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  The printed word first came to the City in 1500 along with the wonderfully named Wynkyn de Worde – an apprentice to William Caxton – to print the materials for the legal trade that had already settled in the area. Britain’s first newspaper, a single sheet of paper called the Daily Courant, began publication on Fleet Street two centuries later, and dozens of other newspapers soon followed.

  As Sunny covered the four miles or so from Hampstead in the early 1880s, London was expanding all around him; omnibuses pulled commuters towards town while rickety carts pulled labourers and building materials in the opposite direction, shaking dust and horsehair plaster into the air as they went, to erect the houses that were spreading out from the centre like a bruise. They were building the suburbs, places where people could live while still working in town. Six million new houses were built in London during Queen Victoria’s reign alone. The people moving into these houses were his readers, his future.

  Sunny stepped into the City as a boy with no need for a razor arriving in a land of beards, his Napoleonic blond forelock falling across his forehead as he peered through the window of a restaurant called Spiers and Pond at Ludgate Circus. He knew this was where many newspaper editors had their lunch and he surveyed the kings of Fleet Street for the first time: they were mostly grey and heavy old men, just like their newspapers.

  It took a few years for Sunny Harmsworth to make any kind of mark, however; though he was an enthusiastic boy bristling with self-confidence, his writing had little style and no soul. It was mostly harmless pap, such as a piece about a famous ventriloquist or the origin of the bicycle. He would wander around the British Museum in a black cape and glossy silk hat, and read up on photography and write an article on ‘how to take a photograph’; he would watch people enjoying the snow on Hampstead Heath and produce a story about ‘forgotten frosts’. Things that interested him, he figured, would interest an editor and the readers. He’d admit later that his own material was ‘poor stuff’.5

  It didn’t matter. Sunny Harmsworth’s timing, like his dress sense, was impeccable. Seismic events from the previous decade had generated a human wave that he’d ride ever higher, a newly literate middle class. Yet he wasn’t the first to catch this wave. The original pioneer of the popular press didn’t start in London and he wasn’t even a journalist. George Newnes was the owner of a vegetarian restaurant in provincial Manchester who had, quite by accident, discovered a new market. Newnes liked to collect bits and pieces of information in a scrapbook for his own amusement – his tit-bits – that he’d often read out to his wife in the evening. Mrs Newnes, presumably to deflect her beloved’s tedious babbling, suggested he compile and publish them for the pleasure of others. So he did, founding a weekly magazine in 1881 called ‘Tit-Bits from all the interesting Books, Periodicals, and Newspapers of the World’, or Tit-Bits for short.

  It was a soaraway success. Tit-Bits was bought by this new class of reader desperate for something – anything – interesting to read. Tit-Bits’ readers had been created by the ‘Forster Act’ of 1870, a law that demanded the basic compulsory education of the masses from the ages of five to thirteen. Prior to the Act, only about one in seven people could read and write, but by the 1880s there were thousands of new young readers. Yet few were inclined to pick up the dense, artless, dead, self-important prose on offer in most of the newspapers and periodicals of the day.

  Newnes found himself running his booming publication from a new London headquarters in 1885 when Sunny Harmsworth and a cycling pal named Max Pemberton walked through his door. The pair approached an ‘amiable-looking gentleman’6 with a beard like a badger’s pelt as he ate his lunch at a table strewn with proofs of his magazine. It was Newnes, who asked the pair what they wanted. Pemberton was stumped for a second, then looked around at ‘the crazy nature of the building’ in which they stood and offered to write a piece on ‘jerry builders’. Newnes commissioned the story and sent them on their way, and Pemberton duly wrote up a story about shoddily constructed ‘jerry-built’ buildings and received a healthy fee.

  From that day on, Sunny Harmsworth was in the Tit-Bits office almost daily and soon sold Newnes a story about ‘Some Curious Butterflies’, then others, such as a visit to newspaper wholesaler W. H. Smith, one with a nod to his father’s legal profession called ‘Q. C.s and How They Are Made’ and another one about ‘Organ Grinders and Their Earnings’.

  Sunny soon realized there was a bigger opportunity here than just selling stories to Newnes. He pushed open his flatmate’s bedroom door one morning, wrote Pemberton,7 and told him how provincial hobbyist Newnes had discovered ‘a bigger thing than he imagines. He is only at the very beginning of a development which is going to change the whole face of journalism.’

