Andrew Roberts - The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe Britains Greatest Press Baron

Andrew Roberts

The Life of Lord Northcliffe

Britains Greatest Press Baron

The Chief

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To Ian and Natalie Livingstone

Patrons of Literature

On the evening of Wednesday 4 November 1903, twelve men sat silently at a long table in a large, brightly lit room at Carmelite House in Blackfriars, London, the headquarters of the Harmsworth newspaper empire. On the table stood a Y-shaped Electrophone an ebonite and metal receiver-box with green cords attached to it. If their experiment came off, they would be making history, and they knew it.

At 8.10pm, a voice suddenly emanated from the box a newly invented machine that, as was reported in the Daily Mail the next morning, marks the beginning of a change in the whole system of the worlds reporting. The speakers diction could be heard as clear as a bell, and eloquent, rising and falling, warning and persuading, pleading, insisting, proclaiming.

More than a hundred miles away at Bingley Hall in Birmingham, the Liberal Unionist leader Joseph Chamberlain was unveiling his proposals for Imperial Preference, a radical plan to reform Britains tariff system and end over half a century of free trade. Every word mattered, and for the shorthand-writers not only could they clearly hear the words of the speaker, they could also feel the emotion of the great meeting, they could hear the mighty waves of applause they could detect the slightest tremor in the voice of the statesman.

The wires of the receiving-boxes on the speakers platform at Bingley Hall had been connected by the National Telephone Company to the Birmingham Post Office, which in turn led onto to two trunk lines running to the Post Office headquarters in London, that then fed into the Electrophone room at Carmelite House. What was it like? wrote the Mail journalist Filson Young about the experience of hearing human speech via this revolutionary process. Like nothing else in the world.

The operation at Carmelite House was organised with perfectionist efficiency and split-second accuracy to take full advantage of this brand-new technological phenomenon. With the head of the reporting corps standing behind him with a stopwatch, the first shorthand writer took down Chamberlains words for exactly two minutes and then started transcribing his notes into longhand for the printer at 8.12pm, whereupon the second shorthand writer took over for the next two minutes. So it continued around the table until the eleventh man, after whom the first was ready to start again. They kept this up throughout the one hundred and fifteen minutes of the speech.

The compositor was thus able to start setting up the first slip of newspaper copy at 8.22pm and, only five minutes after Chamberlain sat down at 10.05pm, the last reporter finished transcribing his notes. The Evening News was therefore able to hit the streets of London with a complete verbatim report of the speech at 10.32pm, a full hour and twenty-seven minutes before any other newspaper received the report of the speech down the telegraph wires.

For the first time in the history of journalism, the Daily Mail boasted, a speech was being reported simultaneously and verbatim by a staff of practised shorthand writers seated in a quiet room far away. The telephone had beaten the telegraph by eighty-seven minutes, and Chamberlains words could be read on the streets of London on the very same night that they were delivered in the Midlands, rendering every other evening paper in the capital effectively obsolete.

The twelfth man sitting around the table was the thirty-eight-year-old Alfred Harmsworth, proprietor of the Daily Mail, Evening News, Daily Mirror, Weekly Dispatch and a large stable of other publications, and who, within five years, was to own The Times as well. Came to Mail office in the evening and listened to Chamberlain speech at Birmingham through the Electrophone, he noted in his diary. Wonderful success. Heard the great man distinctly distance 113 miles. Evening News brought out verbatim speech within half an hour of the finish.

Harmsworth had been a journalist since he was fifteen. Ink ran in his veins. A man of ineffable charm, genuine journalistic genius and immense drive, he was also capable of utter ruthlessness and even, on occasion, cruelty. He and his brother Harold had founded the Daily Mail as Britains first popular newspaper in 1896. By the time of Chamberlains great speech, he was one of the richest men in Britain, and fewer than two years from becoming Britains youngest peer: Lord Northcliffe.

Harmsworth had always embraced the latest technologies to improve the appearance, production and delivery of his newspapers linotype, rotary presses, ticker-tape services, typewriters, motorised transport, and so on and he was to continue to do so. Yet on that Wednesday evening in November 1903, it was not to be the new method of reporting Chamberlains speech that was most profoundly to affect the career of Alfred Harmsworth, as much as what that statesman said in it.

The speech and the controversy that it launched over Britains trading relations was to convulse the nations politics for a decade, split one government and lead to a landslide election victory for another. It was also to catapult Northcliffe from the position of a highly successful businessman into the front-rank of international politics, where he became one of the most controversial figures of the era, loved and loathed alike. For after 4 November 1903 and the decisions that he took in its immediate aftermath nothing would be the same again for Northcliffe and his burgeoning, seemingly all-powerful press empire.

Northcliffe had known the pinch of poverty in his childhood, and with his usual directness appears to have made up his mind quite early in life that this obstruction to happiness must be put out of the way for himself and all his family before anything else was done.

J. A. SPENDER ,

Life, Journalism and Politics 1927

Alfred Charles William Harmsworth was born on Saturday 15 July 1865 at Sunnybank Cottage in Chapelizod, a prosperous suburb of Dublin. It was a pretty, two thousand-square foot house with fine views of the city and a lawn that ran down to the River Liffey. He was the eldest child of his father, also called Alfred, an English-born schoolteacher, and his mother Geraldine, who was the daughter of a hard-bargaining Irish Protestant land agent.

Alfred Senior had put down Gentleman as his occupation on his wedding certificate, and to all outward appearances the Harmsworths seemed like a comfortably off middle-class family. Yet in fact much of Alfreds childhood was spent in an atmosphere of quiet, submerged desperation. His family were indeed middle-class, but they were stricken with that species of Victorian genteel poverty by which genuine deprivation was hidden during a constant struggle to get by. The effect on Alfred was profound. As long ago as I can remember, he said years later, I was determined to be rid of the perpetual and annoying question of money.