Monday, Apr. 10, 1972

First Press Lord

By Curtis Prendergast

THE HOUSE OF NORTHCLIFFE

by PAUL FERRIS 340 pages. World. $10.

In Fontainebleau, the British newspaper publisher Lord Northcliffe once tried on Napoleon's hat. "It fits me," he wrote delightedly. Northcliffe was crazy by then, but putting on Napoleon's hat wasn't as crazy as it sounded. There was never anyone in Fleet Street--perhaps not in journalism anywhere--who suited it better.

Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, first (and only) Viscount Northcliffe, was indubitably the First Press Lord of Britain. Northcliffe's Daily Mail was the first 1,000,000-circulation newspaper. He founded the Daily Mirror, which at 4.3 million is still the world's largest English-language daily. He owned the Times, the Observer, not to mention what was then the world's largest magazine-publishing business. By the end of World War I, he considered himself important enough to make a virtual takeover bid for the Lloyd George administration, proposing to the Prime Minister that he be allowed to vet his ministerial appointments (Lloyd George declined). Northcliffe died mad at 57, in 1922.

Novelist-Reporter Paul Ferris, who started on a Northcliffe paper in Wales, respects his subject--as any newspaperman should. Northcliffe had "the arrogance of the natural journalist, that what interested him would interest his readers." That he made millions proving it was incidental. After the Wright Brothers' first European flight, he raged at his editors for the four-line paragraph they had given it. "Didn't they realize England was no longer an island?"

For Northcliffe, there were two sorts of news: events to be reported, and topics to be stimulated. To get the news, he hired the best men he could find, supported them lavishly, edited them rigidly. Just before World War I, when northern Ireland was threatening (not for the last time) to explode into civil war, Northcliffe went to the scene and ordered up a team of ten reporters, a ship to ferry copy to Scotland in case cable lines were cut, motorboats, caches of petrol, a fleet of cars. "Rolls-Royce for preference," commanded Northcliffe. "Fords," muttered Northcliffe's Scottish aide under his breath.

Northcliffe's topics were a throwback to his first publication, the weekly Answers, which consisted of replies to questions--sometimes invented by the editor--on how tall Gladstone was (5 ft. 9 in.), or how many M.P.s had glass eyes (three). A touch of Answers lingered in all his newspapers. Northcliffe's curiosity was boundless, his attention span brief, his commitments transient. But, says Ferris, he knew "exactly what to do about telephones, cars, Boers and the disgraceful export of British horses to make sausages for the Belgians."

How long Northcliffe had been going mad, and why exactly, no one knows. "The effect of illness was to coarsen his personality by letting its wilder elements escape," Ferris notes. Messages to his editors grew wilder. He traveled incessantly: Australia, Japan, India, back to France. There Northcliffe discovered that an employee, summoned over from London, did not have a suitable silver-fitted crocodile-leather suitcase. He promptly was given -L- 150 to go back to London to buy one.

Northcliffe's own papers stopped printing his contributions. He cabled threats to fire everybody. One editor was told to "stop walking down Fleet Street in a tall hat." The Times, which he bought to save it from bankruptcy in 1908, put guards on its doors--against the proprietor. After he came home again to London, Northcliffe's four phones to his papers were cut off. Yet a Daily Mail night editor received his last whispered message to the paper --Northcliffe had found a fifth phone and was calling from under his wife's boudoir table.

The fight for his papers followed.

Lord Rothermere, his brother, a thick-necked caricature of Northcliffe, got the Daily Mail but not the Times. He took a fancy to Hitler and died of cirrhosis as the Luftwaffe's bombs fell on London. The family's impact has faded, but not Northcliffe's newspaper style --bright, brief, opinionated, superficial --which remains imprinted on Fleet Street. As Northcliffe decreed, once and for all: "Everything counts, nothing matters "

. Curtis Prendergast

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