Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

Opposites in most respects, Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil Harmsworth King were the "Barnum and Bailey" of Fleet Street. Together they created the world's biggest publishing empire, but their relationship foundered sensationally in 1968 when, as King tried to topple the Prime Minister, Cudlipp toppled King.

Genres: Biography

484 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 2003

About the author

After being a Cambridge postgraduate, a teacher, a marketing executive and a civil servant, Ruth Dudley Edwards became a full-time writer. A journalist, broadcaster, historian and prize-winning biographer who lives in London, her recent non-fiction includes books about The Economist, the Foreign Office, the Orange Order and Fleet Street. The first of her ten satirical mysteries, Corridors of Death, was short-listed for the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger; two others were nominated for the CWA Last Laugh Award. Her two short stories appeared respectively in The Economist and the Oxford Book of Detective Stories.

Series:
* Robert Amiss Mystery

Reviews

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the subheading emphasises "The Glory Days of Fleet Street", this book is as much about the private lives and loves of Cecil Harmsworth King and Hugh Cudlipp as the cultural impact of the Daily Mirror or the business history of the international publishing empire they built. And although King and Cudlipp are co-billed as subjects, King's narrative strand dominates: two family trees at the start of the map out Cecil’s Harmsworth and King relations, and he left behind extensive correspondence with his children that is quoted throughout (in contrast, Cudlipp was childless, aside from an infant of doubtful paternity who died at birth along with his first wife Edith Parnell). King's second wife Ruth Railton, founder of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, is almost as crucial to the story as Cudlipp, isolating King from friends and family and feeding his growing and ultimately disastrous megalomania.

King's father Sir Lucas King White was a distinguished colonial administrator and Orientalist; however, it was Cecil’s maternal connections that shaped his destiny: his mother Geraldine was the sister of Alfred and Harold Harmsworth, who had established themselves as newspaper publishers following the early death of their father (also called Alfred), and who are known to posterity as Viscounts Northcliffe and Rothermere. Among the titles that Alfred created and Harold inherited (alongside those Alfred bought – Northcliffe also owned The Times), the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror have been embedded in British life for more than a century.

King's start in the newspaper business was in the advertising department of the Daily Mail and the Evening News "soliciting small ads", and it was made clear that he wasn’t particularly welcome. After three years Rothermere made him advertising director of the Daily Mirror and its sister paper the Sunday Pictorial (today the Sunday Mirror), where he was also regarded with suspicion: the "sour fruits of nepotism", Cudlipp observed. However, he formed an uneasy alliance with the paper’s innovative editorial director, Harry Guy Bartholomew (known as "Bart", and no relation to me) to turn the ailing Mirror into a tabloid along the lines of the New York Post. Cudlipp came on board in 1935, having learnt his trade and honed his instincts for journalistic sensation in provincial newspapers – the antics of the unfrocked Rector of Stiffkey is one saga he chronicled that still resonates down through the decades.

As a director of the Sunday Pictorial, King also wanted Bart as editorial director there too, but "he was so rude to the Chairman that he revolted and appointed King Editorial Director instead". Cudlipp accepted the post of editor, at 23 becoming the youngest in Fleet Street, to Bart’s fury. Cudlipp returned to the post after war service: his sensational circulation boosters included extracts from a book by the Bishop of Birmingham doubting the miraculous elements in the Bible and a rebuttal by Bishop Blunt of Bradford (Cudlipp noted with cynicism that unlike Barnes of Birmingham, Blunt had "expected and received a fat fee"). However, Bart was chairman of both titles and in 1948 found an excuse to get rid of Cudlipp, who moved to the Express. Bart, though, now old and alcoholic, and having made a disastrous foray into Australian acquisitions, was soon afterwards toppled by King, and Cudlipp was restored.

