PART II
BUNNY & SON
4
Whose Mail Is It Anyway?
There was only ever one Viscount Northcliffe.
Sunny Harmsworth had several illegitimate children to more than one woman but his wife Molly never provided him with an heir, so his hereditary title fell with him into his grave. By then, though, there was already another peer in the Harmsworth realm – the first in a long line of Lord Rothermeres.
Bunny Harmsworth became Baron Rothermere in 1914 and was further elevated up the ranks to viscount as a reward for his stint as Air Minister – the job turned down by his elder brother – during the war. It was Bunny Harmsworth who was tasked to weld together the winged elements of the military and create the Royal Air Force. By the time his big brother died Viscount Rothermere was immensely wealthy, he had real political clout and he was a peer of the realm, no less. Yet Harold, always a harried and worried soul, had plunged into deep and sickening despair by the end of the war over the tragedy that befell his own family.
The slide towards despair began with his wife, Lilian, the beautiful friend of his sister Violet whom he’d married in the summer of 1893. Rothermere, unlike his father, Harmie, had wanted – and could well afford – a huge family. And this flesh-and-blood manifestation of his love for all big numbers had started well when his wife gave birth to their first son a year later and another two sons swiftly followed. But Harold wasn’t the only one of Harmie’s boys with whom Lilian was sharing her bed; she was also sleeping with the seventh and by far the most handsome of all Harmie’s eight boys – sporty and fun-loving St John, the child said to be the most like Alfred ‘the Adonis of Hampstead’. Yet St John – Bonch in the pet name stakes – was to become a tragic figure, and what happened to him was the first sign that the seventeen-year spell of almost perfect good fortune that the Harmsworth clan had enjoyed since Harmie’s death was now over.
One morning in 1906, after leaving Lilian’s bed at Bunny’s country estate, Bonch leapt into his chauffeur-driven car and waved goodbye to his lover before clambering into the back for a lie down. A thick fog quickly began to gather, though, as they rattled over the road to the Harmsworth matriarch’s mansion north of Hampstead and St John’s chauffeur struggled to see. So he decided to follow the telegraph poles, figuring they’d guide them back to London. And the chances were that the poles did, indeed, lead directly to the city, but that didn’t mean they stuck by the roadside. The chauffeur followed the poles straight off the road and into a ditch and Bonch lay under the car with four wheels spinning in the empty air – unable, at first, even to blink. It was a car with no roof and his neck was broken. He was paralysed for life. Worse though, for Bunny, his wife became St John’s nurse and she was lost to him.1 Harold would never have eleven children like his father.
Still, Bunny knew the Rothermere name was sure to be carried forth to future generations. He already had three sons. Except, again, good fortune had deserted the Harmsworth family and the Great War intervened. First to die was Bunny’s second son, twenty-one-year-old Vere – the nephew said to be Uncle Northcliffe’s favourite. It seems Sunny or Bunny might have actually pulled strings to try to save Lieutenant Harmsworth from his fate, as Vere had been offered a coveted and cushy posting way back from the front lines not long before a German shell blew him to pieces. He’d declined the offer and insisted on leading his men up and over the parapet.2 Then Bunny’s eldest boy, Vyvyan, met a similar fate. A captain in the Irish Guards, he was mortally wounded – his third war injury – at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917 and lay in hospital for months, dying shortly after being awarded the Military Cross.3 He was twenty-three. Lady Rothermere, incidentally, might have embraced her role many years before as St John’s nurse, but she never once visited her dying boy and she even showed up late for his memorial service.4
There was now only one son left to inherit the Rothermere name: Bunny’s youngest child, Esmond, and there were dark whispers within the Harmsworth clan that handsome tennis-lover Esmond was, in fact, St John’s boy.5
‘I think one has to look on Rothermere as a very unhappy man,’ wrote Bunny’s nephew Cecil King, ‘and after the death of his two elder sons he devoted himself to fighting off despair. So he plunged into money-making on a great scale. He was ambitious to be the richest man in the country, but thought – he told me – that he never got further than number three.’6
At the Mail ’s launch Bunny had been given a quarter share in the paper that added to his magazine and Evening News holdings, and Sunny had also sold him his Daily Mirror for a pittance before the war. He was also a savvy investor. But Northcliffe did not bequeath Rothermere his controlling stake in the Mail. It wasn’t even clear who Sunny Harmsworth actually wanted to take control of his businesses. He was a control freak to the very end and he left numerous confusing, contradictory and complex wills . . . including one that Lady Northcliffe had him sign on his deathbed which, of course, pretty much left her everything.7 It fell to ever-loyal Sir George Sutton to wrestle sense into his master’s affairs . . . and Viscount Rothermere was his master now.
