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Alfred Harmsworth,

Lord Northcliffe

1865–1922

 

The power of the modern press, for both good and evil, was created by men like the Irish-born Alfred Harmsworth.  His chief titles remain to this day, and the influence he had hoped to exert through them continues.  We live today in an era of immediate mass media largely because of his activities a century ago.  His notions transformed the nature of the modern world.

      Alfred Harmsworth was born in 1865 in the little village of Chapelizod, just outside Dublin, the setting for JAMES JOYCE'S [25] book Finnegans Wake.  But that epic of noncommunication had little in common with Harmsworth's driving ambition to be a great communicator.  His father was a Dublin-born land agent.  Two years after Alfred's birth he moved to London to work as a barrister.  His health broke down when Alfred was still in his late teens, so Alfred was largely self-educated.  He was also the virtual head of a family.

      After leaving school, Alfred Harmsworth began in a small way as the editor of Bicycling News in Coventry, where many of the bicycles which were then the latest craze were made.  They were a new means of mass transport, and changed the lives, and courting habits, of a generation.  The mobility provided by the bicycle was a symptom of the age.

      It was an era of mass demand, and Harmsworth conceived the idea of a new kind of newspaper which would cater to the new class of readers which had been produced in England by the Education Act of 1870.  By making elementary education compulsory for all throughout the United Kingdom, the act had given new importance to the printed word.

      The Reform Act of 1867 had extended the franchise to city workers, and that of 1884 to labourers in the countryside.  The working class, of which the working-class Irish were an important element, was now of political importance.  They were becoming the new masters, and newspaper proprietors were keen to gain their support.  Harmsworth was one of the first to sense the new drift of things.  After some years as an active freelancer he decided to go into publishing himself.  His entry into publishing in 1888 marks a distinct new phase in the history of the free press.

      His paper was called Answers to Correspondents, and was exactly what it said it was, a kind of Notes and Queries for the working classes - or ill-educated upstarts, as his critics said.  (Notes and Queries was a well-known magazine of the academic classes.)  The title was soon shortened to Answers, but it was the first outpost of an empire.  He was joined by his brother Harold (later Lord Rothermere), and within five years the paper was selling over a million copies a week.  Other papers and magazines followed, which became the Amalgamated Press, then the largest publishing group in the world.

      In 1894 Harmsworth bought the London Evening News and returned it to profit, an achievement in itself.  Then, in 1896, along with Kennedy Jones, he launched the Daily Mail, intended to be a new kind of newspaper.  His staff was instructed to 'explain, simplify, clarify': it was a paper for the busy person in a modern democracy.  Its circulation rapidly rose from a daily average of 202,000 in its first year to 543,000 at the end of its third.  Yet many grandees saw it as a vulgarization of government and public life.

      The essential feature of the new journalism was not to inform its readers or to support reforming causes, but simply to make money.  Its sensationalism was in the cause of pure commercialism, and circulation figures were all that mattered.  The large circulations naturally attracted the even richer reward of large-scale advertising, and the smaller papers quaked in the advent of these new giants.

      A weekend paper followed called the Sunday Dispatch.  Seeing that 'the new woman' was another force to be reckoned with, Harmsworth began an illustrated paper, the Daily Mirror, in 1904.  Though originally aimed at the female market, the Daily Mirror quickly established itself as a cheap picture paper.  Finally, in 1908, he acquired the Times of London, perhaps the most august paper in the British Empire, whose reputation as 'the Thunderer' was supposed to make the great of the world quake.  This brought Harmsworth to the heart of the establishment that ruled the United Kingdom and the expanding British Empire beyond.

      Harmsworth (like newspaper proprietors in the United States) conceived that his keen touch for what the public wanted gave him the duty to mould their minds.  The backing of the Times was an important influence in bringing about the settlement of the Irish situation, in 1921.  Though his own influence on politicians was now slight, his later years were marked by a megalomania that resulted in his breakdown and death on 14th August 1922.

      Yet Harmsworth's real influence over history was in the creation of the advertising practice which is so well developed today.  Special circumstances brought about the expansion of the press in the 1890s: paper, now made of wood pulp, was cheaper, and machinery was better and faster.  Readers, especially businessmen, wanted a digest of the previous day's news rather than long opinion articles.  All these factors came together for Alfred Harmsworth.

      Modern daily life in America or Europe is inconceivable without the daily paper and its range of wonderful advertisements for a consumer lifestyle.  Whether or not this is a good thing has become for many social critics a pressing question of the day, for consumerism affects everything from the health of individuals to the survival of the planet itself.

      Harmsworth was not self-consciously Irish, but he was representative of those countless millions from his native land who made their way in Britain, America, and Australia through their pertinacity for commerce.  They are not always counted among the cultural heroes of Ireland, but in their own spheres they have helped to make the modern world what it is.

      Though his influence over day-to-day politics was not as great as he would have hoped, Harmsworth created a whole new market for periodicals.  This made his fortune, but it also opened the way for many others.  He remains among the giants of press history.