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CHAPTER 1
Magazine Boy
Sunny Harmsworth began in the middle.
The Harmsworth family weren't wealthy. They were just members of a growing class within Victorian society that sat somewhere between the gentry perusing the land on horseback and the urban poor scratching out an existence down on their manure-strewn streets. The Harmsworths had not even been 'middle class' all that long. Sunny's grandparents were actually Hampshire peasants sucked in from the shires by the ever-expanding city of London. They set themselves up as grocers on the edge of London, in what is now known as St John's Wood.
Alfred Charles William Harmsworth was actually born in Dublin on 15 July 1865, at a house on the River Liffey called Sunnybank Cottage, and was given the pet name 'Sunny' by his father, Alfred senior, the only son of those Hampshire peasants. Alfred senior had sailed to Ireland to take up a post as a teacher at a school for the sons of dead British soldiers in the days when restless Éire was still part of the United Kingdom.
Sunny's mother was a Maffett, from a wealthy family who were pillars of the Irish Protestant ascendancy, the minority that held the Catholic majority in their yoke. She could even trace her lineage back to a colonel in Cromwell's invading army. Harmie, as Alfred senior was known to his countless friends, had charmed Geraldine Mary off a park bench and they had married. But the Harmsworths didn't stay long in Ireland. Geraldine had grown up with servants and governesses, and a mere schoolteacher couldn't hope to provide her with the life to which she was accustomed, so she persuaded her husband to study law and the family moved to London.
Alfred senior was duly called to the bar and became a barrister, at which he was to prove no great success. His true calling was to an altogether different kind of bar – pubs like the King of Bohemia in Hampstead, where he'd flourish his hat, bow from the waist to the barmaids and greet them with a warm silky voice. Folk were forever buying Harmie a drink but he rarely had the cash to pay for a round himself. He was a man in a tall hat telling tall tales, his favourite yarn being how his real father was in fact the 'grand old' Duke of York. He'd stumble up from his pew like a man born a peer of the realm, lift a hand in the air and solemnly declare: 'I am descended from kings.'
There is no evidence of royal blood in the Harmsworth line, and drink would kill Harmie long before his eldest two boys became the next best thing: viscounts. The future Press Lord's father, in fact, firmly disapproved of the trade that would lift the Harmsworth name into the higher echelons of British society, where he felt it belonged. A newspaper office was not the place for a gentleman; he wanted Sunny to follow him into the law. But the addictive nature of ink seeped into Sunny's skin early.
He was only about twelve when he first sat down in front of an amateur printing press at a small London schoolhouse and began to press words on to paper. He spent hours, days, forming letters into words, sentences, paragraphs. He scribbled out the title of The Henley House ...
SCHOOL MAGAZINE
... giving those two words their own space and lifting them out in tall, bold type. His inky little fingers then lined up EDITED BY ALFRED C. HARMSWORTH under that mouthy masthead.
'He made a very poor impression on his teachers,' wrote War of the Worlds author H. G. Wells, who later taught at the school and also wrote for Harmsworth's publications. 'And [he] became one of those unsatisfactory, rather heavy, good-tempered boys who in the usual course of things drift ineffectively through school to some second-rate employment. It was J. V.'s ability that saved him from that.'
It had been John Vine (J. V.) Milne, the school's kindly headmaster, who had spotted an opportunity to stimulate the boy, despite his unexceptional nature. Milne, a shy and lisping Scotsman – and father of Winnie-the-Pooh author A. A. Milne – gently encouraged the future Press Lord as he splattered himself with violet ink.
The first issue, in March 1881, showed a gift for hyperbole that would stay with the boy and his publications for his whole life. 'I have it on the best authority,' wrote Sunny, that the magazine 'is to be a marked success'. A story about bad weather stopping the boys playing football, a subject he was keen on as captain of the school team, followed the boast. But the real scent of his future lay hidden on the back page. Here he printed questions sent in by other kids to which they hoped for an answer. It was innocuous enough, and not even original, yet this page would be the template upon which his entire empire was later built.
Another of Sunny's passions was newfangled things called 'bicycles', huge beasts with a front wheel that reached the armpit. He loved the freedom of cycling down the open dusty roads, often covering great distances with his cycling club pals who wore uniforms and followed a bugler. Sunny was a leader among the boys of Hampstead but the girls liked him too – he was an unusually good-looking boy. Around this time, a friend of Harmie's remembered seeing father and son dining together at the Middle Temple, where Harmie worked; 'a dear old Bohemian gentleman' and a teenage boy who had 'the face and figure of a Greek god'.
Two key formative features of Sunny Harmsworth's early years were his perpetually pregnant mother – she'd give birth to eleven surviving children, none of them twins – and his frequent house moves, due to his alcoholic father's inability to pay the rent and the need for ever more space to house the Harmsworth brood.
