The Prime Minister, though, had had enough of Northcliffe’s haranguing and attempts to dictate government policy. He returned to Parliament saying he’d broken away from Versailles to deal with ‘stones pattering on the roofs and crashing through the window and sometimes wild men screaming through the keyholes . . . I have come back to say a few things and I mean to say them.’ Though the Prime Minister never mentioned Harmsworth by name – referring only to a ‘reliable source’ – he used an article signed by Lord Northcliffe the previous November which laid out his views. ‘There were peace terms published in November as a sort of model to proceed on . . .’ said the Prime Minister, and then, making a joke of the shelling of Northcliffe’s home, added: ‘There was no reparation for damaged houses – not even at Broadstairs.’ The Commons erupted in cheers and laughter, MPs enjoying a supreme political showman taking the stage. Lloyd George primed his guns. Aimed. And shot down the press baron.
The Prime Minister’s attack was puffed on the front page of the Daily Mail and reported verbatim inside, even down to the laughter – the editor Thomas Marlowe himself, perhaps, allowing the PM a free hand.The premier, punctuating his words like a conductor, said Northcliffe was
Here today, jumping there tomorrow – there the next day. I had as soon rely on a grasshopper. [Loud laughter.] Still, I am prepared to make some allowances – even great newspaper proprietors will forgive me for saying so – but when a man is labouring under a keen sense of disappointment, however unjustified and however ridiculous his expectations may be – a man in those circumstances is always apt to think the world is badly run. When a man has deluded himself . . . that he is the only man who can win the war, and he is waiting for the clamour of the multitude that is going to demand his presence to direct the destinies of peace, and there is not a whisper, not a sound, it is rather disappointing, it is unnerving, it is upsetting.
And then the war is won without him! There must be something wrong! And, of course, it must be the Government! At any rate, he is the only man to make the peace! The only people who get near him tell him so constantly, and so he prepares the peace terms in advance and he waits for the call. [Loud laughter.] It does not come . . . Under these conditions I am prepared to make allowances, but let me say that when that kind of diseased vanity is carried to the point of sowing dissension between great allies whose unity is essential to the peace and happiness of the world . . . then, I say, not even that kind of disease is a justification for so black a crime against humanity. [Loud cheers.]37
At the key phrase ‘diseased vanity’, Lloyd George tapped his forehead, the universal sign of madness. He had a point; Sunny Harmsworth was losing his mind.
Alfred C. ‘Sunny’ Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, hadn’t exactly been the sanest of Mailmen for some time, and numerous stories of his growing eccentricity had been leaking out for years. One time during the war, when Northcliffe was angry with the picture quality in the Mail, he ordered everybody involved in the process – photographers, block makers, sub-editors – to stand in line, from tallest to shortest. He then put the tallest man in charge. On another occasion, Hannen Swaffer, the editor of his Weekly Dispatch, handed him a proof with a bow – as a joke. Lord Northcliffe asked what he was doing. ‘Bowing to a peer of the realm,’ Swaffer replied. ‘You don’t know how to,’ Northcliffe retorted. Northcliffe ordered one of his staff to show Swaffer how it was done. The man took the page proof and bowed. ‘Lower still,’ said Northcliffe. The man stooped lower. ‘Kneel, darn you, kneel!’ The man knelt. ‘There you are,’ said Northcliffe. ‘I can make them do anything I like.’38
Some people, including his nephew Cecil Harmsworth King and the Times editor Wickham Steed, believed syphilis had damaged Sunny’s mind. There is no hard evidence for this, though he did have a serious breakdown that left him incapacitated in 1910 which included a trip to Frankfurt – the centre of research into a ‘magic bullet’ cure for the disease at the time. Syphilis was a loaded, decadent word that was, therefore, useful to his enemies – it meant wicked sex driving one mad. His family insisted that a blood test for syphilis towards the end of his life was negative.
No matter, his mind was deteriorating whatever the cause. During a stop in Bangkok as a guest of the King of Siam in 1921, Northcliffe sent a secretary tumbling down the palace stairs when the man couldn’t find a newspaper he’d requested. On another occasion around the same time, Northcliffe was with the editor of The Times standing by a window miserably watching the rain fall, frustrated and bored because he’d wanted to play golf. The wind blew a window blind cord and the acorn on the end hit the glass. He jumped.
