Circulation was approaching the 2 million mark around this time, the target Sunny had long grasped for but never reached. However, this was less because it was a great product and more because there were greater numbers of people buying newspapers in general26 from the ever-expanding middle classes and the increasingly literate working classes and, though he had no heir, two of Northcliffe’s nephews would be at the forefront of the fight to grab these readers.
On any given Sunday before the Great War, a fleet of Rolls-Royces would crunch up the driveway to Granny Harmsworth’s country estate and dozens of grandchildren would spill out on to the damp lawns as a platoon of nannies fussed after them with safety-pins and nappies. It was the dawn of the twentieth century, halcyon days for the Harmsworth clan; everything had gone their way. Even gorgeous Uncle St John was still standing, playing tennis while his elder brothers’ wives tried not to get caught looking at his shorts.
Out there on the lawn trying not to get mud on their crisply laundered sailor suits, two of Mrs Harmsworth’s grandchildren would become the pillars upon which Britain’s popular press would rest. Neither was born to be so; both lost older brothers during the war. Cecil Harmsworth King – the son of Geraldine, the eldest sister, born between Alfred and Harold – and Bunny’s only surviving son Esmond would be Mr Daily Mirror and Mr Daily Mail, the brash paper voice of the working classes and the fading paper voice of the middle classes.
To Esmond and the rest of this new generation of moneyed Harmsworths (and just as with Northcliffe and Rothermere’s nine brothers and sisters), Sunny was the family’s shining light – never Bunny. Once a year, for instance, Northcliffe would invite all these young Harmsworths for lunch (they all seemed to insist that they were Uncle Alfred’s favourite) and Sunny would slip a crisp five-pound note under every plate. ‘We enjoyed the lunch,’ said Esmond, ‘because he was absolutely charming to children. My uncle was a dreamer and not at all frightening. He was an extrovert. Father was shy and withdrawn and much more frightening.’27 Northcliffe was a fascinating, playful and exciting character to his nephews, added King: ‘Towards the end of his life he had persecution mania – the Germans were after him, and he showed me a secret catch which opened a door that would get him away if he was cornered (I think in his bathroom).’28
Out of all these Harmsworth nephews and nieces, it was the unlikely figure of Esmond who had emerged as the heir to the Harmsworth empire – pushed out of the middling ranks by the tragedy of the Great War. Esmond became the leader of this brand-new class of Harmsworths who really were born to better things. He was schooled at Eton and then commissioned into the Royal Marine Artillery, and he even served as Lloyd George’s aide-de-camp at the Peace Conference after the war and would later tell stories at dinner parties of the Prime Minister’s sexual peccadilloes at Versailles. Esmond was elected as the MP for Northcliffe’s constituency by the Kent seaside at twenty-one, while Uncle Alfred was still above ground. He served inside the Tory fold for a decade, then quit Parliament to join the family firm in the late 1920s at Rothermere’s right hand. Over the subsequent decade or so, Esmond was given ever more responsibility but never any real power.
It was a sense of duty, it seems, that required Esmond’s presence within the family business rather than any real genetic disposition towards the newspaper trade, and he was soon crushed by his heavy father, who told him that he had to ‘inherit all the sacrifices of those great personages your two elder brothers. They would have wished for you a great career and sometimes through my tears I see in the future an ample vindication for what they – and I – have suffered.’29
By 1935 Esmond had ascended to Marlowe’s old title of chairman of Associated Newspapers (Marlowe had remained editor of the Daily Mail when Northcliffe elevated him). Bunny & Son were steering the Mail ship and there were fewer and fewer true hacks from Sunny Harmsworth’s days left aboard. They could really have done with a ‘proper’ journalist like Thomas Marlowe to guide them through the coming stormy waters but he had long ago been thrown overboard by Rothermere.
