Mail Men

by Adrian Addison

  Vere arranged for English to be appointed editor of the ailing Daily Sketch on the recommendation, partly, of another mutual friend – its editor, Howard French (who was promoted on to the Associated Newspapers board). Jean Rook was the Daily Sketch’s woman’s editor: ‘David English was the most demanding and inspiring editor I have ever worked for,’ wrote Rook in her autobiography. ‘A massive ideas man, everything he magically Midas-ed – and he touched every page of the paper – turned his staff’s output to gold. He never doubted his newspaper’s influence, or his own strength . . . English, we knew, was too big to be satisfied with the small Sketch.’27

  When he joined, the Sketch was being battered in its market by the Mirror and it was about to take another hammering by Rupert Murdoch’s rising Sun. Its boyish editor blew oxygen into it, pumped hard on its chest and managed to turn it into a lively little read. But the Sketch was doomed. Meanwhile, the Harmsworth family’s flagship Daily Mail drifted in the newspaper doldrums with no wind in her broadsheet sails either.

  There was a flicker of hope for the Daily Mail, though, in the shape of a small team of girls led by Shirley Conran who were working hard trying to get the Mail moving again by creating a paper – within the paper – that women wanted to read. Conran had first worked on the Mail in the early 1960s, writing about homes and design, before being poached by the Observer to create a woman’s page, where she found that ‘the Observer was very much a man’s world and in that world of men, I could do whatever the hell I liked – because none of the men on the paper ever actually read my page. So I got away with murder. It was a sophisticated and sexy page,’ she told the author, ‘not sexy in the lewd sense – sexy in the same way any woman’s magazine today is sexy. And that’s why the Mail wanted me back.’28

  Conran’s old boss, a gentle Mailman called Gordon McKenzie, persuaded her to return and Conran thought she’d be doing a similar page for the Mail. But McKenzie had bigger plans. ‘It was a top secret project they just called “the rabbit”, nobody else knew anything about it.’29 Features chief McKenzie and Arthur Brittenden, the broadsheet Daily Mail ’s final editor, planned to launch a tabloid for females – tucked inside the broadsheet Daily Mail. What to christen this ‘rabbit’ proved to be a struggle. ‘Everybody said the obvious name is Femail – with an “i”, as in Mail – but it was so damn obvious, everyone just thought, “Let’s not call it that.” And then Arthur got a little note from Lord Rothermere [Esmond] saying he’d been talking to some of his friends over dinner and he’d had what they had all thought was a rather wonderful idea – we should call the new magazine Femail. So everyone concerned with “the rabbit” said: “What a brilliant idea! Let’s call it Femail !”’30

  The first sixteen-page tabloid Femail was launched in October 1968, with Conran resplendent in a glam-looking picture byline above a huge photo of a topless long-haired model in jeans . . . the snap taken from behind (bare breasts would be left to Murdoch’s Sun); sex was a firm part of the Femail formula from the start. Inside was a feature on ‘The Fertility Pill’ by that bomb-proof old hand from the war days Rhona Churchill. As Conran wrote on the miniature Mail ’s first front page:

  The things women are supposed to want to read about are generally decided upon by a man. In this magazine, as in our other women’s pages, we are writing for a real woman . . . She doesn’t want to compete, to be equal, she knows she’s different. She’s not interested in women’s rights, but she’s concerned about women’s wrongs, especially if they happen to affect her . . . She thinks about men but not all the time. She’s interested in sex but not all the time . . . She’s as bewildered as a chameleon on a tartan rug, trying to be wife, mother, mistress, chauffeur, cook, washer-up, accountant, general dogsbody and, sometimes, wage-earner . . . She jumps from crisis to crisis, shoulders family problems, and does a lot of thankless work that bores and exhausts her. She tries. She knows what doesn’t interest her, whether it’s politics or football, and doesn’t want to feel guilty about it. Now and again she wants a good gossip. Like us.31

  A new Daily Mail could be built upon this kind of content. Forty-three-year-old Vere, who had been vice-chairman of the company’s board since 1963, spotted it immediately. But it’d take a new era – which was imminent – before the overladen Mail mothership could change course.

  By now Fleet Street was not the road down which magazine-boy Sunny Harmsworth had rolled his brand new Daily Mail cannon in May 1896; it was not a street populated with tired old gentlemen who barely noticed the change that had come through the fug of their own cigars and self-regard. And by now Esmond, the second Rothermere – who was, after all, only two years younger than the Mail itself – was a relic from a bygone era.