‘Somebody shot me, did you shoot me?’ he asked.
On another evening, he asked another man on a balcony: ‘How many moons do you see?’
‘One,’ the man replied. ‘I thought so,’ said Sunny, ‘but I see two.’39 Gossip was rife along Fleet Street about Northcliffe’s state of mind, and he was aware of it. ‘Someone has been saying I’m off my head,’ he said to Mail news editor Tom Clarke. ‘Not you, is it, Tom?’40
In the last few months of his life, he tore up his old Schemo Magnifico folder along with a pile of old photographs and flushed the pieces down the toilet. On his final foreign trip, he even began to assume the identity of a man called ‘Mr Leonard Brown’.
‘Mr Leonard Brown’ was an ultra-wealthy thickset man who checked himself into a small room at the back of a French hotel in May 1922. He had been on a trip to Germany and was in Boulogne writing a series of personal observations of the defeated country. Northcliffe was certain that someone was trying to kill him and that he had eaten poisoned ice cream. A young telephonist at The Times called Douglas Reed was sent across the Channel to act as his secretary and had been told to expect an imperious man who must be obeyed, and that’s what he found. Northcliffe was disorientated and disillusioned. He showed Reed a black silk purse he kept under his pillow: ‘Look at this. It was left here for me, for Mr Leonard Brown, by a man who wouldn’t give the porter his name. How do they know that I am here? You see the colour? It is the colour of death.’41
Northcliffe knew he was unravelling. He wrote to Lady Northcliffe in Lake Geneva, where she was staying with one of her lovers, Sir Robert Hudson, whom she later married – her ladyship had several lovers and her husband seemed not to care, so long as they were discreet (he even threatened to sack one member of staff who knew Lady Northcliffe had been caught in bed with a Times senior executive during a trip to Seville). The eminent physician Sir Frederick Treves, the doctor who ‘discovered’ Joseph ‘The Elephant Man’ Merrick, was also in Lake Geneva with her ladyship. ‘You have with you the most distinguished medical man in the world. Will you kindly ask his opinion of my sanity?’ wrote Northcliffe.
I have begun to have doubts if it is too little work and too much money, or it is simply decay of my faculties; I do not know, but I think I am going mad. Please wire me at once to relieve my suspicions. I dreamt the other night that I had run off with Princess Mary and started a Boarding house at Blackpool, and she said to me: ‘Thank you, we are doing very well.’ That was a dream.42
In his hotel room, Mr Leonard Brown had become obsessed with the case of a murderer named Ronald True, who was sent to a mental hospital as a criminal lunatic instead of being sent to the gallows for killing a woman with a rolling pin. At Northcliffe’s insistence, the Mail whipped it up into a scandal, alleging that True’s family connections had saved him from the gallows.43 Sunny’s final campaign was to be about a madman.
Back in London, the Mail published the first of Northcliffe’s proposed series of articles on Germany, a rambling piece from Flanders that included a conversation with a builder that the British Army said could never have taken place.44 Northcliffe’s secretary was a busy man: his master was like a broken machine in a Post Office sorting office, pinging off letters and telegrams in all directions.
The paper-thin walls that kept Sunny’s thoughts inside his head had simply fallen away. One
telegram to a manager read: ‘Please give that suit away to some poor man tis very dirty.’ Another, to The Times, suggested its manager become chief reporter and ordered its editor to stop walking down Fleet Street in a tall hat. Sunny sacked his golf professional for drunkenness, and his secretary Reed was put on notice for having lunch one day when his master needed him.
On the station platform the next day as he left for Paris, Northcliffe insulted railway officials, said God was a homosexual and claimed someone had tried to murder him with a Perrier bottle. The Times editor Wickham Steed arrived in Paris in the evening and found Northcliffe in bed in a darkened room at the Plaza Athenee Hotel, chewing a cigar and drinking a mixture of champagne and brandy. Steed later found Northcliffe with a devotional book his mother had given him in one hand and a pistol in the other – he’d thought the dressing gown on the door was an intruder. Steed tipped the bullets into his hand when Northcliffe went to the bathroom. Sunny shouted, groaned, pleaded and cursed until Steed left after 1 a.m. Steed returned at 5 a.m. and found Northcliffe with his barber. He handed Steed his second ‘Incognito in Germany’ article for the Daily Mail and ‘found some passages in it so insane that I told him they must be suppressed. They referred to his revolver and his ability to shoot seven Germans at sight through his pocket. He flew into a rage when I suggested suppression of these passages, but immediately consented when I told him that people would think he was afraid of the Germans.’
