‘I went across to the Mail as the foreign editor,’ he told the author. ‘It was a defacto takeover of the Mail by the Sketch. The news editor of the Sketch went across as news editor of the Mail. The picture editor went across from the Sketch to be picture editor of the Mail . . . all the department heads were Sketch people. It caused a lot of bad feeling between the Sketch and the Mail.’9
The Mail ’s editor, Arthur Brittenden, agreed over lunch with Vere at Claridge’s that he would continue editing the old broadsheet Mail as English prepared and tested the new paper in parallel. He even helped compile a hit list of his staff whom he felt the new Mail could live without. There were a lot of them, and what followed was a period of bloodletting dubbed ‘The Night of the Long Envelopes’ in Fleet Street mythology. It came as a shock to many Mailmen and Femails to learn that they were the ones getting the boot; it seemed to some that all that was changing was one word on the Daily Sketch’s masthead. It was actually the Daily Mail that was to die.
Barry Norman was by now the Mail ’s star showbiz writer. ‘We were all told one Friday that redundancy notices were to be given out that night,’ he told the author. ‘And we all gathered around at about nine o’clock at night in the newsroom and then, you knew if you were called in to see your head of department you had a long envelope waiting for you. And I was called in, and I got one.’10 Within a couple of years, Norman was established as a big BBC name and would review movies for twenty-six years, starting with Film ’72. English later claimed he’d tried to persuade Norman to stay, which was, said Norman, ‘a total lie. I’d never talked to David English about that at all . . . But I was soon kind of glad I wasn’t there any more because it wasn’t the kind of newspaper that I’d been used to working for. It was much more like The Sun or the Mirror than like the old Daily Mail or the then still-broadsheet Daily Express. I had a lot of admiration for David, I think he did a very good job on the new Daily Mail. But he wasn’t a man I would trust. I mean he was very affable, good company . . . but I wouldn’t turn my back on him.’11
At the same time as the mass redundancies, the new paper was being precision-planned in absolute secrecy and several trial-run ‘dummies’ of the new tabloid had been made in Amsterdam. The building was packed on the Sunday evening when the floor rumbled and the mighty presses rolled on the first tabloid Daily Mail just like it had all those years before for Sunny Harmsworth. The paper had a good scoop with the splash ‘Spy Scandal in Britain’s Defence HQ’; a Soviet wiretap had been found on a phone line at the Ministry of Defence. And on the leader page, the aged paper was already sounding a lot like Sunny Harmsworth too.
Welcome to the new Daily Mail. Today, 75 years after the birth of Northcliffe’s Daily Mail – the paper that pioneered popular journalism – another generation of British newspapers is born . . . we aim to give you more, much more in the new Daily Mail than a paper that is easy to read and handle in the train. We believe that people are also looking for a new style of journalism . . . To be serious without being glum, to entertain without being trashy, to catch the flavour of these swirling times. With your encouragement we can do it. For a newspaper is only as strong as the support of its readers for whom – and to whom – it speaks. We want the new Daily Mail to be like a conversation between friends. 12
Yet despite all the planning, something had gone horribly wrong. The new Daily Mail looked like an invite to a wake, not a birthday party, on Monday, 3 May 1971, just a day shy of the paper’s actual seventy-fifth anniversary (it would be weird to have a relaunch on a Tuesday). ‘As soon as it began to come off the press there was a great moan of “Oh fuck, what have we done there?”’ said Brian Freemantle. ‘We had put this black border, these boxes, around the text on the front page. It just looked so wrong, like a big funeral notice. It looked crap. It seems so silly and not very important now but it was such a huge thing at the time. We fixed it within a few days. The effort that went into that first edition was Herculean but the reader would never have known by looking at it.’13
The compact Daily Mail looked exactly like what it was; a broadsheet crushed down to tabloid size. Unlike Rupert Murdoch’s relaunched Sun, the new Mail ’s character was not born fully formed. The two personalities, that of the Sketch and that of the Mail, simply didn’t gel. At first, it was neither one thing nor the other. If it was going to survive, it had to become something entirely new and quickly.