Sunny had, of course, kept his penny-pinching younger brother well away from his favourite child from before she was even born – Bunny had actually done very little to earn that quarter share he was given at the Mail ’s founding – fearing Harold would make her a whole lot slimmer and cheaper than her father desired. And Northcliffe apparently held this fear to the very end; on one visit to dying Alfred’s rooftop shed, brother Cecil had thought that heavily sedated Sunny was unconscious until . . . he suddenly jerked to life and declared: ‘Harold will ruin my paper! He will think too much of the money!’8 Dour Harold, who had sold off his shares in the Daily Mail before the war ‘and severed his connection with the paper in order to develop other financial interests’,9 later claimed that he had only ever wanted to buy the Daily Mail to please their mother. Nobody believed him.
Harold had competition, though, in the shape of Daily Mail editor Thomas Marlowe, who also wanted to buy the paper. Marlowe knew Bunny’s input to the paper had been minimal, for he too had been there at the Mail ’s birth, nursing her into the world through a cloud of cigarette smoke and filthy words alongside Sunny Harmsworth, Kennedy Jones and half a handful of others. Marlowe was the direct forebear of today’s Mail editor Paul Dacre, being, as he was, the technician and daily living embodiment of exactly what the Daily Mail stood for, more so even than Northcliffe himself; Sunny’s fickle energies had long been dissipated by his ownership of The Times. It was impossible to micromanage both papers and the pressure may have contributed to Northcliffe’s eventual mental collapse.
Thomas Marlowe didn’t have Bunny’s kind of funds but he did have a wealthy backer in the shape of the Tory Party’s election agent Sir Malcolm Fraser, who could well see the value of reaching all those voters in the middle for the Conservative cause. Yet Sutton wouldn’t listen to Marlowe. In the weeks after Northcliffe’s passing, Marlowe went to see Sir George, who was executor of Northcliffe’s estate under the many wills, nine times to try to get him to name a price for the paper. ‘I could never get him [Sutton] to agree anything,’ recalled Marlowe. ‘He said that there was a great deal to be done and that he was not ready to discuss it. The last time I spoke to him I said, “The truth is, Sutton, you don’t want another offer.” His answer was, “Well, that is the truth, I do not.’ . . . I did not pursue the matter after that because I thought that it was not worthwhile.’10 Indeed. On the very same day Sutton was formally appointed administrator of Northcliffe’s estate, he had already arranged to sell Sunny’s control to Bunny for a piffling £1,600,000 (around £70 million today). Marlowe recounted his story in court as a witness for one of Northcliffe’s many mistresses, who sued Rothermere and Sutton claiming she had lost out as a beneficiary under one of the wills, after the Mail shares were sold for far less than their true value. Rothermere and Sutton also sold off The Times. Pragmatist Bunny saw a newspaper – then as now – that wo
uld rarely turn a profit. They didn’t feel any sentimental attachment to Answers either – they shed the company that owned the magazines to cover Northcliffe’s death duties.
Even without The Times, when Lord Rothermere combined his own holdings (including the Daily Mirror he’d already bought off his brother and, a little later, a near half-share in the ever-accelerating Daily Express) with Lord Northcliffe’s organs he became the largest newspaper proprietor the world had ever seen.
Bunny wasn’t born with Northcliffe’s journalistic gene; he was simply the family’s money man and a magnificent money man at that: by 1926 Bunny’s love of sums had generated him a net worth of £26 million (almost £1.5 billion today).11 Rothermere was far wealthier than Northcliffe had ever been. Sunny’s business had required Bunny’s blunt, ruthless force in order to thrive and, wrote their nephew Cecil King, Viscount Rothermere knew it: ‘Harold told my mother after Northcliffe’s death that of course Alfred owed every-thing to him, and that without his business management Northcliffe would never have been heard of.’12 But, on the other hand, money men can be hired, and without Sunny’s own particular genius and eye for the popular taste there would simply never have been the need for a Bunny Harmsworth.