Anyway, Marlowe died that year. He fell ill on a trip to Cape Town and passed away after an emergency operation aboard the Winchester Castle ocean liner as he made his way back with Mrs Marlowe to their little cottage on the Isle of Wight. Sir George Sutton was at Marlowe’s memorial service at St Bride’s, but there was no sign of Rothermere. And Marlowe’s terse obituary in the Mail perfectly illustrates exactly what was now happening to the newspaper Marlowe had helped Sunny Harmsworth create all those years ago. It was just one column, crushed between huge adverts for meat extract and a new radio. ‘Only BOVRIL can do it! Bovril prevents that sinking feeling and protects against colds, chills and influenza. It must be BOVRIL. Take it Daily!’30
Marlowe was buried at sea and, as the belligerent old Admiral of the Press floated gently to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean bleeding true Tory blue ink as he went, the Mail ’s voice sank with him. It’d take another four decades, and a journalist who was only a small boy when Marlowe died, before it found it again.
5
The Wrong Side of History
Bunny Harmsworth had a taste for ballerinas, and Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev liked to use his beautiful dancers to part super-rich men such as Lord Rothermere from their cash in order to fund his Ballets Russes dance company.
So Serge, as his friends called him, organized a supper party at London’s Carlton Hotel specifically so dainty little fingers might open the viscount’s wallet. Lydia Sokolova was given the task. She was an excellent choice, because Miss Sokolova spoke perfect English – which was not surprising really as she’d actually been born plain old Hilda Munnings in south London. But Cockney Hilda ‘had no experience of extracting large sums of money from rich men’.
‘I was seated between Diaghilev and Lord Rothermere. At what he judged the right moment, the “Old Man” [Diaghilev] whispered, “Now you must go and dance with him.” I was very nervous and it was not until we had two dances that I summoned the courage to approach the subject. Lord Rothermere did not make it easy for me. Eventually, after a little persuasion, he said, “All right. I will do what you ask. But I want you to make it clear to Diaghilev that I am doing this for you personally.”’1
Alice Nikitina was also there, placed far from Harold at the banqueting table, but ‘that did not prevent Lord Rothermere leaving his circle and coming to ask me to dance several times’.2 Rothermere was in his mid-fifties and Nikitina, who’d left Russia shortly after the revolution, was thirty years his junior. They’d have a fourteen-year affair, though she insisted it was never sexual. She received dresses and furs, a car, and Nikitina wasn’t quite sure what to do with the gift of a five-litre bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume – so she massaged herself with it.
Bunny was well known for his generosity and was forever stuffing cash into envelopes; his brother Cecil even told a story of Harold jamming wads of banknotes into the collection box while they were on a visit to York Minster. Secretaries carried cash to give to beggars, and the headmaster of his old school in Marylebone asked for £1,000 and was given £10,000 instead. He funded chairs at Oxford and Cambridge endowed in the names of his dead sons, 3and he also bought the site of the old ‘Bedlam’ mental hospital in south London and turned it into a park in his mother’s name.
Rothermere’s largesse, though, was a clumsy and blunt instrument just like the man himself. Northcliffe’s generosity had been far more thoughtful, more personal. When, for instance, Sunny told Mary Howarth – the Daily Mirror’s first editor – that her all-female newspaper was a total failure, Alfred had opened a cabinet in Room One at Carmelite House and selected the exact brand of cigarette she preferred to soothe her. He always kept them there, just for her. Harold, on the other hand, had once sent a solid gold and gemencrusted cigarette case to one of his sisters, who didn’t even smoke. A niece he’d upset with his whining, boorish talk at a dinner party was sent a diamond Cartier brooch as an apology that was so big she ca
lled it ‘The Bomb’. ‘Among his mistresses I can recall a secretary who used to clatter away at her typewriter wearing a ring containing a diamond the size of a pigeon’s egg,’ wrote his nephew Cecil King. ‘Evidently she became a nuisance, and Geoffrey Harmsworth [a cousin] told me Rothermere offered him ten thousand a year to marry her. Then there was another lady by whom he had a daughter. But most of his affairs were one-night stands with girls who were astonished to receive mink coats or diamond brooches for their services.’3
It seems Viscount Rothermere viewed politicians in the same crass way. They were there to do favours for and to receive favours from – often jobs and honours for friends and family. In the early 1920s, Bunny is said to have demanded an earldom for himself and a Cabinet post for his son Esmond in return for supporting the Conservatives in his papers, but Tory leader Bonar Law declined (his Liberal predecessor Lloyd George, who sprayed honours around like a farmer spreading fertilizer, would probably have thought it a fair exchange).