Vere invested in a huge advertising campaign but to little real effect, because every other paper was also spending big at the time. Viewers were slapped about the face with screaming ads for newspapers during every TV ad break for months, and they were hounded through the pages of their papers with promotions and competitions and exclusive after exclusive; even the Guardian – in its 150th anniversary year – joined the fray, the broadsheet trying to steal readers from the ever-lumbering Times. Nevertheless, the first two months of the new Mail ’s life saw circulation climb back over the magic 2 million mark, where Northcliffe always felt it belonged. But these new readers were phantoms, and they vanished as quickly as they had arrived. Circulation had been given a boost by subscribers to the Sketch, who had been moved over automatically from the dead paper to the new Mail by their newsagent. Most soon left for the bright red waters of The Sun. But of far greater concern to the Mail ’s management were the readers of the old Daily Mail, who deserted the new paper in favour of the still-broadsheet Express in their droves.
Management reckoned that the new paper needed a circulation of at least 2 million for the numbers to work, but by the end of 1971 circulation was down to less than 1.5 million, a perilous low. The numbers were so low that senior Mailmen thought about what they’d do if it failed, or if Vere stopped propping it up with Harmsworth cash and headed for sunnier climes like his father. Brian Freemantle had already had a couple of books published and decided he would write full-time. ‘Everyone was taking out as much insurance as they could in case it collapsed,’ he said. ‘David English, in fact, planned to go and buy a hotel in Bournemouth. Doomsayers said it would die the death, and it was a very shaky start. We lost a lot of readers and it took us a long time to pick them up again. But there was also an awful lot of excitement. Because it was new. And that excitement was pretty well established and stayed with us.’14
It took nerve to stick with the change and English admitted his own confidence cracked a little, even suggesting to Vere that the answer might be to race downmarket to compete directly with the Mirror and the ever-rising Sun. ‘I went to Vere,’ English said, ‘and he said no. He said we’ve got to keep the same course. He said the old Daily Mail never kept its nerve and that was the trouble. It kept changing tack. It would do something and then if that didn’t work it would do the opposite and that didn’t work either. He insisted that we should stick to the plan.’
Vere’s resolve was admirable . . . but circulation kept on falling. ‘It’s all right for you,’ Vere said to English one day when the numbers had taken another tumble, ‘whatever happens, you can still be a journalist and have a wonderful life. I’ll be a failed proprietor who will never be able to work again.’15 It was well over a year before the paper truly began to stabilize and stopped shedding readers.
A fresh ad campaign was launched that set out why ‘Every woman needs her Daily Mail ’ and, finally, the two-year-old newspaper found her voice. This Mail was certainly female. ‘So that you are not just a good listener at parties,’ said the ad. ‘So that you can interrupt your hairdresser once in a while. So that in the evening you can tell him a few things he might have been too busy to learn during the day. So that you are not just another pretty face, Every Woman Needs Her Daily Mail . . . And Every Man Knows Why.’16
David English was a man who knew ‘why’ and he also knew every single person in his newsroom. As a young editor he seemed to have time and energy for everyone – from the Chairman of the Board down to even the most junior members of his staff, and many loved him for it. Standing on the lowest rung of the e
ditorial ladder, for example, were the messengers, gangs of teenage boys who had been part of every newspaper’s DNA since heavy printing presses had first crushed their metal faces against long sheets of paper. Messenger boys (some were, in fact, adults) flitted in and out of newspaper offices and the warrens of the City and beyond, not entirely unlike the Dickensian thieves in Oliver Twist, picking up and dropping off copy and messages instead of picking pockets, and they answered, ultimately, to the editor instead of Fagin. Charlie Whebell was the Mail ’s own Artful Dodger, given a 1970s upgrade. Having left school at fifteen, teenage Charlie was a ‘bovver boy’ with hair shorn to the bone. He stood resplendent in the newsroom among Mailmen and Femails in his Ben Sherman shirt, Levi Sta-Prest trousers and Doc Marten boots. David English took a shine to Charlie immediately.
