Mail Men Page 14
If you haven’t heard of them you’re either deaf or a High Court judge . . . Depending on your age, or whether you suffer from hardening of the opinions, they are raves or knaves, living idols or false gods . . . They are shatteringly honest, incredibly modest, immediately friendly, with apparently no thought for the importance of the person they are speaking to . . . Above all, they are refreshing: they are fun; they are kind. I feel better about life for having been in their company.25
Beatle John Lennon, incidentally, was a Mail reader in the 1960s. A fact that perhaps belies his middle-class roots growing up in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton – with his aunt Mimi, not with the mother and father who deserted him – for the man who later wrote ‘Working Class Hero’. Lennon picked up the Mail in the first week of 1967 and used it to write the song ‘A Day In The Life’ that closed the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album: ‘I read the news today, oh boy . . .’ In its edition of 7 January 1967,26 the Mail published a story about the death of Tara Browne – Lennon’s friend and an heir to the Guinness black beer empire – who had been driving with a girlfriend through the sedate midnight streets of Kensington at 106 m.p.h. not too far from what would later become the Mail ’s current headquarters and smashed into a parked lorry: ‘He blew his mind out in a car, he didn’t notice that the lights had changed . . .’ Another story in the Mail that day was a fairly dull little yarn headlined ‘Holes in the Road’ – ‘There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey.’27 Now, whichever Mailman penned this classic bit of throw-away newspaper filler couldn’t have had a clue that he was helping inspire one of popular music’s all-time classic songs: ‘I read the news today, oh boy. Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, and though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all, now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall . . .’
The ‘cultural revolution’ that was happening, or appeared to be happening, led by Lennon’s Beatles in the late 1960s, was handled in a fairly mild and non-reactionary manner by many comment writers in the paper. A few months before John Lennon curled up with his Daily Mail on his little sofa in his huge mansion to compose ‘A Day In The Life’, Mailman Hugh McLeave, the paper’s science correspondent, took a cool and detached look at the dropping of acid. ‘LSD has a notorious reputation among the living-for-kicks addicts. But clinically it has a deep significance in the concept of mental chemistry.’
How would you react if, lying wide awake, you had a mental playback of the Crucifixion in all its detail? Or you could hold an imaginary dialogue with Plato in Ancient Greece? Or relive the time you spent in the womb and the process of your own birth? . . . This compound, synthesised before the war, is helping the doctors to peel off the layers of the mind in the way that a housewife peels an onion . . . LSD has convinced many scientists that schizophrenia and similar illness has a chemical cause; if they can find what has gone awry in mental chemistry they might cure these diseases. So it may be there is a seventh or an eighth veil of consciousness which these drugs can strip away – to make the breakthrough which would revolutionise mental health.28
When Mick Jagger received three months in jail for possession of amphetamines and Keith Richards got a year for allowing cannabis to be smoked at a party at his home (both sentences were soon quashed on appeal) at the start of the so-called ‘summer of love’ in 1967, the paper opined, under the headline ‘Pushers, pills and penalties’ on the Comment page: ‘The real point about the trial of the two Rolling Stones is that drug-taking has now been shown up for what it is – a national problem in urgent need of attention.’