Rothermere spent four months every year down at La Dragonnière, a villa he’d built among the olive groves and pine trees overlooking Monte Carlo that Northcliffe called ‘a fairy-like little palace’. Bunny’s ballerinas would visit him there while Lady Rothermere, a glamorous woman who looked after her figure, was 500 miles north in Paris using her husband’s cash to play patron to handsome young soldiers turned poets or painters. ‘Bluebell’, as she liked to call herself, even financed T. S. Eliot’s literary review the Criterion, in which he first published The Waste Land.
In Monte Carlo, Bunny would gamble at casinos where he’d sit back eating slices of rich pâté while watching his secretary play roulette with fat slabs of his cash. Another casino regular of Rothermere’s acquaintance was Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe. Princess Stephanie was a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties who’d trained as a ballerina before marrying and divorcing a minor Austrian prince. She liked to smoke Havana cigars – which she’d light by striking a match on the sole of her shoe.4 One day at the gaming tables Rothermere moaned to her that there was no news for his newspapers, so she told him about the plight of Hungary, a country that had fought on the losing side during the war and had come off badly in the peace. Bunny invited the princess back to La Dragonnière for dinner – an offer that seems not to have had a sexual motive though the princess was probably willing – she had bedded countless other wealthy benefactors – and when she showed him where Hungary was on a little map in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Rothermere told her: ‘You know, my dear, I never realised until today that Budapest and Bucharest were not one and the same city.’5
In June 1927, Rothermere’s byline sat above ‘Hungary’s Place in the Sun – Safety for Central Europe’ – a typically dull bit of Bunny prose filed from Budapest, now he knew where it was. Harold’s theme was that the handful of harassed statesmen and officials who redrew the map of Europe after the Great War were focused on Germany, and mistakes were made on the fringes. ‘They have created dissatisfied racial minorities in half a dozen parts of Central Europe, any one of which may be the start of another conflagration,’ wrote Rothermere. ‘The hands that imposed the political conditions now existing there sowed the seeds of future war.’6
He did have a point. But Rothermere soon became bored with his Hungarian campaign, as surely must have many Daily Mail readers who actually made it to the end of his articles. It was massive news, however, in Hungary and to Hungarians no longer living in what was once Hungary – who now lived in states created by the swift whip of a bureaucrat’s pen after the war, Hungarians now part of Romania, Czecho-Slovakia and Yugoslavia. A viscount of the British Empire – great victors of the Great War – had suddenly taken up their cause. Squares and fountains were named after him, his name was carved on a hillside, and trees and rocks were dedicated to him. One and a quarter million Hungarians – a sixth of the population – even signed an address in gratitude.7 And when Esmond went on his father’s behalf to accept an honorary doctorate he was greeted like a visiting prince by cheering crowds. Some monarchists even thought Rothermere should be offered the Crown of St Stephen – Monty Python couldn’t write a more surreal comedy, except it wasn’t funny. Germans and Hungarians dispossessed by bureaucrats in Paris would, indeed, be one of the root causes of the Second World War.
Viscount Rothermere spent much of his time wandering Europe like a hyper-rich nomad with a select crop of associates travelling in a convoy of three cars, two for the passengers and one for the luggage. They’d stop at the roadside every so often, so that aides and editors could swap seats when Bunny got bored with their conversation. And if his hacks back at Mail HQ were having a bad day, it would get a whole lot worse when Rothermere picked up his pen to write a story or two for his newspapers. Finance and international politics were his favourite themes, and from the early 1920s, the itinerant viscount began promoting a nasty new kind of authoritarian rule called ‘Fascism’.