Below stairs in the Daily Mail newsroom, Thomas Marlowe had to content himself with just being a journalist and not a proprietor, though he had been promoted to Chairman of Associated Newspapers by Northcliffe in 1918. Marlowe may have had a reputation as something of a brawler in Fleet Street bars in his early days as a hack but by the 1920s he had morphed into the deaf old Admiral of the British press; a grandiose snob of a man who’d sack a journalist if he didn’t like his tie or the way he parted his hair.
The biggest fear in this post-war era for staunch old Tory editors like Marlowe was socialism and the rising Labour Party. After the war, millions of men who’d killed for King and country now expected – demanded – a greater say in affairs, and in January 1924 Labour had formed a government for the first time under the son of a Scottish farmhand called Ramsay MacDonald. His minority Government didn’t last long, however, and fresh elections were called later that year. Marlowe would do whatever he could to ensure victory for the Tories.
An opportunity arose six days before the general election of October 1924, when Marlowe strode across the Daily Mail decks and into his office, took off his hat and hung up his coat, then checked his writing table for messages. On his desk lay a cannonball that could blow Labour’s election hopes out of the water. It was a note from ‘an old and trusted friend’ that had been left there late the previous evening. ‘There is a document in London which you ought to have. It shows the relations between the Bolsheviks and British Labour leaders,’ it said. Soon enough, the wily old hack had two copies of the infamous document – later dubbed the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ – from different sources. He sent for the printer and ordered him to get the letter into type at once and pull a sufficient number of proofs to supply all the other newspapers.13
Four days before the country was to decide on a new government, most papers decided to publish the Zinoviev letter – especially after the Foreign Office released it themselves, bounced into it by the Daily Mail. Whereas other newspapers reported the letter, though, Marlowe’s Mail raged, screaming out loud that the letter showed the country was in real danger of falling into communist hands:
Everything is to be made ready for a great outbreak of the abominable ‘class war,’ which is civil war of the most savage kind . . . Meantime the British people, as they do not mean to have their throats cut by Zinoviev’s mercenaries, must bestir themselves. They must see that these miserable Bolsheviks and their stealthy British accomplices are sent to the right-about or thrown out of the country. For the safety of the nation every sane man and woman must vote on Wednesday, and vote for a Conservative Government which will know how to deal with treason.14
The Tories won by a landslide, though Labour’s share of the vote actually increased and the election cemented the party’s position as the main opposition, while killing off the Liberals as a credible party capable of winning a majority. Marlowe was certain it was the Zinoviev letter that had won the election for the Tories. ‘The effect of the publication was, I think, unequalled in all the history of general elections,’ wrote Marlowe in 1928. ‘No single event that I have ever heard of produced such direct and definite reaction in the public mind.’15
Only the Daily Herald (the paper which would morph into today’s soaraway Sun), edited by left-wing Northcliffe-era Mailman Hamilton Fyfe, suggested that the Zinoviev letter could be a fake. It was a fake. The Foreign Office’s chief historian, seventy-five years later, proved conclusively that it was a forgery after studying secret documents and accessing the Soviet archives in Moscow. A future head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, even admitted in the secret internal files that he’d sent a copy to the Daily Mail.16 Marlowe never backed down from his assertion that the letter was genuine but the facts prove he was either duped by the spooks . . . or complicit.
Whatever the truth, Marlowe’s battles with the rising Left were not over and his next fight was with the men downstairs in the Daily Mail basement: his own printers. In May 1926, millions of workers were expected to walk out in a General Strike to support the already striking miners, and it was pretty clear where Marlowe’s sympathies lay. ‘A general strike is not an industrial dispute,’ he ranted, under the headline ‘For King and Country’. ‘It is a revolutionary movement.’17
But Marlowe had a problem. His London compositors simply refused to make up the page and his printers wouldn’t print it – a dumb decision on their part that played straight into the Government’s hands; the dispute in the Mail ’s press hall lit the blue touchpaper on the whole industrial-strength firework and the Government reacted with a statement claiming that ‘overt acts have already taken place, including gross interference with the freedom of the Press. Such action involves a challenge to the constitutional rights and freedom of the nation . . . these negotiations cannot continue.’18 The Government walked away from the table with the miners, which, it seems, is exactly what they had wanted to do all along.