One day, around the time Sunny left school, Mrs Harmsworth hired a fifteen-year-old nurse called Louisa Jane to help care for all those kids. The younger boys remembered Essex girl Louisa for having a face like a pastry, dusted with way too much powder. Handsome Sunny Harmsworth was around the house a lot, as he wasn't in school and didn't have a job. The teenagers became intimate, grabbing fumbled moments together in dark corners of the family home, somehow dodging all those wide eyes and tiny ears.
Periods of high stress would have a direct physical impact on Sunny his whole life, and the Harmsworths claimed it was a bout of pneumonia that had left their boy bedridden after a mammoth bike ride shortly after he left school. But it was not strictly true; a scandal had laid him low.
Sixteen-year-old Sunny had made Louisa Jane pregnant and she had run back to her Essex village to give birth to a boy named Alfred Benjamin 'Smith' on Bonfire Night, 1882. The box on the birth certificate for the father's name was left blank, and the first teenage mum to grace the Daily Mail story had been impregnated under the stairs by the newspaper's founder.
It was a nightmare for Mr and Mrs Harmsworth, who were advanced snobs even for Victorian London; the truth hardly mattered a damn and keeping up appearances was everything. So Sunny was hustled away safely out of town on a European tour after answering an advert in The Times. Father and son would never quite be the same again but, far worse for Sunny, his strict and deeply moral mother – whose affection he craved his entire life – felt he had disgraced the family. When he returned from his trip, Geraldine, who was pregnant herself as ever, refused to have him back in the house.
Sunny found digs with a friend nearby, put on a light suit his family had bought him for his European trip and set out on foot in the only direction he had ever really been heading: Fleet Street. All he had to do was follow the same route as the river that rises in the high ground of Hampstead and spills down over the clay upon which London rests. For over 1,000 years thirsty travellers would pause to sip the Fleet's fresh waters and bathe in her healing ponds but, as humanity took root on her banks, she ran ever shallower and slower. The settling horde sucked her dry and she became a stream, an open sewer, a ditch and finally a drain. The Fleet still oozes on down in the dark under Farringdon Road to Ludgate Circus and crosses under the street that took her name before spilling out into the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge.
The printed word first came to the City in 1500 along with the wonderfully named Wynkyn de Worde – an apprentice to William Caxton – to print the materials for the legal trade that had already settled in the area. Britain's first newspaper, a single sheet of paper called the Daily Courant, began publication on Fleet Street two centuries later, and dozens of other newspapers soon followed.
As Sunny covered the four miles or so from Hampstead in the early 1880s, London was expanding all around him; omnibuses pulled commuters towards town while rickety carts pulled labourers and building materials in the opposite direction, shaking dust and horsehair plaster into the air as they went, to erect the houses that were spreading out from the centre like a bruise. They were building the suburbs, places where people could live while still working in town. Six million new houses were built in London during Queen Victoria's reign alone. The people moving into these houses were his readers, his future.
Sunny stepped into the City as a boy with no need for a razor arriving in a land of beards, his Napoleonic blond forelock falling across his forehead as he peered through the window of a restaurant called Spiers and Pond at Ludgate Circus. He knew this was where many newspaper editors had their lunch and he surveyed the kings of Fleet Street for the first time: they were mostly grey and heavy old men, just like their newspapers.
It took a few years for Sunny Harmsworth to make any kind of mark, however; though he was an enthusiastic boy bristling with self-confidence, his writing had little style and no soul. It was mostly harmless pap, such as a piece about a famous ventriloquist or the origin of the bicycle. He would wander around the British Museum in a black cape and glossy silk hat, and read up on photography and write an article on 'how to take a photograph'; he would watch people enjoying the snow on Hampstead Heath and produce a story about 'forgotten frosts'. Things that interested him, he figured, would interest an editor and the readers. He'd admit later that his own material was 'poor stuff'.
It didn't matter. Sunny Harmsworth's timing, like his dress sense, was impeccable. Seismic events from the previous decade had generated a human wave that he'd ride ever higher, a newly literate middle class. Yet he wasn't the first to catch this wave. The original pioneer of the popular press didn't start in London and he wasn't even a journalist. George Newnes was the owner of a vegetarian restaurant in provincial Manchester who had, quite by accident, discovered a new market. Newnes liked to collect bits and pieces of information in a scrapbook for his own amusement – his tit-bits – that he'd often read out to his wife in the evening. Mrs Newnes, presumably to deflect her beloved's tedious babbling, suggested he compile and publish them for the pleasure of others. So he did, founding a weekly magazine in 1881 called 'Tit-Bits from all the interesting Books, Periodicals, and Newspapers of the World', or Tit-Bits for short.
It was a soaraway success. Tit-Bits was bought by this new class of reader desperate for something – anything – interesting to read. Tit-Bits' readers had been created by the 'Forster Act' of 1870, a law that demanded the basic compulsory education of the masses from the ages of five to thirteen. Prior to the Act, only about one in seven people could read and write, but by the 1880s there were thousands of new young readers. Yet few were inclined to pick up the dense, artless, dead, self-important prose on offer in most of the newspapers and periodicals of the day.
