Among all the adoring words over the years, Rothermere had indeed spotted the major faultline running under Europe between the wars: Czechoslovakia, the country forged in the embers of the First World War, where at least half a million Hungarians now lived, as well as more than 3 million Germans. Bunny had no time for the Czechs and signed many articles about the country that could ‘be elbowed out of existence overnight’.39 According to him, Czechoslovakia was a fake state ‘contrived in the interest of the Czechs, a crafty race’.40 ‘Most blunders in life have to be paid for. The blunder of creating that synthetic and spurious state called Czecho-Slovakia may well cost Europe another war.’41
In February 1937, Rothermere wrote that ‘the immense development of armed strength in Nazi Germany now threatens [the Czechs] with retribution . . . The dragon’s teeth that the Czechs have sown are sprouting all around them in a crop of deadly dangers.’42 He was correct. In September 1938, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, sacrificed the German-speaking part of the country in the name of peace, signing an accord promising that their two countries would not go to war. Lord Rothermere sent a telegram to his friend: ‘My dear Führer, everyone in England is profoundly moved by the bloodless solution to the Czechoslovakian problem. People not so much concerned with territorial readjustment as with dread of another war with its accompanying bloodbath. Frederick the Great was a great popular figure, may not Adolf the Great become an equally popular figure. I salute your excellency’s star which rises higher and higher.’43
As war fast approached, even Princess Stephanie the spy urged Rothermere to restrain his effusive support for the Führer, telling him in February 1938, ‘You must be very careful in future. I do not see how it will be possible for you, under these new conditions, to continue to support Hitler in future and at the same time serve the interests of your own country.’44
German troops marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 and Europe was on the brink of war. Most British people who had held a degree of support for Hitler’s Germany in the mid-1930s had long since turned away.45 But not Rothermere. Records released in 2005 revealed that Lord Rothermere’s support for the Nazis was, even this late in the day, tantamount to treason when he wrote to congratulate Hitler, urging him to capitalize on his ‘triumph’ . . . with a march into Romania.46 The documents had been intercepted by British intelligence in the possession of Princess Stephanie’s Hungarian lawyer at Victoria station; she was suing Rothermere for breach of contract after he had cancelled her retainer. On the printed page, Rothermere really was like a bunny rabbit caught in Hitler’s hypnotic headlights and, with the war just four months away, there was simply no stopping his pen:
He is supremely intelligent. There are only two others I have known whom I could apply this remark – Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Lloyd George. If you ask Herr Hitler a question he makes an instant reply full of information and eminent good sense. There is no man living whose promise given in regard to something of real moment I would sooner take. He believes that Germany has a divine mission and that the German people are destined to save Europe from the designs of revolutionary Communism. He has a great sense of the sanctity of the family, to which Communism is antagonistic, and in Germany has stopped the publication of all indecent books, the production of suggestive plays and films, and has thoroughly cleaned up the moral life of the nation. Herr Hitler has a great liking of the English people. He regards the English and the Germans as being of one race. This liking he cherishes notwithstanding, as he says, that he has been sorely tried by malicious personal comments and cartoons in the English Press. I was talking with Herr Hitler some eighteen months ago when he said, ‘Certain English circles in Europe speak of me as an adventurer.’ My reply is: ‘Adventurers made the British Empire.’47
A month later, there was finally some good news for the Mail ’s sub-editors who had to write the headlines for Rothermere’s stories. ‘Further Postscript’, 17 June 1939: ‘Readers of The Daily Mail owe me a vote of thanks for relinquishing its control.’48 He’d handed over to his son Esmond and these were just the fading embers of his Mail regime.
Britain declared war on Germany after Hitler’s troops invaded Poland in September 1939. There was still a war to win, but the entire editorial floor of the Daily Mail must already have felt a little liberated. They didn’t have to publish any more of their proprietor’s bullshit.
6
Faster Than the Mail
Esmond Harmsworth had a ghost over either shoulder, constant reminders that there had once been two boys ahead of him in the line of succession for Sunny Harmsworth’s folded-paper throne. ‘In his room at Northcliffe House hung portraits of his two elder brothers killed in the First World War,’ said Arthur Wareham, one of the ten Daily Mail editors during Esmond’s reign.