  Harmsworth decided to create his own magazine and, around this time, the future Press Lord began to carry a brown folder around with him that had the words ‘SCHEMO MAGNIFICO’ scrawled on a sticker pasted to the front. It was his master plan for the future. He would consult it and scribble down a fresh idea before flipping it closed. The battered old folder would be the fount of all his future publications and he kept it locked in an office safe almost to the day he died, four decades later. Nobody else ever saw inside.

  His mind skipped back to his school magazine’s questions and answers section. It was a staple of many periodicals – even Tit-Bits had one – but there was something more to this common format that nobody else had spotted. It could be a useful device, an excuse, really, to publish interesting little yarns and factoids for no other reason than that they were interesting little yarns and factoids. They were easy on the eye and gentle on the brain.

  It took a couple of years and minor editorships of a small publication called Youth and a bicycle magazine in Coventry before somebody was found to back Harmsworth with the cash to launch his own magazine.

  He was a big-hearted Irishman named William Dargaville Carr, who, it turned out, wasn’t especially wealthy and knew absolutely nothing about publishing. He’d married the best friend of Sunny’s mother back in Dublin and was using his wife’s dowry to try to carve out a future in London. They moved into lodgings and Carr soon annoyed Sunny by hiring the landlady’s son as the company’s office boy; Harmsworth had wanted the job for one of his brothers. Carr & Co. began in a shabby little office around the corner from Fleet Street at 26 Paternoster Square, editorial divided from the trade counter by a screen knocked up by a carpenter – who told Carr he had sixteen children, and some were ill. Carr organised a whip round and handed him four shillings . . . money was never going to be under much control in Carr’s hands. Harmsworth continued freelancing but Carr didn’t do much of anything at all, and hated being cooped up in an office. The new office boy noted that the pair seemed to spend the whole day chatting. The boy’s toughest job was waking his young boss Sunny Harmsworth every morning: ‘he never liked getting up’.

  By then Sunny’s plan had grown flesh and a face inside his Schemo Magnifico. He’d taken a copy of Tit-Bits and doodled out a similar title block, a thin rectangular box – his version slashed from the bottom left corner up to the top right corner like a flag.

  ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

  Underneath, a black finger on either side pointed to

  ON EVERY SUBJECT UNDER THE SUN

  It was a bold statement – Sunny liked bold statements – and it looked fresh and different, if a little amateurish. It was the work of an exuberant youth, the very demographic he hoped to reach. Three words would sit left to right at the top above the masthead: ‘INTERESTING. EXTRAORDINARY. AMUSING.’

  A friend of Sunny’s father, a Daily Telegraph leader writer named Edward Markwick, joined the venture, and soon found more cash in the pockets of Captain Alexander Spink Beaumont, a retired soldier Sunny nicknamed ‘the Admiral’, who some thought8 may have had an unrequited homosexual motive in getting behind the pretty young journalist. But Sunny wasn’t at all interested in men – he was smitten by a friend’s sister, a petite brown
-eyed girl called Mary Milner, whose family were a peg or two up from the Harmsworths thanks to her father’s success in the sugar trade from the West Indies. Molly, as she was known, was a very pretty and graceful, vivacious girl who first spotted the future Press Lord at a children’s party where, she recalled eighty years later, her mother had admonished her by saying, ‘Now, Molly, don’t dance all the time with the best-looking boy in the room.’ Sunny began to spend more time at the Milners’ place than he did at home, and the young couple married the same year he founded Answers, the groom leading his new bride across the dance floor with a dummy copy of his embryonic magazine hanging out of his jacket pocket.9 Molly’s new husband might have been broke at the time but that magazine would lead her to a lifestyle worthy of an empress.

  The first Answers to Correspondents on Every Subject under the Sun was printed on sixteen pages of cream-coloured, almost A4-sized paper and dated 16 June 1888,10 but was actually marked as issue No.3. It was a minor sleight of hand, for how could there have been any letters to answer if it had yet to have any readers? The first ever answer was about ‘The Queen’s Private Letters’ – a correspondent wanted to know if a letter he owned was from Queen Victoria. Probably, was the reply; the Queen wrote in an ‘Italian hand’ which was ‘very thin, very slanting’, and signed her letters ‘Victoria R’ or ‘to very intimate friends simply V. or V. R.’