  By the end of the 1960s Fleet Street was a raucous, drunkenly dangerous place. But the dull Daily Mail wasn’t even at the party. It was a seventy-three-year-old middleweight in a land bristling with younger, lighter, faster, far more vicious pugilists led by a young Australian called Rupert Murdoch. And the Mail had lost its voice long before. It had changed direction so many times, its staff barely knew right from left. It didn’t seem to be for, or against, anything in particular. It didn’t know who its readers were – or should be. The Mail had been milked for money by the first Rothermere and startled off course by Beaverbrook’s Daily Express. It was testimony to the newspaper Sunny Harmsworth built that the Mail survived the first two Lord Rothermeres at all. By the end of 1970 its circulation was in decline and the combined financial losses with the Sketch were over a million pounds (£14.5 million today). Something had to be done.

  Overpaid accountants said the wise move was to merge the Mail and the Express newspaper groups to make a mid-market monster. So a meeting was called between Lord Beaverbrook’s son Max – who declined the title upon his father’s death – and the second Lord Rothermere to decide whether a marriage could be arranged between the two press dynasties. Vere was there too, watching horrified from the sidelines. The Daily Express was the senior partner now in Fleet Street and any new daily beast could only have been named ‘the Express & Mail ’. It looked like it was all over for the Harmsworths of Fleet Street, a fate that would befall the bloodline of every single other press baron including, soon enough, Beaverbrook’s family. At this summit, Esmond had been prepared to let the Mail go but wanted to keep the Evening News, the first newspaper the Harmsworth brothers had owned. Aitken’s lawyer refused, insisting any deal had to be for the whole company. So Lord Rothermere saved his single most important contribution to the Daily Mail story until the very last moment; he washed his hands of the whole sorry mess, resigned and sailed away on a long holiday to South Africa at the age of seventy-two with his third wife, a Texan beauty almost exactly half his age.

  Vere was given total control, and if ‘mere’ Vere Harmsworth had somehow received Uncle Northcliffe’s Daily Mail DNA, maybe the paper could be saved.

  8

  A Compact Double-act

  Vere Harmsworth gathered with his top managers and David English, his number-one editorial guru and the man he thought could revitalize the Daily Mail, in a cold and musty, dank oversized room with cracked windows and flaking walls; Room One, Great-uncle Northcliffe’s ‘big room for big ideas’, was tatty by now, just like the attic where Sunny and Bunny Harmsworth had met with Kennedy Jones under a cracked skylight to work out what to do with the Evening News. This time, seventy-seven years later, it was the Daily Mail that was in deep trouble.

  Problem after problem became apparent, starting with the paper’s voice: the Mail didn’t have one. It sounded like a sad old dear yearning for the past, an old lady they had to somehow make young again, positive and buoyant. The paper needed ‘a sort of Victorian evangelism’, the advertising manager, Brian Henry, had said in a memo, ‘which seems to combine the virtues of hard work with a belief in personal salvation and rewards in this life as well as the hereafter’.1 But, most of all, the Mail needed a young and vigorous new editor. And Vere already knew, of course,
who it would be. The Daily Sketch editor David English was brash and bouncy, full of vim and mischief, but he was also, underneath, a slightly Puritanical man2 who believed absolutely in the family and was loyal to his wife, unlike so many in his trade, and he was also loyal to his friends. He was perfect.

  Vere was lucky English was at the meeting at all because, around the same time Esmond had sat down with Beaverbrook’s son to discuss merging the two newspaper empires, Aitken had finally woken up and done what he should have several years before: he had offered English the editor’s chair at the Daily Express. English, though only editor of the silly little Sketch, turned him down and went skiing with his wife and children. It seems it was a decision taken out of loyalty to his good friend Vere, and perhaps he knew better things were on their way. Plus Max Aitken Jr was no Lord Beaverbrook, in the same way as Esmond was no Northcliffe. Beaverbrook’s boy had already proved, to many, he was a fool. Vere must have, surely, seemed the better bet – a better boss. When David English returned from the ski slopes, Vere was in full command of the Mail: he swiftly appointed English editor.

