Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe
Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe ( 15 July1865 - 14 August1922) rose from childhood poverty to become a powerful newspaper and publishing magnate, famed for buying stolid, unprofitable newspapers and transforming (some say demeaning) them to make them lively and entertaining for the mass market. During his lifetime, he exercised vast influence over British popular opinion. Unfortunately, megalomania contributed to a nervous breakdown shortly before his death.
Although born near Dublin, Harmsworth was educated at the Stamford School in Lincolnshire, England.
Beginning as a free-lance journalist, he founded his first newspaper, Answers (original title: Answers to Correspondents), and was later assisted by his brother Harold, who was adept at business matters. Harmsworth had an intuitive sense for what the reading public wanted to buy, and began a series of cheap but successful periodicals, such as Comic Cuts (tagline: "Amusing without being Vulgar") and the journal Forget-Me-Not for women. From these periodicals, he built what was then the largest periodical publishing empire in the world, Amalgamated Press.
Harmsworth was an early pioneer of tabloid journalism. He bought several failing newspapers and made them into an enormously profitable chain, primarily by appealing to the popular taste. He began with The Evening News in 1894, and then merged two Edinburgh papers to form the Edinburgh Daily Record. On 4 May 1896, he began publishing the Daily Mail in London, which was a hit; its taglines included "the busy man's daily journal" and "the penny newspaper for one halfpenny". The Daily Mail held the world record for daily circulation until Harmsworth's death. Harmsworth then transformed a Sunday newspaper, the Weekly Dispatch, into the Sunday Dispatch, then the highest circulation Sunday newspaper in Britain. Harmsworth also founded the The Daily Mirror in 1903, and rescued the financially desperate The Observer and The Times in 1905 and 1908, respectively. In 1908, he also acquired The Sunday Times.
In 1905 Harmsworth was given the title of Baron Northcliffe, of the Isle of Thanet and in 1918 advanced to Viscount Northcliffe, of St Peters in the County of Kent, for his service as the head of the British war mission in the United States[1].
Lord Northcliffe was also involved in politics. For example, his newspapers — especially The Times — reported the Shell Crisis of 1915 with such zeal that it brought down the wartime government of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, forcing him to form a coalition government. Lord Northcliffe's newspapers led the fight for creating a Minister of Munitions (first held by David Lloyd George) and helped to bring about George's appointment as Prime Minister in 1916. George offered Lord Northcliffe a post in his cabinet, but Northcliffe declined; instead, he was appointed as Britain's Director for Propaganda. However, Lord Northcliffe overreached himself in the post-war era by trying to influence the composition of Prime Minister George's cabinet through his newspapers.
In 1903, Harmsworth founded the Harmsworth Cup, the first international award for motorboat racing. Similar to the Olympic Games, each entry in the race is supposed to represent a nation.
Trivia
The P.G. Wodehouse character Lord Tilbury, owner of the Mammoth Publishing House, is a thinly disguised lampooning of Lord Northcliffe.
Such was Northcliffe's influence on propaganda over the Germans in WWI, German battleships were sent to shell his house in an attempt to assassinate him. His former residence still bears a shell hole in respect of his gardener's wife who was killed in the attack.
Alfred Harmsworth was the first person to own and drive a Mercedes Benz in England.
He created the first Ideal Home exhibition in 1908.
References
- D. George Boyce (2004). Harmsworth, Alfred Charles William, Viscount Northcliffe (1865–1922). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.