Perhaps the Most Influential Single Propagandist for Fascism

On the lengths newspaper publishers took to reach new subscribers — and then drive them away — in the 1930s.

by Terry Kirby

Terry Kirby is a senior lecturer in journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the author of The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism and The Trials of the Baroness. He has been a journalist for more than four decades and has worked for local, regional, and national newspapers.

Two newspaper workers flip a first proof of a page off the printing press at the offices of the *Daily Mail*, 1944. © IWM

The 1930s would see the greatest ever expansion in newspaper readership, with daily sales rising from 4.7 million in 1926 to 10.6 million in 1939. At the start of the 1930s, the Daily Express was selling around 1.6 million daily and challenging the Daily Mail, which had dropped from around 2 million to 1.85 million. Their readership was different to that of the newly relaunched Herald, which was targeting the rising numbers of working-class, Labour-supporting readers; it swiftly amassed sales, soon reaching a daily average of 1 million, and increasing to 2 million by 1933. It sucked away sales from the Daily Mail, which dropped to 1.58 million in 1937 while the Daily Mirror dropped from 1 million in 1920 to 700,000 in 1934.

In the early years of the decade, the publisher Odhams, the new owners of the Herald, had generated new sales by a relentless campaign of free gifts and offers: pens, tea sets, glassware, clothes and shoes, dictionaries and complete bound sets of the works of Dickens were offered to those who took out subscriptions. It paid Labour Party members to recruit new readers and by the mid-1930s employed more than 50,000 people as door-to-door salesmen. The Mail, the Express and eventually the Mirror were forced to follow the Herald’s example, recruiting salesmen and offering even more free gifts in return for subscriptions. At a meeting of newspaper owners at the Savoy in 1933 designed to broker an agreement to end what Beaverbrook had dubbed “madness,” Odhams refused to drop the latest Dickens promotion and was greeted with a declaration from the Express owner that “This is war.” As a result, its readers, and those of the Mail, were soon able to enjoy their own Dickens offers. Each desperately to top the others, the Express once giving away 10,000 pairs of silk stockings. Readers soon realized that, if they kept swapping subscriptions after the usual minimum contract period of two or three months, they would be able to keep themselves in clothes and household goods for a relatively small outlay. But buying of readers could not last; there was a mutual climbdown. Both the Mirror and the Express reinvented their brands, with the latter spending money instead on improving its editorial appeal and the Mirror experiencing what was effectively an internal coup.

The ending of the circulation-boosting gift wars in 1933 was a pivotal moment, coinciding with the elevation to key roles of a group of men who would shape the two newspapers that would dominate the mass-circulation popular market for most of the next three decades. At the Daily Mirror, Harry Guy Bartholomew became editorial director and, alongside Cecil Harmsworth King and the young Welsh genius Hugh Cudlipp, would wrench the paper away from the grim grip of Lord Rothermere’s fascination with elements of fascism and reinvent it for the new working classes. At the Express, Arthur Christiansen became editor, holding power there until 1957 and delivering his own version of a popular newspaper. The tabloid wars had entered the modern era.

Harold Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere, remained enthused by fascism and right-wing causes, becoming, according to one historian, “perhaps the most influential single propagandist for fascism between the wars.” In October 1922, the Mail backed Benito Mussolini to run Italy and in May of the following year Rothermere published a leader, “What Europe Owes Mussolini,” expressing his “profound admiration” for the Italian leader for stopping Bolshevism. In October 1924, just four days before the general election, the Mail published the notorious Zinoviev letter under the headline “Civil War Plot by Socialist Masters.” The letter, alleging that British Communists were being ordered by Moscow to foment armed insurrection in working-class areas of the UK, caused a sensation. Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government lost the election by a huge margin. It was only much later that it emerged that the letter was a forgery, concocted by rogue MI5 agents and leaked by them to the Mail. But it helped boost the Mail’s circulation, which by 1926 was 2 million a day, helping to make Rothermere the third richest man in the country, with a personal wealth of £25 million.

In 1928, in a leader again written by Rothermere, the Mail once again praised Mussolini as “the great figure of the age. Mussolini will probably dominate the history of the twentieth century as Napoleon dominated the early nineteenth century.” Following his obsession with Mussolini, Rothermere became a strong supporter of Adolf Hitler, visiting and writing to him several times. He also supported the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley. After visiting Hitler in the wake of the Nazis’ securing seats in the German parliament, Rothermere wrote favorably of the movement in the Daily Mail and said he hoped Hitler, who he said was changing the world for the better, would become chancellor: “We can do nothing to check this movement [the Nazis], and I believe it would be a blunder for the British people to take up an attitude of hostility towards it.” Shortly afterward he wrote in the Mail denying that he was antisemitic.