  Another correspondent wrote about a German stealing his seat on a train. ‘I felt very much inclined to take the gentleman by the neck and put him out of the carriage,’ wrote ‘Nimrod’, ‘but was advised by the others to let him alone.’ A quarter-century before the Great War, Sunny was already keen to see Germans booted off trains, a subject that would perennially interest him. Page five had thousands of commuters rattling across London on trains and buses with one hand covering an eye while they read ever-shrinking letters, as Sunny had published an illustration of an opticians’ eye test. Answers to Correspondents was information as entertainment, and it was fun.

  Answers was sold by street hawkers leaping aboard these horse-drawn buses in and around Fleet Street and it was bought by many of the area’s countless journalists – and one, Frank Boyd, wasn’t impressed. It was, he recalled later,‘a mean, wretched-looking little production with “amateur” written all over it . . . It looked as if it had not a million to one chance of succeeding.’11

  As the weeks passed, themes began to solidify inside Answers: it published anything about Queen Victoria, Charles Dickens and what people earned, from street hawkers to Fleet Street editors. And all any reader needed to do if they wanted to see their name in print was ask a question about hats – Harmsworth was hooked on hats. Sunny had been born with an oversized head and was convinced that it contained a bigger than average brain and therefore superior intelligence. For one story, a couple of hatters were consulted who explained how men who worked with horses – coachmen, jockeys, livery servants and the like – had smaller heads. The skulls of several clever chaps at London University were measured by these hatters and, reported Sunny’s magazine: ‘The general conclusion to be drawn from the hatters’ figures is therefore favourable to the opinion that large head-dress and mental capacity go together.’

  Grim little tales of death and torture got grimmer and darker, perhaps to compete with the ‘penny dreadful’ publications that Sunny claimed to abhor. Penny dreadfuls were simply written, cheaply printed tales aimed at adolescent boys that cost a penny and were dreadful, hence the name. Over several weeks, wide-eyed youths would be gripped by stories about criminals and vampires, made-up tales about the real-life highwayman Dick Turpin, Sweeney Todd ‘the demon barber of Fleet Street’, and suchlike.

  Or maybe Sunny’s macabre streak was simply because the Answers office in Paternoster Square was just a head’s roll from Newgate prison, where criminals had not so long ago been hung out in the street. In issue number five, an unnamed reporter – almost certainly Sunny himself – took a two-minute walk from the office to the ‘solemn and threatening old building’ on the corner of Old Bailey and Newgate Street. The reporter stepped through the spiked gate and was shown into a room filled with the casts of murderers’ heads taken after execution, finding ‘very ordinary-looking people, with nothing particularly repulsive in their features’.

  A turnkey who was present pointed out to me their throats, which were all marked with deep indentations from the rope which had cut short their career. It is a popular delusion, he explained, to suppose that the fall from the scaffold breaks the neck. In every case death is the result of strangulation.12

  Another early obsession was insanity, and one illustration for ‘How Madmen Write’ on the front of issue eight looked like a seismometer scratching out news of an earthquake. It was as if Sunny somehow foresaw his own fate. Harmsworth himself would die insane on a London rooftop thirty-four years later.

  Answers sold an average of 8,000 copies a week in its first few months, which wasn’t a great figure, and Sunny blamed a persistent heavy fog and the fear of serial killer Jack the Ripper keeping people indoors. However, he remembered these days as the happiest of his life. Proofs would be draped over chairs in the brand-new terraced house that he and his wife Mary rented in Pandora Road, West Hampstead, as his brothers and sisters sprawled around the floor finding stories or answering the handful of questions from readers who actually wrote in. Sunny soon realized that the vast majority had no questions in need of an answer but just wanted to read the thing on the bus. So stories were commissioned from writers and questions created to fit. His friend Max Pemberton became ‘Mr Answers’, heading off on adventures up a steeple or under the ocean in a diver’s bell.

