Fuming for England
Northcliffe. By Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth. (Cassell, 42s.)
ULCERS and alcoholism are said to be the occupational diseases of the journalist. Add megalomania, and you have a fair sample of the ills that Fleet Street is heir to. Without suffering from the first two of these, maladies
N Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, appears to have had more than his share of the third, though a reader of this nine-hundred- page biography must admit, in justice, that he had something to be megalomaniac about. Born in 1865, he founded the weekly Answers in 1888, by 1894 owned a rather mixed batch of eight periodicals with a combined circula- tion of 1,754,500, founded the Daily Mail in 1896 and the Daily Mirror in 1903, and acquired the major interest in The Times in 1908. By this time he also owned the Observer, the Weekly Dispatch and the Evening News. As a success story his career is unequalled.
Yet, even at this high point, there were signs that things would not necessarily continue to turn to gold. Northcliffe enjoyed national power, but power corrupts, and the kind of power wielded by a newspaper Proprietor corrupts peculiarly. The signs of it are all over his correspondence: the flattery from his staff, his alternate bullying and Patronage of those with whom he dealt, the restless eccentricities, the bitter hatreds growing gradually into obsessions. His lack of understanding of the political world was total, and it is pathetic to see him matched against Lloyd George during Versailles and after. In all the statements and the letters quoted in this biography there is hardly a memorable phrase about anything other than the news- paper business. Northcliffe was his own Daily Mail reader. That was how he got where he did, and it was also why he went no further. His role in English politics was that of impotent and obsessive fuming. Geoffrey Dawson, whom he described as 'just naturally pro-German', could have taught him a thing or two about the effective handling of power.
Looking back at Northcliffe's incessant political manoeuvring, it appears as the result of prejudices rather than policies. Friendship with America, 'the Empire' (we have heard that one since), Germanophobia, personal likes and dislikes (he seems to have thought first one thing and than the opposite about practically every leading politician of the age) —it was not with directives along those lines that he could make any impression on the logocracy of Printing House Square. Most of his troubles in dealing with The Times came from the fact that he simply did not know what to do with it once he had it. He could turn it into a modern and profitable concern, but it was too fine a weapon for him to handle. His attempts to do so caused exasperation among the mandarins, expressed in prim letters to common room and bishop's palace. Northcliffe was definitely 'not quite'. One feels for him.
Faced with something practical he was immensely competent, as he showed when heading the British war mission in the US in 1917. His papers were built up with an astonishing sureness of instinct which allowed him to divine the existence of the new, half- literate audience that was to provide the readership of the popular press. On that and the steady fall in the price of newsprint around the turn of the century the Harmsworth fortunes were built. For Northcliffe, however, money was not the main thing. He was in the newspaper business for its own sake, and any journalist is bound to feel satisfaction in reading of the way in which he consistently fought the management (in this case, his brother, Harold Harmsworth) and the adver- tising department. He insisted on good pay for his writers, supported his staff against the principalities and powers of British official life and bitterly regretted the ruin which advertisements brought to the make-up of pages. His papers were usually far more decent than is generally supposed, and, reading this book, one gets the impression that he has been unjustly blamed for what has happened since.
But some mistrust remains. 'The total impression received from an examination of the early issues of Answers is of an ingenious exploitation of the popular mind, which had been taught to read but not to think', write Messrs. Pound and Hannsworth. 'The periodicals . . . were a powerful and constant force in the growth of modern democracy.' Quite; and it may be asked whether this was entirely an admirable process, whether 'modern democracy' would not have done better without the modern press lord. North- cliffe was concerned to produce newspapers and, in so doing, made a fortune. Presently there would be proprietors in the field who were simply concerned to make a fortune and did not much care how they did it.
Kennedy Jones, Northcliffe's associate in the founding of the Daily Mail, explained how ' we found journalism a profession and left it a branch of commerce.' The fatal dropsy from which Fleet Street suffers today is part of the consequences of the Harmsworth revolution, and so is the fact that people no longer believe what they read in the papers.
Personally, Northcliffe emerges as nicer than might have been expected, though signs of lack of balance and growing megalomania were present long before the delirium which overtook him at the end. If he was frequently impossible he was also generous, and his curiously immature charm could and did inspire devotion. Before reading this bio- graphy, which is rather a collection of material towards a life of Northcliffe than a considered judgment of him, I had thought of him as in some sense a wicked man. Now I should say that he was a naïve one. Strange that the two things should often look so alike.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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