In the decades that followed, the Daily Mirror became the bestselling newspaper in the world, and this perhaps explains why a joint biography was the chosen approach – King's position of influence in public life, already in large part due to nepotism in the literal sense of the word, also owed so much to Cudlipp. The Mirror Group also expanded abroad: already in 1948 King was acquiring titles in West Africa, a part of the world he enjoyed visiting. However, although some of their more colourful writers are discussed, the work isn't a general history of the Mirror titles and so we don’t get an exhaustive account of journalistic milestones and controversies. One review, by Roy Greenslade (who has a history of mutual hostility with Dudley Edwards), complains about the lack of any reference to "the Lord Boothby Affair", in which Cudlipp fired an editor and King wrote a front-page apology after the Sunday Mirror hinted at Boothby’s links with the Krays.

As Mirror Group chairman, King's interests also included publishing more broadly, and in the 1950s he bought up several magazine publishers, which were consolidated as the International Publishing Company, once "the biggest publishing company in the world", as well as the Reed Paper Group. The first publisher he took over, Amalgamated Press, had also been founded by Uncle Alfred but had since been sold on; he renamed the AP as "Fleetway", a name most familiar to people of my age from comic annuals bearing the legend "A Fleetway Annual" (it’s doubtful that King knew very much about IPC’s comics, and Dudley Edwards doesn’t mention them).

Alfred Harmsworth’s Mail had toppled Asquith, and King’s downfall was due to comparable pretensions in 1968. His public call for Harold Wilson to be removed as Prime Minister was too much for IPC, and he was replaced by Cudlipp, who lacked interest in management. The incident is also notorious for King's authoritarian fantasy of a new extra-parliamentary government headed by Lord Mountbatten. There was a meeting, in May 1968, but Mountbatten was against it, and Sir Solly Zuckerman denounced the idea as "treason" and walked out. Dudley Edwards is scathing of how this this embarrassing fantasy came to be a source of sensationalism: "Authors of innumerable pieces of tedious nonsense written on the so-called coup include the fanciful Nigel West, and Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame [reviewed here], who thickened the fog by saying that King was a long-term contact of Ml5". Cudlipp was forced to deny to King that talk of a "coup" had come from him. King, however, did not help himself with conspiracy theorising of his own, blaming Wilson for his ejection.

Towards the end of the media story we start to see names with more contemporary resonance: Cudlipp sold off an ailing title called the Sun to Rupert Murdoch, and after retirement returned to the Mirror Group as an advisor to Robert Maxwell. Cudlipp liked Maxwell, and was sorry when it transpired that he was a crook (his own pension, however, was via Reed and so was safe).

King's last days were spent in Ireland, where his sense of self-importance was channelled towards resolving the Northern Ireland conflict. To this end he and Ruth befriended Ian Paisley and made links with IRA figures, although it seems that the Irish parties thought that the couple had more political influence by this time than was actually the case.

Cudlipp married three times, being twice a widower; King married twice and although his first wife, Margaret Cooke, was the mother of all his children, she is absent from his memoirs due to Ruth's jealousy - from the description, it seems likely that Ruth had some sort of personality disorder. Despite being socially awkward, King also carried on affairs while married to Margaret, which he casually discussed with her - to the detriment of her mental wellbeing. King and Cudlipp shared a visceral homophobia - King even dropped one old university confidant, Francis Needham, when he discovered Needham was gay.

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a difficult, if not impossible task to write a biography on two people in the same book, even two who were so tightly linked professionally as Cudlipp and King. The book is long and detailed at at times rivetingly boring, so it helps to be a speed reader otherwise it will take you a long time to plough through. I am aware of them as two legendary newspapermen from the London Daily Mirror stable, then the most successful publishing venture in the world. The paper owned the Melbourne Argus where I worked as a young journalist and they subsequently closed the paper (founded in 1836) and sold it to the rival Herald, then operated by Sir Keith Murdoch (Rubert's father). One aspect that could be a revelation to some is the close association and power that newspaper proprietors wield over our elected Members of Parliament and Minister's in particular. It is really the ultimate power without responsibility. I must admit that I warmed more to Hugh Cudlipp as a character (it must be the old journo in me) as I thought that King was a total prick and his second wife Dame Ruth to be the ultimate conniving, two-faced, dragon lady.