It is said that these two sons were the favourites of the first Lord Rothermere and that Esmond, who was to inherit the newspaper empire, received little encouragement and sympathy from his father. Perhaps this helps to explain the mixture of diffidence and hardness in the character of the second Lord Rothermere. Wealthy, powerful, one of the handsomest men in the country with his slim height and noble head, he . . . failed to make the mark on the country’s affairs which might have been expected of him.1
For the Daily Mail to kick on towards a fresh future and renew itself as the leader in its field, Esmond had to somehow become an amalgamation of both Sunny and Bunny Harmsworth. But he found he was neither. He wasn’t a natural-born journalist and mischief-maker like Uncle Alfred nor a gifted money-man like his father. Esmond may have been the boy to inherit Northcliffe’s Room One – his big room for big ideas . . . but Esmond didn’t seem to have many ideas, big or otherwise. Years earlier, Esmond had told a friend he’d stop all the Mail ’s political campaigns, focus on the weather and make the paper ‘damn boring’2 . . . which is not precisely what happened; the paper still employed intelligent and actively engaged journalists who got on with the job day-to-day without ever even meeting the paper’s gangly and reticent proprietor. They could handle a news story as well as anybody. But he did change its tone, its voice. The single most crucial factor in Esmond’s era was the fact that he didn’t share his father and uncle’s lust for real political clout, nor did he have Sunny’s passion for hyperbole – Northcliffe’s noisy need to be provocative in print, to be noticed and to be one of the men truly in command of his country. Esmond had no desire at all to ‘make’ the news.
So, unlike his father and uncle, Esmond kept his thoughts and opinions in the drawing room where they belonged and out of the pages of his newspapers (there are only a handful of articles in the Daily Mail archive signed by this Harmsworth, yet he ruled for over three decades, and none of these are even remotely controversial). Esmond knew he was no journalist and, also crucially, he had seen at close quarters the rank stupidity of his father’s support for Hitler. All he had to do was glance out of his office window during the Blitz to see how bad Bunny’s judgement had truly been.
London was being reduced to rubble and Nazi jackboots seemed sure to follow – goose-stepping their way down Fleet Street through the ash of the second Great Fire of London towards St Paul’s. The Blitz began in September 1940 and would last until the spring of 1941. France had fallen that May, and thousands of boats had set sail to rescue almost a quarter of a million Allied troops who had retreated to the shores of Dunkirk. Britain was badly wounded, weak and in retreat. She stood tall, bloodied but alone. She could not now, surely, win this war.
Esmond’s father Lord Rothermere wasn’t even in town. He had accepted a request from his old friend and government minister Lord Beaverbrook (more of whom later) to head off on a mission to America seeking support for his country’s cause, but fell ill and was unsteady on his feet in New York and on the Canadian leg of his trip. So his doctors suggested he went down to Bermuda to rest; he took his granddaughter Esme – who was in New York – with him, telling her he needed to get into an area where st
erling was the currency. Bunny was sad and gentle, she said, a seventy-two-year-old man worried about events on the other side of the Atlantic. He was diagnosed with dropsy – swellings caused by excess water. His health worsened and he was taken to hospital; he liked to have Esme by his bedside because she reminded him of his mother.
Harold Sidney Harmsworth died in hospital on 26 November 1940 and, though he had insisted in print during his flirtation with Hitler and Mussolini that he shared their abstinence, his post-mortem revealed signs of cirrhosis of the liver – just like his father and grand-father. Viscount Rothermere’s body didn’t join them, alongside Northcliffe and their mother, in the family plot in north London, though. Bunny was buried on Bermuda.