  English thought sport and television needed to be handled better and the Mail needed outspoken, readable columnists with crisp and sensible opinions. It also had to have a clear political stance. It needed a cleaner look and the best photographs had to be selected with greater care, displayed better and bigger. The Mail should be, in a way, the Daily Express when it was at its best under Beaverbrook in the 1950s. English saw Mail readers as ‘traditional without being reactionary; who are believers in the individual being independent; who are ambitious (not yet rich, they hope to be some day) and who very much believe in this country. This does not mean they are all fuddy-duddy colonels; there is still a “British is best” attitude among the young and the working class as well as the middle class.’3

  Long-term Mailman Noel Barber wrote a story introducing the new editor to the paper’s readers over a photograph of a clean-cut young man who commuted in to work each day from Chislehurst, eleven miles to the south of London. ‘Though politically a Conservative, he is flexible, and feels that “It is not necessary to take a preconceived stance on every issue that comes up,”’ wrote Barber. ‘After newspapers, David’s passion is boating and sailing, and when he gets a day off the family heads for Ramsgate where they berth their sea-going motor-cruiser called Dinan, a name made up of family initials. Does this picture of a young, middle-class family remind you of anyone? It does me – it reminds me of a typical Daily Mail reader.’4

  Young Sunny Harmsworth had been of the middle classes too, an earlier version from the later Victorian era, and he was about to help out his Daily Mail from beyond the grave. It all came down to a little pill. Alfred C. Harmsworth had been forever fretting over his health. Even as a boy, there was always something wrong with him and he armed himself against sickness as an adult. When Lord Northcliffe, for example, sailed off for a world tour, the year before he died, his medicine chest was better stocked than some hospital wards: he had opium and phenacetin alongside vegetable laxative, soda mint, bromide, potassium permanganate, chlorodyne, calomel, zinc sulphate, mustard leaves, iodoform, caustic pencil, a thermometer, suture silk and needles, bandages, plaster, lint and a water-sterilizer. Sickly Sunny Harmsworth, the five-star traveller, also had snake-bite lancets because, well, one just never knew.

  It was this morbid self-obsession that led to a new word entering the newspaper lexicon: tabloid. The word was invented towards the end of the nineteenth century by a medical salesman, to mean any medicine compressed down into a small pill – a ‘tablet’ with the Greek suffix ‘-oid’. During a trip to the US, Alfred was invited by journalist Joseph Pulitzer to publish the perfect newspaper on 1 January 1901, the first day of the twentieth century. (Sunny Harmsworth was fascinated by America and visited the US twenty-two times in an era in which it was a five-day trip each way by steamship.) He took hold of Pulitzer’s New York World and cut it physically in half. Harmsworth had noticed that people folded their papers, to avoid sticking their elbows into the nose of their neighbour on the bus or train. Some just cheated, and only read the headlines and the sub decks – so Sunny ordered that stories written for the World that night should be no longer than 250 words.

  ‘All the news in sixty seconds,’ he wrote. ‘The World enters today upon the Twentieth or Time-Saving Century. I claim that by my system of condensed or tabloid journalism, hundreds of working hours can be saved each year.’5

  Sunny christened this strange, experimental newspaper a ‘tabloid’. It didn’t catch on. The next day the newspaper was printed in its usual broadsheet form.

  By 1971, ‘tabloid’ meant a pair of breasts peeking into your personal space instead of a broadsheet reader’s elbows. Vere Harmsworth hated the word. A tabloid was read by a bloke as he sat on the toilet with a hard hat laid on the cistern or at the wheel of his parked white van or black cab as the radio blared out David Bowie and the solo wares of the broken-up Beatles. Tabloids were made for the men with the small hat size that Sunny Harmsworth had found so curious. The word was the very definition of downmarket. They were sensational rags that people of a certain class instinctively didn’t trust. The new breed of post-war, middle-class readers Vere was aiming at would never allow a ‘true’ tabloid into their home. Never. And Vere knew that the adman didn’t want these unwashed hordes either; they had no spare cash. The adman wanted nice folk with their own car parked on their suburban driveway and money to spend on new carpets and package holidays to Majorca and double-glazing. Twenty-three ‘new towns’ had sprung up all over Britain to help rehouse people whose homes had been bombed during the war and to clear away city centre slums. Vere, who had worked in the company’s circulation department as a sales rep, thought they were populated with just the sort of people who should be reading his new version of the Daily Mail.