The next morning they left by train for Lake Geneva to see Lady Northcliffe, and Sunny babbled incessantly to Steed for almost the entire ten-hour trip in a compartment with the curtains drawn. Northcliffe ‘ended by telling some improper stories to Miss Rudge [a young telephonist]. After luncheon he said to me: “Did I go too far with that girl? Don’t you think I am mad? Am I mad?”’
Northcliffe dictated telegrams that were to be sent from stations as they passed through, and as the train approached Bellegarde, the nearest station to Evian, Northcliffe ‘had, or simulated, a choking fit, accompanied by dry retching. He screamed, shook his fist in my face, and seemed entirely beside himself,’ wrote Steed. He was met at the station by his loyal chauffeur, Pine, and then ordered Pine to drive over the winding roads to Evian at top speed, Northcliffe shrieking from the back that they ‘could all be killed’.45 He was rude to the hotel manager and threatened the porter at Evian’s Hotel Royal and called Sir Frederick Treves, the medical expert whose opinion he had sought, an old fool. William, his valet, put him to bed – where he abused Lady Northcliffe, who fled trembling to her room. He agreed to see a doctor after being told he was an expert in German poisons. The doctor promptly injected him with morphine to quieten him, but he continued to babble until 1 a.m. and had, Steed noted, by then been talking non-stop for twenty-four hours.
In the morning, the Press Lord managed to send a lucid telegram to his mother, the only true love of his life. Sunny had a strange relationship with his mother. His nephew, Geraldine’s grandson, Cecil Harmsworth King, later wrote how Uncle Alfred’s ‘affection for his mother was embarrassing to her, and quite abnormal’.46 Mrs Harmsworth had never been one to kiss and cuddle her eleven children, and viewed them as a burden, not a joy. Sunny would sleep in a room adjacent to her bedroom in the grand house her sons had bought her before going overseas, and he would immediately place a portrait of her on his bedroom table on ships and in hotel rooms. As soon as he arrived, he would write and cable her incessantly with messages of love.
These cables from Evian were fine to his mother but those around him began to panic, terrified that a mad telegram could be taken seriously or even be published. Northcliffe was, legally, still in complete control of his faculties and could do as he pleased. So his brother Sir Leicester was nominated by the other Harmsworth boys to rein him in. He went to, effectively, seize control of the publishing empire along with the ever loyal, by now also ‘Sir’, George Sutton.
Wickham Steed, meanwhile, decided he had to act and sent a cable of his own: ‘Disregard Entirely And Unpublish. Tell Carmelite [Mail HQ] Disregard And Unpublish Any Messages Or Instructions, Direct Or Indirect, From Here Unless Signed Sutton Or Me. Sutton Arrives Late Tonight.’47
Northcliffe instinctively realized he was being blocked. When he instructed Steed to cable the Times manager – under Steed’s name – saying ‘You Are A Rascal And A Thief. I Will Have The Law On You. If You Don’t Leave The Office Immediately I Will Come With The Police To Turn You Out’, Steed sent a harmless telegram with the same number of words, which was just as well, as suspicious Sunny checked the number of words on the receipt.
Steed went to the station to collect Sir George Sutton and, while he was away, the local doctor at Northcliffe’s side told Steed he had called in a nerve specialist from Lausanne – on the other side of Lake Geneva – who promptly wrote a certificate saying Northcliffe was out of his mind. Steed never met the specialist nor did he see the certificate, but a receipt for a Lausanne doctor did exist. The Harmsworths were adamant there was never any such declaration. When Steed saw his proprietor for the last time, he watched Northcliffe tell his wife: ‘My dear, when I’m well again, I shall present my humble duty to the King and ask him to take back our titles . . . We shall be plain Mr and Mrs Harmsworth again.’ Then he turned to Steed and started to abuse him ‘with every kind of indecent insult’.48 Lady Northcliffe buried her face in her hands and shouted at him to stop. Then it was her turn, her husband launching into an obscene monologue. Steed walked away.