‘I thought I was the bee’s knees,’ he told the author. ‘I was a very, very cheeky – “aw-wite my san” – Cockney boy at the time. Arthur Brittenden was the editor when I started and I used to see him walking around the office but he would never speak to a messenger boy like me unless it was, you know, “Boy! Get me a tea!” Then David English took over and we all got a 100 per cent pay rise. Can you imagine? Bosh! Without even asking for one. And then he just started talking to me one day. He asked my name and we had a chat, and I thought: “Blimey, the editor of the Daily Mail is speaking to me!” David English knew everyone and everything in that newspaper; he knew what the messenger boys were up to, he knew what the chairman was up to – he was aware of everything.’17
David English was also in no way shy around the women on his staff, as Anthea Disney, one of his long-term executives, explained. She had not been a reporter long on the dying Daily Sketch when David English arrived as editor and pulled her aside, handing her a book called Black Like Me. All David English’s best ideas seemed to come from America, and the book was a late-1950s tale of a man who travelled through the then segregated Deep South of the US, medically swapping the privileged skin tone of the white man for that of the black. He suffered everything from the threat of violence to the indignity of not being allowed to sup from a water fountain. English – ever the editorial enthusiast – thought the same ruse might work in Birmingham, with Anthea as an Indian. She was young and keen, so she found a doctor in Puerto Rico who could help turn her skin dark with medication and she lay naked on his roof, parting her hair regularly to tan her scalp and making sure the sun got between her fingers and toes, to make sure she looked right. It worked, and in early 1970 she spent weeks in a cold-water flat in the middle of winter in the Midlands, getting abused almost every day. But the stunt made her famous and she was front-page news and a popular talk-show guest. She was even applauded whenever she went for an Indian meal, and didn’t have to pay the bill for months. It took over a year for her skin to return to normal.
‘David was always very comfortable working with women,’ she told the author. ‘He wasn’t remotely phobic about it as a lot of guys were in those days. He wanted energy and he wanted ambition and he wanted a sense of fun. He was a great editor to work for. I think he tried everything out at home on Irene; his formula was to target the paper at himself and his family. If they liked it, a mass of similar people would too.’18
Like Sunny Harmsworth, David English – the middle-class boy done good – was great at understanding what his readers wanted and, again like Harmsworth, he was a man most often described as ‘boyish’. He had the enthusiasm of a young boy but also the cruelties; his name would become a byword for a Fleet Street bully, of which there has been a long tradition.
‘David was a very good editor,’ said Brian Freemantle. ‘He had a huge amount of energy, he would bounce around the room in the mornings when he came in. He always seemed to be in a hurry. But he did rule by fear, actually. He did frighten people. Not that he fired people. He wasn’t an editor who fired people. He didn’t bully me. I think you’ve got to let yourself be bullied to an extent. He wasn’t a tyrant. And I was always going to leave and write books, so his power over me was fairly limited – the only way you can really frighten someone is if you think if you fuck it up, you’re going to get fired.’19
Anger, though, says Disney, was just a tool. ‘David was very feline. You had to understand that he’d always be probing you to find out where your weaknesses were and if he could find them and if you responded and you were frightened of him then – God help you. He was a bully, but in a very charming way. And very controlling. But he didn’t have an unpleasant personality. He wasn’t always swearing at people.’
Disney was sent to New York but then returned as features editor while still in her twenties. ‘English would like to do that; he would like to put a young woman into that job, that had always been occupied by men in their fifties, because he’d enjoy seeing everybody else deal with it – and also see how that person would deal with it.’20 Disney’s immediate boss was Gordon McKenzie, the man who had helped find the way forward for the new Mail with Femail. Some, such as Shirley Conran, thought McKenzie could have been editor; and maybe English knew it too. But, said Brian Freemantle: ‘Gordon was way too nice to be a Mail executive.’21 English would target McKenzie without mercy and would, added another Mailman, Stewart Steven, ‘blame Gordon for the rain’.