His support for Mosley led to probably the most infamous headline ever published in the Mail, on January 8, 1934: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” it read, over an article endorsing Mosley, saying that Italy and Germany had become the best-governed nations in Europe and that Britain’s survival as a great power was dependent on the existence of a “well organised party of the right” willing to show the same “directness of purpose.” For decades, right up until the 21st century, the headline would regularly be used against the Daily Mail by its critics. A few days later, an article in the Mirror by Rothermere was headlined, “Give the Blackshirts a Helping Hand,” in which he said Mosley was misunderstood and urged readers to join the movement. “As a purely British organisation, the Blackshirts will respect those principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics.” In the Sunday Pictorial, an extensive picture feature showed Mosley’s Blackshirts in their “Black House” headquarters. All the papers enthusiastically covered Mosley’s speeches and activities — a 1934 Union Flag-bedecked rally at Olympia was advertised and promoted in the Mail andMirror — although perhaps the nadir was the Mirror’s photography contest to find Britain’s best-looking female fascist, which Mosley himself objected to. Rothermere’s extraordinary flirtation with Mosley ended when the two fell out over a business deal involving supplying cigarettes to shops, and when British Jewish companies began to withdraw their advertising from Rothermere’s papers because of Mosley’s antisemitic views.

Rothermere made several more visits to meet the Führer, as well as other leading Nazis like Göring. In 1937 he stayed with Hitler and Goebbels in the Bavarian Alps. It emerged much later that in the summer of 1939, as war loomed, he wrote to “My Dear Führer” praising his “superhuman work in regenerating his country” and saying there was no problem between the two countries that could not be solved by consultation and negotiation; he also wrote to both von Ribbentrop and Rudolf Hess urging cooperation. However, it later emerged that he was additionally reporting back to British government ministers on Hitler, urging them to prepare for war, which leaves his true intent more ambiguous, or perhaps just naive: it seems possible that he was simply keeping in with both sides. When war broke out, the Mail publicly supported Britain — it had no other choice given its readership and the public mood — but Rothermere’s views had not gone down well amid the patriotic fervor of war being declared.

Under what many would later see as the dead hand of Rothermere, the Daily Mirror had languished during most of the 1920s and early ’30s, its circulation and distinctive identity slowly slipping away in the face of competition from rivals like the Express and, more damagingly, the Daily Herald. Rothermere had used profits from the Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial to fund the Mail and other ventures as well as the free-gift wars. And the Mirror was losing its appeal to the working class, which had been its early mainstay. In the General Strike of 1926, the paper had backed the government rather than the workers, and in the 1930s Rothermere told Mirror editors to aim the paper at the new suburban middle classes who holidayed in France and had tea at the tennis club; the paper’s pictures, once so revolutionary, were now of society figures and middle-class country girls and debutantes, or “girls in pearls,” as they were often known. Bill Hagerty, a senior executive on the paper during the 1970s and ’80s, later wrote: “Rothermere was a sad and unfulfilled man whose 17-year stewardship of the paper … transformed him from a groundbreaking, vital young buck of communication and entertainment to a prematurely middle-aged, middle-class dullard.”

All newspapers continued to publish during the Second World War, although circulations and size were artificially restricted by newsprint rationing, introduced in late 1942. But it was the British government, not Hitler’s bombers, that almost closed the Mirror down. In the run-up to the war in 1938 and 1939, the Mirror and the Pictorial, unlike most of the rest of Fleet Street, had attacked Hitler and warned against appeasement, provoking the Führer himself to complain to the British foreign secretary that the paper was damaging relations between the two countries. The day after the outbreak of war, its Cassandra-conceived front page was a “wanted” poster for Hitler and the paper campaigned relentlessly for Churchill to take over from Chamberlain as prime minister.

Meanwhile, Rothermere, still in control of the Mail and The Times, who had been so keen to praise Mosley and then Hitler, volunteered his services to his old ally, Express owner Lord Beaverbrook, who had been appointed minister for aircraft production by Churchill. Beaverbrook, although aware that Rothermere was by now elderly and in poor health, asked him to go to North America to help in the purchase of aluminium. It might have been seen as a lowly role, but Rothermere took it.

Once in New York he fell ill, but then sailed to Bermuda, where he died two weeks later, at the end of November 1940. His last words were said to have been, “There is nothing more I can do to help my country now.” In contrast to the elaborate 1922 funeral of his brother, Rothermere’s burial in Bermuda was attended by a handful of people, the only family member being his granddaughter, the seventeen-year-old Esme Harmsworth. Today, his family still control the company he founded and the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and MailOnline, launched in 1982 and 2003 respectively, which set the template for modern online popular journalism.

Buy This Book