  Nevertheless, the actual physical size of a tabloid newspaper was clearly the way to go. Compressing and condensing the old Mail into a new pill was the magic formula. They were 20 per cent cheaper to produce than a broadsheet and yet could earn exactly the same advertising revenue. Bunny would have loved the numbers; a tabloid page was physically half that of a broadsheet, yet the bill the adman sent out wasn’t reduced by a single penny. A page is a page, was the adman’s phrase. And half of the tabloid Mail ’s revenues had to come from ads for the paper to be viable. Lastly, studies showed that readers simply liked the smaller format better. Readers spent more time reading them; tabloid-sized newspapers were – as their inventor Sunny Harmsworth had realized seven decades before – simply easier to hold and easier to read.

  That word, though, ‘tabloid’, was proving to be a real dilemma for designing a new Daily Mail, as Brian Freemantle, who was to be the new paper’s foreign editor, told the author: ‘Saying the word tabloid was a bit like saying “fuck” in a monastery. We agonized over that. But the fact was that we were going to go down to tabloid – there you are, you see, I used the word – yet the last thing we ever wanted to be was a tabloid. So, what to call it? We went round and round the houses on that. And finally we chose the word compact.’6

  ‘Compact’ was all about the size and compression of information, not sensational celebrity headlines and soft-porn. Vere wanted to line the paper up for women, specifically young mums. And female readers were already familiar with a pared-down Daily Mail thanks to Femail. But this aspirational young lady didn’t want nipples poking her husband in the eye every morning while her 2.4 children tried not to dribble milk down their neatly pressed school uniforms, the paint drying on the walls of her new kitchen. Vere Harmsworth was certain that the female of the species was the last great, untapped newspaper market – and they’d take their husbands with them.

  Sunny had aimed originally for the female market but he had not really succeeded; it was the clerks that bought his Mail, not women. If his paper had truly found its female voice, he would never have felt the need to create the all-female Daily Mirror. ‘Northc
liffe’s Daily Mail was aimed at the lower middle-class,’ explained Vere. ‘The Mirror discovered the working class. Women are going to save this paper. We have to direct ourselves at women right through – not to producing a women’s paper but a paper for women. The difference is subtle; you don’t publish a lot of women’s pages, you give a news coverage that women want to read; that way you hold your men readers too.’7

  These women, it was presumed by the adman, also controlled the family purse. The meeting in Room One broke up and they knew the way forward. Everything was going to change. Everything. There was no hope for the Daily Sketch, they’d shut it down and merge it with the Daily Mail. The new paper was to be a tabloid’s size without containing ‘red-top’ material; it was to be given a new voice without having a tabloid’s loud and sometimes foul mouth. It would appeal to women and advertisers. The plan was pretty bold and possibly pretty stupid. At the time, a ‘serious’ tabloid was absurd – these readers didn’t exist. It could be crushed from above by the higher-brow broadsheets, knifed in the ribs by the still-strong broadsheet Daily Express and chewed from below by the red-tops. Mick Shields, Vere’s long-term managing director, would say of the proprietor at the time: ‘The chairman is twice as clever as he looks but only half as clever as he thinks.’8

  ‘Mere’ Vere was about to start a war on three fronts and was either the playboy buffoon many thought he was, or Sunny’s genes had finally bubbled back to the surface inside a living, breathing Harmsworth.

  Whatever Vere would prove to be, David English simply bounded away to form a newspaper he wanted to read, that he wanted to edit, around Vere’s vision. However, he was far better prepared than perhaps anyone in such a position had any right to be – he’d had a head start. English had spent the preceding two years growing a new brain for the Daily Mail in the Harmsworth family shed down the bottom of their immaculate lawn. Inside the little-loved Daily Sketch, English had assembled a talented young team. Through sheer charm and force of character, English had persuaded many to quit the mighty Express for the Sketch – a paper some presumed to be doomed. And now, these brand-new Mailmen raised in Beaverbrook’s stable had until the first Monday of May 1971 to build a new paper from the sky down, the Daily Mail ’s seventy-fifth birthday. Brian Freemantle was one of them. He had known David English for two decades and they’d both been reporters on local papers on the south coast before meeting up again in Fleet Street, where Freemantle worked under English on the foreign desk of the Daily Express. When English went to the Sketch, he took Freemantle with him as foreign editor. It was a grand-sounding job title but by that point in the Sketch’s decline, it barely had a foreign department at all.