Yet the Mail machine didn’t even stop, it just paused a while. Many Mailmen abhorred the actions of the paper’s Fleet Street printers, and print workers in Manchester and Paris let their presses roll anyway, refusing to support an attempt to dictate to a free press. Though many disagreed with Marlowe’s words, they accepted that as editor of the Daily Mail he had a right to them. Incidentally, though Marlowe had invoked the King, he himself objected to striking miners being branded revolutionaries by the Daily Mail: ‘Try living on their wages before you judge them,’ George V snapped to coal mine owner Lord Durham during a trip to Newmarket Races.19
Again, typical of the British, there was no mass civil disorder, no march into Westminster by armed hordes – men who’d fought in the war wanted their rights and better conditions but there was little desire for the carpenters among them to construct the gallows. The unions called the strike off after nine days without gaining a single concession, and the miners went back down their pits to work longer hours – for less pay. And the Mail ’s editorial that day went out unhindered, headlined: ‘Surrender of the Revolution . . . Victory for the People’.20
Though Marlowe was all-powerful within the Mail newsroom, he did not own it; and it was inevitable that he would fall out with his proprietor sooner or later. Rothermere and Marlowe simply didn’t seem to like each other, though they did have tragedy in common – Marlowe had also lost two sons. His first boy, Cambridge undergraduate John, had been killed when his car crashed into a cart.21 His second son, Kenneth, was twice wounded in the war and then worked for the intelligence services and died, the cause going unreported, aged twenty-one. But, unlike Rothermere, Marlowe’s personal life was set upon solid rock; Mrs Marlowe, she of the sandwiches, gave him two more sons and four daughters.
A rift opened between editor and proprietor in the mid-Atlantic in the summer of 1926. Pred
ictably, it was over money: Bunny knew his dollars from his cents better than anybody, and he was furious when the Daily Mail attacked America over Britain’s war debt. The Mail had branded the US ‘Uncle Shylock’, after Shakespeare’s moneylender from The Merchant of Venice, and printed a cartoon of the sinister Jewish cliché of the day wielding a huge knife to slice away his pound of flesh through usury.22 The Mail argued the debt was crippling Britain and, worse, the Germans would pay off their reparations long before the British had satisfied their debtor.
Rothermere castigated his editor in print, writing a rebuke in his Sunday Pictorial (later renamed the Sunday Mirror) – the only newspaper he ever founded – and then forced Marlowe to reprint it in his Daily Mail the next day. ‘The Daily Mail jumped in at the deep end of the recent discussion on inter-Allied debts and splashed about, saying that American war debt collection methods resembled the methods of Shylock. I entirely disagree with this attitude. The opinions are those of the Editor and his staff. They are not mine.’23
Bunny commanded Marlowe to stop attacking the US ‘and told him he should take a holiday, which he did’. On his return, they both apparently ‘agreed that the old relations could not be re-established, and he resigned’.24 It was a huge mistake and a typically heavy-handed use of the cosh by Bunny Harmsworth; Northcliffe had stuck with his half-deaf editor even when they almost came to blows – Marlowe was, after all, the only man who had properly held the title as Daily Mail editor up to then and he had been editor for twenty-seven years. Rothermere, in contrast, would go through seven in all before he died fourteen years later. In the meantime, Bunny did what he did best: he drove down costs and made room for more lovely fee-paying adverts. Profits increased and Daily Mail shares shot up in value. Bunny, the consummate money man, wrote an article in July 1929 in which he asked, ‘Will Wall Street Swallow Europe?’ and warned of the flow of capital from Europe to the US. It was to prove prophetic, just three months before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, the economic catastrophe that further fertilized the ground for war. A friend spotted Harold early one morning shortly after, strolling along the street near Lord’s Cricket Ground. He waved hello. Bunny stopped to tell him how he had lost heavily ($40 million in a month, according to his nephew Cecil King) and couldn’t sleep. So his friend invited him in for coffee, and found a lonely man desperate for somebody to talk to.25
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