At last Sir Leicester Harmsworth arrived and persuaded his big brother to leave Evian by insisting their mother wanted to see him. There would be no more telegrams, no more articles, no more headlines. Male nurses manhandled Northcliffe on to a train, where he was seen standing in the corridor angrily looking out of the window, his fingertips pushed white against the glass.
Sunny Harmsworth lay heavily in his bed at his grand London home, the sound of whistling workmen sawing wood and banging nails drifting down from the rooftop above. He was, effectively, being kept captive by strong male nurses at his exclusive home near Buckingham Palace for the sake of his businesses until such time as he recovered – or died.
Ulcerative endocarditis, an infection of a weakened heart – generally a secondary condition caused by another disease (syphilis is not implausible) – was diagnosed, and his doctors prescribed the only thing they ever seemed to prescribe Sunny Harmsworth: fresh air. So a shed that could be spun around on a disc was under construction on the roof to take him closer to the summer air.
While the workmen were completing the shed, Sunny was a sad sight to his old friend Max Pemberton, who called to show his respects. ‘The robust figure, the upright bearing, the buoyant manner were gone,’ he wrote. ‘I saw a stooping, wizened, shrunken old man and the first glance at him told me that he was doomed.’49
Northcliffe spent his fifty-seventh birthday on 15 July 1922 as a deluded prisoner in his own luxurious cage, but it’d be another full month of deep suffering before he passed away. He fasted some days and prayed aloud; often he just broke down and sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. His mother Geraldine saw him only once upon his return to London, and her first born ‘caused a scene’.50 Mrs Harmsworth, perhaps remembering his many illnesses as a small boy when his skull seemed to grow way too fast for his little body, turned to his doctors and whispered, ‘Is it his head?’
Sunny’s grip on the world came and went. In a lucid moment, his thoughts turned to his Australian protégé Keith Murdoch and he managed to write to him to boast of the Daily Mail ’s ‘stupendous figure’ of 1,735,000 copies sold a day.51 Some days he was delusional. He promised one of his two male nurses £1,000 a year and a chicken farm, another he attacked with a fire poker. When his physician introduced him to another renowned doctor, Northcliffe exclaimed: ‘One of George’s bloody knights!’ and pulled his revolver from under his pillow. It wasn’t loaded; Steed had already taken the bullets.52
A mile and a half away, down by
the River Thames, the Mailmen in Carmelite House were on edge. ‘There was a feeling of anxious expectancy everywhere in the office,’ wrote Tom Clarke. ‘Reporters went about with glum faces. Even sub-editors, a much more phlegmatic species, looked up wonderingly at people who entered or left the room. Upstairs the compositors tapped away diligently at their linotypes; downstairs the machine hands got ready the giant presses . . . but they tugged at the coat of any editorial man who passed their way and whispered: “What’s up with the Chief?”’53
The four telephone lines to his house had been cut to stop Northcliffe ‘worrying the office’. But he somehow evaded his nurse guards, found a key, sneaked into Lady Northcliffe’s private rooms and hid under a table to use her private line. He dialled the Daily Mail, hoping his Mailmen would come to his rescue. Mailman Oscar Pulvermacher took the call, another Mailman having handed him the phone gasping: ‘The Chief wants you!’
‘His voice was hardly audible,’ Pulvermacher said. ‘He wished me to give instructions designed to remove him from captivity, poor man.’54
It was Northcliffe’s last call to the Daily Mail. The death shed was ready, a hole was cut in the ceiling and he was hoisted up on a stretcher on to the roof of Carlton Gardens. The strange construction was actually on his neighbour’s roof, above a house, in a twist of fate, where Earl Kitchener had lived in the days when Sunny’s Daily Mail had attacked him for ordering the wrong kind of shells.
The Mail carried daily updates on his condition and on the day he died it read: ‘The patient’s condition remains persistently grave.’ It was Daily Mail issue no. 8218, and 1,800,000 copies were sold.
One of the last things he ever said was: ‘Tell mother she is the only one!’55
Rain fell gently on the shelter’s roof as Cecil and Vyvyan Harmsworth sat with their big brother when he died on the morning of 14 August 1922. The Star beat Sunny Harmsworth’s first ever newspaper, the Evening News, to the story; Northcliffe would have been furious.
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