end of the war and the complete and overwhelming triumph of the cause of right . . . It is the end of slaughter and suffering . . . The bravest and best are under the soil in France. The redeemed land holds its redeemers. The spring has gone out of our year with the loss of that ‘swift and joyful generation’ which welcomed the call and obeyed.33
Prime Minister David Lloyd George became a national hero, as he had taken charge of a government in disarray, and became the man who was credited with winning the war. His Coalition Government won the 1918 election by a landslide. Now all he had to do was win the peace, but Lloyd George felt he still had one heavily armed enem
y left: Lord Northcliffe.
The pair had been friendly but never friends. Lloyd George had sent Northcliffe to the US to head the British War Mission, perhaps in the hope that sending him away would quieten his newspapers, and promoted him up the ranks of the peers to viscount. The Prime Minister also made him Director of Propaganda in enemy countries, so Northcliffe dropped millions of propaganda leaflets of all kinds over the German lines, which, as their battlefield positions weakened, may have had an impact on German morale. A German general even referred to Northcliffe as ‘the most thorough-going rascal of the Entente’.34 Yet despite this success, Northcliffe and the Prime Minister had fallen out – partly over an offer to become Air Minister. As an early enthusiast and sponsor of flight, Northcliffe understood the subject well but he publicly and petulantly declined the post (perhaps expecting greater office). What Northcliffe really wanted – expected – was a seat at the peace conference in Paris when the war ended, and he’d personally spelled out his demands to the Prime Minister. But Lloyd George left him behind.
Kennedy Jones had left the firm due to ill health in 1912 but later resurfaced as an MP. K. J. arranged a telegram in April 1919 signed by 370 MPs, urging the Prime Minister to ‘present the bill in full’ – the cost of the war – to the Germans. In a speech in Scotland, Northcliffe had earlier called for Prussia to pay ‘town for town, village for village, ship for ship, jewel for jewel, picture for picture, dollar for dollar . . . she must pay full compensation for all she has . . . stolen, sacked and burnt’.35 Northcliffe’s hand was suspected in K. J.’s telegram too: making the news instead of waiting for it. For Sunny it seemed to be personal, it was always personal, and by now he simply couldn’t stand Lloyd George: ‘It’s his big head on a little body I don’t like.’36
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