There were many obituaries but perhaps the final words on Bunny Harmsworth are best left for his favourite German: Adolf Hitler had, several years earlier, said he thought Rothermere ‘one of the very greatest of all Englishmen. He is the only man who sees clearly the magnitude of the Bolshevist danger. His paper is doing an immense amount of good. I have the greatest admiration for him.’3
A little over a month after Rothermere’s death, in the early evening of 29 December 1940, around 120 tons of explosives and 22,000 incendiaries fell on London. At least 125 people died. In the lanes around Fleet Street, tins of printer’s ink detonated as firemen fought back the firestorm. The Daily Mail had been warning about war from the air since the birth of manned flight, and fire now licked at St Paul’s Cathedral, a church that had risen from the burnt-out shell of the first cathedral, which had been ravaged by the first Great Fire of London almost 300 years before. Herbert Mason, the Daily Mail ’s chief photographer, was on the paper’s roof with his camera, trying to find St Paul’s in his viewfinder through all that smoke. Journalists like Bert are paid to rush to war zones, but this time the frontline was home. ‘I focused at intervals as the great dome loomed up through the smoke,’ he said, but the ‘glare of many fires and sweeping clouds of smoke kept hiding the shape. Then a wind sprang up. Suddenly the shining cross, dome, and towers stood out like a symbol in the inferno. The scene was unbelievable. In that moment or two; I released my shutter.’4
Ads had stopped covering the front page of the Daily Mail the previous September,5 so Bert’s photograph was to dominate page one of his paper on New Year’s Eve 1940 and help define a terrible epoch as St Paul’s stood inside a hoop of smoke. ‘War’s Greatest Picture: St Paul’s Stands Unharmed in the Midst of the Burning City,’ read the caption. It was the 125th attack of the Blitz and things looked grim.
‘Hitler meant to start the second Great Fire of London as the prelude to an invasion,’ wrote Mailman Noel Monks, the paper’s Air Correspondent. ‘The New Year invasion was to have followed.’ However, the British weather came to the country’s aid that night, gathering wind and clouds that forced the 1,000-strong bomber squadron home. It wasn’t just London that the Nazis set ablaze. Strategic cities around Britain were pummelled and around 40,000 civilians lost their lives, half of them in the capital. But in the same New Year’s Eve edition of the Mail, beneath the picture of the smouldering City and resolute St Paul’s, there was a spark of hope that would catch afire soon enough – and raze the Nazi nightmare to the ground. ‘100 to 1 Backing for Roosevelt,’ the paper said. ‘President Roosevelt is “tremendously pleased” at the reaction to his speech in which he pledged more aid to Britain and declared that the Axis could not win the war.’ The ‘Arms Flow Has Begun’, added a Mailman in New York.
Northcliffe House, a palace to the printed word Bunny Harmsworth had built in the mid-1920s but only ever visited a handful of times, was damaged during the Blitz and Mailmen formed a bucket chain to empty water from the basement so the presses could roll. It became a barracks for journalists, with camp beds for editors and technical staff. The Mail ’s Manchester facilities became vital. And readers were encouraged to share their copy instead of putting it down for the dog. It was a slim read. Paper shortages shrank it to four pages and columns increased from seven to eight to pack in more information.
One toiler inside Northcliffe House at the time was Arthur Wareham, the sub-editor in charge of the front page, a Mail lifer who would rise to become editor. ‘We became masters in the art of compressing a mine of information into the tidy wartime newspapers,’ he would say after the war. ‘This lesson in the economy of words was invaluable and as a result there is no doubt the post-war daily journalism has been superior to the brand we inflicted on our readers before 1939.’6
When Germany’s ally Japan did Britain a huge favour in December 1941 by attacking the US Navy at anchor in Hawaii – finally pulling the Americans into the war at Britain’s side – Wareham hit back against the Japanese in the best way he could. ‘Pearl Harbor was the night that changed the course of the war,’ wrote Wareham. ‘Up to then I had been sending off a brief cable every day to a Japanese newspaper, the Hochi Hochi Shimbun, containing the highlights of the day’s war news. The message I sent on the night of Pearl Harbor was too rude, I am afraid, to be repeated here but it ended the contract in no uncertain way.’7
During the Second World War the Daily Mail was physically a thin paper and, as with the First World War, the women’s pages and the fluffy features were the first to be jettisoned to make room for news. Most of the Mail ’s editorial women had worked in these areas, but towards the end of the war a formidable female hack called Rhona Churchill was in the field, and filling the paper. Ms Churchill spoke German and slipped on an American uniform to travel with the US Army. And as the Americans pushed the Germans back to their own western border, she was proof that there was at least a sliver left of Sunny’s populist touch two decades after his death. ‘My instructions were to ignore the battle stories and roam at will concentrating on getting in among the German civilians and writing factual reports,’ said Ms Churchill.