Opinion is sharply divided on whether the sentences will have the intended effect. Some say it will make martyrs of the two youngsters. Others retort that a lesson was needed to deter those who are hovering on the brink of drug-taking . . . At present there is all too little agreement on the basic facts. For instance, which drugs have what effect?29
Vincent Mulchrone’s effervescent opening words, Hugh McLeave’s detached scientific writings and the mild worries about cannabis use among the young by the paper’s leader writers were not enough to save the Daily Mail, though. She was, at heart, a dull old dear. Esmond had under-funded and under-promoted the paper and industrial strife had blighted the parent company’s profitability – in common with the rest of Fleet Street – for years as the men who actually made the physical thing often sought unreasonable conditions for themselves and tried to resist irresistible technological change. The print unions ruled Fleet Street – possibly more so than the proprietors – through what were called ‘old Spanish practices’: absurd working rights in which cash payments could be demanded for the remaking of a page on deadline or for covering for mysteriously absent colleagues – machine-room minders would even enter false names on worksheets to gain a payment. Some printers, consequently, were paid far more than the journalists; it was very much a closed shop (employees had to become members of the relevant union) and the chances of a skilled craftsman getting a post on Fleet Street were pretty slim – jobs were passed down from father to son. Strikes were endemic. In April 1955, for instance, national newspapers disappeared off the streets for almost a month after a pay dispute between 700 members of the electricians’ and engineers’ unions and the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association – which Lord Rothermere had chaired since the thirties. It cost the industry £3 million (something like £70 million today). Big news events the Fleet Street papers missed included Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill’s resignation, the Budget and the announcement of a general election. As Rupert Murdoch put it, years later, the print unions ‘had a noose round the neck of the industry, and they pulled it very tight’.30
So the Daily Mail was struggling to make a decent profit. And then, of course, there was the Daily Express. The second Lord Rothermere was as completely and utterly blindsided by Lord Beaverbrook as his father had been before him. Even his mother, ‘Bluebell’, had warned Esmond of the danger: ‘I am convinced that Beaverbrook has only one dominant aim in life, perhaps a quite natural one, which is to place his paper ahead of yours! Therefore I do most emphatically warn you against this man and ask you in full seriousness to weigh up the reasons which prompt him now and will in the future to make all kinds of overtures to you, believe me none will be prompted by the desire to really help you – of this I am certain.’31
Esmond did not heed his mother’s warning and personally fell for Max Aitken’s big smile and seductive charm. Years later in 1962, Esmond, for instance, even hosted a lavish party to mark the eighty-third birthday of his ‘friend’ Max. Most of the other newspaper proprietors looked on as Beaverbrook sat on Rothermere’s plush settee in the first-floor drawing room of his Warwick House home with Sir Winston Churchill on one side and Harold Macmillan on the other. The old man was presented with a birthday cake that had a music box and a skating rink on top of the icing and his birthday present was a huge solid silver tea tray engraved with the signatures of every guest . . . a platter more than big enough for Esmond’s head. Beaverbrook later wrote Rothermere a note thanking him for a bash ‘exceeding in glory all my many birthdays’.32
As he ate his slice of cake on the comfortable sofa under a huge chandelier alongside two former Prime Ministers, Beaverbrook may have reflected how, decades earlier, he had declared that the two newspaper groups were ‘locked in a death grapple’. And this fight to the death must have seemed almost done in 1962 to those ex-PMs and London’s other newspaper proprietors. The vivacious Express was at the peak of its powers. It was selling almost 4.5 million copies a day, an astonishing figure and nearly twice what the Daily Mail has ever achieved in its entire existence. Arguably, all of those readers should – and could – have been Daily Mail readers had it remained anything like the paper its founding father had originally intended (though, to be fair, newspaper readership was vast in this era, with many households taking more than one paper every day – ev
en the limp Daily Mail was selling around 2.5 million, while cousin Cecil King’s Daily Mirror was well on its way towards its peak of over 5 million).
Around the same time as the Beaverbrook bash, the Mail ’s gossip columnist and film critic Quentin Crewe asked Rothermere why the Daily Mail was ‘so gloomy’. Esmond replied: ‘My father was a gloomy man, I think that’s the reason.’33 Bunny Harmsworth might have been dead over twenty years by then but he still cast a long dark shadow over the Daily Mail.
Neither of the first two Rothermeres seemed capable of grasping it, but Sunny Harmsworth’s formula was, fundamentally, very simple: give the target audience – the middle classes of whichever era – exactly what they wanted. The Daily Mail could have trounced the Daily Express if either Rothermere had managed to keep things fresh by finding – and sticking with – the right editor while allowing him the freedom to edit without interference. Esmond actually made a botched attempt to sign an editorial wunderkind called Arthur Christiansen from the Sunday Express in 1930 to edit his Sunday Dispatch, but Beaverbrook persuaded the twenty-six-year-old hack from Merseyside to stay inside his firm and soon appointed him editor of the Daily Express, which Christiansen led, for two decades, through its meteoric circulation rise. Beaverbrook also later poached Ted Pickering, who followed Christiansen as editor in the 1950s, from the Mail.
