Banned, Burnt but Bought

Lord Northcliffe, the brash young newspaper baron, was perhaps the most hated man in England during the First World War. The upper class banned his papers from their clubs and ceremonially burnt them at the Stock Exchange, while pacifists, socialists and many others damned him as a warmonger.

Middle England, however, went on buying his newspapers, as it had been doing in increasing numbers for nearly twenty years. And this latest biography, marking a century since he died, says the readers—and Northcliffe—were often right.

Northcliffe’s problem on the Left was that his papers warned for years before the war about the danger the Kaiser’s belligerent Germany presented to Britain and Europe. When Germany did invade Belgium and France in the crisis of 1914 the “Northcliffe press” took the side, in a wavering country, of Britain entering the war to support its allies, France and Belgium, to whose neutrality it was committed.

As the war dragged lethally on, Northcliffe campaigned for total war, with conscription for the army instead of “moral force”, more and better munitions, especially high-explosive shells that could blast through the German defences, rather than shrapnel.

He opposed the Gallipoli venture, believing the war should be concentrated in France in order to drive the Germans out. His papers led the campaign calling for Winston Churchill, as Minister for the Navy, to stand down over the Gallipoli disaster, despite the two men being until then personal friends with an agreement to disagree on policy.

What upset the upper class especially were successful campaigns against Lord Kitchener, the War Minister, who had been promoted to the public as a saviour, and the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. Subsequent opinion mainly agrees that they were not up to the job, but at the time these campaigns could seem like sensationalism, undermining the war effort and helping the enemy to sell newspapers. 

One side effect of Gallipoli was that Northcliffe met and adopted as a protege the thirty-year-old Australian correspondent Keith Murdoch, who had stopped off at Gallipoli on his way to London and wrote a damning report on the war there. Murdoch’s permit at Gallipoli required his report to be private to the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, but he also gave a copy to Northcliffe, who passed it on to the British government and intensified his own campaign. Northcliffe’s coaching and encouragement greatly helped Murdoch develop his own newspaper group in Australia. (His son Rupert is ackowledged as a source for this book.)

Alfred Harmsworth, who became Lord Northcliffe in 1905, began publishing as a teenager from middle London, devising, publishing and profiting from trivia magazines. He built a stable of more ambitious magazines like Comic Cuts, and made enough money to buy cheaply and improve the troubled Evening News.

In 1896 he started the Daily Mail, which still thrives with its appeal to the middle England Northcliffe came from, with his great-nephew as chairman and its pages still annoying the same people as a hundred years ago. It was the birth of the modern daily newspaper, appealing to readers (and voters) well down the social scale.  

The Times, venerable and stately, but then also financially troubled, was an acquisition that brought him status and influence as well as moderate profits. The Daily Mirror was his pioneering pictorial tabloid, now under new owners a competitor to Murdoch’s son’s Sun.

“Wars are not won by milk and roses,” says Andrew Roberts. The fact that Northcliffe controlled some 40 per cent of the British press meant that the government could not escape the ceaseless demands for a more vigorous prosecution of almost every aspect of the war.

Other than as a vehicle for the proprietor’s belligerent views, and flamboyant by the standards of the day, his newspapers were good ones, accurate, responsible, professionally admired—and emulated. Apart from strong patriotism and empire boosting (not unusual in his day) the papers were politically independent. In keeping with the standards of middle England then, he kept them “clean”, upholding “family values”. Personally, though, he was a man for discreet mistresses.

Harmsworth was the eldest of eleven children. His mother was his confidante, adviser and best friend until he died. His brother Harold, who became Viscount Rothermere, was also at his side, as the financial brain that matched Alfred’s ebullient publishing genius.

Northcliffe’s personal and public judgment declined during the second half of the war and he was prone to illness. Some historians have seen this as the onset of megalomania but Andrew Roberts suggests there were other explanations.

Lord Northcliffe died on August 22, 1922, of endocarditis, a rare infection of the heart probably caught on a world cruise he had taken to repair his health. He was fifty-seven. His last writing was a letter to his mother.

As part of his tour, he had stopped off in Australia, liked it and advised Murdoch, the new editor of Melbourne’s Herald. The year before he had recruited Nellie Melba to sing in the world’s first radio concert, broadcast from the Marconi station in Essex.

Roberts shows Northcliffe to have had the enormous strengths, strong feelings and charm of a genius, but also the unattractive egotism and obsessions. He could also be very generous and while he made a lot of money, he sought it mainly for the power it gave him to express his ideas.

The book conveys Edwardian England and the anguished, argumentative but honourable and profoundly patriotic wartime years that followed, with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its young men.

Roberts concludes: “Like many other great men he had serious flaws, some forgivable, some not. But his achievements are unarguable: He was the greatest newspaper man in British history, and he made a major contribution to victory in the First World War.”

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe
by Andrew Roberts
Simon & Schuster, 2022, 547 pages, $48.75

Robert Murray is a journalist and author and a frequent contributor to Quadrant on history