I think the Daily Mail was the first Fleet Street newspaper to adopt this policy and it must have taken courage and foresight. I was lucky enough to have this very fertile field almost to myself until the war ended . . . It was mid-winter and I went out to Aachen [the first German town to fall to the Allies] each day in an open jeep in search of a story, and each day returned with a winner. Somewhat naturally, I became a bit unpopular . . . Our newspapers were reduced to four pages by newsprint rationing, and it was thought I was hogging more than my fair share of the newsprint available for war stories. But it wasn’t my fault. My job as roving reporter was to supply the Daily Mail with all the copy I thought they might want, and the system worked too well. Every day I found just what the Daily Mail wanted – a good human-interest story.8
As the Third Reich fell after five years of war, though, it was clear that the Daily Mail ’s voice had indeed changed – calmed, even – and the second Viscount Rothermere, Esmond Harmsworth, was being true to his word. Though the Daily Mail was an effective newsgathering machine during the Second World War, it did not launch the loud campaigns of its founding fathers nor try to apply a firm hand upon government policy. There was no call for heads to roll, no demand for a different kind of shell to be used at the front, and Esmond kept his name resolutely out of the paper. Paper supplies were short and maybe there was no space for noisy campaigns, but the tone continued when it ended. Esmond was never going to become a fresh mix of Sunny and Bunny Harmsworth, and the Mail was sailing along nicely as ‘just’ a newspaper that reported the news instead of trying to make it. But, unfortunately for a generation of Mailmen, just up the road on Fleet Street proper another man had Sunny’s editorial instincts and the brutal business acumen of Bunny in abundance: a Canadian called Max Aitken, owner of the rival Daily Express.
The Daily Express was founded in 1900 by a man who had long travelled in Sunny Harmsworth’s slipstream. Arthur Pearson had won a Tit-Bits competition during the peak of the battle between George Newnes’s magazine and Sunny Harmsworth’s Answers, and his prize was a job in the Tit-Bits office; but, like Alfred, he ached for more and soon created his own maga
zine to compete with both Tit-Bits and Answers. He joined the newspaper game four years after Harmsworth had founded the Mail but eventually sold up when he began to go blind and his listless Express was selling fewer than 500,000 copies a day. Aitken stepped in and bought it, in secret, bit by bit.
Max Aitken was a mischievous little imp of a charmer who’d been nicknamed ‘Moccasin Mouth’ by the other boys in his hometown in Canada. One even quipped that if God had made Max’s mouth any bigger, he’d have had no space left for his ears. Aitken’s father was a fierce Presbyterian minister with fire-and-brimstone eyes and long black sideburns who had sailed out to the New World from Scotland (just like Rupert Murdoch’s grandfather). Papa Aitken’s strict morality wasn’t for Max, though, and his boy became a millionaire by the age of twenty-five through ruthless cunning and the manipulation of other people’s money. When a dodgy Canadian cement monopoly exploded into a scandal in 1909, he sold up and sailed away to Britain, pockets bulging with loot.9
Sunny Harmsworth spotted the threat from the Express soon after Aitken began to exert control but, by then, Northcliffe’s mind was already too diminished to do anything effective about it. And Bunny, in a truly witless move, fell for Aitken’s radiant charm; he bought around half the Daily Express shortly after his brother’s death and began to, effectively, fuel a paper chasing the same ever-expanding middle market of readers as his Daily Mail. Max Aitken, like Sunny Harmsworth, had created his own school newspaper as a youth and he dipped in and out of journalism as a young man before turning his hand to making money on a grand scale. As Bunny drove down costs and opened up space to the adman in the Mail and the paper became gloomy and pessimistic and stuck in the past, Aitken exercised his ultimate control of the paper and began to invest in the Daily Express. He dictated its political line and filled it full of gossip and intrigue; it was the first to carry a crossword and he had been the first to shed the ugly classified ads from the front page, something Bunny couldn’t bear to clear away from his Daily Mail because of the cash they generated. Aitken, who became Lord Beaverbrook, blew life into the Express, giving it his energy and his ruthless vigour. The paper fizzed, it sparkled, it was optimistic, wicked and humorous, and it looked to the future – just like the first days of Sunny Harmsworth’s Daily Mail. Aitken’s Express was faster, cleaner, crisper and sharper than the Mail – an easier read for a newspaper market that was expanding rapidly. It was simply a better newspaper than Bunny & Son’s Daily Mail. And Beaverbrook, crucially – just like Northcliffe – was never in it for the cash. Canadian cement had already made him hugely wealthy. ‘I run my papers purely for propaganda,’ Aitken later told a Royal Commission.10
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