Newnes found himself running his booming publication from a new London headquarters in 1885 when Sunny Harmsworth and a cycling pal named Max Pemberton walked through his door. The pair approached an 'amiable-looking gentleman' with a beard like a badger's pelt as he ate his lunch at a table strewn with proofs of his magazine. It was Newnes, who asked the pair what they wanted. Pemberton was stumped for a second, then looked around at 'the crazy nature of the building' in which they stood and offered to write a piece on 'jerry builders'. Newnes commissioned the story and sent them on their way, and Pemberton duly wrote up a story about shoddily constructed 'jerry-built' buildings and received a healthy fee.
From that day on, Sunny Harmsworth was in the TitBits office almost daily and soon sold Newnes a story about 'Some Curious Butterflies', then others, such as a visit to newspaper wholesaler W. H. Smith, one with a nod to his father's legal profession called 'Q. C.s and How They Are Made' and another one about 'Organ Grinders and Their Earnings'.
Sunny soon realized there was a bigger opportunity here than just selling stories to Newnes. He pushed open his flatmate's bedroom door one morning, wrote Pemberton, and told him how provincial hobbyist Newnes had discovered 'a bigger thing than he imagines. He is only at the very beginning of a development which is going to change the whole face of journalism.'
Harmsworth decided to create his own magazine and, around this time, the future Press Lord began to carry a brown folder around with him that had the words 'SCHEMO MAGNIFICO' scrawled on a sticker pasted to the front. It was his master plan for the future. He would consult it and scribble down a fresh idea before flipping it closed. The battered old folder would be the fount of all his future publications and he kept it locked in an office safe almost to the day he died, four decades later. Nobody else ever saw inside.
His mind skipped back to his school magazine's questions and answers section. It was a staple of many periodicals – even Tit-Bits had one – but there was something more to this common format that nobody else had spotted. It could be a useful device, an excuse, really, to publish interesting little yarns and factoids for no other reason than that they were interesting little yarns and factoids. They were easy on the eye and gentle on the brain.
It took a couple of years and minor editorships of a small publication called Youth and a bicycle magazine in Coventry before somebody was found to back Harmsworth with the cash to launch his own magazine.
He was a big-hearted Irishman named William Dargaville Carr, who, it turned out, wasn't especially wealthy and knew absolutely nothing about publishing. He'd married the best friend of Sunny's mother back in Dublin and was using his wife's dowry to try to carve out a future in London. They moved into lodgings and Carr soon annoyed Sunny by hiring the landlady's son as the company's office boy; Harmsworth had wanted the job for one of his brothers. Carr & Co. began in a shabby little office around the corner from Fleet Street at 26 Paternoster Square, editorial divided from the trade counter by a screen knocked up by a carpenter – who told Carr he had sixteen children, and some were ill. Carr organised a whip round and handed him four shillings ... money was never going to be under much control in Carr's hands. Harmsworth continued freelancing but Carr didn't do much of anything at all, and hated being cooped up in an office. The new office boy noted that the pair seemed to spend the whole day chatting. The boy's toughest job was waking his young boss Sunny Harmsworth every morning: 'he never liked getting up'.
By then Sunny's plan had grown flesh and a face inside his Schemo Magnifico. He'd taken a copy of Tit-Bits and doodled out a similar title block, a thin rectangular box – his version slashed from the bottom left corner up to the top right corner like a flag.
ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS
Underneath, a black finger on either side pointed to
ON EVERY SUBJECT UNDER THE SUN
It was a bold statement – Sunny liked bold statements – and it looked fresh and different, if a little amateurish. It was the work of an exuberant youth, the very demographic he hoped to reach. Three words would sit left to right at the top above the masthead: 'INTERESTING. EXTRAORDINARY. AMUSING.'
A friend of Sunny's father, a Daily Telegraph leader writer named Edward Markwick, joined the venture, and soon found more cash in the pockets of Captain Alexander Spink Beaumont, a retired soldier Sunny nicknamed 'the Admiral', who some thought may have had an unrequited homosexual motive in getting behind the pretty young journalist. But Sunny wasn't at all interested in men – he was smitten by a friend's sister, a petite brown-eyed girl called Mary Milner, whose family were a peg or two up from the Harmsworths thanks to her father's success in the sugar trade from the West Indies. Molly, as she was known, was a very pretty and graceful, vivacious girl who first spotted the future Press Lord at a children's party where, she recalled eighty years later, her mother had admonished her by saying, 'Now, Molly, don't dance all the time with the best-looking boy in the room.' Sunny began to spend more time at the Milners' place than he did at home, and the young couple married the same year he founded Answers, the groom leading his new bride across the dance floor with a dummy copy of his embryonic magazine hanging out of his jacket pocket. Molly's new husband might have been broke at the time but that magazine would lead her to a lifestyle worthy of an empress.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Mail Men"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Adrian Addison.
Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
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