The Daily Mail entirely lost its way under Bunny & Son – Esmond would appoint an editor to take it upmarket and when that didn’t work, he’d fire the man and then head half-heartedly the other way. Yet up the road Beaverbrook had simply followed a refreshed version of Sunny Harmsworth’s original formula and reaped the rewards of a massive circulation (it sold fewer than 500,000 copies a day when he bought the Daily Express five decades before and progressively found 4 million more people happy to buy it every day).
Beaverbrook had once declared: ‘I shall go back to New Brunswick and retire a failure if I don’t succeed in killing the Daily Mail.’ The Mail wasn’t quite dead yet, but it was seriously ill when Beaverbrook died just two years after his birthday bash at Esmond’s plush London home. Max ‘Moccasin Mouth’ Aitken was sent back to Canada in a box and his ashes were interred underneath a head-and-shoulders bust in the town square in Newcastle, New Brunswick, beside the spot where he sold newspapers as a young boy; many people thought the Daily Mail ’s obituary was all but set in type.
It looked as though the newspaper that would speak to and for tomorrow’s middle England was the Daily Express, not the Daily Mail . . . unless the next Viscount Rothermere, Esmond’s son Vere, could somehow become an amalgamation of grandfather Bunny and great-uncle Sunny Harmsworth.
PART III
THE MAIL PILL
7
Win a Pub
There was a new boy in Postal Bargains.
He was very tall, frightfully posh and awfully handsome – a young chap who looked like an Italian gigolo from one of the movies of this 1950s era, turning the heads of the female staff in the little-loved annexe of the advertising department of Associated Newspapers with his high cheekbones, cleft chin and fine mane of curly hair. The men noticed him too as they prepared special offers and prizes to try and boost circulation, for a different reason: he was the son of the boss, the heir to the Harmsworth folded-paper throne – the second Lord Rothermere’s only son: Vere Harold Esmond Harmsworth. Or ‘mere Vere’, as his caustic chums at Eton had called him.
Few people thought Vere was very bright. Some thought he was plain lazy. When he was evacuated to the US as a teenager during the Blitz for a brief stint at Kent School in Connecticut, for instance, a business associate of his father’s remarked that he was ‘supremely good’ at three things; sitting, eating and sleeping. He loved life in the US though, especially his school. ‘I got back to Eton in 1941 and I did very well for the first year and then this awful negative atmosphere of British education seeped into one. One became sort of brain dead.’1
Vere was a rare thing among old Etonians: he failed to gain a commission as an officer, serving his entire four-year National Service stint in the ranks. Yet it proved to be a good thing and would serve him well in the future. He liked these working-class lads from tough cities like Newcastle, Liverpool and Glasgow. And they liked him. ‘You see,’ he said later in an oblique interview with the Observer, ‘when you’re standing above a tree, you can only see the branches and the leaves but when you’re underneath the tree, and you look up, you can see all the things inside the tree – and that’s a very valuable experience.’2
Lord Rothermere, Vere’s father, hadn’t planned a newspaper future for his son. ‘I remember when I was a small boy, riding,’ Vere told the BBC. ‘My father had a most beautiful house in Kent and used to take me riding in the mornings. I remember him telling me that my future would be as an officer in the Blues or the Life Guards and what a wonderful life it was, hunting and shooting and fishing and all this sort of thing. And I listened to this with a sinking heart and utter horror at the dreadful prospect that lay before me.’3
It was abundantly clear to anyone who understood Fleet Street that Esmond Harmsworth did not have ink in his veins . . . but Vere did; he adored the family newspapers and joined the family business as fast as he could, first at a paper mill in Canada for a couple of years before arriving on Fleet Street in Postal Bargains. Male staff sniped. Female staff adjusted their frocks and hair. Vere was hot, posh and . . . loaded. His father did his best, however, to keep him away from the actual editorial side of the firm, sending him off to the West Country for a stint as a sales rep, where he’d talk to newsagents and suppliers instead of the drunkenly debauched hacks of Fleet Street.