Benito Mussolini, its founder, had, it turned out, once even worked for St John Harmsworth.8 Before his accident, St John had been sent to France by Sunny to learn French so that he could be put to good use in the Parisian arm of the family firm, and he happened upon a restorative spring in Vergèze, near Montpellier in the south of France, with his tutor. It was a poor man’s spa run by a Dr Perrier, who also bottled and sold its ‘healing’ water. ‘There was a muddy pond with natural gas bubbling up, and a few bathing boxes round it, while quite near was a spring of beautifully clear water,’ wrote nephew Cecil King. ‘He conceived the idea – this was like Northcliffe – of pumping the natural gas into the spring water to make a sparkling table water.’9
Bonch never shared Sunny’s taste for the printed word nor Bunny’s thing for numbers, but he loved this water. So he sold his slice of the family firm and bought the good doctor’s business, to the horror of his brothers. St John had a vision. He could see the new green bottles he had in mind – shaped like the Indian clubs he used for exercise – on the table of every fine restaurant in Europe. Then his car crashed, and he supervised the construction of the bottling plant from his wheelchair. The business gave him something to focus on, other than walking again. And out there among the workers moving concrete in a barrow with the soft hands of a primary school teacher was a young labourer called Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini had been earning fifty US cents a day constructing a railway on the Swiss–Italian border, then followed the work west. He couldn’t go home – at the time, Benito was a Marxist agitator who’d fled Italy to dodge his National Service, a crime that could get a young man shot two decades later after iron-chinned Benito had passed through a spell as a journalist and newspaper founder, turning ever harder to the right until he became the world’s first Fascist dictator.
Or, to put it another way – as the Mail did in an editorial just a few months after Northcliffe’s death, when his Fascists became ‘The Saviours of Italy’: ‘The rescue of Italy from the Bolsheviks by the unselfish devotion of the Fascisti is not only a romance in itself; it is also one of the most important events of our time.’10
It was clear, then, from the start where the Mail ’s sympathies lay. Whereas Russia’s Communist leader Lenin, Rothermere himself wrote in September 1923, was a criminal who ‘took hold of a backward country and smashed it to pieces’, Mussolini’s Fascists were ‘manifestly inspired by more exalted motives . . . This young, vigorous, ardent Italian did more than save Italy. In my judgment he saved the entire Western world.’11 Bunny Harmsworth was driven by a cold fear of the Communists; the Reds after all wanted to tear down a system that had served arch-capitalists like him just fine. Though Bunny did accept in his article that the British were rather fond of a hard-won thing called ‘democracy’ – designed precisely to check the rise of these nasty dictators.
Five years and several signed articles in Mussolini’s favour later, Bunny met his hero in Rome and found him hard at work at an oak table in the corner of a grandiose office that had ‘the air of a sacristy’. Jus
t like Northcliffe, Il Duce also liked an oversized room to work in. Indeed, Northcliffe’s passing seemed to have left a void in Bunny Harmsworth’s life that could somehow only be filled by dangerously strong men like Mussolini. ‘I am proud of the fact that The Daily Mail was the first newspaper in England, and the first in the world outside Italy, to give the public a right estimate of the soundness and durability of his work,’ wrote Rothermere. ‘In articles published at various times I have expressed my own profound admiration for what Mussolini has accomplished . . . There can be no doubt as to the verdict of future generations on his achievement. He is the greatest figure of our age. Mussolini will probably dominate the history of the twentieth century as Napoleon dominated that of the early nineteenth.’12
Six hundred miles north of Rome in Munich, a weird Austrian corporal was also watching Mussolini with adoring eyes; Adolf Hitler was incandescent that the German peoples had lost the war and he too, just like Bunny Harmsworth, admired the way in which these Italian Fascists had taken absolute power. Soon enough, his Nazis were on their way to such power too. So Lord Rothermere dispatched his favourite correspondent – himself – to Germany in 1929 to find out more about this new force, his byline sitting over a piece headlined ‘Will the Republic Endure?’:
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