It was like a school playground. ‘After we got the features pages to bed at night for the first edition,’ said Disney, ‘English would be sitting on the back bench and he’d call Gordon and I over – Gordon was a sweet, sweet, gentle Scotsman. We’d go over to the back bench and Gordon would put one foot in front of the other saying, “Ah here we go – he’s gonna give it to us.” And I would say: “Gordon, if you have that attitude when you go over there he’s gonna do it. Don’t let him. Call his bluff.” David could be very cruel. He’d sit in the middle of the back bench with all of his backbench guys around him, and he would say things like “So, do you think this is a great features page, Miss Disney?” And I would say: “I don’t think it’s a great features page but I think it’s a good features page for the first edition.” “You do? And what are you gonna do with it for the next edition?” And you just had to hit back: “Why don’t you let me go do it, or fire me?” He’d laugh and go: “Okay. Go do it.” You had to stand up to him, you just had to. But David was fun, incredibly charming and funny. And a terrible gossip.’22
English’s friend and long-term deputy Louis Kirby said English ‘could be wickedly impish. Whenever he heard an amusing anecdote about a colleague, or rival, he would wait for an opportunity to rehash it when he could create the most devastating effect.’23
By the time the compact found its voice after a couple of years, the physical make-up of the newsroom staff had changed. It got younger, as older hands left and new hacks arrived. ‘I was the first new guy that English recruited for the Mail after the Night of the Long Envelopes,’ Mickey Brennan, who’d just won Photographer of the Year for his pictures in The Sun, told the author. ‘I got a call from English: “Can we have a discussion?” So I went round there and he said: “How much are you earning at the moment?” I stuck ten quid on it and said: “Fifty quid a week.” And English – he had this horrible cringeing voice – said: “Well, I can only afford to give you £70 a week” . . . and I nearly bit his fucking hand off.’24
‘I was still just a boy,’ said messenger Charlie. ‘But I didn’t feel so young in there any more like I had in the old broadsheet Daily Mail. It felt like a young newspaper.’25
Young David English also always made time for a party. As the very first edition of the very first issue of the new Daily Mail came off the presses, he started what was to be a long tradition. He invited everyone into his office for a drink. ‘The editor had two very big offices, one was his work office and the other, opposite, was for entertaining,’ said Charlie. ‘And I was having a drink with Janet Street-Porter who worked on the fashion desk at the time and I remember David English talking to everybody and congratulating everyone. I don’t remember much after that . . . I got very ve
ry drunk.’
Whenever there was an excuse for a shindig – a birthday or an anniversary – David English would open the drinks cabinet and Vere would often be there, too. ‘I was up and down, up and down, getting Mr ’armsworth a drink all the time,’ said Charlie. ‘All the journalists were obviously wary of him because of who he was. But us messenger boys were just ordinary Jack-the-Lads, and we didn’t even know.’
Another reason to crack open the drinks cabinet was to celebrate a scoop, and there was a plentiful supply for English’s revitalized paper from the start. The Daily Mail was, for example, the first paper to really grab hold of a massive pharmaceutical scandal after the father of a girl born with neither arms nor legs walked into the Mail ’s office in the winter of 1971.
David Mason told the stunned editor about a ‘wonder drug’ that seemed to help with everything from coughs to insomnia; the German inventors had actually found it impossible to kill laboratory rats with it. And thalidomide was considered so safe, pregnant women took it for morning sickness . . . with catastrophic side-effects. During almost every day in the first few weeks of pregnancy it could cause a different deformity in the unborn child – if an expectant mum took it on day twenty-four, for instance, the baby could be born with no arms. If she took it a few days later, the baby would be robbed of its legs. Thousands of babies died worldwide.
Mail Men Page 17