Then he moved to the senior management of the Daily Sketch, a paper Bunny had bought when he and Beaverbrook had carved up another minor media empire in the early 1920s and shared the spoils. Harold sold it on but Esmond later bought it back to compete – ineffectively, as it turned out – with cousin Cecil King’s Daily Mirror. Vere loved the little Sketch though. It was a much leaner, swifter operation than the Mail.
One day in the mid-1950s Vere came up with an idea for a competition – perhaps inspired by the ultimate dream of those working-class army pals – in which one lucky reader would ‘Win a Pub’. Newspaper promotions need words, they need to become a fake story, and it often falls to the features department to turn these sugary freaks into actual stories for people to read in their paper as if somebody hadn’t paid for the space. The Daily Sketch’s features editor at the time was David English – an editorial whirlwind in his mid-twenties. The pair pulled on their jackets and went off to do some research in various pubs, and became firm friends. A dozen or so years later, they’d be two sides of a freshly minted Daily Mail coin: the perfect editor on one side, the perfect proprietor on the other.
David English adored his grandpa Alf.
It was Alf who stirred in him a love for newspapers, a passion that would elevate him to the side of the most infamous of Britain’s Tory Prime Ministers even though Alfred Brazenor was a staunch Socialist and union leader who drove a tram.
David English’s father died in 1930 when his boy was only three months old and Alf, for his part, had lost his only son in the final weeks of the First World War. So Alf lavished his only grandchild with love and attention. White-haired, fun-loving Alf and boisterous, friendly David would play cricket out on the lawn with the children of guests at the family-run hotel in Bournemouth. Those were idyllic days, until war came again in 1939 and invasion seemed imminent; tank traps and land mines were sunk in the sand, great spools of barbed wire rolled out along the beach and the pier walkways were blown up so the Germans couldn’t land their boats. A hotel was no longer such a good trade, so the family let the business go and moved to a little house.
Everything was scarce in town, including footballs. So Alf picked up his needle and thread, grabbed a few strips of old leather and sewed them up – magically – into footballs, and became a hero to all the boys of Bournemouth. Alf had been a Lo
ndon saddle-maker – from a long line of saddle-makers – until the motor car killed forever man’s need for the horse.
Grandpa Alf was also, crucially, a newspaper reader who took three from the newsagent every day: the Daily Herald, the News Chronicle and the Daily Mail – one Socialist, one Liberal and one Tory. ‘I was fascinated by the look of them,’ English told Harmsworth biographer S. J. Taylor. ‘When the war came, you read them avidly, the maps and vivid battle accounts. It was fascinating for me to see three papers and how they dealt with different stories.’4 English kept bundles of them under his bed, and would revisit them – long after their news had gone stale.
‘He became obsessed with newspapers,’ Tony Burton, a friend from English’s first days in Fleet Street, told the author. ‘And he loved and admired his grandfather. It was his grandfather who led him to the idea of everything, of laying out a paper – of reporting. The whole kit and kaboodle.’5
English’s mother, Kitty, had worked as a secretary on Fleet Street and told stories about the reporters she’d encountered there, and the family would watch movies about hacks in trilby hats. An older boy left school for a job on a local paper and English ‘sort of hero-worshipped him a bit’, and wanted to follow him out of school and on to Fleet Street.
My mother was absolutely furious. She wanted me to go to university. She changed all her stories about Fleet Street and then it was all, you know, doom and gloom and Fleet Street was nothing but full of drunks and ne’er do wells and people in deep debt. But I was encouraged by my grandfather, who felt that I should write and do what I wanted to do. My grandfather was very courteous, he would never fight with my mother, he would be magisterial with his lovely mane of white hair. He would say, ‘I think the boy should do what he wants. Let the boy do what he wants.’6