  ‘Somehow I knew from the first just what people wanted to read,’ Sunny said in an interview a few years later.13

  Circulation soon settled at around 30,000, but Answers wasn’t turning a profit and there was a real danger that it would follow most of the 200 other publications launched in 1888 into the abyss. Sunny Harmsworth was worried and took to stomping around proclaiming, ‘I cannot make it pay!’14 He was a young man with entrepreneurial flair who was great at setting things in motion, but he was no accountant. He needed the help of a man with a more stolid and calculating mind who did actually care about the price of ink and paper and, luckily for Alfred, he found one close to home.

  One evening his younger brother Harold popped in to help his brother and, unable to get the Answers books to balance, Harold, family folklore has it, took a look at the numbers and openly wept at the damage that useless co-owner Dargaville Carr had inflicted upon those poor defenceless numbers.15 Sunny realized he had found exactly the man he needed.

  Harold Sidney Harmsworth was very different to his elder brother. For a start, while Alfred could barely count his fingers and toes without falling over, Harold was awfully good at sums. Harold adored neat little rows of figures. He trusted numbers far more than he ever trusted people. The contrasting natures of the two brothers was perhaps best summed up by the pet names their father had chosen for his two eldest boys: while Alfred was ‘Sunny’, the firstborn and the family’s shining light, Harold was called ‘Bunny’ on account of his timid and retiring nature.

  Sunny asked Bunny to join the firm but Bunny wasn’t sure, as he had a solid civil service clerk’s job keeping the records of ships’ crew and signing sailors on for duty. The most exciting thing ever to happen to Bunny at work was when a rat darted up his trouser leg at his pest-infested basement office.16 It was to be the future Lord Rothermere’s destiny to be but a shadow next to Sunny, the glowing Adonis of Hampstead and future Lord Northcliffe. Sunny was fair, fine-featured and arrogant. Bunny was dark and brooding, with a black moustache above a fat bottom lip. Whereas Sunny would stroll along turning heads, making friends and influencing people, Bunny would hover outside a house to which he’d already been invited, working up the courage to ring the bell. As Sunny heard a golden future calling him forth, Bunny heard only the voice of impending doom.

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p; Bunny spent a week pondering his big brother’s offer, the rats around his desk squeaking out their advice: he could stay in the civil service for life and be comfortable, or follow Sunny’s brighter star on its far riskier trajectory. The rest of the family urged Harold to join his brother, and Bunny’s letter of resignation was ‘the most important single document in the history of the family’17, wrote another sibling, Cecil (‘Buffles’ in the family’s silly name stakes on account of his shaggy ‘buffalo’ hair).

  A little while after his twenty-first birthday, Bunny chaired the company’s annual meeting from a small deal table in a boxroom used for storing Answers back numbers, with the board members all sitting on stacked copies of the magazine. Bunny had wrestled sense into the books and the company was finally showing a gross profit of over £1,000. He also soon found a way to force out Dargaville Carr, ‘the Admiral’ and the other early investors. But it would take a beggar to truly set Sunny on his way to becoming the first, and only, Viscount Northcliffe and see Bunny rise to become the first in a long line of Viscount Rothermeres.

  A man in dire need of soap and water rose up from the banks of the River Thames in the fading autumn light, his eyes locked on to two young gentlemen headed his way.

  Sunny Harmsworth wore a light suit, a blond forelock falling into an eye, and talked away softly to Bunny, a darker boy with a thick moustache and hair swept over to his right ear, who scanned the Embankment while listening to his brother as if expecting someone to pull him into the mire. The tramp could hear what the handsome young chap was saying: he had an enemy called ‘Tit-Bits’ and was fretting over ‘puzzles’ and ‘prizes’.

  Giveaways and competitions were a vital ingredient in the Answers formula. Readers won prizes for the best Scottish joke or for guessing how many people walked across London Bridge, and Answers had scored a huge success with a glass box of tiny balls that spelled out the word ‘Answers’ if lined up correctly. The boss of a London bank even wrote in to complain that ‘whenever my back is turned, my clerks neglect their work to try shaking the little balls into the right order’.18 The game lifted circulation permanently to 45,000. But the Harmsworth boys needed something bigger and bolder. They needed the most gigantic competition the world had ever seen, no less; something that would capture the fleeting attention of the great British public.